Hug Dancing

by Shelby Hearon

  Perhaps, he said, he would do all the New Testament readings from John, his favorite Gospel. Starting with John 10:1–10, then John 12, John 14, John 20, John 21. What did I think? I knew that the first verses said that he that entered by any other way but the door was a thief but that he who entered by the door was the shepherd. It was Jesus’s saying: “I am the shepherd.” And the other scriptures were explaining who Jesus was also, and the last was a command to feed his sheep. I considered all that while Eben waited, and then I said, “So that you explore what the risen Christ knew himself to be and how he explained himself to his disciples. Not prophecy any longer, but the task at hand.”

  “Yes,” he said, digesting my summary, looking it over in his mind, seeing if that was right. “Yes, that will be something I can work within and around.”

  Then, after we’d washed up our bowls, we went back to take a nap, and, the shades down, sun raining a deep yellow stripe on the boards of the floor, Eben made love to me on a Thursday afternoon, out of his trousers, in the daytime, in the harbor of an empty house.

  WHEN EBEN CAME home, we sat together in the bedroom alcove between the bathroom and the closet. It was a comfortable space we used in the evenings because it was as far as possible from the common wall with the girls’ bedroom. I sat on the footstool, pulled so I could lean against the wall. My hands were tucked, palms together, between my knees. A sign of nervousness.

  He was in the armchair in his undershirt, his braces dangling, his trousers rolled, massaging his feet with his black socks still on. From time to time, in an unconscious gesture, he reached a hand down for his cup of tea, remembered it was empty, set it back.

  He had a full day on Saturday, visiting the housebound, making hospital and rest home calls (the Presbyterian population was aging as well as shrinking), and preparing his sermon. I let him collect himself, turn his attention to the fact that he was home.

  I hadn’t done much to this room, with its polished floors and white plaster walls, but there was a basket of dried grass on the wicker chest at the foot of the bed, a row of blue willow pitchers (my mother’s) under the windowsill, and an old will and testament box (his father’s) we used as an end table by the chair.

  “Where did you eat supper?” I asked him.

  “At the hospital cafeteria. We’ve two in there”—he gave their names—“on respirators. Another in ICU with a bypass. It’s been a hard spring. It’s as though they can make it through the ice storms and winds of winter, and then as soon as the weather turns warm and the days grow longer, they have trouble. The perennial situation.”

  “Yes,” I said. Spring and bad times had an echo for us both. For him, because he’d lost his old father to a stroke at eighty-four the March after we married. For me, because I’d lost my young mother, just turned forty, to a flash flood the May of my high school graduation.

  “Then I had the mixed wedding. This time the groom was a Baptist, hard-shell. The bride said if they couldn’t have champagne she wanted Dr. Pepper, be up front about it. His family did not take kindly to that; they wanted spiced tea and petits fours. Such are the theological hurdles of our day.” In reflex, he lifted his empty cup, discouraged.

  “The Bledsoes came by to see the girls after supper,” I said.

  “Do you think the elder one—”

  “Sugar.”

  “Do they go by those names all the time now? Do you think, I was asking, that she will attempt the Academy?”

  “I’m sure she won’t have any trouble. She’s very verbal.” I remembered but did not repeat Sugar’s definition of ‘seventh-grader.’

  “Ours should bring their friends to church sometime.”

  “The Bledsoes are Baptists.”

  “I meant as visitors, not to proselyte.” He kneaded the ball of his right foot in a rolling motion.

  “How did the Garden go?”

  “Well. As you know, passages I have read a hundred times can come alive. When He is in Gethsemane, it says, ‘He began to be sorrowful and very heavy.’ How many times I’ve skipped over those words. Yet how telling they are: He sees the prophecy before Him. And in the here and now He already experiences it physically.”

  “So you made changes?”

  “You will be interested in what I’ve done with it.”

  “I always am.”

  Finally, looking at me, he indicated my hands pressed between my knees. “What’s on your mind?”

