by Annie Proulx
Ivar grew up in fear of his father’s insensate rages, ricocheted from slaps and screams in the barn to gingersnaps and cream in the kitchen.
Nils, when he was rational, gave Elise detailed commands on how to raise children properly. His own parents had been obsessed with the prescriptions of a book, The Emigrant’s Guide to Preserving Norwegian Culture, written by a homesick settler in Texas, a book that dwelt on the merits of the Norwegian language, twice-daily prayers, Norwegian hymns, clothes, food and, after the fortune was made, return to the “elskede Nord” country. Daily they had sung “En Udvandrers Sang,” “O Norges Son” and others. His mother wished to live in a Norwegian community where land was owned in common by all. But Gunnar shouted for independence and his own land, purchased a mighty, star-spangled flag. Years later, drunk, Nils could still remember one of those old songs, “The Skeleton at the Party,” with its verses about liberty and peace across the sea: “Bliver os Skatter, Afgifter for svær, reise vi Vest over Sø, til Missisippis Breder, o der, ja, o der i Frihed vi blegne og døe…,” but forbade his own children to learn a word of the purse-mouth tongue. Concentrate on American, he told them—Oleana, that Norwegian utopia dreamed up by Ole Bull, was a joke and Norwegians were a joke and their accent was a joke and they made themselves into jokes with stupid behavior and low comedy acts and songs, heavy with simulated farts and swollen red noses and checkered highwater pants. Norwegians were figures of fun like no others, bawling “who threw the halibut on the poop deck?” in exaggerated comic accents, playing the squeezebox through their legs, behind their ears, until you wanted to howl. And what stubborn people, unable to let go of an idea and look at another. So the birth language of old Gunnar and Margaret perished in the Gasmann family.
As an illustration of stubbornness and single-track minds, Nils told the story of how old Gunnar and the uncles began to dig a well on the farm. Seven feet down, they struck a vein of shining red-colored flakes and nuggets. Could it be copper? Perhaps. Samples of the mystery ore were wrapped up in a brown paper parcel to send off to the assay office. But in the meantime water was needed and the men dug on. For one reason or another the interesting package was never sent and in time it was lost.
“A copper mine ignored for the sake of water. We could have been millionaires,” said Nils, “except for those old Norwegian fools.” But he never made a motion himself to dig in the vicinity of the old well, unused for many years. There was pleasure in the thought that while stumbling about the farm chores they might be walking over a great fortune.
The Atomic Power Trailer Church
In 1951 Ivar was seven, and a traveling preacher drove into the farmhouse yard towing a plywood trailer behind a two-tone car with Tennessee plates, packed full of women, children and boxes. He knocked on the farmhouse door, said his name was Howard Poplin and asked Nils if he could set up for a few days in the lower field near the road, be glad to pay a dollar or two. Nils, frowning with his colorless eyebrows, said yes, they could stay there, no need to pay, we were all brothers in this hard world and any god-fearing Christian was welcome on his land. He didn’t smile; he never smiled. After noon dinner he went down to see what they were doing—ruining something, perhaps—and called Ivar to accompany him, told Conrad to slop the hogs.
Poplin’s women were off to one side going through boxes, the wife and an older woman that must be the wife’s mother, Nils decided, looking at their narrow heads and long hanks of hair, the old lady’s grey, the younger one’s a yellowish brown, but the same heads, both with a great vein bisecting their foreheads and drowsy, stunned eyes. Neither one was much to look at.
The preacher unhitched his trailer. He and two rangy, paste-faced girls unfolded long hinged roof sections. With a squalling scrape of raw edge on wood they opened out side walls; the minister ducked into the hollow structure and released the hooks that held up the floor sections which dropped in place and rested on cinder blocks the girls had put down.
“Son-of-a-baby, I’ll be god-damn,” said Nils.
“Take not the name of the Lord in vain, brother. Yep! There she is, a traveling house, sleeps six people comfortable when she’s set up. Look inside and you’ll see a good-sized living room. Got a good old kitchen, two bedrooms. She’s designed to travel, to be set down in this system of traveling house parks right across the country, a national system, all alike, neat as a pin, let you go off in any direction with your good little old traveling house, with all these people traveling out to California and New York and Florida. Hello, Sonny,” he said to Ivar. “I bet you like to cut up some, don’t you? Well, I’m bad to cut up myself.”
