Sister Wilma said she was an Egyptian slave in one of her former lives, and an Indian princess. I wondered if she ever met Raj in her Egyptian days. He too claimed many pasts and personalities.
We sat in Sister Wilma’s living room, in chairs with plaid cushions and chunky armrests. On a table beside Sister Wilma was a Bible, an alarm clock, and a blue jay’s feather. All the plants in the room were dead or dying. Sister Wilma asked us if we had ever been to a spiritual counselor before. We said no. Sister Wilma explained that she worked in a state of split consciousness. “I will be talking to you, and you can talk to me.”
Sister Wilma glanced at the clock. “Please don’t let me run over. Gotta pick up my daughter at nine.” Sister Wilma smiled. “Big volleyball game tonight.”
We nodded.
Sister Wilma then picked up the blue jay feather, closed her eyes, and began to breathe deeply. The room was silent except for Sister Wilma’s breathing, which grew steadily calmer and louder. Although her breathing was controlled, her fingers were not. Nervously, she pulled the feather through her fingers, over and over again.
I poked Ella and pointed toward Sister Wilma. Ella had thirty-five dollars burning inside her pocket. She fingered the bills and wondered how to ask if Sister Wilma knew where her notebook was. The notebook that contained “Howling Mad Home,” her poem about Round Corners.
“You know,” said Sister Wilma, “I’ve been doing readings since I was twelve years old and it never changes. People never change. Take the guy who was in here before you. He wanted me to ‘look into the cards’ and tell him if his wife knew he was fooling around. People have to have tarot cards and crystal balls and star charts. They want black veils and hoop earrings. I don’t even have pierced ears.
“And they think we’re all crooked. The first thing they say is ‘tell me something about myself’. I’m put through more tests in a month than most college students take in a lifetime. I’m supposed to be able to tell them what they had for breakfast this morning and if they’ll get a promotion tomorrow. People love to hear what they already know about themselves. If I were paying the kind of money I’m being paid, I’d want to know something I don’t know.”
Sister Wilma stroked the feather again and again. Her breathing bounced off the silent walls of the room. Ella reached for my hand. I don’t know why I agreed to come with her. I didn’t believe the Sister Wilmas in the world. But Ella sounded so desperate on the telephone. I squeezed Ella’s hand.
“I can’t read palms,” Sister Wilma went on. “ I have no idea what significance the number five has in your life. I can’t shuffle a deck of pinochle cards without bending the corners. But people don’t want to know. They want to see the crystal ball. For awhile, I used one of those dime store snow scenes in a globe. The customers loved it.”
I understood: barns, mountains, cows. The tourists loved them.
“I’ve been psychic all my life,” Sister Wilma said. “I’ve always known I was different. My father recognized what I was from the start.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I tried to hide my abilities. I wanted to be like everyone else. Kids can be so cruel, y’know. But Father wouldn’t let me. He never let me doubt myself.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” I said.
“He always told me I was born with all I needed to be. You are put on this earth, he said, not to become something new but to discover how old you are. We already have all the answers inside us.” Sister Wilma laughed. “Isn’t that a kick in the head? Better not let that get out. I’d be out of business.”
The alarm clock jangled. I reached over and turned it off. Slowly, Sister Wilma opened her eyes and smiled. She placed the mangled blue jay feather on the table.
We rose and Ella handed over her thirty-five dollars.
Sister Wilma pocketed the bills, without looking at them, and smiled. “Did I answer all your questions?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good,” she said, padding across the floor in her Earth shoes. She grabbed her coat, escorted us to the door, and locked it behind us. As she headed for the blue compact parked beside my van, she chattered, “I hope Lucy got to play. She warms the bench and hopes. The coach says she’s too short. Short, I say, look at the Chinese and then talk to me about short volleyball players.”
We watched Sister Wilma drive off into the world of high school athletics, then wearily climbed into the van. We drove to my house, cracked open a couple of Rolling Rocks, and put our feet up on the coffee table.
“Well,” said Ella.
“Well,” I said.
