Chapter 43: Char on the farm
After her first visit at Millston, Char went back to the farm. It is her ancestral home but at that time she sought it out for a bit more than that. She sought it as a holy place for herself, a wholing place. It was fitting to return to the farm to begin preparing for the baby. She also sensed that it was fittingly there where she would begin preparations for Jared’s homecoming, whenever that will be, dear Lord!
The farm means opening, once again, to the dream she’s had since childhood. She’s out tending the chickens, lazily scattering feed when all of a sudden something frightens the fowl and they scatter, running crazily amok, bumping into one another, fence posts. It’s absolutely comic, like a Keystone Kops chase. “Stupid chickens!”
Although it’s a mildly cool fall morning, Char fully buttons up her overcoat just as a wintry chill runs through her. She stomps on the ground as if shaking ice from her boots. It gives her pause. Farm child that she is, she looks for the shadow, but there is none—no hawk, not even a blackbird.
On to her next daily chore, she walks into the barn, begins to scoop some feed for the cows but oddly they too turn skittish. They jerkily shake their heads, anxiously lowing and moaning. She looks about, certain that she’ll feel the heated breath of a predator. She looks hard but sees and senses nothing.
Stepping out to slop the hogs, it seems like the ground must be swelling with snakes because the porkers are all running wild. It’s a melee like the greased-pig chase at the County Fair. She hops and skips, misses most, runs into one, ouch! Looking around again, hard as she might, she strains but still can’t see or sense the danger.
As she turns towards the farmhouse, suddenly poof! it bursts into flames. At their bedroom window she sees that her mom and dad are trapped. They can’t get the windows open. Upstairs, at his attic bedroom window, her little brother is also locked in. All of them are screaming, wild-eyed, pushing at the window frames. Horrified, she watches as each of them slowly surrenders to the flames. Snapshots of melting humans . . .
Heart pounding, Char awakens, snorting out an acrid smell.
The farm is where she was born. It’s where Mom and Dad and Gary live, still. They courageously struggle to maintain the family’s heritage as tillers of the soil—but agribusiness being what it is, they’ve been losing ground for decades. They’ve become field hands, cheap labor. In their better years—just a generation back—they were owners, now they’re merely hired hands, renters of the hoe, men and women who bathe in animal mud for reapers who live on far-distant ocean-viewing hills. They’re sharecroppers to a mega-corporation who is not a landlord seeking to be benevolent. Whose “farm managers” are sweetly scented, green-shade accountants and assorted econometric bean counters.
In truth, Dad hasn’t worked the land for five years. He took a job in town, pumping gas. Cargill, Inc., who owns the farm, lets him stay at the house because they’re caught in some type of entangled litigation, and it serves their purposes to let the land die slowly. For some convoluted legal reason, annually just after Christmas, he receives a letter stating that Cargill “appreciates” his living at the farm.
Mom manages her days as she always has. She’s the picture-book farmer’s wife. Always busy, dutifully wiping dust just before other dust falls, baking pie after pie: rhubarb, peach, pear, apple, every seasonal delight. “Amazing, Mom Clark’s pies!” A local legend, she’s won Blue Ribbons at every County Fair since she first greased her mother’s tins. Of course in the fall she cans a small grocery store for their winter table.
Gary doesn’t really live here anymore. He’s a renter of the renters, more like a boarder. He wanders, like so many rube youths do, in search of that good job in the City, coming home now and then to recharge, touch his roots. Farm boy that he is, however, he’s not at all conscious about that. Sometimes he taps into this while drinking late into the night with his good buddies!
Gary’s no longer a bumpkin or country kid yet he’s not truly adapted to urban ways. He’s a midway creature, half-formed, and so a free-market dysfunctional. He’s a minor character right out of Thomas Wolfe’s novel, You Can’t Go Home Again.
