We’re at a line of fencing. I stop, lean back on a post, as if to catch my breath, and he stops too. “No more about concrete,” I say, raise my hands in mock surrender. “I promise.”
“It was a Sunday,” he says, and my heart glows. A conversation. That’s half of it, right there. He’s talking, I listen while he talks. “Church was at Zachary Weaver’s. One or two men will go early and help to prepare the service. The others come along later. I was there early, on this day. At the Weavers’ all was in an uproar. Someone had heard a radio broadcast. There was—lamentation. Distress.” He shakes his head and looks at the ground. “And I could tell, d’you see? I knew in the crack of an instant what I would need to do. I could see it in their eyes, these people, the change that would be wrought on them. It was already happening, d’you see?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer. I don’t interrupt.
“I went out on the porch and I saw my family walking to the house from our house and I made this decision in the crack of a moment, just like that. I just—I waved with my hand—like this—I waved—” He stops on the path and raises a hand, pushing at the air: go back, stop, turn around. “I walked out of Zachary Weaver’s and I walked my family back to our home and I gave them all of that. The story you’ve heard.”
“The illness,” I say. “Pandemic.”
“Yes.”
He says it low, the one word yes, down into his beard, and for the first time since we’ve met I can read something other than grave self-seriousness on his face—a wash of grief and self-recrimination.
“The plague. The illness astride the land.” His face darkens further. He hates his lie. It eats at him, I can see it. “I gathered my people to me and I told them that the situation was severe and that we must remain isolated, even from our friends and from our church. And I said it will be a hard time, but we have God and with God’s grace we will survive.”
And on he goes, off and running, a steady stream of low syllables. As if now that he’s given himself leave to tell me some part of his story he feels compelled to tell all of it. As if part of him has been waiting lo these many months for someone to tell this story to, someone to share the burden of his accomplishments. He has been on a desert island alone with his desperate act of conscience, wrestling with his awful decision and the work it has required of him, in exile in his own home, alone through the hard months. The only people he has had to speak with don’t speak English.
He recounts gathering his people all around the family table, asking for and receiving solemn promises from everyone, from the eldest to the very young, to remain within the safety of their own land until the sickness should pass. He describes how God provided him assistance, in the form of a ragged starving troop of CIs, who had made it somehow from their Asian homelands to Newfoundland, and from Newfoundland down to this pocket of midwestern America. They understood each other well enough to make arrangements, a trade—Atlee provides shelter in tents and lean-tos in a barren field on the far side of State Road 4, and in exchange they provide labor and loyalty and discretion. They work under him, they share in the spoils, they walk the perimeter of Joy Farms at night, unseen guardians.
It is a precarious arrangement. He knows that. Eventually, one of his children or one of his children’s children will break the promise, wander off the farm and discover the truth. Or someone from the outside world, a burglar or a madman or a refugee, will smash through the fencing into the private world.
“It cannot last forever,” Atlee says. “But it does not have to. Just a few more days.”
We’re getting close now, close to that bend in the road. The sun is halfway along its slow tumble down from noon to night, another day being burned down, sloughed away.
“These are hard times, sir,” I say. “We’ve all had to make hard choices. God will forgive you.”
He stares hard at the ground for a cold second and when he looks up I am expecting anger—how dare I speak for God, how can I?—but instead he is crying, his old lined face dissolved into childlike grief. And he says in a hollow voice, “Do you think so?” Steps toward me and grabs at my shirt front. “Do you think that it’s true?”
“Yes,” I say, “of course,” and he envelops me in his grip and weeps into my shoulder. I don’t know how to handle this, I really don’t.