Gifts of the Spirit

by Patricia Eilola

  “Stop!” I cried. “The baby’s here. I feel its head between my legs!”

  There was no time for me to get to the maternity ward or even to the emergency ward, for that matter. Our new baby was born in the lobby of the Virginia Municipal Hospital. We named him “Jerrold Arvo” and decided between the two of us that somehow some way he would be the last baby we would have. A family of four had already been two more than we had dreamed of or planned for. We would not have another.

  And so when the doctor came to see me, both of us addressed the question to him: “Is there any way to prevent my having another baby?”

  At first he thought we were teasing and told Arvo to “just keep it in your pants.” When he realized we were serious, he told us I could have my tubes tied.

  “It’s a very simple procedure,” Dr. Raihala assured us. “And especially since she has just given birth, it’ll be very easy for me simply to tie off her fallopian tubes. That way no egg will be released into her uterus to meet your sperm,” he told Arvo, who didn’t understand a word of what he had just said but trusted that he knew his business.

  I trusted him, too, and so we agreed the doctor would perform the simple operation the very next day—before I even left the hospital.

  They kept me a week not only because of the birth and the operation but because with there had been a lot of bleeding. “He came almost too fast,” Dr. Raihala had explained. “He almost pushed your entire uterus out with him.”

  Again, I didn’t really understand his terminology, but I did know there had been a lot more blood this time. In fact, there was so much that even when I got home, I felt very weak. It was all I could do to nurse little Junior, as we called him right away, and then I had to lie back and rest.

  Arvo hovered over me both at the hospital and at home, worrying. Dr. Raihala had assured him I would be fine “once she gets rested up and some more iron in her system. Her red blood count is low. She’s a little anemic.”

  What that meant was also pretty much a mystery to me. All I was aware of was that I didn’t feel up to par at all.

  Thank God for Mother and Arvo and, for that matter, for Nonny and Susie and Elsie, who all also hovered over me and the baby, each one waiting his or her turn to hold him. Elsie, of course, was only about two at the time, so she was really too small to handle a baby. But Nonny was good about holding her and the baby both in his arms so she could feel as if she, too, were doing her part.

  They insisted on bringing me trays of food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Mother, of course, stood steadfast in all of the furor. Only she and Irma were really aware how serious my condition was, and both took turns making sure I got plenty of rest and ate as much red meat as I could manage. Arvo shot a deer—out of season, of course. He and Mr. Leinonen had taken to “shining deer,” parking their cars so the headlights showed fields and the deer in them. Then it was just a matter of having a rifle ready and making the shot. I worried about a game warden catching them, but Arvo had reassured me, as he always did about everything I worried about. “Any game warden who knows his business,” he said, “also knows the difference between guys shooting a deer because their family needs the meat and a hoodlum just shooting for the fun of it.”

  He must have been right, because nothing ever came of that dive into lawlessness. He also kept us well supplied with partridges and sharp-tail grouse, in season or not. We needed the meat, and he willingly supplied it. In fact, I think he rather reveled in the chance to try to outwit the game warden!

  I received the prime cuts, well dusted with flour and dipped in bacon fat so they would be crisp and delicious. Teasingly, I told Arvo I would soon weigh a ton!

  He didn’t take me seriously. After Junior’s birth I had returned to my “scarecrow” size, and he worried about my lack of weight. “You haven’t the strength to fight off disease,” he told me one night, holding me carefully in his arms as if I were a glass doll who would shatter if handled too roughly.

  “Oh, pooh,” I answered. And I tried hard to eat everything put in front of me. Pancakes with bacon or sausages for breakfast or puurua (cooked cereal) laced with cream and brown sugar. For lunch I was served sandwiches made out of the previous evening’s meat, sometimes mixed with small onions, and some fresh lettuce from the garden. Arvo had even made a special trip to the store in Sturgeon to buy oranges and apples—fresh ones. I demurred when he insisted I eat one every day, but I think, in retrospect, he turned out to be right after all. In a few weeks I felt good enough to stand up to change Junior’s diapers, a task up to then had been handled by Mother or Arvo or even Nonny!

  It was funny and touching to see him with his little brother. Sometimes he would lie down next to him after Junior had nursed but before he fell asleep and recite nursery rhymes to him, using voices and tickling him at appropriate points in the rhyme. I still had the book I had made for Nonny that was almost falling apart but had served Susie and Elsie in good stead. So I introduced it to Junior one afternoon right after his nap when he always seemed to want to play. I turned the pages, pointed to the animals, named them, and made the sounds they made. “A cow (and I’d point) goes ‘mooo’!” Just as the others had, he was delighted with the sounds and the book, which landed in his mouth as soon as I reached the last page. He, more than the others, seemed to need to suck on something all the time. Arvo fashioned a holder for the nipple on a bottle, which we had never had to use, thank God, and little Junior held on to that for dear life, sucking on it so hard I sometimes feared he would draw it into his mouth and it’d get stuck. But that worry, like so many of the others I continued to experience, did not happen.

