Remembering Arie

The first time I heard him tell that story, I'd asked. "You remember the Depression, Arie?" I said, or something similar. I knew he'd lived in South Dakota, where the land had dried up and there'd been some major dust storms. I thought he'd have memories. He did. 

In 1933, the government had created the Agricultural Adjustment Act, a program designed to increase prices on commodities by decreasing harvests--of corn, soybeans, tobacco, cotton, and more, on livestock too. In 1933, "culling the herd" meant killing farm animals. 

In 1933, Arie was 15 years old, a boy becoming a man. The story he told me traced the lines of horror that ran through him at the sight--and the sound--of someone pulling out a gun and shooting pigs on his dad's farm, shooting pigs he'd raised, shooting them dead in such a way that they'd fall into a pit. 

That story didn't take more than a minute to tell, but after the three times I heard it, an inevitable tear would fall. It always got told in the same way, as if long ago he'd settled on the means to get it right. His hearing wasn't strong anymore, but the dimensions of that story were stored on a particular tape in his memory, and it always prompted a tear. 

It's about the Depression, but it's also deeply about him: he's the one who didn't forget those bloody pigs, not in eighty years. 

Arie died last week. He was 101, a resident of the home where dad lived out his last years.

For a long time, we attended chapel there in the Home, where, once the residents were wheeled in, spiral-bound, big print songbooks were passed out. Every Sunday, Arie'd wave 'em away--"Can't read anymore anyway, and I know 'em all mostly," he'd say. And he did. Watching him sing was its own kind of blessing.

But there was more. "Your dad and Bud and me--we had a lot of fun," he'd tell me. He was talking about fishing, a precious memory. When our folks left the farm and moved to town, they bought a house right beside Arie and his wife, and that made them fishing partners. Dad thought the world of his neighbor, but used to shake his head about Arie's stubbornness. If there was nothing hitting on the lake, Dad would have got off the water much more quickly than Arie, who didn't give up--never. "Maybe we ought to try for some sunnies over there by the weeds," he'd say, way late in the afternoon.

Of the three of them, Bud died first, a couple years ago. Bud had spent the war years in England, reading aerial photographs taken by the crews of a thousand bombers. He didn't live in the home, but his wife did, so he used to come for chapel on Sunday, where he sat beside her and pointed at those big letters, even though singing along was something she lacked the wherewithal to do. 

Then Dad died, over 100 himself, just a few months ago; and now Arie, just a couple days after Christmas. The three of them, fishing buddies--they had a lot of fun. Now they're gone, all of them.

Arie told me once about the last time he was out at the pond at Hawarden. Some friend took him out, put a pole in his hands, and set him on the shore in his wheelchair. I wish I'd recorded how he talked about the dawn, how powerfully beautiful it was, how just sitting out there hoping for sunnies was a sweet blessing like something he couldn't have dreamed up himself. What a joy it was to see that morning sky again.

At the end of the chapel on Sundays, some of the residents would wait for aids to wheel them back to their rooms. He was, a year ago and more, one of the few of my dad-in-law's accomplices capable of keeping up a conversation around the table where the staff would serve up coffee and a cookie, still warm. Sometimes I'd wheel him on down the hallway myself, wheel him down toward home.

But home really wasn't that room on the other side of the kitchen. I'm not at all sure he'd call that house in town home either, nor any single one of the farms where he and Alice raised six kids, all daughters. I  know he thinks of the farm where he found work and wife as the best move of his life, but that farm really wasn't his home either. I doubt he'd want to go back to South Dakota really. I'm not even sure he'd call that fishing boat home, no matter how many hours he'd spent therein or how many dawns he didn't admire just sitting out there on the water.. 

I can't begin to guess what place Arie would have thought of as home, but I can't imagine it wouldn't be some place where he didn't see Alice. 

It is an element of my faith--and his and Bud's and Dad's and Alice's--that wherever he is now, he's home, he's really, really home. 

And I just hope--don't you?--that the Creator of Heaven and Earth gives him a place where there's friends around, where the pigs are fine, the dawn is glorious, and out there on the water the sunnies are biting.