We sat quiet until exactly 10:00 a.m., and then John spoke.
“Would someone like to choose a hymn?”
I was always hoping for Hymn Number 1, “Tell Me the Story of Jesus,” because it was my favorite and I knew most of the words without looking, but it was usually reserved for gospel meeting. So someone suggested a number, and we paged to it in Hymns Old & New, and then one of the women—Florence, usually—would lead the singing, hitting that first note so the rest of us could follow in behind. Once she chose the range, you were stuck with it. Sometimes you’d have to drop an octave to hit the high notes and jump an octave to hit the low ones. When the first hymn was complete sometimes we sang another one. Then John said, “Let us bow our heads in prayer.”
The prayers rose around the room in no particular order, with the exception that John the elder always went last. The prayers were usually brief and simply worded: Lord, we pray that thou wouldst grant us stillness in our hearts; That thou wouldst improve our spirits; That we might find ourselves worthy of thy mercy. Some prayed in a rush, some prayed briefly; some prayed a different prayer every Sunday, some prayed the same thing every week. By and large the prayers were poetic in simplicity in rhythm, and everything remained resolutely in the spiritual realm—overly specific requests were seen as unseemly. (Thus I was quite unprepared later in life when I overheard a prayer session among a group of young evangelicals at a local coffee shop during which a young woman quite fervently prayed, “Lord, you have got to get me out of this lease!”) Throughout the time of prayer, we children were expected to keep our heads down and eyes closed. I do remember sneaking peeks, although not often, because somehow even with his own eyes closed, Dad would catch me and I would get the eyebrows.
When the prayers concluded, we sang another hymn, and then it was time for testimonies, when those who chose to participate shared a Bible verse or several that they had been meditating on during the week and then offered a homespun homily. The first time I gave testimony it took a while for me to get my gumption up, and I quaked as I said, “My thoughts this week have been on Matthew, chapter 19,” and then I read aloud verses 16 through 22, in which a young man asks Jesus what good things he must do in order that he may have eternal life. Follow the commandments, replies Jesus. I have done that, says the young man. Then sell all your possessions and give them to the poor, says Jesus, and the man leaves in a funk, as he has a great number of possessions. “I hope that I will always live so that I am storing up riches not for this world, but for eternity,” I said, and then the next person began to speak and I felt great relief. As with prayer, the testimonies moved around the room in no particular order, and then when all had spoken, John the elder gave his testimony. When John concluded, he set his Bible aside and said, “Would someone give thanks for the bread and wine?”
Once you professed in gospel meeting, you were allowed to pray and give testimony Sunday morning, but in order to take the sacraments you had to have been baptized. We were of the Anabaptist persuasion, eschewing infant baptism, trusting instead that when the Lord so moved us as believers we would seek out the workers and request to be included at the next baptism, a full-immersion ceremony usually held in a river or farm pond. I never got baptized and therefore never “partook of the emblems,” as we used to say. I do remember helping pass them around the room, and how heavy the glass felt, and how I focused intently on handling it so as not to spill it, and how it seemed imbued with a heaviness far exceeding a glass of juice. As the emblems circled, each baptized person took a pinch of the bread and a sip of the wine that wasn’t wine. Following the bread and wine, we sang a final hymn, and church was over. It rarely went over an hour. We rose and shook hands all around. You made sure you got everyone, young and old. It was an informally required formality. The grown-ups visited, and then we sorted our hats and coats from the pile in the kitchen and stepped back into the outside world for six more days.
When I went to help my sister and brother-in-law butcher their chickens, the thinking was that I would build up some sweat equity credit and they would help butcher ours, but now they won’t have to. Our neighbor Terry—with whose family we split the original meat chicken order—has arranged to have his chickens butchered by a local Amish family. They can process up to fifty chickens per day, and since Terry has to haul his bunch over there anyway he asks if we’d like to buy a ticket to ride for our seventeen (originally twenty: one DOA, one terminal splay-leg, and one crunched by the chicken tractor). At first I hesitate, strictly out of hammerheaded pride (turning my chickens over to be butchered by someone else impinges on my delusions of self-sufficiency), but then I visualize the leaf pile of bills, Post-its, and rough drafts covering my desk, and it hits me that sometimes delegation is the better part of valor. Later I bolster this line of thinking with the justification that we are supporting the local economy, although to what extent I am not sure since we will be charged only two bucks a chicken. All arrangements have to be made by mail, so once we commit, Terry sends a letter to a man named Levi confirming the date and time and number of birds, and we mark the calendar.
The birds are ready. They have grown at a steroidal rate on their hog feed and now clomp around the confines of their pen like clucking sumos. As a man I think the bigger the better, but Anneliese finds their growth rate unnatural and would like to try raising some leaner heirloom varieties next year. We have managed to veganize them slightly by shifting their fence so they can peck at greenery, but they still lack the verve for foraging that we see from the layers, who frequently hit the yard in a flying wedge, driving autumn’s last grasshoppers before them like desperate fleeing popcorn.
