"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. 

"Paternity" ii

continuing the story "Paternity" from yesterday--

_______________________________

I remembered Cassie and our child and my own father, who yesterday was out baling hay somewhere, just as he was during the Dutch Festival in town that summer I became a father myself. We’d had a New Holland baler for four years already and developed a list of farmer-customers long enough to call ourselves the Dirks’ family custom balers--my two older brothers, Andy and Darrell, and myself. The three of us usually set things up and took turns working in the mow or in the field; then there was the boss, my father, of course, who always finished the milking at home before getting out to join us; and my little brother Jesse, eleven-years-old maybe, who usually drove the wagons back and forth and loaded bales on the elevator. Three cuts we made some years; some years only two.

Nothing remarkable happened the afternoon Cassie and I told my parents about her being pregnant. Cassie’s mother was there too, the collar of her lavender blouse lying open, tastefully, over her tanned chest. When I remember now how strange that woman looked in our farm house--with all our fans churning up the air--I can see in the collar of that silk blouse what it was that determined, finally, my father’s nodding silence: he didn’t know how to talk to a woman who looked like she’d just stepped from a television screen. My mother, in her kitchen smock, smiled the way good women can when they have to; but my father sat and listened, his hands folded in his lap as if he were in church.

Cassie controlled the conversation. It was her style to talk, to reason out what must be done, and she did, with such coolness that she disarmed my mother’s usually hair-triggered emotions. She explained how she knew it was Easton tradition to marry a couple of kids at a time like this, but how that would be foolish, neither of us even seventeen and neither of us really seriously in love. She told my mother how she was going to move back to Chicago and have the baby there, and how she didn’t blame me for the baby because it wasn’t my fault alone any more than it was hers. It was, simply, what had happened, she said.

At that point my mother reached for her handkerchief.

“Of course, we expect to be able to cover the entire financial picture,” her mother threw in, as if it were the line that Cassie had allowed her to say.

At five, my father, taking his cue from the tolling of the clock in the family room, went out to the barn, sensing, I’m sure, that nothing more could be said anyway.

If I’d scour my high school annual I could come up with two or three other Easton girls who got pregnant that summer, but the story that unfolded in those cases would have been completely different. Once the news was out, Cassie packed her bags quickly for Chicago; as a result, the elders from my church never did visit with us together, as was the custom with the other shotgunned couples who’d violated the seventh commandment. Since she was already gone, they visited me alone, three of them, all men; and once they had nudged the word sin into and out of the conversation, we spent the rest of the night talking about football, my senior year upcoming.

I never saw Cassie again, nor the child--wherever he or she may be--if, in fact, that child exits. Cassie had money like I’d never seen. That was 1970, before Roe vs. Wade, but the Mikklesons had the kind of money that could pay for illegality.

Some summer nights a few years later, when I was home from college, I drove slowly down the lake road past their home late at night, maybe once a week or so. I’m not sure what drew me back so frequently to that path through the birch just a couple hundred feet off the lakefront--lust maybe, but I don’t think that’s the whole reason. Maybe I wanted to know that what had happened was all real.

But what I remember best about that summer is what happened after Cassie and her mother made their afternoon visit to our dairy--what I saw that night in the barn, and what my father said the next day, when he finally opened up.

He caught me once, maybe a year before, beating a cow with a hoe. I don’t remember the provocation anymore, but a milk cow, like a wife or a sister or a brother, can make you feel that bloody kind of hate you can feel only for those you live with, day-in, day-out. He came up from behind and grabbed me, lifted me off the cement and kept me up there until he’d stopped my thrashing.

“You ever do that again, Gary,” he said, “and so help me I’ll use that hoe on you.”

That’s all he said about it, ever.

_________________________

The story is far from over. 

John Updike's "A & P" is a short story favorite that features the cultural difference between kids from a small town and people who inhabit the cottages and houses along the lake, not far away. When I grew up in a town just off Lake Michigan, that kind of cultural divide was manifest every summer, when the lake people came back to their places on the beach but bought groceries in town. They were commonly thought of as "lake people" and were generally more exotic than locals. 

Paternity - i

 

Note: Maybe it was Dad's birthday, maybe something else, but the word "paternity" sounded in me this morning, reminding me of a story I wrote years ago and a collection of stories with the same title, Paternity." I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with father/son stories, but I have tossed out a number of them, or did, when I was writing fiction; and one of them likely became the most read jcs story of all--and that one is titled simply "Paternity."

