Driftless (11 page)

And as far as the Holy Trinity was concerned—this was of course a wonderful idea so long as you did not worry about the need for All to be One rather than All to be Three, but what Scripture, exactly, was it based upon?

Her teacher placed his head in his hands, looked at her through the spaces between his fingers, and called her a “bad girl.”

After leaving church, her foster parents took her home and whipped her until she bled, but this was expected, because suffering
at the hand of others, she had come to believe because of many resounding examples in the Bible, was a sign of having true beliefs.

Within the month, she was taken to another foster home.

That was a long time ago, she reflected on her way back to the parsonage behind the Words Friends of Jesus Church. Now she was no longer a child and did not expect other people to share her thoughts or beliefs. It wasn’t necessary. The Holy Bible Theological Seminary had taught her that. There were hundreds of Christian denominations and all of them had different practices and different shades of belief. They talked about believing the same things, but when it came right down to it, they didn’t. Whatever unity there was came from a shared agreement to not be very specific about what those beliefs entailed. And only odd ducks, like herself, bothered to look very deeply into them.

The congregation she currently served belonged to the Society of Friends. She had known little about this denomination but studied up before coming for the interview.

Their mid-seventeenth-century founder, George Fox, had experienced the living spirit of Jesus Christ, in England. Convinced that such personal encounters constituted essential Christianity, Fox attracted a number of equally convinced followers, and they openly criticized established religious and governmental practices. They called themselves Friends and suffered appalling persecution from other Christians for their iconoclastic beliefs.

Friends came to the New World as many others, seeking religious freedom. Their numbers in Pennsylvania once comprised a majority and their views on pacifism, plain dress, alcohol abstinence, and the shunning of music and dancing were well known. William Penn had been a prominent member of the group. They worshipped in “meeting houses,” in silence, seeking direct communion with God, the males on one side of unadorned rooms, females on the other. There were no paid pastors or priests among them, as they rejected the idea of spiritual intermediaries. Each individual believer, they thought, enjoyed the same direct connection to the Deity. Their nickname, Quaker, currently used to advertise breakfast cereal, mocked the way
some members’ untrained voices quavered when they delivered inspired messages to the rest of the meeting. They advocated for better treatment of mental patients and criminals, and the Society of Friends included many women who were instrumental in spreading the early faith. In later years, Friends contributed to the abolitionist movement. The Underground Railroad was believed by some to have been engineered by them.

In the late nineteenth century, the Great Awakening, also known as the holiness movement, swept across the United States in a wave of evangelical tent meetings led by charismatic, European-trained ministers. The movement owed much of its emphasis to John Wesley and profoundly influenced Quakerism. Soon, an acrimonious dispute over practice and doctrine divided the Society. Afterwards, there were many Friends congregations that to an untrained eye resembled Wesleyans, except for omitting water baptism and other rituals relating to the sacraments, which were rejected in favor of less demonstrative forms of devotion. Gone were the plain clothes and peculiar speech—replaced with collection plates, organs, pianos, and singing. In time, evangelical Friends came to depend upon the services of paid pastors and even called their local meetings “churches.” The Words Friends of Jesus Church was one of these.

Winifred Smith lived in the little parsonage behind the white church. The roof leaked and the toilet flushed with the kind of diminished enthusiasm that often precedes serious septic difficulties. She had a forced- air oil furnace with no air-conditioning, the majority of windows were painted shut, and the floors were covered with linoleum and flowered carpets. The downstairs served as office space for a copy machine, Sunday school library, donation center, and church answering machine. Even the refrigerator was best regarded as communal property, with pictures, calendars, notices, and articles held to its front and sides with magnets glued to pieces of painted, colored clay, made in Vacation Bible School. The upstairs, where Winnie actually pictured herself living, like a swallow in an attic, consisted of two small bedrooms with partial ceilings.

The majority of her congregation, gray-headed and stoop-shouldered, lived under the continuing influence of Depression-era
memories. They could easily recall events—and spoke of them in earnest detail—that occurred before electricity, telephones, and interstate highways. Many had spent their entire lives (excepting, in some cases, military service) in the same geographical area, and every hill, valley, road, and building held familial volumes of association.

