by Jim Kraus
Here’s my recap: we sat for awhile. He had a glass of wine. I stuck with coffee. We chatted about the weather and the Bears’ chances this season (which were not so good; I still listened to the news, so I could be conversant as to their status, on a superficial level), the last movie we saw, the last book we read—and he charmed me by saying he went to the Lombard library and checked out one of my early books. It was an Amish story, and he said he read it only at home so no one would see him reading a romance book. He said the first couple of chapters were quite good.
I would have been happy if the evening had stopped at that compliment. Being complimented was heady stuff. Almost better that having people feel sympathy for you.
And then we ordered. He had the small steak and I had the chicken. (I was being cautiously frugal.) We both agreed that our meals tasted quite good. And they did, really. They make fabulous roasted chicken at Ki’s.
He had a second glass of wine after dinner. We both passed on dessert. I had more coffee. He told some funny stories about working with doctors and having to watch actual operations, to see how the stents get placed.
I told Ava that I appreciated his sensibilities. Most men (and maybe this is unfair) would relish the opportunity to make the stories horridly graphic with blood and spurting veins and arteries. But Brian did nothing of the sort. He kept the blood aspect to a mere trace—we were at dinner, after all.
“And you know what?” I asked Ava.
“What?”
“He actually let me talk. He asked me about writing and I talked for a long time—and he listened. Maybe he only acted interested, but if he did, he did a wonderful job of faking it.”
“Really? He listened? And there’s actually a man who does the faking? Unheard of.”
“Ava, you can be terrible at times,” I said, trying not to sound like a prudish scold, but letting her know that I sort of mostly disapproved. “He did listen. And asked . . . like follow-up questions and everything. I liked having someone to talk with—and not simply be talked at.”
Ava took a deep breath.
“Do you mind if I date him as well? He sounds like . . . like a nice guy.”
I smiled, knowing that I had an edge here somehow.
“No,” I replied. “You already have one. And that’s enough.”
8
The following day, Sunday, as cold as it had been all year, dawned with a wind that yowled across the open field behind my house. Winter robbed nearly everything of its color; only browns and grays remained in the muted sunlight, struggling to knife through a thick stratum of bleak clouds, the color of old oatmeal. I nearly froze by the time Rufus and I returned home from our morning walk. There had been no time to talk. The previous night had not been much better. When the wind howled, Rufus often remained mute. Maybe he found it hard to talk over the noise of the wind and weather.
He had his returning-home snacks. I realized I was wide awake and, after seeing that it was only 7:00, I decided to shower, dress, and go to the early service at church. Most of our old friends went to the middle service. Attendance at the first service ran on the sparse side. I could sneak in late and sneak out early and not run into anyone I knew.
I’m not sure why I decided to go that particular morning.
Maybe my date got me thinking. Maybe things were changing in my life. Maybe I wanted . . . I don’t know. Maybe I wanted some sort of sign, some sort of divine affirmation.
Where better to get a sign than at a church? Or a mountain- top? We’re in Illinois, remember? There are no mountains in Illinois.
I parked down the street, being charitable to those who would arrive later, and the wind, now stronger, whipped and clawed as I clutched my too-thin-for-this-weather coat around my throat. I must have been a sight when I entered, my hair streaming in all directions, my face red, my eyes watering.
I prayed that I would not see anyone that I knew.
I did not. Attendance, by my estimation, stood even lower than I expected, because of the harsh weather most likely. My church’s, or any church’s, numbers suffer in the cold and nasty conditions.
I took a bulletin and sat in the back, on the right side (not my usual spot, but out of the way). Our church . . . my church . . . or this church, I guess, leaned right and backward when it came to style. Hymns, yes, we still sang them—with a pipe organ as well. Bulletins, yes, we still used them—instead of a projection screen or a Facebook update, or whatever the hip churches are doing these days.
Tweeting, maybe.
I could never do that—Tweet—simply because it sounded stupid to me. Not communicating, but the word itself. Tweeting. Please. It is what birds do.
The first two hymns sounded reedy and fragile as the congregation struggled to match the volume of the organ, whose organist appeared oblivious to the overpowering pipes.
The pastor today, the one delivering the sermon, was not the senior pastor. I was momentarily displeased because I liked the senior pastor’s messages. This new guy—well, I couldn’t be sure. And then I thought that I may never have heard him before. He was newish, and I had not been attending that regularly in recent months . . . or years, I guess.
Maybe he would surprise me. Maybe this specific confluence of times and events and temperatures and all the other auguries would fall into place in a perfect alignment to bring his message to a needy ear.
Wasn’t that what I expected? Wasn’t I looking for a sign?
I was. I have been heeding the words of a fifteen-pound dog for the last few months. I wanted to hear from a man of God. Not that the dog of God was leading me astray, but maybe I needed more.
And just how ludicrous do I sound? I am eternally grateful that my thoughts do not become visible, in little cartoon balloons over my head.
The pastor strode to the pulpit. He had a lean and hungry look about him, which I did not immediately embrace. I suspect that I never immediately warm to anyone who is whippet thin and looks as if he has run twelve miles a day—before breakfast.