Gary drinks hard, often, picks up odd jobs but blames no one for the hand dealt him. Truth be told, he just wants to die, even though he’s only twenty-six. Wants soulfully to die planted in the dark, summer warmed earth. When the tall corn rises, he fancies himself the tassel gone to pollen in the air.
Char is a mystery to them. Not a mystification, just a conundrum, the type that’s eventually solved in mystery novels. They believe there’s a solution to her problems—if she’d just “Listen to your father.” They don’t understand why she’s so politically active with City problems. Their Catholic faith is very conservative and traditional, even in these times of heady church reform. Concerning politics and religion, they’ve been molded by the Benedictine monks from the College of Saint Clement who staff their rural church—a “mission church”—on weekends. If in nothing else as liberal, they believe in the social justice of the Papal encyclicals and accept a spiritual equality of the races.
With almost stolid equanimity her parents readily resolve the plethora of rancorous issues that concern Char concerning Church and State. Simply put, for them it is an article of faith that the Church and that State are one and the same thing, meaning that the Catholic Church rules the State and so rules their secular lives. Being so harmoniously ruled, religion and spirituality are not passions for them. Rather, obeying the Church is the way they order their lives. Faith means primarily following the priestly counsel—“Listen to Father Boyle. He speaks with God!” The road to heaven starts with fulfilling their Sunday obligation. For them, religion is a way of farming one’s spiritual life. Like plowing straight rows, it’s adhering to traditional sacramental and liturgical cycles.
For Char, in sharp and heated contrast, faith is all and only about passion—or, as her family realizes now, once was. For—Horrors!— she has clearly stated her rejection of the “all-male Roman Catholic Church!” As is their way, heeding Father Boyle’s advice, the family has adjusted to Char’s radical change quite readily. He’s told them that she has chosen a harder spiritual pathway—farming the lower forty that’s boggy and hilly. “In time, she’ll return. They all do, these young rebels,” Father consoles them.
Without stating the obvious, they are steadfast as to the “real solution” that will solve all her problems: marriage. More specifically, marriage to Jared. But, “These kids. What’s happened to young people today?” They understand neither their daughter or their once-beloved potential son-in-law, both of whom have become crazy radicals.
When Char tells them she’s pregnant, it’s acknowledged with a bitterness only slightly tempered by their joyful anticipation of a grandchild. Here, their being farmers carries more weight than their being Catholics. While they prefer a quick marriage—and presume she’ll name Jared, so everything will finally be “set right”—they accept Char’s way of handling the matter rather more easily than Jared’s family would, if they were to know. Even Gary, who’s never been close to Char, accepts her choice: “Whatever you want, Sis.”
Little do they know about Char’s intense struggles—the battle within herself and with the highly charged “free advice” from different Sisters. Some want the abortion as “a testimony of your total rejection of the Male in any form or power.” Others want her to keep the child, “Because it’s a sign of your effort to eliminate male warfare, as you will raise the child—boy or girl—to be a nonviolent and anti-sexist warrior.” One of the Sisters, with a tinge of goddess mysticism, encourages her, “Talk with the child. She will let you know!”
As is her way, Char’s decision is based less on intellectual analysis than on how being a farmer’s daughter makes her feel—that she should help life grow. On the farm all that counts is what lives, and to live requires impregnation. From the animals to the plants to the Clarks themselves, there are fields to hoe, seeds to
plant, life forms to be cultivated.
They want to ask her what Jared wants but they simply do not talk about his being in there. “Fiancé in prison” is not found as a tagline in their family photograph album. Everyone in the area knows but they just don’t want it discussed. When she visits, they talk cordially about Jared—“How is he? Send him our love,” and the like—but without talking about that place. Her Dad has no sympathy for Jared’s anti-war shenanigans. He’s always effectively ignored him when it appeared that a tussle over patriotism loomed. He simply lost too many buddies in World War II to wax enthusiastic over this Vietnam thing. Too many Memorial Days and too many wreaths and too many even more flowery sermonettes at gravesides. He doesn’t need any more of this. He settled the issue quickly. He told Char, “It’s his generation. He’s got to do what he’s got to do, gal. What you got to do—if he’s your man—is stand beside him.” That was that. Amen.
