In his letters to Dina, Winston Van is mostly saying things just to have something to say. One gets the impression of a man infatuated with a woman, trying not to succumb to despair at his situation, and who has a lot of time on his hands. One learns that in prison he was listening to J. J. Cale (“boy, he’s a down-soundin’ dude”), Rita Coolidge’s cover of “Fever,” and Anne Murray’s “Could I Have This Dance.” One learns about the details of his workout regimens: “I work w/ weights about 11/2 hours ea. day: I work on my arms, shoulders and lats. on M-W-F and on T & TH I work on my stomach, chest and legs. Before I hurt my shoulder I was doing 240 lbs. on the bench but that was 3 months ago. Now I’m sticking w/ light weights and a lot of reps.” One learns of his artistic and literary ambitions: “That’s why I wanna go ahead and get my degree, finish my book and hope I can get something going in that direction before I get out. Don’t know any Norman Mailers out there do you? HA!” He shares his aesthetic judgments, including this one I happen to agree with: “Stephen King. Super writer when he hits. Funny thing about him though, he’ll write a simple book that’s a ‘blockbuster’ like ‘Fire Starter’ and then write a piece of shit.” He gives the impression of an impatient, shallow mind with a lot of jittery energy, obsessed with measuring value in numbers, bragging about how many pounds he can bench and how many book pages he reads in a day. He occasionally writes alarming sentences like (suddenly, on the fourth page of a letter that has no trace of anything else amorous in it): “If you were here I’d grab your blouse with my hand push you [carated in: “gently”] up against a wall, look real mean, then kiss the hell out of you.” And one learns that a man convicted of murdering a child four years earlier began a letter with this:

  “Dear Di,” it reads, “A fuzzy hug for ya.” In all these letters, he never once mentions the murder. I asked Dina if the letters had creeped her out. Not really, she said. She’d done a lot of counseling work with prisoners and had gotten used to their falling in love with her. Like a lot of people who work with prisoners, she was accustomed to compartmentalizing, keeping her life on the outside strictly separate. She had genuine affection for Winston Van—a goofy guy who was boyishly obsessed with karate and country music. She soon graduated from the social work program, moved to Florida, became busy with other things, and the correspondence she’d had with Winston Van and other prisoners in Cummins Unit dropped off. She hadn’t thought about him since.

  One of the things Joyce and Lucy have in common is that they are both people who every day for many years felt eaten alive with guilt—and probably still do. One thing I know I believe is that neither of them should be: Lucy was an abused, conditioned, and brainwashed cult member earnestly awaiting the end of the world, and Joyce did something that absolutely anyone could have done. But I also know it’s impossible for them not to be. Joyce’s quest to contact Lucy and her correspondence with her may in an indirect way be a product of that guilt. “Will you ever forgive me?” was the first thing she said to her daughter when Kelly stepped out of the car at the top of Cave Mountain on the day Haley disappeared. And I don’t believe that Joyce—not then, not after Haley was found, and not in the decades since—has ever been able to accept what Kelly said to her: “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  Likewise, Lucy needs to believe that Bethany Alana’s spirit comforted and guided Haley through her days and nights lost alone in the wilderness because it gives her some small “peace of mind,” as Joyce put it. “She had come to the idea that Bethany had actually had a meaningful life if she had existed in some form to help Haley.” As Lucy wrote to Joyce in one of her emails, “To know she saved someone else is beyond happiness and I am so thankful she was there for Haley. Being in the Buffalo Wilderness myself, there was no way Haley could have survived her ordeal alone. I suppose one aspect of all this is that Bethany was destined to die to save Haley and Haley had to live to save me in some sort of way.”

  And Lucy told me, “I don’t believe in psychics, I don’t believe in mediums, ’cause that’s not of God, that’s not God at all. People like to rely on things like that, but this was an angel that was sent. And maybe it was for me to heal. I don’t know, maybe it was for the both of us. I’m not sure. But it helps to know that her life, it didn’t end in vain, that she was able to help somebody else, and to help me, too, and knowing that she’s okay. . . . Bethany’s alive today, she’s in Heaven, and that’s good.”

  And why not? It’s definitely not the strangest thing she has ever believed, and far from the most dangerous, and if it gives some salvation to an aging woman who suffered unimaginable horror, loss, and humiliation very early in her life—and then had to carry an onerous burden of guilt, and carry it almost entirely alone, for the rest of her life—I’d say that’s a good thing. I’d say it’s a good thing even if it’s true, as Ray Watkins believes, as did many others at the time, that “she was just as guilty as they were.” I think it’s a good thing because the most Christian thing I know I believe is the possibility of redemption from sin.

  11

  F.O.U.

  THE FIRST CULT—WITH THE WORD MEANING WHAT IT MEANS to us now—to enter popular consciousness was surely the Manson Family. They committed the Tate-LaBianca murders in August 1969; police put things together and arrested them in December of that year, and the trial, wherein the sensational spectacle—a depraved and utterly batshit story involving rock stars, movie stars, sex, drugs, and a covey of beautiful young women—unraveled under the gaze of TV news cameras in the summer of 1970. I think of the 1970s as a weird golden age of cults and kooky spiritual experimentation, a time when Moonies, Hare Krishnas, Jesus freaks, Rajneeshees, and Scientologists flourished into public visibility, singing and chanting and handing out fliers in airports and shopping malls, an epidemic of fringe religious fevers bookended by the lurid Manson Family murders and the atrocity of Jonestown.

