Chapter 4: Emaus Clinic

     "Where's Dr. Honaker?" demands Grazyna Czarcinski as a tall and thin young woman in a long white coat enters the treatment room.

"And a happy equinox to you too" smiles the new chiropractor as she pulls up a stool beside the adjusting table.

"Fuck that" Grace rasps in her lifelong smoker's voice. "What's going on here?"

"I'm the new doctor at  Emaus" she explains, her straight black hair swishing as she slides the rolling stool back. "Dr. Honaker leads the Sunday service down the road at Waverly Hall."

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     The renowned clinic for natural healing had been started in the 1920s by the charismatic E. Hieronymous Emaus, a self-proclaimed healer with the somewhat dubious titles of naturopath, osteopath, and chiropractor. Not so well known was that Emaus was also the Grand Master of Fraternis Lilia Croesis, a secretive Christian sect claiming roots in Egyptian mysticism. After Emaus died in  1970 the leadership of the FLC and the Clinic were passed on to one C. Gerald Honaker, an officially trained Doctor of Chiropractic with both mixer and spiritual inclinations.
    Like the Lilicroestians, the American chiropractic profession had had a rift in the early twentieth century. Graduates of the original school, the Palmer College of Chiropractic, and it's affiliates believed in limiting practice to spinal adjustments. Others who advocated additional therapies like adjusting devices, homeopathy, and nutrition came to be known as mixers. Over time the latter would become predominant in both professional organizations and numbers of practitioners.

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     "Well whoop-de-doo" Grace scowls. "If he knows what's good for him he'll keep those long paws off my naive niece."

"Look Mrs. Czarcinski, I'm here to continue your healing if you'll let me."

"As long as you're not one of those neck crackers" Grace assents.

"It's all activator for me" she replies with relief, holding up a syringe-like device for the tapping of spinal segments. "That and homeopathic remedies to prolong the response."

"Well get cracking then so I can get over to your Waverly Hall."

Chapter 3: Old Ladies Hill

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    "Hello in there" calls out a tall guy stooping down to peer into the semi-darkness of one of a strange line of garages along the overgrown side of an old apartment building on a hill.

"Oh" Karma stammers as she leaps down from the sideboard of a dusty old carriage. "I live here and was just looking around."

"Don't worry, I'm doing the same thing" laughs the young man with a huge camera hanging around his neck, his long brown hair glistening with blond streaks in the orange glow of an Indian summer evening. "I won't tell if you won't."

"Deal" she declares, emerging into the light and flashing him a brilliant smile that lights up her face and squinting eyes. "Are you photographing this amazing old house?"

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     That amazing house was the Evergreens, the decaying former estate of the LaMonte-Kerns-Mason family, benefactors for the borough of Bound Brook. By 1973 the old southern family had long since built a modern mansion they called Piedmont Farm, leaving in their financial wake a community pool, library, sports field, campground, and three schools all subsidized by housing developments on  LaMonte farm land. The ultimate gift from their antebellum largesse was the updating of their original pre-electric home in the 1920s into low income housing occupied primarily by the war widows of central New Jersey.

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     "Matthew Berry at your service" he replies, reaching down a hand. "The photos are for my Masters thesis, and I'd like to have one of you up on that old coachee."

"I'll do it if you'll take me to dinner sometime" she bargains with tilted head and a sly smile, taking his long fingers in hers and holding onto his wrist with her other hand.

Chapter 2: Route 22

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     "How did it go Aunt Grace?" asks Karma as she turns to look back while pulling the old green Chevrolet Impala onto Route 22 at the Bloomsbury exit.

"I'm floating" sighs Grazyna Czarcinski relaxing her ample frame back onto the bench seat with eyes closed. "That Dr. Honaker has some magic hands."

"It's those dark eyes that strike me" Karma continues, glancing up into the rearview mirror while pulling into the center lane to stay away from the railing as they cross the Raritan River bridge into Somerset County.

"Now that you mention it" awakens Grace as she turns to face Karma, "his eyes do remind me of old Father Hajduk when I was a girl in Poland."

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    The Czarcinski's had fled Poland in the early days of the Russian occupation of Czestochowa (chens-toe-HOH-vuh) in 1946. A stout Catholic of the eastern orthodox variety, the father, Stanislaw, a former fighter in the Nazi resistance, couldn't bear another occupation and sought advice on where to go at Jasna Gora Monastery in the outskirts of the city. Told of a sister church in an American town near New York city, he leapt at what he saw as one last chance at religious freedom. He and his wife Boska escaped by train with their two children in the chaotic time when Germany had fallen and eastern Europe had not yet settled into Soviet dominance, eventually disembarking at Bound Brook, New Jersey.

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     "Well, that priestly doctor caught me meditating on the lawn" admits Karma as she slows way down to enter the Somerville circle. "He invited me to visit him at someplace called Waverly Hall."

"Just put your head down and go" Ruth proclaims, gesturing at the cars swerving around them.

"I don't know Aunt Ruth, he kind of creeped me out."

"I meant about the circle" laughs Ruth. "That's what my tata always said, but then again he couldn't read a lick of English."

"When's your next appointment?"

"Let's see" Ruth responds as she scrabbles around in her large tote bag on the floorboard and pulls out her reading glasses and a white card. "That's odd, it's Sunday September 21."

 "Oh my god, which way do I go" Karma exclaims while pulling into the median between routes 22 and 202/206. "There are too many twos on these signs."

"You know what they say about a fork in the road" Ruth shrugs. "Either way will get you there."

Chapter 1: Something's Happening

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    "I arise, facing East" chants Karma Czarcinski into the dawn fog of the Annandale woods surrounding the Emaus Clinic. "I am asking toward the light..."

"Stop right there" commands a tall man with a dark handle-bar mustache standing over the young woman sitting cross legged on the wet grass. "We don't use AMOLC prayers in the FLC."

"Isn't prayer prayer?" Karma asks, her long autumn hair and sandalwood beads swishing as she swivels her head toward him.

"Well yes pretty lady, but not when it's the blasphemous verse of the so-called Ancient and Mystical Order Lilia Croesis" he stammers, hideous whiskers swaying with his shaking head.

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    Karma had just returned east after a long stint in the Bay Area. After dropping out of high school in central New Jersey, she'd dropped in to the hippies in 1968 Berkeley, the yippies in Chicago for the ill-fated Democratic Convention, and the commuters at San Fran State, where she'd gotten her GED along with a BA in the first class of the new program in ethnic studies. Now she was back in her original hometown to help care for her mother's ailing sister, and Bound Brook was just thirty miles east but at least a few centuries away from the Hunterdon County religious sect she'd just stumbled into.

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     "It's not just beauty that's in the eyes of the beholder" Karma counters, turning back to the shrouded forest and hoping the conversation has ended.

"Whatever do you mean, my new friend?" smiles the lanky man with intense dark eyes behind horn rimmed glasses. "And what brings such a delightful creature to the grounds of Fraternitas Lilia Croesis on a foggy late summer morning?" 

"I brought my aunt to see Dr. Honaker" she answers, standing straight up from a lotus pose  turning to face him eye-to-chest.

"Uh, well, I'd better get over to the clinic" he stammers, turning tail and stumbling away before calling back over his shoulder "but come see me at Waverly Hall!"