by Tricia Dower
She’s mulling that over while mutilating a carrot when he sticks his head in the kitchen twenty minutes later to say a Sunday school teacher’s car is outside. He doesn’t want to use his church office and get roped into a conversation. Can he take refuge in her office to rethink his sermon? Of course he can. He emerges an hour or so later to phone Cora Bostrom with new hymn numbers. “I won’t ask Derek to change his bits,” he says, with his Horst Buckholz–in-The-Magnificent-Seven smile that jellies her knees. “That would take even greater courage.” Lay leader Derek Hobart, a prune of a man with perfect posture, is a stickler when it comes to the liturgical calendar, insisting the fifty-two Sundays repeat precisely each year, no variation in calls to worship, scripture and responsive readings, the parts he handles. Lin phones Grace, invites her to the service tomorrow and lunch after, then retrieves the bulletins Derek has dropped off at church. The stew bubbles, anointing the kitchen with the scent of onions and celery, rosemary and pepper, as she crosses out hymn names and numbers and writes in the new ones.
She has a sweet, gentle urge to make love to Ron, even though it’s not Sunday.
Mon, Mar 14/66
It was like standing on the edge of an eroding cliff, witnessing R face hostility, knowing I’d pushed him into it, blaming my prideful desire to be married to a hero.
The heavy wooden door thuds behind the last of the worshipers with their cold-weather faces and smells. They bring a spurt of icy air that chills her legs. She’s at the entrance with the choir waiting for the procession, she and the other women in white blouses and dark skirts, the men in dark suits with breast pocket hankies. Grace slips in like Fifth Avenue in a fitted gray suit, black pillbox hat and black gloves. Lin clenches and unclenches her fists to stay calm. Derek delivers the call to worship in his cheerless voice. He could turn “Happy Birthday” into a dirge. Cora pumps up the organ. A braid, as thick and flaxen as the steeple bell rope, hangs down her back and bounces with her efforts. The choir starts down the aisle singing “Are Ye Able.” Derek frowns, checks his bulletin. The first row on either side of the aisle is reserved for the choir and they slide into it now. After Ron leads the congregation through the Apostles’ Creed, the choir files onto the dais for the anthem.
On her way up Lin catches Ron’s eye, gives him her best I’m-with-you smile. His nod back is stiff. Are his legs wobbly? Hers would be, up there by her lonesome with nothing but the frail armor of a teak lectern and a black robe. She has no idea what he plans. He was evasive at breakfast. After the anthem, she scoots back to sit with Grace, who smells good, who always smells good. It’s murder waiting through the responsive reading, Gloria Patri, scriptures, Lord’s Prayer, offering and another hymn before pigeon-toed Cora leaves the organ to sit with the choir for the sermon, the first Lin hasn’t typed for Ron.
After a few coughs and foot shuffles, the room goes expectantly quiet. How easily Ron earns everyone’s attention with just his bearing. He rests his arms on the lectern, leans forward and recites: “Are ye able, said the Master, to be crucified with me? Yea, the sturdy dreamers answered. To the death we follow Thee.” His eyes scan the room. “How many times have we sung that as we just did, this third Sunday in Lent? How often have we lifted our voices and claimed we were able, like those sturdy dreamers James and John, whose confident, even cocky, avowal came after asking Jesus to promise to do whatever they wanted.
“They’d followed him from city to city and seen him perform miracles. The loaves and fishes. Walking on water. Healing a leper here, an epileptic there. Giving a blind man sight, a dumb one speech. Raising a child from the dead. You can understand how they might believe he could—and would—grant any wish.”
He slips on that grin he wears when he’s about to tease her, leans across the lectern, drops his voice and confides that when he was a boy he made his folks promise not to get angry before he confessed to whatever he’d done. Lin nudges Grace. “If I’d had the temerity to ask them to do whatever I wanted and they’d been foolish enough to say, ‘You betcha,’ our backyard would’ve held a pony, our freezer nothing but popsicles. Right, Mom?”
Laughter passes through the congregation like a gentle breeze. Folks in nearby pews turn towards Grace. Some know her from the Rice County Garden Club and the Tuesday prayer breakfasts, others because she shows up often at Open Door events. She returns their smiles.
