by Carla Funk
I loved that brown book, the heft and fatness of it, the cover’s depiction of a grizzly bear standing on its back legs, paws raised, snout scenting the air. Each week, Mr. Schroeder opened to a new chapter, and as he read aloud, his words made a creature step from the savannah, flap up from the thicket, or leap from the dark waters. Every creature, by its natural, God-ordained instincts and behaviours, displayed its Maker’s traits, and preached to us, those highest in the chain of creatures, how best to live. The great horned owl, hunting nocturnally to feed its young, demonstrated loyalty and sacrifice. The wolverine, rejecting all distractions, fought off its predators. The Eastern hognose snake, when faced with overwhelming odds, responded with creative resourcefulness.
After the character sketch of the highlighted creature, Mr. Schroeder turned the page and read a companion story, in which we learned about a person from the Bible, a man or woman whose life was meant to echo the traits of whatever creature had come before. After the American coot, we learned about Esther, a beautiful young orphan who turned from a secret Jew into a queen and proved that just like the coot, it’s important to unite with those of like mind to conquer evil. After the bobcat, the four lepers appeared, knowing and being where God intended them to be, all so that they could receive a blessing. After the kangaroo rat, Dorcas, full of good words and acts of charity. After the sand wasp, Gideon, who went from a coward hiding in a winepress to a mighty warrior leading his people to victory in battle. From “Abigail and the Whistling Swan” to “Young King Hezekiah and the Black-Headed Gull,” animal and human united to teach us about life as God intended, the beasts and Bible characters espousing the same truth, displaying the glory of creation.
From “The Beaver,” we learned the importance of orderliness, of good grooming and cleanliness. The beaver, the big brown book told us, is a skilled and industrious rodent that builds its home from sticks and mud. Every lodge has two rooms, the first for drying off—like the cloakroom where we hung our coats and lined up our boots—and the second for family living, like where the TV set blared cartoons after school.
“The beaver, castor canadensis,” read Mr. Schroeder, “works energetically from sunrise to sundown.”
We learned that the beaver uses its flat, broad tail to steer like a rudder as it swims and to slap a danger warning on the water. Because beavers spend so much time being wet, their fur has two layers—the inner, short layer to keep them warm, and the longer outer hairs to create a waterproof suit. Every day, the beaver grooms itself and others in its colony, using the oil from castor glands on its own belly to coat its fur and keep the water out. Mr. Schroeder held the book open and high so we could see the illustrations of the dam, the lodge, and the neatly groomed, sleek-coated rodent with its four incisors glinting.
“Because it keeps itself so clean, the beaver remains free of parasites, which plague creatures less concerned with good grooming,” he said, then licked his thumb and lifted the page. “And now we’ll hear the story of the penitent woman.”
“What’s ‘penitent’?” said Wesley Peacock, round-headed, big-toothed, peering through thick glasses. He was the boy whose nose never stopped running, the one who hyperventilated when he cried, which was often, and easily, and almost always during P.E. class.
“We’ll come to that soon,” said Mr. Schroeder, his voice slow and smooth. He held up the book and began to read again, this time a true story about a woman who lived in the time of Jesus.
In Mr. Schroeder’s book, the animal and the human narratives remained separate, belonging to their own domains, but in my mind’s eye, they always appeared side by side, the line between them blurring when he turned the page. This time, the beaver and a woman in Biblical clothes—robe, sandals, a covering for her head—flashed into shared terrain, the house of Simon the Pharisee, where Jesus had been invited for supper. Because women weren’t invited to eat with men, and because this woman was sinful, “very sinful,” said Mr. Schroeder, the Pharisees didn’t want her there.
“But why was she so sinful?” Wesley asked, sniffing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “What were her sins?”
“Well.” Mr. Schroeder paused. “Let’s just say that she had not behaved like a godly woman.”