  I exhaled and inhaled. “Eben, I am moving out.” I paused to be sure he heard, watching his face. “The girls may stay here with you weekdays, in order to walk or bike to school. To their schools,” I added, realizing that next year Ruth would be in Waco High.

  “Well.” He leaned forward, working on the instep of his left foot. “I see. Well.” He wore his sagacious face, the one he put on when something had gone wrong—the hot-water heater blew up, wind damage to the church—and he was acting as if it was part of a plan whose outlines he’d seen all along, a detour whose signposts he’d been following, not a pothole he’d hit flat bottom before he knew it. He lifted his teacup, set it down. “Is it one of your secrets, Cile, or may I know why you and Drew have picked this particular weekend of this particular year to come out in the open?”

  My hands knotted into fists. I could feel my anger rise like a flood on the Brazos at his acting as if Drew and I were old news to him. “He told Mary Virginia today,” I said.

  Eben placed both feet flat on the floor, unrolled his trousers. “I assumed that. I was conjecturing why now. Most probably because the price of the land the government is considering annexing has gone up from five hundred to seven thousand an acre.”

  I twisted my fingers, not wanting to say anything I’d regret.

  Eben returned my silence.

  “Trey is going off to prep school in the fall.” I didn’t know if he’d make any sense of that, but he was playing know-it-all, so he could try. There was some truth to it. Drew and I had promised ourselves we’d wait until our older two got drivers’ licenses, which you could do in Waco at fifteen, with a “hardship” waiver, claiming that some parent needed you to drive. That was so they could come to see us or come to town without an adult having to fetch and carry. But when Trey decided to go East next year, with Jock likely to follow the next, there didn’t seem to be any point in waiting anymore.

  “He’s not opting for the Academy here at home, I see.” Eben slipped on his shoes.

  “No.” I retied the belt of my frayed terry-cloth robe. We were both dressing, unwittingly, as if now we must take cover from one another.

  Eben slipped his braces over his shoulders. After a moment he stood and stretched out a hand to me. “Come into the kitchen. We’ll have a bowl of oatmeal.”

  I followed him down the hall, past the girls’ closed door, wearing the white socks I used for slippers.

  In the kitchen he put on water, got out bowls, moving around while I sat on a stool at the counter.

  Pouring boiling water on instant oats, he asked, “What’s the timetable?”

  I aimed for a matter-of-fact tone. “I’d thought after Easter, for telling the girls. For telling everyone. June for moving out.”

  He stirred in wheat germ and skim milk and handed me a spoon. “If you’re set on doing this, let’s see it done in such a way that my congregation at least does not feel deceived.” He showed a thin edge of resentment, his lips tight, and I knew he was thinking of Lila Beth.

  “Of course, Eben. Lord, handle it however you want.”

  He stopped eating. Put down his spoon. “Just this once, Cile, just this one particular time, do not take His name in vain.”

  “Sorry.” I almost said, Lord, I’m sorry. Old habit, a wringing of the hands, lordy, lordy, not intended as blasphemy. But he knew that; and I knew how it annoyed him. It was one—one more—sore spot with a well-worn callus.

  “Easter, you say?” He fished his tiny weekly calendar from the pocket of his trousers. “I’m going to use Luke this year.�
� He glanced at me, knowing I loved that text best: “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.” Last year he’d used instead the verse from John: “Cast thy nets on the right side of the ship and ye shall find.” But he was at his best with prophecies: the heart of predestination after all.

  “That’s good,” I said.

  Easter in Eben’s church was always a fine service, with Christ rising again, lilies banking the pulpit, children carrying their six-foot cross of flowers down the aisle (the smallest ones loudly whispering claims to that daisy, this pansy, that rose, the bloom they’d brought from home and poked through the rolled chicken wire with their own fingers), the triumphal music rising in hallelujah.

  “I plan to ask Jae-Moon to help with the service, not only in order for the congregation to see how varied their number is, but also so that she can monitor in advance the pitfalls I apparently continue to create.” He lifted his thin black hair with his fingers, as if to make it stand up, be bountiful.

