Margaret’s Sweet Potato Casserole
3 cups mashed, cooked sweet potatoes
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup melted butter
2 eggs, well beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/3 cup milk
TOPPING
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
¼ cup flour
2½ tablespoons melted butter
¾ cup chopped pecans
Combine potatoes, sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla, and milk. Mix well. Spoon mixture into a 2-quart casserole dish. Bake at 350°F for 20 to 25 minutes or until bubbles come through center.
Combine topping ingredients, mixing them well, and sprinkle on top of potatoes. Bake 5 minutes more.
—MARGARET PEELE
The Cookbook Committee of the Hope Springs Community Church is currently receiving recipes for their upcoming Women’s Guild Cookbook. Anyone with recipes please contact one of the following women: Margaret Peele, Louise Fisher, Beatrice Newgarden, or Jessie Jenkins.
There. That was short, to the point, and easy to type. Surely, Rev. Stewart wouldn’t have a problem printing that in the bulletin. One could never be sure. She likes her announcements worded a certain way. At least four people I know of, personally, have seen their flower memorials and their thank-you notes shortened or added to by this woman pastor who thinks she has a flair for words.
Truth be told, no one really complains about what she does with the announcements, it just seems like a lot of work for a girl who appears not to have any extra time. After all, no one really cares if the flowers are “lovingly placed in memory” or simply “put at the altar.” They just want to make sure their mama’s name is spelled right and that each of the seven children is listed in correct birth order. Names and dates. That’s what matters.
Sometimes I’m not sure the young pastor has a good hold on what really matters; but she tries hard and most of the people are warm to her, so I don’t plan to rock her boat by saying such a thing to her. Besides, she’s young, she’ll learn. We all do.
This cookbook was not my idea. Since the Women’s Guild is dying out, we’re running out of money. It was Peggy DuVaughn’s notion that we needed to raise some money. And then I think it was Beatrice Newgarden, who has nothing better to do than volunteer at the funeral parlor, who agreed we should have a project. Great, I think, a project. Another project. And before I have a chance to write it down in my secretary’s notes, it’s a cookbook, and I’m in charge.
As far as cooking goes, I’m considered only fair by the women in this community. Out here, everybody grows their own vegetables, has their own livestock, kills, milks, and cans. So every recipe begins with something like “Strip all the feathers from the bird” or “Make sure the roots and stems are cut.” The standards are a little higher than say, Greensboro, where I took my sweet potato casserole to a women’s meeting; and having set it down next to all the KFC boxes and the Winn-Dixie potato salad, was treated like I was Cordelia Kelly from Channel 2’s cooking show.
Here, in the county, women grew up learning to cook before they were tall enough to reach the stove. It was the mother’s and the grandmother’s responsibility to make sure all the girls in the family could make a meal out of one strip of meat and a cup of beans. So we learned to cook. And we learned to be creative. We learned how to stretch dough across two weeks at three squares a day. We learned how to make soup from bones and old potatoes. And we learned to knead our sorrows and our dreams into loaves of bread and our worthiness into cherry pies and fatty pork chops.
When my mama died and I was ten, I lost interest in what the female gender does in the kitchen. My older sisters cooked and cleaned while I worked in the fields, on the tractor, and behind the woodshed. I did anything that kept me from standing in my mama’s prints that were worn into the boards in front of the sink or cast in iron in the handles of skillets. Those days folks didn’t know what to do with a grieving child, so they just let me do the work of men and left me to myself.
My daddy was solemn, not much with words or girl children. But because I looked the most like my mother and because I stayed as close to him as the film of dirt that crept from the fields into wrinkles and under nails, he paid me the most attention. I pretended for a very long time that my sisters and brothers didn’t notice, but after he died I sensed the resentment and the stones of sibling rivalry as they pelted me with their grief-stricken stares.
I was, after all, the only one he would let shave him or feed him teaspoonsful of honey. His last five years he lived with each daughter and son, but everyone knew that he was saving my house for last. Like getting ready for retirement, Daddy mapped out his final six months with great care. When he left Woodrow’s to enter the hospital for the eighth time, he sent his belongings to me, and, leaving the cancer unit, Daddy came home to 516 Hawthorne Lane to die.
Surely he knew that I was the only one who would pick him up and set him behind the wheel of the tractor, wait until the vomiting stopped, and then steer him across the pasture while he worked the pedals. I was the only one who would pad down the dirt and make a hard path so that I could push his wheelchair through the soybean field. I was the only child of his who would not mind hearing his stories over and over, help him reorder his memories, or who would sit with him through thunderstorms while he called me “Mama.” So if Beulah and Bessie, Thomas Jack and Woodrow are still mad at me for picking out the casket and telling the funeral director how to dress Daddy, then they are the ones who have to live with anger. All I got is sadness. And a heart can hold sadness a lot longer than it can anger.
I know because I’ve held both, and the sadness always outlasts the anger. You have to make an intentional decision either to give the anger up or to let it eat out the center of your spirit. Sadness can stay with a body for a lifetime. But with anger, you’ve got to choose. That’s what killed Luther, and that’s how I learned such a lesson.
He stayed angry as long as he could. And finally his head exploded because of the clogged pathways from his heart. It had nothing to do with cigarettes or cholesterol like the doctors said and everything to do with anger. I am not sure how it all began. Whether he had the seed of madness in his soul from when he was a boy or whether it was planted when he saw the first construction sign about the hatchery in Eleanor Littleton’s hayfield. However it got there, bit by bit, the seed grew inside him so that each time the hatchery sold chickens at a better price or every winter when a storm blew off siding or froze our birds, his face got redder and redder, and the anger welled up in his veins.
I begged him, I pleaded with him, “Give up the chicken farm!” I knew that we both could find public work, but it became an obsession, a war in his mind, and he would not let it go. He died at the age of forty-seven, burying what was left of the carcasses of twenty-five chickens, killed by a pack of wild dogs. The hatchery gave me a fair price for his last shipment of chicks. And even though his brothers and sisters couldn’t believe that I’d sell them, and especially to the place that everyone said brought my husband down, I took the money and two years later went on a cruise. Now all that stands as a memorial to that which he would not let go is a fallen down barn surrounded by a steel fence, the pungent odor of old chicken shit, and a few feathers that float just inside the windows.
I live alone. We had no children. I feed five cats and take care of two old dogs. I expect little out of life and am rarely disappointed. I rent out most of the land to Jessie Jenkins’s oldest son, who tries to make a go of it every year raising tobacco and corn.
Active in church, I’m chosen to serve on lots of committees. This is partly because folks think I have more time than money and because there is a certain amount of respect granted to women who make it on their own. Unlike Louise Fisher’s situation, most people are comfortable with the notion that I’m just a lonely widow and not a homosexual. So that even though we are the same age and in the same economic class, and even though it is common knowledge that Louise knows the Bible better than anyone, I am usually the one asked to chair boards and work on programs.
Nobody knows for sure about Louise. But there are speculations and bits of trashy stories about her car having been discovered at the Trucker’s Lodge Motel and two women’s voices coming from room seven; and there is the report on a number of books she receives in the mail from San Francisco.