I no longer believe all I believed when I sat in my chair in the white clapboard house, but I am not prepared to scoff. There is enough derision in the world. That is not to say I am above knee-jerk crankiness. When a stranger on a bus asked if I was a Christian, I shot back perhaps a little too sharply, asking if he would treat me differently depending on my answer, and I could see immediately he hadn’t meant it that way. Because I grew up worshipping in a manner that could be described as unplugged and acoustic, I sometimes wax a tad irascible about churches that serve lattes and happy music. Church should not be easy, I said once while giving a talk, church should be hard. After which a woman mailed me an envelope containing full-color photographs of Asian children whose tongues had been ripped out after they professed Christianity. You see, the lady wrote, church is hard. Clearly we were talking past each other by the width of several zip codes. I get most crotchety when someone proselytizes me with an aura of patient indulgence, as if I am a fuzzy-headed wandering lamb who scampered off to the devil’s clover patch one day and never looked back. Just because you drop the dogma doesn’t mean you don’t dread the price of transgression. Mine is a chastened apostasy—I don’t claim to have the answers, and although I stand outside the church of my parents, I still peek through the windows for guidance.
I wasn’t surprised when Amy asked me about God. All children get around to it. It was actually a couple of years ago, and her voice came out of the darkness behind me in the van. I was stumbling through a wish-wash mumble when she granted me reprieve by interrupting with another question: “Why did the men kill Jesus?” That one is easier, because I may be a silly wandering lamb, but the story of Jesus, that one is written on my heart, every word. So I talked about Jesus. About how he lived, what he taught, and how he died. And then she asked if she could have a horse, and I was given time to regroup. But I realized the future had arrived, and there would be no opt-out. You cannot toss your seven-year-old a copy of Being and Nothingness. As eternally dangerous as it might be to end up a bumbling agnostic, it may be even more dangerous to begin there. The greatest gift my parents ever gave me was a firm foundation.
Lately we have begun going to church.
We have not made any final decision. For a while we attended services at the local Unitarian Universalist church. Then we went to several Quaker services.
Currently we are attending Mennonite services held in a Jewish temple. We have felt warmly welcomed in all three settings, but neither Anneliese nor I have been able to settle. I bring with me my prejudice against anything more organized than a camp meeting, whereas Anneliese—with her background in Lutheranism, Catholicism, and shamanism—finds herself longing for more ceremony. None of this is made easier by the fact that we have friends and acquaintances in all three congregations, and there is the usual polite desire to keep everyone happy.
A couple of times already when I have been behind on some deadline or another, I have stayed home while Anneliese and the girls go to church, and this shames me. When I was a child, Sunday was a day of rest. The Ten Commandments, you know. No matter how far behind he might have been, no matter how much hay was down with rain threatening, Dad saw to only those chores required for the comfort of the animals, went to church, and took the rest of the day off. One year when incessant rain was blackening the mown hay in the fields a rare sunny Sunday dawned, and Elder John took counsel after the morning meeting to see if he could justify baling hay that afternoon. With forage desperately short and more rain coming, it would have been wasteful to let it lie, and so they baled, but I remember thinking it was a momentous decision. Issues of God and faith aside, I am thinking my little girls should come to see Sunday as a day apart. As a day to set all worldly business aside and abide in ceremony. I will never cut it as a Quaker—I cannot find it in me to renounce all violence, not with two daughters under my protection—but I do love their silent hour, which in my case invariably evolved into a self-scouring meditation on the idea that the busy life is not the full life.
For better or worse, I have to play it straight with the kids. When Amy was four she woke up three nights in a row screaming that monkeys were flying in her window. That third evening she was being watched by a babysitter, and the following morning Amy said the babysitter told her Jesus would make the monkeys go away. That night the monkeys were back. How do you finesse that one?
Despite the depth of my parents’ faith, they never oversold the church. Two years ago I asked Dad about the origins of the Truth. “The workers will tell you it comes directly from God,” he said. “Actually it came from Scotland. Sometime around 1900.” After a lifetime of watching him walk so faithfully, the honesty of his answer floored me. Later Mom confided that after years of being assured by the workers that the Truth could be traced straight to the twelve apostles, the discovery that the sect was actually the offshoot of a group formed in 1897 by an itinerant Scottish evangelist named William Irvine did indeed leave them feeling deeply betrayed, but the one issue that nearly drove them out was their refusal to condemn people of other faiths. “We did not, do not, and will not,” says Dad, before going on to list friends, neighbors and acquaintances whose spirit he admires. When Mom and Dad were confronted by a worker over their dissent, Dad invited the man to throw them out. It didn’t happen.
I have only recently (and mainly because I am now responsible for two children) begun discussing many of these issues with my parents. My hesitancy is rooted mainly in simple respect. Having watched how my parents have lived their lives, I have no appetite for spiritual fencing matches. And although I doubt that I could, I have no interest in derailing gentle people. I do not discount Romans 14:13: “Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumbling block or an occasion to fall in his brother’s way.” The lapsed believer does not shed the vestiges of doctrine.
