Читать книгу A River Could Be a Tree - Angela Himsel - Страница 15

Once a month, the bookmobile visited Boone Township School, the three-room brick schoolhouse I attended from third to fifth grades from 1969 to 1972 after we moved to Jasper. Surrounded by fields, a blacktop road wound past the school, and our isolation was broken now and then by a tractor’s hum or a pickup truck rattling along. Although any vehicles were cause for celebration, the green-and-white bookmobile conjured the free-spirited adventurer I dreamed of becoming. On the days the bookmobile came, I was on the edge of my seat waiting for our teacher to say, “The bookmobile is here now. Remember, walk, don’t run!” The row of first-graders, then the row of second-graders, and finally the kids in my third-grade class took turns entering the bookmobile to choose our allotted four books.

It was dim inside and smelled like old paper. Being inside was like actually entering a well-loved, dog-eared book. One of my favorites was a thick book with a picture of a mother and five children on the cover. Back in my classroom, I lifted the wooden desktop and placed the book inside. Then, while my teacher taught the story of King Midas, I quietly raised the desktop and immersed myself in the 1880s and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Undisturbed by the sounds of the teacher and the other children, I spent the afternoon with widowed Mamsie and her brood, who said peculiar things like, “My whockety!”

I made my way through all of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men and Little Women books, as well as Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House in the Big Woods series. In nineteenth-century domestic dramas about families who prevailed despite hardship and loss, the authors drew on their own lives to write their novels and thus were more intimate and honest than the Trixie Belden and Boxcar Children books I’d favored.

In fifth grade, I migrated to the back of the bookmobile, where I discovered the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, and a whole section devoted to the doctor/nurse romances of Cherry Ames and Clara Barton, as well as Donna Parker, special agent. Although I identified with the Peppers because they were poor and their lives were filled with adversity, the romances suggested something completely new: that a girl didn’t have to choose between a career and a boyfriend. She could have both, a notion the church vehemently decried as impossible, even heretical and anti-God’s plan.

For three years, I moved with the same nine classmates from one room to another, from one wooden desk to another. But when I opened a book, I could visit Heidi in Switzerland, share the adventures of the Boxcar Children, or time-travel to nineteenth-century America’s frontier. I was far removed from my sick sister and also from the world that was about to end. I imagined exotic places filled with drama, different in every sense from my taciturn, proud, stubborn, stolid German community who never asked forgiveness and never forgave. They were as uncompromising as the language they still considered their own. In German, the verb was always second in a sentence, there was no way around it, and never try to bend the rules or change them. Obey.

I have often thought that the bookmobile contributed not only to my love of reading and passion to write, but also to my belief that the written word equaled possibilities. Civilization. I was a dreamy ten-year-old, impatient to grow up and board a plane whose wings would lift me far, far away. But for the moment, books would have to do.

When I looked out the school window, I imagined a nebulous future that lay somewhere beyond the fields. I fantasized about being either a librarian or a gypsy on the open road. With my platinum blonde hair, pale skin, and blue eyes, I couldn’t pass for a gypsy, which seemed truly unfair. Yet my gypsy soul might be nurtured by becoming a librarian. I was enamored with the town librarian who, contrary to stereotype, wore short, short skirts and sported poufy, brittle bleached-blonde hair, had talon-like, blood-red fingernails, and whose eyes, lips, and cheeks bore the unmistakable stain of forbidden, harlot-ish makeup. The librarian clearly hadn’t been called by God. At this point, the church’s position on makeup was set forth in another booklet, Truth About Makeup:

. . . the act of painting the face (whether eyes, cheeks, or lips) is falsifying, intended to DECEIVE, an expression of VANITY which is the very basis of all sin, and therefore it becomes, with a plain THUS SAITH THE LORD, a SIN!

What I would be when I grew up and where I would live was, however, probably a moot point. The world was going to end in just a few years, in 1975, and I would not have time to get married, have children, travel, or become an adult. Live a life.

