The Mighty Queens of Freeville

by Amy Dickinson

  Once inside our new house, I turned on the heat, saying a little prayer to the God of the Basement that the furnace worked. I didn’t want to get cocky, but I also layered a hope on top of the prayer—that we wouldn’t blow up in a fireball caused by a gas leak. I didn’t have a couch, so as I waited for the heat to come up I leaned on the sill of the world’s ugliest faux bay window and looked onto the street.

  In my few weeks of home ownership, I had learned that every single thing having to do with my house seemed to cost $1,000. No matter how large or small the job was, the price was always $1,000. Replacing the screen door that flew off in my hands on the first day? $1,000. Affixing the porch to the house? $1,000. At that rate, it would be at least twenty years before the house was even average-ugly. I tried not to care and then I decided not to care, but I cared anyway. I couldn’t help it. I was tired from the long drive from DC and wondered if it was wise to tie myself to a second home when I didn’t own a first home. I wondered when I would get my comeuppance for being so fancy pants.

  Emily carefully scaled the danger-stairs and went into her empty and echo-y bedroom to put on her costume. Every year my sister Anne made Emily’s Halloween costume and gave it to her as a birthday present. This year she was Snow White; Emily had been excitedly slipping into her room and emerging in her costume every day after school for the past two weeks. I stood in the darkening house, waiting for my girl to become a Disney character.

  Main Street was starting to get crowded with little Power Rangers and princesses. I had planned to turn off the porch light in order to avoid handing out candy, but it turned out that the porch light didn’t work anyway ($1,000), so I didn’t have to worry about it. After trick-or-treating, Emily and I were going to sit on my cousin Jan’s porch with my mother and aunts to count our candy and watch the passing parade as the younger kids went on home and the older kids started to filter out into the night.

  I’ve always been inspired by the spookiness of Halloween and have a weakness for tall tales, legends, and fright lies of all kinds. When my nieces and nephews were young, I’d tell them stories of bears and wolverines run amok, escaped convicts, haunted toolsheds, headless milk maids, hook man, peg leg Pete, and the monster of Fall Creek. In the summer when Railey had sleepovers to celebrate her July birthday and the girls brought their sleeping bags to a tent in her yard, I’d swing by to say happy birthday and say, “You’re still planning on sleeping out? Oh, I guess you didn’t see the newspaper today? Well, it’s nothing to worry about, I’m sure. Don’t give it another thought.” Railey, who was quite used to the “Tall Tales and Legends” portion of my act would roll her eyes, but there was usually a girl who would take the bait. “What? What’s in the newspaper?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, I’m sure they caught him by now.”

  “Caught? Caught who?” “Oh, you really don’t know? Well, they had a breakout over at the Auburn State Prison, but don’t worry about it. They caught everybody. Well, almost everybody. There’s just one more guy out there.” I’d act casual.

  Railey would sigh and say in a bored voice, “Oh no. Don’t tell me the guy had a hook for a hand, Auntie Amy.”

  “Oh, then you did hear? As a matter of fact, he does have a hook for a hand, and I know that he grew up around here, but I don’t want you girls to get nervous about it. I’m sorry I even mentioned it. Hey—have fun to night!”

  The previous summer Emily had come with me as I snuck over to Railey’s house after dark and scratched on the outside of the tent. This was an integral physical manifestation of the hook man story. We heard a little voice inside, “Hey you guys, you guys, shut up! Did you hear something?”

  Much screaming ensued.

  Kids didn’t seem to want to be scared anymore on Halloween. Emily’s elementary school had banned any costumes that they deemed to be “frightening,” and so the school costume parade that year was a stream of frisky Bill Clintons and naughty Monica Lewinskies—and one little boy who dressed up as a Secret Service agent, complete with the blue blazer, rep tie, and earpiece.

  I hoped that Emily would be granted at least one Halloween night during her own childhood where she would go off on her own, away from my clutching hand. I wanted her to be in a place where she knew that she was safe enough to let herself get good and scared.