  I smiled, feeling an enormous relief at being back on familiar ground, going over the service.

  “There is a Korean church in town now,” he continued. “I don’t know if you are aware of it. A mix of denominations, primarily Presbyterian, of course, some Baptist, some Methodist, with a bilingual service. I thought we’d have them as our special guests this year.”

  “That’s good.” The church here always had outsiders at Easter, a way of extending the message beyond the “family.” One year they’d had the entire congregation from an all-black church in east Texas. Last year, they’d invited a group of handicapped adults from the Riverbend Living Center. Brightly dressed middle-aged men and women excited and giggling like five-year-olds, putting their quarters in the collection plate, some able to follow the hymns. A few of them had got up and moved with the children and their flowered cross to the front, beaming and patting each other while it was presented.

  Eben studied his notes. “Next week is daylight saving.”

  After a minute, I nodded. He’d said it as if daylight saving were some lesser Lenten occasion, but then I knew what he meant: the crowd would be small. People who made the effort to set their clocks; people who didn’t mind getting up at what would seem an earlier hour.

  “Then the next week is Palm Sunday.” He closed his calendar and tucked it back in his pocket. He rinsed our cereal bowls and set them in the drainer.

  I let out my breath. It was going to be all right. He would shower and we could sleep without awkwardness, from long habit. Then it would be another day. It would be Sunday and the schedule would take over. The hard part, getting it out in the open, was done.

  He turned out the kitchen light. In the dark he said, “You like Palm Sunday, don’t you?” His tone was gentle.

  “I do,” I admitted, grateful. “I like the fickle mob shouting hosannas and waving palms.”

  MY OLD FEAR of being pilloried by the congregation swept over me in the Fellowship Hall, where we gathered after Eben’s sermon for the covered-dish lunch. This was a fine big room at the back of the church, with tables along one wall, and smaller school-sized tables and chairs scattered about, a piano for when the Sunday School classes met here to sing or put on pageants together. A nice sunny room which looked out into the primary play yard with its two large willow trees.

  For a moment, as the crowd closed around me, I was back in Eben’s first church in Austin, being embraced by Mrs. Dr. Croft and her mother-in-law and her friends, in awe of their powers to see into my uncertain soul. Now, fifteen years later, I still had not been brought over, turned around, converted as the church said. To which I had added yet another transgression: adultery. (Which, in an earlier day, would surely have been a lesser sin compared to lack of faith.)

  The congregation here, much the same as that earlier one, were mostly in their late sixties and seventies, all old-line Presbyterians descended from old-line Presbyterians back three hundred years, all trim, neat, nicely bred, and sober. Light on their feet, with youthful voices, they looked like students (as they once were) hosteling abroad, rucksacks on their backs, seeking their fortunes and those of the world. Students dedicated to the YM-YWCA, the Experiment in International Living, the American Friends Service Committee.

  Eben was robust in their midst, the sort of pastor that such thin-chested, narrow-nosed parishioners elect to serve them. Clergy, men and now women, too, with the general look of athletes who have heard the call on the road to their own Damascus. Clergy like the young Scot running for God in Chariots of Fire. Surrounding Eben, the congregation resembled schoolchildren who had not yet got their growth, eleven-year-olds longing to cross the finish line to adolescence. The church, I thought, had not been so much a family as I had hoped; rather, it functioned more like a scout troop—a leader surrounded by eager tenderfeet. And I was not quite either.

  As always, everyone was in good spirits at the sight of the long plank tables heaped with food: rice and beans, rice fritters, rice cakes, stir-fried rice, rice molds, my potato bake, fried chicken, sliced turkey, hams baked with pineapple and cloves, yams, Jell-O salads heavy with Bing cherries, sweet carrot cakes, peach pies, peach turnovers, peach cobblers crusted with cinnamon sugar.