From 1969 to 1972, Abby was homeschooled. She had lain in a hospital bed in the living room much of the time, and my father often had to carry her to the bathroom. She looped her stark, skinny arms around his sun-weathered, strong neck, and he set her down gently in the bathroom, returning to carry her back to bed when she’d finished.

I missed the person she had been, my playmate. Seeing Abby so weak, so ill, was unbearably sad. I often wanted to turn away from her. Looking at her, I felt the same constriction in my chest as when the ministers screamed and shouted about the End Times.

She had to use a wheelchair, and I pushed her around the house, as if I were pushing a small child on a swing. There were more prayer cloths, more anointings, and then, a few months later, she seemed better. Abby was out of the wheelchair, and we baked oatmeal cookies together. Sometimes she ventured outside, a white wraith, and though she was not allowed to run, she sort of chased me, and I ran slowly and let her catch me.

Social workers came over to check on her, and my mother warned us not to answer questions. The social workers asked my mother if Abby had seen a doctor lately, and she said yes, she had, though I didn’t recall Abby having seen a doctor in the past few years. In fact, the talk at home was all about God healing her.

The church’s publication Does God Heal Today? claimed that the medical profession was pagan in origin. Armstrong preached that “Poison plus poison equals poison.” If you had faith and adhered to church doctrine, you would be healed. If you weren’t healed, it indicated a lack of faith or having done something that displeased God and made God vengeful enough to choose not to answer your prayers. Armstrong’s son Richard had died after an automobile accident in the 1950s because he hadn’t received medical care. His wife, too, died because she refused to go to a doctor when she suffered from an obstructed bowel. No one mentioned that faith had not healed either Armstrong’s son or his wife.

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In 1972, it appeared as if our prayers had been answered. Abby was well enough to attend sixth grade with me. Boone Township School had ceased operating, and we transferred to the middle school in Ireland, a few miles away.

In the spring of 1973, Abby joined us mushroom hunting in the woods behind our house. In May, around Abby’s thirteenth birthday, she walked along with us behind the barn and down the path to the mulberry tree, then back into the woods to the creek where we’d built our intricate sand castles, and we checked our brothers’ raccoon and mink traps. Next to me, I could see that Abby was happy, even if she was breathing hard. There was a trace of healthy red in her pale cheeks, and just for a moment, I had a brief glimpse of the girl who’d sat companionably with me, coloring our Disney workbooks.

At my brother Jim’s high school graduation party in June, even our grandparents, looking at Abby, had to admit that a miracle had occurred. Our faith had been rewarded. She’d been healed. This would be the third time God had intervened on our behalf—after Sarah’s birth, and when I’d had pneumonia.

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On the morning of July 2, 1973, our mother took us to town. Mary was attending a drivers’ training class, and Liz, John, Sarah, and I were enrolled in a summer arts and crafts program. Abby was tired. She didn’t want to ride along. She’d been more tired than usual the past few weeks. The heat, we figured. My mother said, “Sugarplum, are you sure you’ll be okay here by yourself?” She muttered yes. My brother Ed, who was sixteen at that time, would be home later in the morning, my mother reassured Abby.

I went into the room Abby now shared with Mary, to borrow her sandals. On their walls were David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman posters that they had pulled out of the centerfold of 16 magazine; a Lee Majors poster hung on the door—every night, Mary and Abby kissed the Six-Million-Dollar Man goodnight. “I’m taking your sandals, okay?” I grabbed them. Abby simply looked at me from the hospital bed. Didn’t respond. Grouchy, I figured.

The summer program was for poor kids, and we played games sometimes, but this particular day, we were learning about the food pyramid and how to cook healthy foods. Popcorn didn’t need to be slathered in butter, and we should have something green on our plate each meal. I felt like the teacher was talking down to us, as if we were not only poor but stupid.

When we returned home in the early afternoon, I bounded into the house after Mary to tell Abby a joke I’d heard at the summer program: “What’s green and red and goes sixty miles an hour?” Answer: “A frog in a blender.”