Ron says, “Jesus didn’t leave himself open to materializing a pony. Not on your life. He asked James and John exactly what they wanted. Their answer was to sit on either side of Him ‘in glory’ as the Bible puts it.” Ron pauses. “Improbabilities surrounded them: the miracles, of course, and they’d been on the mountaintop when Jesus was transfigured into what must have seemed an unearthly being, his face glowing like the sun and his garments lightning white, while a voice from a cloud said: This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.”
Ron gazes at the ceiling as though anticipating a reenactment. A watery sun has risen through the east windows and lights half his drawn face. He looks ready to drop. It was late when he crawled into bed and warmed his feet on her. Has he forgotten what comes next? She’s about to despair when he carries on. “James and John may have believed God was ready to anoint Jesus then and there as Israel’s king on earth, reestablish the throne of David and overthrow the Roman Empire. That’s what in glory meant to them, what messiah or anointed one meant to them. As early disciples, they would’ve wanted status in this new kingdom.”
He leaves the lectern’s shelter for the front of the altar. “When James and John responded, ‘We are able,’ did they understand the message of change Jesus brought, the message of transforming love?” He steps off the dais and proceeds down the aisle past Lin and Grace. They twist around to follow him. Head down as if searching for his next words, he stops at the McKinley family pew, looks up and asks, “Do we understand that message when we send our young men to Vietnam?” His voice has gone duskier. A few people cough. Others whisper. Grace fingers her pearl choker. The five McKinleys look stricken. Lin can almost hear them thinking: What’s this got to do with us?
At another pew he lays a hand on Willard Spates’s shoulder. “Do we arise each day aware we share the moral burden of the killing these young men do in our name?” Ever-accommodating Willard, hands resting on belly, nods with incomprehension. Ron surveys the congregation. So does Lin, not sure how to interpret the shifting eyes and crossed arms.
“I’ve been your pastor for five months and I’m ashamed I haven’t shared my thoughts on this war before now. I didn’t want to risk disharmony within this community. But by not addressing a profound moral issue of our time, I’m failing our community. Failing you.
“So this morning I say without question that the war in Vietnam is in fundamental opposition to Jesus’ directive to love one another as He loved us. He didn’t mean infatuation or some accidental falling in love. He meant the willful act by which we become one with God, the type of transforming love He experienced on the mountaintop. The love that allowed Him to accept He had to die to save us. ‘Even as I have loved you,’ He said.”
He moves farther up the aisle, searches faces in another pew.
“Does crossing half the globe to attack the Vietnamese show our love for them? How about laying waste to their jungles, rice paddies and villages? Our government justifies the use of such force with the bogeyman of Communism. As if two hundred million of us are unable to maintain our preferred approach to government without obliterating those who favor another. Are we that weak-willed and susceptible?”
More coughing and feet shuffling. Heavy whispers as Peter Hemstad, a liver-spotted Thor in an ill-fitting suit the color of an Idaho potato, rises from a back pew and bellows, “Bogeyman?” Peter is well over seventy yet his deep-chested voice owns the room. “The godless Russians take over, you won’t have a pulpit to speak from. You’ll be in Siberia with the rest of the priests and preachers.”
Lin searches Grace’s face for direction. Grace lifts her hand as if to say, Wait. The whole room seems to be holding its breath for Ron’s reaction. He says, “God bless you, Peter, for witnessing to your convictions.” The only sign he’s shaken is the rigid set of his jaw. Peter sidles to the end of his pew and stomps out. The front door thunders behind him.
Ron strides back to the pulpit, consults his notes and clears his throat. “Some say the Old Testament supports war. I suggest to you that’s not God’s last word. The whole point of a new testament, a new covenant with God, was to herald the end of one set of laws and the beginning of another. The Old Testament God sent Israel to war. He commanded the stoning of adulterers and those who gathered wood on the Sabbath. Through Jesus, the same God tells us it’s time to turn the other cheek and forgive, that the Sabbath is ours. The same God now says that whoever among us is free of sin can cast the first stone.
“I say, again, there is no justification for Christian support of the war in Vietnam.”