  I had always been a “worry-wart,” Mother said. And with the weakening of my physical health, my worrying had reached epic proportions—far out of reach of even Arvo’s patient reassurances.

  I worried about Nonny’s going near the water again. I worried about Susie being hurt more because of her buck teeth. I worried about Elsie because she was so good and sweet I was afraid we’d lose her—that God would somehow decide she was too good for earth and bring her to heaven. I worried about the baby because he was a baby. I worried about Arvo, who worked himself to exhaustion every day in the fields. I worried about Mother. What would we do if something happened to her? I worried about Eino. How would he find enough work to allow him to live and still go to school? I worried about Ronny—so far away in the Dakotas. What if he became ill or… died? How would we ever find out? I worried about myself. What if I didn’t get better? What if Arvo’s worries came true, and I became too ill to care for the baby? What if my milk failed? How would we feed the baby?

  I worried myself sick.

  I worried until I started to throw up the good food Mother fixed. I worried until I almost completely lost touch with reality. I truly worried myself into such a state Arvo wound up unable to convince me of God’s love and of the love he felt for me.

  I worried until worrying took up my entire day and most of the night.

  I worried until Arvo decided he had to do something, and that something—that someone—involved the source of my beliefs. It was time, he finally thought, in desperation, to call on a higher power. To call on Milma.

  And so on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer, a couple of months after Junior was born and deep into my time of darkness when I felt an abyss before me and couldn’t believe I wouldn’t fall in, he packed me into the Model T and headed for Metsola.

  Tellervo and young Risto had, by then, both graduated from high school and were home for the summer. Daniel would be entering high school the following year. Milma had another young woman living with her, helping her out. She introduced us briefly but then drew me into her office with Arvo by my side.

  “What has happened?” she asked, reaching out to hold my hand. “You don’t look well. Is it one of the children or your Mother?”

  At first I could
n’t speak. Arvo nodded to me, encouragingly. All of a sudden I burst into tears. I cried and cried until Milma became concerned.

  Leaving me in her office, she drew Arvo outside and had asked him, I later found out, “What’s the matter? Can you tell me?”

  “I don’t know,” Arvo had answered. She had gestured for him to sit down and shooed the children out of the living room. “It’s as if she can’t stop… worrying. It’s making her sick!” he admitted, in tears himself, “and I don’t know how to help her.”

  “Ohhh,” she had made the sound and then turned back toward the office. “Why don’t you leave us alone for a few hours? If you’d like something to do, tell the children you’re willing to help with… the garden? With replenishing the wood pile?”

  At the latter suggestion, he had nodded vigorously. “I can do that. Just point me toward your wood pile. I’ll split and pile all you have there.”

  “Thank you,” she had said. “And now leave your wife with me for a time. Ginny,” she turned toward the girl helping them, “would you bring two glasses of iced tea? Just place them and a plate of cookies outside of my office. I’ll bring them in myself when we’re ready.” And she went back into her office, leaving Arvo to find the wood pile himself.

  When she came in, she took my hand and held it, saying nothing at all, simply allowing me to cry. When the sobs turned into tears and the tears into whimpers, she asked very quietly, “How long has it been since you have become aware of the abyss?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered miserably. “I just know I’m on the edge of it and if I don’t be careful everyone I love and I too will fall in and go down deep… deeper… deepest.” I almost smiled at the endings I had added to the word. Always thinking about grammar, I realized.

  Milma listened. I saw no judgment in her eyes, just understanding and endless patience. Squeezing my hand, she waited. The whimpering stopped, and I just sat there like a lump, I thought, hating myself and, at that moment, even her.

  “Why don’t I just jump in?” I asked her in desperation. “It’s just waiting for me… for us… but I can’t. I haven’t the courage.”

  She sat very quietly for a while, as if thinking about what I had said.

  “Can you describe it to me?” she finally asked.

  “It’s black,” I said, trying to explain what I saw so clearly when I allowed myself to look down. “And it draws me. It pulls me… toward the edge. So it’s as if I’m sitting on there, trying on one hand to find the courage to let go, and on the other trying to find the courage—if that’s the word—to stay put, to hang on, not to fall. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.” I ended, defeated.

  “No,” she insisted, “you did a very good job. I think I know about that place. I have been there myself.”

  I looked at her, surprised.

  “When Risto died… you remember?”

  Of course I did. I remembered everything about that time—the horror of the news, the trip to Hillsboro and Fargo, the visits with the townsfolk, her sermon, our return, the children’s reaction, their plan, and the Grandmother’s increasing dememtia and death.

  I found a voice. “Of course.”

  “Soon after that… do you remember… when Mother—Grandmother Tikkanen—began to fail?”

  “Yes,” I nodded. I remembered all of that, too—my caretaking, her death, the beauty of the funeral, and my eventual leave-taking.

  “I’ve never told anyone what I’m going to tell you now, and I hope you’ll keep my confidence.”

  “Of course,” I stammered. What could she tell me no one else should know?

