by Tricia Dower
“That’s the one. Dad drove to Alabama to preach at the pulpit of a minister jailed for protesting her arrest. That was risky. Thugs were attacking Negro churches and preachers who didn’t toe the line. I was scared for him but proud. I’m grateful he saw me get to seminary.”
“You have his eyebrows.” Thick and low over the eyes.
He kisses her fingertips. “We should phone your parents. I promised your dad.”
“I’ll call tomorrow.” When Daddy’s at work.
He stands. “I’ll tell him that. I won’t break my promise to him.”
The phone is in the kitchen. She hears only the deep rumble of Ron’s voice, the up and down of it, an occasional word. He reports that her father was “disappointed” she wasn’t up to speaking to him tonight. She nods and shrugs. Of course he is. Disappointment is the Wise family emotion of choice. It fills the air with verdict. You’ve let the side down. You’re the bitter pill that has to be swallowed. But she’s a Brunson now and can stop being disappointed in anyone but herself.
She kneels with Ron beside the double bed that night under the dormer’s sloped ceiling. He thanks God for getting them safely to their new home, asks Him to open Lin’s heart to forgive those who’ve hurt her. He runs a hand along her hair and down her neck.
She catches his hand and kisses it.
“Yes?” he says.
“Yes.” Eldon Jukes drifts on memory’s edge but she doesn’t allow him under the heavy quilt. She likes the warmth of Ron’s stomach on hers, the pressure of his mouth, her hands on his back, his legs spreading hers. It doesn’t hurt as much this time.
“Thank you, Jesus,” he says when he’s done.
12
Ron phones on the morning of her sixth day in Hopkins, asking to see her alone before he carries Tavis off to Prairie Fire for the weekend. She’s tense as a coiled spring all day. He’s at her door faster than she thought possible after she buzzes him in, looks charged up. “You must have taken the stairs two at a time,” she says.
“I did.” He pulls her into his arms and nearly squishes the breath out of her then holds her at arm’s length. “You look wonderful. How are you feeling? Are you eating?”
“I feel good. Yes, I’m eating.” She regrets wearing the orange blouse he likes, doesn’t want to look wonderful to him.
He hasn’t cut his hair since he agreed to her move. It’s longer than hers now and wavy, falls over his forehead untamed. He seems to be clinging to the last days of summer in navy and white checked knit pants, a red golf shirt, white belt and glossy white patent loafers. He releases her and ducks into the kitchen. “Mom’s steering wheel is a lab experiment gone wrong.” He washes his hands with dish soap and roots around for a towel.
“Under the sink,” she says.
“Super,” he says. Only a week apart and she’s forgotten how often he uses that word, how much it bugs her.
He opens one cupboard then another. “Am I getting warmer? I’m looking for a glass.”
“Far left on the fridge side.”
He fills a glass from the tap and downs it. “Let’s see what you’ve done.” She follows as he meanders through the dining area and living room, glancing this way and that like a prospective tenant. “Something on the walls to absorb sound would be nice,” he says, as if he doesn’t know how strapped she is. “I hear an echo when I phone. Where’d you get the tree?”
“From a neighbor.” No need to mention it came from a man she doesn’t know.
“Oh, you’ve made a friend. I’m glad.” That patronizing tone she was slow to pick up on.
He peers out the sliding glass door. “To think our little man is over there now. When I phone, I say, ‘What did you do today?’ He says, ‘Nothing.’ Does he tell you more?”
“Not much.” Her shoulders relax. He’s here about Tavis is all. Maybe.
She edges beside him. “What he has been talking about is being with you and riding his Big Wheel again. He’s excited.” It costs her to admit that but given how an absent father affected Anthony she wants Tavis and Ron to be close.
He sits on the hide-a-bed, leans forward, elbows on knees, gazing up with the frankly beautiful eyes that will pull her in if she’s not careful. “That’s what I wanted to speak with you about. We didn’t consider the implications of this separation very well.”
“No?” After hours of agonizing discussion, every detail, she thought, thrashed out.
“It occurred to me that, if we don’t maintain some sort of intimate contact and family routine, living together after a year will be tough. To go for a year without marital relations, for instance, is unhealthy.” He says the last as if it’s an afterthought. She knows it isn’t.