Ella didn’t go home that night. Thomas woke us the next morning when he stubbed his toe on a pyramid of beer cans by Ella’s leg. Thomas drove Ella into town. She insisted on opening the post office despite a temporary sensitivity to loud sounds and a throbbing head. Neither rain, snow, gloom of night or Rolling Rocks, apparently, can stop the U.S. mail.
It was about 10:35, while she was pulling several packages from a mail bag, that she heard Frank opening the store next door. She harrumphed; he’d overslept. “What did you do, Frank, forget to set the alarm?” she said, sticking out her tongue at the barricade blocking the entrance to the store. The taunt hurt her head and Ella winced. She poured two aspirin from a bottle in the top drawer and chewed them without water. Frank hated when she did that.
Ella returned to the sorting. Redbook for Wynn. A farm journal for T-Bone. A letter from Maine for Reverend Swan. A letter for her. Ella stopped, reread the name on the envelope. It was addressed to her. She tore open the letter and gasped. It was from the editor of a literary magazine. Ella remembered the editor from the writers conference. She’d purchased one of his magazines, paid by check, and, apparently, now was permanently ensconced on his mailing list. The letter was a form letter, a call for submissions—the first Ella had ever received. Ella screamed with joy and hopped around the post office; letters flurried behind her dancing to the floor. She whirled and whirled until suddenly she realized “Howling Mad Home” was the only poem suitable for such a magazine.
“Oh no,” howled Ella, laying her head on the counter among the stamps and sobbing.
Ella’s final wail was too much for Frank. He burst through the barricade with a bump and a crash, then had to rest a moment against the door jamb. “What is it?” he panted. “Ella? Why are you crying?”
Frank’s entrance startled Ella. She gaped at him, a line of stamps stuck to her forehead. “I…”
“Are you hurt?” Frank asked.
“No, I…”
“Then what in the hell are you doing screaming bloody murder and scaring me and where were you last night and…”
“I…”
“Ella, I was worried sick.”
“I didn’t think you’d notice.”
“Not notice! You didn’t come home all night.”
“Well, you didn’t notice the ham was burnt on Christmas.”
“I noticed; I was being polite.”
“Polite.”
Now that he had his breath back after that heroic rescue, Frank pushed away from the door and took Ella in his arms. He gently peeled off the stamps from her forehead. She clung to him and thought how good he smelled.
“Now tell me what this is all about,” he said.
Ella handed him the letter. Frank read it.
“Tonight we’ll look for that notebook,” he said. “We’ll turn the house, the post office, even the store upside down.”
“But tonight you have barbershop quartet practice.”
“So. I can miss it once.”
“You never miss.”
Frank shrugged.
Ella snuggled closer. “You sure came through that door fast.”
“I should have hurdled the snow bank. I tripped over a case of beans. My shin hurts like hell.”
“Oh, dear.” They looked at the mess of boxes and cans and rolls of toilet paper.
“C’mon,” he said, “I’ll fix you a cup of coffee and you c
an sit by the stove. I think I even have a bear claw left from breakfast.”
That night Frank and Ella did search and search and search. At 4:05 in the morning, a whoop of glee nearly woke up Round Corners and if anyone had peeked inside the front window of Snowden’s Store, they would have seen Ella Snowden dancing around the canned goods hugging her notebook.
They found the notebook as they dismantled the barricade; it was in a box marked “pastry.” Ella remembers it all now. She remembers working on her poem late one night at the post office and being attacked by the munchies, as they called it at writers’ conference. Overcome by a yearning for something sweet, she let herself into the store to sneak two packages of bear claws from the box marked “pastry.”
“I must have left the notebook on the box and it got knocked inside by accident,” Ella said. “I remember standing beside the box and stuffing my face with bear claws and then walking right out the door, locking up, and driving home.”
Ella made a believer of me. Sister Wilma was right. The answers are inside us. Sometimes right in our digestive track.
18. Looking for Life’s Rest Stops
I love the smell of cinnamon rolls. Oh, that’s right, you can’t smell them, can you, George? What a shame.
