Winter Run (21 page)

But I was interested, so off I went to the house. It must have looked like a Norman Rockwell painting— the spring morning with honeysuckle and multiflora rose coming to bloom, the pony looking over the fence,
and the kid in blue jeans, no shoes, and a hand-me-down white shirt, carrying a bucket, which the casual observer would have thought contained worms for a fishing expedition. The Sunday morning voices on the porch—domestic and secure—carried even as far as the creek behind the barn.

The ground-level screened-in porch was at the front of the house, which itself had been built for storing corn from the days when the farm was a real farm. When my father made the arrangement with Professor James to convert the building into a real house, there was no plumbing and no electricity. During the course of the first six months we lived there, my father installed a drain field, piped water from the spring-house, wired the place, painted it, built a bathroom and a kitchen. He decorated the kitchen with drawings in the Pennsylvania Dutch style called Peter Hunt. The resulting cottage was acknowledged by everyone to be a little “gem,” in Gretchen’s phrase.

So we found ourselves dug deep in the central Virginia countryside. Toward the end of her life, Gretchen once asked me if I remembered why we had come to Virginia in the first place. But I couldn’t, and she, typically, got irritated at me for not knowing. How was I to know? I had been six when it happened. I do know that my father was in the worst of the Pacific invasions as a lieutenant on that 150-foot gunboat, was decorated, and only spoke once of what had happened beyond the mere facts. So there we were—two city
parents and me, a kid absolutely ready for the whole experience.

My father remains a shadow. As I said, he did the Corn House with his own hands, as he did the remodeling of our second house. He stopped the wild-fire and saved a lot of people from ruin. He liked the countryside, but he never became part of it. He felt compelled to be involved with manufacturing as an executive and that forced him to spend much of his time away from home. There was no manufacturing around us then. After all, our country was Mr. Jefferson’s country. But that was changing, too.

The church was my father’s thing, that and two or three deep friendships—and ideas. He had ideas about the way things should be, which he expressed with vehemence that increased as the amount of drink he had taken in increased. Usually the ideas were perfectly sensible, but his opinionated way of telling them put people off.

At the appropriate time in my life, we fought like mad, but his memory has turned soft and the ideas of his I remember are gentle and understanding. Like the time when I was sixteen, in love and jilted, he took me up to one of the overlooks in the mountains, parked the car, and as we looked at the spectacular view of our home countryside, told me very quietly that he understood my pain. He said that the pain was real and that the soupy popular song that went, “They tried to tell us we’re too young,” was true, that love at
sixteen, puppy love, was among the strongest of all human emotions. He said that I would get over it, but for now it just hurt. And even though he was imparting one of his ideas, it is a memory sweet beyond telling.

Now when I look at the age spots on my hands, I see his hands. He was dark. I remember his face in shadow. I have his same hooked nose. He was a church-man. In the early years, many mornings he served at the altar when there were just the angels, the arch -angels, the rector, his housekeeper, and my father in the church.

Of his friends, William Archer, the rector of the Episcopal church in the village, was the closest. Father Will—which is what I called him before I started calling him Uncle Will, much to everyone’s amazement— was from an old New England private school family. His father had been the famous Episcopal priest headmaster of a famous Episcopal boy’s prep school that for generations had pumped out Ivy Leaguers who then became, as used to be said, captains of industry and government, especially foreign affairs. This career, particularly the State Department part, had been decreed for Will from an early age, with becoming a “school man” a distant second. As hardheaded in his way as his father, Will opted for the school part. He got as far as becoming a priest. And then to his father’s great displeasure, after seminary (where he soaked up C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and the Oxford movement and became an Anglo-Catholic), he ended
up as a missionary to the people of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was remarkably successful in this for one so sophisticated and urbane. One of the reasons was was that the men and boys of each mission became servers. Will was a near genius at making men and boys feel the drama of the Eucharist and that they were playing a vital role in this calling down of God to a specific place and moment. Somehow he got his people to make a leap beyond the preaching tradition they were familiar with, into the world of the Anglican Mass.

