There are no Krepkes in Second Presbyterian. In fact I didn’t know of anyone in North Haven with that name, so when I saw Angus at coffee hour on Sunday, I asked him if he knew a Carmen Krepke. He furrowed his brow and looked at me darkly. He said, “Hmmp, Carmen Krepke … sad story.”
Carmen, he said, had spent most of her life doing her best to make her mother’s life miserable. She was a sassy-pants at five; she was beating up boys when she was nine; she got kicked out of school in seventh grade for smoking cigarettes in the girls’ room at the high school. Or maybe it was eighth grade, Angus allowed. Two years later she was skipping more school than she wasn’t, and when she was seventeen, she got pregnant, dropped out of school, and married the father.
Angus was right. This was about the best any kid could do to make a parent’s life miserable.
But there was more, Angus said. Two years later, she was tired of being married and tired of her now two-year-old, so she ran away with a motorcycle gang from Mankato called the Heathens. She left her baby with the husband, who moved home with his folks for a while, and then sensed a call to serve his nation and enlisted in the Navy. Angus told this story with an air of disgust, as if he were relating a cautionary tale of total depravity, a home-town illustration of how low young girls can sink once bad habits and ill discipline are given a toehold.
Now, Angus went on, Carmen was up in the hospital in Mankato in a body cast. She and one of the Heathens had crashed on a Harley-Davidson one Saturday night in September. He was killed outright. She had broken as many bones as the doctors could count and had a concussion and some other problems inside. She nearly died, Angus said, implying that this would not have been an altogether unmerited fate.
He knew all this, he said, because Carmen’s mother’s sister cleans house for Minnie every other week. Elma, Carmen’s mother, was visiting all the time with her daughter in the hospital, which rather surprised some people, what with all the kid had put her through. Elma, Angus said, was “real emotional,” which was not so much a testimony to the depth of her feelings as critical comment about her inability to control them. Control of feeling is a marker of virtue here. The family is Roman Catholic, Angus said in conclusion. “They’re German R.C. And Krepke is Elma’s name, too.…” Carmen took it back after she deserted her husband and baby.” I then told him about the phone call from the hospital and said I planned to call next Tuesday. This intrigued Angus. It intrigued me, too.
Carmen was in room 231, the orthopedic wing of the second floor of Lutheran. Two years earlier, they would have put her in pediatrics. The body cast was gone. One leg was in a cast up to her thigh and elevated with a pulley arrangement. Her hair was extremely short. I was sure most or all had been shaved off after the accident and was just coming back. She was very petite and fair. She was almost hard to see against the white linen of the hospital bed. Her appearance was most un-Carmenesque. I assumed the middle-aged woman sitting in a hard chair at the end of the bed to be Carmen’s long-suffering mother, Elma. She was filling out the menu questionnaire for the next day.
I introduced myself. Carmen smiled and said, “Thanks for coming, Reverend. I’m Carmen, I’ve been born again. Do Presbyterians believe in visions?” I hadn’t known what to expect, but this was not it. All the weight of this skeptical and psychologized culture of which I am a child put me on guard against such a claim, especially when made by a mixed-up young woman who had had a severe concussion and a recent brush with death.
She had loved Denny, she said. He was a Heathen, all right, but he had never hit her and was faithful to her. They were probably going to get married, she said. Tears came to her eyes. She missed him, she said, but was certain he was safe, because he wasn’t really a heathen, not a “heathen Heathen.” “That’s just a name, you know, Reverend,” she added for my edification.
“I was out of it for two weeks after the accident,” Carmen said.
Her mother glanced up and explained: “She means she was unconscious, Reverend.”
Then Carmen looked from her mother to me and whispered slowly and gravely: “When I woke up I had this picture in my head, I mean as clear as TV, just like TV in my head. And since then, Reverend, everything has looked different. I started reading out of the Bible that they put in the drawer of my nightstand.” She showed me a red leatherette King James Version stamped “Gideons” on the bottom right corner of the cover. “And now everything has changed, I got born again.” I glanced at her mother, who had that “all my prayers have been answered” look of immense relief.
