From the first twilight moments of wakefulness the next morning to the last flickerings of consciousness the next evening, Steve found himself in the warm embrace of a happy family operating with a gracious simplicity that seemed to be altogether natural and effortless for them. Nothing was a burden, nothing a drudgery.
From the very first moments, lying there stretching and yawning, Steve had to pinch himself to ensure that he was not dreaming, that he was actually waking up in the guest bedroom of the family of his real-life Spectre Maiden. Descending to an eight-thirty breakfast, his first glance into the kitchen told him that this was no ordinary household. Unseen, he stood back from the doorway and observed the two women of the house busy with the baking. Cecilia was elbow-deep kneading dough, wrestling with the unruly stuff like a pro, slugging it mercilessly and hurling it down into the massive bowl. Already every available square foot of surface area in the kitchen was concealed beneath a dozen varieties of gastronomic delights—fresh bread and sweet rolls, coffee cake and cookies, lefse, sunbuckles, julekaka, and other mysterious delectables. The aroma they gave off was heavenly. This was going to be one amazing Thanksgiving!
Cecilia was tugging and pulling at the springy dough, oblivious to Steve standing there watching her, with great amusement. After a few moments he chuckled out loud. Her head swung around.
“I can see I’d really be in for it if you and I ever got into an argument,” he said with mock seriousness.
Cecilia wheeled around. “What was that?” she exclaimed. Then, catching the impish glint in his eye, she hefted the whole wad of dough to her shoulder and pretended she was going to throw it at him. “Catch this, you stinker!”
During breakfast Steve’s curiosity about the paradise of pastry by which they were surrounded was partially slaked by the information that it had been their tradition for some years now to share their Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday with a large family of friends. Ellie suggested that Cecilia and Steve might like to do a little shopping after breakfast to round up a number of last-minute items on a list. That way they could see some townspeople and Steve could meet more of Cecilia’s friends. The two young folks jumped at the idea.
For Steve, it proved to be a repeat of the night before at the railway station. As he accompanied his beloved in and out of the lives of almost all of the people they met, he stood back and marveled. Everywhere they went they were accosted in a friendly manner by people connected in some special way to Cecilia. Steve couldn’t get over the fact that the relationship of each person to her seemed to be uniquely their own, and on many different levels. Furthermore, all veils were dropped in her presence. She had a disarming effect on everybody without even trying. It is impossible to overstate how deeply this phenomenon moved Steve.
(The night after they returned to Christiania, he came down to my room and carried on for over an hour about it, citing one example after another.
“She can’t help but love people, anyone,” he marveled. “It was so obvious just from watching her. Paul, I love that woman so much, everything about her….” His voice trailed off.
“So do I, Steve. And for the same reasons.”)
The shopping was over and they returned home. They found Ellie humming a tune and washing the last bowls from the morning’s work. Steve noticed that this little woman was just rotund enough to give the impression of merriness. He could tell that she loved doing things for others. She was, in fact, ever baking pies and cakes for the pastor to present to the parishioners and townspeople on his pastoral visits. (“Here’s a little something for you that the Mrs. sent over with me.”) Another evidence of her desire to make others happy was the fact that, unlike Steve’s parental home, the parsonage looked very much lived in, not lived on. She kept it clean and reasonably neat, but she was not a fastidious housekeeper, like Julia. She simply could not find the joy in sweeping and dusting her own house that she found in baking or sewing or gathering eggs for someone else.
She and Steve took to each other from the start. She liked his reserve when he was around people. He was no show-off. That made him a good companion for Cecilia. She took note right away, as only a woman can, of the many little signs of his love and respect for their daughter, but she also appreciated that he didn’t fawn all over her and was cautious not to be too demonstrative in public. Her intuition told her that he was both sensible and self-possessed, traits which in her mind were associated with humility. If he was as brilliant as Cecilia had made him out to be, this would stand him in very good stead. Steve, for his part, saw in Ellie the kind of person he never stopped wishing his mother would become.
Lunch consisted of warm rolls and freshly churned butter along with plenty of cold milk and two kinds of pickles. In the course of the meal, Steve learned still more about the family they would be sharing Thanksgiving with the next day, just enough to make him scratch his head. They were going to consume two ducks, two fat chickens, and a large pork roast!
As they were finishing the meal, Ellie said to Cecilia, “Honey, the folks want you to play the organ for our Thanksgiving service tomorrow morning. I forgot to mention it last evening. You can do that for them, can’t you? Mrs. Myrholm said she’d like a break for one day.”
“Sure.”
“They’d like you to play one of those new preludes you’ve learned at college. Just to see if their investment in you is paying off,” she added with a twinkle.
Cecilia blushed and looked over at Steve who looked puzzled. She had not told him about her financial support from the congregation.
Ellie picked up on this and explained the arrangement to Steve. A lump formed in his throat. He looked at his Cecilia and shook his head slowly.