  I’m sure great books have been written about whatever poison in the water in the 1970s bred so many loony reptiles of the mind. The surge of rapid and radical cultural change that happened between the end of the Second World War and the early 1970s must have felt disorienting and destabilizing, to say the least. I recently had a conversation with a friend about rewatching The Godfather for the first time in a while and noticing how hyperconscious the 1972 film is of being set in the past: the clothes, the cars, the music—the film’s mise-en-scène meticulously places it in the late 1940s; it doesn’t forget its historical setting for one frame. The gap of time between when it was made and when it takes place is only a little over twenty years. That’s the equivalent of a movie made today set in the late 1990s—a thought that sharply brings into focus how stark the difference between then and now must have felt in 1972. All the Homburgs and Packards are saying: Those old-world codes of honor, notions of masculinity and femininity, sexual morality and familial duty still hold sway over this culture; it’s Don Corleone’s principled, grandfatherly refusal to get into the burgeoning drug trade that spurs the plot into motion. The drug-addled and licentious 1970s moviegoers stepped back into as they left the theater were saying: That world is gone. The movie itself was a bellwether of cultural change; the Hays Code had ended in 1968, freeing Hollywood to depict sex and graphic violence on-screen for the first time, and filmmakers had begun to exercise their new freedoms. In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the defendant in Cohen v. California (Paul Cohen was a protestor who wore a jacket with the words Fuck the draft scrawled on it in a courtroom), thereby protecting profanity under the First Amendment. The Stonewall riots happened in 1969, and a few years later, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as a diagnosis of mental illness from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And, obviously, there was the bombshell of Roe v. Wade in 1972. People remembered a time when religion had served as the social glue holding marriages, families, and communities together, and in the 1970s it felt as though its adhesive strength had recently and rapidly dissolved; society secularized, divorce rates soared, and within a few short years, pornography, profanity, homosexuality, and abortion had all moved from dangerous underground spaces one needed shibboleths and secret handshakes to access into the light of day.

  The era in which a sturdy, stable Christianity’s role as familial, social, and communal bonding agent dissolved coincided with the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. People were thinking of the end of the world in a way they never had before: as an acutely realistic possibility. In the second half of the twentieth century, the spiritual nourishment that had fed previous generations and given higher meaning to everyday life went away at the same time as the nightmare of nuclear war slipped into the collective human dream. Full of fear and trembling and left to wander the world without a map, lost souls stumbled onto paths that sometimes led in very strange directions.

  Not quite four years after members of the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc., were convicted of the murder of Bethany Alana Clark, Ray Watkins, then the sheriff of Newton County, would have to deal with another violent crime brought about by another Christian doomsday cult (sort of) working upon the guidance of a concrete and actionable interpretation of the Book of Revelation. This one began as a comedy, escalated into an outrageous spectacle of vulgar publicity, and ended in tragedy. The story is well worth recounting, as it overlaps with ours in the character of Ray Watkins and the setting of Jasper, and well illustrates the mood in the air in the Ozarks in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when the Fourth Great Awakening soured into the sleazy heyday of televangelism, as the influence of Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell swelled along with Reagan’s rise and evangelical Christianity yoked itself to the political Right.*

  In 1976, a forty-eight-year-old man named Emory Mayo Lamb, originally from West Virginia, moved to the Jasper area with his wife, Shirley, and their teenage daughter, Angela. He bought a five-acre property just outside Jasper and a general store on the southeast corner of the town square that had been about to close. Emory Lamb—an eccentric bordering on the functional edge of crazy—who favored black leather motorcycle gear and wore an Old Testament patriarch’s unruly forked gray beard hanging half a foot from his chin, quickly became a major nucleus of strange gossip in the small community. His shop sold groceries and all the knickknacks and bric-a-brac you’d expect to see on sale in a tiny country general store—as it had before his ownership—with the new addition of baked goods Lamb baked himself at home: bread, cookies, pastries, muffins.

  Also, for some reason the new owner of the general store was obsessed with a cryptic acronym of his own coinage, “F.O.U.,” sometimes styled “FOU” or “Fou.” Next to the Open/Closed sign on the door of the shop, he hung a sign reading simply “FOU.” He ordered a bunch of stickers—white circles with the black capital letters “FOU” in them—which he began sticking on walls all over the area: in restaurants, stores, gas stations, the post office, etc. He also ordered a bunch of little wooden coins that read “FOU” and left bowls full of them on the counters of obliging businesses all over Newton County; these FOU tokens were redeemable at Lamb’s general store for one free Coke. Emory Lamb also handwrote and mimeographed dozens of ziney-looking pamphlets, quoting Bible verses alongside his own harebrained midrash, written in a naive idiolect of heterographic but internally consistent spelling and punctuation rules, which were on sale for a quarter apiece in racks on his store’s counter, along with a lot of other Christian bondieuserie like little ceramic angels and whatnot. A Rasputin-bearded, muffin-baking, evangelical biker dude/yeoman-theologian wasn’t even necessarily the weirdest character to inhabit the Arkansas Ozarks in the 1970s; he was, in those early days, by all accounts a very warm and friendly guy who seemed harmless enough, and everyone could agree his blueberry muffins were delicious. Also, naturally, everyone started calling him “Fou.”

