by Kyle Beachy
The woman from inside arrived a few minutes later carrying a leather-bound wine list she set open in front of me.
“Can I get you anything? Something white, chilled enough to fog your glass when I pour it? People have been enjoying the sauv blanc.”
She sat down next to me.
“I’m not sure I feel like talking about wine,” I said. The plan required a certain amount of toughness and resolve.
“Oh?”
“Wine intimidates with the language it evokes. Same with stocks and racehorses. I ask you about a wine, you tell me of its nose and hints of pencil shavings. You mention pear. And then I taste the wine and nod and you win.”
“Win this competition we’re having,” she said.
“Just that wine is a field based on saying the right words at the right time.”
“Okay,” she said.
The umbrellas made for pods of shade in the otherwise bright afternoon. I noticed quite a few women in the Irenia work outfits buzzing around the patio, approaching and leaving tables with bottles and empty glasses.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“What’s yours?”
She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking off into the valley, toward the dropping sun. I waited for her to say something else.
“My name is Opal.”
“As in the birthstone of October.”
“I like how it has two levels. Oh.” She paused. “Pull.”
It was a cult. Pow. That was it, the nebulous something I felt about this place. Boom. And I was at once pleased with myself for solving the mystery and suddenly concerned for the safety of my mind. This cult, den of would-be converters and persuaders, insidious group-huggers. Kablow. We hear or read about such places, these closed worlds of unregulated faith. The attendant metaphor of washing a brain, not so bad a concept in itself.
“This is a name you chose, Opal?”
“Sometimes coming to a new place is a good opportunity to try new things. Leave old things behind. If you want.”
Her visage still and balanced, unreadable, she faced the vineyard. Hair brownish, body skinnyish, not too. Fair skin. Eyes the color of—what?—the fake wood grain of my 4Runner’s dash. The point was to do something good for the boy. A gesture backed by substantial concern and goodwill and selflessness, a mother retrieved. A testament to the reaches of love, mine and hers.
“I should make clear that I’m not here to enlist in whatever you have going. I need to find a woman with the last name Worpley. I don’t know her first name. Do you know her?”
“Why do you need to find her?”
I looked away. Pretty much the full extent of what I knew about cults was: cults hold on. This was how it happened. First they acquired, then they retained.
“Just to chat,” I said.
“Keep the menu just in case. I’ll be back in a few minutes. No rush.”
The woman cultist had left me at the table. Here was how it happened. They approached in a time of vulnerability. They casually walked alongside the overweight goth girl or the sad sci-fi kid and they spoke of gatherings, meetings where a few of them hung out, no big deal.
Down in the vineyard, I saw blue-dressed cultists leading small groups of normal people along long rows of grapes. They went slowly, the guide stopping now to speak of a vine’s characteristics or let dirt fall dramatically through his fingers.
I would have to tread more carefully than I had initially thought. The plan required singularity of purpose and minimal ruffling of cult feathers. I imagined a bearded figurehead wearing robes and white Keds. I pulled over a chair so it sat in front of me, in the sun. I took my shoes off and rested my feet on the chair.
The woman appeared from behind me and took her seat again at the table. It occurred to me that any wine I ordered might be dosed with something.
“You want to know what you remind me of ?”
“Yeah, I’ve decided no wine. I need to find this woman, and if you’re not going to help me I’d like to be referred to someone who might.”
“Okay,” she said, and shifted her gaze to the valley. I looked at my shoes on the ground. I had known the plan was not going to be easy—the plan required focus and fortitude. The plan was to.
“What do I remind you of ?” I asked.
“The way a dog looks at you sometimes and you know it wants something but you have no idea what.”
“Or a child,” I said. “A baby.”
She shrugged. “That’s a real man thing to say. I don’t mean that badly, but babies only want two or three things. The hardest part is birth. After that it all gets easier.”
“So you have kids?”
“Look at the sun,” she said. “It looks like one of those Super Balls.”
I had become distracted. I focused on the plan.
I picked up my shoes and walked to the edge of the patio. A long brick stairway led me down into the valley. Row upon row of plants. I began down one of these rows of neck-high plants, walking a strip of grass only a little wider than my shoulders. The ground was harder than I expected and felt too dry to grow anything. I almost never went barefoot, and my feet against the grass looked suspiciously like hands.
Some of the men and women here among the vines were crouched, holding shears. Others carried buckets of grapes in each hand, passing me with a steady smile and a nod. I saw a woman stop at one of the grape pickers and hand him something from out of a canvas bag. Water. I recalled the work of my most difficult delivery of the summer, unloading those bottles into the cellar with those two men in pale-blue collared shirts. I thought of their willingness to help and the diligence with which they’d worked.
