Saturday on the farm I worked from dawn to dark. During the week I had kept up with feeding calves morning and night, but by week’s end their pens were hardly “shipshape.” I cleaned them with fork and shovel, then hauled the manure with tractor and spreader to the fallow west field. Jolting along in the sunshine and fresh warm breeze, I tried not to nod off, fall from the tractor, and run myself over.
Looking back, I saw a dust cloud rolling down our driveway; it was my father, off to town for baling twine and sickle parts. As his truck turned out of sight beyond the windbreak, my mother appeared in the garden with a hoe. She began work in the sweet corn—my job. I muttered something close to a curse and sped up the tractor. When I got back, almost thirty minutes later, the hoeing—two long rows—was half done.
“I thought you might need a little help,” she said, her forehead glistening.
“I could have done it,” I said. I found a second hoe.
She helped me a bit longer, then managed to be in the house when my father returned. Passing in the truck, he slowed to survey my garden work, then drove on.
By Sunday morning I had finally caught up with my
chores and wanted only to sleep—not sit through Church Meeting. But it was hard to avoid when it was held at my house.
In my religion, Sunday morning worship took place in the home. Our home, since we had the largest living room. As I began to set up folding chairs, tires scraped on gravel. My mother looked out the window and sighed. “Mrs. Halgrimson. Already.” It was barely nine-twenty a.m. Worship started at ten.
“Hungry for the word of God,” my father remarked from his reading chair. He lowered his Bible. “Go help her in, son.”
I muttered something and went outside. The smaller problem with having Church Meeting at our house was that the Elders like Mrs. Halgrimson often drove onto the lawn or backed over my mother’s iris beds. The larger problem was trying to explain to other kids why I didn’t go to a “real” church. “Come on, Sutton, how can a religion have no name and no church?”
During the school year my inquisition took place every Wednesday morning right after “release time.” Release time was for town kids who went to local churches, to their Bible school and various confirmation classes; they got to leave school while Richard Silver (the only Jewish kid in town), Ricky Holds Eagle, and I remained at our desks for “independent reading.” My classmates returned, two hours later, full of religion and candy—their lips were green, their tongues fiery red.
“Come on, Sutton—why don’t you go to church?”
“Yeah, ain’t you a Christian?” they’d sneer, beginning to look at Richard and Ricky as well. Richard pasted a weird smile on his face and pretended to read; Ricky’s face went blank as tree bark.
“I am a Christian,” I’d say, “but my religion is nondenominational.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means it has no name.”
“How can a religion have no name?!”
As a matter of pride I did not repeat myself.
“So where’s your stupid church then?”
“I told you, in our home.”
“You’re weird, Sutton.”
This Sunday morning Mrs. Halgrimson’s face homed in on mine. “So, Paul, I heard you’re working in town.”
“That’s right,” I said. I pretended to tighten one of the nuts on her aluminum walker.
“How’s your father supposed to manage here at home?” She paused. Her blue, rheumy eyes bored into mine.
“We’ll make do,” I said.
“I hope you’re not expecting the other boys to do your work?”
“No, Mrs. Halgrimson.”
“Well, how much do they pay you in town?” she continued as we stumped our way along.
“One-fifty an hour.”
“You’ll probably start smoking, too,” she said.
“I hope not, Mrs. Halgrimson,” I said. “My faith will be tested, but I know you’ll be praying for me.”
“Hummmmph,” she said, and I braced for the front steps.
Gradually, the others arrived.
George Stephens, an older farmer who had a crushed, stiff leg, was hard of hearing, and could be counted on, during testimony, to speak of the hardship of Abraham.
Mattie Swenson, a round-faced elementary-school teacher and her husband, Ray, a mechanic. While most in the Faith were rural people, a few—those on the fringes of town life, or who were “different”—came from Hawk Bend. Ray Swenson was not actually, physically there. Ray remained in their car during Meeting, rain or shine or twenty below, slouched behind the wheel, chain-smoking cigarettes, then flipping butts onto the lawn. It was my job, afterward, to trot out to the car and invite Ray into the house for coffee and a bite to eat. Hungry by then, he usually came in from the cold. Many a prayer was directed toward softening Ray Swenson’s hard heart, and a chair was always left empty beside Mattie—just in case.
