Angus then explained the details of the night’s hunt. “This is their natural mating season, late fall. The males and the females find each other by their call, their snipe call. Now, ya see, the snipe call sounds for all the world like two sticks bein’ hit together. When a snipe hears that sound, he just runs hell-bent for the source of it. Which is how you hunt ’em.”
The Blazer pulled off the highway and onto a dirt road that led to an unused airfield, another failed attempt to put North Haven on the map. “This place has always been good for snipe,” Larry casually observed. We climbed out and Jimmy opened the tailgate and pulled out the hunting equipment—half a dozen gunnysacks and a couple of stripped green ash sticks about a foot and a half long. He turned to me, put his finger to his lips, and said, “From now on, we all gotta be real quiet.” Angus and I nodded in agreement as we set off across the overgrown field to the edge of a recently harvested cornfield on the other side.
Once there, Angus said, “Me and Jimmy are gonna be the beaters; you’re gonna be the catcher, Dave. You stay here and do this.” He knelt as if he were about to pray and continued, “You get on your knees and you put this gunnysack between your knees and keep it open by tucking the top edge into your belt. Then you hit the sticks together like so.” Angus tapped the two hickory sticks rapidly: “Tap, tap,” and then rubbed the one along the other to make a soft, grating sound. “You got that, Dave, tap, tap, rub; tap, tap, rub. To a snipe it sounds just like another snipe ready and waiting. You just keep that up and me and Jimmy will go back across the field and see if we can drive ’em to ya. Now, when they come, they’re gonna come real sudden, they’re gonna come outta nowhere like a bullet, and if you’re lucky, right between your legs and into the gunnysack. Then ya just tie up the top of the sack and grab another one and wait for the next taker.”
I had seen stranger things than this on Wild Kingdom. I dropped to my knees and fixed the gunnysack to my belt to keep it open. Jimmy started stuffing cornstalks into my L. L. Bean vest—to give me better cover, he explained. After the beaters were out of sight, I began: tap, tap, rub; tap, tap, rub. And I waited, sensing excitedly any number of times that there was movement out there in the field and that at any moment one of these bullet-like birds would dash out of the darkness and into my sack.
By seven-thirty, I was shivering with the cold. My knees ached from contact with the frozen earth. The cornstalks stuffed down my back were itching my ears and the “tap, tap, rub” was wearing on me. It was then that I heard from across the field the unmistakable sound of two car doors being shut quietly, but not quite quietly enough. An agonizing revelation swept over me. My beaters weren’t out in the field driving the snipe toward me; they’d been sitting in the Blazer for the last two hours drinking coffee. And there were no snipe, and even if there were I wasn’t going to catch them with a gunnysack between my legs beating two sticks together, which I was still doing as all this came to me.
“Fool,” I said out loud to myself, “perfect fool. You’re forty-one years old, you’ve got a bachelor’s degree in English, a master’s in Divinity, you’ve studied Greek and Hebrew and you’ve been to London and Paris, and here you are on your knees with a sack between your legs, rubbing two sticks together waiting for a bird to fly in.”
So I stopped tap, tap, rubbing, pulled the cornstalks out of my vest, and sat back on the other five gunnysacks. I felt my face go red-hot with anger and embarrassment. I heard a rustle behind me and turned to see Angus coming up alongside me. “Catch anything, David?” I couldn’t answer. He lowered his eighty-five-year-old bones down beside me on the gunnysacks and proceeded to tell the story of the time sixty years ago an army buddy took him snipe hunting. He described his feelings when he realized after nearly three hours in the snow on the edge of a cornfield that there were no snipe to be caught. And he turned to me and looked me in the eyes and he laughed and laughed as I’d never heard the old man laugh. He took me by the shoulders and shook me as he laughed until I could do nothing but join in a duet of stupid laughter.