Frankly, I’m not interested in trashy stories or in the sexual orientation of my friends. And if the truth be told, I am probably a more likely candidate to love a woman than Louise, since I could use a wife to manage the household responsibilities that women are supposedly more inclined to handle. And, at this point in my life, I value more deeply the company of women than men. I think this has to do with the holding of sadness. If forced to choose, women will give up everything else but hold on to that.
I have little energy for anxiety about money or the state of the union. I do love sports but not enough to talk about them, and every evening, just as dusk has passed, I find that I desire the softness of a woman’s voice. Though it is my father’s voice that rings in my head and all along the edges of my heart, it is the faint and melodic voice of a woman that rocks my soul to sleep.
Most of the women at Hope Springs have never even entertained such a notion. They busy up their lives with the comings and goings of their children and trying to second-guess the needs of their husbands. Their days are filled with talk shows and coupon clipping, malicious gossip about the same women they claim to have as friends, and long gazes into the mirror while they touch the fallen skin along their necks and worry that age will steal it all away.
They are cautious with me because I have little patience for their pettiness. They are civil towards me, however, because they know their husbands admire my fortitude and the way I loved my father. I wouldn’t say that they respect me, but they are almost certain to know of my opinion and are guaranteed that I will not bow and curtsy in the way so many of them have been taught.
This unwillingness to cower has occasionally permitted me the surprising opportunity to have long and interesting conversations with daughters and granddaughters who bear great secrets. I would say I am in a most enviable and sacred position. Most of the women in the community know this but would never call attention to it.
For instance, I was the first one to know that Katie Askew was not going to take chemotherapy. A pretty little thing of fifteen and she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I noticed the shifting of her eyes when she realized that she would lose her long blond curls. Nancy, her mother, was so distraught about the diagnosis and so determined about the treatments that she hadn’t even considered that the loss of hair to a fifteen-year-old girl was a fate worse than death. After her first hospitalization, a week before she was to go down to Duke for chemo, Katie had her mother bring her to my house. After her mother left to get her medicines, Katie looked out the window and said, “I want you to talk to my mother.”
“About what, Katie?” I asked.
“About the fact that I’m not going to go to Duke for those treatments.”
Part of her head was already shaven, but a bandage covered the place behind her left ear. The blonde curls fell over it.
“Katie, what makes you think I’d tell your mother such a thing? And, besides, you know that will kill her.”
“I remember what you told us in Sunday School four years ago. You said the most important thing is to be honest with the people you love, and if you can’t be honest then you should get somebody else to speak your truth. So I’m asking you, will you tell her I’m not going to go?”
The big brown eyes would not let me loose. I tried to find another way. I told her to talk to the preacher or to her father, but little Katie Askew was convinced that I was the messenger of her truth. Finally I told her I would. And true to my word, when Nancy came back and Katie was sleeping in my bed upstairs, I convinced the teenage girl’s mother to postpone the treatments until Katie could ease into the idea of queens who wrapped their heads in long, flowing scarves and the open-ended fashion of wearing outrageous straw hats.
Since then I’ve dealt with everything from failing grades to Penny Throckmorton’s plan to elope with a sailor from Norfolk. I’m not altogether comfortable with the role of teenage advocate in the Hope Springs community, but for whatever reason it seems to fit. Besides, all the storms that blow into the lives of families around us funnel the clouds that spin around our own hearts as well.
Like in every community, that’s how it goes here in Hope Springs. Trouble passes from one door to another. Tragedy and adventure not quite as regular, but, still, they come too. And while one mother thanks God for not having sent a particular sorrow her way, she prepares herself for what might be coming next. Because surely every mother knows that when a woman grants life to a new person, a child, sorrow is the only guarantee she will ever have.
Yet even that sometimes sounds better than having to chair every committee or head up every project because all the other women think you’re lonely for something to do. Of course, I know I could say no. But I guess I figure I’m luckier than most; I’ve carried all of the sorrow I’m ever going to have. There isn’t much that can break my heart anymore, so I consider it a privilege not to have to worry about the future. And if calling for recipes permits the mothers in this community to spend more energy preparing the soft places in their hearts for hard news, then I’ll oblige. Besides, there are worse things to ask for than recipes.
Louise’s Old-Fashioned Egg Custard
4 eggs
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
½ teaspoon lemon or vanilla extract
Pie shell
Beat eggs well; add milk and sugar, along with flavoring, beating after each addition. Pour into pie shell. Do not preheat oven. Bake at 350°F for 25 to 30 minutes. Do not overbake.
—LOUISE FISHER
I should have known that it was Beatrice Newgarden who came up with this whole stupid idea of a cookbook. And how did I ever get to be on this committee? Lord knows, neither Margaret nor I can cook. The most I can offer is wieners or burgers, maybe egg custard, the easy version, of course. Everyone knows the fact that we’re heading up this committee is a sure sign of failure for this tidy project.
Beatrice is always in need of “binding” us together. It’s like a calling for her. Any time she senses a weak link, a friendship in need of something, probably time and space, she assumes she’s got to bring people together. She has no sense of boundaries, no sense of where one person, one relationship, ends and where she begins. She’s a fairy godmother in a funeral director’s suit.
The worst part about it is that she has no idea that she’s the poster child for codependency. She’s running around sticking her nose up in the air, sniffing for tension or death, and then, like a dog with a bone, she’s not going to let the cause alone until she sees breath in that mirror of a face she tries to wear.
It’s evident to all the ladies in the church that the Women’s Guild has outlived its purpose. But as soon as Beatrice got a whiff of our resignation, she dug up this project as a means to “encourage younger women to join the group” and to “build up the fellowship.” I’m surprised she’s not been caught trying to resuscitate some of the corpses she dresses. She can’t stand to see anything die.
I, on the other hand, joined the Hemlock Society when I was in my forties. I send Dr. Kevorkian a few dollars every month, and I was Hospice Volunteer of the Year two years in a row. I think death is an appropriate answer to the equation of life. I have never seen it as frightful or even poignant. And I certainly do not see it as something to be avoided.
The first death that I remember was my granddaddy Amos, my mother’s father. I was seven, and I didn’t know him very well since he had been sick since I was three. We lived in his house with my grandmother, but he stayed in a distant room and I rarely saw him. I would make him a card and take him a flower from the garden, but beyond the exchange of those gifts, and the standard prayer for him at bedtime, he was nothing to me.
On the day of his death, my mother, not one to hide things from me, took me into the room before the undertaker came and made me feel of his hand and kiss him on the cheek. I know of people who claim they have never been able to touch a dead person since they were made to do so as a child, but it never haunted me. In fact, I was fascinated by the warmth running out of his fingers and the stiffness settling into his wrinkles. It did not seem harsh or terrible to me. It was like going to sleep. And I was never afraid.
Since then, I’ve buried my grandmother, my mother, and two siblings. You might say that I have developed the reputation for being the deathwatch angel around these parts. I’ve sat in many a hospital room with dying people because their family couldn’t deal with the final hours. I don’t mind having this reputation; I consider it a gift. Just like there are some people who can cook and others who weave cloth or build birdhouses, I can sit in a room, watch as death approaches, gently take the hand of the dying person, and lift them in its arms. It’s the one thing in my life that I’m sure of.
