An old story, "Anna"

Continued from yesterday. . .

Years have passed since then. Today the church pays a music director to order a Christmas show from some slick Christian catalog out of Texas, but Anna is still teaching Sunday school, and now she has my own three-year-old boy. No one else her age teaches, because kids have a way of forcing early retirements, just as they always did. But there is a smile on Anna's face whenever we drop our son off with her for Sunday school. It's a smile unlike anything we ever saw before on her face, a smile that surprised me at first. And Anna has a permanent now, her curly gray hair curled up tight around her head like any of a dozen other women in church.

Time fills in gaps the way dawn colors a lakeshore landscape. Some things I know now about Anna. I know now that Anna cared for her parents until the day each of them died. I know now that her father was no gentle man to live with-blustery, hardheaded, stubborn as the toughest Hollander. I know now that when he was gone, every Sunday she dressed her mother, set her in the wheelchair, and pushed the old woman to church, even when she knew her mother understood little of the sermon. I know now that giving her life to them was a thankless, blessed job that might have turned anyone's face into something grim, something less than radiant.

I know now that the woman who never married regularly plays grandmother to two little blond-haired boys no older than my own son, two little boys her niece was left alone with when their father ran off with another woman.

Why does she smile that way today, twenty years after a class of fourth-grade boys decided she was much too owly to be a good teacher? Why does my son love her today? Why does he curl around my leg and turn away from her when she talks to him, as if he's embarrassed to have all of her attention himself? Why does Anna smile?

Maybe it's because life is easier for her now, later on in her years. Maybe the privileged burden of her parents' care is there behind her, settled in the pages of her mind like yellowed photographs. Maybe the anxiety of being alone has settled into a firm assurance that all things have worked together for good. Maybe playing grandmother has swelled the limits of her tolerance. Maybe the smile is simply the inherent reward of many years of Christmas programs interspersed annually in a lifetime of quiet selflessness.

Four hundred years ago we reformed the church and stopped canonization, stopped making saints. Maybe it's a shame. Today we don't know how to revere those who give themselves, all of themselves, through us to God. We let them pass on too easily, and we don't elevate them like heroes. After all, what was Abraham to David but a symbol of belief and courage, of faith and promise.

So this is for you, Anna. And this is for me. And this is for our son. And this is for our Lord.

I'm happy you're out of intensive care, and so is my son.

*~*~*~*~*

There's a bit more to the story. When the piece appeared in a magazine I knew some people in the community was published, I hoped my masked name might keep it away from those who would know who this central character is. 

Nope.

A man who grew up not all that far from where I did, took a look, read a few words, and said, "Hey, he's talking about my aunt." That discovery got back to me, and more. No one seemed angry however, although if they had been angry or hurt, I may never have known.

Then, years later, when we were visiting the town where I grew up, the fictional Anna came up to me. I don't know that I had ever spoken to her before in my life. By this time, she was most certainly elderly. I will admit that I wondered what she was going to say, but when it came out, mid smiles, she told me she'd had the whole essay decoupaged and it hung in her bedroom.

I'm happy to say that it seemed to me that "Anna" was a winner.

An old story, "Anna"

If my son, here referred to as three years old, is today well into his forties, the story I'm telling is now more than forty years old, originally published in a magazine that, by my direction, gave the author a made-up name. Why? Because, back then, I was afraid of how the individuals might react, given my going public with their lives. It's a difficult line writers walk when writing stories which "use" characters and situations others might recognize, and I was aware of that with "Anna," because here those characters attended the same church I did. So I hid, or tried to.

But here's the story.

*~*~*~*~*~*  

Anna is out of intensive care now, and I guess that's why I'm saying this. Because it strikes me-now that she has wrestled through a fight with her heart-it strikes me that we are far too good at eulogies. Nice things are always easy to say after the funeral. But today Anna came out of intensive care.

Anna is an organist in our church--self-taught for the most part--and a Sunday school teacher for three or four generations probably. When I was a boy, we feared Anna because her grim face wore no emotion; her lips were locked together in a twist that was neither smile nor frown. We read it as perpetual disgust.

Sunday school programs brought out the worst in her. A hundred kids with lit fuses would shoot around the church sanctuary during practice the night before. "You fourth graders, act your age!"

She would always snap at us. We were sure she had no loving voice in her. When she'd tum to the fifth graders, someone would mimic her for sure. Years later I discovered that Anna created those annual programs.

Anna never married. In a church of families, even kids don't quite know how to take women who don't marry. They're different, and a boy starts recognizing such things about the same time he starts reading the script writing carved into the Communion table at the front of the church he's attended for ten years. Suddenly, it's just there. Fourth-grade boys just figured a woman like

Anna--sour Anna--couldn't get a man. Meanwhile, another Christmas program would come and go.

Halfway through adolescent rebellion, I thought Anna was an icon of the staid, traditional, immovable church of my youth. Fashions arrived and left, but Anna's hair looked forever the same, as if she'd surrendered to being out of time. I swore that the older she grew the slower she played organ, until even the bouncy hymns poked along like the old psalms. And always you'd see the expressionless face up there, lighted by the soft glow of organ light. She chewed gum, not vigorously but quickly, nervously, when she played.

______________________ 

More tomorrow  

The Tabor House, Tabor, Iowa

The John Tabor House

Religious visions were everywhere in the years preceding the Civil War. Boom towns out west here may have been hell holes for a time, but they were also peopled by starry-eyed believers who claimed their marching orders came from on high.

Tabor, Iowa, sits on a bluff far above the Missouri, the highest point of Fremont County. The place is not in terrific shape today; but Tabor has an epic past, created when fiery abolitionist Congregationalists set up camp here, just across the river from Nebraska. 

The Reverend John Todd House, in town, was a stop on the Underground Railroad in the 1850s, often a port of entry to runaway slaves who weren’t free until they could be protected from slave-holders and vigilante northerners looking to make a buck from substantial bounties. There was money to be made: slaves were property, after all.

In the 1850s, slavery was under attack, and Rev. Todd was a soldier in God’s army.
Truth is, he got into trouble before there even was a Tabor. A discussion about slavery aboard the steamer he came up on became heated. Once other passengers detected an abolitionist, they wanted his scalp. "Shoot him," someone yelled. "Kill him." One idiot told him if it was his choice, he’d straight-up trade the pastor for a mongrel dog and shoot the dog. Todd says he learned later that man was "a minister of the gospel from Missouri."

Both Iowa Congregationalists and Iowa Quakers thought the institution of slavery an abomination. What separated the two faith communities was a commitment to violence. The Quakers said no. Rev. John Todd and his Congregationalists said yes and became a prototype for an abolitionist preacher in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

The manse of the Reverend John Todd sits right on the square in Tabor--don’t expect a palace. But the old house still has an tiny door leading down to a dank basement. John Todd was no more than a shim over five and a half feet tall, so what’s downstairs is more his size, a cave really, not inviting.

But if you stop by, don’t not go downstairs. At one point in time that basement was an armory full of guns for the war he thought about to begin in "Bleeding Kansas."

What's there today? Nothing. No cement floor, just dirt, a humming dehumidifier, random stones, bricks. That cellar was was never meant to be lived in. It was a place to hide when the prairie sky turned foreboding.

At the request of none other than fiery John Brown, who stayed right there in Tabor, Pastor Todd stocked his house full of guns because he simply could not abide the sin of slavery. Slaves, he and his friend John Brown claimed, had a more righteous reason for rebellion than did patriot colonists a century before.

