Читать книгу Triptych - April Vinding - Страница 7

Surrounded for miles by cornfields and woodlands, the farm was a worn spot in a pair of old jeans. Dusty and threadbare in the center—where gravel showed through like the knee-skin of the earth—the house, barn, and garden were stitched around the grass fringes under the crisp and stacked Minnesota sky. The mile-long driveway spooled from the square seam of the county roads to the house: a piece of worn 70s embroidery, the best efforts of a 23-year-old farm wife to craft style from hand-me-downs and a little colored thread. The barn, corrugated steel with button ventilation chimneys, sat outside the homemade curtains and past the yard and its rusting and prized swing set. The garden, a calico quilt square, laid in leafy stitches on the bottom side of the gravel scuff, a never-ending sampler.

Corn and soybeans in the fields, foxtails and wild grapevines in the ditches, the wind making everything wave just a little, the sun and the sky making smells: this place is the first home I remember.

The farm was tired, but the little family in it, mine, marched to the blooming of tomato plants and the drying of the tasseled corn. The fields were our calendar, marking days and seasons as they checkered the land, and the farm itself our timepiece, the round face of hours circling barn, garden, home. And as much as it’s been said before, it was true. This place was my first world: the canvas and the blank staff, the open book, the unrecited chant. It was, as Eliot says, the place we start from.

My father, slim and brown, his loose hair wavy and faded like his jeans, roamed the hazy light of the barn in the early mornings. In his spattered Red Wing work boots and Pioneer cap, he moved though the rows of sow stalls under the low ceiling, hot when the afternoons were hot and stoic when it was cold. A red paisley handkerchief hung out his back pocket for wiping his hands and glasses, the square brunette plastic of the 70s, and a pair of work gloves flopped from his right jacket pocket. If you caught him in the late afternoon in the dusty air of the barn, standing in the corridor of hay and rust-colored gates, it was hard to find him, to pick him out. Not because, like some men, his work suited him so well, but because he blended in with the light. Maybe it was simply he was as dusty as the air around him, but looking for him I always had to start down low, let my eyes run across the straw-scattered floor, and find his shoes: brown, scuffed, solid. Then, there he’d be, looking back at me, some kind of far-off question in his eyes.

I always had to search to find my father. In the barn in my elastic-waisted jeans or at church in a cotton floral dress and patent leather shoes, it wasn’t hard for me to see him, but it was always the seeing of watching. Watching him stand in a brown suit by the carpeted stairs of the sanctuary and nod in conversation with a few of the men, the deacons, his brows furrowed over marble-blue eyes. Or watching him jog over to help Mrs. Mattson carry a great dish of foil-covered casserole across the leafy parking lot.

My mother, I didn’t watch; her presence more like a smell than an image, an aroma to live in, she was the given, burlap warp to my weaving, shuttling weft. We’ve always looked so much alike—small-framed, large-eyed, with slender Welsh noses and small busy hands—people recognize me instantly as ‘one of Diane’s girls.’ My mother and I look and sound the same, but I am a daughter with her father’s substance. Even from the time I was young, barely to his knees, Dad and I have swung out from my mother’s quiet cord looking at each other past her fibers, our shared complement.

It may sound demeaning, giving my mother the substance of essence, only the weight of an anchor. But in it she’s blessed. Because she’s never been a symbol. Her chestnut hair and light coffee alto have always only stood for her: Mom, Diane. My father and I have had the great struggle of being to each other symbols. And so it is, we’ve watched. I watched because it suited me and because it answered me; they said in church God was like a father, so I had every reason for watching mine.

I watched especially at the beginnings and ends of days, the spaces where he had to cross boundaries, the moments between roles. From the wobbly dining room table, behind plastic cups and slick paintbrush, I would stop swinging my legs and try to see the slice between provider, father—what he was when he wasn’t supposed to be anything. This, I thought, the moment between gears, was the place to find the tenor of identity. A difference or a habit, when none was required, would show me the motor behind action, the vision that framed decision. From before I was old enough to think it, I believed this was the place to test where father linked to Father.