A godly woman, I knew, didn’t smoke or cuss, didn’t wear bright lipstick or mini-skirts. I thought of the wives of my father’s trucker buddies, of their rouged cheeks and blue eyeshadow and smoky laughter when someone cracked a dirty joke at the card table. A godly woman wore dresses with the hem below her knees and kept her hair long, brushed one hundred strokes every night before bed to make it shine. Like Miss Hornsby, our music teacher, a godly woman closed her eyes and swayed when she sang in church, and wore a prayer cap on her head, and owned a Bible that, when opened, showed loose pages and verses underlined in red and blue ink.
When the sinful woman entered the house where Jesus was eating supper with the Pharisees, she knelt at his feet and began to cry. I could picture her there, sobbing into his sandals, her tears wetting his toes. And I could see the beaver, too, hunched beside her, the slow thumping of its tail on the floor like a there, there consolation.
“The sinful woman, crying and kneeling at Jesus’s feet,” said Mr. Schroeder, “broke open an alabaster jar, and—”
“What’s alabaster?”
We glared at Wesley. Someone hissed shut up. Mr. Schroeder took a deep breath and surveyed us with eyes that said, I’m tired of it, too, but let’s all be like Jesus.
The sinful woman broke open her expensive jar and poured out myrrh, the same gift brought by the wise men who came from the East when Jesus was born, a perfume that people rubbed on the bodies of the dead to hide the smell of rot. She anointed Jesus’s feet with that myrrh. Her tears mixed with the fragrance, and she used her long, black hair to wipe his feet. At least, I imagined it as long and black, shining when the light caught it.
“And in doing so,” said Mr. Schroeder, “the sinful woman became the penitent woman.”
Wesley shot his fat hand in the air. I fought the urge to slap it down.
“And penitent,” said Mr. Schroeder. Wesley’s hand wilted back to his lap. “Penitent means she was sorry for the things that she’d done wrong, all the many mistakes she’d made.”
As far as east is from the west, said the Bible—that’s how far her sins were removed from her, explained Mr. Schroeder. What was she at the beginning, she was no longer. A true transformation. She became a new woman, a new creation. He thunked shut the big brown book and said, let’s bow our heads in prayer, and ask God to make us like the penitent woman, and the beaver, too, who both practiced cleanliness and good grooming, purity of the body and of the heart.
I couldn’t help but see the beaver and that woman leaving the Pharisees’ feast together, moving down a narrow, dusty road, a fur shadow ambling beside a willowy silhouette. Maybe to the Sea of Galilee they walked, side by side, silent, and at the shoreline sat to dip their toes in the water, look out across the waves, the woman holding her broken, empty perfume jar in her lap, the beaver raking its sharp claws over its belly, even through the woman’s long hair that smelled like a forest, like the resin of a split tree, balmy and dark.
As Mr. Schroeder led us in a prayer that we might learn from the ways of the beaver, that we would be just like that woman pouring out her best perfume on Jesus, that all our sins to be washed away, I peered through squinted eyes at my classmates. Bowed heads and matching uniforms sat cross-legged on the rug. I was one creature in a small flock gathered at the feet of our present shepherd, learning how to hear a higher voice inside the clutter and noise. Inside the fidgety shuffling and scratching and breathing of the bodies around me, I closed my eyes and listened for it—for the rare, exalted song that inscribed the universe with clues, for the sound of the one who’d shadow me, who’d lead me to still waters, and once there, teach me the song my own voice made.
The Typewriter
IN THE BASEMENT room where my mother kept her add
ing machine and bookkeeping ledgers, I sat at the desk in a steno chair and waited for my first instruction, for the disembodied voice to tell me what to do.
Fingers in position on the home keys, the voice said. Ready? Now let’s begin.
Inside the crackle of the record’s vinyl, the man’s words, smooth and baritone as a radio host, commanded.
a-s-d-f space
;-l-k-j space
Over and over, I repeated the ordered keys, following along with Lesson One of the Smith-Corona Touch Typing Course.
a-s-d-f space
;-l-k-j space
Return carriage.