The father in this story isn't my father, not by a long ways, although I could list at least a few ways in which they're not that different. Anyway, I thought I'd run the story here for a couple of days. The setting is the Wisconsin lakeshore, a place I suppose I'd still call "home," even though it isn't.

Here's--"Paternity."

Paternity

Somewhere today a woman named Cassandra Something-or-other is telling a little different story, I’m sure, because she was rich and likely still is.

What do I remember of her? Her hair--the way she turned her face up into the brisk, beach sun and swept the long bronzed bangs across her cheeks. The way she laughed, always hard and full, embarrassingly sometimes--for me, not her--and the way she never giggled, even though she was only sixteen. The sharp fortitude of her eyes confronting yours and never once backing down. I remember her body very well--and her tan, both where it was and where it wasn’t. Her face, really--the exact shape of her nose and the thickness of her eyebrows, even her lips--has gone from my memory, but a part of her will never go, the ever-urging boldness that knew no fear.

The fall of her sophomore year she and her mother moved, all year round, into her parents’ cottage on the lake. She was what we called “lake people.” I was a townie. Her father owned a Chicago company that turned out fifty fiberglass boats per day. My father milked thirty-five cows. Twice she’d been to Europe. I’d been to Indiana three times to Bible Camp. She was going to college in Vermont, she said, because she hated Chicago, where she’d lived for her first fifteen years.

We were both sixteen. I was an athlete, tall and muscular from years of farm work, and blond, like a beach bum, from the burning sun and long hours in the alfalfa fields that still lie like storybook meadows between Easton and the woods that belt the lakeshore. I wanted her all right, but she just wanted. That was the difference between Cassie and normal Easton girls. They never really wanted. Cassie did--sincerely and truly.

Once I told her how--when I was a boy--we’d seen a train flatten a penny we’d laid on the track. A half hour later she stood, holding a handful of unruly hair to keep it out of her face, while only ten feet away a huge freight exploded by. The miniature football I’d hung on a chain from my rearview mirror swayed in the lurches of the coal cars across those ties, and I was in the car fifty feet away; but she never raised her eyes from the spot on the steel where she’d planted a nickel herself.

I wasn’t really Gary Dirks to her. I was merely the boy she wanted. Eight times we made love. I could probably still list them, by place and degree of success, in order. And we really didn’t quit each other, at least not until the next summer, when she became pregnant and went back to Chicago to have our baby.

She had no desire to marry me, the son of an Easton Hollander, a small dairyman. So she finished high school in Chicago, I suppose, and I never heard from her again, just as she had promised. When I say she left Easton, I don’t mean that her parents forced her to return to Chicago. She simply determined herself that she would leave, then told her mother of her plans. Back then I thought of Cassie’s having free will in the theological sense my father talked about “free will”--as the opposite of being predestined for salvation, almost as sin.

Yesterday, I sat on a crowded curb in my hometown as a Dutch Festival parade marched up from the memory of my sixteenth summer in Easton, one float after another, the Lions Club’s old black and gold, papier-maché feline still mounted on the same crepe-papered hayrack, First Presbyterian’s same black Bible open to the same John 3:16. Only the faces of the queen and her court had changed; even their Dutch costumes seemed handsewn replicas of what I remembered. My children were off on the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Ferris Wheel because a silly, small-town parade doesn’t entertain ten-year-olds who have been brought up on cartoon excesses. So I sat there alone and watched another parade too: a score of Easton high school kids dressed down for the sun, performing for each other. And I remembered who I was back then, sixteen years ago.

_______________

It just so happens that I'm working on a selection of Schaap short stories that includes--even features--all kinds of relative information, like "Cassandra"--where did that name come from? you might ask. Answer: a very comely high school senior from the school I taught in not that many years earlier. "Did Oostburg have a Dutch Festival?" Nope. The miscellany connected with all of that in the story originates here with the Orange City festival. The time lapse--the narrator is remembering--is purposeful. The narrator is putting things together, and, yes he is somewhat haunted. No, I didn't father a child in my high school years, didn't even get close. That's fiction. But yes, I worked on a baling crew back then, so I know what a hot, dusty haymow feels like. And yes, if you grew up in Oostburg, less than a mile from the western shore of Lake Michigan, you knew "lake people" because they were different than the Dutch Reformed whose influence gave the neighborhood a specific kind of identity.