  “Honey, you better hurry up, it’s starting to get really dark!” I called out. Emily said that she was coming right down. I heard an upstairs door open.

  “Don’t forget to be careful on the st—!” I called out, but it was too late. She had already slipped off of the first step and was careening down on her bottom, a pint-size Snow White throwing off static sparks in a not-quite-enchanted cottage.

  I caught her at the base of the stairs. “Oh God, are you OK?” I asked. I checked her quickly for injuries—as far as I could tell, she only had a little carpet burn. She wasn’t crying or about to cry; mainly she looked mad as hell. Suddenly I felt a little sorry for my neighbor Bill. I had a feeling that this was the year that Snow White might kick his ass.

  I smoothed down Emily’s blue and yellow gown. “OK then, let’s say that was the ‘trick.’ Now we have to get some treats. We have some people to see. And some ghosts to see. Who-o-o-o-o-o…” I made the universal sound for a haunting, made popular by Abbott and Costello movies and Scooby-Doo. She shot me a look. I thought I saw little bolts of lightning flash in her coal black eyes.

  We walked out the front door of our very own house and stood on our own porch. I had the house keys with me. Should I lock? I pondered my options. Maybe vandals would toilet paper the inside of the house or steal my—what? I didn’t have anything. If I was lucky, someone would come in and steal the rest of the carpet. If I was really lucky they’d have their tools with them and take the kitchen cabinetry.

  We stepped out onto the sidewalk. The wind came up and the branches overhead clacked together. A whisper of a shiver ran up my spine.

  “Did you feel that?” I asked Emily.

  “Feel what?” she said.

  “I guess it wasn’t anything,” I said.

  “Are you trying to kid me again about the guy with a hook for his hand?” she asked, skeptically.

  “Shut up and hold my hook, I mean my hand,” I said—and she did.

  FIVE

  Making Peanut Jesus

  Finding God in the Community of Faith and Casseroles

  WHEN I LAST saw him, Peanut Jesus was lying swaddled in a teeny tiny piece of paper towel, resting sweetly in his cardboard manger. I turned my back for a minute in order to stop a covey of boys from putting together a tabletop football game pitting the Wise Men against Joseph and Mary.

  I admit that what happened next is something I probably should have anticipated. In my five years of teaching Sunday school to eight-and nine-year-olds at our church in Washington, I had already faced an ark full of preadolescent shenanigans, many having to do with our craft projects and the holy family. I trained myself in the art of the “teachable moment,” even at one point uttering the phrase “Yes, Steuart, that’s right. The Virgin Mary does have nipples. Class? Why does the Virgin Mary have nipples? Anyone? Because she was a woman. And she was a mom too. Does anyone know whose mom she was? No?”

  After my little Aristotelian monologue, delivered to the mostly smirking and freshly scrubbed faces of my prosperous little charges, I pretty much wanted to run screaming into the street, hail a cab, and go to the nearest bar, until I realized that it was ten-fifteen on a Sunday morning, and if I was lucky enough to find anything open, it would most likely be crowded with Sunday school rejects such as myself—and the last thing I wanted at such a moment was to be in proximity to people who shared my predicament and had been driven to drink by a room full of second graders.

  My class of around fifteen kids, which convened after the 9 A.M. service, trooped over to the education building while their parents cruised out to have coffee or a quick brunch at a café. Our weekly ninety-minute sessions were a blur of snacks, s
tories, simple prayers, and crafts. I liked sending the kids home with something we had made together and got pretty good at thinking up new ways to illustrate the Bible stories we were reading in class. Old Testament-wise, my class and I could knock out individual milk-carton chariots driven by clothespin Philistines in about half an hour. Our Popsicle stick Ark of the Covenant took two sessions, but only because the glue needed to dry.

  My crafty crowning glory, however, was the cereal box crèche.

  This elaborate homemade nativity scene featured a stable made of a cut-up cereal box populated with cotton ball sheep, cardboard camels, and the holy family, which we made from toilet paper rolls. The star of the cereal box crèche was Baby Jesus—a peanut still in its shell, swaddled in a tiny piece of paper towel and laid in a cardboard manger.

