Sweet land stories - E. L. Doctorow [37]
As he stood by the pool of fire, the garage doors first, and then the roof and then the collapsed walls, were lifted and spun into the black funnel. Only Walter John Harmon stood where he stood, and then was slowly raised in his standing and turned slowly in his turning, calmly and silently, his arms stretched wide in the black shrieking, with the things of our lives whirling in the whirlwind above him—car fenders and machines from the laundromat, hats and empty coats and trousers, tables, mattresses, plates and knives and forks, TV sets and computers, all malignantly alive in the black howling. And then a child flew into Walter John Harmon’s left arm and another fell into his right arm, and he held them steadfast and was lowered to the ground where he had stood. And then the dreaded wind that takes all breath away was gone, having blown itself to bits. And the fields beyond the town were strewn with the several dead and dying among their possessions. But the pool of fire in the Getty garage was nothing but a ring of blackened concrete, and the sun was out as if the tornado had never been, and the mothers of those two children came running and found them bruised and bleeding and crying but alive. Only then did Walter John Harmon begin again to breathe, though he stood where he stood, unable to move as if in a trance, until he collapsed and lost consciousness.
All of this is in the Consensus. Other elements of the miracle are still debated by the Community and I suppose come under the heading of apocrypha. One of the Elders, Ansel Bernes, who had owned a clothing store, claims that seven mercury street lamps on the walking street in the Fremont business district came on and stayed on when the tornado hit. I can’t quite accept this. According to the Sun-Ledger, Fremont’s power outage was total. It took the local utility two days to get everyone back online.
WHEN WE CAME here Betty and I had been married a dozen years with no children to show for it. One of the appeals of the Community is that we are all parents of all children. While the adults live in distinct quarters of their own, as in the outer world, the children room together in the main house. At present we are a hundred ten in number, with a human treasury of seventy-eight children, ranging in age from two to fifteen.
Except for the main house, which was once a retreat for elderly nuns of the Roman Catholic persuasion and to which we have added a new wing, all the Community buildings were built by members according to the specifications of Walter John Harmon. He called for square, box-like structures with gable roofs for the adult houses, each of which contains two apartments of two rooms each. His own residence is slightly larger, with a gambrel roof, which gives it the appearance of a barn. All buildings in the complex are painted white; no colors are permitted exterior or interior. Metal fixtures are not allowed—window frames are wood, all water is drawn by hand from wells, there is no indoor plumbing, and communal showers, men’s and women’s, are jerry-rigged in tents. Walter John Harmon has said: “We praise what is temporary, we cherish the impermanent, for there can be no comparison with what is coming that is not an impiety.”
But in the business suite in the new wing of the main house we do have computers, faxes, copiers, and so on, powered by a gasoline generator behind the building, though we intend when it is practical to switch to solar cells. There are metal filing cabinets as well. All of this is by dispensation because, regrettably, we do have necessary business with the outside world. We handle legal challenges from state