She hears her Dad, loves him, but is compelled to do more—whatever “more” might mean. She always has more to say, and she’s not shy about speaking up. She vociferously stated her mind in nursing school and the nuns almost kicked her out. “Can you imagine? One of our students advocating Planned Parenthood!” At the teaching hospital, the quick feels copped by the young interns reaped slaps—not just taps but harsh whacks. “Just a cold-assed bitch, you can bet!” When she became a public nurse, she hit her stride when working with the migrants who provide stoop labor on Minnesota’s farms. Just last week, she shrilled on camera at the populist governor’s ability to turn a blind eye to “this racist injustice that is a form of slavery!” She gives no quarter to newsmen, academics, preachers or teachers. All feel her righteous wrath.
Ironically, behind her back it’s often heard that “She’s incredible!” Few can hate her for long because she has a way of finding what you need, what your real cause is, and sympathizing with you, even if you see yourself as her opposition. For Char, only ideas and values are enemies. People are always adversaries or The Opposition. After meeting her, few forget her.
“Mom,” Char turns from the stove, holding a steaming kettle, “I want you to know that I’m going to raise my girl by myself.”
“Girl?”
“Right, I’m sure. Aaren and her coven made contact during the solstice, and we know for sure.”
“Hmmm.” Mom pours, filling two cups with bobbing tea bags. “My great-grandmother used to say that a woman can know, but she never told me how!” Coven?!
“Gee, I didn’t know that.”
“It’s okay,” she laughs, “its fifty-fifty, no matter what! Whether guessing or knowing!”
They sit and swirl the bags. Mom stirs in two large teaspoons of sugar and a large serving of milk. Char idly plays with her teabag, dragging it back and forth, waiting for her cup to cool. She likes straight drinks with their plain and original tastes: no sugar, no milk, but cooling away from hot.
“I’ll be on my own, by myself. I want you to understand.”
Mom sips, letting her daughter talk. She knows she’ll hear more by letting Char wander than by making her defensive with questions.
“Look, Mom, I know that what’s all happening today—the War, riots, pot and radical priests—must be threatening to you and Dad. I mean, what’s been coming down, none of us anticipated, and we have to keep working hard to keep ourselves together and moving forward, not just being paralyzed by events. Do you know what I mean?”
“Sure I do, honey. Maybe. Tell me some more.”
“Sometimes, I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know how it really all began. I mean, the real change, not just the stuff we call reform but the new vision—you know, like when I knew, not in my head, but in my heart, that I’m a lesbian.”
The L-word is its own conversation stopper. Like the bathtub plug dangling at the end of a long silver chain, she says it and plunk! no more talking. Yet only when the stopper falls in place can the tub be filled.
For Char, lesbian is a familiar word, but her mother has heard it only a handful of times in her personal life. For one it means freedom; for the other, terror.
Char doesn’t know why it’s such a freeing word, and her mother is unsure why the terror lingers. Char has thought so many times about discussing it in depth with her Mom, but usually when she comes to the farm it never seems that there’s enough time. Other matters just eat up the visit.
Today the word was not listed on the agenda, so when it jumps out, it causes her a moment’s alarm.
“Gees, I said it, Mom . . .”
“Go on,” and a sip, a long sip, and eyes alive at the edge of fascination.Mom, really? You mean it?
“I am a lesbian. It’s important that I hear myself say that. I don’t want to lie anymore. I don’t want to talk as if I’m a patient in the psych ward, afraid to really tell others who I am.”