On July 26

Yesterday, Sunday, was his birthday. Were he still among us, he would have been 108 years old, born as he was in 1918. He was a PK, one of ten kids in the family, his preacher/father occupying the pulpit in a Christian Reformed church in Allendale, Michigan when Dad, first of all, opened his eyes to this world. He was 85 years old when he passed away in 2003, as was his wife, my mother, who lived another ten years without him. Strangely enough, he and his only son weren't that close.

Not that we argued. Not that I went out of my way to violate whatever senses of propriety he held dear. I don't think I was ever a real "problem child." But I did run afoul of his perceptions and his politics, and, even though we never fought much, I can't help but think there were moments in his life when he prayed hard for a son whose life might well have seemed moving defiantly away from whatever safe harbors he might have hoped would be my dwelling place. 

A cousin of mine, late one night at a family reunion, told me how the marriage counseling she was getting at that time helped her understand what she'd determined were real marital problems. She suffered from having "too good a father," the therapist had told her. I wasn't a kid when she told me that, but I remember thinking, right then and there, that the problem that therapist had identified was a problem my cousin and I shared, children of Schaap brothers. 

My novel Romey's Place is spun out of what I was told at that family reunion. My father--and I knew this clearly--was a wonderful man, a man who took his Christian faith very seriously and tried to be the finest servant he could be, not for others to note but to satisfy at least something of the love he'd long ago determined was his, through grace, a gift of the Savior he worshipped. Throughout his life, the life I experienced with him, he truly and sincerely tried to do the right thing, do the thing he believed the Creator of Heaven and Earth wanted him to do. At the visitation before his funeral, dozens of people tried to wrap me in a cloud of good memories--"your dad was a wonderful man," they said, warmly. I knew they meant it because I knew he was.

Even though the two of us were never all that close, I miss him, not as some kind of fount of wisdom or moral character, but as a standard in my life, just to be here. Right now, I'd love to talk with him about getting old, about facing up into the last years. I don't know that he'd tell me anything I don't know, but just to sit beside me--I just wish he'd be here, especially now in late July, when he was born. 

Yesterday was his birthday. 

Really, I suppose, my spilling all of this out on the page this morning is a witness to what I'm wishing--he's still here somehow. He's not gone for any of his kids, even the ones who he might have thought was walking away. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Original sin (Psalm 32)

 

Honestly, I cringe when I look over the title I just typed in.  Maybe I should add a smiley face or two.  There’s just no way of dodging the darkness created by the juxtaposition of those two words. 

 The phrase has a long history of reference to a belief in the inherent sinfulness of the human heart.  For centuries theologians have maintained that we are all brimming with sin because Adam and Eve turned their back on the pleasures of the garden for a bite of the only bit of fruit denied them.  By that brazen act, we all came heir to their disobedience.  It comes with the territory, as much part of us as toenails or fingerprints.  “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all,” or so begins the New England Primer.

 And it’s not just the theological tenet that wears a black robe, it’s also the belief in that belief.  What might be the most widely read story in 19^th century American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” is the tale of a man who becomes so convinced of the darkness of the human soul that he loses nothing less than joy itself.  “His dying hour was gloom”—or so reads the final doleful line of that sad tale.

 Herman Melville recognized that feature of Hawthorne’s writing for what it was.  When he took note of the darkness in a character like Young Goodman Brown, Melville was sure “this great power of blackness” in his sometimes friend was rooted in “the appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Inner Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is never wholly free.”  Scary.

 My grandfather, a Dutch Calvinist, was capable of taking a kind of morbid pleasure in his own depravity; when he’d consider the nature of his own sin, the darkness he perceived in his soul his soul would make him weep.  Those very tears were a kind of release. 

 What there is of him in me is, quite frankly, a haunting question.

 I have this much at least: a firm belief in original sin.   I’ve watched too much television not to have it, read too many books about the Holocaust, felt horror at what white people—my own good, Christian white people—have done to Native Americans. I’ve seen my daughter through junior high, for pity sake; I know that even little girls can be spiteful as Satan.  I’ve sat in poison rooms with two people who feel nothing but hate for each other, even though they’re married, maybe because they are. I’ve felt the grip of silence between people who haven’t spoken for decades. 

