Burt investigates Gatlin and his church

Burt’s investigation of Gatlin and its church turns a search for ordinary help into the discovery of a town remade by a children’s religious order. He follows the signs from an apparently empty main street into a church whose altered name, repurposed Christian symbols, and child-kept records let him infer the 1964 uprising and its sacrificial rules; the investigation ends not in safety but with Gatlin’s children converging on Vicky and the car.

Arrival in an Empty Town

Burt and Vicky reach Gatlin intending to find a constable and get rid of the body in their car. From a rise, Burt sees all three blocks of the town below. Its entrance sign calls it the “NICEST LITTLE TOWN IN NEBRASKA—OR ANYWHERE ELSE!” and gives a population of 5,431, while the surrounding evidence of ordinary life feels out of keeping with the absence of people. They pass the lumberyard and a 76 gas station whose posted prices—35.9 for regular and 38.9 for high-test—Vicky recognizes as years out of date. The empty road and town make her urge Burt to turn around and take the body to Grand Island instead.

Burt resists, still focused on getting the body out of the car and pursuing the practical plan of going to the courthouse. The disagreement exposes their different readings of the place: Vicky sees an unmistakable warning in the lack of cars and people, while Burt initially treats it as a problem to manage. Once they step out, even the smell of fertilizer seems wrong to him, unlike the familiar agricultural smell of his rural upstate New York childhood. Its sickly undertone recalls death. The landscape’s everyday farming details have become clues that the town is not simply quiet, but dangerous.

Signs of a Changed Church

Burt drives to a neat white church, the one building that seems maintained, and notices its sermon board. Beneath glass, it announces “THE POWER AND GRACE OF HE WHO WALKS BEHIND THE ROWS,” dated July 24, 1976. The name links the church’s Christianity to the surrounding cornfields. Vicky refuses to enter, but Burt goes in to investigate.

In the tidy vestibule, he finds eighteen large wooden letters discarded in a dusty heap. Rearranging them, he realizes they once formed “GRACE BAPTIST CHURCH.” The name has been removed, and the building repainted; the letters establish that the congregation has not merely changed its sermon but has abandoned its former identity. Burt wonders what the church has become, then finds the answer in its interior.

Behind the pulpit hangs a large Christ whose green hair is made of corn. The figure’s unsettling expression and eyes, with images of sinners in their pupils, recast familiar Christian iconography in the service of a different and threatening theology. At the organ, the keys have been torn up, the stops pulled out, and the pipes stuffed with dry cornhusks. A plaque forbids music except with the human tongue. The damage is purposeful: the church’s objects have been altered into signs of the new faith, and Burt recognizes that Vicky’s alarm is justified.

Scripture, Records, and the 1964 Past

The open Bible on the lectern is turned to Job, but its condition points to selective religious revision. As Burt flips through it, he discovers that sections have been cut out, mostly from the New Testament, while the Old Testament remains intact. Nearby, another book bears a childishly stamped title: “THUS LET THE INIQUITOUS BE CUT DOWN SO THAT THE GROUND MAY BE FERTILE AGAIN SAITH THE LORD GOD OF HOSTS.” Its language binds punishment to the fertility of the land.

Inside, the book’s large, carefully drawn letters and erased writing suggest a child has maintained the entries. Burt finds names and birth dates in columns, then follows the record into two further books. The last entry in the first is Ruth Clawson, born April 30, 1961; the next volume records Job Gilman, born September 6, in early September 1964, followed by Eve Tobin, born in 1965, without a second name in parentheses. The third book is blank. The records turn the church into an archive: children have been documenting their community, and the break in the chronology gives Burt a date around which to build an explanation.

He concludes that something happened in 1964 involving religion, corn, and children. He reconstructs the revolt through the story of Richard Deigan, who took the name Amos in 1964, and his friends, including Billy Renfrew, George Kirk, Roberta Wells, and Eddie Hollis. Burt’s account is that the young people adopted religion and killed their parents. He further suspects that they believed the corn was dying because of sin and insufficient sacrifice, and that they set an age limit of nineteen for how long they themselves could live. Since Amos turned nineteen on September 4, 1964, Burt infers that he too may have been sacrificed. These are conclusions Burt draws from the church records and what he has seen, rather than facts he can verify inside the church.

A Faith Made Material

The town’s corn religion is legible not just in its sermons and records but in handmade objects. Earlier, Burt and Vicky had found a crucifix in a suitcase: twists of corn husk form the cross, and a small cob holds a figure shaped from the kernels left on it. Its eyes, arms, legs, feet, and the raised letters INRI translate Christian imagery into corn. Burt admires its workmanship, but within the church’s transformed setting the object also fits a broader pattern: corn is both sacred material and the visible medium through which the town revises its religious symbols.

The church’s signs and objects give that faith a working structure. Its doctrine invokes He Who Walks Behind the Rows; its altered Bible and inscription authorize cutting down the “iniquitous” to make the land fertile; and Burt later learns that the children make more corncob crucifixes to ward off evil. The crucifix’s familiar form therefore carries a local meaning, tied to the corn and the community’s fear of further harm. Religious language, material practice, and agricultural survival are joined, while the church’s removal of its old name marks the break from the town’s former religious order.

Discovery Interrupted

Burt’s investigation does not conclude in the church. As he tries to make sense of the records and the sacrificial history, the T-Bird’s horn sounds continuously. He runs outside and sees children coming from side streets, the town green, and the school playground. They carry knives, hatchets, pipes, rocks, hammers, and a jackhandle. Their arrival answers the silence that Vicky had identified: Gatlin is not uninhabited, but its children are gathering against the visitors.

The church has given Burt a way to read the town, but it cannot protect him from what that knowledge exposes. The investigation connects a missing congregation, rewritten scripture, child-kept records, and corn-based ritual to the history of the children’s takeover. Its account remains incomplete—Burt is piecing together what happened from signs and documents—when the group’s arrival converts interpretation into immediate danger. The church’s quiet, orderly surfaces have concealed a living system of belief and violence, and the children now appear as its enforcers.