At the end of each day on the farm, when afternoon errands and chores were finished, my parents would meet each other in the kitchen, each empty-handed. Mom would raise her heels off the scuffed linoleum, and I would watch my father lean his neck down and their thin lips would touch. They always kissed with their eyes open: hers quiet but wide like they’d met too many flashes in the dark, his squinting like he’d spent his life examining the sun. I’ve always known my eyes, older, would be split between them: externally, large and round like Mom’s, internally, ground and sharpened by hard light.

My parents never lingered or rushed, but ended their kisses with the snap of their lips separating, a click like a latch rejoining. Then she would go back to stirring a bubbling skillet and he would walk into the house to clean up, both of us watching him go, while I puzzled out which pieces of life were which father’s choice. Even in my small mind, marking out the territories of love and duty.

The honey-paneled room is bright, Sunday morning sunshine tapping through the glass block of the high basement windows. Rows of folding chairs face the long wall and in the far corner, on the edge of the kitchen serving window, an old aluminum percolator puffs and steams next to a stack of Styrofoam cups and a cut-glass sugar dish. The room is bright and full in the way only children’s voices can redeem a tired, yellowed space.

Jesus wants me for a sun-beam, to shine for him each day,

In ev’ry way try to please him, at home, at school, at play.

A sun-beam, a sun-beam, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,

A sun-beam, a sun-beam, I’ll be a sunbeam for him.

In the front row stands a familiar little girl, her eyes like a swirl of blue and brown paint on a palette or a photograph of blooming nebula deep in the fecundity of space. Her cheeks are like apricots, round and still soft with baby fuzz and her brown hair bobs around her cheeks and brows like a cap. She sings with her mouth wide open, her nose pressing up as her throat opens for the high notes. She’s like the smallest bird in a forest singing simply because birds sing.

Jesus wants me to be lov-ing, and kind to all I see,

Showing how pleasant and happ-y, his little ones can be.

She looks around as she sings, her arms at her sides, her gaze touching the posters of Bible stories on the walls. Jonah and the whale, David and Goliath, Jesus with loaves and fishes. They all look like coloring book pages with the black outlines filled in flat colors. There are no shades on anything and Jesus and Peter, and the three women at the tomb, stand facing each other like simple facts, without backgrounds or context. The little girl knows all these stories by heart.

I’ll be a sunbeam for Je-sus, I can if I just try,

Serving him moment by mom-ent, then live with him on high.

A sun-beam, a sun-beam, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,

A sun-beam, a sun-beam, I’ll be a sunbeam for him.

A woman in a flowered skirt asks the children to sit and the little girl climbs on her chair. It makes her hands smell like pennies. Her dress sticks out from her knees as she waves her ankles. She’s always been small for her age, surprising women and old farmers in the grocery store when she speaks to them in full sentences. The woman in the flowered skirt sits next to an empty board propped on a chair and covered with olive flannel. She picks up a paper cutout and sticks it to the middle of the board.

“Who can tell me what this is?” she asks the children.

“Lion!” “A lion!”

“Has anyone ever seen a lion?” she asks, looking back and forth to meet the eyes of the older children in the back rows and the younger ones in front. Several shake their heads. “Well, today we’re going to learn the story of Daniel, a man who had to spend the night with a bunch of lions. Joshua, sit down in your chair.”

“But I can’t see.”

“Then come sit in the front on the floor here.” Joshua, a young boy in a striped shirt, brown pants, and blonde crew cut runs around the outside to sit on the floor.

“Daniel,” the woman in the flowered skirt says as she takes down the lion and puts up a picture of a man with a beard and long blue robe and sandals, “lived in a city called Babylon and worked for the king.” The little girl looks at the man on the flannel board carefully, her eyebrows crinkled as she listens. “The king’s name was Darius—can you all say ‘Darius’?” The little girl mouths the word. The woman smooths a cutout of a man with a crown onto the flannel.

