Lamont wrote a series of articles from aboard the Lady Barbara as she progressed on her journeys. Bud published every one of them in the Herald. They were travelogue in content and as close in style to C. S. Forester as Lamont could manage. The articles chronicled his voyage down the Mississippi and a three-month wait in New Orleans for the hurricane season to be over. A rigging failure in the Gulf of Mexico was described in detail, along with descriptions of the dangers such an accident might present in shark-infested waters. Next came Florida, where some unchronicled months passed before the Lady Barbara embarked for the Caribbean. Thereafter the articles became less regular and the voyage more difficult to follow. After ten months, the saga of the Lady Barbara ended in a harbor on an island off the coast of Venezuela when a seacock failed and she sank in waters too deep to permit salvage.
Lamont didn’t come straight home. Perhaps he couldn’t face the town after such an inglorious climax to his voyage. Maybe he couldn’t face home without the dream of being somewhere else. Maybe he just didn’t have the money for the airfare. Whatever, Lamont got a job on an oil rig off the coast of Venezuela and two months later took another oil rig job in the North Slope oil fields in Alaska, where he spent the last two winters.
He wrote Annette with regularity, and she frequently dropped references around town to “when Lamont gets back.” She remained “Mrs. Lamont Wilcox” and seemed no more daunted by his absence than if he had gone to Minneapolis to buy brass screws and fiberglass resin. The eventuality of his return was widely disputed. But, of course, Lamont Wilcox had surprised the town once before.
Lamont came home three months ago on a bright February day. He had written Annette that he was coming and that he had a present for her. The present was a new silver-gray Chevy Caprice. The North Slope oil fields pay well. Lamont looked fabulous. He had lost weight laboring on the oil rigs—even his beer belly was gone. In fact, Lamont announced to an incredulous town and even more incredulous wife that he no longer drank.
A sober Lamont who no longer lived spiritually in the Caribbean was a new creation altogether. He moved home, painted the house and the barn, got a part-time job in the feed and grain, and announced that he would cancel the leases and till his own acreage this season. In less than two months, Annette filed for divorce.
Lamont came to see me. I was officially his pastor, though I knew of him more than I knew him. He had been away most of my years in North Haven. He had that “I’ve been to hell and back” demeanor of so many recovering alcoholics. But he had learned the wisdom of the broken and took Annette’s decision to divorce him with resignation. “They warned me in A.A. that this might happen,” he explained. The North Slope, he explained, had its own Alcoholics Anonymous chapter.
I said I just didn’t understand. “For twenty-five years of your marriage you ended every day drunk and for the last three you’ve been gone. Through all of this Annette was faithful and patient. Now you come home sober and ready to work and she’s off to the lawyer. It just doesn’t make sense, Lamont.”
Lamont looked down and rubbed his forehead with his thumb and index finger. Then he looked at me and said, “Let me tell you a story, Dave. I heard it from this guy who lived for years in Kotzebue on the Bering Sea up in Alaska. He worked for the National Wildlife Refuge. It’s a remote spot, Kotzebue, even for Alaska. Used to be the supply ships came in only once a year. I mean, all your food for the whole year except for game came in on one boat: canned goods, flour, sugar, some vegetables, even eggs.
“My friend and his wife liked their eggs for breakfast. This was before they discovered cholesterol. They would order a whole year’s supply. Eggs keep if you refrigerate them, which is no problem in Kotzebue. I mean, they don’t go rotten, but they, well, change. Every morning my friend and his wife would have their eggs, over easy, sunny-side up, scrambled. They tasted fine. Didn’t really notice any change one day to the next as the months went by. Finally, they were eating year-old eggs, waiting for the boat to come in with fresh. Then the boat would come in and bring eggs that weren’t a year old and my friend and his wife would fry them up—and those fresh eggs would taste just awful. He said they would want to spit them out the first few days. They would look for some of the old ones to fix. You see, they got so accustomed to stale eggs that they liked them better than the fresh. In fact, after a year of stale eggs, they could hardly abide the real thing.”