I don’t recall you baking cinnamon rolls like these, so full of butter and cinnamon. To be frank, George, your swirls were always crooked. Thomas has a way of rolling the dough, the layers of butter and cinnamon sugar so perfect, never crooked… and the way he seals the long rolls of dough with just the proper pinch. Sorry, George, but you never had the pinching touch.
Pinching, not pinch hitting.
What do they taste like? Melt-in-your-mouth ecstasy, that’s all. It’s like your insides really can’t believe how good they are. Of course, you wouldn’t understand; you don’t have insides.
That was rotten—teasing George. I know. Corporeal comedy. I really can’t defend myself. It is like shooting fish in a barrel. What can I say? Someone reload my gun. I get this way when the Good Cheer Lady bit is forced upon me. I explained it all to Thomas as he shoved a list of deliveries in my hand. I have a lousy bedside manner. “Good thing none of these people are bed-ridden then,” said an unsympathetic Thomas.
I was shanghaied into delivering the cinnamon rolls because Thomas refused to leave his yeast. Yeast, according to Thomas, was a temperamental ingredient. And so, it didn’t hurt to talk to it occasionally like a yucca plant or a philodendron. Thomas found nothing unusual in discoursing at length with fermenting fungi.
“It’s part of the plant kingdom,” he said.
Somewhere in Thomas’s past cinnamon rolls came to be the universal comfort food. It was Thomas’s solution to unhappiness. He baked enough cinnamon rolls to force the entire town of Round Corners onto a diet. He was optimistic that the cinnamon rolls would work. I wasn’t sure how flour, sugar, butter, cinnamon, and yeast was supposed to snap Reverend Swan out of the doldrums or give Ella back her illusions.
Ella peeked inside the tin and began to cry. She said to thank Thomas, but “Cinnamon rolls weren’t bear claws.” When Ella reread “Howling Mad Home,” she discovered it wasn’t nearly as good as she remembered. In fact, it sucked like a vacuum cleaner. Personally, I don’t think that’s all bad. If we all wrote perfect poems the first time, revision wouldn’t exist; second chance would never have been born. And then where is the learning in that?
I’m sure Sister Wilma would say Ella once wrote a perfect poem—in a former life—and now all she had to do was remember how she did it. It was just as Ella thought: Memory (or the lack thereof) was the bane of her life.
Perhaps memory, not comets, is the stuff of life. It too visits us in fleeting moments, leaving sparks of recognition, embers that might have told us something if only we had paid attention to them instead of shoving them aside and saying “I’ll think about that later—right now, I have to worry about what to cook for dinner or how Junior’s going to get through college or whether there will be Social Security when I’m old.”
I eased my foot from the accelerator, switched on Catfish Joe’s noonday show, grabbed a gooey cinnamon role with my mittened hand, and took my time arriving at Reverend Swan’s house. This good neighbor stuff was not all it cracked up to be; in fact, I found it downright dangerous. T-Bone threw his cinnamon rolls at my head: “Tell that kid he can keep his damn bread. He probably forgot the raisins anyway.”
Thomas’s good cheer offering sent Wynn into another bout of depression. “Great. More calories. He must be in league with Junior,” Wynn said, passing them around to her clients.
I was apprehensive about my reception at the Swan house. However, that day I was in luck. Reverend Swan was shoveling the sidewalk. He loves shoveling snow. He prays while he fights the white stuff, his prayers taking on the rhythm of his work. Scoop/swing/pitch. Scoop/swing/pitch. Lord/I am/but a man. Lost/and/alone. Have mercy/on/my soul.
I can dig that, not the praying part, but the shoveling. The solace of physical labor, T-Bone calls it. Sounds rather whimsical for T-Bone. But snow does that to you. It turns us all into blithering poets, cowboy romantics, muscle-bound maniacs. The snow war is an honorable battle. The shovel a noble weapon. The ache in the small of the back from bending and flinging a courageous casualty. When I was painting, back in the pre-George Period, and I got stuck, I’d shovel snow. In the cold quiet of swinging shovel, I cleared my head as I cleared the path, made my mind as blank as the snow. And answers would come to me. Some winters, when questions fell faster than snow and there wasn’t a flake left on the sidewalks and paths, I shoveled the fields. There were paths, thoroughfares, avenues all over our farm for the cows and the cats and the rabbits.
