Part Thirty Two

OK, I’m going to temporarily suspend my little exercise in letting people speak for themselves about things I didn’t witness. That’s because to tell this next part would involve rambling and largely (but not entirely) duplicative interviews with at least eight different people.

So I’m going to reintroduce all my own prejudices and angles and agendas into this part of the story. Or at least put them out in the open for awhile.

In the spring of 1992 a man from Michigan, driving a blue Porsche, picks up a hitchhiker on a winding highway in Arkansas. The hitchhiker is Haywood, who had quit the job in New Mexico for ill-defined reasons and meandered his way eastward. In Texas he was hit by a bottle thrown out of a passing pickup and spent the day in a hospital, having glass picked out of his thigh and O-Neg blood pumped into him. Otherwise nothing too eventful happened – at least nothing that would, years later, cause anyone to get in touch with Preacher or the Worshipers once he became better known.

If the story of how the Michigan man in the midnight-metallic 944 came to be driving from Arkansas to Georgia was at all interesting, I would have just put his long and meandering interview in here instead of this summary.

At any rate, the guy – his name is Gary Ross, which is unimportant for our purposes – the guy picks up Preacher and they go hurtling through the heart of the Confederacy together, paralleling Sherman’s March and talking about music, food, and everything else. Ross recalled later that he, Gary, had done most of the talking. That there was something about Preacher which somehow drew things out of you, in a friendly, unhurried way. “It was like,” he said to me, “having a… a personal confessor. Not just kneeling in a booth but sitting there with someone who you could really unburden to, someone who understood where you were coming from and was able to offer insight and empathy, not penance.”

Ross is now a Worshiper. He’s probably not bullshitting about giving Haywood a ride – apparently he found Preacher by googling his name, years later, and sending him a “hey remember me” email. Preacher responded, and confirmed that Gary Ross did indeed give him a ride that spring day a decade ago.

Ross told me he became a Worshiper after reconnecting with Preacher. “I read some of the articles about him. To tell you the truth, there wasn’t anything particularly holy about him when I met him; he was just a good-natured kid. And a good listener. But I started reading up on it, and got the book, and then my oldest came home from college with one of those circle pendants…”

OK, so that’s another one in Preacher’s win column.

Anyhow they’re just outside the town of Barlow, Georgia, when Ross stops to get gas before heading into Athens. And Preacher gets out to stretch his legs, and he tells Gary, hey, it’s a beautiful Spring day, thanks for the ride, but I’m going to walk for awhile.
Ross tries to talk him out of it, but Haywood is insistent, and so they part company. Just a few hours out of Gary Ross’s life, that somehow stuck with him for years to come.
Preacher, then, starts walking down a road heading toward the tiny farming village. And he passes a flatbed truck on the road, and sees two women changing the front tire. He offers to help. They glare at him and tell him no. He shrugs and ambles on his merry way. Halfway into town the truck passes him.

He saunters into the town center. Inquires about a “Help Wanted” sign at the lumberyard; they don’t want him, it seems. Inquires about a “Help Wanted” sign at the diner; they don’t want him either. “It was,” he recalled later, “about the unfriendliest town I’ve ever been in.” He begins to regret whatever impulse, instinct, or intuition caused him to walk off the highway into Barlow. He wonders how long it will take him to hike all the way into Athens, a good 20 miles down the road. He knows that he always does well in college towns.

His footsteps lead him pass the Southern States, where he sees the same flatbed backed up to the loading dock and the two women loading sacks of feed and seed. There are three rather seedy-looking men standing nearby, doing nothing to help. Preacher assumes that their offers of assistance were treated the way his was. But as he draws near he overhears the comments made by the men; their exact wording is lost to posterity, but they are sufficiently vile that even Preacher – Mr. Live-And-Let-Live – is moved to exhibit his personal brand of low-key chivalry.
He starts helping the women load the truck. One of them hisses at him that they don’t need his help. He says, “clearly,” but continues working. The men aim a few comments at him, to the effect of (a) the women are lesbians, (b) lesbians and straight men cannot interact, therefore (c) he must be a homosexual himself. Haywood is not moved by this redneck syllogism.

As Preacher and one of the women – a short blonde woman – lash the stakes in place on the sides of the truck bed, the other woman – a tall, well-built brunette – argues with the manager of the Southern States, who comes out to tell them that they’ve blocked the loading dock for too long. The brunette points out that the seed was supposed to have been delivered, and over a week ago, and that they have nearly missed sowing season as a result of their delivery problems. The Southern States manager is unsympathetic.

Referring to them by their hair color is demeaning, isn’t it? Even though at the time, Preacher didn’t know their names. The brunette’s name is Cassie Shields, and the blonde’s name is Anna Peppersack.

Finally Preacher and Anna finish with the siderails. He asks for a ride back to the highway, and Anna nods once, curtly. Cassie signs for the seed and walks off the loading dock to get in the truck. Anna sits in the passenger seat. Preacher stays on the bed.

And one of the men put his hand on the door of the truck, and refuses to let Cassie in.
Cassie tells him to move. He refuses. She tells him to move again. He makes a vulgar suggestion. The other two men giggle. Preacher suspects he’s about to see some testosterone-fueled stupidity and stands up, to see if it’s too late to do that hand-on-the-shoulder, come-talk-to-me thing that he does so well. But before he can get off the truck Shields has the man’s wrist in a vise grip twisted behind his back and he’s trying not to scream. She marches him a few steps away from the truck and then pushes him away and turns to walk back to the cab. The man lunges toward her and she steps to the side, grabs the back of his head, and slams his face into the door of the truck as she whips it open. Then she jumps in and starts the engine, looks out the window at the man with the bloody nose sitting in the parking lot, and leaves.