These frail, dignified ladies and gentlemen formed the core of her church, supporting it with near-sacrificial fervor. Though many were living on Social Security or the dwindling income from the sale of their farms, their generous giving provided the lion’s share of her salary. Their attendance at church functions bordered on fanatical, and their views on how the church should operate were tantamount to ancestral codes. As one member said during a heated business meeting, “I care more about this church than about anyone in it.” And while he possibly would have eventually conceded that the church
was
the people in it, he nevertheless had hit upon a significant truth.

People, Winnie discovered, related to organizations, and those institutional relationships were often more meaningful than the fleshly kind because they could be sustained over longer periods. People came and went, but the local church and its unchanging programs remained, and her duty was to uphold them.

Winnie Smith cherished her new position as guardian of traditions that were not her own, even though she feared that her acceptance was tentative, a little like the welcome extended to a poor relative. She suspected she might present something of an enigma to people whose lives rooted in family, where the first question asked in getting to know someone was not “What do you do?” but rather “Who are you related to?”

Still, she did not intend to fail.

Winnie conducted two Sunday services, one in the morning—with the largest attendance—and a less formal one in the evening. Both included announcements, a sermon, prayers, and hymn singing accompanied by Betty Orangles, an octogenarian pianist with snow-white hair, a soft pedal foot, and a narrowly construed sense of rhythm. Sunday school preceded morning worship, where Winnie taught grades two through six (three children). On Tuesday afternoons she met with the Women’s Missionary Union in the church
basement, participated in a noon potluck, and helped make blankets for people needing a “touch of sympathy.” On Wednesday night she led Bible study. Thursday nights were devoted to her youth group—two teenagers, if everyone showed up. Twice a month she visited area nursing homes, calling on residents who had once sat in the pews at the Words church and holding Protestant services for those who could be coaxed out of their beds. There were also regular committee and business meetings, visiting the sick and shut-in, holding dedication services for newborns, officiating at weddings, and attending local ministers’ association meetings. So far, she had been able to arrange for other pastors in the area to hold the only funerals that were required, for which she was thankful. In addition to these responsibilities were the numerous and sundry little things that consumed most of the rest of her waking hours: correspondence, individual and marital counseling, building and grounds oversight, and activities too diverse to mention.

BROKEN THINGS

W
HEN JULY MONTGOMERY PICKED UP HIS MANURE SPREADER at the Words Repair Shop, he reminded Jacob Helm to work on the stalled rider on the edge of town. “Send me the bill,” he said.

In the craft room, Clarice Quick called Gail Shotwell about her lawn mower, but there was no answer. “I’ve tried three times,” she told Jacob.

“I’ll stop on the way home,” he said. Several hours later he walked out of the shop, padlocking the double garage doors behind him.

The sun had faded from its yellow brilliancy to resemble a golden bowl filled with late afternoon. The air felt warm, humid, and sleepy-still.

The painted black mailbox read GAIL, in white stick-on block letters. He parked his jeep near an orange- red mower surrounded by tall grass, mired like a rowboat abandoned in seaweed.

Providing mechanical remedies appealed to Jacob in much the same way that healing appealed to physicians. Broken things
wanted
to function properly and were tragically prevented from doing so. When they were fixed, they returned to their normal state and resumed their activities, happily cutting off the tops of grasses or whatever else they had been created for. Ending their uselessness constituted a noble calling: liberation mechanics.

A short time later he located the problem: a faulty switch designed to allow the engine to start only when the mower blades were disengaged. The best solution required a new switch, but in the meantime he could bypass the safety precaution with a small length of spliced electrical wire. The appearance of the lawn suggested that the owner would probably want to mow as soon as possible.

After returning his toolbox to the jeep, he walked along the
assorted collection of wooden planks thrown down for a sidewalk to the house and knocked.

No answer, yet inside the house he could hear a low, unsteady noise.