He was that sort of person.
Isn’t it telling about the frailty of humans that I have, within seconds, dismissed this fellow human being as being cold and inconsiderate? I hope that other people don’t do that to me.
He began to speak.
He read a long passage from the book of Job.
And my heart sank.
If you haven’t read it, that part of the Bible talks about Job, a rich man who had everything he could possibly want, and how he lost everything—or rather, had it taken away from him.
“Suffering makes us better.” I think that’s an accurate quote from the skinny pastor. He went on to read: “ ‘The Lord gave me what I had, and the Lord has taken it away. Praise the name of the Lord!’ In all of this, Job did not sin by blaming God.”
He went on, but after only a few moments, I stopped listening. Not because I chose to, but because I grew angry, the weepy kind of angry that stops all cogent thought.
I fought back tears as well as attempted to quell the anger ascending in me like a helium balloon. The tears acted as ballast, I guess.
I couldn’t hear, because of the internal bedlam in my head.
Yes, everything I had belonged to God. And maybe he had the right to take it away.
But why? Why would he do that? Was I not good enough for God that he had to “refine” me in some horrible fire? And after he snatched from me the only two people who were blameless in my life, he wants me to thank him for it?
Well, he has another thing coming if he thinks that will happen. Because it won’t. Not now. Not ever. There is no good that can come out of my husband and son being torn apart by a drunk driver and a semi-truck full of blasted, stupid, unnecessary flat-screen televisions from China. There is no good in that. They’re gone, and I am here all alone.
I came as close to swearing in church as I ever had in my life.
There is nothing that will ever change that in my life.
I tried to use a tissue and stanch
the tears. I was not too successful.
“Job did not sin by blaming God.”
And that’s it then? That’s the sign? That I’ve been sinning for the past three years? That I haven’t been as darn magnanimous and accepting as a “good” Christian should be, smiling bravely in spite of my loss? Well, God, if that’s what you wanted to tell me, then message received.
I couldn’t stay. I just couldn’t.
And I had used angry, almost-swear words inside a church, if only in my head, though that would be marked against me as a sin, too, I imagine. I would have sworn—a lot—if I was a person who used profanity. I wasn’t, and wished that I could have been, for just this moment.
I pretended to cough, stood up, and slipped out the back doors, not looking left or right, not hearing anyone call to me, pulling on my jacket as I almost stumbled down the stairs and to the sidewalk, almost running to my car, slamming the door harder than I have ever slammed a door, then pounding on the wheel a few times.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand, inserted the key in the ignition, started the engine, and wondered if I should drive through my tears and ire—though waiting until they passed seemed to be too much pain to endure motionless.
I didn’t tell Rufus anything about church that day. When I returned home, he did stare at me for a long moment, as if he had noticed my red eyes. I’m not sure I had ever cried in front of Rufus before—I don’t think so—but I imagined that he could not have truly understood the emotion or the reaction.
Dogs don’t cry, do they?
Not according to Wikipedia, they don’t. They lack the proper moral absolutes for understanding guilt and shame and remorse and unhappiness, the article said, so they have no reason to cry.
I guess that’s correct. An animal can easily kill another animal and eat it—for survival—without even a momentary hesitation. I don’t think I could do that. Not personally—though I suppose I did pay other people to do that for me.
My usual Sunday afternoon routine entailed reading the newspaper online, watching whatever old movie was featured on Turner Classic Movies, and napping on the sofa in the sunroom, under the thickness of a throw and blanket, with Rufus stationed at the top of the sofa, guarding against roaming packs of hooligan squirrels.
Today, I did none of that. I had two cups of strong coffee for lunch. I went downstairs into the basement, considered bringing up a box or two of Christmas decorations, and then decided against it (too early), went upstairs, opened the linen closet with the idea of reorganizing its haphazard contents, but didn’t (too much work for a Sunday), then came back into the kitchen, made another cup of coffee, and sat in the upholstered chair, staring outside, over the deck, to the gray sky and bare trees.
It had not proved to be a productive day, by any stretch of the imagination.
The sermon stuck in my craw, being turned this way and that, my inner self trying to come to grips with it and not succeeding in the least.
I know what the man said made theological sense and contained theological import—but to me, that was all it had.
I mentioned earlier that I wasn’t sure if I still believed or not.
That’s why. This is why.
I couldn’t get it to make sense.
I just couldn’t.
If Jacob had died of cancer or some horrible, agonizing disease—that I could have lived with, horrendous as it might have been. I could have held him and said good-bye. I could have shared in his pain. Even my son—I could have done that for him.
But there were no good-byes. We had no last hugs. The door to their lives had been slammed in my face.
Two closed coffins—that is all there ever was. Closed. Never to be opened. I had no chance at a good-bye. I had to suffer all alone. No one could understand or share that pain. No one. How do you say farewell to a wooden box?
If, in order to be a Christian in good standing, I have to accept, with grace and joy and long-suffering, that pain, then I am turning in my membership badge. I can’t live under those rules. I can’t be a member of a club that asks for too much sacrifice.