And so I laughed till I nearly cried, which told Jimmy that it was safe to come out of the dark. He stepped toward us and sat down on his haunches and told the story of his snipe hunt. He then passed around a flask of schnapps, and we each took a slug. Sitting there in the cold on the gunnysack I felt a kinship with these men, each of them very different from me. I could never have imagined this before we went snipe hunting together. The hunting forced me to my knees and led me into the ancient fellowship of fools, the camaraderie of the humbled. It was a community that those who guard their pride too closely never know. And so I looked at Angus and said, “You know, my brother’s coming for Christmas, and I don’t believe he’s ever been snipe hunting.”
– 17 –
Rapture
Thanksgiving is simply too late in the year, perched on the brink of December, breathing down the back of Christmas. It’s too late to be a proper harvest festival, unless you’re a rice farmer in Louisiana or a Florida orange grower. We come to church in late November and sing, “All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin.” Well, it was all safely gathered in at least six weeks ago, and the first winter storms generally roll out of the Dakotas in early November. Last year, in fact, the winter storms began ere all was safely gathered in when it hailed and snowed the third week of September.
About half the folks in this church are from farm families, and last year they had to look hard for what they might give thanks for on the fourth Thursday in November. Some folks said they didn’t come to church on that Sunday before Thanksgiving because they were too tired or feeling a bit peaked. But in truth, they didn’t come because they were angry—angry at the worry, the endless work, angry at the hail and the snow, angry at being broke, and, deep, deep down, angry at God. But they don’t believe that it’s all right to be angry with God, even for a moment, so on Thanksgiving Sunday they decide to feel poorly, which avoids an uncomfortable meeting with the Author of Providence until their anger passes.
Hazel Hofer was one such person. Hazel was newly widowed the day of the September snow when Anton went out to shovel a path to the barn and had a heart attack. He was only sixtyseven and had big plans. He had done well in the recent hard years and had bought out two flat-broke neighboring farmers. Just the summer before he had put up three new Butler storage units for all the field corn he expected to harvest. He was always getting ready to add a few acres, lease a bigger combine, or drain the wet spot that never yielded what it should. He was a good farmer, and usually a lucky one. Anton’s master plan was to sell out to some agribusiness and move to Florida when he was seventy. The day after he died, I went to see Hazel. There was a rush of tears. Then she dried her eyes, looked squarely at me, and said, “He always had a plan for everything.” She hiccuped a little laugh and added, “But not for this.” She shed more tears and asked me whether I thought she should still go to Florida or stay on the farm. I told her not to decide anything important for a few months.
As I climbed into my car, I saw looming through the saltsmeared windshield Anton’s three shiny new Butler storage units. I thought of the story in Luke’s Gospel about the rich man whose land brought forth plentifully and who built bigger barns and sat back in self-satisfaction and said to his soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry” (i.e., buy a condo in Fort Lauderdale). But then God says (as He still often does), “Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”
Well, in this case, they were all going to be Hazel’s, who could have cared less. She had been to Florida and thought that it was too hot and even flatter than Minnesota. She never really wanted to move, but Anton had always planned on it. I put the car in reverse and tucked the seed of a sermon away to germinate.
It was the week before Thanksgiving Sunday that I went looking for that seed. Precisely how this story of a prosperous farmer snatched preemptively from hi
s prosperity might grow into a Thanksgiving sermon in a lean year in southwestern Minnesota was a mystery to me. On Thursday, Arlene, our volunteer church secretary, put “Luke 12:15–24” on the mimeograph stencil and asked me what the sermon title was going to be. I said, “Give Thanks All the Days of Your Life.” That would certainly cover anything I might say.
The sermon never got written, much less preached. Thursday night I was struck down with the flu: the shakes, headache, sore throat, and then every preacher’s dread plague—laryngitis. By Friday noon I could only croak monosyllables, like “Vicks.” It was as though Divine Wisdom had foreknowledge (even before I had the knowledge) of what I was going to say on Sunday and decided to strike me dumb.
There was only one thing to do, unfortunately, and that was to call on the only spare preacher in a radius of fifty miles who would climb into a pulpit on such short notice: the Reverend Mr. Lex Ardent. He is a retired clergyman who spent his working days as an evangelist on what was left of the old Sawdust Trail, the tent meeting preaching circuit that is the ancestor of television ministry. His church is called the Apostolic Church of the Divine Christ in God, which broke off from a splinter group of a sect whose name includes all the same words somehow arranged in a different sequence.