The bentwood rocker squawks as she lowers herself into it. “Other couples manage. Soldiers are away in Vietnam for a year or more.”
“They have no choice.”
“Those who volunteer do.”
“Well, neither of us is a soldier. It’s not like you to be so argumentative.”
“Lots of things aren’t like me these days. What do you have in mind?”
“I’ll stay here Friday nights. Tavis and I will go shopping for supper. When you get home the three of us will make the meal together. Cora’s family does that.”
“Do they?” Helpful, meddlesome Cora Bostrom, who calls herself musical director, a pretentious title for a church with one small choir that can’t afford robes. But Ron’s in awe of her “Fantasia in C Major” on the 1920s-vintage pump organ.
“Yes, they do. Cora says Tavis is old enough to stir a pot and pull lettuce apart for a salad. Making meals together has helped her kids’ communication skills and made them feel important. Supper’s their sacred family time. We need a sacred time, Lin. Tavis needs it.”
He makes it seem so reasonable. Her voice will sound petulant in his ears. “This was supposed to be my place. That was the whole idea, remember? If you stay over on Fridays, it won’t feel like mine.”
“No, the whole idea was for you to experience working outside the home and having some time on your own. Tavis and I will take off on Saturday mornings. He’ll be out of your hair until Monday night. My staying over one night a week shouldn’t change that.”
“But it will.” How could their understanding be at such odds? She is to develop what Transactional Analysis would call her Emancipated Adult, free from Ron hovering over her, and to reflect on her faith, exempt from the pressures of ministerial life. She’s also been counting on a year away from yeasty smells, stained sheets and crotch hair sticking like glue.
He presses his hands together, lifts his eyes to the ceiling and sighs. “All right, then. You bring Tavis down each Friday and stay at the parsonage overnight.”
“We wouldn’t get there until seven or later. He’d be too hungry.”
He throws up his hands. “So feed him before you leave. That’s a detail, Lin, not a major obstacle. We can make breakfast as a family the following day.”
“I have to think about it.”
“Well, consider this as you do: I can’t proceed with our current arrangement for long.”
Good lord, it’s only been a week. A brief spasm seizes the space between her shoulder blades. “What does that mean?”
“We’ll sublet the apartment and you’ll come home.”
She bites back a scream, forces herself to think. If they could talk about something else, the panic racing through her body might subside. Time. Time. What Angel said about no past or future, only now, has lodged in Lin’s mind for two days, triggering a vague recollection of being outside time during Tavis’s birth. She rocks forward, asks, “What’s twinkling of an eye mean?” She honestly doesn’t care about his answer, just hopes the question will distract him, feed his compulsion to instruct her.
He looks up, frowns. “What?” The word clipped, cross.
&nbs
p; Music from the apartment below throbs faintly in the air.
“That line in First Corinthians, before the trumpet sounding.”
“Oh.” He rubs his hands together between his knees. “It’s an old Hebrew expression: a moment is as the twinkling of an eye. The full passage is about resurrection. The dead shall be raised in an instant, as in the twinkling of an eye. You should know that. Why do you ask?”
She pushes away an image of tombstones collapsing, the earth spewing zombies. “I was wondering if there’s no such thing as time, if everything happens in a twinkling.”
“Dabbling in metaphysics, are you? Or wanting to change the subject.”
After a heaving great silence, she says, “I don’t like you right now.”
He sighs again. When did he become so full of sighs? “Will you pray with me?”
“No.”
He stands and kicks the coffee table. “I hate that shade of red.”
“Good.” She fetches Tavis’s little plaid travel bag, trails behind Ron to daycare.
A half-hour later, she’s in Tavis’s room, missing him so much her stomach hurts. What if Ron doesn’t bring him back? If she weren’t what Transactional Analysis would term a self-pitying Child, she’d do something gumptious like teach herself to juggle. By five o’clock she can’t stand being alone with her angst. She phones Artie and tries to keep her voice light but he sees through her. “I’m on my way.”