Sometimes it took hold in curious ways. There was a sheriff in one of the mountain counties who made the sign of the cross before he ate lunch in the single restaurant in his county seat, much to the horror of the natives, although they would have been hard put to say why the sign of the cross shocked them. But people got used to even this.

After fifteen years on the circuit, the mission church in our village became a parish and Will was called to be rector. He never left. As was his custom, he persuaded the boys and some of the men to become servers.

At some point in Will’s life there had been a great love. I never knew the whole story, just that she had been in one of the girls’ colleges of New England while Will was at Yale. Whatever happened, he remained a bachelor for the rest of his life. He was a tall, skinny man. Really skinny. The first time you saw him, you thought he must be dying of something. If
so, it took thirty-eight years from my first memory of him for it to happen. The way he stood, usually with a cigarette in his hand and one hip cocked, exuded irony. Or maybe I mean humor—with a smile, but the kind of smile that overlays sorrow, like the loss of his love or the mornings at the altar when nothing happened and God was so distant you could barely see him, even in your praying eye.

It became his habit to come to our house for a drink after church and sometimes he stayed for lunch. At the time, the fashion was martinis, which my father mixed with great panache. It makes my stomach shrivel to think of those drinks. Even then they both drank too much.

They were like brothers in the struggle for faith, a struggle that never left either of them and that they passed on to me. Once when Charles and Gretchen were going on a trip, I became Will’s godson by virtue of a paper Gretchen made him sign saying that if anything happened to them Will would raise me and that provisions had been made, etc., etc. The thought of suddenly inheriting a twelve-year-old, let alone me, made Will blanch, and me smile.

So those are the characters and the scene. One more thing, though. For those of you—as I was—not in a sufficient state of grace to know what “cottonmouth” means, it refers to the dramatically white membranes on the inside of the water moccasin’s mouth in contrast to his dark body. The cottonmouth
has little holes on the side of his head that are called pits—hence, a pit viper. He is very poisonous but not particularly bad-tempered if let alone.

The screen door had an old-fashioned spring-loaded stop on it that made a clunk as I opened it. The snake made one of his regular strikes at my hand just as the three of them looked up at the sound of the door.

“Where the hell did you get that goddamn snake, Charlie?” yelled—I mean really
yelled
—my father.

Gretchen screamed and Will jumped up, spilling his fragile martini. By that time Daddy had crossed the intervening fifteen feet, knocked the bucket from my hand, knocking me down in the same motion, fortunately not where the snake fell. The bucket landed on its side, of course, and the next instant we had a three-and-a-half-foot cottonmouth moccasin flowing around the enclosed ten-by-seventeen-foot porch, looking for a way out where there was none, herding the people in front of him. That is, all except my father who had hotfooted it out of there to the out-house, which had been converted to a toolshed, to get some implement to kill—not maim,
kill
—this creature that had intruded on our tranquil Sunday world.

He came back with a hoe. He was going to hoe the snake’s head off. Have you ever tried to hoe the head off a snake in the open, that is, where the snake has freedom of movement? It’s almost impossible, especially if there is porch furniture in the way. By this time Gretchen and Will were watching the proceedings
from the safety of the kitchen, looking out over the Dutch door. But I was still out on the porch, also in the way.

So there we were. If this was the biblical struggle with evil, it had strong overtones of farce. Will, who had completely recovered his humor and was smiling broadly, spoke up. “Charles, it appears to me that if you succeed in killing this snake you no doubt will also make a mess of the furniture, not to mention the drinks. So in order to simplify the situation, why don’t you get a big shovel and shovel him out the door, and he will crawl back to the branch and halfway to the village before he stops for breath, if snakes breathe.” He was about to burst into laughter.

