Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

“My strength was sapped as in the heat of summer”

Yesterday, I mowed my lawn. I thought it would be a quick job because I’d done it less than week before. I am not one of those Dutch folk who believe that “cleanliness is next to Godliness” is found somewhere in Leviticus. But in summer, when I spend hours and hours in the basement clicking computer keys, come mid- to late afternoon I love to get outside and do some honest, sweaty labor in the vineyard of our backyard, where we don’t, of course, have a vineyard.

Yesterday, the grass out front was long enough to call in the sheep. So I mowed, and the clippings—our yard is thick with maple seed whirlybirds right now—filled up the bed of my son-in-law’s big pick-up. The rainfall this spring has been magnificent.

By late July, I likely won’t be able to walk barefoot on my grass because what’s left will be yellowed cactus points. By July, I’ll cut the lawn once every three weeks at best, and then mostly weeds, the only verdure that prospers once the rains stop.

Only once in the near-fifty years that I’ve lived here have I seen a black cloud rolling in, a storm of dust. Only once. But that day I won’t forget because it prompted fear from a memory I don’t have—a vision from the Dust Bowl that turned prairie into the Sahara not all that far west from here.

By November, 1933, dust storms had roared by for years already, in the middle of a drought that went on for ten years. People were actually accustomed to hacking up mud from their throats, to enclosing drinking water in Mason jars to keep it from turning brown, even in the house, to knead bread inside drawers drawn just wide enough to allow their hands inside.

But what came on Armistice Day that November was like nothing else.

In 1923, about two hours northwest of here, a man named A. Karstrom retired and went to town, leaving his son the 470-acre spread that made Mr. Karstrom a good living. What followed was thirteen progressively bad years and the Black Blizzard, which broke his son’s heart and back, the air an image of midnight. In the heat and dust, the farm blew away. Four years later, a new owner took over a place that hadn’t been lived and moved five tons of sand from the acreage. Five tons. That’s how dry it was just northwest of here in 1933. That’s how lifeless.

The NIV, in verse four, holds on to a bit of what the KJV used to say. “My moisture is turned into the drought of summer” has been changed to “my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.” Sapped is the link, as if the sap, the fluid, of David’s soul has dried up by the torturous heat of his own sin and misery. What’s in him is drought, dust. When he looks up from his anguish, all he sees is a black blizzard.

His spirit and strength is as lifeless as that Karstrom farm. Even if the weather turns, he can’t move in the tons of choking dust that rises in his heart and throat.

What he needs is someone to carry away all those tons of dust, to bring him back, to refresh him with living water.

And that’s the story of Psalm 32, his story and ours. Black blizzards turned miraculously verdant by the living water of God’s own forgiveness. That’s the story all right.

Me and politics ii

In 2007 I wasn't ready to sign into anyone's campaign, wasn't particularly "political," but I loved the idea of a black man getting even close to the Presidency. Besides, it appeared that this particular  candidate had no scandals connected to him, carried a background in community organizing, and loved basketball. I'm quite sure I noticed the t-shirt in one of those pop-up ads that come unrequested from the internet, and liked the idea of this one--a sort of football jersey thing. 

I don't remember how much it cost, but I'm guessing it wasn't cheap--and it's a good one. I gambled that its subtlety would make it wearable in Sioux County, Iowa--or so I believed. After all, it didn't just blast out his name; it seemed, first of all, a jersey, and then a political statement.

In 2007 I was edging close to retirement and going over to the college gym early in the morning, along with other colleagues and other emeriti. I don't know that I would have worn that shirt to the downtown mall or a church picnic, but the gym was sparsely populated so early in the morning. I wasn't sure all my friends' eyes were even open.

I was wrong. Two colleagues ripped at me and my shirt, were not only open about their disapproval but voluble in what seemed their hate for Obama. I don't know that either of them said it in their summary anger, but today I'm quite sure their anti-Obama vehemence grew from his toleration of abortion, not his race. At least I'd like to think that was the truth. Whatever their specific motivation, I wasn't accustomed to being slaughtered in public--in front of others--by old friends who thought an Obama t-shirt an abomination, an outright sin. Ripped, screamed at, scolded--one of the prophets of doom was a woman, the other a man. Their whippings happened at different times and different spots in the gym, but both were very public. 

Their shocking fusillades made me more of an Obama supporter, but I didn't wear that t-shirt to early morning workouts again.

Just a couple of mornings later, I happened to come away from the workout with another retiree, the just-retired President of the college, who'd heard part of one of those Jeremiads. "Just thought you'd like to know," he said, whispered, as if we were behind enemy lines, "Louise and I think you're right, but it's not something I can say publicly." I was being commended.

That made me even more sure that my jersey was a good buy.

On January 3, 2008, I caucused for Barack Obama in the traditional Iowa way, by walking over to the side of the room those in charge had set off for the Obama supporters. Most of my liberal friends caucused for John Edwards, who would nosedive soon after. 

As everyone knows, that  night was a huge and unexpected win for the skinny Obama, and I still have the t-shirt. It's been a pj for all of these years so it's in great shape. 

And today, I'm a registered Democrat.