In his own memoir of that era, Todd described himself and what happened this way:

The parson had one brass canon on his haymow, and another on wheels in his wagon shed. He had also boxes of clothing, boxes of ammunition, boxes of muskets, boxes of sabres, and twenty boxes of Sharps rifles stowed away in the cellar all winter.

The preacher took up arms. His eyes had seen the glory.

You'll have to get off the beaten track to find Tabor, and you’ll have to call ahead to to get in the house. Not many Americans stop there anymore, if they ever did.

But the basement still beckons, and the memory of that time and place and the war it begat somehow seems more real when you stand beneath ancient beams on a dirt floor, where once a preacher readied himself for a war that God meant to happen, a war to free the slaves.

The Man with the Branded Hand

The fact of the matter is, he was a favorite on a circuit of sorts, a circuit of American abolitionist audiences looking for more and more information about and inspiration for the cause. Abolitionists were not without a mission. The crusade they'd created when they signed on had a clear and righteous purpose--they advocated an end to slavery in these United States, and, many of them at least, meant the abolition of slavery to happen not next year or next month, but now.

Oh, my, were they hated. Southerners understood that what was at stake was their wherewithal. Loss of slaves meant loss of property, loss of economy, and loss of power, loss of a culture, loss of a way of life. In the early years of the 19th century, the battles over slavery were but a foretaste of what was to come after Fort Sumter.

But the righteous anger of the abolitionists could not be underestimated. Sometimes, slave-holders saw those dirty, rotten abolitionists wherever they looked, bound and determined to destroy their might and right. So they made laws that made them criminals, thieves when they clandestinely went after the property of slave-holders. 

Which only served to turn up the heat.  

Thus, a circuit of rostrums was created up north, where advocates for freedom would gather to hear people speak of the mission they shared so passionately. And that circuit included this particular man, Jonathan Walker, who became a favorite, not because of his oratorical skills--he was sadly wanting on that score--but because just a few minutes into his SRO presentations, he'd step off the podium and walk through the crowd, his hand open, because there on his palm stood, almost proudly, the scars from his branding--"SS" for slave stealer. 

The man with the branded hand had been a sailor since he was a kid in Massachusetts. In fact, he'd crafted his own ship, which explains why people called him "Captain Jonathan Walker," and, yes he did, he picked up slaves and brought them to freedom, sometime from Pensacola, Florida, where he and his family lived in the 1840s. It was quite simple: he'd be contacted by bondsmen, arrange a time to meet under the cover of darkness, and, this time at least, take passage to the Bahamas, where the good men and women he'd helped shook off the shackles that bound them, the whole bunch more than willing to risk their lives to escape the oppression of slavery. Walker picked them up and brought them to the Bahamas.

When he returned to Florida, he was badly infirm, a victim of sun stroke--it was not a big ship, more of a sloop than a ship. Since a number of slaves had been missing, he was accused of the theft, jailed, beat up, and then, of all things, branded by authorities--with the help of slave-owners--branded on the hand, the branding iron left in place for what seemed forever.

When finally Jonathan Walker recovered, his acclaim as a speaker rose like high seas on the abolitionist circuit, not because his rhetoric soared. By all reports, he wasn't much of a lecturer. What people remembered was those horrible scars on the man's hand, his branding, the "SS."

WELCOME home again, brave seaman! with thy thoughtful brow and gray,
And the old heroic spirit of our earlier, better day;
With that front of calm endurance, on whose steady nerve in vain
Pressed the iron of the prison, smote the fiery shafts of pain!

Or so wrote the Quaker abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, in a dedicatory poem to Jonathan Walker and his righteousness.

Is the tyrant's brand upon thee? Did the brutal cravens aim
To make God's truth thy falsehood, His holiest work thy shame?
When, all blood-quenched, from the torture the iron was withdrawn,
How laughed their evil angel the baffled fools to scorn!

Make no mistake, that branded hand was God's own to the abolitionists. Jonathan Walker had taken up the Lord's mission, after all. When Walker looked in the face of a slave, Whittier says he was looking into the face of Jesus, that very face, Whittier says, many "in blindness" miss entirely, even as they kneel "to a far-off Saviour." 

While the multitude in blindness to a far-off Saviour knelt
And spurned, the while, the temple where a present Saviour dwelt;
Thou beheld'st Him in the task-field, in the prison shadows dim,
And thy mercy to the bondman, it was mercy unto Him!

Upper-case H.

John Greenleaf Whittier's salutary poem "The Branded Hand" does the kind of work I'm sure he believed was the calling of the poet/prophet, immortalizing those sacred scars, making them sing forever.

Then lift that manly right-hand, bold ploughman of the wave!
Its branded palm shall prophesy, "Salvation to the Slave!"
Hold up its fire-wrought language, that whoso reads may feel
His heart swell strong within him, his sinews change to steel.

It had to have been an amazing time, religious people, Bibles in hand, going to war--literally and figuratively. Walker's time was even more divisive than ours. Just 16 years after the branding in Pensacola, there were Yankees and there were Rebs and there was blood all over the South, a death toll of 628,000, more than the combined deaths in every other war this nation has ever fought.

Just as so many others did, Jonathan Walker took his family west to Wisconsin for the Civil War years, then crossed the lake and ran a fruit orchard. He is buried in Muskegon, Michigan. 

For the rest of his life, he claimed the branded letters, "SS," meant "saved slaves." His body rests in a Quaker cemetery in Muskegon, Michigan. It is proudly marked.

Aside

 I don't even know how long I've been at this. Years ago already, I thought to shore things up, so I went through years of Stuff in the Basement posts, picked out some I thought might have some relevance someday, dumped hundreds, then erased thousands of others, and, sort of, started over fresh. I think I undertook that trimming post-retirement, so if I would follow the last reach of what's here below the page, I'd run into blog posts put up here about a dozen years ago.

At 76 years old, sifting through the stuff in the basement is even more prudent than it was when I walked out of the classroom. Someday--maybe soon, maybe not--one of my children will come down here and turn on the computer--I hope the old thing doesn't stumble along and take all day like it often does for me. Chances are, it'll be my son. He'll use the passwords I'll leave for him, then call up siouxlander.blogspot.com and sit here pensively--at least I hope so--before he hits the delete button. One of our kids will have to do that, so why not make the event less difficult and do it for them--after all, I'm the crazy who put all that stuff up. 

I've learned some things through all those years. I've learned, for instance, that short stories don't generally do well in the day-by-day blog-post format. Almost inevitably, if I put up a story, even a story that will last only four days, like "Light and Life," inevitably the clicks fall off, largely because short stories have more import if they can be read at one sitting and not sectioned into 15-minute segments. 

I've also learned that obituaries score greater numbers than almost anything else, especially when the deceased has a following among those who frequent Stuff in the Basement. Makes me wonder if local newspapers would say as much. In a dark way, that's comforting.

Anything about Trump generally draws something of a crowd. I don't know if there are any Trump supporters among those who stop by daily, but I rarely get any angry retorts. You certainly shouldn't think I'm creating clickbait when I put his royal Orangeness up some mornings. Color me addicted. It's awful to have to admit it, but I've likely read more about the daily horrors of Donald Trump than I have any other single topic or subject since he and his wife came down the elevator. 

Blogging, I'm told, had its day. When the internet had more wide-open spaces, a ton of people like me determined to try the blog. Originally, I started Stuff when I returned to full-time teaching, having been half-time for a half-dozen years or so. I knew the change would end long projects, and I didn't want to shut down completely. Blogging was a new thing--and sort of like getting up to greet the dawn. I found it a joy, have ever since really, except when things get tight when I get busy. Otherwise, I've long ago fallen in love with a ritual that pushes you to be creative when first your feet hit the floor (actually, I do most of my plotting the day and night before).