Arthur Gilchrist was two years ahead of Ron in seminary. A troublemaker, Ron said, and given to profanity. They stumbled upon him in 1967 when they visited a draft-counseling center inside Redemption Methodist, a downtown Minneapolis church that has worried itself into disrepair in a neighborhood lost to suburban malls and racism. She felt a jolt of attraction that dumbfounded her. Physically it didn’t make sense. He’s short and careless about his appearance. What drew her in, she knows now, was the fearlessness she’d expected from Ron.
After the phone call she goes downstairs to wait for Artie inside her building’s entrance. The sun has given way to the blear of rain. The wet parking lot glitters under lampposts. He arrives in a white van belonging to the shelter for street kids that employs him part-time and gives him a place to sleep. Redemption sold its parsonage before he arrived, remains too hard up to guarantee him a salary. The shelter, a few well-heeled parishioners and a bishop’s fund keep him from clutching a begging bowl on street corners. She runs out, climbs in. He leans across with a hug smelling of Lifebuoy and says, “How’s my favorite heretic?”
“Better now.” Something about him always settles her down. “Been outside all summer?” His tan is incongruous with the raindrops splattering the hood of the van.
He releases the parking brake. “More or less. Six weeks in Brainerd, camping with my hoodlums. Summer in the city’s treacherous, too easy for them to get up to no good. Your new place okay?”
She shrugs. “So far.”
He reaches over, touches her arm. “Need a father confessor tonight?”
She shakes her head. “Just a friend.” She’s unburdened herself to him enough in recent months, is content to be in here with him, sheltered against the rain.
He takes her to a swanky half-timbered house on Lake of the Isles with cream-colored sofas and carpet, lamps that must cost more than all she owns and deep black furniture the hostess tells her is ebony. At one time hundreds attended Redemption Methodist. They were down to fifty when Artie joined them. They rent out the sanctuary to theater groups and meet every Friday at a different member’s home. Thirty have clustered tonight, including the employment agency owner who got Lin the job at Lutheran Protection.
She hasn’t been to one of Artie’s Friday nights in a while. Except for a few younger souls, not much has changed. Nobody dressed up, no sermon, “no bullshit rituals.” Artie claims Bible verses don’t sway anyone not already blind with faith, refuses to wear a robe or a collar, doesn’t want to set himself up as superior to the rest. He sits on a white leather ottoman and plays “With a Little Help From My Friends” on his guitar. Folks sing along. Church to him, he’s told her, is where you can speak and hear each other’s truths. Tonight people tell of their trials the week before—so candidly she almost expects “Hi, my name is Dolores and I’m a Twinkies addict.” An older man reads from a parable about a younger one in ancient Jerusalem who receives scrolls containing the secrets to success. When he says the first scroll is called “Today I begin a new life,” Lin’s shoulders heave with silent sobs. If she were to spill all her bottled-up tears she fears they’d wash her away.
On the way home, Artie says, “You’re opening yourself to higher, nobler possibilities, to something larger than yourself.”
Is she? Feels more like she’s dangling her feet over the edge of her life.
13
Sat, Oct 30/65
Ta da! Introducing Journal of a Pioneer Bride. Incubated in the expense record of last week’s 1200-mile covered wagon journey thru 4 magic tunnels, 3 toll roads & 1 time zone. I couldn’t resist sneaking little details into the expenses like Daddy did in his Kansas trip logs. But I wanted more marrow than “Betty not well today, wheel bearing in bad shape, $6.15 to replace in Kentland, Ind.” I want to record stuff for when I’m too old & feeble to remember it but also capture how I feel about it. Not sure I’m capable of that. Too used to keeping my emotions in a clamshell. But if I can’t talk about them to myself, how can I counsel parishioners?
We’re light years from Jersey. Didn’t realize Prairie Fire was even more rinky-dink than Stony River. Sometimes my reluctance to ask questions alarms me. Today’s big excitement was a backfire on the county road a mile or so away. The church is 1/2 the size of River St, the sanctuary positively spartan: white walls, wood floors, no stained glass. The altar’s a nicked-up table. I’m miffed for R but he’s thrilled not to be Jr pastor in a grander church, said it’s all the church he needs. Here he’s the big kahuna. Chief cook & bottle washer, too, charged w/storm window installation, snow shoveling, grass cutting, leaf raking & mice eviction.
