6

THE CONVERTED CARETAKER

The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

—Thomas Macaulay, The History of England, vol. 1, 1848

In searching for parallels to the Free Town Project, many Graftonites thought, naturally, of one summer in the early 1990s when people noticed an unusual amount of traffic heading to the remote upper reaches of Wild Meadow Road. Neighbors reported that cars and campers with out-of-state plates were overflowing the dooryard of an old farmhouse, disgorging dozens of people who were smiling and calling out greetings to one another. Some of them were Asian. It seemed like a cult.

When the suspicious Graftonites checked the property records in the municipal offices, they found that the farmhouse had been purchased by the Unification Church, a national organization that became famous in the 1970s for holding mass wedding ceremonies performed by its charismatic leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

Many locals were displeased with the church’s presence in town. Following the lead of national media outlets that were publishing unflattering portraits of the Unification Church, dark rumors began to circulate about what they called “the Moonie House.” Strangers began selling flowers along Route 4. It seemed more like a cult than ever.

When I asked Jessica Soule, whose kittens were bear-snatched from her residence down Wild Meadow Road, about the time the Moonies founded a community in Grafton, she laughed.

“Well,” she said. “I guess I was the head Moonie.”

SOULE’S PATH TOWARD the Unification Church—and Grafton—began on a Friday morning in the summer of 1974, when she awoke and tried to make sense of the sensory inputs all around—the hard ground beneath her twenty-year-old body, the low leafy branches near her face, the dull ache of an empty stomach, the distant, but not too distant, sound of brisk footsteps on pavement.

When the fog of sleep cleared, she crawled out of a gap in the shrubbery that grew around the Ohio statehouse in Columbus and stood, bare feet beneath denim jeans, wondering how she was going to get through another day of homelessness.

How could you let this happen to me? she asked God. She’d been on the street for four days. Or was it five? But he didn’t answer.

Over the next several hours, Soule sat on benches and wandered aimlessly, reflecting on how far she’d come since her childhood in a Massachusetts church community. Her family was headed by her well-to-do lawyer father, and she’d once had dreams of becoming a doctor. Those dreams didn’t last. When she was fourteen, her parents divorced, and she wound up living with her cousins.

At eighteen, she thought her life was taking a positive turn. She joined the US Navy and fell in love with another recruit at a naval base in Philadelphia. But within two years, a series of unexplained seizures caused her to be discharged; she married the man, but what she thought was his minor alcohol problem turned out to be a major drug problem. After a bitter fight, she fled their apartment. She’d been sleeping beside the statehouse ever since.

As she sat on the bench, despondent, she watched the trolleys rolling past and the people walking by, businessmen and sideburned factory workers on lunch breaks, tourists gazing up at the tall buildings, and parents headed to the park to get in a bout of summer exercise for their pets and schoolchildren. Everyone had a destination. Everyone had a purpose.

Soule came to a decision. From a likely-looking place on the sidewalk, she stood facing traffic. When a bus came by, she waited until the last possible moment and then rushed out onto the street in front of it.

“Those Ohio bus drivers are good,” she later said. She hadn’t timed it quite right, and the bus didn’t even make contact. “He slammed on the brakes and jumped out.”

“I know what you were doing,” the driver said, herding her onto the bus. She feigned innocence, but he sat her down between two women and took her back to the bus station. There, she told him that the suicide attempt had been a passing, crazy thought, and she walked away. But she was already planning to find another, better spot, one where the bus would be going faster.

On the way out of the bus station, a pair of young women stopped her and handed her a flyer. She was about to blow by, but her ear was caught by their accents; one was from France, the other from Germany.

“Will you come to a spaghetti dinner tonight?” they asked in rough but passable English.

It was the right question. Soule couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. Soon the young women were driving her to Ohio State University and leading her into a conference room crackling with youthful energy. Before the food was served, everyone’s attention was directed to a podium at the front of the room.

“This Japanese guy got up and said God is both masculine and feminine,” Soule said. It put her in mind of her jeans, which were a minor act of rebellion against the church communities she’d grown up in.

After the dinner, they asked her to stay for the weekend, to listen to other talks. On Friday evening, Soule was ambivalent about the message. By Sunday evening, she wanted nothing more than to dedicate her life to the church.

“I like it here,” she realized. “The people are kind of good. Some people might be naive or a little over the top, but this was a niche I fit into.”

The weekend conference was being run by the Unification Church, which then had about five thousand followers, many of them young people disaffected by the social upheaval of the ’70s.

Soule moved into a former fraternity house off the university campus, along with about a hundred other new church members. The men lived on one floor, and the women on the other. They bought her clothes and gave her food, but the important thing to Soule was her spiritual education.

“The teachings, they were the world to me,” she said.

She tried to reconcile with her husband, but he couldn’t abide by the church’s strict stance on sobriety. When he faltered, Soule found it much easier to turn her back on him than on her new peers.

Though it didn’t yet have a large national presence, the Unification Church was already beginning to draw criticism for its unusual practices and its political beliefs—Moon was using his wealth and influence to mainstream his hard-line anticommunist messages into the media. On top of a faith-tinged business empire, he would eventually become a billionaire and attract a religious following of seven million.

