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I approached and coaxed him out of his shell. He admitted that, yes, he was new here. He had come from Alabama, where he had been raised in a typical modern environment. His father was a mechanic. “We never stepped inside a church before coming here. Never. Well, we may have stepped in one, but not to go to a church service.”

“Weren’t you Christian before?”

“No. Nothing.”

“What were you?”

“Go-getters. Do anything, see anything.” That was his parents’ philosophy. But when they learned about the Minimites a couple of years earlier, they experienced a change of heart. The community elders dissuaded his mom and dad from joining; being in their fifties, they might have been too set in their ways to make the needed adjustments. But the son was deemed eligible.

Provided he make some changes. Before moving to the area he wore his hair in the style of a punk rock musician. All his money had gone towards punk rock paraphernalia. Judas Priest was his favorite rock group. He worshipped Judas Priest. He had thought nothing of spending sixteen dollars on a tee-shirt with slits down the sides and a piece of cloth sewn in underneath to pass as another shirt. His white-topped tennis shoes had cost fifty-five dollars.

Today he wore black work boots, blue denim broad-fall pants that buttoned up the sides, suspenders, a wide straw hat, and a solid white shirt that buttoned at the top. A tuft of whitish frizzle on his chin tried to be a beard, and it quivered as he jerked his head like a goat, glancing at the scene around us and shifting nervous eyes from side to side. His name was Bill.

“Yeah,” he said, pausing and nodding his head slowly. “It’s how you stack your priorities. The Bible tells us to lead a quiet and peaceful life. Of course, you’ve got to do some running around. If you’re going to raise a family, you’ve got to earn a living; there’s just no getting around that.”

To make his start, Bill was working as a live-in hand for the owner of this barn, the man whom I had seen laying block so skillfully. This man, middle-aged and gray-haired, was too busy to talk, but he had a story to tell. He was also a convert, and a well-educated one. He had gone to one of those expensive eastern colleges before being drafted into the Vietnam war. He was the man I had heard arguing with his wife.

Certain individuals seemed to represent a spectrum of temperaments, almost embodying the social whole in themselves. When Elbert strode onto the scene, he didn’t enter it—it entered him. Everyone drifted into his orbit. He said hardly a word; his gait was smooth, legs and broad shoulders in liquid transposition, head serenely afloat.

He seemed half-oblivious to the dress code. Even though he was of strict Amish upbringing, son of the local bishop, no less, he allowed his young sons to run free without suspenders (technically required). He left one, sometimes two, of his shirt buttons open. His front tails parted and his pants drooped, revealing a bristly lower abdomen. Once I saw him pull his tails completely out, all the way up to his forehead, and mop his brow with them. Most of the men buttoned every button; he didn’t seem to notice or care when he was half-naked.

Around the back corner of the barn behind a large water tank, I stumbled on a knot of men lounging around in the shade and talking near a cooler full of Kool-Aid. One of them looked up at me sheepishly and said, “We didn’t yet get much done in this heat. When it’s cold we like to get out there and start moving the saw to warm up. But when it’s hot like this…”

Later in the day an elderly gentleman appeared, wearing a tattered straw hat and sandals. He was of medium height and bore himself with a slow, stately gait. His gray-streaked charcoal beard was long, his voice slow, and his eyes large, kind, and penetrating. He introduced himself as Cornelius. He told me he was single, living alone, and trying to lead a quiet life on the fringes of the community. Though not an official member, he, like Mr. Miller, felt a strong attraction