36
Founded in 1794, and located on the shores of Casco Bay where the Androscoggin River flowed into the sea, Bowdoin College was routinely ranked among the top colleges in America. Its list of alumni included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the explorer Robert Peary, and the sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Unfortunately, it did not appear to include Prosperous’s own Pastor Warraner. An early morning call to the Office of Alumni Relations produced no record of a Michael Warraner among its former students, and a similar inquiry left at Bangor Theological Seminary also drew a blank.
While I was still sucking on a pencil and trying to figure out why Warraner would bother to lie about something that could so easily be checked, I received a follow-up call from a secretary at Bowdoin. Apparently one of their associate professors was interested in meeting with me. He was free that afternoon, in fact, if I could find the time to ‘pop up’ to the college.
‘Did he really say that?’ I said.
‘Say what?’ said the secretary.
‘“Pop up”?’
‘That’s how he speaks. He’s from England.’
‘Ah.’
‘Yes. Ah.’
‘Please tell him that I’d be delighted to pop up.’
Somewhere in Bowdoin’s Faculty of Religion, the name ‘Warraner’ had set a small alarm bell ringing.
*
Professor Ian Williamson looked exactly how I always believed most academics should look, but rarely did: slightly disheveled – but not so much as to raise too many concerns about his mental well-being – and fond of waistcoats and varieties of tweed, although in his case the potential fustiness of the cloth was offset by his choice of Converse sneakers as footwear. He was youthful, bearded, and cheerfully distracted, as though at any moment he might catch sight of an interesting cloud and run after it in order to lasso it with a piece of string.
As it turned out, Williamson was a decade older than I was, so clearly the academic life agreed with him. He’d been at Bowdoin for more than twenty years although he still spoke like a weekend visitor to Downton Abbey. Frankly, if Professor Williamson’s accent couldn’t get him laid in Maine, then nothing could. He specialized in Religious Tolerance and Comparative Mystical Traditions, and his office in the lovely old faculty building was filled equally with books and assorted religious bric-a-brac, so that it was somewhere between a library and a market stall.
He offered me coffee from his own personal Nespresso machine, put his feet up on a pile of books and asked me why I was interested in Michael Warraner.
‘I could ask you the same thing,’ I said, ‘given that he doesn’t appear to be one of your alumni.’
‘Ah, fencing,’ said Williamson. ‘Right. I see. Excellent.’
‘What?’ I said, not seeing.
‘Fencing.’ He made a parrying gesture with an imaginary foil, and accompanied it with a swishing noise, just to make certain that I got the picture. Which I didn’t.
‘Sorry, are you challenging me to a duel?’
‘What? No. I meant verbal fencing – the old thrust and parry. Philip Marlowe and all that. I say, you say. You know, that kind of thing.’
He stared animatedly at me. I stared less animatedly back.
‘Or perhaps not,’ said Williamson, and a little of his enthusiasm seemed to leach away. I felt as though I’d kicked a puppy.
‘Let’s say that I’m curious about Prosperous,’ I said. ‘And I’m curious about Pastor Warraner. He seems like a strange man in an odd town.’
Williamson sipped his Nespresso. Behind him on his otherwise empty desk I noticed a trio of books with their spines facing toward me. All related to the Green Man. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that they were displayed so prominently.
‘Michael Warraner entered Bowdoin as a liberal arts student when he was in his mid-twenties,’ said Williamson. ‘From the start, it was clear that his focus was on religious studies. It’s a demanding regimen, and tends only to attract students with a real passion for the subject. A major consists of nine courses, a minor five, with two required: Introduction to the Study of Religion, or Rel. 101, and Theories about Religion. The rest are comprised of various options from Asian Religions, Islam and Post-Biblical Judaism, Christianity and Gender, and Bible and Comparative Studies. Clear enough?’
‘Absolutely.’
Williamson shifted in his chair.
‘Warraner was not the most able of students,’ he said. ‘In fact, his admission hung in the balance for some time, but he had influential supporters.’
‘From Prosperous?’
‘And elsewhere. It was clear that efforts were being made on his behalf. On the other hand, we were aware that space existed in courses for dedicated students, and …’
‘Yes?’
‘There was a certain amount of curiosity among faculty members, myself included, about Prosperous. As you’re no doubt aware, it is a town founded by a secretive religious sect, the history and ultimate fate of which remain nebulous to this day. By admitting Warraner, it seemed that we might be in a position to learn more about the town and its history.’
‘And how did that work out?’
‘We got what you might refer to as “the party line”. Warraner gave us a certain amount of information, and we were also permitted to study the church and its environs, but we really found out very little about Prosperous and the Family of Love that we didn’t already know. Furthermore, Warraner’s academic limitations were exposed at a very early stage. He struggled to scrape up credits and D-minus grades. Eventually, we were forced to let him go.
‘Pastor Warraner, as he subsequently began to style himself, was later readmitted to this college as a “special student”. Special students are people from the local community who, for whatever reason, desire to resume their education on a part-time basis. While they’re assessed on their academic record, non-academic achievements are also considered. They pay course fees, and no financial aid is available to them. Their work is graded, and they receive a college transcript, but they are non-degree candidates, and therefore cannot graduate. Pastor Warraner took ten such courses over a period of about five years, some more successfully and enthusiastically than others. He was surprisingly open to issues of Christianity and gender, less so to Asian religions, Islam, and Judaism. Overall, my impression was that Warraner desired the imprimatur of a college education. He wanted to say that he had been to college, and that was all. You say that he also claims to have a Masters from Bangor?’
