Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [78]
It was striking me with ever greater force that one of my initial impressions had been truer than I realized. Mary and I really had stumbled onto a kind of parallel world, a dislocated chunk of the past. The way of life and outlook which the Minimites upheld really had descended from an alien time and place and was displaying before our eyes a kind of alternative reality, a little-taken fork in the road of history.
Science fiction writers are fond of postulating time travel scenarios: “What might be if this had happened instead of that?” The time traveler is sent back and interposes a change—and returns to the present to find a world he doesn’t recognize. What if the Christian monks hadn’t over-intellectualized, hadn’t abandoned the life of the body? In a sense, you could say the Minimites were living out the experiment. And in doing so, they showed that the historical fork was still open.
Of course, by the same token, the future of the Minimite community itself was not carved in stone, but depended even now on its members’ own choices. And one of these was for the new minister who would soon lead them.
Wilbur operated a modest harness business in a small gray shop nestled behind the weeping willow across from his barn. It served mainly Minimites, but outsiders like me could use it too. Not long after our chat on the porch, I dropped by and entered a dim room whose walls were adorned with leather straps, chains, halters, and bits. Nobody seemed home. “Wilbur?” I called doubtfully.
There was no answer. But through a doorway, in the back room, I noticed the silhouette of a seated figure.
“Wilbur?”
Still no answer.
I took a few steps toward the doorway, and then a voice said, “What have you been doing today?”
I started. It was Wilbur’s, but strangely singsong, as if he were in some other world. I still saw only a silhouette in the shadows.
“Picking tomatoes.”
“There’s a lot to do on a farm,” he replied in the same unsettling voice. It clearly wasn’t a time for conversation, and I left.
I happened to bump into Bill a few minutes later, and he was breathless with news. Edward had visited Wilbur just before I did, and it seemed there had been an incident. Bill had a way of reporting facts selectively that only intensified one’s curiosity: “Wilbur was sewing on the sewing machine, and it got hung up, and Edward pointed his finger and said, ‘There’s your problem.’ Wilbur ran the needle right through his finger.”
My jaw fell. “Why did he do that?”
The machine, apparently, had stalled out while the two had a téteà-téte. Then Edward looked, saw what the problem was, and pointed. And Wilbur ran the needle. “Wilbur claims it was an accident.”
“Why would anyone stick his finger right under a sewing machine needle?”
“There’s Edward for you,” said his loyal hand. “Sticking his finger in other people’s business.”
Two of Edward’s other fingers, by the way, were truncated. He had stuck them in a meat grinder just as someone turned the handle.
Could a man of such gentle demeanor have had it in him? I couldn’t help wondering. That would explain his strange behavior. Wilbur, leery of scholastic debate and abstract conjecture, needed a more concrete way to express himself—to sew up his case against busybodies.
But if so, he had only skirted the issue. The real contest was still to come.
Section III
Harvesting
Sixteen
As the Pumpkins Turn
As the residue of James’s sheaves was cleared away, the threshing season breathed its last. A new, cleaner spirit seemed to aerate the land; the days were getting shorter; the sky at night