The next day, Joe and I set out to visit a “real” cult. On our long drive to Searcy County (which is close to the Missouri border), Joe filled me in on the details. The group we were going to see was not pagan in the Wiccan sense. Rather, their “spiritual” leaders had read the Old Testament (i.e. the first, Jewish two thirds of the Bible) with its sacrificial prescriptions a little too motivatedly. At one point, the cult leader assembled his family and friends to sacrifice a goat. The idea was to club it to death with a large stone. The self-ordained priest slugged the unsuspecting animal over the head once, and then stared at the goat, waiting for it to collapse. The goat blinked in an annoyed fashion, shook its head, backed up as far as the rope that tied it to a nearby stake would allow, and then charged its surprised would-be murderer. It took him half an hour of frantic sidestepping and excited hollering to bludgeon the disgruntled animal to death.
We were not going to see these people for our own amusement entirely. Joe’s Harvard buddy Noam, who had struck up a friendship with a cult member at a Grateful Dead concert a few months earlier, had finished his Teach for America assignment in the impoverished Arkansas Delta town of Helena. He now wanted to take his UPenn med school girlfriend to stay a few days with his more … say … unconventional friends. Noam looked up Joe as he and his girlfriend Deborah passed through Searcy, and over a cup of coffee at Hasting’s Hardback Café Joe decided to join them for the afternoon. Not wanting to pass up all the excitement (staying in Searcy for a summer will do this to you), I went, too.
After the discouraging incident of the botched goat-murder, the cult has dwindled to two people. One is a “witch” who tours the States as “the Great Hempress.” She lectures lesbian communities on the powers of the Mother Goddess, which of course can be experienced much more impressively after breathing in the nurturing fragrance of burning Mary-Jane. Her priest-partner is a blond and green-eyed swear-to-god “Indian.” He lives as a shaman in the woods – unless he is in the emergency room because of scurvy.
It’s quite fashionable to claim some Native American heritage in the American Midwest. Usually all it takes is dark hair, an olive shade in your tan, or a hawkish nose, and your great-grandmother must have been, say, half Cherokee. Unless you’re from Oklahoma, it is statistically unlikely that this is actually the case. There is always some heritage that is cooler than others, of course. Like the Irish. According to the Census Bureau, 34 million Americans (and more like 85 million on St. Patrick’s Day) claim the Emerald Isle as their homeland. That amounts to nine times the population of Ireland. Here in the Midwest, where the dreams of cowboys and the Noble Savage live on, Indian blood is part of having a decent pedigree (not full blood, though: “those people” are drunkards who live in dilapidated trailers on neglected reservations and who are too poor to even have the scrap metal strewn around their front yard the White Trash collects in case they ever own another 1972 Ford pickup). One Harding art professor, Paul Pitt, carves Native American flutes and lives in a cave-like house in a hillside outside Searcy. He is an adopted member of the Neches Tribe of the Cherokee Nation, and goes by the name “Coyote Clay.” People snicker at this behind his back, but always with a certain degree of shrugging well-wishing. Locals think of Pitt’s taking on an Indian’s somehow more highly spiritual identity, which is what Pitt finds infused into his flute making, as eccentric, not ridiculous.
After a much longer drive than we were promised, we finally turned onto a gravel road that could not have been more aptly chosen if our afternoon of poking around for weird cults had been staged by a movie director. We were just south of Leslie, Ark. in the part of Arkansas that can accurately be called a Third World country. As we drove deeper and deeper into a tangled, dark and unabashedly unkempt looking wood, rotting logs strewn over the muddy gravel, we passed trailer after trailer with broken windows or sunken roofs, the roadside one long entanglement of brute plant life with car corpses and rusted barbed wire fences fighting off kudzu vines. White chicken crossed the road in erratic bursts. On a less inhabited stretch, a vulture rose from the roadside where someone had run over a tan mongrel whose body now lay headless on the slope of a weedy ditch. Trash fluttered everywhere and our passing whirled the brittle plastic and greasy torn paper into the molasses-thick air. It was dark and overcast, and the air seemed pent-up with the angry promise of rain.
Finally, we saw Noam’s car turn into the underbrush several hundred yards away. A pack of dogs shot out of a driveway, one of them three-legged, and ferociously attacked first Noam’s, then Joe’s tires. When we finally carefully opened our car doors and edged past the beasts, Noam was nowhere to be seen.
A rustling noise startled us from inside the trailer.
“Noam?” Joe shouted. “Noam?”
We heard what might have been a voice gasp incoherently out from the darkness of the barely ajar front door, quickly walked past Noam’s car (where his girlfriend Deborah cowered uncertainly), and stepped across a patio of rotting wood into the dark of the shady structure.
It took me a moment to adjust my eyes. The room’s interior was in utter chaos, cluttered with rubbish, leftover food, metal scrap, plastic bags, old magazines, books used as shelves, and broken shelf-boards used to hold up broken window-frames.
Noam’s outline was standing in the middle of the room, waiting.
He was chewing, slowly and deliberately, a chocolate chip cookie he seemed to have taken from a plate of baked goods the “Great Hempress” had prepared. The plate sat quite quaintly next to a knife on the otherwise clear kitchen table that was the centerpiece of the room.
“Where are they?” I asked.
Noam shrugged.
“Is this even their place?” Joe pressed him.
Noam deliberately chewed his cookie, crumbs sticking to the side of his mouth and to his cheek. Thoughts of angry my-home-is-my-civil-war-battlefield hicks with long straggly, greasy hair, full unkempt beards, rotted teeth and tattoos on their arms that read “Southern by the Grace of God” flooded my brain.
“This is funny,” Noam finally mumbled.
“What’s funny, Noam?” Joe asked impatiently.
I hope they aim for my head, I thought. I would hate to be shot in the gut.
“I called ahead. But it looks like nobody’s here.”
We listened. There was a long silence. Indeed: no-one.
Which is just like Arkansas: an empty trailer where you duck in fear of a crazed half-savage with a shotgun, and a flea-ridden dog chasing you away, away and out until you break back onto the paved roads that seem to breathe so easily, seems so human, so redeemed.
That is the heart of Arkansas. A specter. Nobody. Nothing. A mad dog and a sigh of relief.