Each key-strike on the blank sheet of paper made my letters appear official and important, superior to the printing and cursive that filled my notebooks. The typewriter had been a gift from my parents, my mother imagining for me a future career in office administration, thinking I might like to learn how to type, to pretend the role of a secretary who filled out forms and answered the ever-ringing telephone. But as I punched down the keys, as the machine’s thin metal bars hammered the ribbon and inked the page, and as the carriage dinged for its next return, I felt my spine straighten, my body shift into someone smarter, someone who might do more than sit primly at a receptionist’s desk. Someone who might write a book, the kind real people would actually read.
Ours was not a bookish family, but we liked books. At least, my mother, my brother, and I did. Each week, we lugged full bags of borrowed books to the returns counter at our town’s small library, then checked out new stacks, my brother heading for the Westerns and me to the racks of glossy juvenile paperbacks. My mother’s bedside table displayed her dedicated reading habits, with its Bible, Daily Bread monthly devotional, gardening texts, and whatever historical novel she was working through. Across the bed, my dad’s nightstand lay comparatively bare, with his glass of water, bunched-up handkerchief, nasal spray, and a radio that played country music on low volume all through the night.
Other than the Ritchie Brothers auction catalogue, with its shiny full-colour pages advertising heavy machinery, the only thing I ever saw my father read was the local newspaper, and even then, he rarely glanced beyond the headlines. At nights, when my brother and I sat listening as our mother read aloud from The Chronicles of Narnia, my dad snoozed on the living room carpet, the TV on low, head and shoulders propped on a giant cushion, hands tucked beneath his cheek like a child posed in sleep. Never once did he read us a story, and never once did I ask why. I wondered sometimes if he even knew how to read. He’d left school at the eighth grade, a fact he often repeated when he saw me doing homework at the kitchen table, but he’d left by choice, I thought, hadn’t been forced to quit by his father, sent out into the world of work to bring home extra wages for the family, his own story bending to another’s will.
At the typewriter, trying to keep my head up, my eyes on the copy, and my wrists relaxed, I pressed on, fingers over the keys, following the man’s voice.
a-s-d-f space
;-l-k-j space
Return carriage.
Stop typing.
THE WORDS, AND the urge to stitch them together, had begun with another gift.
“It’s a diary,” Aunt Pauline had called, over the Christmas noise. “A place to write what happens in a day. Somewhere to keep your secrets.”
I’d sat on the living room linoleum at Grandpa and Grandma Funk’s, amid the chaos of crumpled wrapping paper, fussing babies, smoking uncles, and battery-operated toys, and slipped the tiny gold key into the lock that clasped the red book shut. With a turn and click, the diary unlocked and released a slim white pen. I opened to the beginning, January 1, 1981, and on the blue-ruled page, wrote:
Today is Christmas.
I am writing in my new diary.
Shhhh.
At school, my pencil traced someone else’s letters, following the dotted lines so that the letters took their proper shapes and turned into words, and the words turned into sentences. In the blank spaces in my workbooks, I wrote answers to questions about someone else’s story.
What is the name of Ace’s lamb?
Baa-Baa
What colour is the lamb’s wool?
White
Where is the lamb hiding?
Behind the tree
But alone in my bedroom, behind a locked door, I wrote with my skinny pen in my red pocket diary:
There are some things
in my heart that I need
To get rid of that I need
To get rid of them I—
really get rid of them
really really really really
I need to get rid of—
them
Jesus said
you are a little—
scared but
don’t be scared
Every lie, every black thought and harsh word, every pig, jerk, stupid-face, idiot, loser, bugger-off, moron—they sang on the page. I felt it—the angel who kept records in the Book of Life, standing at my back, leaning over me with a giant quill, and bearing witness as I signed my name. Words, I knew, held power—the power of life and death, said the preacher as he read from the Bible. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God—it was a verse I’d heard over and over, even memorized for Sunday-school class to earn a pencilled check mark beside my name. I loved the rhythm of it, the way that verse pumped like pedals on a bicycle, its syllables pulsing Word and God. Spoken aloud, it sounded like a magic spell, an incantation strong enough to bend the listener toward its truth and make them a believer.