“What park system is that,” said Nils. “Haven’t heard a thing about it here.”
“Well, the parks ain’t built yet, but they will be after Eisenhower’s road system gits finished. It come to me after prayer. The traveling houses are going good. I got a franchise, preach the word of God, interest people in these fine little houses. There’s a million need them.”
The wife and the mother had gone inside with the boxes. Ivar could hear them talking as they clattered stacks of dishes into the folding cupboards.
“We spend most of our time on the road,” said Howard Poplin. “What I predict is within ten years half the country is going to be living in mobile housing, rolling homes. It’s oppressive property taxes that’s doing it. You build you a house and settle in to raise a family and right away they’re after you with them old taxes. You are in their claws, can’t get loose, when you got a fixed house. Mean people move in next door, shout and fight all night, their dog barks his brains out and there’s not a thing you can do. They put up a racetrack and a dance hall across the street and you just got to take it. Plus the cost of building such a fixed house is terrible, and the experts say that’s because of the labor unions; they’ve put up the cost to where it’s almost ten thousand dollars to build a simple six-room house. This little travel house is just as American as a thing can be. It’s against taxation. It’s for freedom and independence. It appeals to the pioneer instinct.”
“It sounds like good sense,” said Nils. Howard Poplin showed them inside. The walls were varnished plywood, wrinkled red-check curtains at the windows. The floor bounced under his feet and the whole place was echoing and dark.
“Whyn’t you give Sonny here a nice cookie,” Poplin said to his wife. Ivar was allowed to accept a stale raisin cookie from the woman. The pulse in her forehead beat.
“The only trouble I ever had with this travel trailer is when a big tractor truck ripped the side offn it on a narrow bridge, but being as it’s only made of wood, I fixed it up again in half a hour. Now look here at this,” said the man, back outside, hauling down a flat canvas bag tied to the roof of the car. He drew out a long wooden triangle and unfolded it into a three-sided shape.
“Grab ahold,” he said to the girls, and they scrambled onto the roof of the house and he passed it up to them. They set it in blocks and fastened it with hooks and eyes and it became a steeple. The banner came next and Howard Poplin hung it above the front door. “ATOMIC POWER TRAILER CHURCH OF JESUS! We Believe in the Signs! We Come to You!”
“I bet that’s the first traveling church you ever seen,” he said to Ivar.
Conversion
“What time is it?” Nils asked himself in the dark. He couldn’t make out the green glowing clock hands.
“Oh,” he mumbled, pulling the light string, “it’s—it’s two A.M. And what the hell is that? Sounds like pigs being butchered.” He sat up, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and began to haul on his pants. “By god, if there’s hog thieves out there—”
Elise woke up, pulled the pillow off her head. “What in the world is happening?”
“It’s that goddamn preacher with his folding church. I don’t know what he’s doing down there—listen!” There was a distant roar of voices as though a crowd were fleeing a catastrophe.
“Don’t you know I had enough of this here you letting strangers set up so nea
r? You don’t know if you’re going to wake up getting murdered on your pillow. You tell him to get off this here land. I wouldn’t of let him on the land. Sick unto death of it. That time you let them gypsies stay down there, remember that, way they dug up all them rosebushes and carried them away after singing them funeral songs all night? They give me some sass about not pouring boiling water on ants, said ants was our friends, don’t harm ’em. The tramp I caught in the kitchen scrounging around in the jars? And made like to put his hand on me? Oh, I don’t know how I put up with it.” She heaved back into the pillow and pulled the quilt over her head. “It was a bad mistake to marry a man who chews tobacco while he dances,” she said, but Nils did not hear a word of the muffled sentence. He’d stopped hearing it four or five thousand times ago.
As he walked down the lane he could see electric lights strung up around the folding house and hear the thump of a generator. Drawing close, he made out a fringe of people swaying in front of the traveling church. Where had they come from? he wondered. Not from around here those angular women with caved-in chests and stony faces, men as gaunt as Texas longhorns, all of them rocking back and forth and watching Harold Poplin, a bible in his right hand, who stood under the raw lightbulbs, covered in rattlesnakes. Snakes twisted around his neck, up his coat sleeves and into his shirt, snakes curled up the legs of his bag-kneed pants, dripped from his fingers like frozen oil. A post with a board nailed on top of it was his altar.
