World Made by Hand

Fifty-six

I struggled with whether to tell Loren about my audience with Mary Beth Ivanhoe, the “precious mother” of the New Faithers, and decided against it. I felt it would only make him turn more hostile toward them. Anyway, I had not digested the experience myself. He asked if Brother Jobe had showed me around the place, and I told him they were building a warren of rooms in the old gymnasium.

“Sounds like they’re turning the place into a fucking termite mound,” was all he said.

With the help of Brother Judah, we got the two jail cells cleaned up on the second floor of the old town hall. They were across a center aisle from each other in the rear behind the old police offices, which had been closed down when the town moved operations to the building out on Highway 29 in 1983. The old police offices had most recently served as the dressing rooms for our community theater productions. Props and scenery flats from Guys and Dolls were still scattered about in there. Then it dawned on us that we had to furnish the cells with at least a bed and a slop bucket each. Judah said they had extra beds at New Faith and he’d fetch some over in a wagon. Meanwhile, Loren and I went to scare up some padlocks, which was not such an easy task, since a lock without a key was useless. Loren found an old combination lock in a kitchen drawer in the rectory. He remembered the combination because it had been on his locker at the health club he belonged to in Glens Falls for fifteen years. The other padlock wasn’t so easy. It took us a couple of hours. Finally we found one with a key in it in Claude Wormsley’s desk at the old water treatment plant. Once we had the locks, we scrounged a couple of lengths of chain from Tom Allison’s livery. By this time, Judah had gotten two beds delivered and our jail was open for business.

At quarter to seven, when we were confident that most everyone in town had come home from their places of work, we returned to the school where Brother Jobe “surrendered” to Loren in the lobby. He was lovingly surrounded by a couple dozen of his followers, who seemed more entertained than worried. One of the sisters handed him a big picnic basket, but as Loren prepared to bind Brother Jobe’s hands behind him with rope-we didn’t have any handcuffs-he gave me the picnic basket to carry for him.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Brother Jobe said, with a wink, as if this was all a show, which to some extent it was.

“Well it is supper time,” I said. “And, frankly, with all the scrounging and cleaning, we hadn’t made provision for meals yet.”

“That’s a heck of a way to run a penitentiary,” Brother Jobe said.

Another sister handed me a leather briefcase.

“His books and papers and like that,” she said.

“Might’s well turn out a sermon or two in stir,” Brother Jobe said.

He made his farewells and we paraded him all the way down Salem Street to the corner of Main Street and Academy, where the old town hall stood. Along the way, plenty of people sitting out on their porches or inside at their dining room tables saw us pass by with our “prisoner.” A few children playing out in the streets followed behind us for a while, until they began taunting Brother Jobe and Loren barked at them to “get lost” or he’d “lock them up too.” Robbie Furnival, one of the shaving victims, passed us by on his way home and volunteered to testify in any court proceedings. By the time we got Brother Jobe to the jail, we figured we’d made our point and word would get out around town that this dangerous character was in our custody, and there would be no more involuntary beard shaving or other affronts to civil liberties in Union Grove from the New Faith bunch.

Once up in the cell, though, Brother Jobe became irascible, letting his underlying annoyance show, and demanded various extra furnishings that perhaps we should have thought of ourselves but didn’t: a table and chair, which we got from the old police office, a jug of drinking water, a blanket, and a couple of candles. That took another hour of scrounging. Finally, we secured the door to his cell with a sturdy length of chain and ran the padlock through it. By that time, he had a napkin tucked into his collar and seemed pleasantly preoccupied with the fried chicken, corn bread, pickled okra, and other delicacies that the sisters had packed for his supper, not to mention a quart of cider, all laid out nicely on the table before him.

“We’ll come back later and tuck you in,” Loren said.

Brother Jobe just snorted and waved goodbye.