MR. JORDAN, THE school bus driver, sat behind the wheel morning and afternoon, steering us over icy roads, through slush and rain and the heat of Indian summer. When the busload grew raucous, he shouted into his rearview mirror, “Quiet down!” Though his bushy salt-and-pepper beard never betrayed proof, I was sure he wore a constant frown. We kids held a common theory—that Mr. Jordan was a mean and angry man who hated children, all children, and only drove the bus so he could yell at us. His rules were a long list of no’s, which he enforced with the rigour of a cop. No eating, no drinking. No foul language. No fighting. No standing when the bus is moving. Shelly Reinhardt swore she once saw Mr. Jordan grab a kindergartener by the hood and fling him back into his seat when he stood up before the bus came to a complete stop.
“He’s not a mean man,” said my mother, when I complained about Mr. Jordan. “He writes poetry, you know.”
All I knew of poetry came from the Little Golden Book version of A Child’s Garden of Verses. Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems, with their accompanying illustrations, left me feeling like I was alone in a summer bedroom, with the curtains breeze-lifted and the naptime air cool and dim and quiet. I read the verses again and again, letting their music strike a cadence in me. Images of the sea, of boats, rain, a cow, and the child’s shadow, though familiar, were made strange in the poem’s unspooling sentences. When the shadow lay in bed like a lazybones and refused to join the child in the noonday sun, I understood the riddle of the image but still felt eerie when I closed the book, as if a mirror had been held up to my own face, as if, in how the words were stitched together, I’d been told a secret about myself.
I don’t know how the idea came, or what gave me the courage to act on it, but one morning, when I climbed the steps into the bus and Mr. Jordan said “Good morning” in a voice that was half gruff, half kindness, I said, “Will you write me a poem?”
“A poem?” he said. He leaned back in his seat, adjusted his cap. He wore the same thick, black-framed glasses as my dad. “You want a poem?”
I nodded, queasy at the thought that he might yell or tell me to sit down, be quiet, stay put.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, and cranked shut the folding doors behind me.
The rest of the week went by without him mentioning my request. Each time I climbed aboard the bus, in the morning or after school, I looked at him with expectation, wondering if today was the day he’d give me a p
oem. The following Monday morning, as I got on the bus, he reached into his chest pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
“Here you go,” he said, and nodded at me. I was sure I saw a smile within his whiskers.
I said thank you and then found a seat alone. There, I unfolded the page. At the top of the white, unlined sheet of paper, it read: “For Carla Funk.” A line underscored my name. Below, in two stanzas that ran the width of the page, black ink leaned forward in cursive, neat as my mother’s handwriting.
If you would be happy, then walk with your God,
Through home, and through school, and through life.
He’ll guide you, and keep you, and bless your soul,
Through sunshine, through clouds,
or through strife.
Just trust in His Mercy, His Grace, and His Love,
As you journey along here below,
And you will find many blessings,
—sent down from above,
Which only our God can bestow.
I heard words like mercy, grace, and blessings in Sunday school and in church, but to read them in Mr. Jordan’s cursive script, and to see his name—Frank Jordan—signed at the bottom and underlined, like my name at the top, made me feel welcomed into a secret club. Frank. Frank Jordan. I knew I couldn’t say his real name aloud in front of the other bus kids, but out in the schoolyard, as we walked to our coat hooks, I showed the poem to anyone willing to look.
“Frank Jordan wrote it,” I said. “Frank Jordan, the bus driver. He wrote it just for me.”
I STUDIED FRANK Jordan’s poem like a schoolbook text. It had two parts, and though I wouldn’t have known then to call them stanzas, their shape was clear. Within each section, the end words rhymed. Other words repeated, making echoes in the way the poem sounded when I read it aloud. And in the poem was God.