4
Peter wished some moment of clarification might present itself: it was hard, by June, to keep silent about the changes in Irene, about the strain those changes were placing on the house over which she presided. But a man like Peter, in the absence of any immediate crisis, can’t feel sure about what might occasion such a moment. His wife was a different person from the one he’d known last summer, or even in early spring: that much was plain. But who, in the privacy and safety of his home, says something like “you’ve changed” to his wife? Actors in movies talk like that, not people.
She’d begun spending more time at church; but this was not a seismic change, and besides, she took Lisa along with her for Greta Handsaker to dote on in the church nursery. Her baby had grown much too big to just be set down and left alone on a nursery floor, but there were plenty of books to read there, and sometimes other children to play with; if Lisa found herself playing with younger children, she’d try to interest them in Drop a Dragon, a game she’d invented with her mother a little over a year ago. In this game, each player draws one unbroken line—of any color, following any arc, however long and squiggly—until a picture emerges, sometimes vague and evocative, sometimes clear as day. They’d called it Drop a Dragon because the drawing produced from its halting initial playthrough had looked a little like an undulating green dragon; in those days, Lisa, still trying out new ways to speak each day, sometimes appended consonants to words that ended in vowel sounds. “What will we call this picture?” Irene had said, holding it up. “Drop a dragon!” she’d said proudly, pointing. It was a story Peter and Irene liked to recount when they could. Everyone always smiled when they got to the punch line.
But Irene brought Bible study home now. Sometimes she read by candlelight before bed. It struck Peter as an odd affectation, the candle; you keep candles around for when the power goes out. She was probably saving the house a few pennies, though, so what was the harm? She did seem to sing a lot now, more than she ever had. It was a little strange. But she wasn’t loud or bizarre, just different. And so he kept his thoughts to himself.
She never preached to the family, and she seldom said much that seemed out of character. Occasionally Peter would make romantic advances at night; she almost always rejected these now, but he attributed this to her practical nature. He was still part-time at work, and there’d been no company-wide raise last year; more children were not in their plans. Of all the small differences only one occasion really stood out, and it was a secret he couldn’t tell.
She was in the kitchen washing dishes, her back to the living room, where Peter’d dozed off on the sofa. She was singing quietly to herself. As he rose from sleep, after who knew how long, he heard her, the song drifting in as through a light fog. He’d loved her voice the very first time he’d ever heard it, all the way back at Henry’s Drive-In; now he lay listening, motionless, trying to identify the hymn. He expected to find something familiar if he listened hard enough; but the key was minor, the tempo slow; and then the melody dropped away, but the song continued at the same pace and tempo, and he realized she’d been praying—chanting—either petitioning God directly under her breath, or reciting some formulaic prayer he didn’t recognize or couldn’t make out at this distance.
It had a lilt of its own; not, to Peter, a pleasant one. He didn’t know where it came from, and he didn’t want to follow it out to where it went. He drifted back into his nap, the way you sometimes fall asleep when there’s something on your mind you’d rather not think about. When he woke again, there was pot roast in the oven. You could hear the juices sizzling in the pan. The rich smell filled the house.
* * *
Lisa was chalking hopscotch squares on the driveway while her father pushed the lawn mower over the grass. He wore a white undershirt and his summer shorts, black checks over alternating gold and white squares. It was very hot outside, and though he’d kept the blades sharp and the mower oiled, the June grass was thick. Sweat ran into his eyes. He stopped near the driveway to wipe his brow with his hand.
Lisa looked up, hearing his heavy breathing. “Sharon’s daddy has a lawn mower that’s a car,” she said.
“I know he does,” said Peter. “It’s an antique. Her daddy let me take it for a spin once, back when he first bought it.” It was a John Deere Model 110. Everyone in Crescent had stopped by the Lumley place to see it when it was new.
“It sounds like an airplane,” said Lisa.
“Sure,” said Peter. “They call that ‘horsepower.’”
“Can we get one?” Lisa said. “It’s super fun. Sharon gets to ride it.”
“Can’t go wrong with a True Value,” said Peter, rattling the push mower by its handles.
“Two people can ride on Sharon’s lawn mower!” countered Lisa.
“Maybe Santa will bring us one,” said Peter; it was a good line, but he didn’t get the rhythm right, because he resented having to hear from his daughter about Chuck Lumley’s Model 110, which Chuck had been able to afford because his parents owned preferred stock in the Union Pacific. Lisa looked hurt.
“OK,” she said, throwing her piece of chalk at the garage door.
“Oh, honey,” he said. He sat down on the driveway next to her. Sweat dripped from his forehead onto the cement. “Sure, we can try and get one sometime. They’re just kind of—”
“Expensive,” Lisa said, finishing the sentence for him. She had heard this word about a lot of things, starting with Baby Alive and continuing on more recently through Malibu Barbie and color TV.