The rest is a huge question mark. Ambiguous and watery, just like Beatrice’s boundaries. And I’m not stupid. I know people are curious about my sexuality. Hell, I’m curious about my sexuality. But I’m sixty-three, and I still do not know what or how it is that I love.
I never married, left home when I was eighteen. I followed my sisters and went to work in a cotton mill just to get away from the farm. There in town I met women whose lives were more cruel than I would ever imagine and men whose hearts were full of greed and malice. I made my home in a boardinghouse with six other young women mill-workers, and it was the most of family I have ever really known.
Roxie Ann Barnette and I were roommates. And as well as I can guess, I believe that I fell in love with her. In those days, however, Oprah wasn’t around to help you name your relationship. There wasn’t any support group to encourage the child within. There were no women running with wolves. Hell, there wasn’t even an advice column for girls who had any feelings other than those of desire to raise a family and win a blue ribbon at the state fair. I was confused and lacking in any guidance. So, without complaining, I took the most that I could get, friendship as rich and deep as intimacy can go without touching and a paycheck once a month.
Roxie would set us up on double dates. God bless her for trying. I was even engaged for a brief period. Some man who had his eye on Roxie but settled for her best friend. I can’t remember the fellow’s name. Anyway, they were lovely, agonizing years of hating myself while trying to fit into somebody else’s clothes. Years of not knowing what was wrong with me but feeling certain that I would never be happy. At least once a month I would swear that I was going to move out. It was killing me to be faced with such strange and inappropriate feelings.
To this day, I’m not sure Roxie knows how much I care for her. Never in the four years that we lived together did she seem to know. I could always tell when someone would question her about me; they’d look at me hard while I clung to Roxie’s every word. But she never hesitated, never held back. She brushed the accusations and the suspicions aside. She never turned me away. I get the feeling that George, her husband of forty years, knows. There’s a bristle to him that apparently only shows up when I’m around. Roxie acts like she doesn’t see it. I think I kind of like that, though, that he knows that I could take Roxie to a place just beyond his reach. And she, without hurting either one of us, finds room in her life for us both.
They live in Maryland. I go up to see her every couple of months, and she has frequently come down to see me. We meet at silly motels along the interstate. George prefers that she stay near the highway when she travels. I guess it makes him feel like he can get to her more easily.
She’s as beautiful as she was forty-five years ago. Tall and raw-boned, she’s a long drink of clear, still water. Dark hair, solid smile. She has eyes like a child. Open, honest. Like her conversations. She’s as innocent as rain. The answer to a lonely man’s prayers. She believes what you tell her, and she takes everyone at their word.
I’m exactly her antithesis. Short and dumpy and as muddy as the Mississippi River. And I’m hardly innocent. The only man’s prayer I can answer has to do with being able to tote bags of cement twice my body weight and knowing which wrench is used to take off square-headed bolts. And don’t expect me to believe anything you say until you prove yourself worthy of my trust. I’m as cynical as I am stubborn, so I rarely get taken advantage of, except by this woman who holds up my heart.
We’re about as different as two women can be. But we can finish one another’s sentences and wake up with the same dreams. I light the fire and she keeps it going. She tests the ice and I skate behind her. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for Roxie. No place I wouldn’t travel to find her. No silence I wouldn’t hold. I was even her maid of honor, something I swore would never happen on this side of heaven.
When she got married, however, I honored her vows. I respected her relationship with George. But God help me, on their wedding day, hearing the promises, knowing the love that was there and not there, I thought my heart would split. The healing was a long time in coming, and I doubt I’ll ever be whole. But I’ve managed to keep my head about me and not be lost to the emptiness. I’ve resorted to severe Bible reading, like punishment I suppose, and bonsai gardening. And somehow I find that the two taken in daily doses ease the pain and sharpen my focus. So that the years have passed and I have managed a life, a living, and a livelihood.
I’m the godmother of her two children, been like another grandmother to Ruby’s littlest one. So that in some odd sort of old-maid sister kind of role, I’ve become a part of the family. And much to old George’s chagrin, I’ve found my place in everybody’s heart but his.
Recently, I have noticed a change in the way Roxie remembers a story or tries to make a decision. There’s a look in her eye that reminds me of the distant daydreaming I used to lose myself in while spinning spools of yarn along big silver bobbins. A step just beyond reality. A pulling of the mind. It’s just that it seems she has a harder time getting back.
I was surprised when George called me a month ago to ask if she had written. It seems she was convinced that we were supposed to meet in Virginia the weekend of July Fourth. I knew nothing of these plans but worried that I might spoil some necessary charade she had arranged for herself. So I made up some lie that some of my mail had been missing for a few weeks and could I please speak to her?
“She’s not here,” he said. There was a long pause, and I knew there was more to be spoken.
“Lou, Roxie isn’t well. There was an incident.” I remember waiting for more.
“An incident? What the hell does that mean, George?”
He cleared his throat, and I remember thinking it was one of his arrogant but typical gestures. “I’ve been seeing someone else. For about a year. Rox found out.”
I believe my reply was something like “Yeah, that’s an incident all right, you son of a bitch. Why is she still with you?”
And he said, “I told you. She isn’t well.”
I asked him what he meant, and he said that the doctors think she is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. About two years ago they said this.
That’s all I remember of that conversation. That and the question of how she could keep such a thing from me. That and the attempt to grasp how I was stupid enough not to see it. All of it, including knowing about the two-timing bastard that she married. I drove up the next day. Roxie seemed surprised and actually quite focused. I asked her if she wanted to come back with me, and she politely refused. We did not speak of the incident.
For three weeks I have called her every day. She will never stay on the phone long enough for me to get a true sense of how she’s doing. At least four times she has claimed it’s a bad time to talk. And in between phone calls, I find myself vacillating between driving up to Maryland, packing her stuff, and moving her back home with me and staying the hell out of it and letting her handle her own life. I feel like I’m running from Margaret’s house to Beatrice’s. Ms. Cement-Wall Boundaries to Ms. Floating Borders. I do not know how to be.
I realize that this lifelong struggle, however, is wearing this old heart thin. I know that I cannot tell anyone about this. I understand that it’s a secret I do not even know how to tell. I’ve kept quiet for so long I’m not even sure how to give it words. All I know is that the burden is getting heavier. But it’s highly unlikely anybody has any counsel for me now. Too much water beneath the bridge. Too many pages in this chapter.
I suppose I should just keep to the path I’ve made for myself, fill my time with gardening and the reading of the prophets, the quarterly treat of my bonsai books that come from California, and now this stupid cookbook. Distraction has steadied me this long. Perhaps it will level my thinking a little bit longer.
1 cup salad oil
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup buttermilk
2 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup prunes, cut up
½ cup prune juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
SAUCE
1 cup margarine
1½ cups brown sugar
1 cup condensed milk
1 box confectioners’ sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
Combine oil and sugar. Add eggs one at a time. Add soda to buttermilk. Sift dry ingredients together. Add flour mixture alternately with buttermilk. Fold in prunes and juice, add vanilla. Bake at 350°F for 30 to 35 minutes in a greased and floured broiler pan.