Eileen and John Embury, two pews over, quietly take their leave. Their Marine sergeant son has been in Vietnam a year. The Weems family follows. Eileen was a Weems.
Tension ripples across the room. Ron stands before the altar again, bereft of notes. A deep red has crawled up his neck. The sleeves of his robe expand as he lifts his arms. “So what are we who love God with all our heart, mind and soul to do if we renounce killing? We, who love our neighbors as ourselves. We, who love our country. Do we set ourselves on fire as pacifist Alice Herz did last year in Detroit at age eighty-two? As thirty-one-year-old Norman Morrison did outside McNamara’s office four months ago while thousands of Pentagon employees spilled out, heading for home? As twenty-two-year-old former seminarian Roger La Porte did a week later at the UN building?”
An image flickers in Lin’s brain, fast like a film. She leans forward and hugs herself. Grace pats her back. Ron takes deep breaths, his shoulders going up and down. Would he ever do such a thing? Would it be her fault?
He says, “All three felt they had to send a message—humans must stop killing other humans. They’d tried all the protest methods. What else could they do?” As for me, I have more living to do. My alternatives to self-immolation are nowhere near as dramatic, yet they’re as close as I can come for the time being to Yes, I am able.”
Lin falls back against the pew, blots her eyes with a tissue.
“Unlike those brave people, God rest their souls,” Ron says, “I haven’t yet exhausted all other tactics. I’ll implore Senators McCarthy and Mondale and Representative Nelsen to end our involvement in this conflict. Offer them my support if they do. I will counsel any man of draft age interested in becoming a conscientious objector. I will let my voice be heard from the pulpit as I’m doing this morning and add that voice to thousands of others taking to the streets. I’ll demand the government we elected represent our wishes by leaving Vietnam to the Vietnamese.
“We have an opportunity to add our presence and our voices to a protest in Minneapolis the week after next. Lin and I have room for three more in our car and I pray you’ll help get others there. You’ll find a sign-up sheet with details on the table by the front door. I’m available after the service to speak with anyone who’s interested. The intent is for a peaceful protest. I can’t guarantee that. But without a willingness to take any personal risk on the path to Yes, I am able, a Christian’s talk of peace is hollow.”
A hasty benediction and it’s over. Grace leans toward Lin and whispers, “I’m dying to applaud.” As they exit the pew, half a dozen people pounce on them, chests out, nostrils flaring: “Tell that husband of yours, that son of yours…Protesting is treason, refusing to fight cowardly…If Vietnam goes, all Asia falls. Before you know it, we’ll be speaking Chinese or Russian…Our credibility’s shot if we let Ho Chi Minh humiliate the South…We stayed out of Hungary and look what the Commies did there.” Lin is overwhelmed but Grace is a marvel, applying lemon balm words like “I hear you,” or “It’s edifying to learn your point of view.”
George Copway, who teaches something or other at the high school (Lin doesn’t know everyone as well as she should yet), jabs a finger at her and says, “You want the truth? If Indochina goes Communist we lose the tin and the tungsten. That’s why we helped the French, that’s what it’s really about.”
Fern Vaske, a scrawny widow from Faribault, gives Lin a hug and whispers, “It needed saying.” Lin’s back tenses up for a second. She’s not much of a hugger. Ron is. And he’s better at saying, “I love you.” Lin’s quick to tell him back but knows she should say it first sometimes.
When the six people slithered out during the service, her first thought was Philistines! Grace, per usual, is more charitable. “A High Noon moment for you, Ronnie,” she says at lunch in the parsonage. “I couldn’t be prouder. You’ll call on them, of course, the folks who left. It must have been difficult for them.” Ashamed, Lin sends up a silent prayer for Eileen and John’s son. Why can’t everyone’s son be spared?
That night in bed she tells Ron she would’ve melted into a blubbering puddle if Peter had foamed at the mouth at her. He says, “No you wouldn’t. I thought of you facing that monster in court and my monstrous doubts in our living room. I looked deep into myself, felt unworthy of you and tore up my first sermon.” She spoons his back, kisses the crescent-shaped mole on his shoulder. To think she inspired him makes her heart go crazy. He surrenders to sleep as though under a spell. She lies awake for hours, seeing burning bodies in the dark.
