by Tricia Dower
“Lovely woman,” Grace says, as Winnie waves goodbye. “Her husband’s another matter.” She swivels to face both Linda and Ron. “It’s a relief to be with you two.”
Linda shrugs off her black flats and tucks her legs under her tweed circle skirt, free to observe mother and son in profile, his face a reflection of hers: sucked-in cheeks and a full lower lip on a heart-shaped face. His father must have contributed the renegade tuft Ron slicks down with Brylcream. Grace’s straight black hair is drizzled with white, like icing on a chocolate Bundt cake, the deep kindness in her eyes surely more than age.
Anxious to thank her for the two days in New York, Linda declares last night’s Funny Girl “fabulous,” an overly enthusiastic word she rarely uses. Ron makes matters worse by letting it slip she left the theater singing “Sadie, Sadie, married lady.” Grace will think she’s flighty. She rushes to explain. “It was either that or cry at Fanny Brice giving up the stage for the first man who said he loved her.” Yesterday they put on Russian accents and rode the Central Park carousel in a chariot, pretending it was a troika. She was too sore to straddle a horse. It was Linda’s idea to trace the route of an antiwar march they’d missed by two weeks, she imagining how romantic it would’ve been to spend their honeymoon defying a phalanx of police, the stories they’d be able to tell. They discovered a Christian bookstore in Greenwich Village and bought The Minister’s Wife as a Counselor. “What serendipity,” Ron said. During Funny Girl, she realized she was gaining a career by marrying the first man who said he loved her, one with an enviable vocabulary no less. He looks in charge of the world behind the wheel, the muscles under his long-sleeved, striped cotton shirt moving with authority as he shifts gears.
“Ronnie’s father never asked me to give up teaching,” Grace says, “but a few church mice did. Howard wasn’t big on genteel poverty. If they could match my salary and still pay his, he told them, we’d consider it. He was more in the camp of the Lord helps those who help themselves than the Lord will provide.”
“He got some of that from my grandfather,” Ron tells Linda through the rear-view mirror.
“The one who skipped the ministry?”
“The very same,” Grace says. “He thought religion had nothing to offer but propaganda. A bit of a dandy he was, always saying ‘Yowza!’ He and Howard weren’t close.”
They take the Jersey turnpike to the one that crosses Pennsylvania, ooh and ah at the copper, ochre, crimson and purple leaves on trees edging the road. Even if trips to Kansas had been in the fall, the colors wouldn’t have been as bright with joy as they are today. Grace taught seventh grade science until last year and seems to know which trees produce which blistering displays. She reels off the names but not in a smug way: poplar, hickory, sycamore, birch, maple, sumac and black gum. Leaning forward to hear better, Linda catches a hint of wood smoke and vanilla. Aunt Libby said every woman should have a trademark scent. Linda hasn’t found hers but then she isn’t much of a woman yet compared to Aunt Libby or Grace.
“Trees do so much for us,” Grace says. “And I’ve learned from watching them yield to storms, not fight them, from seeing their branches bend under ice but not break. I have snapshots going back decades of trees that feel like old friends. Many of Howard’s churches were in the country. In some places snow fell so deep you wouldn’t have known where you were if not for a familiar tree.” She shakes her head as though bewildered by her own memories. “Our first church, on a dirt road, had a fence around it to keep cows out. In retrospect, the parsonage was a dump and the outhouse smelled like a swamp but we were in love and I thought it was all so grand.” She turns and smiles at Linda. Sunlight catches the fine black hairs on her cheek.
As four lanes narrow to two, Linda’s stomach jigs with nervous anticipation. The Pennsylvania Turnpike tunnels, cut deep into the Appalachian Mountains, have gripped her imagination since early childhood. She once feared they were giant vacuum cleaner tubes for sucking up cars. But Daddy claimed they were magic. If she made a wish before entering one, it would come true one day. He must’ve known she wouldn’t keep track and present him with an accounting of ungranted wishes. Later she imagined them gateways through time, the present scraped out of their insides, the light at the end the future. Today, Blue Mountain swallows the car into its eerie glow and disgorges it into sparkling daylight. Sloughed-off cells of her past settle like ash onto the road behind.
