Ceremonies

trapped in his room like an animal in a cage. He decided to stay where he was.

The screen door burst open and Poroth hurried in, looking distracted. He headed for the stairs but called over his shoulder, 'Aren't you coming out?'

'I'm not really dressed for it,' said Freirs. 'I think I'll just watch from in here.'

Sarr paused. 'You'll have to come out eventually,' he said. 'We're performing a Cleansing.'

'A what?'

But the other was already hurrying up the stairs. Freirs could hear him tramping overhead, then the creak of floorboards as he helped Deborah off the bed. Their footsteps as they descended were slow and unsteady. Moments later Sarr appeared with Deborah leaning on his arm. She looked as pale as before, with the same dark rings beneath her eyes, and her pallor was further accentuated by a black scarf wrapped around her throat, concealing her up to the chin. She smiled weakly at Freirs as they passed.

'Sarr, what's this Cleansing you spoke of?'

'Something special,' said Poroth, busy helping Deborah out the door. 'You'll see. Best just to stay inside here till the singing's over.'

The screen door slammed, and Freirs could see the assembled Brethren turn to watch as the two of them stiffly descended the back steps, like the last and most important arrivals at a ball. There were by now nearly a hundred people in the yard. Among them he recognized the leathery old farmer who'd given him a lift and the elderly couple who'd refused him one. He even thought he recognized, from the skimpiness of his beard, the teenage boy who, with the girl, had almost run him down. He wished once again that he'd gotten a better look at them.

Abruptly the elderly couple turned their backs on one another like figures in a dance, and, as he watched, the woman appeared to walk away without a word of goodbye. In fact, he noticed now, all the women, old and young alike, had begun to move off to the side of the lawn nearer the barn, leaving the major portion of it to the males. He realized that the sexes were once again being segregated, just as they'd been in the Bible school yearbook. Like Orthodox Jews, he decided. Crazy.

Freirs had expected Joram Sturtevant to lead the worship, but apparently the man's position was more social than theological, for when the services finally began it was neither he nor Poroth, the host, who strode to the front of the group and asked for silence, but rather a short, older man whom Freirs had never seen before. Clasping a large, worn-looking black Bible before him, he called upon the assembled Brethren to pray with him for Sister Lise Verdock, who, along with her family, could not be with them this morning owing to her tragic accident. All eyes were downcast as the man led the invocation, quoting at length from Jeremiah – 'O Lord, my strength and my fortress and my refuge in the day of affliction' – the Bible open in his hands now but never actually looked at, as if the mere act of holding it affirmed the truth of what he said.

After the prayer the man stepped back, handing the book ceremoniously to a younger man who took his place. Gradually, as the morning progressed and new speakers, women as well as men, replaced the old, each of them holding the Bible while addressing the congregation, Freirs began to realize that what had seemed, at first, to be an unstructured occasion was in fact highly formalized. People seemed to know just when to take their turns as speaker; when, as happened but seldom, two Brethren found themselves approaching the front of the congregation at the same time, one would hold back and wait, as if by some prearranged system of dominance.

Nearly a dozen people, mostly men, had addressed the group, with further prayers for everything from more rain to the smiting of idolaters, along with another prayer for Lise Verdock, when, after a pause in which no others had volunteered to speak, Sarr Poroth pushed his way to the front. Watching from his seat by the window, Freirs saw him scan the congregation and smile at Deborah, who was supported by two of the women – and closely observed, at the same time, by Mrs Poroth.

Holding the Bible open before him, Sarr began to speak. Freirs leaned closer to the screen to hear better.

' 'And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man… ' '

It took Freirs a moment to recognize the passage. Though most of the others had spoken from Jeremiah, Sarr was telling of the Flood, of great cataclysmic events that at last, under God's goodness, had had an end. ' 'And Noah builded an altar,' ' he said, not once looking down at the text,' 'and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savor; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.' '

Freirs found the singsong rhythm of the passage unexpectedly comforting, easily as much so as the words themselves, though for hours afterward something in him would repeat, troubled, that final qualifying phrase:

'While the earth remaineth.'

Joram Sturtevant stood ramrod straight, defying the heat and staring intently at each successive speaker, but he found it hard to concentrate on what was being said. His thoughts were on the stranger back there in the house.

He had not liked what he'd seen. Granted, the man bore a name hearkening back to the prophet, yet he himself was, by his own admission, an infidel. That had been his very word, in fact; he'd spoken it with pride.

There'd have been danger enough if the stranger had been of a rival faith, one of the numerous Christian or Hebrew or mongrel sects that schemed and struggled and vied for men's souls in the vast benighted world beyond the borders of the town; they were all the same, those sects, all greedy and, when the Last Judgment sounded, all damned. But to have so bluntly declared himself an infidel, an enemy of faith itself- surely this was a hundred times worse. Maybe Brother Rupert had been right about him.

And to call this infidel a 'guest,' as Poroth had this morning -surely that was the flimsiest of lies.

Poroth himself was speaking now, drawing laborious parallels, in a low and earnest voice, between the tribulations of Noah and the Brethren's current difficulties. The young man had a good mind, Joram conceded, but he was clearly nervous in groups and made a poor speaker. And it seemed he made an even worse farmer. Joram cast his eye over the cornfields in the distance, the small, sickly-looking stalks already prey to all manner of weeds and pests. He could see, even now, that Poroth's first crop would be accounted a failure.

The image struck him as an apt one: for wasn't Gilead itself a kind of garden, carefully cultivated, nourished and protected, its families as varied as the crops of a well-managed farm, its young like tender shoots? Yes, here was the stuff of some future sermon! And admitting a stranger entrance, as Poroth had, was akin to opening a garden's gates to predators. The shoots would be corrupted, seeds trampled, the soil itself tainted.

Perhaps, though, as with the first Fall, a woman was to blame.

Young Poroth, lacking as he did a father's guidance, seemed inclined to let Deborah order him about, and it was said that taking in the stranger had been her idea.

There she was now, amongst the women near the barn, staring dully at the proceedings. What had happened to her yesterday had been no surprise to Joram. He had been convinced for some time that the devil was in that cat; his right hand still smarted from his encounter with her earlier in the year. Sister Deborah should have foreseen the tragedy. Like as not it had been a judgment upon her. She was, Joram allowed, a handsome woman; he admired the slim-ness of her form and her dark, wanton-looking eyes, though he suspected she'd be capable of all manner of sin.

Lotte, his own wife, had once been just as slim, but after three sons her figure had thickened. And now, of course, the woman was almost unrecognizable, her belly grown so enormous it pained her constantly. Joram thought of her as Sarr came to the end of his talk. He had left her in the Poroths' living room, her sweating form filling their little rocker in a way he'd found faintly disagreeable. Somewhere in him was the vague suspicion that he'd been wrong to bring her here today, but this he'd long since repressed, and what he felt instead was, for the most part, a mixture of irritation at her feminine frailty – the other children hadn't been such trouble – and concern at her appearance. If he felt any guilt, it was for not having insisted that she come outside here with him for the services, to stand, just like Deborah, with the other women. They couldn't allow themselves to grow soft, he and Lotte. They had an example to set for the community.

Freirs had expected the services would be over when Poroth finished speaking; he hadn't counted on the hymns. There were more than a dozen of them, from 'Blue Galilee' to 'Christ the Harvester,' growing in volume and fervour until he felt sure some of the Brethren would wilt beneath the steadily advancing sun, which, having risen