Mitch Simpson crumbled when fifty-seven elderly Presbyterians became for a moment accidentally omniscient. They overheard a bitter lament over his dying church and then heard him go about his physical necessities. The daunting awareness that rushed over me was that the One who hurled the planets into place knows absolutely everything about me—most of it much more damaging than Mitch’s revelations. The omniscience of God is a dreadful thing. I prefer my privacy. I prefer the liberty of saying one thing while thinking another and getting away with it. But if I am to be known to my depths, if Mitch Simpson is to be known even more deeply than he came to be known that Sunday, it is this same God whom I would have know us. For God is even more gracious than the gentle congregation of Johnston Memorial. For the very One who knows all is the very One who forgives all. All is known, and all is forgiven … all is known, and all is forgiven.
– 15 –
The Jefferson Street Leaf War
Even though it’s only four blocks from the manse, I generally drive to the church in the evenings. Annie usually doesn’t need the car, and I like to hurry home. But Tuesday night of last week I walked. It was a warm October evening—warm in contrast to the cold nights we’d been having for nearly a month. The first frost had come the last week of September.
The Tuesday Evening Bible Class has been studying the Old Testament prophets this fall. We just finished Jeremiah. The text we had discussed that night was Jeremiah, chapter 31, verses 31 to 35. The prophets, Jeremiah especially, verbally barrage the children of Israel for their failure to obey the law that bound the people to this God who cared desperately about right and wrong.
But in the thirty-first chapter of Jeremiah, the most wildeyed of all the prophets takes a desperate step beyond the familiar theme. “The days are coming,” he has God say, “when I will make a new covenant … not like the covenant which I made with their fathers …I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts.…”
I mused on all this as I passed the tiny white bungalow on Jefferson Street that has been home to Alvina Johnson for nearly fifty years. Until last year, Alvina had been director of the church’s Christmas Pageant. The house is immaculately kept, both inside and out. Alvina has managed to keep fifty-year-old furniture, carpet, even wallpaper, looking impeccable, if slightly faded, near the windows where she has been unable to police the entry of the sun’s rays.
Her small lawn is weed-free. She somehow makes each blade of grass stand up straight. On each side of the front steps, standing at attention in front of the foundation, Alvina plants a row of marigolds, fourteen on each side. A sidewalk leads directly to the concrete steps and divides the front yard in half. Squarely in the middle of each side is an old tire painted white and made into a planter. In each she plants seven more marigolds, six in a circle and one in the center. It’s always been this way as long as anybody can remember. The entire yard is surrounded by a picket fence about three feet high.
As I approached her house that Tuesday night, it was too dark to appreciate any of what might still remain in late October of Alvina’s careful ordering of nature. But it was not too dark to see a figure moving about the yard in the shadows cast by the autumn moon. The silhouette was bending over, as if looking for something on the ground. Then it stood up, lifted a halfbushel basket, and walked toward the fence separating Alvina’s yard from the Lundins’ next door. It then dumped the contents of the basket over the fence into the Lundins’ yard. I recognized Alvina as she shook the last of the leaves out of the basket.
I cleared my throat and walked as noisily as I could to warn Alvina of my approach. She looked up, recognized me, quickly set the little basket down, and began to remove her canvas gardening gloves. “Alvina,” I said, “you’re working late.” It was, after all, a quarter past eleven. Every house on Jefferson Street, Alvina’s included, was dark. “Snow’ll be here soon, Pastor.” she answered. “You know you should really get everything cleaned while you can.”
I looked pointedly at the pile of leaves she had just added to on the Lundins’ side of the fence. I didn’t need to say anything. It was so obviously odd, even for Alvina, to be raking leaves in the dark and dumping them into the neighbors’ yard.
“They’re the Lundins’ leaves,” she said. “They’re off their big oak over there.” She pointed an accusatory finger at the red oak behind me in the Lundins’ front yard. “The slightest breeze from the west, and half of them blow into my property. I know they belong to them because I only have the one maple in the back. I sort them out, of course; I mean, I keep all the maple leaves. I figure they’re mostly mine. But the oak leaves are theirs. It’s only fair, Pastor.”