You shouldn't think some major announcement is forthcoming. I'm not quitting quite yet. I thought to thank those of you, my most faithful readers, for wading through four days of a short story. Fiction just doesn't work in this genre, I guess. Then again, maybe "Light and Life" is a lousy story. Whatever the cause, it's not unusual to see the numbers drop off with each passing day when I'm running a piece of fiction. I wasn't surprised.

A kid told me the story of his sister's letter in his mother's drawer and his mother's inability to tell her husband even the good news--a long-ago student told me that. Almost any fiction has prototypes. This story was just too much a projection of a sad tale one of my students told me. There was a time in my life that I couldn't help but try to write something like that out, to make sense of it, to build some sort of order out of chaos, which is the aim of most art, or so it seems to me. But with this one, I'm pretty sure it never appeared anywhere because I wanted to avoid the consequence of appearing to break that student's trust. 

It's old. Like I said, the only copy I have is in dot matrix print on yellowing paper. 

Tomorrow? On my way to Bancroft, Nebraska, yesterday, I listened to a kind of biography of Harriet Tubman. The speaker at yesterday's gathering at the John Neihardt Center was going to be talking about Nebraska's role in the Underground Railroad, and I thought I'd just listen in to the story of Harriet Tubman. I remember hearing that she was raised in a Dutch Reformed household; about that, I was wrong--that was Sojourner Truth.

And it turns out that there isn't really a definitive edition of Harriet Tubman's life, which seems impossible given her reputation and the temper of the times (and all the talk about CRT, although it's subsided a bit since the demise of De Santos). Harriet Tubman worked the underground railroad with such frequency and passion that she was sometimes called the Moses of her people.

Tomorrow, something about Dred Scott, just one time the Supreme Court and, for that matter, the Bible went sadly off course. You may want to tune in.

________________________

And what of the picture atop the page? It's got nothing to do with the price of eggs. Just another taken in front of that Lake Michigan cottage we inhabited a week or so ago. It's what I was doing, early morning, when "Light and Life" was running.

Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 42:3

“Why are you downcast, O my soul?

Why so disturbed within me? 

Put your hope in God, 

for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

In verse three of Psalm 42, some shrill voices are taunting, as they do again in verse ten; but unlike so many other songs in the book, in this one, Psalm 42, the enemy is not the psalmist’s Godless neighbors, but his own miserable self.

What’s clear in the opening verses is that David—if he’s the author—has seemingly fallen into a chapter from Saul’s life, Israel’s very first king, the potentate who wrote the book on depression. His darkness is self-imposed: “Why are you downcast, O my soul?” is not the question David would ask himself on a battlefield. The war here—or so it seems to me—is within. “Why are you down in the dumps?” is the way Eugene Peterson puts it.

If Psalm 42 were a short story—which it isn’t—I might be willing to hazard this analysis: in verse six, we’ve arrived at the climax, maybe not the dramatic climax of the narrative, but the technical climax, because, somehow, we get the sense he’s turned the corner, that the conflict, whatever it may be, has been bested.

Right here in the psalm, this narrator—emotionally enfeebled—rallies, not because someone tells him he should, but because he tells himself he should. “Put your hope in God, fool,” he argues and then commits: “I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” He’s gritting his teeth, pushing himself up by his own spiritual bootstraps, rallying himself as if he were the captain of his own cheerleading squad.

Were some student to hand me this story, I’d likely red-pencil, “I’m not convinced” somewhere in the margin, and then scribble in something even more widely scribbled in on student stories: “show us, don’t tell us.”

But when we read on, it seems clear that the answer he commits to in this verse doesn’t shoo the darkness. Psalm 42 is not at end. The whole poem may well be a technical climax to the big story. I sort of like that idea, even
if there is no satisfying denouement.

It seems to me that what David is calling on to cure himself is what he already knows but may have forgotten or simply not mustered. What he now believes will deliver him from the darkness is not a bromide he’s buying from someone else because he already knows the way to health and joy.

You can almost feel him trying to bully away his personal demons: “I WILL YET PRAISE HIM,” he tells himself, doing everything he can to refresh his own faith, telling himself—a mantra even—something he knows so very well but has somehow lost.

He’s not asking God to ride in on a heavenly steed; he’s not asking to be saved. Instead, he’s telling his own darkened spirits what he already knows but has forgotten or stopped believing—that his only hope and comfort is in the Lord.

The joy of David’s poetry, read thousands of years later in a world David himself wouldn’t begin to understand, is our blessed realization that a human heart beats in every line. These are God songs, divinely inspired; but to read them as if they weren’t the work of a human soul is to miss half the inspiration.

In Psalm 42, David knows the truth he simply can’t muster. Every believer who’s ever been “down in the dumps” has been there, feeling exactly that pain. Every one.

David knows, but somehow he just can’t. The psalms are ours too. The psalms are us.

Light and Life -- finis iv

Today, the end of the story.

*

In three weeks we'll be married, Shari and me, and I really believe I'm better off knowing what I do now about Kenny and Sally, and about my own parents. Shari's from such a model family--everything's perfect. At college she gets these recordings  her dad makes of the conversation at Sunday dinner, and it's all so "nice." Besides, Shari's the oldest.

It's December now. We decided that I'd spend some time alone with my parents when the semester ended and before we all head out to California for the wedding. So I'm back home now in my bedroom, where the pennants are still tacked to the wall because Mom won't let that bedroom belong to anyone other than her little boy.

Yesterday, when Dad was at the store, I told Mom what Sally had told me, how she'd claimed she wrote her about Light and Life. I didn't want to hurt her, but I felt like I needed to know. We talked about what Sally had said. "How is it you can't tell Dad?" I said. "I'd think he'd be just plain thrilled."

She'd been sitting at the table with both arms up, but they dropped right away. Then she looked up at the chandelier as if an angel might just then descend from all the light. Her hands came back up to her eyes. "If you would know the hurt that girl gave us," she said. Then she breathes in deeply, as if what was coming would take more than words. "You can't ever know how much we cried. You wouldn't believe it, Brian. You wouldn't."

I reached for the radio and turned down the volume. "I don't understand how you can keep that from him. It ought to give him hope," I said.

She breathed in deeply again. "Who knows what goes on in the corners of his mind? I don't doubt your father prays fifty times a day for that girl. I don't doubt right at this moment, when some guy is buying a new hammer or whatever in your father's store, paying for it at the counter--I don't doubt he's thinking about two grandsons he's never seen."

"And his daughter?" I said.

"And his daughter," she said. "Praying."

She pulled her hands down around her coffee cup. "We can't talk about all of that anymore. We just can't. There's only so much hurt somebody can take and that's it. Something else has got to break through the silence."

"Do you love him, Mom, or are you scared of him?" I said.

She took off her glasses, laid them beside her toast. "You get to be one flesh," she said, "and you know exactly how he's going to react to anything and everything, because you know how he's part of you." She sipped her coffee. "I'm not afraid of him. But I'm afraid of all that pain." She closed her eyes tightly. "He once swore he didn't have that daughter--that that's the way it was going to be."

*

My mother keeps her letters in a little, shiny cedar box that resembles, in a way, her own hope chest. It has a key somewhere, but it's been lost for years. When I was little I used to look in it because it had two pink bracelets that my sisters wore when they came home from the hospital, fresh from God--and mine, a blue one, P-0-S-T printed in the beads, the family name. Jewelry, and other stuff--birth certificates and my grandpa sent my grandma during the war.