Up to this point, I was inclined toward killing, but at this speech, I converted and became vehement for clemency. Daddy wasn’t sure. He was still very frightened for my sake. But after a pause, when Gretchen said, “Oh, Charles, just get the creature out of here,” that is what we did. A scoop was gotten from the tool-shed and the snake cajoled into sliding across the high sill of the screen door. He went fast down hill toward the weeping willow in the front yard. As he crossed one of the willow’s big roots, a curious thing happened. In order to avoid a knob on the next root, he crawled back over himself, creating his last circle, I thought, for me. And he stopped for an instant, looking—if a snake looks—back toward us, all of us still full of the chill a snake brings with him. Then without a thought to the consequences, I blurted out, “That’s how I
found him. I was walking in the creek. I felt him move under my foot. He was in circles like that. That’s all. I wasn’t sure which kind he was …” I trailed off to nothing, waiting for the lecture.

Instead, Will looked straight at me and asked, “Do you want to learn to serve at the altar, Charlie?” I caught my breath. Sometimes twelve-year-olds were allowed to light the candles and carry torches, but never serve at the altar. I wasn’t even confirmed.

But I had been closely watching Will and my father together at the altar in the early mornings, and I had heard the language of Cranmer and the King James Bible. And although the surface meaning of the words often escaped me, even then, I could hear the struggle toward God. I knew that beyond the farm and nature and the animals and Matthew and the other people I knew and loved, this was the center of their lives, and wondered without words whether it would become mine.

I already knew the danger of it. I’d felt the heaviness left sometimes after the last Gospel—after the words of St. John are repeated (“And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us … full of grace and truth”) and the response (“Thanks be to God)”— when my father walked from the church in front of Will, and I somehow knew that nothing had happened for him. I also knew that in that moment, at least, Christ was not “among us” for me either, and that all I was left with were the words, wondering, even then, if the words would ever be enough.

The next Lent when, at thirteen and confirmed, and knowing how to serve, I determined to keep what we called a good Lent. To go to church twice a week and, childlike, to try to get to the bottom of the mystery. Church was at seven. There was still plenty of time to catch the school bus after the service.

It had been an easy winter, not like the previous winters and certainly not like the Great Winter of the dog hunt. Even so, Lent was early that year and there was snow. My father was as usual away during the week on business, so I was the server at the seven o’clock celebrations of Communion, or what we, being High Church, called Mass.

One early morning I walked into the chancel in front of Will, who was carrying the veiled chalice, looked out to the nave of the church, and saw only one other person. So that morning in the cold church (they hadn’t yet installed central heating) there would be only the three of us—and the mystery and the words.

In a church procession the most important person comes last, until we come to the step and I move aside and Will goes into the sanctuary to arrange the veiled chalice and open the altar book. Then I kneel on the bare wooden floor, waiting, balanced. I can kneel for thirty-five minutes without feeling faint and have learned to keep my back straight, so my weight goes to my knees.

He returns to the foot of the sanctuary and stands while I remain kneeling, still tense, but cautiously
hopeful. It is about to start. He begins, “In the name of the Father,” while making the sign of the cross. After we say the psalm, he turns to me, bowing, and says, “I confess to God Almighty, before the whole company of heaven, and to you …” Here he is to say “to you my brethren,” meaning everyone in the church.

But that morning, halfway into my first Lent, he made a mistake and said “to you my brother.” To me alone. And I felt a sudden warmth as if God himself had finally spoken to me; and for that moment the steady and inexorable loss of my world became bearable, even at thirteen.

Funerals are the reason I go back now. They seem to happen particularly in the winter, as the old people die off, and I come from wherever I happen to be. Each time I return, the road west from the town—now a city—is overlaid with more memory, like the layers of features on a new style map: topography, roads, towns, villages. Each layer is added on until it is all there—everything you could possibly want to know about the countryside and your own life—laid out in one case by modern science and, in the other, memory. Of course, the church has changed again and again. That is what they wanted, my father and Will—to take the little country brick church and make it a thing of small but rare beauty. They wanted it to have a large stone altar, a pipe organ, lots of vesting rooms, the modern-medieval windows. Those windows were made in Holland, and when they arrived at
the village Will and my father were so excited that Daddy installed one of them himself instead of waiting for the experts. They were proud of themselves and the beauty of the window, until two weeks later the whole thing buckled and the experts barely saved it.