Yes, I am very aware that we live in a broken world and that believers and nonbelievers will suffer—but only the believers are told that they have to have joy in the midst of it. The non-believers can revel in their unhappiness and no one thinks they are weak or lack faith. They are deemed normal. Not me. Not as a believer. I need to put on a cheerful face in the midst of a crumbing, breaking heart. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t.
So . . . I spent the day, talking to myself and carrying on a very long, heated argument between myself and . . . I don’t know . . . that new guy at church—the one with the lean and hungry look.
I ate two blueberry muffins at 4:00, although Rufus ate probably a quarter of one of them. I know chocolate chips are bad for dogs, but I am pretty sure blueberries are okay. They have antioxidants in them, right? And he loves blueberry muffins, licking the floor to make sure every last crumb is devoured.
That was going to be my dinner. Being tied in angry knots left little room for an appetite to develop. And if I lost a pound or two, all the better.
Since I’m dating again, apparently.
And I didn’t tell Rufus any of this, not in one of my out-loud monologues to the dog during the day, when I’m not sure he really paid attention to me anyhow. But I didn’t tell him any of this because . . . well . . . I was pretty sure he wouldn’t really understand. And I didn’t want that to happen. And what would happen if he told God all about it. I didn’t want that either. What God doesn’t know won’t hurt him.
That night, the air colder than it had been all fall and early winter, seemed even colder. I checked The Weather Channel before leaving on our walk—31 degrees. It felt icy. I didn’t pay attention to the relative humidity—I don’t think I really understand the term—but it did feel damp outside and that dampness seemed to have more penetrating power than just the cold.
I promised myself I would look it up on Wikipedia to find out the reason for it. Yes, I know you can’t trust Wikipedia. When my son was alive, and in kindergarten, the teachers in the upper grades at grammar school forbade students from ever using Wikipedia as a source for any of their school assignments. What got me is that they would much rather trust a book as a solid, trustworthy source for a second-grade research paper on butterflies. But you have to remember this—I write books (or at least wrote books). I sounded very trustworthy and reliable as I described the cultural mores of the Amish community. I had never included a known falsehood in my books—but I am far from being an Amish scholar. All this to say, for my purposes, Wikipedia always worked fine.
Rufus hunkered down as we turned into the wind on Glencoe. A large open field lay to the south leaving nothing to impede the wind, as it bit and gnashed at us as we tucked into it that night. We both hurried to make the turn, to find some protection from the trees along the private, NO TRESPASSING pond area.
I was puffing when we got there.
“Cold,” I said aloud.
“It is. I might need a jacket,” Rufus said, “like the one Rusty wears.”
Rusty was the schnauzer that might have been Rufus’s legitimate cousin—the one from the same breeder. Rufus had scoffed at the idea of wearing a jacket like Rusty’s—but he had snorted when it was September and 50 degrees. With the wind and the damp, opinions are easily swayed.
“I could get you one, if you want,” I replied.
“Okay.”
We walked a ways, and I tossed him a treat, which he chewed happily.
“Rufus,” I said, “is my dating Brian okay? Is it okay for me to . . . want to see him again? Is it okay to want to be with him?”
I know. I know. It’s crazy doing this. But if I asked any of my female friends or family—well, here’s what would happen: Ava would claim that I need to be with a man—in more ways than one. Beth would want to know if he’s a church-going man. Bernice would not want to even hear the question. Others would caution a
bout going too fast, or too slow, or at all. Confusing, right? Rufus is the only clear, trustworthy voice I have right now. As they say, he doesn’t have a horse in this race.
“Sure,” he said quickly, as if he had been considering this question for a while before I asked it. “But I would like to meet him.”
“Okay,” I responded.
I waited until we got to the end of Anthony Street before I spoke again.
“Does God want me to be happy?” I asked, louder than I wanted, but I wanted the words to be heard over the wind rushing up Western Avenue.
Rufus responded quickly this evening.
“Being with a man is what will make you happy?”
I waited a half a block.
“I don’t like being alone.”
“I’m with you,” Rufus said. And after another moment, he added, “And God is with you, right? I mean, you have asked him about it, right?”
I don’t know why, but I immediately grew angry.
“Yeah, right,” I snapped back. “I asked. But Brian is someone I can actually hold in my arms. I can actually feel him as he holds me back.”
“And that’s what you want?”
“Yes,” I snapped quickly. “That is what I want.”
I wondered what Rufus knew about God, really. He sort of knew what the Bible was—this book-thing that people look at. But he could not read—I felt pretty certain of that. So how could he know so much about God and what he stands for?
I guess I figured it out like this: when I pet Rufus on the head, in a kind, gentle way, more than just touch is communicated. Those gentle strokes must tell him that I care for him, that I will try my best to provide for him, that I will keep him from harm. None of that had been said in words—but instead, communicated through our shared touch. He knew exactly what it all meant.
Maybe good dog Rufus found the same sort of information emanating from God in the same way—nonverbal, but absolutely concrete and real. Maybe God reached down, somehow, and touched Rufus and from that divine touch, the good dog just knew God and what he was all about. Maybe that knowledge was all coded into his DNA and instinct.