Me and politics -- 1

I'm quite sure everyone we knew in Arizona was Republican--shoot, even the liberals were Republican, as was the newspaper, the Arizona Republic. The Goldwater effect was very much alive, as was the man with dark-rimmed glasses. In the community where we lived, it was just about impossible to be a Democrat. Besides, my family was Republican, so I'd never done much thinking when it came to politics. The truth?--I'm embarrassed by how conservative I was back then,  but then so was everybody else.

So when we moved to Iowa, I told myself it was time--new place, new times, new rootedness--to participate in American political system, so I did. The Sioux County Republicans were meeting at TePaske Theater on some Thursday night that bicentennial fall, so I went, alone, and sat somewhere  in the back. I was a conservative, but I no right-winger. I'd attended a meeting of the local John Birch Society when I was in high school, a strangely clandestine gathering in the top floor of a lakefront mansion in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, maybe a dozen people who sat around watching a slide/tape program (remember those?) of shots featuring Martin Luther King shaking hands with men who were supposedly known communists. This was Wisconsin, after all, and blood from Sen. McCarthy's whacko hack jobs still pooled in the sandy soil hither and yon.

What I witnessed in TePaske Theater in August, 1976, was a political convention that made me ill because the dialogue was pretty much the same as it was in that little meeting in the lakefront mansion a decade ago. Men--I don't remember seeing any women--would raise their hands and contribute comments drawn from what seemed to me to be Depression-era sentiment. I wanted no part of it. My first political visit in our new home in Iowa was also my last. 

To say it turned me into a Democrat would be presumptive. I would have asked the age-old question back then about tigers changing stripes. It was impossible to think of myself as a Democrat. I didn't know my grandfathers' political leanings, but I knew I didn't have to ask--they were thoroughly Republican, as was my dad. I couldn't have thought of myself as Democratic. They were liberals, the sworn enemy for most of my life.

In the following years I tried to avoid party labels. I voted for McGovern, the prairie populist who promised to end the Vietnam war; but then I went Republican during the Bush years, trying to stay like W and his father somewhere close to the middle.

By '08, I'd had enough conservatism, enough tiddly-winks with wedge issues, enough clap-trap from the conservative world to make me look left, where I saw and heard someone who appeared out of nowhere, a guy with a horrible name that most conservatives opposed, not because he was black--of course, not because he was black. Of course. 

When the Iowa caucuses came around early in 2008, I'm not sure I had a political affiliation, but I had decided opinions, and those opinions formed around two particular candidates, this black guy with the awful name and, of all things, a woman named Hillary. But before the rise of anyone to the top, there were more candidates, including a liberal from New Mexico, Bill Richardson, and John Edwards, a politician a bald guy like me couldn't trust because he had such perfect hair.

___________________ 

Tomorrow--memories of the '08 race.

"Field of Dreams"

It went something like this, I guess. The filmmakers started with sixty pictures of Iowa farms thought to be possibilities for making this movie. What they wanted, of course, was endless cornfields where there was the fairly substantial promise that the crop would come up tall and healthy, and where, out west of the place ("if you build it, they will come") gorgeous sunsets would delight the evening sky. 

So, the story goes that the woman appointed to do the choosing, a woman named Sue Reidel, got to a photograph of the Lansing farmstead, down a lonely gravel road, and, just like that, went for it--"perfect." The truth is that they trucked in water early that summer, pulled it all the way from Lake Michigan, because they needed to be sure that the corn that season would reach optimum height. Otherwise, once the decision was made, the Lansing place started to take shape as a baseball diamond.

The man who wrote the book Shoeless Joe that became the movie is a Canadian writer named W. P. Kinsella, who went on to have a successful career as a novelist and died ten years ago already. The story, the novel, and the film all employ what people call magical realism--no, gangs of dead baseball players didn't come walking out of the corn like they do so gracefully in the movie. That's magic realism.

Thursday night, the Minnesota Twins will face off against the Philadelphia Phillies, real, live professional teams, not spirits or ghosts or fantasies. Tickets are long gone, but Netflix will put the game up for those of us who can't make it all the way across the state. 

That t-shirt at the top of the page is mine, purchased for me by an old friend who told me some time in the 90s that he was taking his family out east and stopping at Dyersville just to see "the field of dreams." He was just eccentric enough to do that, so I told him, jokingly, to pick me up a t-shirt. He did. 

Sometime later, this old friend was killed on a Sioux Center street when struck by a truck. That death--and something of his life--is somewhere in it, a stain in the old t-shirt only my eyes can see. It can't be removed. It's not just another t-shirt. It's been with me for decades.

Anyway, I'll be watching Thursday night. 

A Joey photo shoot*

It was the kind of little shack that had no use whatsoever. It stood behind their house, just off the alley out back, and when the old retired farmer and his wife decided, once and for all, to get rid of the thing, someone came along, picked it up, and hauled it off.

Unearthing thereby a nest of opossums suddenly turned up, four or five joeys (little possums) totally incapable of escaping the back of the old lady's spade. Our kids were kids, and they were out back, witness to the carnage. The old woman showed no mercy. They came home heavy with grief, anger, and total disbelief.

Me? They were only opossums.

I hit one with our brand-new, silver '64 Impala, just weeks after getting my license. I was driving a party of teenagers around to school that night, on our way to the prom, specially selected as cool sophomore servers. I know exactly where I hit that beady-eyed beast--it was just a couple miles from Hingham. Whack! Thump! All night long I heard that sound. That death haunted the prom. And it was only an opossum.

