Free Spirits by Julia Watts

Strawberry Fields that if anybody came by needing food or a place to sleep, we’d take care of them. We wanted our place to be a home for whoever needed one. Rick always quoted that Robert Frost poem, ‘Home is where when you go there/they have to take you in.’
    Adam looks at me hard, and I read his thoughts, That letter to the editor quoted Robert Frost, remember?
    I nod.
    “Well, one night, this man showed up at the farmhouse—a scrawny guy with a flattop and a clip-on tie and an intense look in his eyes—the kind of look that either draws you in or makes you want to look away. At the time I thought of him as old, but he was probably just in his forties, so he’d be a mere child to me now.” Dr. Branch smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling into crow’s feet. “Anyway, he identified himself as Brother Bobby Scoggins, and he claimed he had gotten lost on the way to some kind of meeting. As the years have gone by, I’ve come to suspect it was a Ku Klux Klan meeting, but of course, he wasn’t going to tell us that. So even though he didn’t look like our kind of people, we invited him in and made him a sandwich and a cup of tea. Then Rick found a spare blanket for him and showed him out to the barn.”
    Dr. Branch gets up from his rocking chair and starts to pace. “That was the last we saw of Rick until morning. He and Brother Bobby apparently stayed up all night, reading the Bible by flashlight with Brother Bobby preaching and testifying. Rick said that when he stepped out of the barn into the morning sun, he was a new man. And he was. But he was a man all of us liked less, unfortunately.”
    “How was he different?” Adam asks, knitting his brow like he always does when he’s really concentrating.
    “Well, you have to understand the brand of Christianity that Brother Bobby was pushing was way different from any type of Christianity I’d ever heard of. On the commune, we were the kind of Christians who believe God is love and that we should try to act like Jesus did: to be loving and peaceful and kind and nonjudgmental. But the Jesus Brother Bobby told Rick about was something else altogether—a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus who only offered salvation to white people. And there was lots of stuff Rick talked about from the Book of Revelation which he interpreted to be about the atom bomb and God’s chosen people…white Protestants, supposedly—rising to power.” Dr. Branch shakes his head. “It was toxic stuff, man. It was like Brother Bobby kept my good friend up all night, feeding him poison until he decided he liked it.”
    “It’s so weird,” I say. “Why do you think Rick went from being so peaceful and kind to being…”
    “The embodiment of the worst qualities human beings can have?” Dr. Branch finishes for me. “I’ve thought about it a lot over the years, and the only conclusion I’ve come to is that some people are extreme. Rick was never in the middle about anything. He was either super energetic and excited or so bummed out he couldn’t get out of bed. His ideas were extreme, too. If he was going to be a hippie, he was going to be the biggest hippie of them all, right down to burning his draft card and running off to Mexico. And if he was going to turn into some kind of racist religious zealot, he was going to go far enough with it to make Hitler look middle-of-the-road.”
    Dr. Branch sits back down in his rocker. “The commune disbanded shortly after Rick started following Brother Bobby. He gave us all an ultimatum to ‘turn or burn,’ so we chose to turn away from him. His girlfriend was the only one who stayed but I heard she left him after a while, too, and went back home.”
    Katherine and Mrs. So come up to the porch. Mrs. So’s arms are full of herbs.
    “Well,” Mrs. So says, “I don’t think I’ll ever have the kind of success with herbs that Katherine has, but I’m going to give it a try.”
    “Oh, that rosemary and sage are so hearty, all you have to do