Jacob knocked again, louder. Again no answer. The staggered, muffled noises inside the house grew louder and more rhythmic. Someone, it seemed, must be inside.

He decided to try the back door and walked around the yard, climbing with some effort through blackberry brambles and hickory saplings.

The sounds could be heard more clearly here, rambling yet melodic, each tone flowing away from the previous one in a mocking, playful humor, as though the ground itself were making up earthy songs about the foibles of nature. Then he recognized something familiar in the melody, and while he was pondering this familiarity he walked around the corner of the house and discovered inside the screened-in porch a young, completely naked blond woman, seated on a broken glider, her head tilted to one side, playing a bright red guitar. Her eyes were closed, her mouth partly opened, an expression of concentrated effort on her face.

A wide, sequined guitar strap fell over her right shoulder, and the additional weight of the instrument rested in the cleavage between twin pale thighs. The slender fingers of her right hand plucked vigorously at the four coiled strings as her left hand darted up and down the neck as quick as a weaver’s, searching for some combination of movements to free the notes she hoped to coax from the instrument. The motion of her hands was relayed by a thick black cord issuing from the front of the guitar onto the porch floor, around her naked right foot, and through the back door, leaving the impression that the house itself amplified the muted stirrings into heavy, spacious, romping tones. Because of the angle of the guitar, her left breast remained partially obscured, hidden. The other stared amply ahead, apparently aimed through its ripe focused nipple at the bridge of his nose.

She opened her eyes, raised her head, and looked directly at him. The music stopped at the same moment that her uncommon beauty
announced itself inside Jacob’s mind, like the bright pain following with brief delay after an openhanded slap.

Jacob felt accosted. A barrier had been breached and he was immediately surrounded by a number of aggressive and uncomfortable revelations. He was thirty-eight years old, and his feet were stuck in a pivotal spot in history in which six million years of instinctual male responses to naked females of childbearing age meeting the highest standards of pulchritude needed to change. Indeed, it had fallen solely on Jacob, the responsibility of crafting a Better Way of reacting to young, unclothed women, based on unassuming contractual and egalitarian considerations, shared ideals, and mutual respect. His obligation, it seemed, required him to ignore the synaptic and endocrinic associations that men were assumed to hold in regard to such women: leafless bouquets, genetic rewards, orgasmic flutes and funnels, slippery wine skins, squeeze toys programmed by Nature’s Cunning Twin to reduce even the most sober, mechanically oriented minds to mush. He reminded himself that beauty was subjective, interpretive. The viewed object-in-itself did not possess a wild nympholeptic spirit able to reach inside him and command his allegiance. The only reaching going on within his present circumstances lay within his own jurisdiction. Everything happened inside him. His memories and loneliness were directly contributing in some unknown but potentially understandable way to the perception that Diana herself had come to be seated inside the porch—Diana or some other mythopoeic creature of such alarming loveliness that ordinary human relations became temporarily suspended. He was projecting these alluring symmetries onto her and he needed to take responsibility for doing so, now. A woman on a porch, nothing more. Everything else about the situation he was simply making up. Someone dying of thirst and stumbling upon a cavern filled with dark, wooden casks of chilled wine will not be the most reliable judge of viniculture.

In addition, a hateful thought soon informed Jacob that the young woman before him so far surpassed his late wife in physical beauty that they could not be compared. In other words, there was a comparison but no one who loved his wife or at the very least the
memory of her would propose it. This woman communicated an exuberant compact burgeoning that had years ago departed from Angela, whose bodily form had been consumed in a losing battle against disease. But even in her best days, Jacob feared, before illness had begun to exact its limping toll, Angela had never possessed this creature’s combination of raw visual appeal and unrehearsed grace. She glowed with health. Her neck, stretching out of the extraordinary suppleness of her shoulders, mimicked in every detail the curving stem of a lily rising to its flower. And the problems posed for him by the rondure of her hips were addressed in his imagination, one after another, before they blossomed into conscious questions, only to be posed anew.