Truth is, I've often wondered what kind of joke the Lord perpetuated on us when he created the opossum, ugly rooters with eerie pink hands and a fleshy pig snout to match. What a mistake. 

When I was no older than my kids were that day in the alley, I saw one shot dead. I was out on a trap line with a loving man the prototype for the father in my first novel, Home Free. 

His father gave him the flashlight, aimed, and squeezed the trigger of the .22. The shot was muffled, silenced. They stood there, waiting for the motion to cease. The animal pawed at its forehead, at the perfect hole between its eyes, as if somehow it could scratch out the lead. "Possum," his father had said, as if it were some kind of eulogy.

My words, my sentences, years ago, drawn from my childhood experience of the first murder I'd ever seen. But it was only a 'possum.

So 'possums and me, we've got enough of a history, enough for me to recognize this little one coming up the trail toward me yesterday (see him up top?) on a sunny winter solstice afternoon. I knew 'possums didn't see well, and the wind was at his back, not mine. So I stood still, camera in hand, while Joey snooted around along the well-traveled back road along the river. 

In fact, kept coming at me as if I weren't there, kept coming until I barked at him to let him know that I wasn't just some cottonwood. He snarled a little and wiggled off--opossums come from the factory with only low gear. 

So I shot this little one with a camera, walked back home, and opened the files. 

Now pardon me for giggling. But what I found is a regular portrait gallery. It was as if Joey is coming up on graduation, and he or she wanted a senior portrait. I might not have chosen the season (first day of winter) or the place (a foot of snow on a river bank), but this Joey in buffalo coat was determined. I don't know why I say it, but this he has got to be a she. 

So here's Joey, class of '17, River Floyd High. She needs something comely for the high school annual. I'll send her proofs today. I know where to find her. 

Got a favorite? Here's a sexy little peek-a-boo.

This one left her a bit more exposed. Darling pose though, isn't it?

Got a couple of her outside the weeds too.

Tried something full body, with less than wonderful results. That winter fur makes you think her roots are gray. They are, I guess. But I'm thinking there's something in this pose a little cheeky for a high school girl, don't you think? But then, nowadays. . .

My favorite? Something close up, even though I think I'd have preferred a bit of powder on her nose.

Now at least she's got possibilities. I hope she's not too picky--she didn't seem to be yesterday. 

I swear I always thought the Creator of Heaven and Earth simply released possums out into the world about a week or so before he had the design down. 

But I've got to admit it--this Joey is almost cute. 

________________________________

*from December 21, 2016

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

“When I kept silent, 

my bones wasted away 

through my groaning all day long”

I’m not sure I know why myself—and I’m not sure I want to know—but one of the first novels I read that simply wouldn’t exit the chambers of my heart was Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope, a novel of sin and self-righteousness, set in apartheid South Africa. The pulsating portrayal of Pieter van Vlaanderin’s guilt simply wouldn’t let me alone. I became him—like I said, I don’t know why.

Van Vlaanderin, a police officer sworn to uphold laws which keep races apart, has sexual relations with a black woman. His marriage is cold and stultifying, but he knows very well that his sin is not his wife’s fault. In the face of his own overwhelming desire, he falls. But he doesn’t get away with it, and the truth comes out.

The real horror of the story, however, is his inability to find forgiveness. The sorrow in his heart just won’t go away.

Too Late the Phalarope put me through agonies more terrifying than any I’d ever undergone myself when, as an undergraduate, I read the novel. When van Vlaanderin kept silent, his bones wasted away through his groaning all day long, and so did mine. Reading the novel was excruciating, and that’s why it was so memorable.

And I’m not sure that’s why, perhaps, Too Late the Phalarope comes to mind when I read the third verse of Psalm 32: I can’t help thinking of the bone-wasting agonies of Pieter van Vlaanderin, a white man from apartheid South Africa and a supposedly God-fearing family, a man who couldn’t find forgiveness.

Post the Bathsheeba-saga, David’s bones shook with horror and guilt at what he’d done. We know that’s true, after all, from Psalm 51. “My sin is always before me,” David says, after Nathan let him know the truth. Full of misery, David asks the Lord for forgiveness: “Let the bones you have crushed rejoice.”

Some scholars speculate that Psalm 32 should really be Psalm 52. The 32nd Psalm seems, after all, a kind of retrospective poem David might have written to explain exactly what happened when finally he found the forgiveness he was looking for in Psalm 51. “This is how it went,” he seems to say. Then he explains how it was that he acknowledged his sin and confessed. David’s songs—both 32 and 52—record the reality of God’s forgiveness only because they first acknowledge the reality of his sin, or so it seems to me.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Psalm 32 begins in defining blessedness as the condition of the forgiven, the state of mind and soul of those who know that every last inch of the blackened corners of their hearts have been scoured, those who don’t try to cover things, those who conceal nothing from the watchful eyes of God—as if they could.

I sometimes wonder whether those who confess faith in God can really know his grace if they haven’t known their own sin, if they haven’t felt the groaning of their bones, as David says, if they haven’t felt something of to the horror that Pieter van Vlaanderin knew—as did David.

Answer me this: how can anyone know grace without knowing sin?