When cake has baked for 30 minutes, begin to prepare sauce. Cook first three sauce ingredients over low heat. Cool and add confectioners’ sugar and vanilla. Pour sauce over cooled cake.
—BEATRICE NEWGARDEN
I don’t understand why everybody’s so mad at me. I was only trying to help. I figured a cookbook would help us raise some money, get us involved in a task together, create more love among the women at Hope Springs. But I just got off the phone with Louise, and she talked to me like I suggested we donate our kidneys, for goodness’ sake. My mother always told me I was too good for that church, those women. I’m forever having to be the one to smooth things over, get people to talk to each other. And I just hope they realize that if I hadn’t come in with this idea about the cookbook, our Women’s Guild would not last another year.
The Good Lord knows that I have tried to breathe new life into that church by bringing in some younger women. But these girls today…they have aerobics classes and their careers in management. They have their children in everything there is imaginable. Why I even heard Rev. Stewart was planning to have some Chinese karate man using our fellowship hall to teach karate or kung fu or some Asian exercise that probably isn’t Christian.
Things are just so complicated these days. Everybody’s trying to do everything and getting nothing done. Nobody wants to pitch in and help at the church. I feel like it’s all I can do to keep that little church up and running. Nobody has any sense of loyalty or responsibility anymore. And I don’t see it any more clearly than I do in my own family. Robin has an important job at some bank in Charlotte. She’ll probably never marry. Teddy keeps going to school for one thing and then another. And Jenny, bless her heart, the twins and that lazy husband of hers are all that she can handle.
In the beginning I tried to busy myself in their lives, be a real mother to them, but I was told in a hurry to mind my own business. And after Paul died I just assumed I could live with them throughout the year, especially during the winter, since the homeplace gets so cold. It’s a daughter’s duty, after all, to care for an aging mother. But that idea went nowhere.
Oh, I admit it hurt my feelings for a while, but I realized that they’ve got their own lives to lead. So I moved back home. And even though it took a while to adjust to living alone, I managed. I stayed busy with visiting the sick, taking cassette tapes of the Bible to the shut-ins, teaching crafts at the nursing home. I was home for about a year when Dick Witherspoon asked me if I would like to help over at the funeral home. Well, I never thought I would be one to do such a job, but it turns out to suit me very well.
I always did know how to put clothes together, and I’ve fixed hair since I was a little girl twirling strands of cotton. The makeup wasn’t hard to learn. Pinks and rose mostly. Mr. Witherspoon says I’m the best funeral beautician he’s ever seen. He says you would hardly know that those corpses are dead the way I fix them up. I like to think of it as my little ministry for the community and for those who suffer.
I know most of the dead. It’s a small community after all. So I can usually remember how they flip their hair and how much lipstick they wear. I’ve got a good memory for how people look. And I am also very clear about what they could have done to look better. On occasion, it’s this desire to better someone’s appearance that has gotten me into trouble.
I almost got in a fight with Delores Wade over her mama. Delores claimed her mother had never had color in her hair and that I should leave the gray showing in the front. I knew perfectly well that Elsie Wade needed Clairol Number 83, natural black shade.
I had tried to tell Elsie while she was living in a loving, gentle way, like the Scriptures tell us to do, but you’d have thought I was telling her she needed a feminine hygiene spray. We were in the Wal-Mart at Burlington, standing at the shampoo aisle, just chatting, and I said, “Why, Elsie, I believe that if you tried this Clairol Number Eighty-three, you’d be very pleased with the results.” She turned a funny shade of red, made a huffing kind of sound, and wheeled her buggy around so fast she knocked over the toothpaste display.
You know, thinking about that now, I remember that happened only a few weeks before she died. So that when they brought her into Witherspoon’s, I figured here was my chance to lend Elsie some of the dignity she would never claim while she lived here on earth. But once again my good deed got punished.
Delores, the meddlesome daughter who moved up north after school, claimed her mama looked too young. The black hair wasn’t natural. I said to her just as tenderly as I could, “Now, Delores, isn’t that the point for women in life and in death?” I was only speaking the truth, but after I said it I was afraid the woman was going to hit me!
Dick, Mr. Witherspoon, said that even though he could see that I had done an excellent job with Elsie, the bereaved family needed to be pleased. Delores had apparently made things difficult for him. So I gave Elsie back that white chunk in the front and even streaked the back.
After that Mr. Witherspoon preferred that I let the family choose how to fix up their loved one. He agreed that I had a real eye for that sort of thing, but that in the funeral business, just like at Kmart, the customer is always right. So now I fix them up the way I remember they looked or the way they could have looked with a little help, take a picture, and then let the family tell me what they want to change. There’s always something they want different, since I’ve learned there’s nothing worse than a person in mourning having to make wardrobe decisions. I keep the picture as a sort of legacy to my work. Mr. Witherspoon said he used to do the same thing, but now he doesn’t care to remember how many people he’s buried.
I shouldn’t complain about the families, since I know all about what grief can do to your memories. For the longest time after Paul died, I pretended we never had an argument. I’d have long conversations with the other women about how Paul never raised his voice and how we never let the sun go down on our anger. They would all smile and nod, pat me on my arm like I was so fortunate.
But in the more recent years, I’ve remembered things a little differently. Like how Paul never raised his voice because he rarely used it around me. And that we never had any arguments because we never talked. I realized that I had grown so accustomed to the silence that I began to invent reasons for it. Like he had too many things on his mind to speak about my new dress. Or he was all talked out from the last auction he called. I pretended over the years that we were comfortable and that the mediocrity that we both settled for was really happiness.
It never occurred to me that we didn’t have anything to say to one another. That the silence was simply reflective of our marriage. Now don’t hear me wrong; I’m not saying that Paul Newgarden was a bad husband or even that he was a bad man. He wasn’t. He provided for his family. He bought the children toys on holidays, took us to the beach every summer, and even set me up my own savings account. He helped out around the house and did as much driving for the children as I did. He just didn’t know how to love me. Not in the way I wanted.
There was always a gift for my birthday. Weekends there would be some little knickknack he would pick up from an auction and bring home after the sale. He never missed taking me out to eat for our anniversary. All things that other women claim not to get from their husbands. But even these women, when they make this claim, make it with a depth of humor, some slapstick comment that makes me realize that there’s some balance for what they do get that I’d never understand.
Like, for instance, maybe he doesn’t bring her flowers but he can say her name in a way that reminds her of pure sweetness. Or maybe he forgets their anniversary but makes up for it by rubbing her feet and singing her some silly love song that makes her blush. So that even though a woman would complain about what her husband did or forgot to do, there would always be a lift to her voice when she remembered how he made it up to her.
Paul never forgot anything, leaving me with no grounds to complain and no memory of clever romance he used to win back my affections. He was sturdy and dependable, solid as Gibraltar, but the thing is that he never, not in the thirty-seven years that we were married, ever surprised me.
I’ve learned that some people like predictability, say that they need it. I know that I thought I did. But I wish Paul would have done at least one thing that I could remember with a smile and a shake of my head. Some story that I could think about and, even with twenty years having passed, still laugh at the thought, and know that it was so intimate that no one could understand.
