Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [49]
When the marriage knot was finally tied, the sexuality that had been saved for it became inseparably woven within a relationship of many strands. Judging from the large families I saw in the neighborhood, there might be a more descriptive way of putting this: the Minimite husband now freely indulged in something denied his freewheeling off-the-farm brethren—romance on the job. The low divorce rate among Minimites—zero, to be precise—may surprise us. Then again, maybe not.
Twelve
Meet the Neighbors
By now it was pretty clear that the way to get to know the Minimites was to join them in work. Work of course was the currency here, and was traded back and forth like money. It was also the way to stay current, to keep in step and in good stead with the neighbors and to sometimes meet strangers.
But what a barn raising or hoeing had in spectacle, a smaller work assignment could make up for in specificity. Put differently, if at a barn raising you got to know many people superficially, in a smaller job you got to know one person well.
Edward
With this in mind I followed the trail back to Bill’s home one afternoon in hopes of getting to know his boss, the man reputed to have an education, the man with the overheated wife. They lived in a symmetrical, immaculate white frame house. It almost looked like a stage prop, someone’s abstract depiction of domestic bliss.
At the door I shook a hand that was more like a baseball mitt. I explained myself, and in moments I was inside. After passing through a side porch, we entered a long, bare room containing a kitchen at the near end and a living area with a rocking chair and daybed at the far end. The windows were tall and admitted much light, but the walls were blank and unadorned. The centerpiece of the spartan space was a black Pioneer Maid, which gleamed at its spot on an interior wall like the focal point of a simple chapel.
With his hat off, Edward’s ample gray hair looked like the mane of an elderly lion. He stood an inch or so taller than I and had square, slightly hunching shoulders. His eyes were friendly, yet they glinted with the slightest hint of…what was it…mischief? Was it that he already knew who I was—maybe more about me than I wanted him to? Or was there something about his own past he wanted to divulge?
A woman in a white head covering stepped from the kitchen area. Two wide-eyed young things clung to her apron, each wearing a miniature version of the same headpiece. Mr. Pendleton introduced the woman as his wife, Grace.
She didn’t look angry at all. If anything, she was quick to catch my eyes with the pleasure she took in my arrival. Roundly proportioned, with a round untroubled face and dimpled cheeks, she could have sat in for the portraiture of the Mona Lisa, were it not for the head covering.
As Grace prepared mint tea, Edward and I seated ourselves on the daybed, and after I told him a little about myself, he filled me in on his background:
“I grew up in a good Catholic family in a semirural area,” he said. “My dad believed in hard work, and he even found a local farmer, a Jew, whom I could work for in the summer. My mother, bless her soul, was a gem of a person. She’s dead now, but my father put her on a pedestal.
“When I went to college, I came with all these ideals; I started out loyal to the Church’s teachings. But it was the sixties, and that’s when things began to unravel. I would be one person at home and another altogether at school. My parents had no idea what was going on. I did things there that I don’t even want to think about.
“After I graduated, I went to Vietnam. I was a combat engineer, so I didn’t have to do any of the fighting myself, but that didn’t mean things