I don't think Sally writes often, because I didn't find many letters. Mom keeps what she gets in there. She wouldn't throw them away. I'm sure my father knows too about her secret place. 

When I checked it yesterday, I found the one about Light and Life Christian School. There it was, just like Sally said.

I think he has to read It. Besides, he taught me himself to believe in miracles. So I'm going to the store this afternoon. Place will be full of Christmas shoppers, but he's got enough holiday help so I can sit him down in the back at his old roll-top, take out the letter, and put it in front of him. 

I want peace at our wedding, when all of us together go over those vows. If we can't have joy, we can at least have hope. Besides, I know my father needs an answer to a a thousand prayers he never spoke out loud, and I know from the way Sally turned her eyes away that the Lord of rubber cement hasn't finished with her either. One way or another, the God I worship, the one my father respects and fears, the God who brightens Shari's family's faces, the Wonderful Counselor the two us want right there at our wedding in two short weeks, that God, the super-glue God, is going to have His way with my sister, just as I can't help but believe He will with Dad.

Faith itself, I want to believe, is its own kind of miracle.

I've got that letter here with me right now. It's in my billfold, along with two school pictures of Mark and Bryant, pictures he's going to see. They're perfectly darling kids, and his daughter is a good mom. He's going to know.

Maybe I am naive. Maybe I am. But I believe.

 

"Light and Life" is maybe thirty years old, and, I think, unpublished. Why not? I think it was one of those stories that might have been too "Christian" for the small magazines and literary journals, and too, well, "obvious," if it were to appear in the kind of church magazine that it could have reached. Plus, too close to the real thing.

There were prototypes for the characters and the action of the story, prototypes--real people--that I wouldn't really want reading this story or living with the fact that maybe some of their neighbors were.

I may be wrong, but after writing it, I think I stuck it in a drawer. My only copy of "Light and Life" is boldly outfitted in dot matrix print.

So this could well be its first public appearance. The people I wouldn't want to shame have long departed this world of sorrows. Whether or not they made their peace is something I don't know. I'd most certainly like to believe they did.

*  ~  *  ~  *  ~  *

Shari takes the boys on the tramway down at Santa Cruz' Boardwalk on the oceanfront. She's up there floating over the whole amusement park, and Sally and I are sitting down beneath them, sharing a gyro. Mark and Bryant poke their hands out when they're right over top of us, and all I can see is their pink flattened palms against the pale blue skies.

Sally is almost ten years older than I am, and Kenny's not the first man she's lived with. She works for the county social services, investigating abuse cases. She takes referrals from people she calls "mandatory reporters"--doctors and teachers and other school officials--and tries to check them out. It puts her in places you wouldn't believe. The old man should be proud of her. She works hard and she gets tired because sometimes she says the pain won't go away. To me, what she does is a kingdom calling. The stories are enough to make you weep, seriously.

Anyway, we're sitting down there on a bench along the edge of the beach, Bryant and Mark right above us in the tram car with Shari, and Sally's got a mouth full of gyro.

"Why don't you get married?" I say, just getting it right out there in front of both of us, the same tone had I asked her for shampoo. "I don't get it. What's the big deal?"

"You got Dad in you," she says right off. 

"So do you," I tell her.

She nods at me as if truer words have never been spoken. She's got that gyro in both hands so it doesn't leak all over, but she pushes it at me. I take the sandwich, but I don't want to take a bite just then.

"Tell me," I say.

She waits, looks around, jabs at her lips. "Listen, little brother, whyn't you mind your own business?" she says, wiping the juice from the corner of her mouth with a napkin, still trying to laugh it off.

"It is my business," I tell her. "You're my sister." 

"Shuttup and eat," she says.

It's a Saturday, but Kenny's off working somewhere, making a delivery.

"You go to church ever?" I said, this big glob of sandwich right between us.

Now she waits for a long time, looking right at me. I'm thinking she's mad--didn't want me asking. Finally, she looks off into the sky and says, "What's left in me for faith is between me and God--not you or Dad or Mom or anybody else."

Lines are drawn in around her eyes. I sometimes wonder if she didn't lie out in the sun too long because her skin seems almost calloused, hard and edgy, spotted, but not with freckles. Her hair falls off her face and is pulled back behind her ears, tied there in a style popular years ago. She's getting older.

"I'm going to have to tell Mom something," I said to her. "When I get back, she'll want to know about you."

"Easy enough," Sally says. "Tell her we're all fine, we're all doing just fine."

"Are you?" I said.

"I don't need your righteousness, little man," she tells me. "You lived all your life in that burg. Only thing you know is hardware."

Like I say, she's my big sister, and I didn't grow up with her; but I saw her slay my father's spirit. "Dad's had more pain about you, Sally, more than I'd ever hope to see anyone have," I tell her.

Shrugs her shoulders. "I'm sorry about that, but the old man screwed up my life," she says.

There the both of us are, this messy sandwich between us, little kids running all over, spending money, a big log-ride concession splashing down into the water, not fifty feet from where we sit.

"How'd he ever hurt you?" I said.

"You're a tail-ender. You don't know shit about what it was like to be breaking the freaking ground."

I took another bite of the gyro. I didn't want her to know how serious I was. "You still believe in God?" I asked her.

She stood up, walked over to the railing, and looked out over the quarter-mile of beach toward the ocean. The wind pulled at her skirt. Her legs were whiter than I'd ever seen them.

I threw the sandwich in a barrel and looked up at the tramway. Shari and the boys had to be on their way back. I felt like I had to get something down in my mind. "Tell me," I said. "I don't care about Mom or Dad. I got to know myself what's going on with you--tell me."

She pulled her arms back from the railing and stood there as if she were chilled. "Mom knows," Sally said. "Mom knows well and good. She knows everything. I write her."

I'd been gone to college for three years. Maybe Mom had never had the opportunity to tell me what Sally told her in her letters. I wasn't even aware of Sally's writing anyone. As far as I knew, it had been years since Sally's name was even spoken. That's what the old man ruled.

"What do you tell her?" I said.

"Ask her," she said. "She knows." 

"I didn't know you wrote her." 

"She does."

"I'm sorry," I said.

Both of us watched a gull float by and beg for popcorn.

"I wrote her already last spring to tell her I enrolled Bryant in a Christian school," Sally says. "I wrote that. It wasn't easy. Well, she knows it. This little Christian school a couple blocks away. 'Light and Life,' it's called."

I didn't know what to say.

"What do they want from me?--blood? She told me how wonderful it was. I got a letter back that wasn't like anything I'd ever received before--almost as if I were back in the fold." Then she laughed, the same as when she told Kenny they hung blacks in Denton--same mocking laugh. "But she can't even tell him," she said. "She can't even tell the old man because he won't hear about the damned black sheep. I'm just lost." She twisted her purse back behind her shoulder. "You ever think of what that man does to her? You ever think of that?"

The beach was full of people, but we couldn't have been more alone.

"You are so much like Dad," she said. She pulled her shoulder up to her face, as if to wipe away something that might have slipped from her eyes. "You're such a kid," she said, pulling the back of her wrist through her eyes, and looked down as if gyro sauce were running down her fingers. Then she looked at her watch, turned it around on her arm so she could read it clearly.

"Lately I think He won't let me go--I mean the big guy," she said, pointing up. "It's like something sticky is between us--super glue. The other day I was thinking that's what it was--super glue. Isn't that nuts?--just super glue. Or rubber cement--that too, stretchy stuff that won't let go."