Oh, I suppose I expected too much. Maybe I read too many romance novels, but there was always something I needed that he could never give. Some part of him that was so closed off to himself that he did not have a clue as to how to open it to someone else, even, maybe especially, his wife.
And as soon as these thoughts came to me and I understood that the conversations that I was having at the graveyard were just as one-sided as they had always been, I quit going. I put the flowers out on significant holidays, but primarily I don’t go out there. Jenny said something about it, asked why I didn’t go anymore. I just shrugged like I didn’t know. But the truth is, I figured I could find better things to do with my time, that I had wasted almost four decades talking to a dead man and I might as well not waste anymore.
I know that people whisper there’s something going on between me and Dick at the funeral home. But it’s all completely professional. He’s never married, so there is certainly possibility for a relationship. But so far he’s been a complete gentleman. Too much like Paul, in fact.
More than likely, I can tell you what he eats for lunch every day during the week and what jacket he’ll wear to meet with which families. I’ve never been to his house, but I can pretty much guess that it’s a tractor magazine that sits by his toilet and that he uses the same coffee cup every day. And I know enough to realize I don’t need another arrangement of convenience, even if it would mean that the weekends wouldn’t be so quiet. I think for now I’ll enjoy the solitude and escape the disappointment of marriage.
Besides, I have enough to do, like this cookbook. Obviously, Louise isn’t going to be much help, and Jessie has already said she doesn’t have many recipes herself, so I told Margaret that I’d be more than happy to help her collect what she needs. I have a whole file of my own. Most people know that my mother was the best cook in Guilford County, and when I got old enough to write, I had her tell me everything she knew how to make. I have notebooks full. Now, of course, there are some recipes that I just won’t share. It’s silly, I know, since neither Robin nor Jenny will ever use them. But they were my mother’s, and they’re sacred to me, so that I don’t want to throw all my pearls to the swine.
It wouldn’t matter anyway. Church isn’t what it used to be. That little girl of a preacher tries, but I miss a man’s voice in the pulpit. I love to hear the Psalms read by a rich bass voice. Her high-pitched tones put me to sleep. And, besides, she seems unsettled most of the time, like she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. Troubled, distracted in a way, like she’s done something wrong. But as far as I know there have been no complaints about her. Even Dreama Isley hasn’t said anything bad about her. That in itself is no small feat, since Dreama doesn’t like anybody.
You know what I think would help? A hobby. If she had something to do that she really enjoyed, like flower arranging, maybe that would ease the edginess around her eyes. Young people without families need something to occupy their minds besides work. The young women especially. Surely she doesn’t find any men to date, being in her position and all, she needs some leisure activity that can keep her busy and her mind off of her loneliness.
I think I’ll hunt up a couple of my flower-arranging books, let her borrow them, and make her a prune cake. I’ve got all the recipes out anyway. I might as well try a couple, just to make sure they’re right. And Lord knows, there’s nothing like a good prune cake to smooth out the kinks.
1 cup white sugar
Pinch of salt
3 beaten eggs
½ cup dark brown corn syrup
½ cup light corn syrup
Almost all of a stick of margarine, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup chopped pecans
Pie shell
Add sugar and salt to eggs. Add syrup, margarine, and vanilla. Stir in pecans. Pour into pie shell. Bake at 300°F to 325°F for 45 to 50 minutes.
—JESSIE JENKINS
Now surely those white women know that black women don’t use recipes. We cook by what’s in our heads, the tastes we remember in the backs of our mouths. The memories on the tips of our tongues. They’re all the time wanting to know how much salt I put in the greens, how many eggs are in my pound cake. And when I tell them I can’t remember, they holler, “Well look at the recipe card and call me.”
I know they probably just think I’m being cantankerous or, worse, that I’m illiterate, but I don’t have any recipe cards except what I got spinning around in my Rolodex brain. And I’m sure that if I did ever take the time to write down all that I know, I could fill up a book by myself. But black women never learn to cook from recipes.
Before my mama taught me to cook, she taught me to focus. So that when she started calling out the ingredients for whatever it was she was cooking, I was to call them back to her. “One cup of sugar,” she’d say. And like a parrot, I’d repeat, “One cup of sugar.” It was the way of learning back then. And even though we were calling out the spices in a pie or the number of teaspoons to dip from the canisters, it became like a prayer to us. A call and response like a song in the fields or a litany at Easter.
I grew up in a house full of women. Grandmothers, aunts, sister-in-laws, and mother. And they all could cook as well as they could tell a story. And those women could tell a story.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have the luxury of writing things down. Not the stories and not the recipes. Most of the women I grew up around knew how to sign their names, and how to spell most words, but taking the time to put things to paper was too costly in matters of time and vision.
Grandmama taught me the alphabet when I was five, but she never learned how to put the letters together to spell a word. Mama was real smart, read the Bible through fifty-seven times, drew pictures, and quilted beautiful quilts. She could recite poetry and psalms, but she never wrote down a memory or a recipe. Maybe it was because she and the other women were never sure they would find what was needed for the recipe or because they knew that a person’s memory on a page could never bring somebody else happiness.
Black women, in the early days, learned to cook by using whatever it was they happened to find growing in their backyards or whatever it was that the white women threw outside to rot. They never measured for taste. They spooned or folded or stirred whatever it was they had to spare. And if they didn’t have sugar, they wrestled honey from bees. If they didn’t have collards or turnips, they dug up poke leaves and dandelion roots.
Black women have always learned to improvise, and we never cooked directly for pleasure, only for survival. We never had the luxury to try something new or invent a dish for fun. Our women knew that if we messed up the stew, burnt the corn bread, or took too much skin off the bird, our family would go without a meal that day. So there wasn’t any room for misreading the recipe card or not paying attention to what we were doing. We focused when we learned, and we were serious about how we cooked.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I don’t mean to say that mealtime wasn’t joyful. In fact, it was the happiest time for our families. I suppose any time you’re surviving, there’s pleasure to be had. The men were pleased that they didn’t have to watch their children go hungry, and the women were pleased because, just like Jesus, they had managed another food miracle for the family.
You ever notice how black women act when they hear that story about Jesus feeding the five thousand? They’ll nod their heads and smile because they’ve seen it done. Every Friday in fact. Their man would come in with a couple of skinny little fish he had managed to catch with a worm and a string, and that woman would take those fish, batter them in leftover cornmeal, fry them up, squeeze a dozen biscuits from an inch of dough, make slaw from an old head of cabbage, and feed the whole neighborhood. Yeah, we know them Jesus stories like they were ours.
But you try to explain black women’s cooking to white women and they look at you like you’re speaking a different language. “No recipe? How can you cook this whole meal without a recipe?”
I just roll my eyes and walk away. There are some things that separate white women from black women. Cooking is only one of those things. The others have to do with emotional expression and how we like to sing in church. Black women are not afraid to wail from sorrow or holler out in joy. And when we worship, we expect to be just as moved by the choir as we are by the preacher. White women seem to value stillness and silence. Black women are going to make some noise.