Mom catches that image, feels her way through her own fear that they will know who I really am. As she listens, within herself, she monologues. You were afraid, Bertha, weren’t you? Yes, I was. Afraid that they would know me in those ways they didn’t really want to know me. You mean that the men didn’t want the full knowledge of you? Oh, yes, I love Frederick and I gave him all that I could. I tried to be faithful to my vows, but I always knew there was something I shouldn’t say. You’re telling me there’s something terrible about yourself? Terrible, yes. But not terrible to me, I don’t think, but it would make him terrible! So who can you tell? …No one.
“Mom, is this okay?”
Mom nods.
“Men are not enough! I don’t know how else to say it.”
Mom nods.
“It’s not that they don’t try. I mean, take Jared. He tries but he just doesn’t know what it is I really want.”
Bertha’s listening to her daughter but hearing as if she herself were speaking.
“When he talks about love—and he is romantic in his moments, I’ve told you that—it’s like he gives me all the strength of his right arm without knowing that he has a left. I don’t know . . . is this making some kind of sense at all?”
Bertha has been running with Char’s words, back over her fifty odd years, back to when she first heard one of her aunts say to her mother as they leaned over her newborn brother, “Three will surely fill up your time. Just don’t think about anything else.”
That bit of conversation has remained in Bertha’s mind, and it has surfaced now and then throughout her life, but—why?— it always leaves her with a sharp headache. Right now, it’s a pointer, a magnetic arrow pointing towards other remembrances that begin to link up.
As a teenager, Bertha was a step behind the others who always giggled when the boys walked by and then exhausted a great cloud of heat in saying, “Golly me, I can’t wait till I have a baby!” Even then, she knew that it meant something more than what they themselves didn’t know—couldn’t know, being virgins and all. That somehow the word baby had something to do with being filled. With filling that void which being a girl meant. Those empty spaces between the girls as they looked at each other, seeing each other as dolls on a shelf, wind-up dolls not yet wound up, and baby-making being the winding.
She had not been as compelled by the word. Others called her a “hopeless romantic” because she wanted someone to love her and her alone¬—not love her for having babies. In the movies she’d always drift towards Bette Davis and the tougher femme fatales, but she didn’t know why. Although somewhere within her she knew that “they make men work for your love!”
Frederick had been the kind to work, at least a bit more than her other suitors. He seemed to appreciate her. One time he even confessed, “Maybe I should be ashamed, Bee . . . but I love just looking at you. Watching you. I enjoy the lust you fire up inside me!” That had been just before Char was born. Having babies changed him too, but the memory was sacred and powerful in its own way. She spent many a frigid Minnesota night being warmed by it as he snored in seeming bliss.
“Yes,
dear, I understand,” is all she manages to get out. She’s unpracticed in this kind of sharing.
“Mom, you drive me nuts! I know you understand. I’ve known all these years that you understand and support me. I just know that otherwise, so I’ve told myself, I don’t know if I could be doing all this. But you’ve got to help me here. I worry at times that it’s just us young women, maybe deluding ourselves . . . I don’t know, things are really fucked—oops, sorry—really a mess in the world, and maybe we’re not on the right track. But I can’t see how we’re not!”
It is time. Bertha retells the aunt’s conversation, and she reveals Char’s father’s cameo of love. Much to her surprise, she finds her tongue painting thoughts and images which, not being of the therapeutic generation, she fails to recognize come from her dreams.
“On the farm, a young girl quickly learns she’s a sister to the cow. Men talk about her, value her, and protect and possess her just like the cows. They love our big teats. They want us to calf each spring. They build fences and hold us—stupid as cows!—from wandering away . . . and they feed us!
You may think that’s odd but it’s not a bad thing. Maybe it is all that men can manage, I’m not sure. Maybe they can’t change. Or—now dear, this is an odd thought, but since we’re here drinking—” and with that word, for some inexplicable reason, she breaks out into a titter. Char is snared by the comic energy and starts laughing with her. It gets funnier. Their laughter sets one off, then the other. Contagion: They laugh even more as their faces become spotted by raindrop tears, and only slowly, as if carefully walking down steps in the dark, slowly do they begin to stop. Just as they do, Mom says again, “Drinking!” and they swell up, the energy almost knocking them off their chairs.