Change

My heart doesn't know exactly how to take this. On the one hand, it creates a smile because the picture, ten years old now, shows grandkids as kids. They still are, of course, especially to a grandpa, but they no longer wear those clothes. They can't. They're a decade older.

Ian, the youngest, will be a junior in high school. Pieter, who's wearing a t-shirt from his uncle and aunt in Stillwater, does all kinds of maintenance work at a plant just outside of town that spins E10 gas out of endless acres of corn all around. He's also in love.

And the high-schooler, back then, the girl holding the dog, is twice a mom, a young married. 

Oh, yes--I said my heart doesn't know how to take that picture on top because we don't really reverse time, and there's a bounty of sweet sadness to that picture because it captures a world that's gone. That's sadness. 

But then there's this too.

 

Just a couple of days ago--that high schooler's second cherub. That's sweet.

Great Plains

 

Ten years ago, a colleague and I led an excursion west of here, into the Great Plains--the mandate? to meet and greet one of the continent's most stunning regions, a place blessed with huge skies and endless ranges. 

When I look at these photographs from that experience, I am--even today, a decade ago--still wondrously blessed.

Every year at Yellowstone, someone gets hurt by the monarchs of the plains. We made it through without injury and all of us were greatly blessed.

"like an umbrella"

Sometimes it seems that the present administration is capable of producing a few rollicking old stories as good as anything from the pens of Gilbert and Sullivan. I mean, there are far bigger stories, far more reasons to despair than the new, sickly green color of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. There is a war in Iran--or is there? There's a newly invigorated socialist movement in the land of the free and the home of the brave. There's an ancient overweight would-be monarch who seems utterly incapable of holding on to power, given polls that increasingly and convincingly make him look like a loser. And there's a few moments of sheer hilarity.

Those off-color reflecting pools have been raising a stink for weeks already, but last week they turned into created a flood of madness when Janine Pirro, one of Trump's oldest and most trusted buddies and recently named the U.S. District Attorney for DC, ushered her own version of the truth into the fray and blamed the horror on shoddy workmanship, an indictment that made another explanation loyalist in Trumpster camp look, well, dumb, former gov of North Dakota, Doug Bergum. It  appears that there was long ago on capitol hill some bad blood coursing through both of their veins toward or with each other--about what I don't know. 

Trump, who is not practiced at keeping his mouth shut, laid into his old friend (and Fox News-er), Ms. Pirro, offering her newly documented explanation for the green mess on incompetent handlers. That did not sit well with the boss, who characterized Ms. Pirro's new explanation memorably, by saying "she folded like an umbrella," a line that set lips a grinnin' all over town. Yet that day, the Fox News barrister was spotted leaving her office complex all by her lonesome, packing enough ammunition to end the battle, if not the war. 

What happened? It's unclear, except it seems that the meeting with the king left him mellowed a bit, in a state of mind a few notches below "fold like an umbrella."

Much ado, much ado.

Sometimes I wonder what the American public will expect of his immediate successors--MAGA or not. This one has made the f-word pretty much standard political dialect. He's strangely off -key more often than a kid trying the violin. His anger at one of his oldest and trusted friends resulted from his having to field questions about her refusing to stay with his much preferred vandalism story, the explanation he liked, true or not. Trump goes unhinged because one of his trusted lieutenants told the truth when a lie was the much-preferred route , or so he directed. 

Are we going to take that from whoever replaces him in two years? Are we going to want another number 1 who blows a gasket when someone tells the truth? Can there be another? Are there others? 

I don't know. I'd like to believe he's one of a kind.

Paternity -- denouement

Denouement isn't exactly just an English teacher's word. It looks and feels and is French in origin, but it refers to the story's answer to this question: "so what?" What effect did the story have on a kid named Gary, on his life. 

I had options--it ruined it, is one. Another would be that it retooled him into the angel he never was. Options are many, most of them rise from a place on a continuum that stretches between poles in just about everyone's life--on one end profound effects, and on the other, minimal. 

That Gary is telling the story does more than suggest that his father's haymow lesson has most certainly affected him. Would it prompt him to chase down Cassie and the child? I chose not to end the story with him claiming a son or daughter somewhere, but I wanted him to live the indictment his dad inflicted on him that dusty, hot day in Trillian's haymow.

Here's the denouement, the story's end. This is how the story ends:

*

Two years ago, I was divorced. I could give you a hundred reasons why, but none of them would be any good really. Anyway, I see my two kids on weekends, and I take them places, but you get tired of amusement parks and malls. So, I took them to the Dutch Festival in Easton yesterday, a half day’s ride north of Chicago, where we live.

Today I’m a teacher, special ed, in the schools there. My students are kids who don’t understand why it’s important to show up for work in the morning if you want to keep a job. And every year I get new ones, a new crop of sixteen-year-olds. This year I will too. And I wonder sometimes if I’d recognize that one of Cassie and me, the one I never saw. Maybe it was a girl.

Somewhere, I imagine, Cassandra Whoever-she’s-married-to is telling her story too, and it’s probably not at all the same.