  “I came close to that abyss myself.”

  “You did?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “Yes, I did. For about a month after you left, and the feeling had nothing whatsoever to do with your leaving. I don’t want you to blame yourself even one single bit. I just felt… down. I didn’t seem to be able to find the strength to go on—to manage two congregations, to provide spiritual guidance to others when I couldn’t find any for myself, to handle the children and the housework—it just became too much. I, too, started to worry about everyone and everything—especially myself and the lack in me of the strength that was the essence of Risto’s life. Suddenly and not suddenly at all, I saw the abyss in front of me, and it lured me, too. It would have been so simple just to have leaped into it—to have had all of the demands on me disappear. I could simply be at peace lying there in the darkness, alone.”

  I nodded. I remembered that feeling clearly.

  “And so one night, after the children were asleep, before I got into bed, I sat down in the kitchen, and I turned on the gas on the gas stove.”

  I gasped.

  “You see,” she went on, “I know exactly where that abyss is and how deep the yearning is to find peace in it.”

  I nodded. I had felt exactly that same way. The abyss had both drawn me and kept me away. “But you turned it off.”

  “Yes, I did,” she said, “but I have to admit it was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. I truly wanted the peace the abyss offered me. No more sorrow. No more pain. No more having to face another day without the strength I needed.”

  “But you turned it… the gas… you turned it off,” I kind of asked.

  “Yes,” she answered, “from somewhere—and I thank God every day for it—I found the strength to grasp the edge with all my might, to turn my back on it, and to return to living each day, one day at a time. That’s what you must do.”

  I nodded, understanding finally what she was asking of me. The worry had been simply a warning sign that I was nearing the edge, and how easy it would have been to have slipped over it! To have taken a knife from the kitchen and slit my wrists… in the sauna… where there wouldn’t have been as much mess. I had gone that far but no farther in my thinking.

  “All that worrying,” I finally said. “It was just the abyss calling.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It was. I’m so proud of you for coming here.”

  “No,” I drew back. “Don’t thank me. It was Arvo who decided to come.”

  “He loves you a great deal.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “And you are truly blessed, I hear, to have four children of your own.”

  “Yes.” It was difficult, but I grasped hold of the blessing and held it close to my heart.

  “Then you can find the strength, too, to ignore that abyss. To wipe it out of your mind. To know it isn’t really there at all. It’s merely a figment… and a terrible one at that… of your imagination.”

  “I have a lot of imagination,” I admitted.

  “I know. You needed a lot to take on our whole family!” She said it jokingly, but there was truth in it, too.

  “I did. At first I thought Tellervo and young Risto would never accept me.”

  “But you made them.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “So there’s another place where you can find strength—in that memory.”

  “Ye…sss…,” I wasn’t quite sure about that one.

  She laughed. “Well, it was a good try!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes, it was.” I found myself laughing too. It felt so good. I realized that I hadn’t laughed… for weeks… maybe months.

  “Now,” she looked me in the eye, “are you ready for iced tea and cookies?”

  “Yes, I think I am,” I answered, suddenly feeling strong. Where had that strength come from, I wondered? Then I looked at her again, sitting there so still and quiet, so full of love and belief in me, that the tears came again, but this time they were healing tears.

  We shared iced tea and cookies and talked—mostly about our children. She’d met Nonny, of course and Susie, and Elsie had come to church, and the older ones had attended Sunday School. I t
old her about Eino and the path he was taking and about Ronny and the path that closed for him. She shook her head and simply said, “God’s plans for each of us are sometimes difficult to understand.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, knowing it was good that I had shared what had happened between Inez and Ronny with her because it had become part of the abyss.

  Finally, I took a deep breath and stood up, stood up straight for the first time in months. I had taken to slouching, in hopes that whoever/whatever governed the abyss would be less likely to see me.

  “It’s our Unitarian equivalent of Hell, you know,” she said. “I’m incredibly proud you came to me and shared yourself with me. It’s helped me a great deal.”

  “Helped you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she answered. “Whenever someone is on the verge of the abyss, it helps me to help them see their way out of it. It reaffirms that I made the right decision.”

  “When you turned off the gas?”

  “Yes.”

  By then afternoon had slipped into evening, and the crickets were chirping and the frogs mumbling as we walked out of the house, her arm around me.

  Arvo had indeed done quite a job with the woodshed. Every piece of wood had been cut, split, and piled neatly.

  “Thank you,” she said, reaching up to give him a kiss on the cheek.

  “Thank you,” he said, reaching out his hand to mine, which was reaching for his.

  “All is well,” she told him.

  He looked down at me, his eyes questioning.

  “Yes, all is well,” I confirmed, reaching up to kiss not his cheek but his lips.

  It took us quite a while to get home that night. We stopped at the corner of Highway 22 and Highway 25 to make love and again in the yard of the Alango Hall.

  All was once again right with my world, and I was inordinately grateful for his love, for God’s love, for Milma’s love… for love period. “For God is love,” I told him quietly as we held hands driving the final mile or so.