“Oh, dear, I guess it all seems so silly. Men drink whiskey and tell tall stories. We’re sipping tea. Oh my, I’ve got to get myself under control. Tea and off we go!”
To steady herself she gets up and pours herself and Char another cup.
“What’s in these herbs, Mom?” Char giggles.
“Oh, no, don’t start!” Mom returns the kettle to the stove. “If we don’t stop, your Dad will come in and say, What are you silly gooses doing?”
“And if he does we’ll have to say, We’re not gooses, we’re cows!” This gets them rocking again like two kids telling naughty jokes on the porch when their parents are away.
“Gees. Stop! Let’s get serious,” Char slowly comes down. “I want to hear you out.”
“Oh, dear, I’m not so sure there’s any more to say.”
“But you feel there is, don’t you?”
“To tell the truth, yes. I just don’t know how. All I know about men and women is what the Bible says, and it doesn’t really help me here. I once asked your Dad how he knew what men must do, and he brought the Bible over to me and said, ‘Sweetheart, everything we need to know is in the Good Book.’ But I wasn’t satisfied. I didn’t know what to say.”
“I do,” Char states firmly, “I don’t think women are more than cows either when you read the Bible. I know you find more in going to church than I do, but I don’t feel good there. I mean, what was Mary? She’s not God, is she? No. You know that. What more is she but a Holy Cow? A barn animal who bore the great Male Son? I mean, the virgin birth’s almost like artificial insemination, don’t you see?”
As if answering a starter’s bell, Mom stands up and walks over to the sink and begins to fill the basin, pours liquid detergent, grabs a few dishes and starts washing.
“I don’t know. This makes me nervous, somehow. I can feel what you’re feeling but I’m afraid it’s sinful. Whatever the Church says about Mary is not as important as remembering that God touched her. Men cannot take that away from us. God touched Mary. He didn’t touch Joseph.” She continues to wash, even washing things that aren’t dirty.
Char pushes her chair back. She must give her Mom some space but she’s also aroused, sensing that they’ve picked up a keen scent.
“Mom, look—men have turned the Bible, certainly the New Testament, into a male religion. Talking about a Father God and making much that Jesus had a pe—err, male organ and that the Spirit’s neuter. When what it’s really all about is that a woman, a female, a young girl shared herself with God. What did she share? Her female self. Her feminine soul! Just like with the calves, they’re part cow and part bull, and who is Jesus but part Mary and part God! Tell me, how does that image of Jesus make you feel?”
“Yes, yes,” anxious words and breaths, nothing left to clean, almost desperation. “Oh dear, I guess you might be right, but I must admit it makes me feel scared. Like something’s hovering over the house, something powerful and angry that will cast down a ball of fire and kill us all!”
Mom’s words are toned with hysterical fear. She blesses herself two, three, four times! Char stands and steps towards her mother, throws her arms around her, hugs her.
“Oh, Mom, Mom, I understand, I understand,” and they sway together. Mom is slightly trembling and releasing a low moan. Char hugs and hugs her, pulling her towards her, trying to leap over their physical barrier and touch the soul she just saw as herself in her mother’s words. “Sit down, Mom. Don’t worry, just listen.”
Char goes to the kettle, fires it up, rinses the cups, puts in fresh tea bags and takes out the heavy cream that she knows her Mom prefers when she drinks more than one cup at a sitting. During these few minutes Bertha slips into a moment of intense inner praying: uttering one prayer for peace of mind, another as she imagines herself as Mary holding the Christmas Babe.
“Mom, do you remember me telling you about my dream, the burning house one?”
“Of course I remember. Why?”
“Because you just freed me from it!”
“What?”