Somehow, though, I had trouble feeling relieved. One part of me was almost ready to grasp her little white hand and say, “Praise the Lord, sister Carmen, praise the Lord, let us pray.…” Another part of me was considering the psychological impact of near-death on an emotionally immature young woman, the effects of a concussion and of all the painkillers that had been pumped into her little body. So I smiled weakly in what was surely a slightly patronizing manner and asked an obvious question in the style I had been taught in pastoral counseling classes: “You say you’re living life with a new perspective?”
Carmen looked at me as if I were a none too bright child and said, “I asked you to come, because, you see, Mom’s sister cleans for some people in your church and they said you got a bike and so I figured you’d understand about us and that we’re not all a bunch of freaks and that Jesus could even love a nogood biker like me. I read in this Bible about this woman that Jesus met at a well who was a Samaritan or something, and everybody thought Samaritans were shit and He knew about all her divorces, but Jesus talked to her anyway and then she testified for Him. Do they let bikers in your church, Reverend?”
Carmen would not tell me about her vision. She had told no one, she said, not even her mother. But it was still with her, she said, “just like TV that never turns off,” and because of it everything was different. We talked about her recovery and the hospital and the food and her doctors and then I offered to pray. Before I could speak my amen, Carmen was adding her own words: “Dear Jesus, I just thank you for savin’ me from gettin’ killed, and savin’ me from gettin’ sucked into darkness and for comin’ to me in the hospital and lettin’ me know that you were there. And I pray for all the Heathens, too. Keep ’em outta trouble the best ya can. Amen.”
I visited her about once a week for the next three months. I grew fond of her, although Elma I discovered to be less easy to love. She had led a victim’s life and assumed the posture of those who believe the cosmos is in conspiracy against them. I came to respect Carmen for her candor and her valiant effort to love a difficult mother. But deeper even than this affection lay the strange appeal of Carmen’s faith. To say that her faith was simply childlike would be unfair. Her experience with the Heathens and her brush with death lent authenticity and depth to her. Yet her faith did not examine itself. She saw no reason to second-guess experience, but just accepted it. She trusted her vision for what it seemed to her to be.
My life could never be portrayed in such a dramatic chiaroscuro of lights and darks. It has known no sudden turns, no conversions. My faith never stops looking at itself. It trusts nothing fully. It suspects every emotion to be mere sentiment. It scrutinizes every whispered intimation of divine presence as a possible deceit of the subconscious. I don’t think I ever believed as Carmen does, not even when I was a child. I don’t know that I can, or that I should.
The last time I saw her in the hospital was a Tuesday, a week ago tomorrow. She said the doctors were letting her out in two days and that she would be coming to church. I had heard such promises from hospital beds and knew that they were often forgotten later. I said I would look for her. Then she said she had something to give me.
Elma reached behind the nightstand and handed me a package. It was wrapped in brown and orange gift wrap and tied with orange ribbon. Inside was a painting done on black velvet. It showed a figure riding on a motorcycle away from the viewer and toward a white spot—a light, I supposed—set at
a distance on the horizon. The rider had long dark hair and white robes swept back in the wind as the motorcycle sped toward the light. It was obviously Jesus—Jesus on a motorcycle. “It’s a picture of my vision,” Carmen said. “This occupational therapy lady from the hospital has been teaching me how to paint. I know he’s not wearing a helmet—I suppose Jesus would have worn a helmet—but there was no helmet in my vision. It’s a gift for the church. You can hang it in the entrance where people will see it right away when they come in.”
That Sunday morning at 10:20, as I put on my pulpit robe to go pray with the choir before the service, I glanced out my office window and saw Elma and Carmen coming across the parking lot. Carmen was moving fast on her aluminum Canadian crutches. Elma strutted beside her as if this were her dancing day. I looked down at the black velvet painting of Jesus on the motorcycle leaning face to the wall behind my desk. “Annie,” I said to my wife, who had stopped in to say hi before church, “quick, hang this picture on a wall someplace, anyplace.”