Reverend Swan attacked the snow with vengeance. Apparently, he had a lot on his mind. Mrs. Swan thought he should hire a boy to do the shoveling. You’re sixty years old, she said. When he shoveled, she ran back and forth from whatever work she was doing—ironing, baking, sewing—to the front window. She expected to see him prostrate in the snow bank someday, his heart refusing to lift one more flake.
Hire a boy, she said. Just like the one he once had been in a little town on the New Hampshire-Vermont border. Back then, he shoveled snow to earn money. He bought his first football with snow money, and a scarf for his father, and a new rosary for his mother. It was her birthday. The students at the seminary outside of town made religious articles—rosaries, prayer books, medals, statues for the dashboard—in a manufacturing plant, where they also learned to be priests. For his mother, he chose a rosary with blue beads and inside every bead was a picture of the Virgin Mary. Never had he seen a rosary so beautiful. He asked the seminarian at the cash register to bless it for him. His mother insisted on having the blessing redone, by a “real” priest after Mass on Sunday.
Those beads had come in handy in the following years. He grew up, planned to become a priest/rosary maker, met Mrs. Swan, fell in love, married, and “deserted the church,” as his mother put it. When he became a minister in “that heathen faith,” his mother told him, she prayed for him on her special Virgin Mary rosary. When she died, the undertaker entwined the blue beads about her fingers. They were entombed with her, much as horses and slaves were buried with pharaohs. She would need them in the next world, apparently, to pray for her wayward Episcopalian son.
There was another thing Reverend Swan bought with snow money. Music lessons. His mother never understood the saxophone. She wanted him to take organ lessons, then he could play at Mass. And perhaps, if he had studied the organ as she wanted, he’d still be Catholic today.
For it is from the saxophone that he first learned doubt. Limits, the saxophone said, can be broken. It does not have to be as it always was. You can be free, the saxophone said. You can fly. And it came to be that the saxophone was his belief, that God lived in its clear notes, not in some glass beads.
I stood on top of a frozen snow bank, towering above Reverend Snow, as he finished the end of the sidewalk. Finally, he le
aned on the shovel and squinted up at me.
“Maud, I have to confess to feeling out of touch with God lately.”
He thought I might understand, it being an artist thing. Ever since Odie flattened his saxophone, Reverend Swan had been praying, frantically, all the time, everywhere, in hopes of regaining his former spiritual status. He prayed so he wouldn’t think. He repeated prayers from the Catholic missal he had memorized as a child. If he had known Arabic, he would have quoted the Koran. If he had known Hebrew, he would have recited the Torah. Anything to keep his mind from working—alphabetizing, editing, correcting, arranging his being.
At night was the worst time. When he slept, he could not pray, and then his subconscious ran amok. Often he struggled awake in the darkness, sweating, gasping, thinking. And the thought he awoke with always was the same: “What if we really are all alone, and there is no one else out there; what if there never was anyone here but us, and when we go—we’re gone.” Reverend Swan was utterly shocked by the blasphemous train his thoughts had hopped.
Obviously, Reverend Swan needed a Rolling Rock, but today I was without my supplies. I shoved the cinnamon rolls under his nose. “I know what you mean. The feeling of purposelessness can drive you crazy. Cinnamon roll?”
Reverend Swan tugged off a glove and reached for a roll. “I can’t accept the concept of purposelessness,” Reverend Swan said. “We are more important than a particle of space dust. I’d rather become a Hindu and look forward to a life as a worm or a cow than accept it was all for naught.” Reverend Swan paused in mid-chew. “A Hindu! Mother would blister her fingers on the beads.”
I am the resident chief of self-doubt, everyone knows it and so, whenever they’re feeling even the slightest bit diffident they come to me, Mother Cowboy Confessor. My advice is as deep as one of Catfish Joe’s Top Ten.
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