  My class of kids happily participated in the manufacturing of our crèches, cutting, gluing, and excitedly talking about Christmas. We assembled our individual Nativity scenes and reviewed the miraculous story of the birth of Baby Jesus. Then they drifted into their favorite classroom activity, which was to goof around.

  While my back was turned, I heard the familiar crack of a peanut shell. The faintest whiff of peanut essence escaped into the atmosphere, like a tiny puff of organic life being released into the stale air of our basement classroom. By the time I turned around, Peanut Jesus’ manger was empty. I knelt down, face-to-face with Wyatt West. He was wearing his usual Sunday school outfit—a tiny pair of chinos and a Brooks Brothers navy blue blazer over a light blue oxford shirt. He had a little clip-on necktie. Like many of the boys in my class, Wyatt always looked to me like a miniature congressman on a constituent visit. He was holding two empty peanut shell halves, looked blankly at me and said, “Wha…?” A small fleck of peanut skin dangled at the corner of his mouth.

  “Did you just eat Peanut Jesus?” I asked him.

  “That was Jesus?” he said. “I thought that was Joseph.”

  I decided to ignore the implication that it was somehow all right to eat Peanut Joseph and cut right to the chase.

  “No. Joseph is the dad. Class? Who is Joseph?”

  I picked up Joseph. His body was made from a toilet paper roll, which we had glued fabric onto and accented with pieces of yarn. Joseph’s eyes were pinto beans and his mouth a piece of macaroni. We used little cardboard flaps to make his flipperlike hands and feet.

  “This, my friends, is Joseph,” I said. I held Joseph aloft. He looked exactly like a toilet roll in drag. RuPaul, by way of Charmin.

  Later, on our way home in the car, I reviewed the events of the morning and asked Emily, as I often did, where I had gone wrong. She was a diligent and cooperative fifth grader who didn’t have me for a teacher and so could rattle off all the books of the Old and New Testament in thirty-six seconds. I was hoping she would have the perspective I lacked on my class of primary schoolers. “Mom, second grade kids are jerks. Especially second grade boys. They’re total spazzes too. And they have potty mouths. Have you listened to the way they talk? Honestly, sometimes I don’t know why you bother.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That was very helpful.”

  While I was aware that other Sunday school classes at our church’s efficiently run education program seemed to impart actual information, my own class of kids retained startlingly little. Sometimes I wondered why they kept coming, week after week, until I realized that most second graders don’t exactly have control over their own schedules. Like Emily, these kids came to church because that’s what they did on Sundays. It was like soccer practice, ballet, or Little League. They showed up because their parents drove them there.

  The following week, I took my concerns to the rector of our church, Reverend Kenworthy. “The kids—I don’t know. I don’t know if they are getting much out of what I’m doing.”

  “You’re there. You’re there every week, and this is your ministry,” he said. Like a wise person who answers a question with a question, he dodged my concerns by praising my intentions. But ministry? I didn’t think so.

  I started teaching Sunday school when Emily was in kindergarten, soon after we started attending Christ Episcopal Church in the fanciest part of swanky Georgetown. I wanted a place for the two of us to go on Sunday mornings, which for me have always felt like a yawning, mournful void—a time when I feel overly homesick and sorry for myself, a time that I only know how to fill with church. The church I chose was fairly high-church Episcopalian; its pretty Gothic interior burnished with the scent of a hundred years’ worth of incense. I had attended this same church occasionally when I was a student at Georgetown, whenever I needed a Protestant refuge from the Catholicism of my college. Famously, some scenes from The Exorcist were shot in the church’s small side garden. Some mornings, while lingering in the garden during the coffee hour, I pictured Jason Miller, brooding and intense, keeping Satan at bay and surrounded by a film crew.

  I grew up in a churchy, if not overtly religious, home, and attending church is one childhood habit I’ve never seen fit to break. The only years when I didn’t attend services regularly were when my husband and I lived in New York City together during the mid-1980s. Then, our Sundays were fully committed to the official New York religious devotions of reading the Sunday Times and buying things. Once we moved to London and my husband’s job removed him from the Sunday equation, I started occasionally attending church again, always on my own—popping into a small Anglican church on the pretty square across from our apartment.