“Why don’t you and Steve walk over to church this afternoon and practice?” Ellie suggested. “The choir is going to sing the Harvest-Home song for their anthem and they’re going to come early to run through it with you in the morning.”
And so Cecilia and Steve spent the rest of the day by themselves in the church. It was a large frame structure that seated over three hundred worshippers on the main floor, and another fifty in the choir loft. Well-nigh everyone in town belonged to the church, and farmers for miles around also claimed it as their spiritual home. Pastor Endsrud conducted two worship services every Sunday morning during his twenty-six years in Meadowville, separated by a Sunday school hour for children and adults.
Within the sanctuary all was at rest. Steve was very content just to sit in one of the pews in the choir loft close to the organ and soak it all in—the holiness of the chancel with its life-size altarpiece depicting the Good Shepherd bearing a lost lamb home, the intricately wrought Communion Rail forming a half-circle around the altar itself where the faithful knelt to receive the Body and Blood of their Saviour, the elevated pulpit from which sounded forth the Word of God for all to hear, the structure of the nave with its vaulted ceiling which could not have been the work of an amateur, but most of all the glorious music pouring out relentlessly, now loud, now a mere whisper, from the hidden pipe chamber at the touch of his beloved’s fingers and feet. For a long time he sat there staring at her graceful and strong movements over the keys and the pedals. At length, he could not help himself any longer. He got up, slipped around behind her on the organ bench, and enlaced her chest in his arms, breathing so hard she could feel it all the way to her toes. The music stopped. She tilted her head back. He tilted his forward and swung himself onto the bench beside her, facing backwards. She leaned into his arms. And they kissed and hung on to each other like that for what seemed like an eternity, eventually relaxing and letting each other get back to what they had been doing before, sort of. Not a word was said.
Happening in this Holy Place and in these holy circumstances, this lengthy embrace was almost the equivalent of marriage vows for them. That’s how both of them described it to me separately the following week with not a trace of embarrassment.
This organ console was home to Cecilia. Mrs. Myrholm had given her lessons on it since she was eight years old. She knew the stain on each of its yellowed keys, the tone behind each of its plunger stops. It did not take her fingers long to accustom themselves once again to the stiff tracker action: each range of pipes was manually operated from the keyboard which had to be fastened to the side of the pipe chamber. After electricity came to town, you no longer needed to have somebody sitting behind the chamber to pump the bellows with his feet whenever you wanted to play it. An organist had to have powerful hands to last through an entire service. But Cecilia loved the old organ and affectionately compared the quality of the sounds produced by its pipes to those of the latest models back at Christiania.
Towards evening they left the church and skirted around the edge of town so they could stroll hand in hand without stirring up gossip.
The evening was spent quietly around the fireplace in the living room. A cold early winter wind was whining outside, but inside all was peaceful. The day had been so busy, but now serenity reigned in the Endsrud home. The pastor was sitting in his favorite easy chair to the right of the hearth. Ellie was in another chair to the left. And on the rug in front of the hearth Steve and Cecilia were sitting beside, or rather, discreetly interlocked with one another.
“If you weren’t here, Mom and Dad would be sitting over there with their arms around each other,” Cecilia said into Steve’s ear just loud enough for all to hear, pointing to the love seat behind them directly facing the hearth. The pastor winked at Steve and nodded, and everyone had a good laugh.
Taken as a whole, this end-of-the day ritual broke entirely new ground in Steve’s heart. He’d never experienced anything like it. The conversation ambled along dealing with things some people would call trifles—a new baby in the parish, the Thanksgiving Communion Service in the morning, the illness or the recovery of a friend, the sick calf in quarantine out in the barn, and such like.
At about 9:30 the family got out three well-worn hymnals from the bookcase and sang hymns. Steve’s voice blended well with the rolling tones of the pastor and his wife and the full chords Cecilia struck on the piano. Nobody needed to tell him that his spirit was also beginning to blend with theirs effortlessly in a marvelous way. Then Pastor Endsrud opened the big family Bible and read the appointed passage for the day from St. Mark’s Gospel about the Sower and the Seed. Cecilia looked up at Steve and he looked down at her, and she knew in that moment beyond a shadow of a doubt that his heart was fertile soil where the seed was taking root.
A family prayer followed, simple, direct, and not very long. Each one offered to the Lord what was on his or her heart. First the pastor, then Ellie, then Cecilia, and then it was Steve’s turn. He didn’t hesitate for a moment.
“My dear dear God. I love you so much. I love Pastor Endsrud. I love Ellie. And I love my Cecilia to the bursting point. Thank You, thank You, thank You!”
His voice cracked. That was all he could say. Pastor Endsrud intervened, “Our Father who art in Heaven….”
And everyone went off to bed, reminding each other that tomorrow would be a big day.
Could it be any bigger than today has been? Steve asked himself as he mounted the staircase to his bedroom.