But I couldn’t help thinking when I was sitting there yesterday on the curb, when I saw all those Dutch kids around town, all those preening girls and the boys with the developing shoulders, that somewhere someplace there’s this tall, gaunt, half-Dutch, sixteen-year-old, who could just as well be up in a stuffy haymow somewhere with my father, wearing out overalls by hoisting bales on his knee, his face sticky with sweat and chaff, and sometimes talking, sometimes talking.

*

I doubt my mom and dad ever read the story, but they might have. Here's what I would have liked to explain to them, parents who probably never understood what their son was up to by writing stories like "Paternity." Let the writer take the denouement apart:

Two years ago, I was divorced [I wanted to suggest that his life hasn't been a bowl of cherries--is that because of what happened one summer on the lakeshore? I didn't care to have him somehow blame what happened with Cassie on her, but neither did I want him to simply forget it. This line deliberately suggests that he hasn't.] I could give you a hundred reasons why, but none of them would be any good really. Anyway, I see my two kids on weekends, and I take them places, but you get tired of amusement parks and malls. So, I took them to the Dutch Festival in Easton yesterday, a half day’s ride north of Chicago, where we live. [The phenomenon I noted one year at about the time our kids were approaching middle-school age, when we went to the Tulip Festival in Orange City: preening high school kids in tank tops in the warm, late spring.]

Today I’m a teacher, special ed, in the schools there. [Making him a teacher was easy--I was one.] My students are kids who don’t understand why it’s important to show up for work in the morning if you want to keep a job [A friend of mine told me he did that--explaining that his students weren't a whole lot like the kids we knew growing up. What Gary doesn't say, but what he thinks is that his kids come from homes not so ship-shape as the home he grew up in]. And every year I get new ones, a new crop of sixteen-year-olds. This year I will too. And I wonder sometimes if I’d recognize that one of Cassie and me, the one I never saw. Maybe it was a girl. [I didn't want him obsessed, but that he was reminded every once in a while was, I thought, a good thing, a state of mind his father had accurately predicted.]

Somewhere, I imagine, Cassandra Whoever-she’s-married-to is telling her story too, and it’s probably not at all the same. 

But I couldn’t help thinking [it's something he remembers--"can't help it")when I was sitting there yesterday on the curb, when I saw all those Dutch kids around town, all those preening girls and the boys with the developing shoulders, that somewhere someplace there’s this tall, gaunt, half-Dutch, sixteen-year-old, who could just as well be up in a stuffy haymow somewhere with my father, wearing out overalls by hoisting bales on his knee, his face sticky with sweat and chaff, and sometimes talking, sometimes talking. [This is a tribute to his father. "Sometimes talking" suggests his father's silence is a feature he remembers and appreciates. It suggests, as imaginative literature always does, that Gary looks back at what happened one day in a lakeshore haymow as something he's drawn from the respect he had for his father.]

For now, let me lay out the roots of this story, roots that start, oddly enough with a darling pair of Dutch bunnies, the belted kind. Where they weren’t white, they were brown, not black. I bought them at a twice-a-year auction that, long ago, was the wildest and most fascinating auction in a six-county region. These bunnies were darling—or did I say that already? —and they were comfortable enough to tolerate each other as roomies. A boy and a girl, just like our kids, neat as neat can be.

Call me a bad parent, but I substituted doing the chores my children were supposed to do, daily, but had some trouble getting accomplished—feed the bunnies, keep their cage nice and clean, and play with them. Promise me that and, okay, Dad will buy a couple of those cuties. Most of those responsibilities got left to their father, but I started to love getting up in the morning and going out to the barn out back, as if I was some old retired farmer.

On Easter morning that year—sun bright and shiny in the sky—I went out to greet the day and found both bunnies gone. Initially, I worried about some kind of crime--they had been stolen! I looked around, all through the cage, which stood just outside the old barn, on the south side.

No bunnies.

It was Easter morning, a particularly religious holiday. If we had easter eggs, they came from our kids’ friends. Barbara and I weren’t big on Easter bunnies, save the wonderful twosome out back, who’d blessed our kids with brown and white fluff.

Quite quickly, I determined that telling the kids their bunnies were gone would be out of the question—I mean, my own soul felt bitten through. What might happen to them—and on Easter too?

So off we went to church. Barbara knew, but the two Schaap kids were innocent as lambs, more so.

All through the trumpets of Easter morning worship, all I could think about was those two bunnies, our kids’ bunnies, and how I would have to break the news that would have assuredly broken them. How would I say it? Where would we sit to tell them? They’d bawl, but would I?

Don’t ask me how the worship service went—I was parked in another zone.

When we got home, I snuck outside after telling Barb I was going to do one more search.

I did, and, amazingly, I found the two little sweeties balled up together beneath the neighbor’s lawn mower. I flipped the deck up and there they were, not fifty feet away, burrowed in the long grass beneath that old mower.

None of that is in the story, but, trust me, all of it is.

I was so incredibly relieved that it seemed impossible to believe. I had put myself into an emotional ringer because I had no idea how I would explain to my kids the deaths or absence of their two warm and snuggly bunnies.

I don’t know why, but that morning I happened to think about ending a pregnancy, about abortion, about what it was. And what I ran into was a contrast my mind couldn’t help but project. For pity’s sake, a rabbit left me at wits end, an animal--a terribly cute pair of them, but not a creature blessed with a soul. Their mysterious absence flat-out ruined my Easter morning.