  Although he would be coy about it the first few times you asked him, “F.O.U.” stood for “Foundation of Ubiquity,” a phrase that a mysterious old man had once whispered to him in a mystical vision. (He later realized the mysterious old man was himself from the future, but I’m not going to get into that.)

  Fou fished his own Peter from the Sea of Galilee one day around Christmas 1976 when a very lost soul, Keith Haigler, passed through Jasper. Keith, a twenty-two-year-old man from North Carolina, had spent two years in the marines followed by one year adrift, staying with his parents, couch surfing with friends, and living on his dwindling savings from his military pay. In the final weeks of the year, he had decided to drive across the country to California, hoping an idea of what to do with the rest of his life might present itself to him there. On the way he stopped in Jasper, Arkansas, and ducked into Emory Lamb’s general store to buy a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes. He had a conversation with Lamb, bought one of his zany religious pamphlets, got back on the road and made it to Missouri, where he spent the night at a friend’s house. There he read the pamphlet, and the next day, instead of continuing on his way to California, decided to drive back to Jasper to talk with Fou again.

  The older man and the younger had a few key interests in common: Both played the guitar, and Keith also harbored a boyish obsession with the biker aesthetic; he wore a leather vest with patriotic patches all over it and a classic black leather Harley-Davidson motorcycle cap, the kind made iconic by Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and dreamed of one day buying a motorcycle, although he never actually did or even got a motorcycle license.* Keith was also a religious quester, who read in the Bible on his own but chafed against organized religion; he had been to church, and didn’t find what he was looking for there—but now he thought he might have found it in Emory Lamb’s rather more disorganized religion. Also, he hated his father and found a kind of spiritual allofather in Lamb, who invited him to live in a campervan parked on his property and by and by permitted Keith to call him “Daddy Fou.” During the next few years, they built the F.O.U. Ministry: They converted an old barn on the property into their church, decorating the walls with thrift-shop paintings of Jesus, with a pulpit at the front of the room and pews made of car seats salvaged from junkyards. At the feet of his sensei Keith studied the Bible, and sometimes worked in the general store, and drove around all over the Ozarks putting up mimeographed posters advertising the ministry. The posters read “Foundation of Ubiquity” in fancy certificate typeface on top with all the other text on them handwritten in Sharpie, mixing Christian and biker semioses (“THE SON OF MAN HAS RISEN / BROTHER’S [sic] WE WILL RIDE”), and in time they actually did gather together a small congregation of evangelical bikers. Soon a row of Harleys could be seen parked outside the barn on Emory’s property on Sunday mornings.

  At some point in his independent Bible study with Daddy Fou, Keith became fixated upon a particular passage in the Book of Revelation, 11:3–12:

  And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. . . .

  And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves. And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry . . . because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth.

  And after three days and an half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them. And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them.

  Keith pondered and pondered this passage, until he arrived at the realization that he himself was one of these two witnesses. Emory Lamb apparently did not try very hard to dissuade him, but he assured him that he himself was not the other witness. At that point, Keith began to kind of slide off on his own theological trajectory. He wrote a pamphlet preaching the divine truth of Fouism, paid thirty dollars to make a thousand copies of it, got into his car and finally continued his cross-country drive to California; he was on a mission trip now, to distribute the pamphlets and preach the good news. The day before he set out, he recorded in his journal the date of the beginning of his one thousand two hundred and threescore days of prophesying: Saturday, January 21, 1979.

  In San Francisco he slept in his car at night and by day competed for attention with other guys thrusting documents containing ecstatic proclamations of ecclesiastic gibberish at the passersby of Haight-Ashbury. There, at a skating rink, he met a sun-kissed and dirty-blond California-as-they-come California girl named Kate Clark, who was two years younger than he was and came from a fairly rarefied environment, the sort of laid-back West Coast aristocracy that always makes me think of Joan Didion; Kate’s mother was the mayor of the bougie San Mateo County beach town of Pacifica. Kate fell fast and hard for the handsome lunatic in biker duds with a honeydrip southern drawl and apocalyptic visions dancing behind his eyes, and in the amour fou (no pun intended) stage of young love he somehow convinced her that she was in fact the other of the two witnesses mentioned in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Revelation. They turned around and ran away together, camping and scrounging from dumpsters along the way, at first back east to Keith’s family in North Carolina, where they got married at a courthouse; then they went to Jasper, Arkansas, where they were wedded in holy matrimony before God by the spiritual father Daddy Fou, and the new Mrs. Haigler moved in with Keith in the campervan parked on Lamb’s property.