by David Rhodes
In the hallway, she spoke briefly with Reverend Winchell from the Grange Congregational Church. As he talked to her in a professional, lecturing tone, he frowned, and Winnie suspected that he did not approve of women pastors, or at least of women pastors wearing brown corduroy pants.
Walking out of the nursing home, Winnie looked at the sky and was immediately reminded of her dream from the night before. The blue seemed intensely and especially blue. On the sidewalk, she lingered for a moment, going over the errands she had to run in town. The air had turned cooler and she wished she had worn a coat.
It was from this point forward that Winnie, for years to come, would review in her memory every thought and action, looking for some way to explain what later happened. She walked to her car, drove to the Piggly Wiggly on the corner, and purchased groceries—no frozen items because she did not know how soon she would be back at the parsonage. She walked across the street to the hardware store and bought five twenty-amp fuses to replace the ones that burned out when the washing machine, furnace, and refrigerator all came on at the same time. At the bakery she selected three doughnuts and a small, round loaf of bread. She deposited her salary check at the drive-through window of the bank, withdrew fifty dollars in cash, filled her car’s tank with gasoline, considered purchasing a lottery ticket as a visual aid for Bible study, but was momentarily possessed by a demon of frivolity and bought a package of red gum instead.
Her next stop was at the home of Muriel and Don Woolever, an old couple who lived outside Grange. Don had a heart condition that severely limited his ability to get out, and Muriel still suffered from a broken hip.
When Winnie knocked on the farmhouse door, no one answered. She checked the garage and after finding it empty she scribbled a note on a piece of paper and taped it to the front door.
While she was backing her car out of the driveway onto the road, Winnie wondered where she would end up if she drove south on the road instead of north. She had never continued past the Woolever’s home. And because of the leaves blowing from trees like torn brown parchment pages and thin ribbons of steel-gray diaphanous clouds stretching out of the horizon in trails of lost grandeur, Winnie drove south, following the winding road between irregular stretches of oak, birch, and pine.
The blacktop changed to gravel and the road narrowed, not well traveled. There were no houses. Neither were there signs of telephone or electric service.
The road narrowed again. She climbed a steep hill, turned left, then right, and descended into a valley marsh.
Cattails, skunk cabbage, wood asters, and thick-bladed grasses rose out of standing water on both sides of the road. There were few trees taller than hedge height, with the unsightly, bowl-shaped nests of herons lodged thickly in them. Three deer stood knee deep in a shallow pool, eating floating vegetation and staring at her car in wide-eyed disbelief, water streaming from their narrow, delicate mouths.
Still she could see no houses, driveways, or mailboxes. She drove over a narrow bridge with wooden planks, rusted iron sides, and a hand-painted sign in orange letters, EIGHT TON LIMIT. The wooden planks thumped loudly against her tires. On the other side Winnie parked next to a stand of sumac and returned with a doughnut to stand on the bridge above the little stream.
Not wanting to get her clothes dirty, she refrained from sitting on the planks and leaned against the iron railing. The clear, cold water ran beneath her brown shoes and she ate the pastry with great satisfaction after discovering the filling to be custard. Overhead, a skein of geese flew in a disorderly V-shaped line, calling in hoarse, plaintive tones. Once again she was reminded of her dream from the night before. Checking her desire to eat the remaining portion of her pastry, she tossed it into the water as an offering of thanks and watched it float downstream and around a switchback. Crisp autumn wind moved through her thin shirt, touching her skin. A sugary buoyancy filled her stomach. She contemplated both sensations on her way back to the car.
As she climbed behind the wheel she was startled to feel her name spoken. “Winifred.” She climbed out and turned back to the bridge, hoping to find someone behind her. She was alone. But she was certain of having heard her name spoken in a clear voice with throaty personality. It had felt to her like the voice of her mother, yet not hers, a voice she knew yet couldn’t place. Most of all, it had resembled her own voice speaking without the usual interior echo—from the outside. She walked back to the bridge, stood in the middle of the planks, and listened.
Once again she heard her name spoken, this time in its more familiar appellation: “Winnie.” Accompanying the sound came the sense of someone beside her, behind her, before her, around her, someone she couldn’t see and couldn’t touch, someone whose presence was intensified through the absence of anything to attribute it to.
The feeling of buoyancy she had earlier experienced in her stomach delightfully changed and spread through the rest of her body. She felt light enough to float. It seemed as if the breeze moving across the marsh could carry her with it. She held this feeling for a moment and then realized something very uncommon was happening. The grasses in the ditch appeared to be glowing. The red, cone-shaped sumac tops burned like incandescent lamps in a bluish light unlike any she had ever seen yet instinctively recognized. And the pleasure of recognition—discovering the familiar within the unknown—comforted her with its stillness. She looked at her hands and they seemed to be lit from the inside, her fingers almost transparent. The light glowing within the grasses and the sumac glowed within her, within everything. They sang with her through the light, jubilantly, compassionately, timelessly connecting to her past, present, and future. Boundaries did not exist. Where she left off and something else began could not be established. Everything breathed.
