Dogwood

by Chris Fabry

  She sighed. “What if the baby is you? Or better yet, what if this child represents your soul?”

  I stopped breathing, dead in my shoes. The hallway spun with some realization. But what?

  “Your father is intensely interested in your soul, even though you don’t seem to be. You wrap it up and hold it tightly, not because you want to nurture it but because you don’t want to see its reality. That it really is there.”

  “Soul, as in my spiritual side,” I said, gasping the words.

  “Soul, as in your being. What’s at Karin’s core. It’s clear you don’t care much about it, at least in the dream. If it weren’t your father, if it were some babysitter or drug dealer, you’d hand it over. You think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, my voice catching. “What about my father? Who is he?”

  “I think you know.”

  I struggled to swallow and choked out, “God?”

  Ruthie nodded. “He cares a lot for that soul of yours. More than you know. More than you ever will or could. He’s the one who made it in the first place. Makes sense he’d want to care for it, nourish it, cherish it. And he’s willing to wait until you’re ready, until you can bring everything to him. In the meantime, whether you realize it or not, he’s there, acting like yours is the only one in the world.”

  My knees felt weaker than hers looked. “Why now? Why here? Why did you wait until—?”

  “Timing is everything, my dear. It’s no coincidence I waited till now because I didn’t think you were ready before. I knew you weren’t. That you came with me to this place, that you’re willing to see this scoundrel or devil or lover is proof you’re willing to open up a little and take a chance.”

  I recoiled from the thought. “Take a chance on what? On throwing my marriage away? my children? my life? I don’t even know what I’m doing here. What we’re doing here.”

  Someone stepped up behind us. A guard. “Is there a problem?”

  “No,” I said. “Just a discussion before we go inside.”

  “Better hurry it up.” He pointed at the clock. “Time’s wastin’.”

  “Ruthie, this whole thing scares me. What if I get in there and . . . ?”

  She patted my arm with an arthritic hand that could have passed as the talon of some ancient bird. “Karin, do you trust me?”

  “I have up until now, but I’m beginning to wonder why.”

  “Then you’re going to have to trust me when you don’t feel like it.”

  “I don’t know if I—”

  “I do.” Ruthie said it forcefully, eyebrows furrowed, like she meant for it to sink deep into my soul. “I’ve divined the one dream you told me about, but I haven’t figured out the other one.”

  That took my breath. “How do you know about the other one? I never told you.”

  She waved a hand. “Some dreams are written on our minds, and it takes years to figure them out. Others are written on our hearts, and it takes someone who loves us deeply to read them and tell us what they mean. There is a language on your heart I’ve been trying to translate ever since I met you. At first, it was just curiosity. Then the more I got to know you, the more I came to love you, the more I wanted to know.” She pointed at the door. “There’s an answer sitting in a chair in that room, separated from us by a thick wall of plastic. I am going to find out what is written on that heart of yours because it’s the only thing that will truly set you free. At least that’s what I believe.”

  My heart would not be still. Something told me life would never be the same once we faced Will.

  “Karin, I know this is good, but there’s something I need you to do.”

  I wasn’t sure what else she could ask. She had already driven me from my comfortable life. What more?

  “Can you open that door for me?” she said.

  Karin

  Children are unaware of thorns.

  I pushed Tarin’s stroller to Ruthie’s house, and Tarin caught sight of a rosebush in bloom and reached to grab it. I held her hand but picked a bud so she could smell it. “That’ll hurt you if you touch the sticky parts,” I said.

  Ruthie’s house was nestled in a sea of stucco and hot tubs, and its simplicity struck me. Ivy wandered around the chimney, and violets bloomed near the concrete porch. Inside was unbearably hot, but she didn’t seem to notice. She had bathed before dinner and smelled of sweet talcum.

  Ruthie poured two glasses of sparkling wine, and we ate a mouthwatering Parmesan chicken recipe she said had been in her family a hundred years. I think it was the first time I truly savored a meal.