"Hey, Mom," the boys yelled from above. "Look up here."

She raises a hand to her eyes to see the kids, smiles. 

I tell myself that's enough.

*

Light and Life -- a story ii

 

Rev. Ellerbroek isn't a ball of fire, but Shari's parents like him--just like mine would--because basically he's conservative as heck. Shari and I saw him on and off last summer, when I worked out there on her uncle's dairy. We're getting married in a couple weeks now, in January, and Ellerbroek is marrying us.

He's dry as sticks from the pulpit, but in his study he's all there. When he talks about the Lord, his face is lit as if he's in love.

He was telling us how when we plan the wedding we ought to think that it's not just for us but for all the people who attend. I don't think he knows about Kenny and Sally.

He was saying how the people who attend hear the vows when they're sitting out there listening to us, and how just listening in again to the commitment people make is important, no matter how many years you've been married. He says that repeating the vows means everybody else renews them.

I told Shari it was hard for me to think of my parents actually repeating vows again, as if through the years they may have forgotten they were married.

She said she thought when you're a kid you don't know everything--maybe not even when you're an adult. You still I don't know all there is to know about your own parents, even though they brought you into this world.

I suppose she's right. The older you get, the more you know that there's mystery in life, balances in the way we get along. Sometimes, I suppose, a very fragile truce.

"I'm scared anyway," I told her. "Going to be a hot time in the old town with Sally and Kenny there in the same church as my old man."

"Maybe Ellerbroek's right, honey," she told me. "Maybe we can be a blessing."

A blessing's one thing, I thought. This one'll take a miracle.

*

I worked in California last summer because I wanted to be with Shari and I didn't care to sit alone at home selling ten-penny nails. Sometimes I think it's hard on my dad to know that I'm not taking over for him. The store has been in the family for three generations, ever since the late 1800's. Don't ask me why I want to be a teacher, but I do. Actually, I think it has something to do with the way my parents raised me, to aspire to something noble, like teaching. It's been my father's undoing, I suppose, to make me think that being a teacher or a preacher is a kingdom calling. I took him seriously. 

But then, who knows? Maybe someday I'll run the store. Stranger things have happened.

*

Santa Cruz is more than just a couple hours' drive from Shari's place. It's like a whole different world. The tree-lined streets downtown are full of VW buses and jeeps and old woodies, surfboards strapped up-top. Bearded guys with graying hair tie it up with farmer's handkerchiefs. They sit on downtown benches and play chess in the soft sunlight that falls between the trees. 

You see the strangest things. I bought a tape one day from a place where the guy who took my money wore a Fu Manchu mustache and silver-flecked orange glasses with the wildest butterfly rims.

I met Shari at college. She lives in Denton, a California town that would look just like Apple Valley if it weren't for mountains whose sloping shadows rise from the horizon. It's a small town, where the Coast to Coast has a big quadrangular desk and the men come in on Saturdays to lean up against the edge and talk--just like they do at the old man's place. The only difference is that in Denton's Our Own you can't buy an icepick.

Shari's along with me one weekend, when Denton comes up in the conversation at my sister's place. It's Saturday night, and we just got back from this dive where we had terrific Mexican food, not just your standard taco. Shari's playing with the boys on the floor and we're all laughing, when Kenny tells her that he's made deliveries in Denton before and he knows what kind of place it is. "I been there," he says. "You're a California girl all right, but you're from Denton, really."

In the way he says it, I feel this blade across my neck, and I figure Shari feels it too.

"Sometime I want to stay up there overnight and party in that white town, party big-time," he says, rubbing his palms together as he sits there on the couch, his elbows on his knees. "All night long," he says, looking at Sally.

He's talking about all the stiff old farmers in Denton. I know what he's saying, and so does Shari. But he doesn't mean it for us, he means it for Sally. He keeps looking at her.

"You party up there and you're dead," my sister says. She's pointing her finger at him. "They'd hang boys your color." And then she laughs.

I didn't know how to react, but the thing is, he laughed at Sally. I thought he would have kicked her. I thought he never would have let her say that, but the two of them sit there laughing at each other's poking.

The way they laughed together about what Sally had said about Kenny being black--as if she he just let her talk that way to him--it's just something I didn't forget right away because it said something about them together. I can't find words for it exactly, but it felt different being around them after that.

*

Shari takes the boys on the tramway down at Santa Cruz' Boardwalk down on the oceanfront. She's up there floating over the whole amusement park, and Sally and I are sitting down beneath them, sharing a gyro sandwich. Mark and Bryant poke their hands out when they're right over top of us, and al 1 I can see is their pink flattened palms against the pale blue skies.

Sally is almost ten years older than I am, and Kenny's not the first man she's lived with. She works for the county social services, investigating abuse cases. She takes referra1s from people she calls "mandatory reporters"--doctors and teachers and other school officials--and tries to check them out. It puts her in places you wouldn't bel leve. I think my father would be proud of her. She works hard and she gets tired because sometimes she says the pain won't go away. To me, what she does is a kingdom cal ling. The stories are enough to make you weep, seriously.

Anyway, we're sitting down there on a bench along the edge of the beach, Bryant and Mark right above us in the tram car with Shari, and Sally's got a mouth full of gyro.

"Why don't you get married?" I say, just getting it right out there in front of both of us. "I don't understand."

"You got Dad in you," she says. "So do you," I tell her.

She nods at me as if truer words have never been spoken. She's got that gyro in both hands so it doesn't leak all over, but she pushes it at me. I take the sandwich, but I don't want to take a bite Just then.

"Te1 1 me," I say.

"Listen, little brother, whyn't you mind your own business?" she says, wiping the juice from the corner of her mouth with a napkin, still trying to laugh it off.

"It is my business," I tell her. 11You1re my sister." "Shuttup and eat," she says.

It's a Saturday, but Kenny's off working somewhere, making a delivery.

"You never go to church, do you?" I said, this big glob of sandwich right between us.

11What1s ln me for faith is between me and God," she says, "not you or Dad or Mom or anybody else."

Lines are drawn in around her eyes. I sometimes wonder if she didn1t lie out in the sun too long because her skin seems almost cal loused, hard and edgy, spotted, but not with freckles. Her hair falls off her face and is pulled back behind her ears, tied there in a style popular years ago. She's getting older.

"I1m going to have to tell Mom something," I said to her.

"When I get back, she'll want to know about you."

"Easy enough," Sally says. "Tell her we"re all fine."

"Are you?" I said.

"I don't need your super righteousness, Arlan," she tells me. "You lived all your life in that little burg. Only thing you know is the store."

Like I say, she's my big sister, and I didn't grow up with her; but I saw her slay my father's spirit. "Dad's had more pain about you, Sally, more than I'd ever hope to see anyone have," I tell her.

"He"s screwed up my life," she says.







There the both of us are, this messy sandwich between us, little kids running all over spending money, a big Jog-ride concession splashing down lnto the water. not fifty feet from where we slt.

"How/d he ever hurt you?" I said.

"You/re a tail-ender, Arlan. You don/t know what it was like to be first in 1 ine, breaking ground."

I took another bite of the gyro because I didn/t want her to know how serious I was. "You sti 11 be!ieve in God?" I said.

With that, she stood up, walked over to the calling, and looked out over the quarter-mile of beach toward the ocean. The wind pulled at her skirt. Her legs were whiter than I/d ever seen them.

I threw the sandwich in a barrel and looked up at the tramway. Shari and the boys had to be on their way back. I had to get something down in my mind.