I know it’s strange that I’m going to an all-white church. I hear that it isn’t so odd in the city, but out in the country, we’re real clear about one another’s places. It’s like that caste system in India. You know where you’re going to end up by the family into which you’re born. It’s clear and settled by the color of your skin. Like a sentence of life or death. And there ain’t no amount of money, no amount of land or property going to change your destiny.
I remember crying about it when I was a little girl. Crying that I didn’t have the pretty pink dresses that I had seen the little white girls wearing or crying that I couldn’t go into the buildings and diners that they paraded into, and I wondered how things could be so separate for little girls. But Mama would rub my neck and wipe my face and say, “Jessie, that’s just how it is. You ain’t never going to have what those children have, but you’ve got to remember that what you do have is just as good and you are just as special.”
Then she’d remind me of how I got to watch her make my dresses from her own or how I got to play with my brothers in the creek or in the tops of trees. That I was free to go into the black-owned businesses, the church, and everybody’s houses that I loved. And before I knew it I was feeling good about my place, and I even found myself feeling a little sorry for the white girls, who couldn’t run in their dress clothes or would never know the words to our jump rope songs. But feeling sad or feeling happy, I was always clear about our places. And even though over fifty years have passed, not much has changed in this part of the world.
I’ve seen white men spend more time working on a black folks’ church than on their own just to make sure that our places remain separate. Oh, the women try to act like their menfolk are doing the deed out of love, but I know better. They’re doing it to keep sticky black children from dirtying up their velvet pews. They’re doing it so they won’t have to say out loud what they know in their hearts. White people and black people aren’t supposed to sit side by side and pray. White people and black people aren’t supposed to eat the same body and drink the same blood.
In their minds it’s real clear. And they can say what they want about rebuilding and fixing up the AME church down the road; they can go ahead and say they’re giving God the glory until they’re red in the face, but they aren’t fooling anyone, least of all the black folk.
I think I started going to Hope Springs on a dare. It was about 1960. I was in my late twenties, home from graduate school, radical and inspired. I didn’t even believe in God anymore, but I did believe in equal rights for everyone, equal access, equal opportunities. I was sitting at the table at my parents’ home, spewing on about how different things were going to be, how there were so many changes happening. And I think it was my older brother, Ervin, who said something like “If you’re so sure things are moving so quickly, why don’t you visit the church down the road? Why don’t you hightail it right on up to that white church, sit on the front row, and just see how far those fancy speeches are going to get you in this community?”
So I did. Much to my family’s surprise and fear, I went right by myself and sat on the first row. It was the most defiant thing I have ever done. And I was scared, looking all bad on the outside with my Afro and my beads, but inside I was afraid. Nervous as a cat.
Funny thing was that it turned out that the pastor was a decent man. He was probably in his seventies, had been there more than twenty years, and had a lot of respect from the congregation. So that when he visited me at my parents’ home, asked me to teach youth Sunday School, and went with me to my grandmother’s funeral, the white church people paid attention and carried on likewise.
I never heard a harsh thing from or about the man. And, better, I never experienced anything ugly or spiteful from the membership. Now I’m quite sure that behind the doors there was plenty of talk, but in my presence I never experienced anything but loving-kindness. His goodness rubbed off on them, made them a better people. And I believe that’s the greatest thing to say about a minister.
He wasn’t a very good preacher. The services were lifeless, and his sermons were dry. But after the reasons of protest wore off and I was forced to look again at why I went there, I discovered I needed to hear the way he talked to God. His prayers walked me back to faith, and, praise the Lord, I’ve never turned away.
That’s been more than thirty years ago now. I got married in that church, baptized my babies in that church, even buried my parents in the side cemetery, something the funeral director in the black community said would never happen. I know that it’s been a stretch for most of those folks to have me there, but I’ve found my place. I belong. So I stay.
We’ve probably been through nine or ten preachers since then. Some good. Some not so good. But we’ve managed to stay together and, for the most part, not let issues of race cloud our worship. The Wilmington Ten incident cost us some members, was hard on everybody, but, like good friends, we managed through. I’d say it’s been a blessing, for all of us. It has not, of course, been without its struggles, but, then again, most real blessings require some wrestling.
Rev. Stewart is the first woman preacher we’ve had. She’s young, same age as my Janice, inexperienced, grew up just a few miles up the road. We can’t pay her much, but we have a nice parsonage and we keep her fed. She worries a lot, and I expect has more mothers than she needs, but we’re pushing along. She seems glad to have me there. Like my presence somehow eases her liberal tendencies. Like I’m the balance for everything else bigoted and unjust in the community. She can say to her peers that Hope Springs isn’t all-white, and that because of my family she can claim to have an integrated congregation. I think I help ease some of her white guilt. I know that I’ve done that for more than one minister here.
Most of my children are close by. Everyone except Annie. She moved up to Washington with her husband. She gets homesick a lot, but I’ve told her what my mother told me: “When you marry, you go with your husband. His people become your people. Give it five years, and if it still doesn’t work, you can come home.”
James Junior lives next door. He works nights and tries to make a go of it farming. He’s a good son, married to a girl he met in high school. She takes him and the family over to the Baptist church near Burlington, where she grew up.
Robert is in Greensboro; he teaches school and has never married. And Janice, having lived out the five-year contract, moved home, changed her name back to ours, and lives at home with me and her son, Wallace. She changed his name too. He’s sixteen and acts older than his mother. He’s also the only one who will go to church with me.
James Senior, who claims he married me for my pies, left home when the girls started high school. He made it sound like it was finishing up military duty or schooling, talking about how he had “put in his time” and that now he was going to enjoy life. Guess a pie isn’t enough to hold a marriage together. I think I probably knew that he was leaving by the time our second child was born, but I kept hoping.
That’s one thing I learned isn’t different between white women and black. We are always hoping. Hoping it won’t rain on our washing. Hoping our children will get home safe from school. Hoping the lump in our breast is just dried up milk, and hoping our husbands will love us when we’re old. That last hope for me withered up and blew away more than fifteen years ago. That’s when James Senior left.
We’ve yet to get officially divorced, and from time to time I hear from him. A postcard, a phone call. He sends a check regularly. The children know he loves them. But he’s never come home, and I’ve never asked him to. I managed a good living keeping the books at the mill in town. I’ve always been good with numbers. “A gift,” my mama would say. So I worked my way up from the weaving line to the front office and from angry protester to union president.
With or without a husband, I’ve done better than most of the women in my family. And even though the nights are long and lonely, I’d rather be without him than worrying that he’s going to leave me. At least I don’t have that unsettled sense about me like the other women my age whose husbands keep coming home a little later every night with that distant look in their eyes.
At least I know where I stand, and I stand there just fine. At least I have that. And I don’t have to wonder anymore whether or not this time he won’t come back. Like somebody who’s been figuring on getting cancer all their life and finally hears the diagnosis, at least I know. I do have that. But there’s nothing more, and sometimes I feel as cold as a stone inside. Cold as a stone.
Unfortunately, I do still think of him every time I bake a pie. When I’m pressing down the edges with my thumbs, it all comes back. Like calling on the old memory of how to cook a meal, I wander into the forgotten places of desperation. Hope. Thinking with the heart of a woman, that maybe, just maybe, this one will do the trick.