  Emily’s first Christmas Eve was spent in a Snugli strapped to me as I stood in the back of the sanctuary of the small church on our London square, sobbing quietly with loneliness (my husband was away) as I followed the candlelight service and wondered what my family was doing half a world away in Freeville. She was two months old and her family hadn’t yet met her.

  I wanted Emily to know God. I thought I could make the introduction and perhaps stick around for a while to see if these two strangers struck up a cordial conversation. I was like an ambitious hostess at a cocktail party—I didn’t want to force a relationship, but once the two started to talk, I would quietly disappear and hope it took.

  Later in January during Emily’s infancy we flew to the States—all three of us—in order to baptize her at the Freeville United Methodist Church. Like most things we did together during our brief time as a family, I was the tour guide and my husband the tourist, detached from the experience itself but ready with a camera to photograph it. He was a natural-born chronicler, used to looking at life through a lens, and of course because he was so often taking the picture, he was frequently missing from it. Our photo albums were mainly records of a mother and a daughter having experiences together, prefiguring our life to come.

  My hometown church, next to the elementary school on Main Street, has always been one of my favorite places. Like everything else in Freeville, our church had become an exaggerated version of itself with the passage of time. In January, blanketed with snow, it looked like a New En gland white-steepled church such as you might see in a painting by Grandma Moses, but like much else in the village (including its inhabitants), up close it was obviously a little the worse for wear. It was faced with aluminum siding in the 1960s, and moisture in the joints between the metal clapboards forced little rust stains (they looked like rusty tears) down its front. A marquee with press-on letters announced that week’s message—COME HOME TO JESUS.

  Inside, the small narthex gave way to the warmth of the sanctuary, which is wrapped in highly varnished maple wainscoting. Jesus stares benignly out at the congregation from his assigned place—high on the wall, next to the altar. Jesus’ portrait, reproduced in the 1950s, has a muted, photo finish quality. It’s a head-and-shoulders shot of Jesus, which in its pose and composition looks exactly like a high school yearbook picture. Jesus has a surfer smile, Tiff any blue eyes, a trim beard, and shoulder-length chestnut brown hair. He looks smart and nice. He’s definitely the valedictorian of his class.

  On Sundays w
hen I was a kid, swinging my legs against the pew and hallucinating with boredom during the service, I’d stare at Jesus’ yearbook picture and pray for him to deliver me from evil—and the agonies of the sermon. Whether due to divine intervention or good luck, I was spared both.

  The United Methodist Church is not only a house of worship, but it is also the place where things happen in Freeville. The church is like a town hall, performance venue, and all-you-can-eat casserole buff et rolled into one. The congregation more or less runs itself according to an ambitious calendar made up not necessarily of holy days but of potluck suppers, coffee hours, barbques, festivals, rummage sales, skits, cantatas, and hymn sings.

  Many of our gatherings revolve around the eating of casseroles, pies, poultry, and any vegetable served in white sauce or Campbell’s condensed cream of mushroom soup with shredded cheddar cheese and crumbled saltines on top. The church kitchen is staffed by a group of volunteer women who prepare and serve the meals by which we feed our faith. They engage in a cheddar cheese ministry of the highest order.

  Among the kitchen ladies are my three aunts, Lena, Millie, and Jean. They wear aprons over their good clothes, their faces blurred by the steam rising from the massive pots they use to prepare their specialties—mashed potatoes, mashed squash, candied ham, or the church’s legendary chicken barbque.

  On summertime Saturdays for the last fifty years a small committee of men have gathered at dawn at the barbque pit across Main Street from the church. They lay out the coals and light them. By 8 A.M., the coals are white with heat, and they line up dozens of chicken halves on large wire racks, sopping them with a marinade-soaked brush. Within an hour the chickens start to cook and the vinegar scent of the marinade drifts through town.