 What’s worse, I’ve felt my own original sin in every last manifestation—pride, envy, wrath, sloth, lechery, avarice, gluttony—each one of the old seven deadlies.  I own them all; at times, they own me.  I honestly believe it would be nice to have faith in the eternal goodness of the human character, but such a faith would be, to me, simple-minded.

Sin is a condition, like dandruff, only infinitely worse of course, because the end of the road it creates in our lives is perdition, hell, destruction—both here and in the hereafter. 

 What David suggests in the first two verses of Psalm 32 is that not only our transgressions—those things we commit, knowing better—but also our original sin, the factory-built condition of the human heart we inherited from Uncle Adam and Aunt Eve, our sin, “not in part, but the whole/is nailed to the cross/and I bear it no more;/Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O, my soul.”   

The "God of battles"*

 

It's a diary and it's personal, but it was also penned 265 years ago by a lieutenant in the 19th Cavalry Regiment of the Missouri State Guard, 8th Division, who was clearly writing only for his wife, Bettie. Whether or not the diary ever got to her isn't known, but it's likely it did and thereby lived/lives on, one of the most treasured Civil War memoires. 

This page was penned just a few days before Lt. Fisher's bunch of the 19th Cavalry rode into Humboldt, Kansas, and torched the place, burned it to the ground. Date? October 15, 1861, six months after Ft. Sumter. Understanding the gulf of misunderstanding that prompted the secession of slave states requires a stretch from those who unwilling to paint angels' wings on the backs of either side or admit that there was more to blame than the single, horrific issue of slavery.

. . ."we may have a hard time of it as it is reported that there is a force of 500 men with 4 pieces of Cannon at Humboldt and several detachments at LeRoy, Emporia and Cofachique," he explains to Bettie. As it turned out, Humboldt put up less of a fight than Fischer and his Reb troops eventually encountered. When the 8th Division of the 19th Cavalry left the town, they left it in ashes, burning everything in sight just as Fisher says, and exactly what Missouri Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson once famously claimed rebel forces would do, burn the whole state on their way to the Missouri River.

But then, right here on what remains as the first page of the diary, comes an admission/confession/testimony that those of us who know little about the rebel cause or mind find not only unexpected but beyond imagination--the Christian faith:

". . . if they are there they will give us 'fits,'" Fisher tells his wife, "but our cause is just and the God of battles has been with us in every fight yet and with Him on our side we are sure of success may he be with us and prosper us."

I remember learning sometime in grade school that the Civil War of these dis-United States ironically posed "brother against brother"; but this kind of testimony still gives me fits. How he can claim righteous standing with the Lord God of Hosts, while at the same time, Union troops and civilians in Humboldt, Nebraska, are scared stiff of the destruction they will suffer in the next few hours, many of them praying for protection from the same God who the seceders claim is on the side of the men in gray who can't fold their hands in prayer because one hand holds a torch?

________________________

*Lt.

No one does sweet corn like Garrison Keilor

(We had our first sweet corn of the season last night, and it was wonderful!)

When I come to the spring, the time of romance,
The season of amour
And I dig in the dirt and I set out the plants
And mix in the horse manure.
We thank you, dear Lord of power and might,
Who didst from the dust create us
Grant that your children find earthly delight
With a crop of sweet corn and tomatoes.

O the homegrown tomatoes the Lord sent down
So we know what paradise means
No grief, no tears, just tomatoes, my dears,
And sweet corn and string beans.

Oh we thank you dear Lord for this good good life
And thanks for the day we were born
And the gifts you have given, especially these heavenly
String beans, tomatoes and corn.

Sweet corn: the best thing in life. I grew up in a house 

about a hundred feet from a cornfield, 

and every evening we’d put the water on to boil, 

then pick the corn and husk it as we walked rapidly toward the house 

and chuck it in and dish up the chicken 

and say a prayer and out came the corn, 

on went the butter and salt, eight minutes flat from stalk to mouth, 

and when you ate sweet corn, life had nothing better to offer. 

You’d been to the top. That’s how it’ll be in heaven, I’m sure.