Mary went in first, put her books on the dresser, then screamed, “Mother! Mother!” Our mother, Liz, John, Sarah, and I rushed into their bedroom. Abby sat in her chair, her head tilted back. Her eyes were wide, the irises rolled up. Her mouth was slightly open. Her hands lay limply on the armrests.

Our mother went straight to the chair, felt for Abby’s pulse, her heartbeat, pressed her hand against Abby’s forehead, and said, “She’s dead.”

“She’s not dead!” Mary kept saying. “Do something, you have to do something!”

“There’s nothing we can do.”

I turned away and went out the door and into the kitchen, such a normal kitchen, dirty plates from breakfast in the sink, towel hanging over a chair, wastebasket half full, wall calendar scribbled with my father’s notes about how much it had rained and the daily temperature. Tupperware container of food scraps for the compost pile. Everything was the way we’d left it, the way it should be. And the clock was ticking. I was mesmerized by the second hand. It was a little after one. It was now seventeen minutes since we’d found Abby, and the second hand simply went ’round and ’round, as if nothing had happened. A normal kitchen, and Abby lay dead in the next room.

My mother called our father at work and, since we shared the same party line with several families on the Portersville Road who, if they picked up their phone quietly, could listen in on whoever was using the phone, pretty soon all of the neighbors had heard the news. My mother called her parents, Grandma Himsel, and the aunts and uncles, and in that same calm voice delivered the news. Sarah, John, and Liz sat together on the couch, sometimes crying, then silent. Ed came home—he’d been back for lunch before going to the woods to set his traps, and had checked on Abby then. “She was okay when I left, I gave her some Sprite. She seemed okay,” he repeated. “What happened?”

“We don’t know these things,” our mother said. “God doesn’t always tell us.” This had long been my mother’s standard answer for anything we didn’t understand, from where the angels lived to why people die. Of course, even I knew that God didn’t need to inform us of His plans, but I thought Abby had been healed. I thought it was cruel of God to trick us into believing.

It all seemed removed from me as if I had stepped into some strange world in which I knew the characters and heard and understood exactly what they were saying, but in which I was not at all a part. I felt like we were stumbling around, trying to figure out this new, senseless landscape, which couldn’t possibly be.

I went upstairs, lay across the bed, opened a book, and read. The sun streamed in through the curtainless windows. The heat felt harsh yet comforting against my face and bare legs. I was not going back downstairs. I would stay in bed, alone and quiet with my book, until it was all over.

Books had long had the power to transport me, connect me to the past, to others, and enable me to travel freely across the boundaries of time and space. Books both opened a window into other worlds beyond the cornfields and allowed me to retreat within myself and block out the world: Abby, in a wheelchair or lying in her hospital bed, a frail, pale shadow of the girl who had sat with me in the backyard and wove necklaces and bracelets of clover with me. Who had pretended to be Batman, a white cloth diaper safety-pinned around her neck, jumping fearlessly from the top step of the porch. And now, Abby, downstairs. Dead. And I read.

An hour later, I heard my father’s broken, “Oh, no! Oh, no!”

The sun waned. The commotion below quieted. I decided to go back downstairs. Weeping, my father held Abby’s thin body in his arms on the couch. His sobs shook her so that her arms dropped and dangled. The ambulance arrived. The sober-faced young medic tried to get my father to release Abby to him. He couldn’t let go. Then the funeral director himself sat on the couch with my father and spoke to him quietly in German, his mother tongue, the tongue of his ancestors, of his home and his childhood. It calmed him. Reached him. Finally, and painfully, as if he were giving up a part of himself, my father allowed them to take Abby from his arms.

In Abby’s room, her jewelry box remained on the dresser. The game of Parcheesi that we loved to play was still on the closet shelf, along with the Dating Game and the creepy-crawly bugs kit and the Easy-Bake Oven. On her chair lay Little Women. It was as if she’d walked out the door, leaving her things behind, never to return, as if Jesus had picked her up in the middle of the day and carted her off. And we’d been left behind.

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