“It’s hard for me to believe but it’s true. Oh, Mom, can’t you see now, begin to see what happens when women, Sisters—and you are my Sister! my Sister in soul—when Sisters talk, new revelations erupt. What’s happening to us is what’s happening all around.”
Char’s enthusiasm brings a flush to her Mom that rises with the wet warmth of the tea. She feels as if Char’s energy is running down her throat and splashing into her stomach.
“Mary is a cow! Oh how true, and it’s she who is touched by God. So you see, what Jesus has is—what Jesus is, is a male who’s touched by God only as God touches the feminine!”
Char’s mind is ablaze with ideas and sky-rocketing images. Mom is still the somewhat bewildered spectator.
“I’m not sure, dear, what you really mean.”
“Geez, Mom, look, what we women—and men, everyone—have to find is the feminine which God touched. If God is filled with masculine energy, and even if this energy is divine, what we are, who we are as full humans—I mean, isn’t Jesus in the Church’s theology the ‘perfect man’? Right, look, he’s only perfect because he has the God-touched feminine!”
A moment of quiet enwraps them, one filled with a deep conversation of heart. Char is smiling that deep smile that Mom often sees when women first announce they’re pregnant, and which others gain when they finally give birth. It’s a smile of wondrous connection.
Char sees her Mom as she feels her Dad must have when he had his romantic moment. She sees a woman who has opened a door for her. A woman, a Sister whom she longs to invite to walk through that door with her.
“Mom, I hope you can see now why I must say openly that I’m a lesbian. It’s an affirmation of that feminine which was touched by God. You know, maybe you can even understand this better, that it is not a matter of sexuality. Sexuality is not the issue. That’s where the traditional priest theology loses itself in sin—it’s all focused on genitals.
I’m having a baby. I am having this baby because I am a lesbian!
I want this child to come into this world knowing that she—or he—is loved by me and by God, by the Mother God. And the only way the child will know is by knowing that I have loved
the male and the female.”
All throughout, Bertha has been watching her daughter closely, feeling her truth more than understanding her words. “I can, I think, maybe I can believe in what you’re doing, but who else will? You could be hunted and beaten and driven out of town—don’t you fear that?”
“Possibly.”
“I’m not sure,” and a terrible spectral hand grasps her throat, “I’m not sure even what your father might say.”
“I’ve thought about …Yes, I know. It really hurts that he and I can’t have this, be like this. I know.”
Mom stands up, and in doing so picks up her daughter’s hand. She carefully draws her to herself, bringing their stomachs together as one. She opens her heart to feel what must be felt—flying deep within her is an image of the Pieta. She hugs Char steadily for a full minute and then releases her, catches the back of her head and seals all that she seeks and has given with a full kiss on the mouth.
“I love you Char. You are truly my love child.”
As the dream comes again, she is inside it and outside of it at the same time. When the hovering presence comes, Char plants herself into the ground. Her toes root and her calves and thighs become the firm stock of a great-breasted Weeping Willow, tall as the house and so heavily bursting with clusters of catkins—tiny, yellowish green flowers—that it appears to be embracing the house. As she transforms, she names the terror. “Male-without-female, you are known to me!” At that, the wind becomes crazed and tears at all that stands in the ground, blowing deeply into the earth around her, ruthlessly trying to expel her roots. Yet the malicious fierceness succeeds only in opening her flowers. They split and shower the air, the house—pile like haystacks in the open field, a network of silky hairs like the sheen of snowfall.
“Male-without-female, you are to die within me!” Erupting from the sky, a great fireball tears into her breast and scorches a deep hole. Smoke pores from her mouth and she throws a great sound—not of pain but in song. “Male-without-female, we are One!”
It is then that the rest of her transforms back into herself. She is now laden with a blossom-necklace. All about, the land is quiet.
Joyously, as she stands by the tree which once again is embracing the farmhouse, she watches her family—Bertha, Frederick and Gary—sit down at table to say grace.
Kill the dove! Page 43