  “Food was never meant to be gulped,” Ruthie would later say. “Food and family and friends are meant to be enjoyed slowly. Meals are a lot like life, fresh and hot and inviting. If you run through them, you miss a lot.”

  At some point in the evening, Ruthie asked about my love life.

  “I’m married. I don’t have time for love.”

  I thought she would laugh, but she waited, drawing me like some ingrown tide. Though I could not speak his name, I told her of a young man I had known, and the feelings I had pushed away suddenly returned.

  “What happened to him?” she said.

  “He went away and I settled for a good man.”

  “Have you ever spoken with him?”

  I shook my head. “It’s too late.”

  Somehow we got onto the topic of writing, something I had done in childhood. Ruthie handed me a leather-bound notebook and said she wanted me to fill it with everything I could remember.

  That night I began writing again, but I mostly filled the book with her words, her homespun wisdom. When I met her for lunch and forgot the notebook, I wrote on paper napkins or on the backs of children’s menus. I could not get enough of her words, and there didn’t seem to be anything she would hold back from me.

  Some time later she asked what I’d written, and I opened the book to her words and shared my thoughts.

  Ruthie laughed from the gut, put her elbow on the table, and propped her chin on the back of her hand. “I think we’ve finally found something.”

  “Really? Like what?”

  “Finally hit a nerve. All this time we’ve been dancing around the edges of your life, and we finally find it in this journal of yours.”

  “You mean, writing? You think—”

  “It’s never only one thing, honey. It’s not just writing or the idea of putting something on paper for others to read. There’s something more here.”

  The wrinkles on her face came into focus as she leaned forward. “You struggle. You fight and you claw inside that head of yours. You wrestle with God, with the idea that he actually cares for you, with the place your children have brought you, and a thousand other things. There’s something about your struggle others need to know. That they’ll benefit from.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Ruthie stood and picked up one of the glass objects her husband had created. A dogwood bloom. Two long petals, two short, like the cross. A bloodstain on each. At the center, a crown of thorns. Our town had embraced the story of Christ crucified on a dogwood tree. The legend said it once grew straight and tall. Jesus promised it would never be used for executions again, and as the poem went, “Slender and twisted it shall always be, with cross-shaped blossoms for all to see.”

  Ruthie cradled the glass gingerly, studying it and holding it up to the light like a priceless gem. “God puts every one of us here for a purpose. There’s some pull on our lives that draws us toward that purpose, and the farther we go away from it, the more unhappy we are. The closer we get, the more we yearn and desire it.”

  “I’m a mother and a wife. I don’t have time for purpose or desire or being drawn to anything but sleep and laundry.”

  She smiled. “There’s a reason you spend nights in your closet. I think you’re there because you’re not even close.”

  “Close to what?”

  “To what you were really put here to be. Not to do. To be. Doin
g is overrated. Being is where God works. What he’s most concerned about.”

  I frowned. “What, you want me to start an orphanage? run for office?”

  “Nobody knows that but you and God. And you don’t even know the half of it. You see, he looks at our lives as a whole, not just today, tomorrow, yesterday, and next week. Not even this year and next. He’s not counting your failures and your mistakes and keeping a running tab like heaven’s waiter. He sees the end just as well as the beginning. He knows about the pit you’re in right now.”

  “The closet.”

  “Exactly. He knows where you’re headed. You’ll get there if you keep struggling. Most people think the struggle means failure. It’s actually the best thing that could happen. That struggle will pull you out on the other side a lot stronger, a lot deeper. It’s like cooking a good meal. You don’t do that in a microwave, my dear. You let it simmer and boil and simmer some more until it’s right. And you do that in an oven over lots of time and some high temperatures. Life is a process without a timer.”

  It was a stretch to believe my nights in the closet weren’t worthless siftings of the mind. “So you think I’m supposed to write?”

  Ruthie rolled her eyes. “It’s not a supposed to. And, yes, you will find whatever that thing is.”