“Good,” the woman in the flowered skirt continues. “Well, Daniel worked very hard for King Darius and the king put him in charge of the whole kingdom.” She reaches to the floor and picks up a cutout of a gold sash with colored stones in it and places it across Daniel’s shoulders. The cutout slips and flutters to the floor. She picks it up and holds it between her fingers and looks out at the children: “But, the other men working for the king were jealous of Daniel.” The little girl fixes her round eyes on the new cutout of a group of three men.

“The men convinced King Darius to pass a law saying no one could pray to anyone other than the king for a month. But three times every day, Daniel went up to his bedroom and prayed to God, just as he was supposed to. The other men went and told the king. King Darius was very sad because Daniel was his friend, but the other men insisted he had to be punished because of the law. So that night, Daniel was put in with the lions.” She pauses. The woman removes everything from the board but Daniel and puts cutouts of lions all around him. Close enough they could touch. The little girl frowns at the flannel board.

“But, Daniel prayed to God and God sent an angel to close the lion’s mouths.” The woman puts up a picture of an angel, tall and blonde with big white wings and a sword at its side, beside Daniel. “When the king came back the next morning, he found Daniel safe and sound.” She removes the lions and puts the king next to Daniel then smooths the gold, jeweled sash over Daniel’s shoulders again. The little girl stares at the cutouts on the board, at Daniel and his sash, as she listens. The woman puts both her hands in her lap and looks again at the children. “Daniel was faithful to God, even when it was hard. He obeyed God’s word, did his duty, and God showed his love to Daniel by giving him protection.”

A shuffling begins above the children’s heads and the brush of conversation scuffles down the stairs. The service is finished and the adults—farmers, feed vendors, the owner of the A&W, and their wives—are chatting and moving toward the basement. The children begin to shift in the metal chairs. The percolator pops and the top rattles. The little girl keeps looking at Daniel, her mouth open like a hungry bird. The children get up to find their parents and the woman in the flowered skirt gathers the cutouts from the floor. As she bends to pick them up, Daniel’s sash flutters down again.

The little girl’s mother comes to pick her up and the men begin folding the chairs and leaning them against the wall as the women peel plastic wrap from trays of frosted and unfrosted zucchini bread.

“Hi, Sweetie—should we go get Megan and Mindy from the nursery?” Her mother’s voice is quiet and young like she’d only begun using it recently.

The little girl turns around and climbs backward off the chair. Her mother picks her up under her shoulders and lifts her to her hip. They walk toward the upstairs nursery to get the little girl’s sisters. “What did you learn in Sunday school today, Sweetheart?”

Faithful: love, protection.

We lived in the country, God’s country, where Bible Belt and Bread Basket were not demographic or economic but theological. Bread, yeasty and rising, its belly stretching in the bowl, came from hands I knew: seed to soil to a green Tupperware measuring cup and a glass bowl on a familiar cream countertop. The smooth black belt in a deacon’s jeans or parched leather on his Bible came from helping cattle birth on New Year’s and chasing cows from a frozen pond that Thursday in February. Things beyond the grasp of calloused fingers were in God’s hands, and there was no in-between because no one else was involved. Provisions were evidence of hard work and Provision. Like heredity, a difficult but direct simplicity. Sometimes it took a while to parse out where the responsibility lay, but, in the end, there were only two choices.