"Tell me, Sally," I told her. "I don/t care about Mom or Dad. I got to know myself. Tell me."

She pulled her arms back from the railing and stood there as if she were chi 1 led. "Mom knows," Sally said. "Mom knows wel 1 and good. She knows everything. I write her."

1/d been gone to college for three years, of course, so maybe Mom had never had the opportunity to tell me what Sally told her in her letters. I wasn/t even aware of Sal Jy/s writing anyone. As far as I knew, it had been years since Sally/s name was even mentioned.

"What do you write?" I said.







"Ask her," she said. "She knows.11 "I didn't know you wrote her." "She does."

"I'm sorry," I said.

Both of us watched a gul I float by and beg for popcorn.

"I wrote her already last spring that I enrolled Bryant in a Christian school," Sally says. "I wrote that. It wasn't easy.

She knows it, Arlan. This little Baptist school a couple blocks away. Light and Life, it's cal led. Bryant goes to a Christian schoo I . 11

I didn't know what to say.

"Shoot, what do they want from me? Blood? She told me how wonderful it was. I got a letter back that wasn't like anything I'd ever received before--almost as if I were back in the fold." Then she laughed, the same as when she told Kenny they hung blacks in Denton--same mocking laugh. 11But she can't even tel 1 him," she said. "She can't tell Dad because he won't hear of the black sheep. To him. I'm lost eternally." She twisted her pu se back behind her shoulder. "You ever think of what that man does to her? You ever think of her, Arlan?"

The beach was ful I of people, but we couldn't have been more alone.

"You send Bryant there for her sake?" I said. "Is that why you dld i t?11

She looked at me as If she hated me. 11You.are so much like

Dad," she said.

11Te l l me ," I sa i d.







"The only difference between us--between him and me--is that he thinks he knows why he does things. I don/t.11

Maybe I was asking for myself only right then, I don/t know. "Sally, you still pray?" I said.

She pulled her shoulder up to her face, as if to wipe away something that might have sl lpped from her eyes. 11You/re such a kid,11 she said, pulling the back of her wrist through her eyes, and looked down as if gyro sauce were running down her fingers. Then she looked at her watch, turned it around on her arm so she could read it clearly.

"Lately I think He won/t let me go," she said. "It/s like something sticky is between us--rubber cement. The other day I was thinking it was rubber cement. Isn/t that nuts! But it/s like God won/t let me alone. He won/t.11

11 Hey, Mom," the boys ye1 1 ed from above. 11 Look ,·a here."

11That/s all, Sally," I said. "I just had to know."



*

In three weeks we/11 be married, Shari and I, and I really believe that I/rn better off knowing what I do now about Kenny and Sally, and about my own parents. Shari/s from such a model farnlly--everything/s perfect. At college she gets these tapes her dad records of Sunday dinner, and it/s all so nice. Besides, Shari/s the oldest.

It;s December now. We decided that I/d spend some time alone with my parents when the semester ended and before we all headed out to Califor·nia for the wedding. So 1/rnback home now,






in my childhood bedroom, where the pennants are still tacked to the wall because my mother won't let that bedroom belong to anyone other than her little boy.

Yesterday, when Dad was at the store, I told Mom what Sally said, how she'd claimed she wrote her about Light and Life. "How is it you can't tell Dad?" I said.

She'd been sitting at the table with both arms up, but they dropped right away. Then she looked up at the chandelier as if an angel might suddenly descend from all the light, and her hands came back up to her eyes. "If you would know the hurt that girl gave us," she said. Then she breaths in deeply, as if what was coming would take more than words. "You can't ever know how much we cried. You wouldn't believe it, Arlan. You wouldn't."

I reached for the radio and turned down the volume. "I don't understand how you can keep that from him. It ought to give him hope," I said.

She breathed deeply again. "Who knows what goes on in the corners of his mind, Arlan? I don't doubt your father prays fifty times a day for that girl. I don't doubt right at this moment, when some mother is buying Lincoln Logs in your father's store and paying for it at the counter--! don't doubt that he's thinking about two grandsons he's never seen."

She pulled her hands down slowly and surrounded her coffee cup. "But it's a subject that we can't talk about anymore. We just can't. There's just so much hurt somebody can take and that's it. Something else has got to break through the silence."

hDo you love him, Mom, or are you scared of him?" I said.

Light and Life - i

A story for lent.

In point of fact, Kenny Hays is not my brother-in-law--not by man's law or God's. He's only lived with my sister Sally, not married her, and the whole business has been almost the death of my father.

But Kenny Hays feels like my brother-in-law, and maybe by common law he is. What he's not, is my dad's son-in-law; not yet anyway, and not ever--if you listen to the old man. But neither is Sally his own daughter anymore; I heard him say just those words to Mom once, years ago, and once is as often as he says important things.

Kenny's black, but that's not the reason. Long ago when I just started in my father's hardware store I was arranging fishing lures up front when the men who come around about ten in the morning to stand around and jabber--looking over the
Journal lying open on the knife case--when those men were talking about the black guy who, strangely enough, walked into Apple Valley from the lake and was standing across the street in front of the cafe. I heard every word they said about him--about blacks. I was just a kid.

The guy was a string-bean in a cut-off sweat shirt, with a bluish tattoo against his bicep; and he had on a hat, even though it was warm for May. His boots were scuffed, as if he'd been walking through sand since dawn. That far north of the city you just don't see many black people.

My father came up from the garden department to help Jenny Wassenaar carry out a rented lawn seeder, and he heard the men talking about the black guy, about blacks in general--in fact, about black men--in words I never heard adults say before. Bill Aanders looked right in my father's face and laughed as he spit it all out·--what they'd been saying--hoping to get a laugh out of him too.

But my father didn't crack a smile. He glanced over at me as if to tell me he knew I'd heard what they said; then he turned away and walked to the back of the store, leaving the chorus of yucking behind him.

I don't think my father has written off his daughter because she's shacked up with a black man, although that may be part of it. In a little town like Apple River, to some people Kenny's being black is a worse curse than the two of them's not being married--but not to my father. To him, Kenny and Sally are living in sin, and Sally's left absolutely every last value he tried to teach her, like an empty can of pop, along the road she took to get as far away as she could in record time. There's two kids over there now, little bushy-haired boys, Mark and Bryant, whose skin is the color of hot chocolate and who talk Just like Kenny. But both of them have short legs like their mother--like I do too--and when they hop off the kitchen stools and head out to watch cartoons in the morning, their feet make the same shuffle I've heard for years when the boss walks over the hardwood floor to his roll-top in the store's back room. When I heard those kids walk last summer, I thought right away that it was something my father should know, once I dare to tell him.

*

I visited at Sally's this summer, when I worked in California. I'm on a ride with Kenny one day down to Modesto, even though he's not supposed to take riders--company rules. He works for Gardener's, an industrial delivery service in Santa Cruz, and sometimes he makes long trips with this Audi truck.

"You like dried fruit?" he says to me when we come up on a roadside out in the middle of sand hills. "I'd kill for dried bananas."

"Sure," I said. I'd tried it once when we carried some ten- dollar bags of trail mix we thought hunters might buy.

So we're walking around this fruit stand, looking at every kind of dried fruit you could think of, and Kenny grabs one right out of the bin, a little sharp slice of banana, and he sticks it into my mouth. "Lay that on your tongue one time," he says.

It was okay, kind of tasteless really, just a little sweet. "That's good," I tell him. "I see what you mean." And he puts one in his own mouth as if he's never tasted dried bananas himself, just picks a half dozen right out of the bin.