In September, Soule hopped a bus with other churchgoers headed to New York, where Moon himself was scheduled to speak. After hearing so much about his towering presence, she discovered that he was much shorter than she had expected. Still, something about him captivated her.

“He stopped his speech, and he looked at me and smiled, probably because my big eyes were bugging out,” she said. “He stopped and looked at me and smiled and did the little Asian head nod.”

It was electric.

“The girls on either side of me, we were all in the same group, they elbowed me and said ‘He looked at you! He looked at you!’”

Afterward, a senior member of the church invited Soule to join Moon and other church leaders in his hotel room. The invitation was the first of many, and Moon became Soule’s mentor, encouraging her to rebuild her relationship with her parents and to pursue a college degree. At his invitation, she and hundreds of other church members moved into a theological seminary in Barrytown, New York, where she had frequent contact with Moon’s children.

When the church’s national profile rose, she watched as the press asked repeatedly whether the members were tortured or subjected to brainwashing. Government agents approached her and asked her questions about what really went on in the church’s inner circle. To Soule, the questions were silly. Nothing was going on but spiritual teachings.

“People say he’s a monster. But no, he wasn’t. He was the nicest man I ever knew in my life,” she said. “He turned me around so much.”

In 1975, after Soule had been at Barrytown for a little over a year, Moon told his young wards that it was time for them to carry the church’s teachings out into the world. He sent many to serve as missionaries in other countries, but others, like Soule, were told to find their own path, in their own way.

She started by founding the Family Unity Network, a nonprofit in Minneapolis, and when that shut down, she turned to social work in Wareham, Massachusetts. She stayed there for years, sometimes talking to Moon on the phone or visiting when he came to speak in Boston.

When Moon was put on trial for tax evasion in 1982, he drew the support of mainstream religious figures and civil libertarians. When he was sentenced to be jailed, Soule prepared to chain herself to the prison fencing in protest, but her friends in the church talked her out of it. About a year later, Moon was released and resumed his position.

As the Moon family continued to build its business empire, one of the sons, Kook Jin Moon, proved to have aptitude as an executive. In 1993, he founded a small arms company, Kahr Arms, that sited its main production facility in Worcester, Massachusetts. He went on to take a leading role in the family’s other business interests, including military hardware for the South Korean army and ginseng.

“He was a great believer in the Second Amendment,” said Soule.

Reverend Moon had a bleak outlook on the midterm prospects of the governmental institutions that upheld law and order. He saw a society on the brink of collapse. The guns, he told Soule, would help the church members to defend themselves during the imminent chaos.

IN THE SUMMER of 1994, a church administrator telephoned Soule, who was then thirty-nine and living in Lynn, Massachusetts. He told her about the church’s summer camp and retreat in rural New Hampshire and said that the hostility from the native Graftonites was getting to be a problem. Every time the church sent someone up to host a retreat, they would find that the vacant building had been vandalized—windows broken, items gone missing, sometimes wanton destruction.

Soule quickly agreed to move to New Hampshire to serve as the caretaker for the property. Her mission was to provide a year-round presence and help demonstrate to her Grafton neighbors that the Moonies were decent people.

When she arrived, she explored the old Bungtown farmhouse. Small bedrooms, large woodstoves, and a more modern addition that they used as a lecture room. The remoteness of Grafton, awash in deer and wild turkeys, was exhilarating. She took daily drives and came to love the feel of the breeze in her hair. The church, like so many others, had identified Grafton as a place where dreams could be pursued, uninhibited by the forces that had persecuted Reverend Moon.

“It was out in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “I figured, there’s no street signs, so the government couldn’t find me.”

When summer camp or a retreat was happening, the house would fill with children from the city, with the overflow set up in tents and campers on the eighteen-acre property. In between sessions, the church office in Boston would sometimes call her and tell her to set up some bedrooms for church members who needed temporary lodgings.

It didn’t take long for Soule to experience the conflict between the church and the locals. She was asked whether the people at the Moonie House engaged in orgies.

“Do you know what abstinence is?” Soule would shoot back. “That’s what we go through to get married in the church.”

And those were the good interactions. One neighbor gave her the finger every time he drove by and someone used his vehicle to knock the church’s mailbox down in the night. After it happened twice, she remounted the mailbox on a concrete post. “The next time he did it, he broke his truck,” she said. “And he got arrested.”

Soule got a gun license and bought a pistol. Privately she dismissed the locals as inbred, but publicly she helped coordinate church events that were open to the public and gave out gifts of food to Graftonites in need. For years some residents talked about the day the church gave out free lobsters.

Tensions with the town ratcheted up over the issue of whether the Moonie House was a tax-exempt church or a taxable residence for Soule. Eventually the Unification Church, which was by then a well-established religious organization, prevailed, and relations began to ease once again.

After two years in Grafton, Soule won a court case against the Department of Veterans Affairs, which had initially denied her claim for benefits. When she received a large lump sum to make up for years of nonpayment, she used the money to buy a house of her own, located just a few miles down the road. A couple of years later, the church closed the camp down, but Soule didn’t leave town. She’d fallen in love with Grafton’s reforesting hills and the endless possibilities of the lonely dirt roads.

She had little inkling that her kittens would soon be eaten by bears. And even if she had, she would have even less inkling—like, zero inkling—that the freak incident would prove to be just the beginning of her bear problems.