At a service plaza, gasoline has the same addictive smell in this post-tunnel future it’s always had. Grace spots a picnic table in a sunny patch. They fetch coats from the trunk. Ron looks eighteen in his yellow and navy varsity baseball jacket. The sun warms their backs and throws their shadows along the tiny oasis of grass as trucks wheeyoo by. They polish off Winnie Judge’s ham and cheese sandwiches and lemonade from a Tupperware pitcher she sent with them. Grace makes a ceremony of handing over envelopes she’s safeguarded since the reception: cards with over five hundred dollars in checks and cash.
In the ladies room she asks, “Shall I call you Lin or is that reserved for Ronnie?”
Linda never considered Ron might want a pet name for her. She contemplates checking with him then impulsively says, “Yeah, why don’t you? I should introduce myself that way from now on. Ron spells it L-i-n. I like the way that looks with Brunson. Do you?”
Grace smiles as if she can’t see how riddled with flaws Lin is. “I’m definitely partial to the spelling. A Chinese family named Lin in one of our churches told me it means forest in Mandarin. I had a soft spot for them.”
Back at the car, the newly christened Lin—a starting-over name, it occurs to her—offers to drive.
Ron says, “Tomorrow, darling. I want you to rest today. And the next stretch is a nightmare around the curves.”
She shoves aside her pique. She’s only swollen between the legs, not dying of consumption. She changes places with Grace, asks if Ron needs her to read the map. He leans over the steering wheel, peers left and eases onto the turnpike. “Nope. Just keep an eye out for Exit 13 in a few hours.”
She can do that. She won’t lose track like Mother. Her marriage will be different.
Her mind drifts to the wedding and a question she forgot to ask Ron. “What did you mean when you said ‘jail/no bail’ to Carl at the reception?”
“An inside joke. Our Freedom Rider mantra. By not posting bail and filling the jails, we were driving up the cost of segregation.”
From the back, Grace says, “He asked our permission before he went. Howard said, ‘Go, you’ll be making history.’ Having lost two children before Ronnie was born, I wasn’t so sure.”
Lin turns around sharply. “Oh Grace, I didn’t know. That’s awful.”
“That was on my mind, Mom, believe me. I spent a long hard night in prayer before getting on that bus to Jackson. I knew I’d be arrested, likely beaten. Pretty sure I wouldn’t die.” His voice wavers at the end and he has to clear his throat. Lin’s eyes sting at the affection he must have for his mother. She envies him that.
Grace leans forward and lays a warm, thrilling hand on Lin’s shoulder. “That dreadful prison farm let him write only one letter a week.”
“Heavily censored,” Ron adds.
“We weren’t allowed to visit him. Howard and I and a few other parents called on Governor Andersen. We begged him to get us in to see our kids. He couldn’t. And the two people he sent to investigate conditions were hoodwinked.”
“To be fair,” Ron says, “they were allowed only five minutes with us.”
“They came back saying the prisoners were fine except for complaints about the food,” Grace says. “When one Rider posted bond and came home early, we learned the truth.”
Lin pats Grace’s hand in commiseration but also to keep it on her shoulder longer. She says, “What truth?” Ron describes cell lights on day and night, windows closed to bake the prisoners in the heat, something called wrist
breakers and something else called the Hole. Lin says, “Enough,” but in truth she’s exhilarated to be privy to a conversation more adult than she recalls ever having had with Mother and Daddy, proud to be part of this new family. She glances at her reflection in the car window and gives it a private smile.
Ron tells them Carl acted the clown on prison marches back from the shower. “We’d strip the sheets off our beds, shuffle naked down the hallway and redeem them for towels. After showering, we’d hand the towels back, get clean sheets and return to our cell. The walk back was the only time we saw the other prisoners and, partly to stop rude comments about our privates, Carl turned his sheet into a costume.”
“Like what?” Lin can’t imagine talking about privates in front of her mother.