Now let me be clear. I’m not a huge anti-abortion kind of guy. Politically, I’m most often on the progressive side. I’ve long ago had my fill of hyper-Christians who can’t or won’t take the time to empathize with those (especially women) who would just as soon not let the state tell them what to do with their bodies.

I’m not a fierce anti-abortion guy, but the comparison was too evident in my own life: I was long gone from the Easter worship that morning because my mind, my heart, and my soul were consumed by the startling absence of two rabbits.

There’s a story here, I told myself, something about taking human life more seriously. That’s something this whole arrangement of Easter morning events had made clear.

And then there was this. We’d heard the story from friends of ours, how a young lady somewhat prematurely pregnant with child had told her parents that it wasn’t that big of a deal—“it’ll all be over by volleyball.”

There’s something so patently ridiculous, so insanely juvenile, about that remark—and something totally childlike in its precious innocence. I gave the story to a football player.

I’ve never written a story that’s more "pro-life" than "Paternity." I doubt they ever knew.

Paternity -- v

Behind him the bales kept falling all over the spaces where he could walk. He twisted around quickly, as if he had forgotten what he was about. He scrambled down two levels of bales to get to the window, then dug his knees into the hay to look outside. “Slow down, Jesse--didn’t you hear me?” he yelled, and he grabbed the end of the elevator and shook it. He stayed there for a minute, ripped four bales from the track and stacked them, one atop the next, to keep them out of the way.

Seated over there, he had to yell for me to hear. “You think it’ll all be over, do you?” he said. “Just like that--like the mumps? You think it’ll all go away, just like that? Like a sore knee, is that it?”

“What?” I said. “She’ll be gone. She’s rich. You saw her old lady. She’ll take care of the whole business.”

The floor at the end of the elevator was cluttered with bales. He pulled himself up from his knees, grabbed the end of the elevator, and twisted himself around it; but his foot slipped in a crack, and he twisted his back when he couldn’t keep his balance, finally falling to all fours. Just like that, like a slap in the face with an open hand, another bale came off the end and slammed to the floor over his twisted foot.

He came up swearing under his breath, something he rarely did, and he grabbed that elevator and twisted it, wrestled it loose from the knot Andy must have tied to anchor it, the chain jangling like loose bells, then turned it completely upside down, dumping every last bale off the track and to the ground between the barn and the wagon. “Now slow down!” he yelled again at Jesse.

“You don’t have to lose your temper,” I said.

“You shut up,” he said, pointing back at me. “You talk like a child--it’ll all be over--” he said. “It’s no big deal at all because once you make a touchdown nobody will remember.”

Anger and hurt twisted his mouth and narrowed his eyes, pouring out in something close to tears. “We’re talking about life here. Don’t you understand that--or is all you care about getting laid?”

I never heard my father use that kind of language.

“Life,” he said, and he put both hands down on a row of bales and climbed up several levels, lifting himself to the nest of kittens he’d laid at the beam. He grabbed a kitten from the pile that he’d found up there, took it in his huge hand and held it towards me like some circus magician, the kitten’s round head protruding between his thumb and forefinger, the rest of its body in his fist, small and gray with long fur. He raised it higher and higher towards me, then jerked down suddenly, as if he were snapping his fingers, as if he were a kid snapping a lead pencil in half. When he opened his hand, the kitten was perfectly dead.

I couldn’t believe what he’d done.

He didn’t say anything just then. He looked at me and tossed the kitten across the mow somewhere. If his eyes could have spoken, they would have explained everything, but his eyes were vacant. He just stood there and stared, almost as if I could be next.

“Dad--” I said.

“You two made a child,” he said, “not a kitten.”

And just then Jesse came up the ladder, almost crying himself. “I tried to get that old guy to slow down, but he just kept on going,” he said. “I tried.”

“That’s what you made,” my father said, pointing at Jesse. “And who’s going to be nice to him--who’s going to dry up his tears, Gary? You going to be there?”

_____________________________

The action of the story is now over. What remains is the denouement--the sense of how all of this figures into Gary's adult life.

I didn't set out to write a story in which a father would deliberately and with no malice in spirit or mind kill a tiny kitten with his bare hands. I had no sense at all of that until, almost mysteriously, it happened. I remember thinking, "He could grab one of those kittens .  . . and then what? He could kill it with his bare hands. He could."

Would my father have done that? I don't know, but in a way, as the writer, I'm beyond that question already because my father was never up in a hay mow that I know of, and while he might have used the language Gary's father does, he certainly would have been that disappointed--not angry, disappointed.

Tomorrow, the denouement.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 32

 

 “Blessed is the man. . .in whose spirit there is no deceit.”

 What I have is a shard of old newsprint with a fading picture, enough to prove that I’m not simply telling tall tales.

 Once upon a time, an immigrant tenant farmer named John  worked some land not all that far from here. Wasn’t good land either, at least not by his neighbor’s reckoning. The soil was light and thin, and bluffs, lots of them, shouldered a river that all too often flooded the valley beneath.

 

John rented that land from a gruff, bearded man, who determined that most of what he’d made during his life would be given, upon his death, to a Methodist hospital not far away.

 

Along came the Depression, the complication of the story on this yellowed sheet of newsprint. The landlord mortgaged his land to keep from losing it; but when he died mid-Depression, that Methodist hospital became the John’s landlord.