It’s a mindless journey, I know. But still I go. And because I let myself wander this way, pie recipes turn out to be the only recipes I will write down.
1 tablespoon flour
¾ cup sugar
1½ cups scalded milk
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/3 stick margarine
3 to 4 ripe bananas
Vanilla wafers
Combine flour and sugar. Add to scalded milk and cook over low heat. Add some hot mixture to egg, then add to mixture. Cook over low heat until thick. Stir constantly so mixture does not lump. Stir in vanilla and margarine. Layer with bananas, sliced, and wafers. Crumble vanilla wafers for topping.
—REVEREND CHARLOTTE STEWART
I know as much about cooking as I do about trying to explain the doctrine of the Trinity to a four-year-old. What was Nadine Klenner thinking when she told little Brittany that I could explain it to her? I’ll tell you what she was thinking: “That preacher doesn’t have anything to do this afternoon, here’s my baby-sitter while I go get my nails done!” That’s exactly what she was thinking.
A couple of months ago she claimed Brittany wanted to know all about baptism. I planned out some Bible verses to read to her, got her a little coloring book called “Dancing in the Water,” and even filled up the font to give her a demonstration. When Nadine dropped her off, Brittany went straight to the nursery, where she stayed for the entire hour while her mother did their grocery shopping. She had no interest in going to the sanctuary, seeing the baptism font, or coloring pictures of a baby being sprinkled. She wanted to play house in the refrigerator box that the nursery teacher had brought to church the Sunday before.
This time she’s probably set on testing out the little Wurlitzer organ somebody donated. I suppose I should tell Nadine that she has to stay with us, eliminate this baby-sitting pattern, besides I don’t know any male preacher who would baby-sit a four-year-old, but Nadine has a way of getting what she wants with me. She reminds me of my sister. An empty glass trying to fill herself up. Always managing to find somebody who’ll drain themselves dry in order to give her an ounce of living. I poured myself out a long time ago, so I should know how to put the top on with Nadine. But somehow I feel myself open up like a carton of milk when she walks into the room.
Serena never meant harm. It was the way she coped. The way she managed the life that was handed to us. For as long as I can remember she was living off me. My paycheck, as small as it was, my friends, my homework, my fears and my faith. I had only a few resources in knowing how to deal with our mother, Joyce. Serena had none except for the ones she borrowed from me. Thinking about it now, maybe that was more or better than having her own.
I could tell when Joyce fell off the wagon just by the distance Serena let between herself and me. Somehow it would be she that would awake to the late-night binges first, and it wouldn’t be long before I would feel her hot, sticky breath next to my face. I’d slide over, and she’d crawl in the bed next to me.
Even now, as time progresses, I find that my body remembers her in the way my mind forgot. Like at night, when the darkness is as thick as wool, the moon clouded over, and the streetlight is hidden in the tree limbs, I still feel her spooned around my back, her arm carelessly thrown about my shoulder. She is still in me. Drained as I feel of most emotion, I still carry my sister deep inside my heart.
Hope Springs was a surprise. They called me right after seminary graduation. Their pastor left them after only a few months. “Got a bigger church,” they said. Mrs. Peele was the chair of the search committee. She heard me preach at a women’s day service at the church on campus. She knew I was from the area, so she asked me to preach during the summer until they found an interim minister.
That was eighteen months ago. I moved from supply preaching to becoming the interim pastor to six months later being permanent. It seemed like a natural progression, just like the passing of school year to school year. And though we haven’t ever really discussed it, I think most everybody is satisfied.
Because, as best as I can tell, things are going okay. However, I’ll be honest, and it’s hard for me to admit, but I realize now that I haven’t always been prepared. Not for the big stuff and certainly not for the little stuff. And sometimes in church, I’ve learned, the little stuff is the big stuff. Part of my job, I’m discovering, is that I’m supposed to know the difference. And sometimes I don’t. I just don’t.
Like printing the bulletin. I think the order of service and the announcements should flow, be like a hymn or a litany of praise, but all I get are complaints that I put the middle son’s name before the first daughter’s on the flower memorials. Or that the inserts are too long. I’ve learned that most of the folks don’t read them anyway. They don’t seem to have much appreciation for any written material other than The Farmer’s Almanac.
There are times when I’m just not sure that I’m cut out for this preaching business. Looking back, I think maybe Daddy was right; I should have been a nurse or a teacher. At least that way you’re able to see your patients get better or your students graduate. You have some sense that you’re making a difference, that your project is complete. In the church you can never tell if anyone’s getting any better or if anybody’s learned a thing. It’s like a long, dry summer, the only success you can claim is in naming what hasn’t died.
Everybody’s always asking about why I wanted to be a preacher. It’s a natural curiosity, I suppose. I never knew any women ministers. And though I wish I had some brilliant story of a mountaintop calling, some bush burning on a hill calling out my name, I know that my story isn’t nearly so extravagant. I received a full scholarship to divinity school because of the urging of a religion professor. Since no one else took the time to nominate me for any other graduate school scholarships and I truly admired Dr. Little, I went ahead to seminary and finished the course of study in the recommended three years.
I started going to the Methodist church when I was little. A neighbor took Serena and me in an attempt to make things better for us. Joyce called it meddlesome, but I would still go every Sunday because I loved church. I loved the order of it all. Families sitting together. Mothers and fathers and squirming children, all bunched in tidy rows. A bulletin that spelled out exactly what would happen from beginning to end. Hymnbooks and Bibles with everybody on the same page. Everyone had the understanding that rarely would there be a surprise in church. And I, the daughter of an alcoholic, I longed for an hour without surprises. An hour of cleanliness, order, and clearly defined boundaries. So that church became that solid rock in my sea of disarray. It was where I went to quiet the chaos.
I never had what I would call a religious experience in church. There was never too much emotionalism. And the preacher only came to our house once. As most people did. I joined the church when I was twelve and went regularly right up until college. In all my years of perfect attendance in Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, summer camp, and revival there was never really anything unusual. I never witnessed one miracle, unless you count the tree face.
It was Jimmy Rudgers who showed me the countenance of Christ that had just appeared on the surface of the remains of the old tree at the back of his grandmother’s tobacco barn. It was mesmerizing and strange. A miracle, to be sure. Jesus’ face set and peeling into the center of a rotten tree trunk. Long hair and eyes set off in the distance, a crown of thorns around his head. He was not quite the clean and smooth-skinned man I had envisioned, but it was still him peering at us from the table of a tree. And we dared not tell anyone for fear the gift would vanish.
Every Saturday morning for a month we would meet at the shrine. I never spoke of where I was going, not even to Serena. Jimmy and I would light matches around the secret sanctuary and pray for stuff to happen: my mother to quit drinking, and his older brother to suffer the consequences of meanness. All week I waited for the chance to visit the wooden Christ. I collected flowers, beads from my jewelry. I even stole a dollar from Joyce’s purse to leave at the altar that was mine only to share with Jimmy Rudgers.
In defiance of our pact of always going together, I went to the face alone on a Tuesday when I cut my lip on the water fountain. Butch Rierdon snuck up behind me when I was getting a drink and forced my head into the spout. My bottom lip was split, and I was sent home. Since Joyce was never known to show up in times of emergency, I walked home by way of the stump. In the daze of that warm autumn day, I knelt before the face of Christ, touched my swollen, torn lip to his, and felt the skin grow back together.
