by Amy Sorrells
Often in the summer when school was out and they had nothing else to keep them busy, Mama had doled out old baby-food jars to him and Eustace and Shelby so the three of them could run off to play and make butter. They’d take a ladle to the milk tank and fill the jars three-quarters full, seal them up tight with the lids, and skedaddle out of there before Dad could catch them. They’d run to the creek shaking the jars the whole way, then sit on the mossy banks and stick their toes in the water and shake and shake the jars. Eventually, a clump of butter appeared in the bottom, sitting in a puddle of buttermilk. Sometimes Mama put a pinch of salt or sugar in the jars ahead of time—cinnamon, if they were really lucky. They’d scoop the butter out with their fingers, sweet cream cool and smooth on their throats.
Once, Dad had found them out there and not noticed Shelby was with them. He was coming at Noble and Eustace hard with an old piece of barn wood, rusty nails still sticking out the ends. When he’d seen Shelby, though, he backed down.
“He always act like that?” Shelby had asked, her dark curls falling over her ivory skin.
“Pretty much,” Noble admitted, hot with the shame of realizing all over again something was broken in their family.
Eustace was nearing the end of grade school when he made one of his biggest mistakes. He and Noble had cleaned all of the milk collectors and tubing and hung it to dry. They washed out the barns and did all their chores. But as they washed out the room where the milk tank was, they unknowingly knocked the plugs loose that powered the cooling and cooling alarm system for the milk tank. The next morning Dad checked the tank temperature and it was way too warm. The tank truck was coming to empty it that morning, and half a dozen rounds of milking were unfit for sale. Noble could still remember the way the purple rose in his father’s face. He could still feel the chill that ran through him as all the blood drained to his feet and he and Eustace stood there, weak-kneed and waiting for their punishment.
The beating lasted only a few minutes, but it’d seemed like an hour. Mama’d heard it all the way from the house and ran out to try to stop him, but she, too, got Dad’s wrath, right on the side of the face where she ended up with half a dozen stitches. Eustace got it worst, though. He always got it worst. Dad broke one of his ribs, and the punch he took to the face swelled his eye up so bad the doctor had to lance it so the swelling wouldn’t make him lose his eyesight, it was pressing up against his eyeball so tight. He had a scar from that and one that matched Mama’s that took a dozen stitches to close.
Noble remembered standing in the corner of the emergency room watching the white-coated doctor give Mama and Eustace shots and then sew them up with a curvy needle while a kind-faced nurse dabbed at the still-oozing blood with clean gauze. Every so often she’d glance at Noble and smile at him, but her eyes gave away her sadness. Noble kept his face still and tried not to cry, which was what he wanted to do. He wanted to cry and run into the clean and kind arms of the nurse, to steal a bunch of that gauze that looked so soft for the next round of beatings, and some gloves, too, for the heck of it. But Dad sat in the chair across from the exam tables and glared at him, a warning he knew meant he had to keep his mouth shut and his hands at his sides.
“Heifer went crazy.” Dad cursed as he told the young doctor who smelled like soap and had extra-neat combed hair. “Never seen nothin’ like it. The wife here and Eustace, they got in her way and she wouldn’t have it. Woulda trampled over Godzilla to get outta that barn. Gonna have the vet come and make sure she ain’t sick.”
Dad shook his head like he was right sorry about the whole thing. He kept his hands shoved deep in his work coat pockets so nobody’d see the swelling and bruising on his knuckles. “Never seen nothin’ like it.”
Noble had tried to get in front of Eustace to help him fight back, and Dad had thrown him against the wall so hard the wind came out of him and his back ached for days from the impact. He hadn’t said anything about his own pain, and he wouldn’t as long as Eustace couldn’t say nothin’ about his. He remembered that day from all the others because of the look he’d seen on Eustace’s face, his big brother lying on the limed-up floor, his hands held up to his face to protect himself. Strange thing was, Eustace wasn’t wincing, though he knew what was coming. He was focused on something in the corner of the room, something far beyond and behind Dad and his rage. Like the male calves when the noose was wrapped around their soft necks, their wet noses nudging up to the hand that led them as they were sold to the butcher for veal, Eustace’s eyes were calm. And that had filled Noble with a rage he never got over. Not even now.
Like everything else Dad did, his leaving them came unannounced. He did what he liked and didn’t care what anybody thought. Noble was sixteen at the time and had heard Mama and their father fighting plenty from their bedroom. He’d heard his father’s harsh demands for sex before he knew what sex was, and the banging of the headboard against the wall, and the slam of the door and Mama crying herself to sleep afterward. He’d heard Dad blame her for the money never being enough, for him having to be on the road all the time, for her forgetting to pick up his beer at the store, and for Eustace coming out of the womb stupid.
So when he left for a trucking job like usual one Monday morning and didn’t come back that Thursday like always, they felt relief more than worry as they picked over the brisket and potatoes Mama always made on the nights of his return. And when he didn’t come back Friday and then Saturday and then the whole next week and the one after that, it felt like the world turning from gray to Technicolor, the air changing from heavy to sweet and light.