Every day on the farm, Dad came in to have lunch. He’d wash up to his elbows and we’d all sit up to the table by a streak of sunlight piled on the floor glowing through the yellow gingham curtains. He’d pray, or we’d say “God is great, God is good, and we thank him for our food. A-men” and Megan and Mindy, with their fine hair and liquid eyes, would get to “Amen” a beat behind. We’d eat apples and pickles and sandwiches with Mom’s garden tomatoes. Every day, Mom asked Dad what he wanted to drink; every day he said milk. After we ate, Mom laid Meg and Mindy down for naps and Dad would sit in the battered recliner and stretch out his legs. The brown and avocado chair leaked a pouf of dust into the slanting sunlight when he sat, and I’d play Tinker Toys or Lincoln Logs on the carpet while Mom went back in the kitchen to start supper, both of us feeling more secure knowing he was close. Dad would start snoring, narrowly though his Danish nose. The stroganoff would bubble and then we’d hear him: “Shoot.” He’d take off his glasses and rub his eyes, crank the leg rest back, and mumble another “shoot,” cursing himself for wasting time.

One sunny afternoon while the hotdish bubbled and Dad was gone on errands, Mom took Megan, Mindy, and me out to harvest green beans. Well into motherhood by 23, she used the rhythm of her work—the garden, the house, us girls—as a ladder for climbing out of abuse. She’d left Cedar Rapids for college to escape the alcohol on her father’s breath and never moved back. Now, through motherhood and witness of my dad’s childhood homestead down the road, she was learning what it could be like to have a family. Each task, learning to can vegetables, sewing us dresses, bringing rhubarb crisp for church fellowship, was a rung toward normalcy, another proof there were things you could stand on.

This afternoon, she tied a kerchief behind her ears and, surrounded by tall sweet corn stalks, wandering cucumber vines, and curling bean bushes, she kneeled on the soil and first pulled weeds. She bent into tendriled bushes, her brown eyes bright under the red kerchief. Megan and Mindy toddled in their pink overall corduroys, and I explored the towering cornstalks, bringing leaves and rocks for them to play with in their grassy camp.

I bopped between standing over their bonneted heads to boss their play and squatting my elfin body next to Mom’s nymphish frame. She showed me where to snap the juicy necks of the beans, right under their hats, and I listened to the crack of the fuzzy pods as the juice sprinkled my fingers.

When our bushel basket was almost half-full, Mom flexed her back, fingers draped over her hip, and looked up to shoo a fly. Past her hand she saw a white wall, blanking the landscape, swallowing the trees and phone poles.

She dropped her handful of beans, hefted the basket to her hip and scuttled us to the basement. She sat at the top of the stairs with the phone cord stretched from the kitchen, catching Dad at some register counter or in the FHA office negotiating payments. By the time she had told him what she’d seen, the storm churned like a titan tiller. She hung up when they lost connection, then started us on puzzles while we waited in the gloom.

When it was quiet, we went upstairs and outside. The ground was white. I stepped off the deck and started collecting ice balls in my play teapot and asked if we could keep them. Mindy started crying because she was afraid the kitties weren’t safe. Mom took us back inside and we put my filled teapot in the freezer and sat at the kitchen table stringing the beans. The sun came back out, brighter through the oak branches than at lunch. The trees in a seven mile stretch were stripped. The corn crop beyond them stood three inches high.

That night Dad brought roses, three for Mom and one for each of us girls, like there was something to make up for, either on God’s behalf or his.

“In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.” My grandfather’s voice begins the familiar story, its tenor timbre the same whether asking for the gravy, telling his sons where to plant, or reading from a columned Bible on his knees. A loose violin string, on the rim of squeaking, his voice is a bending thing. It comes out his lips as if trying to avoid touching his tongue.

“So Joseph went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.”

Grandpa reads the story from an armchair in the farmhouse living room, the long horizontal space between the floor and ceiling lit with the ivory pools of lamps. He is the patriarch in his home: behind him, generations of the faithful, before him, his family. His wife perches on the blonde stone of the hearth, gazing at her usually-busy hands. He reads an important part of the story: genealogy—important because your ancestors say something about the danger and power that live in you. The room rolls out before him with the colored lights on the tree silently blinking off the tinsel. His round belly pushes the Bible to the end of his lap, his head squarish from the missing hair on top and graying stripes on his temples, and his feet awkward and naked in plain stockings on the flat carpet.

“Joseph went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son . . .”