"You can buy everything here, can't you?" I tell him.

We're looking at dried apples right then--flat, donut-shaped things that feel like soft rubber when you bite them.

"In California, you can buy every last kind of thing all right," he says, chuckling at little as he rips at a piece of apple. "Whole lot more than dried fruit."

I got a hint of what he's trying to say when he laughs, so I figure I'll bring it back. "Beautiful state," I tell him.

He just shrugs his shoulders. "I grew up in a place where a boy could take out a fishing pole and spend all of a day down at the river pulling catfish," Kenny says. "I grew up in a place where there wa'n't any drugs to speak of, where we used to play ball every afternoon we weren't fishing, and where there was more than enough real air to go around--you know what I'm saying?"

I'd always figured Kenny was born in California.

"I'd move back to Mississippi in a twinklin'," he says. "People say I'm nuts, but I know what's real, see? Thing is, it wouldn't be no place for your sister."

I didn't think any black man in his right mind would would want to move back Mississippi, but I didn't know how to say that to him. "I didn't know you were a Southern boy, Kenny," I said, and once I'd said boy, I wished I hadn't.

But Kenny laughs so hard he almost loses the hunk of apple. "I'm a real Southern boy for sure," he says. "Thing is, a black man knows where he stands in the South. Go north or out here, and you don't know what's the score with some folks."

Tons of prunes and nectarines are piled up in separate bins, but Kenny grabs a plastic bag of bananas, another one mixed fruit, and a pair of fresh apricots, then pulls out his wallet by the chain, and marches up to the woman who makes change from her denim apron.

"Ain't no place for a kid to grow up," Kenny says. "They rot from the inside out. Can't find a place to be alone," he tells me, as earnestly as my own father could have. "I'm thinking about moving back to South Dakota."

I looked at him strangely, I suppose, before he busted out laughing.

I guess I'd never thought of Kenny in the same way I'd thought of Sally--as someone who couldn't go home.

*

At Fort Belmont

 

My daughter seemed unwilling to believe her parents used to travel back and forth--western Iowa to eastern Wisconsin--on a two-lane road. I don't know why she thought that impossible, but the plain truth is I'm a good bit older than Interstate 90, old enough to remember Hwy 16 that ran through hill and dale down at the foot of the state of Minnesota.

Personally, I go back even further, my very first trip undertaken in 1956, when I'm guessing I-90 may have been little more than someone's dream. Back then old Hwy 16--I get nostalgic just typing out the numbers--jig-jagged through what seemed endless miles of boring farmland until it began to spaghetti through the hills west of the Mississippi. 

Occasionally a river valley would break the endless miles of prairie. Already at Jackson, old 16 snuck down into the woods along the Des Moines River, dipped into the shadowy darkness wrought by honest-to-goodness woods, and passed a tourist trap on its way into town--Ft. Belmont, the signs said, a shady spot on the prairie that--or so I couldn't help thinking--had designs on, in the days before Visa, loosing you from whatever you had jingling in your pockets. 

We never stopped. We were on our way home after all, miles to go before we'd sleep. Ft. Belmont stood up and out from the trees right there where somebody would be glad to sell you a little war bonnet or a rubber tomahawks or a full set of bow and arrows. "Trading post"?--sure. Most everything made in Japan, I thought.

Along came I-90. Ft. Belmont was off the beaten path, so the chamber of commerce (or something similar) made haste to move it all--store and reconstructed fort a mile or so north to a nice big spread along the interstate, easy access on and off. Eventually they put an old Lutheran church there too, and a school. 

The new Ft. Belmont keeps hours only between Memorial Day and Labor Day, so the whole place was shut down last Saturday, when finally I stopped by. What's new now is I know something about Ft. Belmont. I know Inkpaduta and his outlaw gang of cold-blooded Santee killers moved north after the desolation they left on Lake Okoboji in March of 1857. I knew that they kept up the slaughter when they came up river north to here. 

I knew all of that, and that's why I left I-90, hoping I could at least walk up to this good old phony Ft. Belmont. What I didn't know was that during the 1862 Dakota War more local men and women and children were killed here, slaughtered by yet another outlaw gang of killers. I didn't know that, had to read it off a memorial.

Believe me, I know the historical context, the required background. I know the Santee Sioux were losing their homeland to newcomers named Ole and Britta and Lars. I understand their loss of homeland, but if you call those Santees "freedom fighters," then you better do likewise with the Hamas killers who swarmed into Israel one early Sabbath morning in October. There's no pardon for slaughter. Murder is murder.

Three women tried to escape the horror here near Jackson by bringing their children with them and climbing into a hole in the ground beneath the cabin. One child could not be stilled, so one mother took it upon herself to leave the cave so the others might be saved. She did, and she and her baby were immediately slain. 

On Saturday I stopped at Ft. Belmont. No one was around. I stood a hundred yards from the tourist-y fortress facsimile, alone in a little cluster of historic buildings that still felt tourist trap-y, just as the original had when years ago it was clustered down the hill at the edge of town, surrounded by trees so otherwise foreign on the prairie we'd travelled.

I stood there, in a way, to apologize. The sight isn't sacred. That monument you see, set there in 1909, is in a city park downtown. You have to hunt to find it. Sure the new Fort Belmont is touristy. You can't miss it from the highway. It's huge, and, sure, its more than a little silly. 

But this time, when I had the time and actually stopped, like I never did sixty-some years ago, this time I stopped and remembered the suffering I now know something about. I stood there alone, just off the interstate, and nearly bawled because I know the brutal stories and because I couldn't help but think, once again, how blasted unredeemable we can be before God, but how, despite whatever arrows befall us, whatever roads we travel, He is somehow never all that far off the highway.

State Champs!!

They're state champs. If they were a volleyball team--or buckets--they'd ride into town aboard the city fire department trucks, all of them, horns and sirens blasting. Won't happen. Didn't. They'll be lucky to get an inch or two in the local newspaper, even though a sub-state basketball game will get a page. 

So let me just say something--a little bit about those kids in that picture--because somewhere way back I had a hand in their incredible victory. The guy who, literally, runs the show isn't even the teacher. Call him a para-professional maybe, someone who gets a few bucks for taking on their competitive forensics program. Anyway, last summer, when he was casting about for material for his readers theater troupe, he called. "Got any ideas?" he said.

I've done a few in the last few years, the first of which was a simple readers theater text created from the fine poems of one-time American Poet Laureate, Ted Koozer. I loved his Blizzard Voices, a book of poems with stories that aren't exactly his either. Koozer listened to the stories of hundreds of men, women, and schoolchildren, who'd lived through the Great Blizzard of 1888 (GB88), sometimes called the Schoolchildren's Blizzard.

Listened isn't exactly the right word either--just plain read is a better fit. Years ago, some wise person thought it might be a good idea to get people who remembered GB88 to put their memories on paper and send them in, then put them all together in a book you can buy yet today, a book that goes by that name, The Great Blizzard of 1888. 

Koozer, who's from Nebraska, picked up that book and crafted a small book of poems from stories he'd read. A decade ago, I read his book of poems, loved it, and couldn't help thinking it would be really easy to create a readers theater script from those poems, a script that would, as Koozer did, tell the immensely powerful story of GB88. 

A readers theater presentation means no one has to recite lines, action doesn't have to be blocked, and it doesn't require a cast of thousands or a stage manager or lighting or music. It's just three or four people--maybe six or seven--maybe just two people reading great material, like memories of an terrible blizzard, the GB88.

