rubbed his eyes behind his glasses.
'I think that bus ride knocked me out.'
Wishing he were still asleep, he followed Poroth through the rows of tombstones and down the slope toward an old dark-green pickup truck parked at the edge of the road. The Co-operative across the street was open now, he saw, with several more trucks and autos in the adjoining lot. All were as somber in color, and most of them as antiquated-looking, as the ones he'd seen earlier, like cars in old photographs. The Co-op's windows were unshuttered now, with merchandise spilling out the open door, and a balding man with glasses and a fringe of beard was busily dragging straw baskets of sponges, axe handles, rubber boots, and overalls from the doorway onto the porch. It looked like moving day. The porch ceiling was already filled, garlands of clothes-line, shiny metal farm implements, and kerosene lanterns dangling like mobiles from the hooks that had looked so ominous before. A stocky mechanic was bent beneath the raised hood of a car parked off to the side of the gas pumps; Freirs could hear the regular iron scrape of some tool he was using and, in the distance, the hum of a tractor. Sounds of civilization. He blinked in the sunlight as he followed Poroth toward the truck. His legs still felt stiff from his nap.
The screen door across the street swung wide and two young men – brothers, from the look of them, and hardly more than teenagers – emerged from the store carrying mesh bags stuffed with groceries. They couldn't have been more than high school age, yet both, like Poroth, wore beards without mustaches and dressed in black overalls over collarless white shirts, making them appear almost elderly. They had been talking together with some animation but fell silent as they saw Freirs and Poroth descending from the graveyard across the street. Poroth, ahead of him, raised his hand in greeting; they waved back. The smaller of the two glanced at Freirs in surprise but quickly looked away, following the other down the steps toward one of the parked trucks. The strangeness, a feeling almost of foreignness, lay not so much in how they dressed as in how they moved: they walked closer together than boys in Freirs' world, and without the defiant swagger most of them affected. As they climbed into their truck, giving Freirs a last subdued glance over their shoulders, he had the impression that they'd have liked to stare longer but that it would have been rude, betraying an unseemly curiosity. Such restraint was somehow unnerving; he felt like one of the first Westerners to enter Japan must have felt, being received courteously and correctly but, it was clear, by people who considered themselves superior.
He wished he weren't wearing the chinos and blue workshirt, imitation L. L. Bean that here just looked phony and college-boy. Plus his goddamned gut hanging out. What Poroth and the others were wearing, that uncomfortable-looking black and white getup, a virtual uniform – was apparently what real country people wore. Beneath his shirt Poroth's broad back was probably as well muscled as any of the people Freirs knew who hung around $600-a-year health clubs or spent their leisure hours pumping iron at the Y. Though now that he looked at it closely, the shirt itself was sweat-stained and none too clean; was this the way the man attended church?
Poroth patted the metal flank of his beat-up green truck as if it were a farm animal. 'She probably isn't what you're used to,' he said regretfully. Freirs expected him to qualify this, to add some assurance of the truck's homely virtues, but the other merely swung himself up into the driver's seat and waited for Freirs to climb in beside him.
The pair of youths had just pulled out from the parking lot and disappeared up the road in their own truck, and once more the loudest sound to break the quiet was the regular metallic scrape from across the street where the mechanic labored over his engine. The man paused above some unseen part; then, as Poroth gunned the pickup's motor, he looked up, his face betraying neither friendliness nor interest. His beard looked somehow incongruous above the grease-stained overalls, a man out of the Bible attempting to pass for modern.