Lamont leaned back in his chair, smiled, and raised his eyebrows. “For twenty years Annette lived her life around Lamont the drunken dreamer. She’s a good woman, Reverend, a helluva woman. She got used to living that way. I think she even kind of liked it. Patching up for me, apologizing for me, bitching about me, that was how she lived her life. She played sober and I played drunk. I was lost in a dream; she lived in reality. I was weak; she was strong. When I came home sober, it was like fresh eggs after twenty years of stale. And she couldn’t stand the taste. People are like that, Reverend. They get used to the stale and prefer it to the fresh. They get used to the fake and like it better than the real thing.”
As it turned out, a sober Lamont was at a loss to figure out where he fit into North Haven. So he moved to Minneapolis, where he has successfully introduced himself to his children and grandchild. Larry told me he got a job selling boats at a marina in Wayzata.
I talked to Annette while she was working in the bank the other day. As she counted out three tens and four fives for me she said, “Lamont said he went to see you before he left.” It was more a question than a statement. I put the money in my wallet and said, “Ya, he just needed to talk.” She looked away from me. Her eyes began to moisten. She bit her lower lip but not a tear rolled down her cheek. “Twenty years I put up with his drinking. Let me tell you, it was no picnic. Twenty years supporting the family. He was either in the barn with that damned boat or at the Blue Spruce. And then he takes off for three years and when he comes back everything is supposed to be just great.” Then she stiffened, looked directly at me, and said, “A person can only take so much, ya know.”
She’s living out in the farmhouse, which was awarded to her in the divorce settlement. She is back to being alone and brave and often speculates darkly about what Lamont might be “up to now” in the Cities.
– 11 –
Sherry Moves Home for a While
It’s only the end of June, and it’s too warm too soon. When the summer ripens, the heat will make people irritable and lethargic. By the middle of August the heat waves rising off the cornfields will make the horizon wiggle, and the dogs will be moving slow and even the most sweet-tempered children will have gone whiny.
But before the irritability and lethargy comes a short period of garnered courage in the face of this cyclical adversity. You dig your Bermuda shorts out of the back of the closet and get the window fans out of the basement and buy a twelve-pack of Popsicles for the kids and tell yourself that this isn’t so bad. Which works until it’s too hot for any clothes and the fan blows hot air like a hair dryer and the Popsicles are all over the faces and front halves of the kids.
Courage is followed by indulgence; in this stage you permit yourself not to do a whole host of chores that you ought to do because, well, it’s just too hot. You begin to indulge the children because it’s too hot to argue. In time, you permit most anything, as long as they stay outside and don’t touch you or anything valuable with their sticky paws. If summer lasted any longer than it does, civilization as we know it, all order and discipline, would sink into a miasma of laziness and permissiveness.
It was hot this past Sunday in church. Attendance was thin, as it usually is in the heat. This, of course, is a particularly visible manifestation of the summer decline of civilization. The building is not air-conditioned, but we have woven wicker hand fans donated and placed in the pew racks by the Howe Funeral Home some forty years ago. As the congregation fans itself through the sermon, they look like troubled water—restless, agitated, and eager to go.
Sitting with Angu
s and Minnie MacDowell in the third pew on the pulpit side was their son, Larry, from Spokane. On either side of Larry sat his four-year-old and his three-year-old. They were all fanning vigorously. Not sitting or fanning anywhere was their wife and mother, Sherry. Larry is forty-something. Late childbearing seems to run in the family. MacDowells enter into nothing lightly or unadvisedly.
Sherry’s absence ached for an explanation, but something about the family mood induced congregational discretion. All through coffee hour, nobody asked what everybody was thinking: “Well, where is Sherry, anyway?”
As everybody drifted to the parking lot and that sweet taste of air-conditioning on the ride home, Minnie sneaked up on me, tugged at my sleeve, and said in a near-whisper: “Pastor, could I see you in your study?” I looked at Angus, who was watching this out of the corner of his eye.
