“I didn’t think so.”
Outside the bathroom, in the hallway, Kevin Anderson was calling Perry’s name.
“Coming,” Perry shouted cheerfully.
Before Russ could stop him, he was out the door.
Glancing at the mirror above the sink, he was dismayed to see a father with responsibilities. What he wanted more than anything was to have nothing to do with his son. At the thought of letting Perry’s disturbance and his mildew stink be Kevin’s problem, he felt a melting warmth in his loins. The warmth, which also related to Frances, plainly told him that the thought was evil. But every other scenario—getting Ambrose involved, locating Marion and making her deal with Perry, forcibly removing Perry from the bus, forgoing the trip himself or dragging Perry to Kitsillie—seemed worse than the next. Each of them would grossly delay the group’s departure, and Frances was waiting on the bus. To have her even once seemed worth whatever price God might later make him pay.
* * *
After Jesus had returned to his friends, eaten breakfast with them, let them touch him, he ascended to heaven and was never on earth again in body. What followed, as recounted in Acts, was a radical insurgency. The earliest Christians had all things in common—sold their possessions, shared whatever they had—and were militant in their counterculture. They never passed up a chance to remind the Pharisees of their hand in nailing the Christ to a tree. Their leaders were persecuted and forever on the run, but their ranks kept growing. It no doubt helped that Peter and Paul could perform miracles, but more crucial was Peter’s inspiration to extend his ministry to the Gentiles. From a fire that had started within the Jewish community and might have been safely contained there, sparks flew into the greater Roman Empire. Paul, who’d begun his career as the most zealous of persecutors, holding the cloaks of the mob that stoned Stephen to death, was the most tireless of the fire spreaders. When last seen, in Acts, he’d made it all the way to Rome and was living, unmolested, in a rented house. Unmolested but still an outsider, still an insurgent.
What gave the new religion its edge was its paradoxical inversion of human nature, its exalting of poverty and rejection of worldly power, but a religion founded on paradox was inherently unstable. Once the old religions had been routed, the insurgents became the Pharisees. They became the Holy Roman Church and did their own persecuting, fell into their own complacency and corruption, and betrayed the spirit of Christ. Antithetical to power, the spirit took refuge and expressed itself in opposition—in the gentle renunciations of Saint Francis, the violent rebellion of the Reformation. True Christian faith always burned from the edge.
And no one understood this better than the Anabaptists. They began as a rebuke to the Reformation in northern Europe, which had retained the practice of universal infant baptism. For the Anabaptists, the voluntary choice of baptism, as an adult, was decisive. The book of Acts, an account of Christians so original that some of them had known Jesus personally, abounded with stories of adults seeing the light and requesting baptism. The Anabaptists were radical in the strict sense, returning to the earliest roots of their faith. They were correspondingly feared by Reformation authorities, such as Zwingli, and cruelly persecuted—banished, tortured, burned at the stake—in the first half of the sixteenth century. The effect was to confirm the radicalism of the Anabaptists who survived. In the Bible, after all, to be Christian was to suffer persecution.
Four centuries later, when Russ was a boy, memories of Anabaptist martyrdom were still vivid. The stories of Felix Manz and Michael Sattler, and of others killed for their beliefs, were part of the group identity of his parents’ Mennonite community, part of its apartness, in the farm country around Lesser Hebron, Indiana. The kingdom of heaven would never encircle the earth, but it could be approached on a small scale in rural communities that practiced self-sufficiency, lived in strict accordance with the Word, and pointedly removed themselves from the present age. The Mennonites chose to be “the quiet in the land.” To aspire to more was to risk losing all.
The Anabaptists of Lesser Hebron weren’t Old Order—they used machines; the men wore ordinary clothes—and they weren’t as communist as the Hutterites, but Russ as a boy heard little of the wider world and saw little of money. When he was twelve, he worked a long unpaid summer for a couple who’d lost their son to influenza, Fritz and Susanna Niedermayer, milking their cows and shoveling their manure in the assurance that they’d have done the same for the Hildebrandts had their situations been reversed. His older sisters disappeared for months at a time, helping families with new babies and leaving Russ with extra duties on the small farm his mother owned. They had a few cows, a large garden and a larger orchard, and ten acres for row crops that must have earned a bit of cash.