Oh we thank you dear Lord for this good good life
And thanks for the day we were born
And the gifts you have given, especially these heavenly
String beans, tomatoes and corn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AToiX451bVo

The new, old Little House -- ii

Balancing the sometimes contrary demands of the true story itself is not an easy task for a writer. Laura Ingalls Wilder was fashioning a classic for kids when she began (she was 65 years old!) to write books using her own experience and her family's pioneer saga on the way west. 

What the TV series didn't really examine was the plain fact that Charles Wilder was a squatter, someone who knew the truth but homesteaded on land he, as a white man, should have acknowledged to be Osage land. In today's language, we might say the Wilder family were "undocumented"; they'd moved on to land they weren't entitled to--they were illegals because all around them at the time were patches of land that had been the province of a variety of Native nations. They should not have been there; ICE would have moved them out.

In 1870, the Drum Creek Treaty was signed, promising the Osage nation "$1.50 an acre" for all Osage land and mandating that all would-be homesteaders (like the Wilders) had to leave before the same land would be opened up for homesteading (although the land would be for sale, not free). The new Netflix series ends with the Wilder family back in their covered wagon, bound for Minnesota, which is the historically accurate move. They're on their way to Walnut Grove, where, this Saturday, a local group will stage, outdoors, their final 2026 production of the Ingalls family story, the Wilder Pageant. 

If you're interested, you might want to look at a website that tells the story of the story and determine yourself how much of the Netflix production is accurate to history and how much is pure storytelling. 

Either way, this new version of the story is worth watching (take if from a story-teller).

The new old Little House

It's difficult to overstate just exactly how popular NBC's original Little House on the Prairie show was. Beginning in 1974, Little House ran for nine seasons at a level of TV glory that few series could even dream of. It won a list of awards as long as lodge pole, and made Michael Landon (and a handful of others) the kind of Hollywood stardom most Americans would recognize almost anywhere on the street.

 Just an hour or two north of us, Minnesota's Little House monuments features a river bank where, or so the docents claim, the Ingalls once inhabited a hole in the ground on their way west. It's not something you forget quickly, in part because seeing the Ingalls family--the TV version--crouched in a river bank hut doesn't fit exactly with the family that became the most celebrated TV family in history. 

That sweet and sentimental series captured more awards than many other really popular productions, and earned a viewership that was surprisingly universal--adults from 35-64 made up more than sixty percent of its viewing audience as late as 2024, when the original series was streamed on Peacock. The show's firm place in the American imagination was enough too make Netflix consider a reboot.

That reboot is running right now and doing very, very well. There are, of course, some major differences between the original series and the newly refashioned Little House.  One of the central conflicts of the family in the new series is their trespassing. By the time the original Ingalls family reached Kansas, they'd become squatters, living on property that, by law, belonged to the Osage tribe. It's hard to lift the kind of allegiance the whole family had in the original series when you know that they and hundreds of other white, American pioneers, were deliberately living on land that belonged to this country's original inhabitants. 

Then, too, historians claim that Pa Ingalls wasn't a whole lot like the Michael Landon version. They suggest that the records suggest that he wasn't the ace Pa who kept moving around the Great Plains, that he may not have been the nice guy the book and the series make him out to be. 

It's gutsy to make a reboot. Netflix had to know that. Any new version of the tales can't avoid the historic truth. Lets be clear here--the new Pa Ingalls is just as wonderful, just as loving, just as driven by justice (and just as handsome) as Michael Landon, but the central conflict of the new series is the fact that the Ingalls family lives on a swath of Osage tribal land, and the Osage aren't happy about it.

There are, as you can imagine, a bundle of other distinct changes, and a good deal less of the sentimentalizing so characteristic of the original series. The fact is, homesteading was probably never so sweet as it was in the old Little House. Some sweetsie stuff is unavoidable, but other major themes are more universalized--the conflicts between the Ingalls sisters, for instance, is newly adopted, and racism is more plainly evident.

No matter. I like it. It's almost impossible to think that this newly fashioned series could ever touch the massive popularity of the original, but that doesn't mean the newly minted version isn't worth your time or mine. 

Try it.

 

“Blessed is he. . .whose sins are covered”

 After far too much traveling in the last couple of years, I have come to the conclusion that motel rooms are not designed for people my age; they are decorated with entirely too many mirrors.  Wherever you look, full length panels offer views of your own sad and sagging mortality you hadn’t asked to see.