Mama quit crying at night and started cleaning, opening windows and washing them outside and in so the sun came in and filled the new white kitchen she’d painted and the milk jar full of zinnias she’d weeded back and cut fresh. And when the papers came from a lawyer out in Kansas, she signed them and took them right back out to the mailbox and then baked Noble and Eustace and her a cake. “We’re having a birthday.”
“Ain’t none of our birthdays,” Noble had said.
“It’s this family’s birthday. We’re starting new.” So she blew up balloons and let them have as much ice cream as they wanted and turned up the oldies music station, which was what her own daddy, who’d gone to his grave hating Dad, always played when she was little. She threw away and put away and gave away anything that reminded any of them of Dad, and whatever was left she threw in a heap and they had a bonfire and danced around it like those tribal folks in Africa he’d seen in the National Geographics he borrowed from school. None of that took away the hate Noble had for his father, but it sure did help. And for the first time in a long time, he remembered the story of Moses begging Pharaoh for freedom, and he felt like God was there with them.
Noble went back inside the barn to switch out the cows and the automatic milking devices. He turned up the radio.
I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time . . .
From George Strait to Johnny Cash. Not bad. An old wives’ tale said the cows gave more milk when they listened to music, and he’d trained them all up on country and western. Helped pass the time, too. Eight cows at a time meant about eight rounds of milking, each round taking about fifteen minutes by the time he got through cleaning all the teats beforehand, hooking them all up and unhooking them, and dipping the teats in a protective Betadine and lanolin mixture when they were done. The rhythmic sound of the machines reminded Noble of a candy factory as the pulsations mimicked in mechanical form a suckling calf.
Of all the farm duties, milking time was his favorite, especially since Dad had left. The cows were happy, he and Eustace were happy, and they all relaxed into the hum and whir of the milking and the sway of the cows as they gave up their milk. If Dad had done anything right, it had been to maintain the Jersey herd. Jerseys were the gentlest, most trusting of the milking breeds, and the extra richness of the milk allowed them to get enough more cents per gallon to keep the farm go
ing with a smaller herd than some of the other breeds like Whitmore’s Holsteins.
They could ride a Jersey cow, too.
He remembered the first time Shelby had been brave enough to let him help her ride Marcia, one of the older cows named after the Brady Bunch girls.
“Where’s the saddle?” Shelby had asked.
“Ain’t no saddle for a cow.”
“You expect me to ride this thing bareback?”
Marcia stuck her huge tongue out and reached it up to lick the dripping snot off her snout. Noble had fixed a bitless bridle to her head.
“Yep.” Noble grinned. He leaned down and laced his fingers together for Shelby to step into.
Gingerly she did and pulled herself up. Marcia sidestepped, and Shelby leaned her whole body flat against the cow’s back. “I don’t want to do this!”
“Too late now,” Noble said, taking the reins and guiding Marcia out toward the pasture, where he led them in a big circle before bringing her back around to the barns.
By the time they got back, Shelby was laughing so hard she was in tears.
“So I guess you had fun then, eh?” Noble asked, holding her gently under her arms as he helped her down.
“I surely did.”
Shaking off the memory, Noble fixed his attention back on Eustace, who was shooing Dolly into the barn with the last of the girls. She’d recovered nicely from the traumatic birth of Pecan, who was still relegated to the barn with the other calves being weaned from their mothers.
Before Dolly, Eustace had other favorites, but none like her. She’d been born shortly after their dad left them. She was a little weaker than the other calves from the start, the sort of calf Dad would’ve let die or shot if he’d still been around. Her suck was weak and uncoordinated, and her tongue kept lolling out of her mouth as she ate, making everyone wonder if perhaps she’d lost some oxygen in the birth process, something Pecan so far seemed to have avoided. Then Dolly ended up with severe diarrhea—the scours—and had to be monitored constantly for dehydration and progress (or lack thereof). When she ate, Eustace stood patiently and held the enormous bottle as she struggled with the nipple, her eyes rolling into the back of her head she was so crazy for something to fill her belly, which was no doubt aching from the disease. Even the vet, who’d come to give her intravenous fluids when she’d been at her sickest, suggested they let her go. But Eustace had been relentless in his dedication to keeping her alive. He’d paid so much attention to her that he’d saved her life, really. Since then, she’d acted more like a dog than a cow, the way she ran—as much as a cow can run—to the fence whenever Eustace came around.
Noble eyed Eustace as he attached Dolly to the shell and claw of the milking apparatus. “What would you think about your little brother going to play guitar in Nashville?”
Eustace walked past without looking at him and grabbed an armful of alfalfa. He tossed a bunch in the trough in front of each cow.
“That’s what I thought,” Noble said, a pang of guilt washing over him.
20
Sunlight angled through the stained-glass windows of the sanctuary. The six two-story stained-glass windows had been made and installed by one of the church’s charter members. The windows portrayed well-known images from the New Testament: the Good Samaritan, the Farmer Scattering Seed, the Lamp on a Stand, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son, and the Wedding Feast.
