Body and Bread (21 page)

“No. They’re sometimes…better.” I wanted to defend the group, but the majority was a clique of girls, gossipy, heavily painted. I couldn’t decide if they were just shallow or shallow and scary. No one talked to me much, which was fine. I didn’t come for the people.

He leaned, whispering, his gaze making me flinch. “This world-denying type of faith has been rejected by Christianity.” He checked the room, but no one noticed us talking. “The most extreme forms of dualism are simply not good theology.”

“Really?”

He suppressed a smile.

I wasn’t sure, but I thought he’d said I shouldn’t accept a simplistic view of good and evil. At least, I hoped that’s what he’d said. “Who are you?”

He squirmed, a fidgety highbrow, like me, a misfit. “My name is Saul. I’m visiting my friend, Fay.” He nodded toward one of the women who took turns bringing punch.

“You don’t live here?” I asked.

“No. The School of Jericho Prophets is in Palestine…that’s Texas, about a hundred miles from here.” He pulled a pamphlet from his briefcase.
Heritage and Children’s Craft Fair
, a caption read above pictures of women quilting, a man sanding one side of a tin-fronted cabinet.

Weird
didn’t capture it. “What kind of school is it?” The women wore aprons, kerchiefs; the men sported beards, cowboy hats. They smiled a lot.

“A place where the gospel is for everyone, including Jews, because God is faithful to His covenant with them.”

“A Bible college like Oral Roberts?” I asked, even though Jews weren’t allowed there.

“People say we resemble the Amish, but our teacher is Elijah, the new prophet.”

“Sounds like a cult,” I said. I was looking for answers to questions like, Was the God who commanded Abraham to kill his son the same one I had to worship? Or, Why weren’t any of the disciples women?

“Ours is a place where dialogue is a means of appreciating the difference of the other.” He folded his arms then picked at his sleeve. “Our homestead fair is in two weeks. Will you join a group I’m taking?”

At the craft fair, I learned that members made soap, planted rice and alfalfa with teams of draft horses, even refused birth control and medical care. Their complex of bungalows stood at the end of a dirt road in a pine forest clearing. It seemed like another planet, but I tried to reserve judgment.

At the fair, children spun wool and pressed apple cider. I stood with Saul, who responded to greetings with exaggerated acknowledgments, bowing, repeating himself; no one stayed to talk. A woman was shaping a vase at a potter’s wheel when Elijah joined us. His appearance seriously tested my composure.

He wore what looked like a striped bed sheet draped over his head, swirled around his body. A leather strap wound across his palm and wrapped in loops up his forearm. He was tall, brawny, a fullback in a toga.

“Good day, good day, father,” Saul said, twitchy.

“Good day, Saul, brothers and sisters,” Elijah said. Men and women answered in robotic counterpoint. When a child took his hand, he patted her head. “I’m grateful today for this bounteous display of love and talent. God has surely blessed us.” When he tightened the fold of sheet at his neck, his leather armband squeezed flexed muscles.

If this had been a movie, I’d have laughed. Picture John Wayne in
The Robe
.

“Father,” Saul said, his glance darting, “this,” his hand jerked in my direction, “is Sarah Pelton. From Nugent.”

“Welcome.” Elijah noted my matching skirt and blouse, my bubble haircut. “Are you considering joining us?”

“I…this is my first visit,” I stammered, appalled, fascinated. Who could possibly think I belonged in this la-la land?

“Wherever you go, my dear, may your spirit, like leaven in dough, shape you into good light bread.” He rubbed the sign of a cross on my forehead then walked toward a home-school display.