She understood her predicament: the world, experience, sensations, memory, time, and dream could not be separated. The realizations taking place were not taking place “inside her,” but all around, everywhere. The problem lay not in establishing the objective truth of what she perceived but rather in establishing how the truth had come to be perceived—how otherness had been obliterated. She participated in being looked at as much as looking. She was not simply having a vision of something; she was something in a larger vision. A Great Omnipresent Looking had turned upon her and she looked through it. The whole world participated in awareness.
The miracle of consciousness, the hiding place of God, split open like a fruit too large for its peel. Time lost its linear appeal and assumed the form of the wholly holy. Events, forces, and mind were the same thing, creatively at work. The world and the Kingdom of God became factually identical; each existed one in the other. The sun reflected from the clouds in avenues of colored ideas. The contradiction of conceptual antagonists stood side by side, making sense. The solitary miracle of Pure Grace held everything else inside it, wonder and peace. Death stood before her and she recognized it—a mere shadow cast by life, not a separation; the breathing of life bound it up as shape binds substance.
She walked down the embankment and into the stream, where the cold rushing water swirled around her ankles, calves, knees, and thighs in such a happy, embracing manner that tears filled her eyes. The water was alive. And as her sense of herself as an autonomous individual migrated into everything around her, her sense of isolation and loneliness merged into belonging. She found her true home and her true home found her. There was no “other” place. The grasses were part of trees, part of the smallest organisms in the water, part of the water, part of the worms in the soil, part of the soil, part of the air, part of her. All were constantly changing into and out of each other. And all of these were part of God, that infinitely small and infinitely large spirit that loved her, whatever she was, whenever she was, without reservation, and the realization of this love brought the numinous splendor of divine, mobilized thoughts flooding through the world. It felt like waking from a nightmare of harsh and brutal illusions into welcome beyond measure. A banquet of celebration had risen up inside and
around her—more and more life, larger, richer, and more joyful life.
A white pickup came clanking down the narrow road, thumped and rattled across the little bridge, and came to a stop not far from Winnie’s little car. A man in a work coat climbed out and stood for several minutes looking between Winnie’s opened car door and Winnie in the creek. He climbed down the embankment and walked along the edge of the stream.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” said Winnie, the water rushing around her.
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.”
“You’re crying.”
“If I am, it is different than you think.”
“I was afraid you might be having some trouble. My name is July Montgomery and I farm in Champion Valley. That cold water will ruin your health.”
“If only you knew how little those things matter.”
“You’re probably right,” he said, and sat down on the bank beside a honeysuckle. “Come out of the water—just for now.”
But Winnie didn’t move. She didn’t know what to say. This was the most important time of her whole life, but its importance was unspeakable. Words hadn’t yet been invented to talk about it. What now filled her was understood through a long chain of lucidity that would break if she spoke about any single link. Nothing, yet everything, had changed.
The stranger sitting on the bank was no exception—he also glowed from the inside. She could feel both his kindness and his sorrow radiating from his face—feel it as her own. But she couldn’t explain.
“We’re all together all of us all,” she said. “You’re in here too.”
“In where?”
“In here, in God.”
“I don’t believe in God. What’s your name? Do you live around here?”
“You don’t believe?”
“I’m afraid I don’t see any sense in that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
“God, churches, praying, and heaven—that kind of thing. My wife went to church for a while, but for myself it never made sense. Did you say you lived around here?”
“Where I live is not important. The only thing that’s important is this.”
“What?”
“This.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Not ‘that,’ this.”
“Is there a phone in your car? I could get it and you could call your husband perhaps, or a friend or relative.”
“Why are you concerned with such small things?”
“I’m just a small person, I guess.”
And just when she felt her heart breaking from not being able to communicate what she was experiencing, he seemed to understand. He looked at her and he somehow understood. Something in his experience connected with hers and he felt it.
She walked out of the water, took off her brown loafers, and sat next to July on the grass, her corduroy pants soaked nearly to the waistline. Her ankles and feet were bright red splotched with white. He wrapped his coat around her shoulders.
“That isn’t necessary,” she said.
“Probably not, but it makes me feel better.”
“I don’t understand how anyone can not believe in God,” said Winnie. “What else can satisfy our desire to at once understand and love?”
“Never made any sense to me—a man in the sky writing laws, judging actions, and deciding fate.”
“Oh no—not that god. Did you think I was talking about that god?”
“I guess I did.”
“Not even the old me could believe in that god. I mean I tried, but I couldn’t. That god died a long, long time ago, if it ever existed, which I seriously doubt.”
“Which one were you talking about?”
“You know—the only real one. Oh, how impossible this all is.”
Tears continued to run down Winnie’s cheeks. July handed her a fairly clean handkerchief, but she handed it back without using it. “Words are meaningless,” she said. “The truth dies before it fits into them. Language lacks the capacity to hold anything real. It serves an utterly different master. What’s really real is a home words can’t get into or out of.”
“Not everyone is capable of seeing the things you see,” said July. “Some of us have been too deeply hurt.”
Another vehicle, a station wagon, came from the north. It slowed to walking speed and came to a complete stop in the middle of the bridge. A window rolled down and a woman’s shrill voice called, “Winifred, is that you? Pastor Winifred?”