After the service, Annie came through the greeting line and whispered to me, “Jesus on the Harley is hanging downstairs by the furnace room door.” Twenty feet behind her were Carmen and Elma. Elma said indignantly that she had not noticed the painting in the entrance as they came in. She began to peer theatrically over my shoulder to the left and the right. The two of them waited as everybody else drifted off to the parlor for coffee. I escorted them downstairs to the boiler room door, where Jesus on the Motorcycle hung on the very nail that had held a Minnesota state boiler inspection certificate an hour earlier.
Carmen seemed pleased enough, but Elma was clearly not. How displeased I did not know until yesterday afternoon when I walked to the back of the church to find my hymnbook and noticed that Jesus on the Motorcycle was hanging prominently to the right of the sanctuary door. I shook my head and groaned. I lifted the painting off the wall and saw a neatly typed message taped to the plaster underneath. It read, “Do Not Remove This Picture. God Meant It to Be Here.”
There was really only one thing to do. I called Carmen on the phone and told her that her painting was “extraordinary and altogether unique.” (The truth.) Would it be asking too much if she were to give me permission to hang it on the wall of my office rather than in the church?
I’m looking at it right now. It is awful, I mean “awful” awful and “full of awe” awful. I don’t know what I know about visions, but I do know that Carmen Krepke, who spent nineteen years of her life creating a hell, was in church this past Sunday. I know that she is suddenly much more patient with her mother than I could ever be. It’s hard to believe that people change much, but sometimes they do. Grace does not necessarily move along the paths we know, the roads that are comfortable for us. Who knows with what strange vocabulary God may speak? Who knows what image the Divine may choose?
When Carmen said it would be okay for me to hang the picture in my office, she also told me that I “ought to get the Norton back on the road. It’d be good for ya to do some ridin’.” I hung up the phone happily jostled again by Carmen’s directness of speech and faith. She simply accepted experience as it came to her and for what it was. I guess that it is this trust in experience that so intrigues me. She trusted her love for Denny, the Heathen. She trusted Jesus, who came to her in a dream. She trusted the thrill of a motorcycle.
The weather is supposed to turn colder last night; the TV was even talking about freezing rain later in the day. But I got up early this morning and went out to the garage and took the carburetor off the Norton. Jimmy Wilcox says he can rebuild it. And the weather will turn warm again.
– 7 –
Learning to Dance
The session met the Tuesday night before Palm Sunday. The five of our six elders present ambled into the Sunday school classroom at the end of the upstairs hall at about ten after eight. We always meet there because it has bigger chairs than the other rooms, but they’re still not quite adult size. Everybody’s knees stick up and we normally leave our coats on because it’s cool, though not nearly as cold as the church parlor, where the only grown-up chairs are.
The only real item on the agenda was a matter referred to the Session by the Christian Education Committee. They had been asked by the advisors of the Westminster Fellowship, the church’s youth group, that the “young people” be permitted to have a “sock hop” in the fellowship hall underneath the sanctuary. It was to be held the Friday after Easter. Nowhere but here has anything called a “sock hop” been held since about 1959, except as a sort of nostalgic indulgence in which the avant-garde of Minneapolis or Chicago demonstrate how avant they are by embracing as camp what is really very recent history.
At first, I thought that the Westminster Fellowship had chosen this name for their dance in order to clothe in fifties innocence a matter they knew would be contentious—namely, dancing in church. But not so. Their choice of words was honest and without political intent. I discovered that their advisors, who remembered sock hops from their teenage years, had told them that dances held in church basements were called by this name.
The Session is normally supportive of youth activities. Because so many young families have left for the city, kids are an increasingly dear commodity in small towns. But even a sock hop, evoking as it does the innocent image of kids’ feet in sweat socks on the old linoleum floor of the church basement, is still dancing, dancing in church. Never has there been dancing in Second Presbyterian Church, not even in the Fellowship Hall with its cinder block walls and well-stained suspended ceiling. Four and a half centuries of Calvinist inertia recoil at the idea of dancing anywhere in the house of the Lord.