Later that evening while Saul led me to the cabin where I’d spend the night, he told his leader’s story. Two years before, Elijah, whose real name was unknown, had visited Israel with a tour group. While strolling the Via Dolorosa, he’d heard a voice say, “If the Lord be the true God, why not follow him?” The same words spoken by the biblical Elijah. That night an angel appeared in a dream, reproducing a visitation to the ancient prophet. The next day, the new, emerging Elijah spent most of his time bathing, purifying. His last afternoon in Israel, he wrapped in a hotel sheet then chanted “Amazing Grace” while walking the streets. Back home in Alpine, he read in the newspaper about a neutron star that had torn through a gaseous cloud, creating a ram-shaped nebula. Sure this was a sign, Elijah traveled to the MacDonald observatory. The image, when he viewed it through the telescope, recaptured for him God’s act of burning a sacrifice to disprove the power of Baal. So Elijah assumed his new name, took his life savings, and, like his mentor, opened a School of Jericho Prophets.

Saul wasn’t stupid. He knew I’d see Elijah as a zealot, maybe a schizophrenic who should be institutionalized. “It seems fantastic, I know, but our culture is too quick to reject the mystic. I’m sure you’re familiar with Native American shamans, and Sufi teachers in Morocco and Senegal practice a mystical expression of Islam. Opening yourself to such possibility can expand your appreciation of the world.”

Now, he had my attention. “Does Elijah think he’s been reincarnated?” I asked as we stood outside the cabin door. Window light spilled onto our feet; an odor of pine, mint-sweet, tannic, sanitized the compound.

“No. He feels a spiritual connection much like a husband and wife who have stayed fifty years together. But holy.” He’d met Elijah, he said, ten months earlier. The prophet had been distributing School of Jericho fliers at the entrance to a Waco rodeo.

“At the what?”

“Just listen,” he said. The two men had talked under the bleachers while loudspeakers blasted and bulls and broncos tossed their riders.

“Only in Texas,” I said.

A mother and teenage daughter walked past, and Saul nodded. “Hello, hello,” he said, ignoring their sneaked glances as they stepped into the cabin. I decided to save my questions about his religion. “Did he wear his sheet to the rodeo? You must’ve thought he was psycho,” I said, impressed with Saul’s brainy talk and age of, I guessed, about thirty.

“You should watch, decide for yourself, little girl.”

I didn’t mind when he wandered off. But the next day, he’d know that Sarah Pelton was nobody’s little girl.

I visited the Jericho School four more times with Fay. The school’s general population most resembled the cross section you’d find inside any grocery store. I attended chapel services led by Elijah, his Episcopalian-style ritual accompanied by robust Baptist hymns. Meals included sugary pastries and garden-grown vegetables; anyone could pick blackberries in a cultivated patch behind the barn. During one of the daily adult classes, a hunched older man said, “For Christians, suffering is inevitable,” and Saul actually snorted. Fay rolled her eyes, and I began to feel at home.

A week later, when Elijah offered me a job in his office, I searched Bible verses for guidance and stumbled through the compound’s prayer routine. When I told Sam I might go, he called me Sister Judas. “Religion’s an illusion,” he said, scooting his chair back. Disagreeing with Sam was hard, not only because it hurt, but because I didn’t know enough to sound convincing. By my graduation day, he took for granted that I’d decided to go. “This Jesus stuff can get pretty sticky,” he said. Still, I knew he thought quoting scripture was proof of being brainwashed, his teasing remarks painful reminders of our changing relationship. “Faith, hope, charity, these three,” he said, “roads advertised but less taken.”

I’d been accepted at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, and my move was the family’s topic of conversation at dinner the night after my graduation. Kurt had already driven back to Austin, but Sam was staying for the weekend.

“I can’t wait for you to see the campus,” my mother said, spooning piccalilli relish onto her greens, “and that city.”

Sam sat back, crossing his arms, but I kept silent. “Mom, Dad,” he said before I could stop him, “Sarah needs to tell you something, but she’s worried that you won’t like it.”

My mother’s head cocked.

“Thanks, Sam,” I said, furious.

“Tell them,” he said. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

“I don’t exactly know how to say this,” I began, squeezing my eyes shut. “I’ve been thinking about joining the School of Jericho Prophets.”

“The what?” my mother said.

“The group I’ve visited in Palestine? You met Saul, the assistant director, at church.” They’d been introduced in the parish hall at a wedding reception.