 

To say times were tough seems an embarrassing understatement. In John’s obscure corner of Sioux County, Iowa, it was smarter to shoot cattle than feed them, if you had cattle at all. When things grew desperate, the John went to the hospital board and asked for grace—1,000 dollars’ worth of rent simply couldn’t be had and consequently couldn’t be paid. The hospital graciously nodded their consent.

 

Those hills nobody else wanted? They ended up at the heart of John's family’s survival. When drought left no feed to be grown or purchased, he let his sheep graze the bluffs, where they ate the buck brush. When things got even bleaker, he shooed his hogs up there too, where they could munch acorns from the burr oak that run like an unruly moustache over those hills. When other farmers were dumping livestock, those bluffs saved the John's operation, and by the time the Second World War came around, the family farm got on its feet.

 

This old newspaper clipping is from 1976, 44 years after the Methodist Hospital Board shook their collective heads and let that $1,000 land payment ride.

 

In the picture with the newspaper story is an old guy with his shirt buttoned up tight beneath his chin. To his left is his wife, in a hair net and a print jacket, what’s likely her finest mother-of-pearl brooch right there perfectly centered on her chest. The old guy—you might have guessed, he’s John—is handing a small piece of paper to a big guy with an open collar. It’s a check for a thousand dollars. All three of them are smiling. Forty-four years later.

 

Like I said, I got the paper to prove it. If you don’t believe me, I’ll send you a copy. But I’m saving this one, because it’s an obscure story that needs to be remembered, a little story on a shard of old newsprint, an otherwise long-forgotten story for our time and all time, a story about a human being in whom there was no guile.

Paternity -- iv

We're in the middle of "the talk"--father and son, the first big one after the news story hit: Gary got a girl from the lake pregnant. It would have been impossible for me to know how my dad would have reacted had I been Gary Dirkse, but the point of my writing the story was to see where the story itself would take me. What my parents would have trouble understanding is that imaginative literature--an imagined short story--explores what just might happen. A sermon preaches the truth in my heritage, but this--the story--is something different, an exploration by the creation on paper of something approximating "real life."

_______________________________ 

“You know,” he said to me that day when I’d climbed up in the mow beside him, “I always thought it would be Darrell and Gloria, the way they neck. I didn’t think it would be you.”

Little Jesse was loading the bales on the elevator that poked its nose into a square door maybe twenty feet off the ground. Trillian was helping him. We were putting hay up in the corners of the east loft, and the air was hot, full of chaff and dust, even though it wasn’t past ten or eleven in the morning.

“We’re all capable of it,” he said. “I’m not throwing the first stone either.”

He pointed me over to the place where he’d been packing. “Watch out for those kittens there,” he said. His stacking had uprooted four of them, gray ones--farm cats--certainly no more than a month old, from their nest, so he’d put them up beside a rafter that he likely didn’t mean to cover. The end of the yellow elevator, anchored with twine down to the wall, protruded from the open door behind him, sunlight cutting through the maze of dust in perfect geometric shafts.

“You know you shouldn’t have done it,” he said, not meaning it as a question.

I nodded.

When he didn’t hear me reply, he looked straight up at me.

“Yes,” I told him.

“Our bodies are the temple of the Lord,” he said.

I really didn’t feel any less healthy having made love eight times. It didn’t seem somehow like a desecration.

When a bale came up the elevator, it fell, end first, down to the floor where it grazed off the edge of another set deliberately below, then flipped over completely, landing flat, strings up, four, maybe five feet closer to the spot where we were trying to fill in the last of the holes in that corner of the mow. He’d grab them from the spot where they’d finally come to rest and heave them at me. Jesse was sending them up plenty fast.

“I’ve been thinking for hours,” he said, “and I just don’t know what to say to you that you don’t already know.”

I didn’t talk back. I was sorry for letting them down the way I did, but Cassie wasn’t really a girl I’d marry anyway, I thought. I’d miss her. I knew I would. But I didn’t love her, not love like you’re supposed to, I thought. Besides, she really wasn’t even of us. She was “lake people.” And she was leaving.

“Slow down, Jesse,” he yelled down the open hole. “We’re finishing up up here.”

He motioned with his arm for me to climb up and take the bales from him when he picked them off the floor. His was the heavy work; mine was simply tedious: fitting them into what spaces remained.

“The church calls it a sin,” he said.

“I know it,” I told him.

“I don’t know if it’s a bigger sin if it happened a hundred times, or a little one if it happened just once,” he said, “but you and this girl, how often did you do it?”

I don’t know why I said what I did, but I told him it had happened four times. “But she let me do it, Dad,” I told him. “Every time. She told me that it was okay, that nothing would happen.”

“You and Adam,” he said. He picked up a bale and heaved it up to me off his knee. I was standing on a ledge of bales maybe four feet above him.

“Well, you saw her,” I told him.

“Sure I did.”

“She let me.”

“Slow down, Jesse,” he yelled again. Bales were piling up after flipping over the end as if they were riding a waterfall.

He pulled his handkerchief out and wiped his face. “So you just go and do whatever that thing you got in your pants says?--is that it?” He stopped and stared at me, bales still falling heavily to the floor.

I threw one in a hole without looking up at all. But I didn’t talk.