There was an edge of defensiveness in Alvina’s voice. If she’d been altogether comfortable with this bizarre justice, she would hardly be executing it just before midnight, when all the other people on Jefferson Street—most notably the Lundins—were in their beds. It was late and I could think of nothing to say but “Good night, Alvina. Don’t work too hard.” I told Annie about it in the morning, and we agreed that Mr. Johnson had chosen wisely in moving to Minneapolis forty-nine years ago.
I should not have been surprised when three days later Alvina knocked at my office door and asked if she could “have a moment.” She removed her hat, gloves, and coat, and sat decisively in the chair on the other side of my desk. “Is there anything in Scripture about people being responsible for their own plants and animals?” she asked. “I know that the Old Testament has lots of rules about sheep and goats and whose fields are whose. But is there anything that might apply to my leaf situation?”
Alvina informed me that Ollie Lundin had just yesterday returned the oak leaves. “It took me hours to rake and sort them and he just dumped them back—in broad daylight, Pastor! And not only his oak leaves, but quite a few of his maple leaves, too.” I was going to ask her how she knew whose maple leaves were whose, but decided that the smallest step into this legal thicket would be the end of me.
She had been to see our police chief, Billy Hobart, who, she complained, had been no help. He had told her that there were no laws about whose leaves were whose, which Alvina suggested was a major legal oversight. “Everybody in town has always just sorta raked their own yards and not worried about whose tree the leaves came from,” Billy had said. But to Alvina it seemed patently unfair that she, who had only one small maple in her back yard, should be required to clean up the mess made by other people’s trees. She was growing more adamant and animated and seemed to have lost any trace of the reluctance I had noticed when I came upon her doing what was “only fair” in the middle of the night.
I was about ready to make the only point I could think of—namely, that no mortal wisdom could ever discern whose leaves were whose, which was a sort of theological version of the line Billy Hobart had tried—but Alvina guessed my direction and in the heat of righteous indignation told me something I don’t think she had planned to reveal. She sat up even straighter in her chair and said, “This past summer, I hired Danny Olson to go up in my tree and mark my leaves. He put an X on each one with a Magic Marker. Only took him two days.” This, she said, allowed her to tell those maple leaves that were her responsibility from everybody else’s errant ones. She allowed that the X’s tended to fade and some were hard to see. Especially in the dark, I thought to myself. Next year, she said, she would have Danny do it later in the summer.
A picture formed in my mind’s eye: gangly fifteen-year-old Danny Olson with a Magic Marker in his hand, long legs wrapped around a branch as he tried to reach the leaves on the end. And I could see Alvina down on the ground pointing out the ones he’d missed: “Now, Danny, be sure to mark that bunch just below your left arm.” I could not imagine that he had been able to come anywhere close to putting an X on every one of Alvina’s leaves. He undoubtedly didn’t mention to her that he might have missed a few. But even a hint of a chuckle at that moment and Alvina Johnson would slam the door in my face for the rest of her days or m
ine, whichever came first. In the end I had no biblical ammunition for her to aim at Ollie Lundin, who, she said, “was a Lutheran of some kind and would probably pay attention to Scripture.”
Alvina is not happy with me, but she’s not generally happy with anybody. I assume she and Ollie are going to go on dumping leaves over their fence for a while, and that Danny Olson will have a couple of days’ work next summer. But what impressed me about my brief involvement in the Jefferson Street leaf war was Alvina’s righteous appeal to what she kept calling “fair.” There was simply no doubt in her mind that the ultimate ethic of the cosmos is what’s “fair.”