“What kind of dancing would it be?” asked Arnie Peterson, who seemed cautiously open to this radical departure. “Well, you know,” was the consensus answer, “the kind of dancin’ kids do these days.” But nobody had a clear picture in their head what kind of dancing that might be. There followed a reflective silence in which the five Session members present appeared to be struggling to conjure up mental images of how sixteen-year-olds dance.
The quiet was broken by Angus MacDowell, who offered a bit of hard intelligence. He said that he had just been to visit his son and daughter-in-law in Spokane. “They get cable TV out there, and one afternoon I was flippin’ around with the remote control and on come something they call MTV. All the kids watch it, Larry told me. Well, I mean to tell ya, if this MTV is the kinda dancin’ the kids are gonna do, we got trouble.”
Angus’s ensuing description of what he had witnessed on MTV was exhaustive, horrific, and persuasive: bizarre costumes, thunderous electric guitars, incomprehensible words, young people of indeterminate gender leaping and gyrating and making pained facial expressions into the camera. It occurred to me that Angus must have been tuned into MTV for a considerable time.
Arnie said that he doubted our kids would want to re-create such scenes in the Fellowship Hall, which everybody knew. But everybody still agreed that any kind of dancing was, well, dancing, and just didn’t belong in the church. Inertia carried the day; the sock hop was voted down four to nothing with one abstention. The Session allowed that a well-supervised junior-senior high dance in one of the kids’ basements, but not in the church, would be fine with them.
Over the next few days I found myself increasingly miffed by the inconsistency of the moral logic behind this thinking. Why should it be unacceptable for teenagers to dance in the church basement when it’s fine for them to dance in their own basements? But it was more than ethical quirkiness that bothered me. Rather, it was the unspoken fear of outward, physical expression, the unspoken discomfort with movement, of letting feeling flow out into arms and legs, and underneath that, a fear of the body itself, especially, I suspected, a fear of young bodies. I brooded about it for the rest of the week, muttering to myself and my wife about hobbled spirits and the fear of spontaneity and joyless religion. By Thursday, we were joking about Elmer Gantry being right about “petrified Presbyterians.”
&nbs
p; Friday evening before Palm Sunday was Jimmy Wilcox’s baby sister’s wedding. I officiated, of course, standing in front of a row of eight nineteen- and twenty-year-olds, some of the girls so nervous that they had to bite their lips to keep the giggles at bay. All went well; it was a standard ceremony: Wagner at the beginning, Mendelssohn at the end, the soprano sang “The Wedding Song,” and the uncle read 1 Corinthians 13.
Annie and I were invited to the reception, which was to be held at the Elks Club. We were late getting there, what with locking up the church and picking up the babysitter. The Elks Club is two miles outside of town on Highway 6. We approached with the car windows down to take in the evening air. From a good half mile way, we heard the “Beer Barrel Polka” reverberate across the soybean fields. Polka music was certainly not the couple’s choice, but a largess granted by the bride’s parents, who were, after all, paying the bills.
The inside of the Elks Club was hot, in spite of wide-open windows and doors. The place reeked of sweat and beer. Eddie Polanacheck and the Polka Aces, imported for the occasion from New Ulm, were onstage. Half the town was there, polkaing up a storm, clapping their hands, drinking beer, and singing along with the wonderfully facile lyrics.
And right in the middle of the dance floor, kicking their legs back like hot polka dancers do, were the happy octogenarians, Angus and Minnie MacDowell. They were smiling ear to ear and danced with little old steps, but in perfect time. Minnie’s silvergray hair, permed for the occasion, was bouncing in 2/4 time. When they saw me, they didn’t stop dancing; they just stopped having fun doing it. They shifted to a sort of Presbyterian polka, that is, done decently and in order, with great attention to the details of process, but little outward enjoyment. Minnie’s hair wasn’t bouncing anymore. Angus stopped grinning and assumed an air of dutiful concentration meant to communicate that he was only dancing because Minnie wanted to.
Good News from North Haven Page 5