  “But how do you know?” I said. “What was your purpose?”

  Her eyes twinkled like I imagined Santa’s would the night before Christmas. “When I was little, times were hard. I grew up along a creek, and I’d spend hours walking up and down it, surveying the flow of the water, just like you used to do. One day I was looking into the water and saw the reflection of a young girl across from me. From that day on, I knew I had a friend. We spent hours together. Talking. Laughing. Having tea parties. Every time we were together, it was like pouring water from an endless pitcher. Her life into mine, mine into hers. Over the years, I’ve replaced her with others, usually younger women.”

  “Like me.”

  Ruthie nodded. “Water that’s not moving becomes stagnant. And if there’s not someone pouring into you, the pitcher gets dusty. A person is most satisfied and most useful when she is both giving and receiving. In marriage. In life. In friendship. With God too.”

  A few days later Ruthie and I talked as I pushed Tarin in a stroller along the sidewalk. There were moments talking with Ruthie when things became crystal clear, as if my life’s clouds suddenly broke and brilliant sunshine streamed through, illuminating the countryside.

  “I went to the kitchen the other night for a glass of water and grabbed a mug from the cabinet,” I said. “It was dark and I felt my way along until I found the sink and turned on the tap. But I had the mug upside down. I didn’t know it, but I was trying to put water in an upside-down mug.”

  “What happened?”

  “Water went everywhere. My nightshirt got soaked. It just struck me: I’ve lived my whole life like that—upside down. God has tried pouring things into me that I had no capacity to keep.”

  She smiled and wobbled to a stop. “Karin, here’s the hidden truth about that. He’s the one turning your life upside down. He has you in that closet for a purpose.”

  “But I don’t like it. It’s not fair.”

  Ruthie put a wrinkled, arthritic arm around me. “One day you’ll be right side up, and the water will go where it’s supposed to. You’ll be filled.” She spread a hand out and motioned toward an imaginary window. “One day there will be a display at Books-A-Million. It’ll fill a whole window and they’ll have to stack them on top of each other and people will push their way through to get at them. Oprah will call and you’ll be too busy to talk.”

  “Right. And what will my books be about? What’s the subject that will draw me again and again?”

  “It’ll be about struggle and finding your heart. It’s really what you’re all about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ruthie didn’t speak for a long time. When we made it to her porch, I took Tarin out and let her play with a shoe box filled with toys Ruthie kept out for her.

  Finally she spoke. “We do almost anything not to struggle. We take the easy path because it makes us feel better. We think a smooth road will get us to the destination quicker. And that’s our problem—we’re not at all concerned about where we’re going but how fast we can get there.” She sat in a rocking chair and wiped her brow with a paper towel. “That has been your full-time job for a long time.”

  “Taking the easy way out?”

  “Choosing to feel better instead of growing.”

  I wasn’t sure I agreed, but I decided to follow her lead. “Why do you think I do that?”

  “Because growing is painful. Most people work overtime at the Make Me Feel Better Chapel. Something bad happens and they throw a verse at you, like a fish to a walrus. That makes them feel better, being able to pull something out of a hat they hope will make sense of the pain. But if you’re on the other end, it doesn’t matter that the verse is true; it still feels like a fish because the person had no intention of entering your struggle. Of just sitting with you and moving through it like those Old Testament boys did or the man in the parable. It never occurs to them that you need them to bend down and help you up, take you to a doctor, try to bandage your wounds. They throw a verse, cross to the other side, and they’re on their way.”

  “But I don’t blame them. Struggling is hard. You can’t really enter into another person’s pain like that.”

  Ruthie drained her glass of iced tea and tossed the remaining ice cubes onto her zinnias. She took my glass, turned hers over, and poured a small amount of tea on the bottom and watched it pool. “You were telling me about living upside down and trying to pour water on the bottom of a mug. It’s possible to hold a little water here. That’s the way I tell if my dishes are clean in the dishwasher. Most times I can’t remember if I’ve done them, so I pat my hand there to see if there’s any water. You can’t get much, but there’s some.”