Poroth drove fast, either from a desire to impress or a simple impatience to be home. Thanks to the truck's height, Freirs enjoyed a commanding perspective of the road ahead. With every uneven-ness in the surface the two of them bounced on the springy black seat like cowboys on horseback; several times Freirs found himself reaching out almost surreptitiously to steady himself against the dented metal of the dashboard. He stole a glance at Poroth, whose skin, while rough, seemed surprisingly pale for one who spent most of his day working in the sun. Against the dark beard his face seemed all the paler. The beard, and the man's sheer size, made it difficult to tell his age. In the photo he'd looked as old as forty, but Freirs now suspected he was as much as a decade younger, perhaps as young as Freirs himself. He tried, in his imagination, to erase the beard from Poroth's chin and to do the same for the long, obviously home-cut hair. What sort of person would Poroth be in the city? Stick him in a three-piece suit, or on the subway with a briefcase beneath his arm, or sipping at a beer in some restaurant near Abingdon Square… No, it didn't work, he just wouldn't fit; he was too tall, too broad of shoulder, too obviously meant for outdoor labor. His very features were too stern, his brow thrust too far forward. There seemed no urban counterpart for him.
Poroth still hadn't asked him anything about himself, his interests, his impressions – none of the chat that Freirs would have offered a Sunday visitor. Had he done something wrong? Maybe Poroth had resented his snoozing in the graveyard.
'When you saw me resting back there,' he said, speaking loudly over the sound of the truck, 'I hope it wasn't also the resting place of some relative of yours.'
Surprisingly, Poroth didn't answer right away, and he gave Freirs a quick, unsettling look. 'Well,' he said at last, 'the fact is, pretty much everyone around here is related in one way or another. It's like a tribe – you know, a limited area with a few extended families. A sociologist would have a field day.'
Freirs heard the complicity in Poroth's voice – he'd been speaking as one educated man to another – and remembered what Deborah had written: Both of us have attended college outside the community. Clearly Sarr didn't want him to forget it.
'Sounds incestuous.'
Poroth shrugged. 'No more than any other tribe. Our order's pretty strict. And there are also Brethren living outside of Gilead, so it's not as if we only marry each other. My wife's from Sidon, over in Pennsylvania – an even smaller settlement.'
'You met at college?'
'No, we'd met years before that, at a Quarinale, a kind of planting festival. But we didn't get to see each other again till college. I was at Trenton, Deborah spent two years at Page. It's a Bible school.' He paused. 'We've only been back here for six or seven months. Deborah's still learning to fit in.'
'Is fitting in important?'
'Very.'
Freirs felt a stir of interest. 'I guess she and I will have a lot in common, then.'
Poroth darted him a glance. 'In what way?'
'We're both newcomers around here.'
The other mulled this over, frowning. 'I guess you're right. There are some strong personalities in Gilead, and a few people haven't really accepted her yet. It's all a bit new to Deborah. At this point, she's still trying to get all the families straight. There are faces to remember, names and relations-'
'Yes, I saw a lot of those names on the tombstones back there. Sturtevant, van Meer
'That's right. And Reid, Troet, Buckhalter, a few stray Verdocks-'
'That was the stone I fell asleep by,' Freirs said. 'Troet.'
'Ah, yes.' Poroth kept his eyes on the road. 'Actually, they were a distant branch of my mother's family. She's a Troet too. But that branch is gone now.'
'They all seem to have died at the same time.'
Poroth nodded. 'Some kind of fire, I think. The Lord works in strange ways.' He fell silent; then, as if realizing that this was insufficient: 'Fire's always been a hazard in the country. These days, though, people around here live pretty much the way everyone else does, and they die of the same things other people do – heart attacks, cancer, an occasional accident… all the usual things. Of course, they may live a few years longer, what with working hard, breathing clean air, eating food they've grown themselves.'
'Well, I plan to do plenty of hard work this summer,' said Freirs, settling back, 'but it'll be more the mental sort. Still, this looks like a healthy place to do it.' He patted his belly. 'Maybe I can even lose a little weight.'
Poroth smiled. 'I should warn you, Deborah's a good cook. I hope you're one who struggles against the temptations of the flesh.'
Freirs laughed. 'No better than the next man, I guess! You know what they say about the best way to get rid of a temptation.' He laughed again and looked over at Poroth, but the other was no longer smiling.
They had already passed through a lane of brick houses, square and unadorned, notable only for the absence