“Let me get this straight,” my mother said, folding her arms. “You’re giving up college to join a cult?”

“Please don’t get upset,” I said. “If I go, and I haven’t decided yet, I’ll work as their secretary and bookkeeper. You won’t have to pay for anything.”

She gripped the front of her dress. “This absolutely takes the cake. Ho-nest-ly.” She shook her head. “Could you pick
anything
further removed from this family? What’ll it be next—Martians? Owen, aren’t you going to say something?”

Hugh leaned over his plate, chewing, watching Dad.

“This is the first time I’ve heard anything about a school of this sort,” my father said, “and before I make any decision, I’d like to hear Sarah tell us what it is and why she wants to go.”

“Ever since the explosion,” I said, “I’ve needed some answers, not the kind you get in a classroom. I believe the Jericho Prophets can help. Please, I have to try this first, then I promise I’ll go to college.” As I talked about the school, Elijah, Saul, Fay’s family, and the Amish-like way of life, I made my assessment sound more acceptable and my decision sound more definite than I felt.

“Sam, did you encourage this?” my mother asked.

“She told me she was thinking about it,” he said. “I, for one, say as long as she’s no Jesus freak, if it’s important, she should go.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” my mother said, squeezing her hands. “No college education, no future. Just pack her off to a nut camp.” My mother’s opinion of organized religion paralleled Sam’s; in fact, many of their views were similar, an ironic source of the tension between them. “Typical. You’d support anything that upset us.”

Should I go, I wondered, even if they tell me not to? I pictured the school’s chapel, its purple-draped altar.

“Wait, wait, Mama,” my father said, pushing his palm against air. “I’m hearing that Sarah is interested in religious study.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, relieved but unsure.

“It seems the least we can do is visit this place.”

“But how can you—” she interrupted.

“All I’m saying,” he said, raising his palm again, “is that we’ll look at Sarah’s school, then we’ll talk again later. Nothing’s been decided.”

Hugh slumped, almost invisible.

“But let me caution you, young lady,” my father said, pointing his fork. “The Peltons don’t make commitments lightly.”

During their test visit, my father was so fascinated by the draft horse cultivation that he guided a team and plow himself, his leather-strapped shoulders and waist tilted against the tugging reins, his Florsheim wing-tips plodding forward. When he met Elijah, though, he almost balked. That evening, after a sermon on the Christian ethos of compassion, he sat in Elijah’s book-stacked office, and they debated the philosophical underpinnings of Paul’s conversion and the theology of his first Athenian convert, Denys the Areopagite; my father didn’t mention the sheet again. Later, at home, I overheard him telling Hugh while they watched a Cowboys game on TV: “Elijah is like Moses. He’s a mystic who’s witnessed the symbolic presence of God.”

Saul’s master’s degree in divinity, his observation that scientists (and doctors), like prophets, “confront the unpredictable realm of uncreated reality,” and his conversion parallels with my father’s hero, ensured my father would find him acceptable. My mother, I knew, was confident I’d be leaving for New Orleans in January. But in the meantime, she liked Saul’s manners: the way he opened a door as though someone were sleeping in the next room, and his habit of resting his fork then folding his scrubbed hands while he chewed his food. She ridiculed the kerchief-covered women, imitating what she described as their cocker-spaniel expressions, so I steered her away from people on the fringe. The facilities ranked three stars: mopped floors, sanitary, semi-private baths, sufficient air and heat. Once I’d promised to see a doctor if I broke a bone or felt feverish (no one worried about me not having birth control), we made a deal. I would try the school until Christmas, then we’d renegotiate. I moved in on a Monday in August.

I posted checks, placed orders for alfalfa seed and notebook paper, typed letters. As for enlightenment, Elijah and Saul were the only sources, and while one was busy, conversation with the other was like deciphering algebra. I gave up trying to find a boyfriend.

New Year’s Day came and went, and I played the
commitment
card. Of course, I explained, breaking in a new bookkeeper mid-year would be difficult, and after all, I’d promised. My father convinced my mother to let me stay the year.