I never even told Jimmy. So that when he finally confessed that he and his brother had made the carving the summer before, that it was no miracle after all, I was not even angry at their practical joke. I only smiled, licking the line on my lip that had become the only evidence I had that I was special.
Since then, the scar has practically disappeared, and my life as a spiritual person is more of an intellectual journey than an emotional or even a faithful one. I moved from class to class, level to level, concentrating on the tasks given, the expectations of professors and committees, and jumping through the hoops placed before me. I was the perfect student, who has always played by the rules without ever asking for anything special. Even when Serena died, I did not pause.
The president of the school called after the chaplain had heard the news and contacted him. He arranged a sort of medical leave for me. But I only missed four days of classes. One to identify the body, since Joyce was too drunk and Daddy was out of town. Two for the visitation and funeral. And one to clean out her things from my mother’s apartment. I left Joyce passed out on the kitchen floor, drove back to seminary, and took my exams.
I don’t think of myself as wounded or dysfunctional because of my upbringing or lack of family ties. I can’t believe that my life is so terrible. I appreciate that I’m rarely surprised. I have low expectations of what life has to offer. And I like being in control. Frankly, it’s much more satisfying than being out of control. Or so it appears. I don’t know of a time when I wasn’t in control. Even sitting before the face of Jesus, I never permitted myself too much imagination. I was always very sure of where and who I was. There are some things even Jesus can’t change.
When I got the job as pastor of Hope Springs, I didn’t tell Joyce. She found out in November of that first year. Even though she swore she had been sober six months, I was still too worried that she’d show up one Sunday morning hungover or drunk. I managed to keep her out of it until she ran across my name in the paper in the wedding section. I believe I had just married Penny Throckmorton and that sailor the Friday before. Anyway, Joyce came in the next Sunday. And she was, I’m happy to say, on her best behavior.
Oh, the women were so happy to meet her. They treated her like a queen for the day. She was cordial, polite, even proud. But afterwards I asked her not to come back. Now when folks ask me where she is, I tell them she’s Episcopalian and goes over to the church in downtown Greensboro. So far, I’ve not been bothered by her or the church people wanting her back.
Daddy comes to town every couple of years. That’s about as much as he gets back to North Carolina. He’s been in Texas for seventeen years. When he left Joyce he married again right away. That one didn’t last either. But now he’s married to Judy VanBerken, and I think because her family’s got a little money he’s going to try and stick it out. We’ve not talked much since I went to college, and I’ve never told him that I admire him for his willingness to keep looking for happiness. Unlike me, he always seemed to know there was something better than what he had. He’s never quit believing that it might just come to him as long as he stays interested.
I suppose I would look too if I believed that there is something better out there for me, but, for the most part, I’m satisfied with my life. I don’t want for much anymore. And the most I look for is to keep from being surprised, caught off guard, or running into the unexpected.
There are, of course, some aspects of being a pastor that I hate. The late hours. The pettiness of some of the membership. The endless committee meetings. Sometimes it feels more like running a business than the house of God.
But there are also some things that I love. Like being able to bless stuff. Marriages, babies, families. I even blessed Myrtle Simpleton’s back porch because she was afraid a demon had camped out there. It is such a feeling of power to summon forth the forces of the universe, the nodding of God at the beckoning of my voice, the touch of my hand. And in the moment when I bring the blessing down upon the person or relationship or object of one’s fear, even though I feel nothing, I like to think I am a lightning rod, a vehicle of grace. The power alive and surging through me. It never matters where or when or with whom, I still like the thought of calling on the name of God.
The rest of the time, though, I simply try to maintain the order. Keep programs for all the age-groups, Bible studies, visitation, fellowship. It’s a lot of work to manage the faith and entertainment of a congregation, and I’m always trying to keep everyone comfortable. I guess that sense of trying to create balance is starting to show. Everybody seems concerned that I work too much and that I appear tired all the time or that I have no hobby or leisure activity. Mrs. Newgarden even brought me books on flower arranging the other day. Could it be that I appear so unhealthy that I need a book on flower arranging?
And, only recently, one older minister down the road, the Lutheran, who was out weeding in his garden on a Tuesday morning, told me I needed to “cool my jets” and understand that for the most part the preaching business is to “hatch, match, and dispatch,” so that there was no reason to burn myself out trying to do anything other than baptisms, weddings, and funerals.
I was surprised at his advice. I know that I looked shocked, disappointed. But I realized that, of course, there is an element of truth to what the old guy said. There is a need for balance. And yet I still keep pushing, wanting to believe that I am capable of doing a little something more for this church, though I don’t know what that is. Still, I’m not naive. I know that the church is not growing. I see the heads get grayer and grayer, the nursery and children’s Sunday School get smaller and smaller. I understand that the reason they hired me was because they didn’t want to pay what a man requires and that they just don’t want to close the church doors while they’re alive.
I see the apathy, the clutching to traditions, and I recognize that the circles I’m running in don’t add up to much of anything for these folks. Both Mrs. Peele and Mrs. Jenkins have told me to slow down, take it easy, and I trust them more than anyone else in the church, but somehow deep inside me I know that I’m afraid that if I stop or even slow down, this flame I’ve decided is faith will burn out for everyone. Perhaps or especially for me.
And in the midst of fanning flames, I try to make myself believe that maybe there is a God somewhere orchestrating this entire arrangement, and that maybe time will bring healing and I might come to appreciate what I don’t plan. I like the notion that seasons can pass, that Sunday can run to Sunday, and that God is capable of moving today like he did in the Old Testament with the children of Israel.
I like to imagine that God is a cloud rolling over our sorrows and our disappointments. Picking up that which is unbearable and pulling it into his great growing mass. A pillar of fire warming our dreams and the desires of our hearts. I like to think of God as small flakes of heaven’s bread falling like snow all around us. Tiny pieces of sugar, unrecognizable joy, that land in our hair, on the lids of our eyes, and on the wounded and seeping places in our hearts.
I like to think that there is reason and purpose to all the pain and all the emptiness we do not understand, that God is making a way for all of his children to be led into some promised land. And, like driving through an ice storm, a long ways from home, someday we will see the light on the porch and know where we are, even appreciate where we’ve been. A home where everything is finally all right with a welcome that surpasses any I’ve ever had.
This is what I like to think when I sit at my desk writing a sermon or planning a prayer, but mostly I am just keeping my eyes on a long and winding, barren road. Driving ahead like some undeterred soldier, looking neither left nor right. Eyes only forward, hoping that I might see the cloud, the fire, a little speck of snow, and maybe the light on the porch. And, even though I know it’s hopeless, really, it’s all I’ve got.
So I drive on. Straight then curve then stop then straight. It is a cadence of survival that keeps me in motion. I baby-sit. I preach. I write recipes. Speaking of which, maybe I can find the banana pudding recipe that Joyce’s mother used to make and bring us. That should work for this Women’s Cookbook. If Brittany is not interested in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, perhaps I’ll have time to find it and jot it down.