Hulking Helmer Klemke with his battered face and raspy voice. He had been a gandy dancer with Northern Pacific Railroad, had taken whores and drunk whiskey and boxed bare-knuckled from Michigan to Seattle, bottoming out in the Depression work camps before seeing
the Light. Helmer had a tendency to weep during testimony, his and others’, and then honk his nose onto his sleeve. My mother kept a box of Kleenex near his chair.
William Crews, a young accountant from town whose wife was an Avon representative and always on the road, sometimes for days at a time. He was a pale, serious man who trembled during his testimony, which often contained allusions to Jezebel.
The VandenEides, who milked seventy Brown Swiss and whose five daughters each had braids and noses both as thick as haymow ropes, and had about them a faint smell of oak bark, a scent that did odd things to my heart rate.
The Grundlags, the only family who raised hogs, and who smelled like it.
The Sorheims, who milked eighty Holsteins, and whose twin sons, Gus and Hans, were two years older than me and fifty pounds more muscled. When we hayed together they took pride in tossing sixty-pound bales, one in each hand, and smirked at me, who couldn’t. However, on Sundays, I took pleasure in their brief, stammering testimonies; at the sudden blotchy color on their necks; at words that came out thick and heavy as potatoes.
Not that I could do any better (actually I was sure I could), but I had never tried. Ours was a religion where baptism came not at birth but “of age.” “Like Jews!” Richard Silver had said when once during release time we shared our sad stories. “Sort of,” I replied; I certainly didn’t need him as my new best friend. Anyway, at
nearly sixteen I was now of age and then some; it was expected that, during Church Convention at summer’s end, I would “profess”—that is, declare my faith, and be baptized in the river.
Washed of my sins.
Set free.
But set free of what? That was the question. And the kind with which I drove the Workers crazy during our Bible study conversations. Frankly, I hadn’t heard the call, but it couldn’t be that hard to fake. Today, for example, I could have spoken to Matthew, chapter 7: how this very week I had unfairly judged a man. I would tell the story of Mr. Batson and his greatly inflated spare tires, his need for faith near the hour of death. I could take the metaphor of tires and roll with it. Tires were like people; the constant wear on their rubber bodies inevitably wore them down, two-ply tires around the twenty-thousand-mile mark and four-plies around forty thousand, unless of course they were steel-belted radials. And the air inside tires was like faith in the Lord, which kept people pumped up with the spirit of God …
I felt a sharp tap on my shin. My father was looking sternly at me. I straightened in my chair, wiped drool from my chin. I had fallen asleep.
During communion the cup of Welch’s grape juice came around. I passed it on. Following the cup came the bread, one slice from which, in the old style, each person of age pinched off his or her portion. This body of Christ in Wonder bread did not crumble as much as homemade,
my mother had found. As I watched it pass down the line, its soft, curving whiteness filled me with a vision of Peggy Leikvold’s full white sleeveless blouse. I let my eyes drift shut in order to see her better. She began to arrive at the station in smaller and smaller blouses, and the last ones were made of brown chamois, the same velvety material that I used to buff and polish her windshield while she smiled at me from below … My father’s sharp kick jolted me again. I quickly put my hymn book over my lap and straightened up for the final song. Blessedly, someone had chosen 311, the shortest in the hymnal.
After Meeting, most of the Friends stayed, as usual, for coffee. Another annoyance. I was always starving to death at this point. One of the older VandenEide girls—Mary, I think—came up to me and whispered, “So it’s true, you’re working in town!”
“Yes,” I said.
“What are the Workers going to say?” she said.
“Who cares?” I said, and pretended nonchalance. She giggled and fled back to her covey of sisters. The Workers’ circuit brought them to our congregation on the last Sunday of each month—but that was a whole three weeks off.
Gus Sorheim jostled me from the cinnamon-roll line. “When haying time comes, my dad said we ain’t gonna do your share of the work,” he whispered hoarsely.
“We ain’t,” his brother, Hans, added, bumping me from the other side.
I stared at them, at their beetle brows, their small
heads perched on gigantic shoulders. “So? I heard you both have to take summer school in order to graduate.”
They glared at me. “So?” Gus said.
“Yeah, so?” Hans added.
“So what’s the difference between me working in town and you going to summer school?”
Their eyes glazed and narrowed.
“It’s different,” Gus said.
“Yeah, it’s different,” Hans added.
After everyone had finally cleared out, and as I put away the folding chairs, I felt suddenly and crushingly sad. But maybe I was just hungry.