The grapes hanging from vines were alive with dust. A trellis system supported the vines, anchored by stakes set into the earth at regular intervals of exactly two natural steps. I kept going. I saw a tour group coming toward me and cut across a row to avoid the sound of their crass, outside-world chatter. I smiled at two cultists who were categorically not Ian’s mother, working on an irrigation system. I kept walking deeper into the vineyard and soon reached what appeared to be a perimeter of sorts, where the rows of plants stopped and a field of barely kempt grass began. Turning back, I saw the Irenia building far in the distance, along with a figure slowly making its way down the aisle. Sun perched up there like some massively dispersed searchlight. Of course it was Opal coming toward me, a propane lamp in one hand. I considered my plan and turned back to the western reaches of the property. There was activity out there; I could see tiny bodies moving out in the field, a truck approaching them from the north.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re allowed to go out there.”
Plans, what they say about them. I had hoped to find Mrs. Worpley in the Irenia building, somewhere closer to my car. Stepping into the field of grass would take me one ring farther from escape. Opal’s eyes were deer eyes, wide and vague, but without suspicion.
“There has to be a leader,” I said. “Someone who sleeps with the women and runs the meetings.”
“That’s a bit crass. Nobody here has to sleep with anyone unless they want to.”
With her head cocked she looked younger than I’d initially thought, and this was the sort of thing on which one could easily dwell, and there was no time for dwelling. If the sun was to be trusted, it was getting on into late afternoon.
“I need to find Mrs. Worpley. You don’t seem to want to help. Fine. But I have to think whoever your leader is might.”
“You’re wrong. I want to help. He’s out there working with everyone else. He’s the hardest worker I ever met. That’s the point. But he’s also willing to speak. He’ll answer your questions.”
Somehow I had entered into a world of assumed names or sheer namelessness. Opal this woman and her talk of some man, only he, he the professional noun. Perhaps she deemed his name unutterable. Or she wouldn’t say the name out loud for fear of tarnishing it. Or if she said his name once, she was required to say it two more times.<
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“What would it take to make you say his name?”
“Who?”
“The leader. Your leader.”
“Rich? His name is Rich.”
We hadn’t moved. I looked at Opal again and reminded myself that the point was to do something for another human being. Help the boy. Selfless gesture of love.
“Come on,” she said.
Luckily I had been trained for this. Adaptation, applying several fields of knowledge to solving a problem. Liberal as derived from liberalis, Latin, meaning for free men. As opposed to servile arts. Trades. Opal stepped into the grass and I slipped back into my shoes before following. The field was huge and encased by trees. North of us, the trees climbed to a wall of bluffs, topped by some nature of radio or other such tower. West and south were more gentle hills rising with the forestry.
“Tell me something,” I said. “How did you come here?”
“I don’t want to answer that, so I’m not going to.”
We stepped high over an arid expanse of sparse, tall grass. The people we were approaching all wore the pale-blue cultist raiment. Once we’d walked twenty or so yards into the grass, Opal stopped.
“Of course you can ask about the past if that’s what you want. But you’re going to find that a lot of people here don’t want to talk about it. It’s all the same, anyway. So what’s the point?”
We were walking slowly now, side by side, toward the activity in front of us. Everything was open out here; endless sky, ground stretching outward as far as trees would allow, we creatures standing still. The occasional insect fluttering between stalks of grass, buzzing. When she spoke next, her voice had an energy to it, the charge of conviction.
“People out there? Everywhere you go, people are real good at giving reasons to do things. But if you stop for a minute and look at them, the reasons can be so crazy. Like you love God so you do this. You know?”
I would speak to Rich the Cult Leader and tell him a lie about heart disease. I would say, Look, man, I respect what you’ve got going out here, but a boy is dying. He is emaciated and losing his hair and coughing blood and all he wants is one last glimpse of his mother’s face. I would say his name, Ian, and this would humanize the disease. I would promise to have her back by nightfall.
Opal and I came to a stop close enough to the workers that I could make out faces. Next to us was a fallen tree on which she sat, and I soon sat next to her. And it wasn’t physical as such, the thing I felt. No terrible urge to press my chest against her waist or taste her biceps or any of the other normal desires for flesh. But this thing included those, somehow, and was bigger, somehow. I reminded myself what I knew about cults.
“They have all the contracts and signatures they could ever need. But people still lie and people still cheat. All over the place, all the time.” She paused and turned to face the field. “Look out at them.”
I counted somewhere between twenty and thirty people moving around the base of what would someday soon turn into a building. Currently it was no more than a knee-high wall of stones forming a perimeter wall, about fifty feet wide and a bit less deep. I looked at Opal. There were things I could have said, and there were things I could have admitted to myself about what was going to happen next.
“What do you think is going on?”
“Normal cult activity,” I said.
“Don’t be silly. What do you see?”
“The rocks are brought here by that truck over there, then unloaded by those people. And then these people take stones from the pile over to a place on the wall, where these other people lay the stones and then fill them in with some kind of concrete.”
“It’s limestone from the quarry.”
“So what is it? What’s the project?”
“A building,” she said.
“They’re building a building,” I said.