  Then she turned her glass over, grabbed the pitcher of tea, and poured with abandon until the glass overflowed, ran down the sides onto her hand, and spilled onto the porch.

  I picked up my feet as it gushed past Tarin, who looked on in amazement.

  Ruthie’s eyes were on me, burning through. “Which do you want?” she whispered. “Do you want to live on the surface of the bottom, as shallow as the bottom of this glass? Or do you want something else?”

  “I want to be filled. I want to overflow.”

  Tears rimmed her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “Good. You struggle and fight with everything in you and don’t take the easy way out. Wrestle those demons in that closet and don’t stop struggling until you’ve written it down for every one of us.”

  It took a long time to digest that.

  Later, when a cool breeze had blown past us, carrying the scent of dinners on the wind, Ruthie spoke again. “Most people have given up on their heart. They’ve settled for less. Like a married couple on treadmills, both working hard, spewing out sweat, but never getting anywhere. They’re content to sit on the porch in rocking chairs and watch life. At one point they had some vague sense when something deep down inside called to them and they wanted to follow, but the ticking clock and the kids and the mortgage drowned it out. It’s a rhythm, a beat in the background you have to strain to hear. You have to push things out of the way to really listen.”

  “I think I know what you’re talking about,” I said reluctantly.

  “You hear it clearly when you’re young. There’s a freedom when you’re a child that sets the heart on the right path. But something happens. Especially with girls. We sense something. We feel uneasy in our gut because of someone’s words or an action, something that doesn’t feel quite right, but then we push it down. We don’t listen.”

  “Why?”

  “For a million reasons. We don’t want people to think we’re judgmental. We don’t want to hurt another person’s feelings. We’re afraid of what others might think
.”

  “Example,” I said.

  “When I was younger, I sang in a church group. We’d travel around to different places. There was something about the leader, though. It was a gut reaction—stay away; don’t get too close. But I didn’t listen.”

  “Did he ever do anything to you?”

  Ruthie bit her cheek. “Yes. And here I am an old woman, and I still remember that night. Like it was yesterday. To this day I feel vulnerable around people who are supposed to be spiritual leaders. That’s the terrible thing. You stop listening to your heart and you become a shell of who you were meant to be.”

  Exactly what I felt like. Empty. “Can you ever get that back? regain the power to listen to your heart?”

  “You bet. That’s the great thing about God. He can restore the broken places. It’s really what he’s all about. Beauty for ashes.”

  If you’ve ever had a friend who cares enough about you to get down in the dirt and roll around, to cry and laugh and shovel the manure of life, you’ll know how I felt when Ruthie leaned forward. I still get shivers thinking about her words and how true they were. How true they are.

  “God is taking you somewhere, Karin. Someplace deep. He wants you to go with him. Most people never hear that call, never follow. They’re too busy or too successful or have just stopped listening. He’s making you uncomfortable. He doesn’t want to let you settle for chicken feed, where you hunt and peck what you want and leave the rest. I don’t know where you’ll wind up, but I’ll bet it’s going to feel a little bit lonely. He probably won’t take away your sadness. In fact, he might add to it. But when you’re closer to God and the things he cares about, there’s no better place.”

  “I’m not sure I want to go. I’m not sure I can.”

  “You can. You’ve been given a gift. Most people never get old enough to let go of the illusion. . . .”

  “Which illusion?”

  “The one that says you can have a perfect life, a perfect marriage, a perfect child, or whatever else you dream of being perfect. That you can get to a point where there’s no pain. That you never lose sleep.” Ruthie put her head back on the rocker. “Basically life is a dance through a field full of cow manure. Most people won’t even go into the field; they go around it and pretend. Or they try to tiptoe here and there and stay close to the fence. They never see that all that fertilizer creates some beautiful flowers and some of the greenest grass you’ll ever see.”