But I’m glad we’re talking. During one recent exchange I said Mom and Dad’s refusal to condemn “outsiders” (Dad avoids the term, saying it has a ring of arrogance) made them to some extent skeptics within their own church. No, Dad said. Mother and I have misgivings about the church. We have no skepticism about God and His Son. And it struck me then that if none of us followed our parents in the church, perhaps it is because they refused to follow it blindly themselves. Their actions signaled to us that as important as it was to live in “the Truth,” it was more important to live truthfully. Before their children above all.
Because of their example, I am slowly turning the corner on why even some skeptics stick with church. “Men are better than their theology,” said Emerson, and while I can’t see going back, I will be perfectly happy—perhaps even relieved—if my girls become Quakers or Catholics or sister workers—as long as they treat themselves and others with care.
Amy still asks me for stories from my childhood. She’s done it often enough now that it sometimes it takes me a while to generate one she hasn’t heard before. There is the sensation of opening a dented recipe box to riffle through dog-eared index cards. But I dredge one up every time, because I know the inexorable hour approaches when the star power of the yammering bald guy will wane and sputter to nothing. Tonight when she asks, we are tooling down the darkened highway in our dilapidated fambulance, so I tell her about the time our second secondhand Volkswagen bus broke down on a winter night when we were on our way home from gospel meeting, leaving our double-digit family with no ride but the farm pickup. The next time we went to church Mom, Dad, and the toddlers crammed into the truck cab while the rest of us wrapped ourselves in sleeping bags and rode in the back. Dad bolted plywood sheeting over the bed to shelter us from the wind. Unable to sit upright beneath the plywood, we lined the crawl space with old couch cushions and lay on our backs, making a game of trying to judge our progress by tracking the turns, imagining our bodies as needles spinning on a compass.
“Tell me another story from your childhood,” she says when I finish. So I tell her about the little boy who fell asleep in church on Sunday, and she giggles. Surely she is filing a few index cards of her own. One day she will draw one composed on this night, about her benignly freakish parents and how they dragged her around in a tatterdemalion van that smelled of pig feed and home-brewed goat cheese. And then she begins to sing: O Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary, pure and holy, tried and true… It is a song her mother taught her, and her voice hangs in the air with the purity of starlight.
Terry arrives before dawn, and like thieves we load the chickens into his trailer. They are thickly feathered and hefty in my hands and armpit warm where my thumbs stick beneath their wings. Because we make our raid early we don’t meet much resistance, and when we pull a tarp over the trailer only a few disgruntled clucks seep through the canvas. Terry tells me the Amish family will be expecting me at five that evening, and then he drives off, the trailer lights stoplight red in the dark yard. I should be butchering those chickens, I think, one last time, then I console myself with the knowledge that Amy, Anneliese, and I have been butchering our own deer on the kitchen table for three years now, and then I review the mental jumble of other things I can do today other than pluck and gut seventeen chickens, and I think, Well, OK.
It’s cold, gray, and windy when I drive into the Amish family’s yard ten hours later. As I turn around and back up to the trailer where it is parked beside the house, several straw-hatted heads pop out of the woodshed. Young boys at work. When I have some trouble adjusting the hitch, one of the boys scurries away to a shed and returns with a wrench and hands it to me silently, but then when I still struggle they jump in to help manfully, the way young boys do when they want to demonstrate their abilities. Finally the cup clunks in place over the ball and I lock the hitch in place, then let myself into what I assume was the garage before these carless folk moved in. Now it is a large room jammed with countertops on sawhorses, galvanized tubs of water, coolers, tubs of chicken feathers, and some fourteen pint-sized chicken pluckers—barefoot children in long dresses and overalls, working beside several adult women and teenage girls. When I walk in, the smallest children draw toward the women and look furtively from behind their skirts. There is only one man—Levi—and he greets me with a smile. “We are almost finished,” he says. Some of the coolers are already packed, so I begin loading them. The women are still bagging chickens—long gone are the stolid white-fea
thered beasts of the morning, replaced by pale yellow carcasses, headless with naked pointy wings and their drumsticks neatly trussed. In one galvanized tank the carcasses float in the water like giant waxy bobbing apples.
The little boys hustle to help me tote the coolers, clustering busily, heaving and ho’ing in a further attempt to prove their mettle. By the time we get the coolers in the trailer, the women are bagging the last of the chickens. Levi and I review the handwritten bill and tally, and as I write the check the little girls in bonnets peer up silently from behind Mom, and then I am back in the car and away.
Back home after supper and with the baby asleep in bed Anneliese and I get out our vacuum sealer and start sealing pieces and double-bagging whole birds. The carcasses are huge—a couple of them top eight pounds on the kitchen scale. When we feel we have enough whole birds bagged, we clear the kitchen island, round up knives and cutting boards, and start chopping the remaining birds into pieces, removing the drumsticks and wings, fileting the breasts, saving the backs for stock. Amy is already up past her bedtime but she is so eager to help, we tell her she can stay up thirty more minutes. She tucks in happily, sawing away at wings and thighs and helping push the button that runs the vacuum sealer. When the half hour is over she slumps a little but we hold the line, following her upstairs to tuck her in and kiss her and thank her for helping.
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