“Yes, expensive,” said her father. “They are expensive.” He returned to the lawn. He didn’t want to make any promises he wouldn’t be able to keep if operations kept shrinking at the stockyard. From the corner of his eye he saw Lisa pout a little more, then retrieve her chalk, finishing the squares she’d been drawing and putting big round numbers inside them. It was hard to believe she could write numbers already. In October she’d be six.
“When’s Mommy coming home?” she asked when he was pushing the lawn mower back into the garage.
“She should be home in time to fix dinner,” he said. It was half past noon. He gave her a conspiratorial look. “What should we do about lunch?”
“Grilled cheese!” said Lisa.
“Coming right up!” said her father, tipping an imaginary cap to her as he headed in mock hurry toward the house.
* * *
Let me ask you a question: What do you see in your head when I tell you that one Sunday, toward the end of June, Irene Sample went to a church in Council Bluffs? Are you seeing a Catholic church with a stoup full of cool water just inside the front door, leading through a pair of huge doors into a great high-ceilinged room full of wooden pews with prie-dieus for kneeling? Something more modest and Midwestern, maybe—a Methodist room with an angled ceiling, wooden beams, plenty of light? Are there candles? Stations of the Cross? Carpeting? Is the organ pipe, or electric? Maybe there’s an upright piano instead of an organ, maybe a stylized cross behind the altar: the kind of thing you’ve been looking at for several minutes before you say, Aha, that’s the cross, I get it now. You wonder whether you’ve happened across a particularly modern congregation, but it’s not that: it’s just that you’d brought a set of assumptions with you when you came inside, some of which concerned the constancy of the cross. But here, suspended above and to the rear of the chancel, is this massive gnarled thing, made, evidently, of straw or strips of green wood. You can see how puny a human body would look if you tethered one to it with rope or fishing line. You can imagine it creaking and rustling while its captive strains against his bonds: no use.
If you shrink that modern greenwood cross down to the size of a poster, and, instead of suspending it with rigging from the rafters of a large room, nail it to some painted-over drywall behind a lectern in an otherwise undecorated storefront next door to an army surplus store, then you have prepared the room in which Irene Sample attended church services in June 1972, two months after she
’d accepted a second copy of a tract she’d initially been given by a man named Michael, who had been scavenging for food in an open garbage can in Omaha.
It was Michael who stood at the lectern now. He was not dressed for church: he looked much as he had that day last November. His tan pants were dirty, his beard untrimmed. His hands looked like they’d been scrubbed with pumice—his palms, when he gestured, showed pink—but there was still plenty of dirt under his nails, which were long. Every member of the small congregation in the folding chairs before him looked better than he did: better dressed, better rested, better fed. There were only seven people in the chairs, plus Irene. The room was bright with sunlight. Lisa was playing in their driveway while her father mowed the lawn; Irene, as far as anyone knew, was out shopping.
Michael’s text today was from Luke 17:31. “I want to start with Luke, seventeen and thirty-one,” he began; he spoke very slowly with his eyes on the book before him, not looking up. He paused, still with his head down, and remained silent for so long that Irene’s mind began to wander out into open space. “Simon,” he said after a while, extending his hand awkwardly toward a young man seated near Irene.
Simon got up. As long as he’d been sitting still, Irene hadn’t noticed that he smelled, but the movement dislodged the scent; it was strong. He stood and began reading from a well-worn Bible. “‘In that day, he that shall be on the housetop, and his stuff in the house, let him not go down to take it away; and he that is in the field, let him likewise not return back.’ Thank you, Father,” he said, and then sat back down again.
“Thank you, Father,” echoed Michael, belatedly, after what proved to be the first of many long silences. “We find the Lord saying the same thing in the book of Matthew. It’s a little different there. Matthew…” He broke off again.
In the space that opened, Irene remembered a Matthew she’d known pretty well at college—he went by Matt. She felt ashamed, remembering Matt in church, even a church as modest as this one. She tried banishing him from her mind, listening hard and focusing. But in the long quiet Michael left between one thought and the next, Matt found all the room he needed, roaring through in his Plymouth Fury all red and shiny, the upholstery on its backseats soft and warm.
“Matthew specifies what the worker in the field might go back to his house to get,” Michael continued finally. He looked out over the seven in their chairs, and also at Irene, his gaze stopping on each of them as it went. His blue eyes were very bright. “Lisa. Twenty-four, seventeen and eighteen.”
It was the woman Irene had visited with in front of the Astro Theater. She, like Michael, looked much as she had on the day Irene had seen her; the same dress, the same simple shoes. “His garment,” she replied, looking up from her Bible.
“His garment,” said Michael, after a long pause. “Let not him that is in the field, turn back to take his garment.” An even greater silence followed; Irene thought about Grace Evangelical. Everyone all dressed up at the holidays. Peter in his suit at Christmas services, just the two of them. Before the wedding, before Lisa, precious Lisa, whose dolls now had conversations about going to the movies. Where had the time gone?