Minnie sat on the front six inches of the vinyl chair in my office, her back straight as she held the bulletin from the worship service, which she had managed to roll up into a tight little tube. As she talked, she worked at rolling it even tighter. She and Angus were just back from Spokane, she said, where they had gone to visit Larry and Sherry and the grandchildren. They had planned on staying for two and a half weeks, but came home after one. “You see, Pastor,” she said, “there was a problem.”
The bulletin in her hands was now about the diameter of a pencil. These, I knew, were very large words for Minnie MacDowell, who, in general, had simply not permitted problems in her family. And if there were problems, they were certainly not called such and were never talked about to others. For Minnie to say “there was a problem” was akin to most people dropping to their knees, tearing at their clothing, and sobbing about hopelessness, guilt, and possible suicide. Minnie knew her Bible, of course, and knew that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” But she did not understand these words in a personal sense, but rather in a general one, as in “People in general have sinned and fallen short,” some people much more than others, and Minnie had well-formed ideas about who. So for Minnie to say “there was a problem” was a confession of apocalyptic proportion. The problem, of course, was that Sherry, seven months pregnant, and mother of two, had not been in the third pew on the pulpit side that morning. Sherry was, Minnie revealed in a cathartic burst, “in Mankato, staying with her folks.”
“Could you talk to her, Pastor? Ask her to call Larry.” And then, looking at her bulletin-tube, she went on, “Tell her I’m sorry if I said anything.” With those last words, all of southwestern Minnesota trembled.
Words had been spoken, and Minnie had spoken them. “What happened?” I asked. “Well,” Minnie said, “it was really hot in Spokane, too, and Angus and I were there only five days when the baby got the chicken pox. Angus and Larry thought that it would be helpful if they just sort of got out of the way, so they went bowling on Thursday, and while they were gone the water heater quit and when they got back Larry went to fix it and we were watching him go into the crawl space to look at it, and we were talking about how good Larry has always been with mechanical matters and I think I said something that may have hurt Sherry’s feelings a little. Well, when Larry emerged from the crawl space, she handed him the baby, went upstairs to the bedroom, locked the door, called the airlines, and bought a one-way ticket to Mankato. All she said to Larry was ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you, and there’s another box of oatmeal bath under the sink in the children’s bathroom.’ ”
“What was it you said, Minnie?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t remember exactly,” she answered. “Something about fixing the water heater.” The failure of her memory at this point stood in intriguing contrast to her precise memory of Sherry’s last words.
“I’ve got to go to Mankato on Tuesday,” I said. “I’ll stop and see Sherry.”
She was happy to see me. Seven months pregnant, she negotiated her way onto the plastic-covered couch in her parents’ fussy living room, took a sip of iced tea, and asked if I had seen Larry and the kids and how they were. How was Jered’s chicken pox? Had the pox crusted over yet? Was he sleeping through the night?
“How are you?” I asked. There were a few tears as she told her tale, which was commonplace enough: how she stopped working when Jessica was born, not because she had to but because she really wanted to be home with the baby, day-to-day life with two preschoolers whom she loved as life itself. “But there are days, Dave, when I think I might forget how to talk in complete sentences. Diapers … ear infections … reading The Cat in the Hat fourteen times in one afternoon … who hit whom first. You don’t even get to go to the bathroom alone. I love them so, but I can hardly wait till they go to sleep at night, and then I’m so tired I can’t move.”
She pulled her pregnant self up a bit. “And now number three … I don’t know if I’ll make it.” She paused for a second, took another sip of iced tea, and went on: “Dave, what I didn’t need was two weeks with Larry’s folks. We’ve always gotten on, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. They’re so, well … THERE! No salt in the food. Angus patrols the house with a screwdriver and a hammer fixing things. The kids get to them. And then Minnie.…”
With that she looked away and her eyes reddened. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe I’m overreacting. No sooner does their plane land than Jered gets the chicken pox. He’s up all night. I’m up all night. Larry sleeps like a brick. Has to work the next morning, you know. Things were edgy by Thursday. Larry says that it might help if he got Dad out of the house, so they go bowling—bowling in air-conditioning. Did I tell you how hot it was? Anyway, I go to give the baby another oatmeal bath and the water comes out like ice. The hot-water heater picks this particular moment in the history of the world to die. I’m ready to call the plumber, but Minnie says, ‘Wait till Larry gets back. I’m sure he’ll be able to repair it without such an expense. You know what a talent he has for these things.’