The only other people I know who talk as much about what’s fair and what’s not fair are my children. And, like all parents, our predictable response to their predictable lament that something isn’t “fair,” is to say, “Get used to it; the world’s not fair.” But their faith in “fairness” as the moral yardstick of the universe remains unshaken. Which is as it should be. Fairness is the ethic of adolescence. My hope is that their present zeal for fairness will make them fair in the way they treat other people the rest of their lives. When they were small children they believed that they were quite obviously the center of creation and that all things existed only to please them. They are growing beyond that now, thank God. But some people never do.
In time, I hope that they will also grow beyond the ethic of fairness—not that they leave it behind, but that they come to see that it is not the end of wisdom. Fairness is what the law tries to write down and, like the law, it is absolutely necessary. But it will fall short in the end, for it cannot make all things right and good.
This is what old Jeremiah was hinting at in chapter 31 when he ruminated about a new covenant and a law written on hearts. The old law had simply been unable to form people into the crucible of love and justice that he knew God wanted. It had demanded only an outward conformity. But the prophet dreamed of an inward fire. That fire is gracious love and it lies beyond what’s merely fair.
It isn’t fair, I suppose, that Alvina, who has one small maple tree, has to rake a lot of leaves from the Lundins’ trees. It’s not fair, but it would be a gracious thing for her to do.
– 16 –
Hunting
Winter has come early to the northern plains. The fall—nobody here uses the eastern word, autumn—was a lovely time, short as it was, a gentler than usual season of warmish diamond-clear days and cool nights. On many an evening Annie and I sat on the front porch in heavy coats with hot coffee and breathed air that became wet and heavy as the temperature dropped, smelling rich and fecund with fallen leaves and the dying impatiens at either side of the front stoop.
The fall here is no riot of color. The islands of cottonwood, maples, and box elders turn to yellows and browns, but the surrounding sea of soybean and field corn dominates the landscape. And that rolling ocean becomes a brown stubble against the oil-black of the dirt. Brown and black are the colors of fall here, It is lovely, but no one here would think of driving around just to look at it.
The fall is given over to three activities: canning fruits and vegetables for women, hunting for men, and high school football for everybody. I suppose it has been this way from the dim mists of human history. Primitive adolescent males played violent and daring games of some sort while adolescent females watched; the women of the clan gathered nuts, berries, and roots and salted or dried them for the famine of winter; the men and older boys, armed with clubs and flint-tipped spears, chased down now extinct species of deer, and maybe in a good year a woolly mammoth.
Not much has changed in twenty thousand years. The adolescent game is now horribly complicated and requires expensive equipment, the women have self-sealing Ball jars, and the men have traded in their spears for shotguns. With fourwheel-drive pickup trucks, they don’t need to run as fast or as far as their ancestors did in the hunt, if they have to run at all.
With each one of these ancient activities there still comes a certain camaraderie. The kids talk football, and so do many of their parents. Together they remember great plays and notable victories of years past. They shake their heads and click their tongues and say, “Yeh, yeh, that sure was some catch Donnie made.” Women talk canning at the church coffee hour: “Alice, did you know Piggly Wiggly’s got eight-ounce Ball jars on sale?” And the men talk hunting. They tell the same stories again and again, stories grown with the years to be even better than the truth was: “I tell ya, Bill, I could hear that ten-point buck snortin’, I was that close. Scared the piss out of me when he bolted.”
My wife and I have stood apart from most of this over the years we’ve been here. As children of the sixties and of the suburbs it was foreign to us, as well as unapologetically sexist. Anyway, church members load us up with more canned peaches, strawberry jam, and wild duck than we can eat. Even this, I suppose, shadows the ancient days when the members of the clan left such offerings at the opening of the cave of the tribe’s shaman and his woman.
So I was at a loss for words last Sunday when Jimmy Wilcox came up to me in the greeting line after church and invited me to go hunting with him. Jimmy’s my age, a native who never left town. He runs the local oil heat business. He’s always been something of a thorn in my flesh, vaguely adversarial without being confrontational. When he was on Session, it seemed as though every other sentence out of his mouth began “Well … I dunno.…” I’ve always suspected an unconscious rivalry in him, a resentment toward me, the guy from the Outside World with (what seems to him) a fancy education and smooth ways.