Michael looked pained; he closed his eyes. “Think about the worker in the field,” he said, impossibly slowing his rhythm even further, not raising his voice but speaking as if to a friend across a table in a diner late at night. “Think about that worker in the field at midday. How he looks out there after half a day’s work, when the hour comes. Sweating. Sunburned. There’s a reason why Luke wants us to see this worker in the field, why Matthew says you don’t go back for your clothes. It’s not just that God doesn’t mind if you’re dirty,” he said.
This time he paused for a full minute, still with his eyes closed, eyebrows knitted together; everyone looked up at him, waiting, trying in private degrees of failure or success to keep their minds focused on the message.
“The dirt’s a sign,” he said, finally relaxing his face and opening his fiery blue eyes. Their gaze looked over the congregation and at the back wall. They appeared, to Irene, like sapphires.
* * *
The freezer in the garage was full of beef: even in frugal times, there were plenty of steaks in the Sample house. Irene retrieved a prepackaged box of four and entered the house through a door that led from the garage directly into the living room. Peter was on the couch, watching a baseball game. He got up when she came in; he wasn’t overceremonious about it, but he wasn’t ever going to be the sort of person who stayed in his seat when his wife entered the room.
“It’s three o’clock,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice, but there was a pleading note in it. Tell me something.
“Sorry I’m so late,” she said, smiling earnestly, taking hold of and gently squeezing his hand, slowing but not breaking her stride as she headed for the sink, where she put a stopper in the drain and began running warm water.
“It’s three o’clock,” he said again. “You left at ten thirty.”
“Well, I went to Council Bluffs,” she said, taking the steaks from their box: they were vacuum-sealed in plastic. She set them under the running water.
“Well, I know that,” he said. “But that was four and a half hours ago.”
“I didn’t go shopping,” she said over her shoulder, addressing him directly; she didn’t look down or away. There was more innocence than defiance in her expression. There is no defense against innocence.
“Irene,” he said, not knowing how else to respond.
“I found a new church,” she said, turning off the water. The sink was half-full. The steaks floated there like fat little boats.
“We didn’t know where you were,” he said. “I had to make excuses to Lisa.”
“Oh, Peter,” she said, crossing again to the living room. “Yes, I imagine. I am so sorry. The time just got away from me. I did mean to go to the store, too.”
“You left at ten thirty,” he said again.
She took a step toward him, so that he’d see her face, all of it: her lips, her eyes, her forehead with its two gradually deepening furrows.
“It’s a very different sort of church,” she said, again taking hold of his hand and squeezing it, gently, the way you might with a child who doesn’t and can’t grasp your meaning because he is too young to understand. Several years later, at a Greyhound bus station in Minneapolis in the winter, he remembered this exchange, finally recognizing it as the moment of clarification he’d been hoping for in those then-recent days. It can really get quite cold in Minneapolis in the winter.
5
A while later she began saving food scraps in a little plastic bucket on the kitchen counter. It sat just to the left of the sink. She found the bucket in the garage one day while Peter was at work; it had some oil rags in it, which she took out, laundered, folded, and replaced, neatly stacked, on the shelf where the bucket had been. Peter either didn’t notice or didn’t mind; a small bucket for food scraps on a counter is the sort of thing that can pass without notice almost anywhere. When he’d been a child, his mother had kept a pail under the sink for potato peelings. She fed them to the chickens.
Peter and Irene Sample had no chickens, of course—I say “of course” even though there’s really no reason why they couldn’t have. It would have been a thrifty move on Irene’s part, to have Peter build her a coop one Sunday: save on eggs, save on meat. But back in Tama her house hadn’t been that sort of house, and Peter was unsentimental about his childhood. He didn’t miss cleaning up after the chickens.
There is at least one different version of Lisa Sample’s story, one where the plastic bucket on the counter in Crescent is indeed for some chickens who live in the backyard, pecking and scratching; anything left over Irene uses for compost, and the lesson young Lisa takes from the bucket is “waste not, want not.” She sees the fat, happy chickens outside and eats their eggs each morning, yolks dark and yellow, almost orange, and she’s a smart kid, she makes the connection. She grows up to be a person who
dilutes the dish soap several times before buying a new bottle: who cleans the windows with vinegar and old newspaper instead of Windex and a paper towel. She unplugs electrical appliances that aren’t in use, and waits until evening to bathe, having learned, from her mother, that over time these small choices add up to real savings, which can be kept on hand in case the day should come when a reserve is needed, when new supplies are scant.
In this version of the story she learns all the same lessons, but not from her mother.
* * *
Irene attended services in Council Bluffs again the following Sunday, and on several subsequent Sundays through July. She kept up her Wednesday night Bible study in town for most of the summer. One Wednesday in August she came home early; Peter and Lisa were sitting on the sofa watching Wild Kingdom together. She closed the front door behind her with greater force than it needed.
“You’re home early,” said Peter.
“Daddy! Shh!” said Lisa. On the screen a lioness was stalking an antelope, Marlon Perkins narrating in his deliberate cadence, his voice high and clear.
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