Preacher hears a hearty “fuck you, bitch,” as they leave. He makes eye contact with the man but manages to avoid laughing. Barely.

A few miles outside of town – near where they had stopped to fix the flat – Cassie pulls the truck off the road with a cloud of gravel and gets out of the truck, screaming, cursing, and stomping. She marches away from them, up the shoulder, yelling at no one in particular. Anna hops out of the truck and starts to go after her.

Leave her be, Preacher says from his perch on the pile of canvas sacks. Anna jumps. She’s forgotten he’s there. She looks up at him.

Leave her be, Preacher repeats. She’s got a lot of adrenaline right now after all that. Back there in the parking lot she wanted to kick three asses, at least, and only got to kick one, so now she’s got a lot of unused ass-kicking energy to burn off.

Anna starts to go after her anyway, then stops and thinks better of it.

Thanks, by the way, she says to Preacher.

Don’t mention it.

No, really. Sorry we were rude to you before. It’s just that… she shrugs, words failing her. But Haywood understands. Fifteen minutes in Barlow and he understands.

He starts to climb off the truck. I’ll just hoof it the rest of the way to the highway, he says.

No, stay, Anna says. The least we can do is get you something to eat. She looks at him. He looks skinny. He is skinny.

Please. The others might want to meet you, anyway. Plus those assholes from Southern States might decide to ride down the highway later on, and you don’t want to be alone if they find you.
I imagine, Preacher says, I’d want to have her there. He points with his chin toward Cassie, who is still kicking up clods of weeds on the shoulder.

Anna laughs. That’s Cassie, she says. She used to be in the Army. I’m Anna.

Preacher, Preacher says.

Peter? the girl says, wrinkling her brow.

No, Preacher. That’s my actual name. What can I say, I grew up in California.

After awhile Cassie sits down on the shoulder and tries to act like she’s not crying. Like she hasn’t worn herself out. And Preacher says, now go get her. And Anna does.
When they walk back awhile later Preacher is still lounging comfortably on the seed bags.

Thanks, Cassie says. Her face is red.

Thank you, Preacher tells her, for beating that guy up. Where were you in the fourth grade and one of his spiritual cousins was taking my lunch money?

Long Island, she says to him, smiling a little. Assuming we were in the fourth grade at the same time.

She is actually a year or so older than Preacher.

They drive back to the highway and then down the highway and then down another side road and then they turn into a rutted driveway that was probably gravel at one time. They bounce under some tree branches and cross a little creek and then ride through fields waiting to be planted and fields holding sheep. Around a bend and through another stand of trees and there is a run-down and empty goat-shed on the right hand side of the driveway as the lane curves up to the big barn just pas that. A large white farmhouse sits on a pretty green lawn farther up the hill, on the left.

As the truck pulls in two other women come out of the barn. Their names are Ellen Smith and Donna Maith. And in the house is a woman named Karen Poole.

Cassie backs the truck into the barn and Preacher notices that the other women are looking at him with skepticism. Mixed with hostility.

“Was white boy on the list?” Donna asks Anna.

“It’s a long story,” Anna says.

Preacher helps them unload the truck. There are introductions all around. Anna tells them what happened. Karen has wandered down by this time; she is a very small, almost elfin woman. They are all in their mid- to late-twenties.

And a dog trots up, a big mutt with a lot of German Shepherd in him. He sniffs Preacher for a moment, and then head-butts the man’s hand. Haywood crouches and strokes the dog’s head good-naturedly, roughly. The dog wags his tail and sits down for more.

He doesn’t take to strangers, Ellen observes.

And I’m pretty strange, Haywood concedes.

The name of the place is Sappho Farms. Of course.

Karen Poole inherited the entire spread from her grandparents in her last year of law school at Emory. Donna was an undergrad there. Ellen was her significant other, an unhappy school-teacher who’d graduated with a history degree from University of Georgia a year earlier. In those days Karen had a lover named Elizabeth, a barista and aspiring poet. Cassie had gotten kicked out of the Army for the reason you would guess she was kicked out of the Army, went to Georgia Tech and majored in engineering, and met Anna – who had decided, a semester shy of graduating, that she didn’t want to be a software engineer.

Anyhow they pooled their money, fixed up the place, and tried to put their political and spiritual and cultural ideals to work in their own six-person agricultural cooperative. A year later Elizabeth left; farming life wasn’t for her. All of them found it much harder than they’d expected. And a few months after that… a few months after that, Anna and Cassie came home with Preacher.

Most of this – except for the part about Elizabeth – was explained to Preacher while they washed up and prepared for lunch. While the others prepared for lunch; they had Karen take him aside and pump him for information, mostly because there wasn’t room for six people in the kitchen at once.

Karen recalls that he was at once quite forthcoming and quite vague about what brought him to Barlow, Georgia. “He said he’d graduated from St. John’s a couple of years back, that he’d been knocking around the country looking for whatever it was he was supposed to do ever since,” she would recall later. “I remember thinking he was polite, articulate, and utterly indifferent to our little social experiment.”

They eat. Preacher entertains. He does that well. He tells them a funny story about Alaska. He asks them about the farm. He tells them that he looked for work at the diner and the lumber yard and neither of them would give him the time of day.

“Where,” Donna asks him – she’s very practical – “were you going to live if they’d hired you?”
Preacher shrugs. “Something would have come up,” he says. “It always does.”

“And why?” Ellen said, “why would you suddenly decide to look for work in Barlow, Georgia, of all the godforsaken places?”

He shrugs again. “When you have absolutely no reason to be anywhere in particular, it’s easy to act on the vaguest of impulses,” he said. “I lived in a town called Barlow once, and liked it.”

That would have been Barlow, Texas, where he lived for about six months when he was a kid. In case you’re keeping score at home.