I was so taken aback at this invitation that I could not find the right words with which to say “no” before he went on to explain that the particular hunt he was proposing was one that even I, “a man of the cloth”—there was the barest provocative edge to those words—would not find objectionable. “You hearda fishin’ where you throw ’em all back,” he said. “Well, this is huntin’ where you can throw ’em all back if ya want.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see old Angus MacDowell, who gave me just a bit of a squeeze below the neck and said, “C’mon, David. Do ya good.” Now I have a deep affection for this man, outwardly stiff, but inwardly a still well of quiet grace.
Curious and a bit flattered to be included, I started to open my mouth to ask the obvious questions about how you could “throw ’em back.” Before I could get a word out, Angus let go of my neck and gave me a sharp slap on the back and said, “Good, it’s all settled then. We’ll pick ya up Friday a week, five at night.” And they rushed out the front door with uncharacteristic suddenness. I turned back to the greeting line vaguely bewildered by it all. Alvina Johnson found my hand, shook it vigorously, and said, “Nice sermon, Revrunt.”
By the time I got home I was beyond curious; I was intrigued. Perhaps is was some racial memory of man against beast buried in the back of my brain. Perhaps it was a sense that my inclusion was a rite of passage that would initiate me into the local fellowship of men. Maybe it was simply a longing for adventure nursed by a life of routine. Whatever it was, by dinnertime I was on the edge of excited. Something in me longed for the hunt. I was less sure how I might inform my family of this impending and mysterious expedition. I decided on nonchalance with my wife. I found an L. L. Bean catalogue in the magazine rack and idly flipped through it as she mashed the potatoes. “You know, I could use one of these camouflage vests when I go hunting with Jimmy Wilcox.” She stopped mashing and looked at me incredulously: “Hunting! With Jimmy Wilcox! You?!”
Jennifer, our thirteen-year-old, was even less subtle. Having been weaned on Bambi and brought up watching Wild Kingdom, she had developed into something of an adolescent animalrights activist. She was the neighborhood’s protector of stray cats and guardian of unloved dogs. A week before my invitation to hunt we had been driving to Mankato together when we met a car with the carcass of a white-tailed deer roped to the left front fender. “Neanderthals!” she cried out in horror and indignation as the car flashed
by. I had been impressed with the word “Neanderthal.” A week later, when she shouted it at me for planning to go hunting with Jimmy and Angus, I grew defensive. I dragged out the old argument about hunting being every bit as humane as the process that gave her the hamburgers and fried chicken she so enjoyed.
The day of the hunt—the Friday after Thanksgiving—arrived cold and sharp. About noon I called Angus up to ask him how I ought to dress and what I needed to bring. “Nuthin’, Dave, nuthin’. Just dress good and warm, but no bright-colored clothes. We got all the stuff.” At ten minutes after five, Jimmy drove up in his blue Chevy Blazer 4 x 4. Annie kissed her man farewell and made the only comment about the hunt since the mashed potatoes. She patted me on the chest of my justarrived L. L. Bean camouflage vest and said, “Go bring back plenty meat to cave for woman to cook,” and pushed me out the door.
Jimmy had the heater in the Blazer blasting away as we drove out of town to the south. They eyed my new vest without comment, though I thought I detected a wry smile on Angus’s lips when he saw it. But I felt a man among men, off to do things that men do and have done since the beginning.
It was Angus who broke the close silence and answered my bursting curiosity. “Too late for ducks, Dave. Not many pheasant this year, so we’re gonna hunt snipe.”
“Snipe?” I asked.
“Ya, snipe,” Angus replied. “Huntin’ snipe is a different kinda deal. They’re nocturnal, you know.” He hesitated and then added, “They only come out at night. So ya can’t shoot ’em. I mean, ya can’t see ’em to shoot ’em, so ya gotta catch ’em by usin’ their natural instincts.”
Good News from North Haven Page 11