“Like a noose one time, a Ku Klux Klan robe another, can’t recall what else. The other jailbirds would whistle and cheer. I’d be trying not to laugh. The guards seethed. They knew he was mocking them. He had the fearlessness of someone with moral authority on his side. He’s not religious but he was a powerful model for me that summer before I entered seminary.”
“Will we see him in Minnesota?”
“Depends how involved we get in his current preoccupation. He told me he burned his draft card.” He shakes his head and grins. “Pure theater. He’s too old for the draft.”
“Which reminds me,” Grace says. “That pastor of yours made a hullabaloo about your so-called antiwar obsession. Some of his flock said it gave comfort to the enemy. He said your sermon about civil rights was one thing—the Church has been vocally supportive for years. But they’ve taken no official position on Vietnam. Did anyone complain directly to you, Ronnie?”
“The head of the pastoral committee called it a distraction from spiritual work.”
“Apparently a few threatened to leave,” Grace says. “He went on about it so much I thought my eyeballs would roll back into my head.”
Lin has never mentioned Mother and Daddy’s objection to Ron’s antiwar stance and to her complicity in it. They expressed concern only about the danger she was in by opposing the war. They didn’t seem to care about Ron and she found that selfish, unchristian. She kept their comments to herself so he wouldn’t think badly of them and, by association, of her.
The car chases the sun west, reaching the Holiday Inn at Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, by seven. A big green and yellow sign with a star on top says “Happy birthday Molly!” After dinner—Ron and Grace call it supper—Lin takes a bath. When she comes out, he’s asleep in the tomb-like room, has folded the midnight blue bedspread over the desk chair and drawn the matching heavy drapes. She enters the cost of the meal and motel in a notebook of expenses he’s asked her to track and slips into bed. He said it’s up to her when they next have “relations,” that he’s content with only her breath on his skin. When his body jerks she wraps an arm around him, watches his eyelids flicker. She’s never belonged to anyone this way.
The morning brings car windows opaque with dew and air damp with mist. “It’ll burn off,” Ron says. He switches on the heater-defroster and heads for the Ohio border. He’ll drive first to get them through “the muddle” from one turnpike to another. After Youngstown and steel mills that foul the air, the scenery calms down. In the back seat Lin stares out the window at the sky being sky and the rest being forest or farmland, flatland or valley. Small towns with narrow dirt roads zoom by, all unfamiliar. Trips to Kansas followed a more southerly route from Ohio.
“Look!” she says. She’s seen pumpkins before, but not rows and rows of them. The car crosses a long steel and concrete bridge over a river with an Indian name. She feels like a pioneer on a Great Migration, in search of a new frontier.
Grace says, “What a shame we can’t see Lake Erie. It’s only half an inch away on the map.” A more scenic route would take longer, Ron patiently explains, and he couldn’t guarantee clean restaurants and restrooms. “Just like Howard,” Grace says, “always thinking ahead.”
“Did he get his voice from his father?”
“No. He cried so much as a baby, it permanently strained his vocal cords.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. He was a pistol.”
He makes a face into the rear-view mirror but a chuckling sound in his throat. Lin folds the knowledge he wasn’t always perfect into her mind.
After Cleveland, he climbs in the back seat, allowing her to drive because the terrain is flat with few curves. She got her licence just three years ago and has driven only Daddy’s automatic. Ron gave her a few stick-shift lessons before his River Street Methodist stint ended, didn’t seem bothered when she ground the gears. She stutters in first gear, grimaces, gets the hang of it and glances in the rear-view mirror. If he’s concerned, he pretends not to be. Beside her, Grace reports on harvested fields of what she guesses were potatoes, fields of beets still growing, corn drying on the stalks for cereal and fodder. She notes a combine, a broken down barn and a school that’s seen better days. In a city like New York, so much clamors for attention. Out here, there’s just one of everything for miles. When Grace points out a sign for a haunted cornfield at the next exit, nostalgia pricks Lin’s heart. “I talked my father into getting off the road somewhere in Illinois to see a two-headed calf,” she says.
“Did you find it?”