“Does it say somewhere in the Bible that it’s all just fine and dandy if the girl says yes? Is that a verse you read somewhere?”

I was up high, I remember. I reached up and scraped away cobwebs so thick with dust that they could have passed for yarn. But he stayed there at my feet, staring. I wouldn’t look at him.

He turned around and grabbed for another bale. That’s when I said, “Any guy would have done it, and you know it.”

“Does that make it right?” he said, shoving another one up at me.

I twisted around, keeping my feet straight beneath me as I picked up the bale and swung it into a hole at the corner of the roof line.

“What’s the big deal?” I said. “By football season it’ll be all over anyway.”

 
I’m not sure where that came from.

“'Football season,'” my father said, in a tone without emotion, as if he were repeating it in order to get me to verify that what I’d said actually came from my lips.

“That’s what I said,” I told him.

His face turned suddenly into some fierce mask. “It’ll all be over, will it?” he said, laughing in a biting, mature way that I’d never heard him laugh before, as if I wasn’t his own boy.
______________________

Tomorrow: the denouement.

Paternity -- iii

I submitted the story to a magazine that had  taken another story of mine. I thought "Paternity" had a good chance of being published.

Nope. Got it back sometime later with a staff criticism that the ending was too shocking (ending is a day away). The general sense was that it needed to be foreshadowed somehow--readers needed to be better prepared.

At just about that time, I visited an old friend in the bike shop, and somehow we got to talking about his boyhood on the family dairy--just a little one, like the narrator's father's dairy. He told me the little story you read at the end of yesterday's passage. It was perfect foreshadowing, for building to the final scene of the story because it set within the father a certain view of life and death in the barn that would make the ending less of a shock. You'll see.

What follows is the final setting for the story--the mow.

When Cassie and her mother left late that afternoon, I went out to the barn, maybe a half hour after my father picked up and left in silence. I pulled on my boots just outside the parlor and unlatched the door. I was young then, cocky. I figured I’d take my licks and have it over. But I found him beating a cow that night, whacking away, the milking machine lying awkwardly in the gutter like some overturned turtle. He had a dowel he’d picked up somewhere, thick as his finger, and he was thrashing that cow like I’d never seen him do before.

When he saw me standing there where the rest of the cows were already stanchioned, he stopped, frozen in the act, a vacant, stunned look on his face. We both knew that nothing needed to be said, so we milked beside each other all night long and never spoke a word. I felt almost excused, as if what I’d done with Cassie was lost in some big harvest of sin.

The next morning we were out baling hay at the Trillian place, an old farm with hundreds of acres of land and a sprawling, ramshackle barn with 1904 painted just below the point of the eaves.

Today, the baler my father bought is obsolete because people say a crew of five or six makes baling hay too labor-intensive. Today, with the right kind of equipment, one man can do all the haying and never leave the air-conditioned comfort of his cab. Back then, haying employed our entire family, locked us up in dusty mows, forced us to gulp ice-cold lemonade from a common-cup canning jar, to work long, hot hours in stagnant air, thick with dust, and to talk to each other, even when we may not have wanted to.

When my father came on the job that morning, we’d already started up. I was stacking bales on the wagon when I saw his pickup roll into the yard. My brother Andy was driving the baler, while old man Trillian himself shuttled the first load back to the barn where he and little Jesse unloaded. In a matter of minutes, half hour maybe, Darrell rode out on the empty wagon and told me Dad wanted me to work with him in the barn.

My brothers hadn’t said much to me that morning. They knew what had happened the night before, but on the ride out to Trillian’s I’d found a corner in the back of the wagon and they let me be. Maybe they were disappointed in me, I don’t know. Maybe they were jealous. Whatever they felt, they didn’t say much. Maybe they felt as I did--it was all water over the dam. The way I saw it, Cassie was leaving. Now it was her problem.

My father is a tall, gaunt man with very dry hair and proud features, a wide nose that, come summer, reddens almost daily. His arms are long, and his hands carry muskmelons as if they were softballs. He resembles the picture we have of his grandfather, the North Sea sailor who, eighty years ago, decided to leave the Netherlands and cut a life for himself and his family from uncut Dakota grasslands.

My father has mellowed in the years that have passed since that summer. He laughs now as he watches his own grandchildren play on the rope swing he hung, not four years ago, from the maple I remember as a sapling. Back then, with three teenage boys and six children in all, with thirty-five milk cows, with all of that life riding the back of the cold and dreary lakeshore seasons, he seemed to me to be driven. I remember unforeseen spurts of temper during harvest, nervousness in unexplained silences during early spring planting. Whole nights passed in October when he didn’t speak a word to my mother or to us.

Although he was a man to be feared then, it would be wrong to say that I was ever afraid of my father. He was to be feared the way he himself talked about fearing God. Each of us, I think, lived in a kind of awe of him. Darrell, the oldest, still wrestles him: if Dad says Darrell shouldn’t use herbicides, Darrell claims he’ll go bankrupt if he doesn’t. Andy simply follows Dad. He’s learned to live with him the way a good Marine feels comfort in a well-defined chain of command. I don’t claim to know about myself.

___________________

That last line belongs to the narrator, but I suppose it comes from the heart of the writer too, which is probably why there are so many stories about fatherhood.