“Mark sixteen eighteen!” he screamed. “They shall take up serpents and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them. They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall RECOVER. Not ‘feel better by and by,’ not ‘show some improvement’ after taking costly medicines and paying for costly X-rays and doctor bills. NO! Jesus SAID, ‘they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall RE, amen, COV, amen, ER!’ AMEN! THAT is what we’re here to do tonight, lay hands on the sick, on the sick, so they shall RECOVER. That is why you have brought your feeble and ailing family members here tonight. Friends, I been all up and down this land with the Atomic Power Trailer Church of Jesus, traveling all over from California to Florida in this house of the Lord, laying hands on the sick so they shall RECOVER. And straight across the country and down it too, wherever I been, like a boat that leaves a white wake behind it I leave a wake of people who were sick once but have now RECOVERED. Over in Balk, Kansas, a mother brought her baby to me. That baby hadn’t moved for two days, that baby was as limp and grey as an old dishrag, and I smoothed my hand—like this—up one side of that baby and down the other, and that child opened its eyes and said, ‘Mama, I’m thirsty.’ Yes, that’s right. ‘Mama, I’m thirsty.’ And I watched her give that baby a sip of water, the first taste of water in TWO DAYS. My friends, that baby was on the road to RECOVERY. A man not ten miles from this very spot came up to me, an elderly man with two canes, he could hardly hobble along. ‘Reverend Poplin,’ he says, ‘Reverend Poplin, I’m crippled with rheumatiz, I was threw from a horse as a young man, I been gnawed by the frosts of winter and lost my toes in a blizzard, an axe took my left thumb, the cataracts are dimming my eyes and I live in a state of sorrow because my wife is dead. Can you help me?’ ‘No, sir, I cannot,’ I replied, ‘for you are not sick but old.’ The BIBLE says, ‘I have been young and now am old. It comes to all of us.’ So those of you out there suffering from the effects of age, which is a different thing than being sick, accept your lot and look forward to the glory of Jesus. For nothing will make you young again. ‘I have been young and now am old.’ It’s just common sense. But if your trouble is sickness, well, here we are. Now look at this sick young boy, he’s got polio and he can’t walk, but we’re going to help him RECOVER with the help of ATOMIC POWER prayer and Jesus. I call it ATOMIC POWER prayer because prayer has the strength of the atom bomb, prayer can move mountains, we all know this.”
With amazement Nils saw that the boy Mrs. Poplin was leading across the stage, the child shuffling uncertainly and clinging to her shoulder yet moving inexorably toward her snake-festooned husband, was his own son, seven-year-old Ivar, whom he had believed home in bed asleep.
“Ivar!” he said, but did not shout because the boy was inside Harold Poplin’s embrace and snakes were coiling around his neck, slithering down his arm to drip onto the floor. Poplin held one arm over the child.
“See how white and puny this boy is? He is barely standing up, you saw how he couldn’t walk without the help of my assistant, his legs are crippled, no strength, his back is twisted so’s he resembles a eggbeater when he tries to walk, they give him six months to live. Think of it! Six more months of life for this precious youth who may have been destined to discover a important scientific cure and invent a process that turns grass into gold and manna. This boy needs PRAYER, ATOMIC PRAYER. InthenameofourfatherLordJesusChristhealthispoorsickafflictedboyandmakehimwelllethimRECOVERandbewelllethimgo forthandmultiplyandinventsomegreatdiscoveryorcureanddevote hislifetoJesusChristandtheministryoftheatomicpowertrailer CHURCHAAAMEN. Now, son, see if you can walk.” And the man collected his snakes from Ivar who took two uncertain steps, then skipped, laughing and waving his arms, to the shadows at the side.
The crowd groaned and wept, some cried out, and Harold Poplin was shouting that the collection plate was coming through, give what they could to do the work of Jesus Christ and help the traveling church get across the land.
The thrashing
Ivar was pocketing the five-dollar bill Mrs. Poplin had given him with thanks, when a demonic thing he did not at once recognize as his father burst into the circle of light and shoved the woman staggering, seized Ivar in his callused hands, and dragged him close with hissing threats, tore the bill from his pocket and threw it on the ground. He shouted at Poplin to get his filthy crook’s rig off his property, promised them the sheriff within half an hour. Ivar wept and twisted and tried to escape the hard grip but that was useless. Nils was in the fury of his life.
