“He’s trying to tell the world something,” said Alice’s father. “He’s trying to show what’s happening to us.”
Alice had the reputation among her friends at Midwest Christian as a straight talker, somebody who faced the facts and looked reality in the eye. She lived up to her reputation a few days later when Ben’s Malibu disappeared in the distance and she drove over to his farm to have a closer look at the carnage. She expected to see flies swarming over the white carcasses, but there weren’t many. There were more hornets, some hovering like little copters around the snouts and some crawling into the caverns of the ears the way a honeybee goes into a flower. And sparrows, fluttering flocks of them, landing on the bloating bodies and pecking bits of dirt from the forest of bristles.
Numbness swept over Alice at the sight of the bulging pink bellies and all those limbs jutting stiffly out like table legs. She returned a day later, thinking that if she looked again, the horror would diminish. The scene had changed but only for the worse because starlings and crows had moved in and were pecking into the rotting flesh.
She stood with her hands folded and looked at the awful sight. She didn’t feel disgusted or angry. She didn’t even feel sad. She felt scared. As she stood staring, her clasped hands tightened and her shoulders gave little shudders. The fear that had come over her, as best as she could understand it, was that this was just the beginning. Her mother’s doomsday fantasies might be coming true.
The sound of a car slowing down near Ben’s driveway interrupted her quiet and private horror. Alice turned and prepared to be embarrassed by someone who would think she was some kind of pervert who liked to stare at animal carnage. The vehicle, a dark Toyota station wagon, did more than slow down: it stopped, and the heads of three small people stared in her direction. Alice faced them, and for several seconds it was a stare off. Then the vehicle inched forward down the driveway in Alice’s direction. As it got closer, she saw that the occupants were foreign—probably Mexican immigrants who worked on one of the big dairies, but the Minnesota license plates didn’t make sense. When Mexicans drove in from other states, they usually came from California or Arizona. The driver was a young woman, and she swung the station wagon directly in front of Alice. She was not white, but she didn’t look Mexican either.
“Hi,” said the young woman, “what on earth happened here?”
She sounded totally American, but she looked Asian. Alice came to a quick realization: these were the Hmong family that had just moved to Dutch Center.
“Are you the Vangs?”
“Whoa-ho!” said the young woman. “Word travels fast around here. Yes, I’m Mai, and this is my brother, Nickson, and that’s my mom, Lia. We were just taking a ride and checking things out.”
Nickson lifted his hand and nodded. “Hi,” he said. The mother, in the backseat, only nodded and smiled.
“I don’t live here,” said Alice.
“You sound American,” said Mai.
“No, I don’t live on this farm.”
“Looks like you’re too late,” Mai commented.
“I don’t think anybody could have stopped him. They were Ben Van Doods’s hogs.”
“I meant it looks like it’s too late to eat them. They smell rotten! Why didn’t he butcher them when he had the chance?”
“I don’t know,” said Alice.
“Quite a waste there,” said Nickson.
They all had such intense eyes and such black hair. Even the mother had those intense eyes, but she was all eyes and no speech.
Alice didn’t like the judgment that had been leveled at Ben Van Doods. It felt directed at every farmer around Dutch Center. She didn’t like these brazen newcomers, but at the same time, she did. What would it feel like to be that confident and outspoken in an unfamiliar setting?
2
Alice sometimes wondered if she would go to church if she had a choice. In Dutch Center, church was something people did out of habit, sometimes sleeping through the sermon, sometimes gossiping after church in cruel ways. Alice didn’t like the way that the people with the most expensive cars parked right outside the front door. Showing off. Wouldn’t people do better by staying home and relaxing in a quiet room, reading their Bibles and asking God to help them make the right decisions? Alice didn’t have a choice. In Dutch Center, not going to church would have been like having a bumper sticker that said, “God Is Dead.”
Compared to some of the real wackos, even her mother, with her doomsday fears of the millennium, seemed relatively sane. One church member thought space travel into the heavens was a Hollywood camera trick created by atheists. There was the millionaire retired farmer who thought global warming was the result of the earth still drying out after Noah’s flood, and the even wackier jeweler, Gerrit Vanden Leuvering, whose gray head swaying in the second pew harbored the belief that dinosaur bones were leftovers from an earlier creation because this earth and its creatures were created 6,456 years ago. Around these people Alice knew that it was best to keep her mouth shut. Don’t pretend to know more than the next person. If she had spoken up, more people than her mother would be saying she was arrogant, somebody too big for her britches. Alice didn’t go to church to argue science. She went to hear the music and to find peace. “Getting centered,” some people called it.
She could sing hymns and listen to organ music all day, and often Rev. Prunesma preached sermons that made her think about something other than the judgmental eyes of her mother or the shuffle of hungry steers. Man does not live by bread alone: at its best, that’s what church was all about. Going to church also gave her the chance to wear clothes that made her look like somebody who didn’t live on a farm. It wasn’t as arrogant and pretentious as parking an expensive car in front of church, and it did give her a taste of the future when she planned to be out of here.
The Krayenbraaks walked down the aisle in their usual long-long-short-long order—Father, Mother, Aldah, Alice—and sat in their usual pew: left side, sixth from the front. People said Alice resembled her father more than her mother, and she thought about that as she watched his dignified and stately walk that he reserved for church. Compared to her mother, he looked well groomed when he went out into public. Alice had never known him when he wasn’t bald, but he still fussed with the little hair he had left. You could have held a carpenter’s level to the edge of his sideburns.
In church, her father did not look like a farmer, and she hoped she did not look like a farmer’s daughter. She knew they both looked different when they were on the farm. On the farm, he had an undignified but still controlled, pumping-forward efficiency in his manner. When she was working outside with him, she thought she looked like somebody who was following the mandate of the hymn that said, “Work, for the night is coming.”
The church sanctuary was a no-nonsense place of worship. Simple and huge is how Alice thought of it—like a large auditorium. The ceiling slanted in straight lines of wooden rafters above them to a peak that was fifty feet over their heads. The smooth oak benches had no cushions, and though narrow arched windows lined the walls, the stained glass patterns were simple designs that did not hint of “graven images.” A large wooden cross stood against the wall behind the lectern, which was centered on the raised pulpit—centered to remind everyone that in this church the preaching of The Word was central to the worship service.
The church didn’t have a choir, and it didn’t have any fresh flowers or stenciled banners. Bright colors of any kind would be a distraction. The congregation didn’t want their house of worship cluttered with any New Age garbage. Of all the churches in Dutch Center, this was the one that had the largest number of farmers and the smallest number of the local Redemption College students.
Just as the organ prelude was ending, the Reverend Prunesma walked in from the front of the church, followed