sporting goods, drug store—have been added two video rental stores, a computer store, a games arcade, a beer distributor who carries domestic but specializes in imports, and a “New Age” shop that peddles herbs and books, among other things.
The town changed because times and people change, but the town changed mostly due to the influx of people from Philadelphia, for the county is slowly becoming a suburb of that large city. The population of our own county seat has already grown to overflowing, and now the new folks are spilling out into developments that surround the small towns like barbarians around the walls of Rome. Farms are sold to developers for as much as $20,000 an acre, and the Amish are moving upstate, far from the madding crowd who are more concerned with widening the highways to ease their drive into Philadelphia than they are with easing their souls by preserving the agricultural heritage that has nourished the county for so many years.
These people are different. They are outsiders—or insiders, depending on your point of view. Most of them regard the natives as impossibly backward, even amusing. You see it most clearly when they are confronted by an Old Order Amishman. The two cultures are so far apart. One, it seems, belongs to God, and the other does not.
They have no time for religion. Oh, some make an effort for their children’s sakes perhaps, for this past year my church has welcomed four new families, all of whom were originally from the Philadelphia area. Now only three remain. They sit in the stern, wooden pews on Sunday morning, not even trying to hide the fact that they are bored. When my congregation—my native congregation—begins to lapse into that catatonic condition caused by a too-hot Sunday morning, they fix a look of placid contemplation on their broad, well-fed faces, some of them adding to it a gentle smile, if to say yes indeed, pastor, you are so right, I understand perfectly, so you and the Lord will forgive me if my mind wanders just a bit to cooler and less loquacious climes.
I understand, and I forgive, and sometimes I speed the sermon along, or try to make it a bit more dramatic in order to win them back again. But the Holts, and the three other families who still remain, were and are irretrievable. Sadly and, in the case of the Holts, tragically irretrievable.
There was a sense of wrongness about the Holts. I have read in several books recently of the uncomfortable and unmistakable feeling one gets when one is in the presence of people who are truly evil. This was the feeling I had when I first met the Holt family, at least the three older members. Kimberly, the six-year-old, seemed too young to be tainted by the bland corruption I smelled in the father, and the silky superiority worn by the mother, which, I feared, had blended together into a potent and heady malignance that simply exuded from every pore of fifteen-year-old Keith. His parents wore masks that were but feeble attempts to hide their true personalities, but the fact that they knew the masks were needed and thus recognized the evil in themselves said something for the possibility of their eventual return to normal humanity.
But the boy wore no mask at all. He smiled when I first set eyes on him from the pulpit, but it was a wolfish smile. With such a smile must Satan have tempted Christ to cast himself from the roof of the temple, a smile that said to Christ, there is pride in you, for what God cannot be proud? and in that pride will come your fall, as did mine.
In weeks to come, I began to see more in that smile. I began, to my horror, to see knowledge in it. I began, even as I continued to mouth the words of my sermon and to chant the litany of the well-known scriptures, to hear his thoughts. This is what he said, what he said with that smile—
You are an Eater of Man-Flesh.
I see you. I can see all the way inside you.
I can see the flesh inside your mouth.
That is what his smile cried to my
The town changed because times and people change, but the town changed mostly due to the influx of people from Philadelphia, for the county is slowly becoming a suburb of that large city. The population of our own county seat has already grown to overflowing, and now the new folks are spilling out into developments that surround the small towns like barbarians around the walls of Rome. Farms are sold to developers for as much as $20,000 an acre, and the Amish are moving upstate, far from the madding crowd who are more concerned with widening the highways to ease their drive into Philadelphia than they are with easing their souls by preserving the agricultural heritage that has nourished the county for so many years.
These people are different. They are outsiders—or insiders, depending on your point of view. Most of them regard the natives as impossibly backward, even amusing. You see it most clearly when they are confronted by an Old Order Amishman. The two cultures are so far apart. One, it seems, belongs to God, and the other does not.
They have no time for religion. Oh, some make an effort for their children’s sakes perhaps, for this past year my church has welcomed four new families, all of whom were originally from the Philadelphia area. Now only three remain. They sit in the stern, wooden pews on Sunday morning, not even trying to hide the fact that they are bored. When my congregation—my native congregation—begins to lapse into that catatonic condition caused by a too-hot Sunday morning, they fix a look of placid contemplation on their broad, well-fed faces, some of them adding to it a gentle smile, if to say yes indeed, pastor, you are so right, I understand perfectly, so you and the Lord will forgive me if my mind wanders just a bit to cooler and less loquacious climes.
I understand, and I forgive, and sometimes I speed the sermon along, or try to make it a bit more dramatic in order to win them back again. But the Holts, and the three other families who still remain, were and are irretrievable. Sadly and, in the case of the Holts, tragically irretrievable.
There was a sense of wrongness about the Holts. I have read in several books recently of the uncomfortable and unmistakable feeling one gets when one is in the presence of people who are truly evil. This was the feeling I had when I first met the Holt family, at least the three older members. Kimberly, the six-year-old, seemed too young to be tainted by the bland corruption I smelled in the father, and the silky superiority worn by the mother, which, I feared, had blended together into a potent and heady malignance that simply exuded from every pore of fifteen-year-old Keith. His parents wore masks that were but feeble attempts to hide their true personalities, but the fact that they knew the masks were needed and thus recognized the evil in themselves said something for the possibility of their eventual return to normal humanity.
But the boy wore no mask at all. He smiled when I first set eyes on him from the pulpit, but it was a wolfish smile. With such a smile must Satan have tempted Christ to cast himself from the roof of the temple, a smile that said to Christ, there is pride in you, for what God cannot be proud? and in that pride will come your fall, as did mine.
In weeks to come, I began to see more in that smile. I began, to my horror, to see knowledge in it. I began, even as I continued to mouth the words of my sermon and to chant the litany of the well-known scriptures, to hear his thoughts. This is what he said, what he said with that smile—
You are an Eater of Man-Flesh.
I see you. I can see all the way inside you.
I can see the flesh inside your mouth.
That is what his smile cried to my
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