Winnie stood up.
“That’s Muriel and Don Woolever from my church. I’d better go see them. It’s my job. Don is probably back from visiting the doctor and I need to check on him. Muriel sounds anxious.”
“I could tell them you’re busy, if you want more time.”
“No, that’s all right. It’s been nice talking with you.”
“Keep my coat.”
“You’re very kind, but no thank you,” she said, handing it back. “I must be going. Where did you say you lived?”
“On a little farm outside Words, on Highway Q.”
Winnie put her wet shoes back on and climbed up the bank. After speaking for several moments with the old couple, she climbed into her car, turned around in the road, and followed them north.
July put on his coat and went back to his truck.
THEFT
IN THE GRANGE PARKING LOT IN FRONT OF THE BRICK OFFICE BUILDING of the American Milk Cooperative, Cora climbed into a car with Alice Hobs, the neighbor who drove on Mondays, Thursdays, with Alice Hobs, the neighbor who drove on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays. They heard a tire squeal and looked toward it.
Grahm turned off the road, raced across the lot, and pulled in front of them before they could leave, coming to a pitched stop. A small scream came from Alice, and both women stared wide-eyed through the windshield. By the time Cora recognized him, Grahm was out of the car and halfway to them, three chrome-colored balloons in one fist and a handful of cornflowers in the other.
“It’s all right!” she shouted at Alice, who was searching frantically for the lock to her door. “It’s my husband.”
“Happy birthday,” said Grahm, opening the door and thrusting the flowers toward his wife.
Cora climbed out, accepted the gifts, and stood looking between her husband—his hair wet and uncombed, his shirt half out of his pants—and her children sitting without seat belts in the front seat. “Happy birthday!” said Grahm again, and Cora burst into tears.
“For Christ’s sake, Grahm,” she yelled. “What’s wrong with you?”
At this signal, Alice slowly backed away from them and drove out of the lot.
“I thought we could go out for dinner,” said Grahm. “It’s your birthday.”
“Why does everything have to be like this? It’s pathetic, Grahm. Why can’t anything ever be nice?”
They drove to the Red Rooster Restaurant and ordered meals that included a trip through the salad bar.
Seth and Grace were happy to be eating out, and even happier to be inside a public building where the censure of strangers prevented their mother from continuing to yell at their father. As she watched them running in and out of their booth, playing with the silverware and salt and pepper shakers, and marking up the paper placemats with the Crayons the restaurant provided, Cora felt herself relaxing.
“Who’s milking?” asked Cora.
“Wade,” said Grahm.
“We can’t afford to hire people to do our work,” she said. “And Wade’s on probation.”
“I’ve known him since he was a boy.”
At home in the driveway, the children bolted from the car and fled into the house. Grahm and Cora remained in the front seat, looking into a rapidly darkening sky.
“I just wanted to—” began Grahm.
“I know,” said Cora. “It’s not your fault. I’m just so tired. They’re trying to make me quit. They
hired a girl just out of high school and they’re giving her a lot of my work. Today, Phil pretended to be unable to find the new application forms, which left me with nothing to do for over two hours while that new girl made out the reports. They’re trying to make me quit.”
“It’s not worth it. You should resign.”
“We need the money and the health insurance.”
The screen door banged shut on the front of the house. Seth and Grace stood on the porch, looking at the car. Their expressions caused Cora to go to them immediately. Grahm went to the barn to pay the neighbor and send him home. Minutes later, Cora found Grahm in the milk house.
“Someone was in our house,” she said in a breathless whisper. “The papers are gone—all of them. They found the box in the upstairs closet. I don’t think anything else was taken.”
They ran inside and silently set about putting everything back in order. Hoping to keep Grace and Seth from knowing that their home had been violated, they pretended nothing out of the ordinary had happened—as though natural forces were somehow capable of spewing out the contents of cabinets, drawers, and closets. As they worked they knew that the thoughts Seth and Grace might entertain to explain the disorder—such as their father going through the house in a fit of rage—might be even more detrimental than the pretending, but they couldn’t help it. The truth hung heavily in their chests and they couldn’t imagine speaking it to their children. Their privacy had been spoiled, their sacred place defiled.
After they finished putting the house in order, Cora remained upstairs with Grace and Seth while they did their homework. Grahm called Wade to see if he had seen anyone.
“Hell no, Mr. Shotwell, I didn’t see anyone all the time I was over there. And you’ve got to believe me—I had nothing to do with whatever happened.”
“I know that,” said Grahm. “I never thought you did.”
Grahm called the police and at about ten-thirty met two men from the sheriff’s department in front of the milk house and together they walked across the driveway, under the tamaracks, and onto the porch. Cora joined them. The officers inquired after the robbery. One of them wrote with a ballpoint pen into a fat, leather-bound pad of paper. Strapped to their waists hung a number of other lumpy, leather-covered objects, and their brightly enameled badges reflected the porch’s orange bug light. Despite their laconic professional manner, Cora could tell they did not regard the theft of papers as a very serious crime.