 One of the reasons English TV comedies are more fun than American sitcoms is that English audiences, it seems, don’t demand physical perfection.  English comedies regularly feature unhandsome people; but American television offers a persistent diet of perfect shapes, both male and female, so many, in fact, that one begins to believe that such pulchritude is the norm.  Given all that gorgeous flesh, suddenly seeing yourself bare naked on a six-foot wall is an epiphany of horrific proportions.  A few weeks ago I came home and told my wife I would never eat again.

 I suppose I shouldn’t be equating sin with body fat. Someone told me recently of a new study which maintains that John Calvin’s despairing views of the sins of the flesh was attributable, in part, to the revulsion he felt about the debilitating hemorrhoids he fought through most of his adult life. If that’s true, it’s something I wish I didn’t know.

But there is a link here in this verse from Psalm 32, at least in my mind.  The exuberance of the line bursts from the realization that something repulsive is wholly taken care of, covered up, covered over, out of sight and, better yet, out of mind, even out of soul.  That something isn’t nakedness, but it’s close.

Sin isn’t so much an act as it is a condition, like dandruff or flat feet. Sin is something we never stop fighting. There’s no truth, says the Apostle Paul, in those who claim they have none. 

But the blissful joy of the opening lines of Psalm 32—or so it seems to me—is not the blessed realization that our sinful condition is gone, but instead our blessed assurance that God’s forgiveness has it covered—as in, “not to worry, fella, I got you covered.” Our greed, our neglect, our thievery, our hate, our drunkenness, our adultery, our pathetic pride, our green-eyed jealousy, even our pride—sin in all its pathetic naked horror, even the ones we can’t forget, the one that haunts us, makes us sick unto death, that sin is covered because He’s got our back. 

David’s sins were legendary in the unsavory mess created when he couldn’t keep his royal hands off someone else’s wife, and then “covering” that sin by the sleazy murder of her beloved. 

All of that is gone, David himself testifies here in Psalm 32. It’s history. All that’s left is grace.

That’s the story here.  Praise the Lord.

Liberation Sunday

I've been putting together a collection of little stories originally published in a magazine titled Reformed Worship. Way back when the magazine was first published, the editors asked me to contribute stories avout how we worship, stories of relevance to those who look after liturgy. I did so for a long time. 

In an old file folder, I stumbled over this one. Don't know  if it was ever published, but a couple of decades after I wrote it, I found it quite moving, a very memorable communion Sunday.

~   *   ~   *   ~

Thursday, April 18, 1945

The end is in sight!  Saturday evening Jan and I came from Kloosters and were just at the train crossing when four British Spitfires dove from the cloud cover to attack a passing train.  It was a hot moment, but once we were hiding in the manholes on the side of the little country road, we could see the air attack beautifully.

Today I should have gone to Amersfort, but there was so much fighting outside of Nijkerk.  People came and warned me that the Canadians were already at the river.  A German told me that I better return from where I came from, but now that it seems so close I cannot believe it may be true.

When you return, Adriaan, there will be so much to say, so much to tell you.  How strong our children are, too, in all of this.

When I arrived at Driedorp, everywhere there were Germans and cars and motorbikes, and on all the farms in that area were Germans.

I decided it would be safer to go back home, but when I passed them again they were sneaking off with their guns cocked, moving in the direction of the river.  And the Tommies were busy with their Spitfires in the air!!

After one p.m., everybody has to stay inside.  In the woods last night there was a fight between German and Canadian reconnaissance patrols.  Four Germans and three Canadians killed.

Heavy fighting around Apeldoorn.  Zwolle, Leeuwarden Meppel, and practically the whole of Gronigen and Friesland are liberated.

In Voorthuizen a landing of paratroops, approx. 1000 this morning.  The Huns are nervous wrecks.

 

Friday, April 19, 1945

Did the housework very fast, and went to Kloosters’.  Father Klooster is killed by artillery shell on the farm where he was in hiding since the Germans started looking for him.  Why, Lord, with the end so near?  Such a fine man, so much good during the war. All those allied pilots hidden and moved into the woods.  Such good work.  Now killed when the Canadians are so close at hand.

Mother Klooster is strong.  The six children are heartbroken, sit in silence at home. Many people visit, even though it is dangerous to be out and the fighting never seems really to stop.  Should I stay with Mother Klooster and help with children?