Dotted across the room, his children are surrounded by their children. The new babies, Adam and Andrea, balanced on crooked forearms, the burst of toddlers, Mandy, Megan, Mindy and Sara, lit on dads’ knees, and the two firsts, Jeremy and me, cross-legged on the floor, all of us grandchildren in candy-colored pajamas, the white vinyl soles and toe caps wiggling as we fidget, the zippers snaking from ankle to collarbone, elastic scratching on our wrists.

“And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks by night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shown around them, and they were terrified . . .”

We always read about the shepherds—never the gospel with the wise men—because here, surrounded by fields and stars and animals, the shepherds are kin: someone run out to do the chores between supper and presents, someone doing the Christmas milking late after the kids are tucked away on floors and piled in beds together—they are people with no reason to lie, the context of their lives so commonplace that had they imagined the story, there would be no angels or singing, no new stars. To people like this, simply a bountiful crop was miracle enough, proof of abundant love; a leveling of nature was the sign of shirked duty, the result of disobedience or an unworthy sacrifice.

“When the angels left them and had gone into heaven, the shepherds hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in a manger. When they had seen him, they returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.”

Grandpa shuts the Bible and puts it on the table beside him. His unaltered voice turns toward his sons and son-in-law, “Boys, time for the chores?”

The men excuse themselves, out to be with their flocks by night, covering in dirty jackets and boots. The women move to do the dishes, divvying leftovers for all the households and putting bones and scraps in an ice cream pail for the farm dogs. We cousins occupy ourselves. Someone starts the coffeepot and I skip around the living room chanting a new song:

Just as they’d been told.

Just as they’d been told.

And they found it all—

just as they’d been told.

In half an hour the men come back, the chores quicker with four sets of hands, knocking snow off their boots and wiping their steamed glasses. Grandpa is still out—finishing some last task. The adults pour coffee and duck into the bathroom to change diapers. Then, Uncle Jeff stops everyone, Grandma in mid-wipe with the flour sack towel dangling from a casserole dish, we cousins weaving through legs and crawling around the floors: “Listen! I think I hear the sleigh bells.”

Six little heads swivel and listen. Jeff points, his wavy hair tan like Dad’s: “Maybe out the window!” Six small bodies clamber onto the couch and invade the curtains. Dark. Snow. The line of pine trees black against the far gravel road, the space in between empty like the sea at night. Dad calls, winking at Jeff, “I think I hear them too—better check the bedroom.” We jump and tumble through the living room, Sara’s foot gets smashed, she wails, we stomp and batter back to the bedroom. While we’re away someone thumps on the hallway wall. “The roof! That must be the reindeer!” Frothed and vibrating like atoms waiting to be split, our arms and legs are stiff with adrenaline, little fists balled at the ends of our now-too-warm pajamas.

The door smacks. “ho, ho, Hooooo!” Squealing, bumping. “Are there any kids in here or have they all gone to bed?” We scream in response and careen like water bugs, knotting up in ourselves. Father Christmas clomps through the kitchen with his pillowcase bag over his shoulder. He steps into the living room where we are wide-eyed and humming. We’ve been good and we’re desperate for the affirmation.

A few minutes after Santa leaves, Grandpa stomps back in, buzzing his lips and shaking his hair. “Sorry I took so long!”

We burst between the wrapped boxes and run to the kitchen shouting. “Santa came!” “He brought me a present!” “He was fat for the chimney, Papa!” “Santa came!”

“Oh, I’m sorry I missed him. Maybe I’ll get to see him next year.” Grandpa smiles over his thin teeth. We surge back into the living room and settle in our family clusters, the adults on chairs and couches, we cousins on the floor, the moms on the edges of cushions, ready to help with tape or ribbons.

Grandpa settles back in his armchair, a mug of coffee on the table next to him, and watches his brood: his wife, his sons, his daughters, his daughters-in-law, his son-in-law, his grandsons, his granddaughters. Sits back, the father, the giver of gifts, and watches over.

