“Well, look at you,” said Rochelle, not kindly.
The little road to the Smith Farm was crowded with SUVs and RVs, most of them bearing license plates from points far west. Not surprisingly, when they reached it, the parking lot was jammed. Inside the visitor center, the three of them were ushered into a room where a sturdy missionary with an Australian accent related the story that was likely already known to everyone in the room: the Smith family had come to Palmyra after earlier struggles in Vermont, and when young Joseph prayed about which church congregation was truest to God’s word, an angel led him from his bedroom to the woods, and there God himself, and Jesus, had delivered the answer—none of them.
“And so, before you exit to the farm, and before you enter the Sacred Grove, I want to testify that like Joseph I once struggled to understand what God wanted from me, and so I did pray with an open heart and real intent, and my Heavenly Father spoke to me, just as I was promised. I know that the Gospel is true and I am loved by my Heavenly Father. I welcome you all to this glorious and holy place. Now, does anyone with a mobility issue need the golf cart?”
Lewyn got up. Outside, the light had become something mottled and a bit strange, as if rain clouds were gathering and dispersing at the same time. “Are you coming?” he asked Mark and Rochelle, who had remained seated.
“To be honest,” said Mark, “I’m thinking not. I’m not feeling good about this. I can’t really explain it. I mean, not in a way you’d understand.”
Lewyn frowned. “Rochelle?”
She shook her head.
“Okay,” Lewyn said. “I mean, I would like to see that Sacred Grove. Since we’re here.”
So Lewyn left them together, an odd couple united by their very different aversions, and he walked with the other pilgrims down past the Smith family’s home, and into the woods. He felt the first drop of rain and turned up his face to an unaccountably glowing sky. It was not unpleasant, though the family in front of him instantly produced umbrellas. Everyone, apart from himself, was in a group or holding hands with somebody else. It was deep green, and it all got quiet once they entered the trees.
In the woods, to his confusion, he saw no signs or guideposts pointing the way. People dispersed along a web of paths, as if they knew where to go, which frustrated Lewyn more and more with each turn he took. Surely these faithful had some piece of information not available to him, and all were congregating at the Sacred Grove, the corner of this forest where their mystery had taken place, while he himself meandered. He walked for a good while, occasionally passing others, sometimes hearing the sounds of people on other pathways through the woods, as the rain gently came and then halted. He wasn’t warm and he wasn’t cold. The ground underfoot was soft. He could have gone on forever if not for the awful feeling that he was still in the wrong place, and everyone else had already arrived, experienced the magical thing, and then departed, and also that Rochelle was waiting for him and growing more disgusted with every passing moment. Finally, he found that he had come around to the lane again, and he could see the farm buildings beyond. A wave of deep disappointment went through him.
On the path not far ahead was an elderly couple, the man drawing a windbreaker hood tighter around his face, the woman waiting under her plastic umbrella. He didn’t realize he was going to speak to them until he heard his own voice, embarrassingly reedy.
“Excuse me, I’m trying to find the Sacred Grove.”
The woman turned to him. She had thin hair, crossing the border from blond to gray. The man frowned.
“I’m sorry?”
“The Sacred Grove. I’ve been walking around but I can’t find it.”
“But,” said the man, “you’re in it. This is the Sacred Grove.”
Lewyn looked around himself. Something about not seeing the forest for the trees occurred to him, but that wasn’t quite right. “Isn’t … I mean, I thought it was a place in the forest. Like, a particular place.”
“Well, there is a particular place,” said the man with admirable restraint. “Not many people know the exact location. President Hinckley does, of course, but the church believes that everyone should have a personal experience of the Grove.”
“So … I can’t find it?” Lewyn asked.
“Well, you can’t find it if you don’t know you’re in it,” the man said, not unkindly. “Are you a member of our church?” he asked.
“Uh, no. No.” It was the first time anyone had actually asked him that, he realized.
Outside the visitor center he found Mark on a bench beside the parking lot looking deeply unhappy. Rochelle was in the car, making use of the air-conditioning.
“I’m sorry I took so long,” he said as they walked across the lot. “I kind of got lost.”
“I think all these people are lost,” said Mark.
At six they drove to the outdoor stage, a massive structure that bore no resemblance to the proscenium stage Lewyn had been imagining. Built into the hill itself, it looked more than anything like a massive gray hamster habitat, with too many levels and surfaces to easily count. Lewyn wondered how they were going to get through the evening, the three of them, when it was clear that he was the only one of them who even wanted to be here. But he did want that, even if he had no idea why, or what was the tug that had been working at him all day, pulling him along like the strongest undertow off Chilmark. Rochelle and Mark, with nothing in common but their profound unhappiness about the afternoon they’d spent together and the evening ahead, would each have leapt wordlessly into Mark’s car and gunned the engine for Ithaca and their utterly different lives there, if only it weren’t for himself and his unfathomable wish to go further in. It was something he would still be thinking about, years later. It was something he would uncoil his path back to, always stopping short of understanding.
They had to walk past a corral of protesters shouting that Joseph Smith was an apostate and Mormons weren’t Christians. “Shame on you for attending this unholy event,” said a woman to Rochelle, who grabbed Lewyn’s hand. “You’re going to burn in hell, you know.”
“Oh I know,” Rochelle said tersely. “But not for this.”
“Freedom of speech at its finest,” said Lewyn, trying for lightheartedness.
“WhatMormonsDontTell.com,” Rochelle read from the group’s signs. “What don’t Mormons tell? Something to do with history or science?”
“Something to do with Satan,” said Mark.
The field was teeming with people dressed as if they’d walked straight out of a swords-and-sandals epic but without having shed their American health, corporeal padding, and straight white teeth. Everywhere Lewyn looked he saw blond and blue-eyed shepherds, double-chinned warriors with leather-like breastplates and what looked like cut-up rugs on their shoulders, giddy kids straight from the mall or the soccer field, dressed as child soldiers and desert maidens. There was a tall man in a vaguely Aztec getup featuring a green dotted skirt with a fringe of beads, a fake black beard, and a towering headdress that might have looked over-the-top on Carmen Miranda. He held the hand of a small child in a dust-colored shift and a green headband, absently sucking on a juice box, and chatted with a guy around Lewyn’s own age who was obviously meant to be Joseph Smith. People kept coming up to “Joseph Smith” and posing with him for pictures.
“I see him,” said Mark. “Over there, in front of the stage.”
Jonas was with a large group of goatherds or nomads, some with oversized faux beards, most with scarves wrapped around their waists and heads and heavy beaded necklaces, as if the whole group had been routed through a Moroccan bazaar and not allowed out until they had piled on the inventory.
“This is my cast team,” Jonas explained, when they reached him. “We’re all in the Prophet Lehi story and later the Prophet Abinadi.”