  The talk buzzed around the newly arrived hymnals which we had used for the first time that morning. Adopted by the national church, they came to us a blue-bound multilingual surprise. Languages by the dozen were represented. The waltz “Amazing Grace” appeared not only in English but also in Kiowa, Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee and Navaho. Here—firm arms held out hardback royal blue copies to friends—was “Holy Night, Blessed Night” as “Sheng Ye Qing, Sheng Ye Jing” in Chinese; “Silent Night” as “Stille Nacht” in German; “Christo Vive,” an Argentinean version of “Christ Is Risen”; “De Tierra Lejana Venimos,” a Puerto Rican version of “From a Distant Home.” Transliterated Korean songs such as “Whak Shil Hahn Nah Eh Kahn Jeung” (an old favorite, this one, “Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine”); the African “Kum ba Yah”; the Israeli “Shalom, Chaverim”; the Filipino “Awit Sa Dapit Hapon”; the Hispanic “A La Ru”; the Japanese “Hitsuji Wa” and many many more.

  Gray heads with tanned clear faces nodded in astonishment, read aloud phonetically—here a verse in Dakota dialect, there a Latin American folk hymn. All sharing the beaming faces of lifelong believers raised on the old hymn that promised: “Red yellow brown black or white, we are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

  But what transfixed, amazed them most, one and all alike, was seeing that in the front of the hymnal even the Order of Worship appeared in three languages. So that, for example, we could all say together the Lord’s Prayer in English, “Our Father who art in heaven,” or Spanish, “Padre nuestro, que estás en los cielos,” or in Korean, “Ha neul eh geh shin oo ree ah buh jee,” as the Spirit moved us.

  “Well, my dear, what do you think?” Lila Beth stood at my elbow, in soft gray, looking, with her deep weathered cheeks, as she always did, not only like a gardener, which she was, but like a rancher. The sight of her, Drew’s mother, made me start, happy but uneasy. I was grateful to have her near and pressed my face to hers. Don’t you, I longed to say, don’t you turn on me. They may all hurl stones when they learn the news, but not you. To you my heart is vulnerable.

  “About the hymnal?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Not the food, which is too sweet for my taste, as always.”

  “It gives a new meaning to ‘speaking in tongues,’ doesn’t it?” I smiled at her. I’d noticed that all of Willie Nelson’s gospel songs that I played at home were gone from the new songbook: “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.” But on the whole it was cheering to see this congregation of Calvinists trying to pronounce their faith in the strange utterances of other voices.

  “It’s often the case, isn’t it,” she answered, “that the language precedes and in some sense creates the situation. I’m thinking of the courts, certain
ly, but here, too. You’ll see, even here in time it will be one world.”

  Eben, talking with a group of other elders, beckoned to her then, and she touched my arm and left. His face revealed nothing of our last night’s talk, but a slight chill swept over me. These were his people, the sheep of his flock, and under his eyes I felt myself shut out of communion with them already.

  THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON, late, Drew called, bold as could be. “Hi, honey,” he said. I waved to the girls, who were going out the door with the Bledsoes, and sat at the desk in the private room. “Lord, it’s good to hear you. How’d you know he wasn’t here?”

  “Drove by. Saw his car at the church; saw that beautiful Pontiac in the drive.”

  “I wish you’d stopped.”

  “Same here.”

  “How’re you doing?”

  “Come up to the farm tomorrow? I’ll tell the office here I’m up there talking to the federals. I figure we don’t have to be so careful now. Everybody’s going to know before long anyhow.”

  “Sure. Sure I can. I’d like to be there now. I miss you like crazy.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Last night, when he came in.”

  “And—?”

  “I was scared to death. But it was okay. He agreed to wait until Easter to tell the girls and the congregation.”

  “How about letting your folks know?” he teased.

  “Please, Daddy and my former teacher can hear it on the grapevine.”

  Drew laughed. He liked to get a rise out of me about my father and his wife, who now lived here in town, whenever he could. It took his mind off his mother.

  “You know what I found up there yesterday?” he asked.