Today’s our 1-week anniversary. I feel a bit taller for some reason. We’re celebrating by getting ready for tomorrow’s service. My jaw aches w/tension already. I just know I’ll grind my teeth tonite. Meeting all those new people? On Hallowe’en, no less. Cue the scary sounds.
Ron’s sermon about the masks people hide behind is perfect. Everybody laughs at his things-that-go-bump-in-the-night prayer and his Aldo Ray voice seems to cast a spell on the kittenish college girls with teased hair whispering into white-gloved paws in the pew in front of Lin.
She’d tell him how irresistible he is up there but that would be too much like flirting.
Undignified.
The Pastoral Committee holds a welcome reception for them after the service in the windowless Congregational Hall, done up with cobwebs, tiny orange lights, glowing jack o’-lanterns, a cidery witches’ brew and treats for the kids. Must be sixty adults there and forty little Supermen, Atom Ants, Uncle Festers, Snow Whites and Olive Oyls. Lin nearly cries in thanks. God’s mysterious ways? Who else would know how much it bothers her they’re too far out for trick-or-treaters? She didn’t tell Ron, doesn’t want him to know what a baby she can be.
Grace charms the pants off everyone at the reception. She’s such a natural and so snazzy. Her dress isn’t weighed down by a yellow mum corsage with fat dangly ribbons. (“I look like the prize-winning squash,” Lin jokes.) Grace doesn’t seem to mind some guy’s story about scraping a cat off the road. Or having to say over and over, like a stuck record, that as far as they know they’re not related to Alfred Brunson, the first Methodist missionary to preach to the Indians in Minnesota. Lin asks if she’ll start coming to Open Door now instead of Northfield Methodist. She says her daughter-in-law doesn’t need her looking over her shoulder but Lin would like nothing better than Grace beside her every Sunday, showing her how to be.
Ron is a regular border collie, herding Lin around the room, making sure she meets Debbie and Dan Austin, who call themselves mommy and daddy (good grief) to three hundred dairy cows, Gerald and Arleen Sweany, who keep bees, Bill Pearsall, who manages the Prairie Fire Flames and lets Ron practice with them (first in the Cannon Valley baseball league this year, go Flames!), four Future Farmers of America, three women with wimpy handshakes, two men with badger breath (and a partridge in a pear tree). Most with English, Scottish and German names she has to memorize. Not a dark face in the crowd. Where are the downtrodden to whom they’re supposed to bring promise and hope? Everybody calls her Mrs. Brunson, despite her saying, “Lin, please.” She can’t count how many wiseacres say, “So you’re from Joisey.”
She’s nervous as all get out but most folks are swell. Yackety too. (Some goofuses love to tell their business.) It’s weird what makes people proud. Like having ancestors in the nearby Civil War “sematree” or fathers and grandfathers, husbands and brothers on a Fallen Heroes plaque in the church vestibule. Many are related to each other, which may explain why they come way out here from towns that have their own Methodist churches. What stirring preacher drew them here in the first place, which indispensible preacher’s wife? Tick one off and lose a chunk of your congregation?
She’s invited to join Crafty Gals, teach Sunday school, serve at the pumpkin pancake breakfast and make shepherd robes for the Christmas pageant. Apparently the choir is desperate for her thin soprano, too. Grace says, “Be careful. They’ll run you ragged if you let them.” But ragged is what she’s here for. The minister’s wife book says shots at counseling come where you least expect them. Can’t wait at home like a lump for the phone to ring.
It’s tradition for the new minister and his wife to hold an open house so everybody can see they haven’t painted the walls black or started keeping pigs in the basement. Ron and Lin hold theirs in December. She scrubs the place to death. If they get booted out it won’t be for yellow waxy build-up. The eight-foot Christmas tree Ron cut down from their woods floods the living room with a swell pinesap odor and Lin’s onion dip is a hit. Thirty show up. A trustee’s wife remarks that it must be nice not having a mortgage. Grace says a serf’s mentality is an asset when the collection plate feeds you. You’re supposed to be grateful the stove works.