I tried to remember Warraner’s precise words. ‘I believe he told me that he’d majored in religion at Bowdoin, and studied as a Master of Divinity at Bangor Theological Seminary.’
‘I suppose, if one were being generous-spirited enough, those statements might offer a certain latitude of interpretation, the latter more than the former. If you asked around, I bet you’d find that he approached Bangor at some point and was rebuffed, or tried to sit in unofficially on seminars. It would ft with that desire for affirmation and recognition.’
‘Any other impression that he may have left upon you?’
‘He was a fanatic.’
‘Doesn’t it come with the territory?’
‘Sometimes. Warraner, though, could rarely string together more than a couple of sentences without referring to “his” god.’
‘And what kind of god does he worship? I’ve met him, and I’ve seen his church, and I’m still not sure just what kind of pastor he is.’
‘Superficially, Warraner is a variety of austere Protestant. There’s a bit of the Baptist in him, a sprinkling of Methodism, but also a healthy dose of Pantheism. None of it is particularly deep, though. His religion, for want of a better explanation, is his church, the bricks and mortar of it. He worships a building, or what that building represents for him. You say that you’ve seen it?’
‘I got the grand tour.’
‘And what did you think?’
‘It’s a little light on crosses for my tastes.’
‘Catholic?’
‘Occasional.’
‘I was raised in the Church of England – Low, I should add – and even I found Warraner’s chapel positively austere.’
‘The carvings apart.’
‘Yes, they are interesting, aren’t they? Unusual here in the United States. Less so, perhaps, among the older churches of England and certain parts of Europe, although Warraner’s are quite distinctive. It’s a Familist church, of that there can be little doubt, but a Familist church of a particular type. This is not the element of the sect that fed into the Quakers or the Unitarians, infused with a spirit of peace and gentleness. It’s something harsher.’
‘And Warraner: is he still a Familist?’
Williamson finished his coffee. He seemed to be considering making another, then thought better of it. He put his cup down.
‘Yes, Mr Parker,’ he said. ‘I believe that not only is Warraner a Familist, but Prosperous remains a Familist community. To what end, I couldn’t say.’
‘And their god?’
‘Look again at those carvings inside the church, if you get the chance. My suspicion is that, somewhere along the line, the link between God – the Christian deity – and the rule of nature has become lost to Warraner and those who share his religious convictions. All that’s left is those carvings. For the people of Prosperous, they are the faces of their god.’
I stood to leave. As I did so, Williamson handed me the books from his desk.
‘I thought these might interest you,’ he said. ‘Just pop them in the post when you’re done with them.’
There he was again, ‘pop’-ing and putting things in the ‘post’. He caught me smiling.
‘Did I say something funny?’
‘I was just wondering how many dates you’d gotten in the United States because of that accent of yours.’
He grinned. ‘It did seem to make me very popular. I suspect I may even have married out of my league because of it.’
‘It’s the residual colonial admiration for the oppressor.’
‘Spoken like a history major.’
‘No, not me, but Warraner said something similar when I met him. He drew an analogy between detection and historical research.’
‘But aren’t all investigations historical?’ said Williamson. ‘The crime is committed in the past, and the investigation conducted in the present. It’s a form of excavation.’
‘Do you feel a paper coming on?’
‘You know, I might do, at that.’
I flicked through the first of the books. It was heavily illustrated with images and drawings.
‘Pictures, too,’ I said.
‘If you color any of them in, we may be forced to have a long talk.’
‘One last question?’ I said.
‘Go right ahead.’
‘Why are so many of these faces threatening or hostile?’
‘Fear,’ said Williamson. ‘Fear of the power of nature, fear of old gods. And perhaps, too, the early Church found in such depictions a literal representation of a metaphorical concept: the radix malorum, the “root of all evil”. Hell, if you choose to believe in it, is beneath our feet, not above our heads. You’d have to dig deep to find it, but it wasn’t difficult for Christians with ancient links to the land to conceive of the influence of the malefcent in terms of twisted roots and clinging ivy, of faces formed by something buried far beneath the earth trying to create a physical representation of itself from whatever materials were at hand. But the god depicted on the walls of the Prosperous chapel has no connection with Christianity. It’s older, and beyond conceptions of good and evil. It simply is.’
‘You sound almost as though you believe in it yourself.’
‘Perhaps I just sometimes find it easier to understand how someone could conceive and worship a god of tree and leaf, a god that formed as the land around it formed, than a bearded figure living on a cloud in the sky.’
‘Does that count as a crisis of faith?’
He grinned again. ‘No, only a natural consequence of the study of every shade of religious belief, and of trying to teach the importance of being tolerant in a world in which tolerance is associated with weakness or heresy.’
‘Let me guess: you and Michael Warraner didn’t exactly see eye to eye on that subject.’
‘No. He wasn’t hostile toward other forms of religious belief, merely uninterested.’
‘When I see him again, should I pass on your good wishes?’ I said.
‘I’d prefer if you didn’t,’ said Williamson.
‘Frightened?’
‘Wary. You should be too.’ He was no longer distracted, no longer smiling. ‘One of the challenges I like to set my students for their first class is a word-association game. I ask them to list all of the words, positive or negative, that come to mind when they think of god. Sometimes I get pages of words, at other times a handful, but Warraner was the only student who ever wrote just one solitary word. That word was “hunger”. He and those like him worship a hungry god, Mr ‘Parker, and no good can ever come of worshipping a deity that hungers. No good at all.’