Back at the barn, he beat Ivar with his fists, lashed him with a length of rusty cable that laid the boy’s back open on the first blow and kept on until a vertebra jutted white from the bloody pulp. The shrieks and cries stopped as Ivar fell unconscious, but Nils beat on, shouting incoherently about laziness and ruin, lies and perfidy, criminal instinct, and it was his shouting that brought Elise from the house, trailing her old chenille robe in the mud. When she saw what he had done, was doing, she did not try to stop him with cries or protestations but seized the five-foot iron crowbar that stood in the corner and brought it down on his head.
She turned away from her dead husband, shaking and trembling, knelt to pick up Ivar.
“Let me help you,” said a soft voice, and Howard Poplin came in, half crouching, his necktie dangling loose.
“He’s dead,” she mumbled. “I killed him.” Poplin knelt beside the body of Nils, glanced at the great wound in the head glistening with running blood.
“You tend to the boy,” said Poplin. “The boy will live. I’ll stay here and pray over this man.” His necktie moved and she saw it was a snake. She was numb to it; nothing could move her but the child, shuddering against her.
Howard Poplin stayed in the barn with Nils all night, praying, wrapping the snake around him, laying his papery hands on Nils’s brow, and when morning came, both of them emerged from the barn, Nils staggering but with the rattlesnake twined around his arm and looping across his chest.
“I preached to him. I whirled the snake over and around him. I prayed in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Sperit that his life be restored. He come to and seen the Truth, reckanized his sinful past, seen he had to follow the signs, he heard me, he tooken up the snake and he is here to live and tell about it. Amen. And I ain’t just whistling ‘Dixie.’”
So they both lived, the boy Ivar, halting and silent, sent with his brother, Conrad, to live with Elise’s sister; and Nils, converted, believing Howard Poplin had returned him to life after his wife murdered him. In a year Nils had taken to fearlessly handling hot ke
rosene lamp globes and picking up rattlesnakes himself, staring in their eyes, swallowing a pinch of Death to Rats with his tea, never once bitten or poisoned, because he had faith. He discarded his Lutheran upbringing as a soiled and rent shirt. He invited Poplin to stay for a year and preach, promised him he would build him a church, and when the preacher refused, saying he had to travel on, was doing the Lord’s business, Nils promised to paint a message on the silo where all who passed by on the road could see it. As for his murderer, Nils bided his time. She spent each weekend at her sister’s house with Ivar and Conrad, one wordless and cringing, the other a big eater, impatient and clumsy. Nils never accompanied her, behaved as though the boys were dead.
(Later Howard Poplin invested the church money in the design and manufacture of a camper vehicle he called The Conqueror and made an immense fortune. He is still alive, somewhere in Florida, but calls himself Happy Jack now.)
A little help
Nils’s chance came twenty years later when a cancer grew in Elise’s belly. She shriveled down to stick arms and legs, her shins covered with sores that would not heal, and between the slat ribs and jutting pelvis rose a great tumor-swollen belly, like a last grotesque pregnancy. The pain was savage, yet when Conrad telephoned on Sunday she told him in a steady voice that she was turning the corner, planning a big chicken dinner, thinking about going to Minneapolis to buy a nightgown, and was Ivar all right? When she was better, she said, she wanted to take a trip, see some of the country.
All through the dusty summer the sun rose pouring heat on the unshaded house, and as the heat filled the twisted bedsheets like some thermal gas, so the pain filled the room like rising water, just a thin shimmer across the floor, then lapping at the legs of the bedside table, rising slowly, inexorably, until it washed across her fiery bed like beach waves, growing in height and violence, long combers of pain shot through with sand and bristly kelp, flooding the bed and rising higher, up the walls, the deep weight of it weakening the walls and floor until at midday the room overflowed with it, saturating the ceiling, spurting out between the shoddy clapboards and trickling down the outside of the house to pool in the dust and runnel the driveway. Now it was impossible for her to breathe beneath the deep ocean of pain and she gasped and choked, “help! Nils, help, oh please, help, help me. Oh, help, help.” And in the afternoon the pain began to boil and bubble; she was a fish dropped living into a cauldron. Her skin split open like a ripe tomato, the muscles convulsed and tightened against the bones; as the boiling liquid seeped into the marrow of her spinal column, she arched and cried until the vocal cords failed, help, help, help, help…