That spring, Megan and Mindy were in the barn when the pigs got out. A fence latch supernaturally slipped, or wasn’t shut tightly enough, and the hundred-pound sows surged from the pens, rioting and shrieking.

Dad shoved through them, his calves crushed between heaving bellies. Mindy yelled, “Daddy! Daddy!” her arms outstretched, while Megan’s eyes welled under her bonnet, panic freezing her elbows rigid.

He had brought them to the barn, something unusual—had taken them out to be with him. Whether it was an action of love to be near his daughters or a necessary duty to help Mom now that Grandma had moved out of town, I don’t know.

Grandma and Grandpa had moved off their farm, after years of losing money, when Grandpa found a bank for sale in Rockford and decided to gamble on a new life. Though the bank was in a town of only 2,500 and Grandpa was learning the trade hands on, business was going well. He had no trouble relating to the farmer clientele, and everyone needed loans. My parents included. To try to make ends meet, they’d bought a second farm to rent out. But that wasn’t enough. Eventually, Dad started selling insurance from a desk in the bank lobby 50 miles away. Several days a week, he would get up in the mornings, haul feed and clean a couple stalls, then walk back to the house to shower and put on his brown suit and tie in time to be in the boardroom by 8:30. The days in between were crowded, hectic, and it may have been easier to overlook details like pen latches.

When Dad reached Meg and Mindy, their fists clenched his jacket and he scooped them up in his arms like lambs. They clung to him as he wrenched his legs through the churning sea of pigs. He’d left them standing on a low ledge when he’d brought them to the barn, a precarious place for three-year-olds—a corner above a concrete floor. The danger of the height had kept them from being crushed.

Dad left the livestock spurting from the pens and brought Megan and Mindy to the house. Mom was excavating the cupboards for her canning supplies, preparing to stretch the garden produce as far into the winter as possible. Meg and Mindy ran for her when Dad set them down. “Call Jeff and have him come fast as he can,” he said. “The pigs are out.” Megan and Mindy were stunned. I stood in the living room and watched Dad rush back out to the barn.

By the time the hog-flood was dammed, Mom had no use for her Mason jars and six piglets had been trampled. It was clear something important had been protected, but things had also been lost. No one was ungrateful, but in the choice between hard work and Provision, it wasn’t clear to me who had failed.

One clouded, fall afternoon I crouched at the backyard stump overturning wet wood dust to find dry underneath. Meg and Mindy were inside with Mom and I had bounded out to the stump in my spring jacket, exhilarated by the blue nylon hood gathered around my face and the cool air on my cheeks. I liked being alone, with no big sister responsibilities, free to touch and absorb the world rather than to give and interpret.

As I wondered at the airy sawdust just below the springy wet surface, Dad walked across the yard from the barn, his face a tanned triangle under his green hat. I was surprised when he stopped in the yard. I saw him often enough: he spent most of his days just feet from the house where we girls did crafts and made cookies, but he worked with the pigs or tractors alone. We only interacted on my ground—in the kitchen, at bedtime in my room, or over dinner—never on his. We shared atmosphere but not space, like two lions naturally distant from each other precisely because we were the same species.

When he came close, he asked if I wanted to swing. I nodded and ran across the yard with my fingers in fists and my arms swishing against the coat, the lining crinkling in my ears. I wrapped dimpled fingers around the cool chains and Dad stood close and gave me a push. He smelled like pigs and dust. On the backswing he grabbed the chains and ran alongside while he pushed, then he thrust his arms up and let me go in the sky.

After a couple flights, he slowed me down and my feet skidded on the dirt under the swing, my toes wiping the soil crumbles back and forth as the seat swayed. He squinted up at the sky and watched a line of geese flash over the yard, arrow across the field, and sail toward the distant trees. I watched him look at the birds. He looked back down from the sky, his eyes still squinted at the corners: “What do you say we walk to the woods? See what’s out there?”