I knew Lex through the local clergy association. He moved here when he retired six years ago to live with his son, Reg. Lex’s theology had been strongly influenced by the woollier and more wild-eyed of the Old Testament prophets and their thunderings against idolatry, corruption, and all sins of the flesh. From this point in the Bible, Lex’s religious thinking did a graceless leap over the Gospels and landed squarely in the Book of Revelation.
It was well known in town that Lex only preaches one sermon. He had gotten away with this over his forty-five-year career in itinerant evangelism because he had been forever moving from one tent meeting to the next. If the Sawdust Trail happened to bring him back to the same town again, Lex believed that a person who had been saved by his sermon the first time through would not need to be present the second time around. If someone did return, the sermon must not have worked the first time and he could well stand to hear it again.
Lex’s lone sermon was about the Rapture, that esoteric doctrine beloved by those of an apocalyptic spirit. This doctrine says that at the Second Coming of Christ, all true and faithful followers (liberally numbered at 144,000) will be plucked live and whole from wherever they happen to be at that unexpected moment and whisked into the Kingdom. On the rear of his rusty Buick LeSabre Lex has a bumper sticker that says: IN CASE OF RAPTURE, DRIVER WILL DISAPPEAR. That bumper sticker is the core of Lex’s theology and pretty much the whole point of his sermon.
In the sermon, Lex paints a dozen verbal pictures of people gathered together in various places, from which one of them—always only one—would suddenly and without warning disappear: people are waiting in line at the supermarket, and all of a sudden the checkout girl is gone—the Rapture! Kids sitting in school and, without a hint of what is to come, a seventh grader in the second row vanishes—the Rapture! Folks are shopping at Sears and suddenly the guy standing in the auto parts line is simply gone, leaving behind him the two brand-new snow tires he’ll no longer be needing—the Rapture! Then, in darker tones sharpened over the years to a sinister edge, Lex would describe a church service: worshipers gathered on a Sunday morning, and only ONE of them is “Raptured,” actually hinting that the one may not have been the preacher.
In this school of preaching, Lex is a master: he launches his sermon slowly and quietly and then climbs gradually into sermonic frenzy. It is, of course, designed to scare the bejabbers out of his listeners, most of whom on brief self-evaluation count themselves among “Those Left Behind,” as Lex names them. Now that he was off the Sawdust Trail and on the Substitute Preacher Circuit, Lex has developed a knack for adapting the sermon to any and every occasion. If it’s a Christmas sermon, he brings his listeners back down by ending with something like “It was to save us from being left behind that God sent Jesus to be born.” If it’s an Easter sermon, he says, “It was to save us from being left behind that God raised Christ from the dead.”
When Lex preached his sermon to Second Presbyterian on Thanksgiving Sunday, I was there, being too ill and mute to preach myself, but not sick enough to stay home in bed. Frankly, I was a bit curious as to how in the world Lex would work his sermon around Thanksgiving. I underestimated him. He found, of course, the text I had already chosen from Luke very much to his liking. “Good choice of Scripture, Dave. Good choice.” The day found Lex in fine form. As he preached, he wandered away from the pulpit, waved his hands about, and pointed theatrically in the direction of the ceiling. He has no need for notes after all these years. Lex worked slowly into his great crescendo, jabbing at the heavens with both index fingers, painting pictures of lukewarm Sunday-only Christians with disappointed looks on their faces as they watched the few and the true swept up in the Rapture. All of this was a great novelty to the politely attentive congregation of Presbyterians, who rarely let themselves get swept up in anything, much less such rhetoric. After twenty-five minutes of this, Lex ended his sermon by slicing the air with his fingers, closing his eyes, and fairly shouting, “Thank God, thank God, in this season of Thanksgiving, thank God that it is not too late for anyone in this room!”
