Wandering

The pastor and his missus, the Nobles, are worried, but not scared. They're about to be visited by members of the church council, and they're concerned because several of the friendliest old shoulders have turned cold. A few parishioners they considered friends--or at least friendly--have made themselves notable by their absences. Something is in the air. They feel it, and they're worried.

Mrs. Noble registers something of that fear, but her husband lovingly dissuades her, or tries. He's done nothing wrong; they both know it. But the two of them have been in the ministry for a long time, and some corners of his tenure at this church--his last, they've decided--are darker than they'd should be.

Mrs. Noble will be having an operation (we're not told her medical problem), but her apprehensiveness rises from her determination that she doesn't have the heart to do the whole thing over again--go to yet another town, another manse, another crowd of congregants, another garden, another redone bedroom--she has absolutely no desire to do all of that again for the four-hundredth time. 

She doesn't have to come right out and tell her husband because he knows darn well how and what she fears and feels.

The council arrives--all men, of course--and they take places, on edge, in the parsonage sitting room. She greets them, then retreats to the kitchen. They begin with the matter of church remodeling, which they conveniently table. When she begins to believe that things are not going to turn out as she feared, she reenters the front room to serve a dish of pecans.

That's when it gets ugly. Accusations--of a sexual nature!--are made against Mr. Noble. They're phony, of course, but the faction they were afraid of already before the meeting has done the dirty work: "for the good of the church," and so forth. It ends as badly as you could have suspected. 

Do such things happen? Of course, innumerable times in the last year, I'm sure; but reading Ruth Suckow's "Wanderers" is not going to make your day shine. 

I read it Monday, recorded it, which means, really, interpreted it. I've been recording Ruth Suckow stories for some time now, a little project encouraged along by a society that tries to keep Ruth Suckow from disappearing from the reading public's eyes. When I read her stories aloud, I can't help but fall into the characters--and when that happens, I can't help but "feel" the story. "Wanderers" is depressing; its stubborn insistence on their unjust and sad expulsion from the church they'd tried to serve "for the Kingdom" is suggested from the opening paragraph--and there's no deviation. It ends even worse than the Nobles suspected, and they're so innocent, so, well, Christian.

Last night I heard summaries of two sad stories, one of them, in outline at least, not a whole lot different from "Wanderers," a young pastor suddenly released from a church he came to serve. I met him only once, but his wife was a precious student, very talented, full of personality and charm, a young woman who worked for me, someone I saw every day for a year or more. I hate to feel any bit of the pain she must feel.

And then there's a couple--he's an administrator in a Christian school. I knew them because I knew the places where they grew up, even knew their families. The story is, he walked out of their marriage, a shock to his wife. She's a Facebook friend, and it just seemed to me that his absence from all her posts was striking. 

Once upon a time they were all in my class. It's not like they're your own children. I'd be sleepless if it was. But it hurts in the same places, just some lesser equivalent. 

I think "Wanderers" is very well-done, but it's doggedly depressing. Things don't go well for the Nobles, and they don't deserve the shocking expulsion from their own backyard garden. 

When I finished reading it, I couldn't help but think that it was like so much of the literature I assigned during my almost forty years in the classroom, stories and poems and plays and essays I wanted my students to read--forced them to read--because they were well-done. Often enough, those stories were depressing too, in part, I suppose, because writers--like me--find a rich vein of what's most decidedly human in our proximity to calamity, or, in some cases, the calamity we bring to ourselves on our own. 

Then again, maybe a diet of difficult imaginative literature may not have been a bad thing. Light in the darkness distinguishes itself as light only when there is some actual darkness. 

I'd like to think that those students of mine who are suffering right now are suffering some bit less because they've read about suffering, about human frailty. Maybe teaching the darkness is itself a possible means to more clearly see the light.

I hope so. For each of their sakes, I hope so.

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If you would like to hear the recording of Ruth Suckow's "Wanderers," let me know and I'll send it.