Everywhere, still, there are Germans.  I have responsibility at home.  Mother Klooster seems very strong.  Oh, but seems.

Planes in the air and all the shooting is very heavy.  Went by inside roads back home but shooting from Spitfires on everything that moves.

Farms all over full of Germans.  The school playground is green with their uniforms.

On my way home passed Vander Kamp’s farm and shells rained from two directions.  Cows lie dead all around, hooves up.  Such destruction.

Germans came to our farm after I returned.  “We have to go on,” they said, “but in two weeks it will be all over anyway.”  They were sick of it.  Wanted to see our cellar, but it was too small they said.  Thank goodness.  With our house so full of people.  And the Jews, too.

When they were gone, we put mattresses down there. Whoever was tired could sleep.  All the time the screeching noises of shells overhead and then waiting for the explosion.  Where will it come down?

 

Saturday, April 20, 1945

God up early and went outside.  Quiet for some time.  People killed and wounded.  The roads are full of people from Nijkerk, heading out to the poulders, to the meadows, crawling into shacks and henhouses.

Adriaan, where are you?  It seems too much for me to go on with everything, even though now the end is so near.  Adriaan, we will be together again soon.

The rest of the day passed slowly by, quietly.  People say that ‘t Oever and Putten also were taken, meaning “stay close to home.”  Flying still going on.  Now and then a burst of shellfire.  Fires in the distance.  A haystack down the road at Bethanien.

In the evening, with approximately 20 people, stayed in the cellar, but nothing happened so I went up to our bed.  Adriaan will come again soon.  Lord, please, bring him home.

 

Sunday, April 21, 1945

Everything is again QUIET.  All the barbed wire blockades are put in place and Jan had to go all the way around Watergoor to come home because the Allies are two kilometers away.  On the Holkerweg, every 50 meters there is artillery.  Not much flying now, and only little shelling.  This afternoon quite close by some machine gunning and even some regular rifle shots.

I think they will be here tomorrow!

The Germans seem almost to be gone.  Only the shelling continues.  It is still not safe to be out.

Piet van Meerfeld comes in the morning.  I see him coming on his bike up the lane.  He has bread in his rooksack.  He has flour, now, from the air drops.

“Mevrouw Hartog,” he says, “I have for the first time good flour, and today is communion Sunday.”  And he gives me a half loaf because he knows we have neighbors here, we have onderdykkers.  But I know he means this loaf is communion bread.

“Take and eat,” he says, and he smiles.  Then leaves for the next farm from our church.  Communion Sunday.

We have in our house two men in hiding, a family from Nijkerk--the Harts, running away from the fighting--Uncle Ben and his wife, Hannah, a man named Schneider--an American pilot--and our Anne, Henk, and Jan.

We have half a loaf of communion bread.  Schneider says he is Catholic.  The onderdykkers are Reformed.  Uncle Ben and his wife are Jewish.  The Harts are with us in our church, and I have our family, our own children.

Van Meerfeld pedaled through the artillery because he knew it was communion Sunday and he had communion bread.  And he knows it is liberation.  He wears a smile like this work he is doing is holy work.

So we eat the bread, all of us, this Sunday morning.  A communion like none other I remember.  Eat and celebrate, eat and profess. I tell myself, “take, eat, remember, and believe.”   Even the children have a bite.  It is a sacrament they will not forget, ever--I tell them later, when we are alone.  This is the children’s first communion.

Van Meerfeld is right.  He has now good flour.  It is good bread he brings.

Wageningen and Ede are also liberated and how long before finally Holland is free!

Mother Klooster is alone this Sunday.  There will be no funeral until all of this is over.  Tomorrow will come all the celebrations, and yet in all of it she must have the funeral and she will be alone with her six children.

Sometimes, I think I cannot go on with this, even though the Canadians are here--if not yet today, then tomorrow for sure.  Sometimes, even the joy is hard.

Adriaan, are you too liberated?  When I heard about Buchenwald, I turned ice cold, but Psalm 91 is for us: “Because he loves me, says the Lord, I will rescue him.  I will protect him for he acknowledges my name.  A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.”

O darling, the end is coming.  How happy we will be.  I have so much to tell you.

 

--Adapted from the personal stories of Diet Eman and Michael Van Wijk.