“The body wants to work. That’s what I learned here. That’s biology. Think of your cells working. The cart comes and goes from here to the processing station, where the limestone from the quarry is cleaned and broken up. Right now people are down there mining rocks.”
“Work,” I said. “The point is to work.”
“Yes! Some days you carry and other days you mine and some days you drive the truck. You lay concrete. Because in times like these, hard work is the only thing that can ever save the world.”
“So why aren’t you working now?”
She smiled. “The body also wants Recess.”
I had seen her smile before, along with these dents on her cheeks. The shape of a human face, all the similarities.
“There are three stations. This one is called Building. The other stations are Farming and Marketing, but we usually call Marketing the House. Farming is about the earth. You open it up and refill it and move it around. You water it and accept what it gives. At the House mainly what you’re doing is selling. It’s a different kind of work, but it’s still work. That’s the point. We rotate stations once a month. Marketing for a month, then Farming, then out here for Building. A month’s just long enough to settle in. Then you switch and do something else.”
I moved my right hand down to the log just behind her and leaned forward enough that the inside of my arm touched the outside of hers. I leaned back because this was obviously too much but kept my hand where it was.
“Are there guns here, on the premises?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Are they being stockpiled?”
“This is the United States of America.”
We sat quietly on the fallen log and took in the movement of the workers. One time my father returned from a business trip with an ant farm, carefully pouring the sand, sending away for ants by mail. The point being: a child requires role models who are, above all, diligent. I looked again at Opal, and this time I was a little more sure than the last.
“It’s not work alone,” she said. “It’s why. Because they work out there in the world too, but it’s always for someone else or some piece of paper. Here the work is for you. Six workdays a week and everyone has one full day of Recess built into their personal schedule. Everyone here is really great.”
I looked at her again and tried very hard not to know but knew anyway.
“Can I tell you something?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said.
“I’ve been devoting a lot of focus to my hands. Examining them and thinking about them.” I raised them in front of me, palms away. “They’re changing all the time. Growing and thickthe ening or acquiring new scars. The hands I have at twenty-two are not the same hands I had at eleven. You ever seen an eleven-year-old boy’s hands?”
“I might have,” she said.
“At eleven, hands are growing faster than any other part of a boy’s body. When we’re old, it’s the nose and ears that keep growing. At eleven, though, hands are an indication of who the boy will turn into. There’s that X-ray they do to know how tall you’ll grow. That’s all the nature side of the story. There is still nurture to consider.”
Her smile remained. I had completed the first step of the plan. Here she was, right next to me. The next steps were less clear. I could try lifting with my legs and carrying her back across the field, through the aisles of vines and past the building to my car. Drive her back to the dirt path and the porch, unlatch the screen door and complete the miracle.
“You’re still his mother.”
“You know what I remember? On my wedding day, I remember all of us going into that room in the back and there was that piece of paper. I honestly thought they were joking. Then they gave me a pen and I understood, and I remember sitting at the table and crying, just bawling over the baby inside me and the wedding on the other side of the door and this piece of paper with the places to put our names. I see your eyes. You already made a decision about me. It’s okay. I could tell you every detail and you still wouldn’t understand. But I know who I am and I know my boy. I know he’s okay. Nobody knows what’s going to h
appen to anyone, but I know he’s going to be okay. And so right now, today, I’m not going anywhere. Look. Here comes Rich.”
I recognized the bald man approaching us, recalled his skill at carrying water, his energetic assistance. Now he was sweating heavily and the thighs of his khaki pants were streaked with dirt. He nodded as he approached and raised a hand in greeting.
“Well, I know this guy! Decided to come back and see us. Good. I’m glad to see you.”
He took my hand into a firm American shake, held my eyes, then nodded to Opal. I hadn’t remembered him being so handsome. Out here in the grass, working with these others, context, context.
“You helped me with the delivery a few weeks ago.”
“That’s right. I was working the house with Tall David when you came with all the water. Receiving donations is a big part of Marketing. Had a feeling you’d be back sooner or later.”
“He’s come to take me away,” she said.
“Oh, now, that sounds kind of silly, doesn’t it?” he said.
I watched Opal leave us and move off into the grass. Here is what a cult does: it passes you among people who appear to care. Their language was one of interest and concern, inclusion. The key was to see behind the words. To spot the mechanisms within, the wheels spinning. I allowed myself to be led a few steps away from the log, toward the building project. Rich stood at my side.
“So what’s on your mind?”
“Mrs. Worpley. Opal. I came looking for her. I have to speak with her about motherhood.”
“What about motherhood, exactly?”
“What the term entails as far as extent and duration.”
“Huh. Didn’t know she had a child.”
I had no idea how much he knew. Presumably everything. He knew that I’d made it here and that my quest was partially complete. Presumably he would use this partial completeness against me somehow, lull me into a state of contentment. Rich began to massage his shoulder with a hand chipped and scarred with toil. Behind him in the distance I saw Opal bent over in the grass, picking up a piece to bring to her mouth and blow, making it buzz.