Furthermore, a readers theater doesn't even require lots of rehearsals. I've got one coming up twice this month, and I'm guessing the cast--four people--will read through it only once before it goes live at the town library and, later, the museum.

The blizzard's got me far afield--back to high school forensics. The coach called me and asked about ideas. I told him about Koozer, sent him my script, and he ran with the whole idea. The result--I saw it yesterday in a very special showing for parents and family of the state champs--was wonderful, warm-hearted, touching, very moving, creatively accomplished. 

People died in GB88, hundreds, mostly children. You know the story--the storm struck as if without warning and left scores of rural school teachers, most of them just teenagers, with the very same difficult question--should kids be sent home or kept at school? The answer to that question in hundreds of rural school throughout the region turns out to have been "kept at school." 

So the high school's take on Blizzard Voices made it through regionals and went on to state, where they finished first, best in show, state champions. The list of finalists included schools twice and three times their size. Their depiction of Blizzard Voices was perfectly masterful.

My role didn't amount to much. I merely pointed at an option, a story line, and the director took it from there. What I pointed at was a treasure, and he realized that, shaped it wonderfully in his own way for the high school kids he had, and created what I'd be more than happy to call a work of art. Let me repeat that--"a work of art."

And art is good. The beauty it brings is a blessing. Stories that speak to the heart do just that--they actually speak to the heart, as did--and does--MOCFV's "Blizzard Voices." 

That State Champ banner at the top of the page is worth more than a State Champ basketball trophy. Their care-filled depiction of a monster blizzard brought the kind of beauty that rises when a very human story is brought to life before our eyes and somehow leaves our hearts moved.

Congratulations!!!

Do Process

“Why are you downcast, O my soul?

Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God,

for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

One night late, years ago, a preacher friend of mine, over a few beers, began talking about what he went through when his wife left him, years before, an event that’s not supposed to happen, and certainly not supposed to happen to preachers. He didn’t blame her; he knew he’d had a hand in what happened himself, preacher or not.

At that late hour, with a bit of lubrication, I stayed with him when it appeared he wanted to talk. I sound as if I was using him, and maybe I was in a way; but what interested me was his use of a phrase I’d heard before: “It took me a long time to process that,” he kept saying. “I didn’t have the tools at first to process what had happened.”

I’ll admit I thought it was psychobabble, a cliché, an entirely strange word drawn from what we do to legislation or cheese or army recruits. But the emotion he carried as he told me the story made me wonder what that pat expression meant in the context of his adultery. I wanted process unpacked.

By “process,” he said, he meant becoming able to look at the wound and not cry or rage. Process, he said, meant stepping back from the immediacy of the emotions, a step that wasn’t at all easy--and it took time, he said. And it took work. Like forgiveness.

It seems to me that in verse five of Psalm 42, David (if he’s the writer) appears to have processed something. The unforgettable opening verses of the psalm emerge from the core of his grief; but verse five steps back from the sadness that threatens him and he begins talking to himself. “For heaven’s sake,” he says, “what’s with me anyway? Why am I so incredibly depressed?”

Then he pulls out an old bromide and tells himself what he’d obviously known for years and even sung in a whole psalter of his own ballads, something the curtains of his despair had seemingly covered: “Put your hope in God,” he tells himself, processing his sadness.

And then the resolution. Picture him, gritting his teeth, almost a snarl, pulling intent and dedication out of truth he knew, inside out: “. . .for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

I may be wrong. Maybe there’s a gap in this psalm. Maybe, like the preacher without a wife, it took him some time to process the emptiness in his life.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to consult some standard King David biography and discover that this song was finished months after it was started, that he’s simply telling the story?

But we don’t know that, and no one ever will. All we’re left with the psalm. And in this verse—or so it seems to me—David seems to bottom out, to take hold of the promises of God he’s relied on throughout his life, at a myriad of other moments when he stood in dire need of being rescued. “Put your hope in God,” he says, in command form.

In this verse, the story the poem tells is at its climax because the writer has stepped back to tell himself, to shout, in fact, the truth into his own ears, and now ours. “I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” [emphasis mine, but I think his too].

Sounds like a preacher friend of mine, talking to me over a beer years ago.

Sounds like Job. Sounds like a lot of us.

. . .but not forgotten

In a work of fiction, it's almost impossible to make a character as supremely loveable as Nebraska's Willa Cather does with the great earth-mother Antonia, in her century-old novel My Antonia. This Antonia isn't one bit divine, but her zest for life, notable throughout a childhood Cather recreates, is perfectly enchanting. If you've read My Antonia and you love the novel, as gadzillions have and do, then you probably adore Antonia, or Tony, as Jim Burden calls her in the story.

Tony is not untouched by the dark side. She is the oldest daughter of an immigrant Bohemian family struggling to make a go of it on uncooperative Great Plains land, one family of thousands, many from all over Europe, who believed that this new country was their chance to escape the bondage of poverty. For some, that dream was real. For others, just staying alive required every last stich of strength and perseverance. Some didn't make it.

Tony's father, Anton Shimerda, was something of an aristocrat in the old country. But he'd married a tyrannical woman, then lost himself in the vast expanse of treeless prairie he found himself in here, bereft of the art and music that had enchanted his soul.

Tony's father ends his life by suicide. She was just a girl. His death not only emptied her life of her father's presence and grace, but forced her to take over the hard, hard work of breaking ground for a sustainable life.

Still, like Jim Burden, who cannot forget her, readers can't help but love Tony Shimerda, who eventually came to town to work for well-situated town folks. What she and the other hired girls take with them is rowdy earthiness of their country ways. Off-limits to town boys of means, the country girls just want to have fun. Jim Burden's parents, in sanctified righteousness, forbid him from going to dances, where the country girls just plain shine. They're thought to be loose. 

No matter, like Jim, who tells the story, most readers love her zest. Besides, the hired girls are great and sexy dancers.

Quite suddenly, Tony finds herself with child, and on a train to Denver, where the father, Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor on the railroad, told her he'd meet her, marry her, and raise a family. 

In Denver, he was not to be found. Tony Shimerda was pregnant and abandoned.

She can do nothing but return. With her brother, she slaves through harvest season and into winter, when one night she locks herself in her bedroom and delivers her baby boy herself. 

You can't help but love the woman. And, well, hate this scum, Larry Donovan. 

If you've never been to Red Cloud, Nebraska, schedule a trip sometime soon. Because Willa Cather used so much of Red Cloud and its history, the town's heart and soul is their favorite novelist daughter. You can visit the little old Catholic church where Tony eventually married the farm boy who gave her the rest of her kids. You can visit their farmhouse, the Pavelka place, north of town.

Tell you what--take a car tour through the whole wide country where Willa Cather remembers her childhood so fondly.

And be sure to stop the tiny cemetery plot at the beginning of the tour. You can't miss it--it's right there along the gravel. In it stands the stone of the man who abandoned Antonia Shimerda, in real life, Anna Pavelka. 

Of course, his name isn't Larry Donovan; for the record, what's etched there in stone is "James William Murray." There's the stone all right, just where the tour notes claim it is. And here's the thing: the bottom of the stone bears this old cemetery cliche: "Gone but not forgotten."

No kidding. "Gone, but not forgotten." Every year thousands of people take that gravel road tour, and nobody forgets what Larry Donovan did to your and my Antonia. Poor James William Murray: in Red Cloud, Nebraska, so much just can't be forgotten. 

Visit sometime. Stop there at the grave and tell him he was a cad. Or worse. Good night, was he ever. Like a hundred others, tell him he's gone all right, but not forgotten.