The pew squeaked, feeling the release of James’s weight as he stood. He hadn’t exactly been praying, as had been his routine before heading back to his office each morning. Aside from finding it hard to pray in general, he was distracted with apprehension about his upcoming nine-thirty appointment. He heard the clock on his office wall chime nine o’clock as he walked back that way. Bonnie had yet to arrive—she usually didn’t get there until about nine thirty, which would give him some time to look through the folder of some of Tilly Icenhour’s earliest sermons he’d found while cleaning out his office.
He was struck by one dated August 18, 1957, which would’ve been the heat of the summer. The sermon’s title was “Wondering as We Wander.” James knew from the church’s history that 1957 had been a rough year, with many people wanting a new church building to match all the other more modern-style churches popping up in places like Lafayette and Indianapolis, but Tilly had bucked against their requests. Decades later, when Tilly had explained the situation to James, he said he had not been against growth and evangelism, but that he’d been against a giant (at least for Sycamore) campaign that would have stretched them financially and distracted them from the many existing needs within the church congregation.
“It’s about balance, James,” Tilly’d told him over one of the many coffees the two had shared at the Percolator before Tilly and his wife moved to Florida. “That’s the hardest lesson a pastor has to learn. The world’s gonna tell you to always have something big you’re working on, some new and shiny vision to captivate and motivate your congregation, to keep it going, to keep it fresh and afire. But programming, newfangled music and technology, that’s not what keeps a church alive. It’s depth, James. It’s the gospel. And whenever you choose the depth of the gospel over new and shiny, you’re gonna have a battle on your hands. The battle will be worth it, but it’ll be a battle all the same.”
James skimmed through the typed, stapled pages that spoke in plain, yet poetic prose about the beauty of finding God not only in the spectacular and new, but in the plain, in the uneventful, in the desert.
No one knew this boring, steadfast sort of faith like the Israelites as they wandered for forty years. God saw to it that they had everything they needed, but in my opinion, he let them wander until they got the “wants” out of their system.
They were blinded by the lives of the Egyptians, their captors, and no doubt thought that once they were freed, riches and the perceived blessings of material things would be theirs. But God wanted more for his people than possessions. He wanted to give them a land, a home, where rest and peace were the outpourings of a Promised Land centered on him.
This proposal for a new building has distracted us from many things, from each other, and from God. And while new buildings are often needed, as the leader of this church, the elders and I can assure you it is not needed for us—not right now. We’re a culture built on working toward something, and we become uneasy when that goal is contentment with where we are and what we have.
Contentment in a capitalistic society can feel like a desert, like a place dry and flat, barren and lonely. But God tells us in Hosea 13:5, referring to the desert wandering of the Israelites, that he took care of them in the wilderness, in that dry and thirsty land. And again, in Deuteronomy 2:7, he reassures us that he has blessed us in everything we have done. He says that he watched the Israelites’ every step through that great wilderness. During those forty years, the Lord was with them, and they lacked nothing.
“James?” Bonnie knocked softly on his office door.
“Be right there,” he called. He paused to straighten his tie in the mirror on the back of his door before opening the door. He couldn’t remember the last time Gertrude Johnson had attended a service, and he’d only really seen her when he went into her flower shop, which was a rare occasion unless he was buying a bouquet for Shelby for her birthday as he had always done since she was a preschooler.
As he grasped the door handle, Gertrude pushed the door open, shoved past him, and sat down in the chair in front of his desk, her purse squarely on her lap, and her hands folded over the top of it as if she’d been the one waiting for him. She was one of those women whose eyes always seemed to bug out slightly—even from behind her glasses, or perhaps because of them—as if she were ready to verbally pounce on whomever contested her opinion. She wore a leopard-patterned cardigan and had a feathery fuchsia scarf tied around her neck despite the ninety-degree weather forecast for that afternoon.
“I’m here about the church closing.”
“Good morning, Mrs. Johnson. It
’s been a while.”
“It has. Frankly I’m surprised you noticed.”
“Noticed what?”
“Why, that I’d been gone, that I’d left the congregation. It was some time ago, you know.”
While he knew she hadn’t been there, he didn’t know she’d officially left, nor could he remember whether her departure had been recent, a matter of months, or years ago. “Yes. About that. Would you like to talk about it?”
“Would I like to talk about it. Pshaw.” She pushed the pshaw through her lips like a little sneeze and peered at him over the top of her glasses as if he should know precisely why she’d left.
Still unaware of her reasons for being there, he tried to approach the conversation another way. “This closing has been hard on all of us. If there’s anything I can say or do, or anything that needs to be said between us, I want to end things well here, for everyone.”
“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”
James sat on the corner of his desk in front of her, trying to keep things casual, unassuming. He remembered Gertrude from many of the potluck dinners and from Sunday mornings, but beyond that he could not recall ever having a conversation—at least one of any length—with her. He tried to remember if they’d had a row, or if she’d had a fracas with someone else in the church, but he couldn’t remember anything involving her.