The woods were behind the house, a crease in the rippling fields, locked in by acres of worked land. The only way to them was to walk over the fields. I was not allowed near the field that bordered the yard, but at harvest time, yellow cornstalks flew from the combine into the grass and became my brooms and magic wands. I played with them around my stump, knocking the stalks against its sides and tracing the tangled grooves in its weathered flank with tips of leaves. I nodded and we started across the grass, his crusted boots and my pink tennies.

I kicked the leaves as we walked and spattered my shoes with the leftover rainwater locking the leaves together. The field ahead of us was grooved like God had raked it. At the edge of the yard, tufts of seeded grass perforated the line between, marking the boundary. Dad stepped cleanly over them and the seeds caught on my corduroys. When we stepped into the field, my knees pumped and lifted up and down the waves of soil while Dad’s boots skimmed the ridges. Uncle Jeff had come to help with what small harvest there was and all the fields around the house were quiet, waiting for the snow.

Another angle of geese called above us. The house and yard looked like a framed picture from this side, a small protected image. I walked up and down, crusty broken stalks bumping my shins and ankles, holding Dad’s hand under the open sky. We walked slowly over the stubbled field, a moving wisp breaking the lines on the earth that marked tasks to their places.

When we reached the edge of the fields, Dad lifted me and I put my arms around his neck. My toes bumped against the work gloves in his pockets and the trees ahead held up the clouds like the beautiful, heavy nests of hawks. Soon we stood on the edge of a brook, Dad’s boots washed clean of the manure, my hands empty of swing chains or dolls. We could go see the trees, walk through the woods and pick up stones or walnut husks. He could step across the creek and we could see where the geese flew when they left the parks and lawns, what they did when they didn’t have to find food and protect a place for their chicks to sleep.

Dad looked out into the woods, his hand reaching out to snap the hollow stem of a cattail before we crossed. He handed me the cattail and I held it heavy in my fist. The outside was soft and dense with velvet. He lifted his heel to cross the gurgling water and said, “We should take some treasures home to show Mom and Megan and Mindy. They’ll be sorry they couldn’t come with us.” He smiled, his lips thin like Grandpa’s, his eyes blue like mine.

But when he looked back over the creek to see where we were going, he paused. He squinted at a small red square floating against the cluttered branches at the edge of the trees. I tried to find what he was reading, but only saw a spot of red. I couldn’t read the words, but the sign was clear. We shouldn’t cross the brook; it was time to go back home.

Dad talked to the trees as we both looked past the brook. “Maybe I should get back to the new piglets—and we wouldn’t want to scare the geese away from their nests.”

When we stepped back into the yard, Dad set me down and I went back to the swing set to push down the slide. Back in my yard I felt safe and adventuresome, protected by the house and the aspen fluttering over the slide, with the cattail as a new prize to add to my kingdom. I laid it down on the end of the dimpled slide and Dad pushed me again on the swing.

Soon, he had to go back to the barn. He thanked me for going on a walk with him and gave me a kiss on my cool cheek. Then he slipped his work gloves back over his hands. He walked back to the barn, his head up, angled toward the edges of the grass and field and brook. His brows were folded, but I couldn’t see what his eyes were focused on. As he crossed back to the gravel of the barnyard, a line of geese called overhead. I looked up at them and suddenly felt confused, not sure if I was happy to be in the square of my yard or not, not sure if I was happy to have left it. Dad watched the geese fly into the woods before walking through the door of the barn; I went over to crouch by my stump, hungry for rippling places with centers, heavy with so many lines.

By fall Dad was driving to the bank nearly every day. The crops weren’t making enough money and, even though he had found a buyer for the second farm and was selling a few hogs each month, FHA started sending demand notes. The land he’d planted was pulling away.

When he’d left the farm for the first time, pulling himself away, Dad had gone into the city to college, looking deep into the words he’d grown up with, leaving home to discern if God was calling him into a pastor’s ministry. He tried to find God’s voice in schooling, but after hints and leadings, there had been no voice from heaven, no fatherly affirmation of a gift held up in open hands. So he went back to the land.