Wed, Mar 16/66
I’m ready to bean somebody. The Trustees called a special session yesterday (on the Ides of March yet) & drafted a statement Derek is to put in the next bulletin: “Military service is an appropriate form of obedience to the United States government, which has its authority from God.” Oh yeah? Peter Hemstad isn’t the only trustee off my Christmas card list now but he probably bullied the rest into it. Superintendent Foote told Ron this morning he’s on his own. The majordomos at Methodist HQ haven’t yet determined if there’s “just cause” for the war. The Pentagon must be biting its nails. One candle, at least, lights this darkness: Grace has recruited Pastor Rule from her church. If Open Door defectors want a war-mongering Methodist minister, they won’t find him in Northfield.
March twenty-sixth arrives. She practically vibrates in anticipation. She’s never even jaywalked. What if the police haul them away in a paddy wagon? At least it’s too cold to turn fire hoses on marchers—below freezing five days after the official start of spring, the grass still sleeping under snow. Grace rides with four others from her church in their pastor’s car, the young widow Fern Vaske and her son Jeff with Lin and Ron. Harold and Renate Schroeder’s station wagon hauls the For God’s Sake Stop It signs Lin made out of poster board and stapled onto paint stir sticks. Fifty-something Harold teaches history at Carleton and Renate the women’s Bible class at Open Door. They find something positive to say to Ron after each service. He has a sense they feel personally responsible for his morale. Their big smiles and easy laughter cheer Lin, too.
She spends most of the drive twisted around facing the backseat, urging conversation out of Fern, who looks like a little girl in her Christmas-colored stocking cap, and seventeen-year-old Jeff, who has brought a comic book called Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt to keep him company. Lin doesn’t particularly want to chat but she needs to know the women in church better if they’re ever to look on her as Ron’s ministry partner. She’s aware Fern lost her husband to a forklift accident at the bag factory three years ago. Lin asks about her job as a bookkeeper, learns it’s “Okay, nothing special.” Where they live in Faribault is “Fine, nothing special.” Jeff looks up from his comic book long enough to say he guesses school is okay, in response to Lin’s question. Fern becomes more animated when Lin asks why she signed up for the protest, tells how her father lost his legs to a Japanese land mine in Iwo Jima. “He changed after th
at and not for the better,” she says. “I want a different life for Jeff.”
Jeff says, “Gramps will call me a sissy if I don’t enlist when I’m old enough.”
“Better that than crippled or dead,” Fern says.
Few could call Jeff a sissy and get away with it. He can probably lift Lin’s heavy oak desk without emptying the drawers first. His shoulders and arms under a high school football jacket are as big as Eldon Jukes’s were. Would her brother have been as strapping? According to Mother he was barely the length of a ruler when she miscarried him. Lin prayed for his soul when she was a child, prayed for forgiveness. He’s a nineteen-year-old version of Daddy in her mind now, a dark, big-boned vampire bat hanging on her conscience.
Before long they’re in Bloomington, ten miles south of Minneapolis. Both cars stop at a nondescript prefab house. Helen and Carl emerge with signs that say Withdraw Now. Jeff sniggers. Helen says Lin looks like a Russian spy in her heavy tan wool trench coat with epaulets, her sheepskin-lined mittens, fur-lined black boots and black faux fur hat. Lin laughs, says Helen looks like a quilted marshmallow. Carl writes a lawyer’s name and phone number on their bare hands with a pen, says, “If you’re arrested, call him before the cops beat the crap out of you.” He doesn’t look as if he’s joking. Lin swallows back a sharp taste of panic. They wouldn’t beat a woman, would they? The wispy Fern doesn’t look as if she’d last a minute.
Carl and Helen climb into the Schroeders’ station wagon. The three-car convoy parks as close as possible to Pioneer Park in front of the post office. They join hundreds of others slapping gloved hands together—human furnaces puffing out icy smoke, bulky as bears in heavy coats and hats with earflaps, some brandishing Out Now and No More War signs. Lin knows she will cry from happiness if she lets the moment sink into her.