“So no oatmeal bath and we wait for Larry and Angus to finish a third game. Larry comes home and says, ‘If I’d known that the thing was going to bust, we would have never gone, honey.’ Somehow that didn’t help. The hot-water heater is in a crawl space under the kitchen. It’s hard to get to. You have to go in about twenty feet on your hands and knees. Anyway, Angus and Minnie and I are watching Larry’s rear end as he makes his way to the water heater. Jered is in my arms whining, and Jessica is wiping Oreo off her face with my skirt. There’s a moment of quiet as Larry gets up to the hot-water heater, and then Minnie says to me—David, I still can’t believe she said it—she says, ‘Sherry, it’s really a good thing that you didn’t lose that weight, or Larry might have had you crawl in there.’
“Something snapped, Dave. It had never crossed my mind to walk out on them. Family deserters are scum you read about in the Star. But it was just so much, just so much.…”
We talked another hour. I didn’t have to talk her into coming down to North Haven to make peace. She had already called Larry that afternoon. Nothing I said was needed to persuade her to go home with them to Spokane. That was always what she was going to do.
I think Minnie’s tongue was tamed in all of this, which it needed. I think Larry and maybe even Angus have seen something of Sherry’s world from her vantage point, which they needed. And of course, Sherry got a break, which she needed.
Life together is hard. There are no perfect husbands, no perfect wives, no perfect children, no perfect mothers-in-law. Life in family—life in any community—is both our sorest test and our sweetest joy. Life together stretches us, pulls us, strains us, but in it we are nourished by the struggle itself.
It is the best chance Providence gives most of us to grow out of ourselves and into something more like what we were meant to be. Life together is the welcome tether that kindly but relentlessly binds our ravenous egos. Life together is where most people get their only chance to be heroes. Families can breed heroes—local heroes, yes, but giants of spirit nevertheless: courageous and well-tempered souls who return ag
ain and again to brave the rigors and savor the delicacies of loving the same people for a long time. For the only thing harder than getting along with other people is getting along without them, even Minnie.
– 12 –
Air-Conditioning
A week before we went on vacation the furnace in the manse died. The church owns the house, so it was their worry. The day the furnace dies is one of the few times when it is a happy thing to be living in a house that belongs to somebody else.
I called Arnie Peterson, who is head of the Board of Trustees these days, and he called up Jimmy Wilcox, who runs the only heating business in the county. Arnie set up a meeting for the three of us the next morning at 9:30 in the basement of the manse. Coffee cups in our hands, we stood around the old furnace like an anxious family at the bedside of a dying grandparent. With a flashlight in one hand and a three-foot stick in the other, Jimmy peered and poked into the innards of the ancient hot-air monster. The thing looked like a giant octopus standing on its head, its tentacles grasping the bottom of the joists of the first floor of the house.
Like a discreet doctor, Jimmy guided us away from the presence of the patient over to the foot of the basement steps before he offered a prognosis, which was terminal. He said softly, “Thing’s been on its last legs as long as anybody can remember. There’s no fixin’ her.” Furnaces are all female to Jimmy, like boats are female to sailors and cars are female to mechanics. “Church is just gonna have to spring for a new one.” We all knew as much, but with his next words, Jimmy opened a can of worms: “Tell ya what I’ll do. For about five hundred bucks more, I’ll put in one of these new heat pumps instead of a regular furnace. That’s at cost, of course. Then in the summer, Pastor and his family can have air-conditioning. You see, these heat pumps cool in the summer and heat in the winter.”
Good News from North Haven Page 8