“Yeah, but it only had two noses and four ears, poor creature.” Daddy would’ve loved the faster toll roads. She chides herself for letting him wander into her mind.
At the Indiana toll road, Ron sticks his head over the front seat and says, “You’ll want to stop as soon as you safely can, sweetheart. The stretch ahead has sharp curves and suicidal truck drivers. It gets tricky around Gary and Chicago.”
She’s thrilled he calls her sweetheart in front of his mother.
After a lunch break, Grace gets in the back and Lin tries making sense of the map. Grace leans over and points. “We’re way at the top. Almost in Michigan.” Lin spots towns farther south she would’ve gone through with her folks, the air heavy with Mother’s disappointment over one situation or another. She will not be like Mother. She will make the best of whatever happens.
At the motel that night, she shampoos and rolls her hair in pink foam curlers, sets up her portable dryer on a small round table pitted with cigarette burns. Ron wraps the flowered vinyl bonnet around his head, switches on the dryer and says, “You could defrost meat under here.” She pictures a pork chop on his head and nearly explodes with love.
When the bonnet’s on her head the whoosh in her ears makes conversation impossible. She breezes through The Minister’s Wife as a Counselor. It describes various types of wives. The Assistant Pastor appeals to her. She doesn’t want to be a Compulsive Counselor—with a name like that, who would? The Concerned Friend is a possibility but Lin has little experience with friendship. Grace must’ve been the Understanding Mother type that convinces people they’re made of finer stuff than they are. Lin has no maternal instincts. What she felt for the delinquent boys in the home was more curiosity than anything else, occasionally a little sisterly. To be their mother would be a heavy weight.
When her hair is dry, she asks Ron if their parishioners are mostly white collar or blue.
“I’m not sure, haven’t met them all.” He pauses to think, looks up at the ceiling. “We have farmers, naturally. Some people work in the bag factory and at Malt-O-Meal, the colleges and hospital in Northfield. We get a few students. Why?”
“According to this, blue collar workers talk to minister’s wives mostly about physical ailments such as headaches and backaches.” Complaints like that, the author says, reflect a lack of psychological sophistication. Holier-than-thou words but they fit Mother, who hasn’t conceded, at least to Lin, that her pain might have a psychological cause.
“That makes sense,” he says. “They do more physical labor. I’d refer them to a doctor.”
“What if they’ve seen a doctor and their real problem is disappointment with their lives? How do you get them to understand that?”
“You can’t assume aches and pains are other than people say they are, sweetheart. That would be playing God.”
The book says a minister’s wife must have the courage to be herself even though she and her husband are one. How does that work, she wonders, as she curls into Ron that night, nine hundred miles from Stony River, the hum of the road still in her body.
The sun rises with effort on the day that will see them into Prairie Fire. Fortified with strong coffee, they travel through small towns with drooping telephone wires and houses dressed for Halloween. A stream accompanies them for a stretch, widens then narrows again. They have lunch at a restaurant with elk-horn light fixtures, orange chairs and russet tablecloths. Ron comes across “I Got You Babe” on the radio, declares it caterwauling and searches for a classical station. Grace says the big hit the year she and Howard married was “Makin’ Whoopee.” They fill up at a gas station where the soap is scored with dirt, the tap has only cold water and the air smells of skunk. Lin notes these moments in the expense record, thinking she’ll write them up later in some sort of memory book. A bridge takes them over the Mississippi River, the cause of the April floods Archie Sloan mentioned.
A sign reads “Welcome to Minnesota.” Ron says, “Population two more.”
10
Tavis’s voice floats in from the right. “Is it apple day, Mommy?”
She sprawls on her back as a dream takes flight, her legs too dopey to move, the dim room indulging the drowsy illusion she and Tavis are all there is in a vast, silent world. She hurls her reply into the void. “Yessiree. It’s Monday.” They’ve been here two days. “What time does Black Bear say?” Hanging from a nail in the kitchen is a garage sale clock, its face in the belly of a mute plastic bear, no tick, no tock, its hands moving implacably toward que será, será.