When he sat down, he looked exhausted. This was work for a younger man. Sweat was pouring down his temples. He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. Then he closed his eyes, threw his head back, and stretched his legs out in front of him. Lex had told me he liked the sermon to be the last thing in the service, except for a closing hymn. He fairly struggled to his feet to sing it, pushing himself up from the big mahogany preacher’s chair. His eyes were still half closed, as though he had not yet descended from his hermeneutical high. Lex had picked the hymn “Come, Lord, and Tarry Not.” We’d never sung it before, so most of the sound was coming from the direction of the choir: “Come, Lord, and tarry not; Bring the longed-for day; O why these years of waiting here, These ages of delay?”
Our choir, eight ladies and one gentleman, recesses out of the church during the closing hymn. We have no center aisle and if they were to go out via one of the two side aisles, they’d find themselves going out the front doors and into twenty-degree weather. So they leave the choir loft, which is up front on the left, march across the back of the chancel behind the communion table and out the right rear door, into the Westminster Room, and head straight for the coffeepot.
This is a direct but narrow path with one hazard—a wooden heating grate in the floor directly behind the big oak communion table. The grate measures two and a half feet square. It is made of pine and is just set in the hole in the floor that opens to the heating duct below. The duct bends at a right angle about three feet down before continuing on to the old hot-air furnace.
Emma Bowers, a soprano, is new to the choir. She is a small woman and gives herself another three inches of height by wearing those spiked high-heeled shoes that faded from fashion twenty years ago. As she passed over the heating grate that Sunday morning, her right heel went into one of the little square holes and lodged there tight. The processing choir, hymnbooks in front of their faces and open to page 233, slowed as Emma tugged to free her foot. I guess the shoes were old and tight. Her shoe stayed on and the heel didn’t break off. On her third and mighty pull, Emma lifted the whole grate (which wasn’t so heavy) right out of the duct and moved on, trooper that she is, walking as if she’d been shot in the leg but was trying not to notice.
Right behind her was Elsie Johnson, Alvina’s younger sister by ten years, who, to put it kindly, does not have a keen awareness of her immediate environment. She can see all right; she just never seems to notice things. I turned to see if Lex had noticed Emma plowing along, determined to make it to the rear door as if nothing at all had happened.
He looked over to watch just as Elsie Johnson stepped to where the grate wasn’t. She gave a little sque
aling “Whoop!” and just disappeared from sight behind the communion table.
Lex dropped his jaw in a flabbergasted gape. His eyes went wide, his hymnbook slipped from his hand, and then he shut his eyes tight: THE RAPTURE! Still in the grip of his sermonic euphoria, he saw before his very eyes the scene he had been putting in words for forty-five years. Elsie had been taken and he was left behind. This state of flabbergasted misapprehension lasted for perhaps four seconds. I am sure it was the longest four seconds in Lex’s life.
Then his look shifted from horror to befuddlement to immense relief. He closed his eyes and mouthed what was surely a prayer of earnest thanksgiving that the Apocalypse was delayed.
Elsie hadn’t even fallen over, but rather stepped square into the duct and went down the three feet to where it turns horizontal. There wasn’t a scratch on her, and to this day, I’m not sure that she’s clear as to just what happened. A dozen people ran to her rescue. They fished her out and dusted her off. After things quieted down I stood up and croaked, “She’s okay,” and then whispered a hoarse benediction.
I went home exhausted, ate a whole bag of potato chips, and went to bed. About eight o’clock that evening I awoke feeling much better. The worst of the flu aches were passed and my mental picture of those four seconds in Lex’s life were becoming a great joy to me. I remembered my reason for choosing those words from Luke in the first place—Anton Hofer, who had put up three new Butler bins one day and was gone the next. I saw Elsie vanishing with a “Whoop!” and thought of all the dear hearts who have vanished just as suddenly from my sight: my grandparents, some older uncles, a friend from seminary.
I took a shower and put on my bathrobe and looked at myself in the mirror. I imagined myself vanishing into the floor with a “Whoop!” and said to my soul: “Soul, you haven’t got a thing in any storehouse: no bank account, you don’t even own the house you live in. You have no silo to put silage in, but here you are, graying and getting lumpy. You might never have been. You have no right to have been, but here you are.”
Good News from North Haven Page 12