On autumn afternoons in the combine, rolling over the soil shabby and spent, he could have wondered why. Wondered if harvests of grain were his highest entrustment, the task for which God thought him worthy. But on spring days—the land snapped out black and ready, the trees whole again in glossy sun—Dad sat alone in the high cab of the planter and, feeling the space warm in the rays from the sky and waves from the land, could have believed God had guided him to the place he could be most fulfilled. Could have believed he’d been brought back to the land of his fathers to raise his girls and love his wife, to work out a hard but simple living in the landscape of heritage. Could believe that, like the shepherding of Moses and David, the wandering of Elijah, God could use the land to shape and fill a man.

But prophecies came by envelope and soon it was clear even this might be taken. Dad heard FHA was anxious enough they were accepting proposals. So, he walked into the county office and prayed they would accept his: whatever I can sell my farm for is yours. They took it.

When he came home, I couldn’t see his face—the line of his lips or his squinting eyes, which would be ridiculous, now, with no distance around them, fixed in the wrong frame of vision. We would move to town; Dad would wear a suit. I wished for the bone of my stump and the flank of the yard, thought about the woods and the sound of the geese. Dad cleaned the fodder off his boots and set them in the square closet between his dress shoes and my pink Kangaroos, something else put away.

The night before we moved, Meg, Mindy, and I jumped on Mom and Dad’s mattress in the living room, Meg’s self-trimmed hair flopping jagged and lopsided, and Dad put the last box by the door. We’d already eaten supper and packed away the dishes, and our Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite sleeping bags were laid out in the bedroom. The only other things in the house were five toothbrushes, the couch, Mom’s contact case and the record player. Dad came in, surveyed the empty kitchen, and walked into the living room. As he squatted next to the record player his knees cracked like they did when he walked down the stairs. He slid a slip of vinyl from its cardboard sheaf and parchment wrapper and placed it on the turntable. The record started spinning and he picked up the needle, blew the dust off, and cradled it between the grooves.

The needle crackled, laying down the snaps, and Billy Joel began crooning “The Longest Time.” Turned away from us, I could see Dad’s shoulders sink into the yearning, then his decision to climb up the harmony to be where we were. “Want to dance, girls?”

Meg and Mindy, full of an innocence he was being asked to farewell yet again, ran up and threw their arms around him. He waddled around the living room with a pair of little feet on each shoe. Mom came from vacuuming upstairs to watch, her eyes a thread of assurance that happiness can go on.

When Dad started slowing, Mom asked Meg and Mindy to dance with her. They ran over and she spun them in ballet twirls. Dad scooped me off the mattress. My toes bumped the wallet in his pocket. We started dancing with my legs swinging.

We could both do the yearning, though I couldn’t yet say what it was for: a voice in the hall, unwritten music, the fact of miracles and mutual need even without demonstration of their fulfillment. There was nothing I could do for him, and I knew it. But he knew it too.

Dad and I danced until the end of the song and Meg and Mindy twirled themselves dizzy. At the end, Dad set my feet back on the carpet and went to stop the spinning record. Mindy, in a smiling heap on the floor, drunk on vertigo, her cheeks and nose crimson and her eyes wide and glassy shouted, “Again!” Megan and I joined her, jumping from the floor to the mattress and back, the word bouncing and dipping with us, springs in our stomachs and throats. “a-Gain, A-gain, a-Gain, A-gain, a-gAin!” Dad bent, his knees cracking, and moved the needle back. Mom walked toward the couch and saved them both: “Why don’t you girls dance? Dad and I will watch.”

The music started and all three of us began whirling, necks stretched back, palms up, the dingy speckled ceiling flopping, mixing, swirling as we spun faster, faster. Everything shifting from liquid back to solid as we thumped to the floor, our brains smudging the room back to place.

We sped up on the bridges, the bouncing valves of the background vocals filling our ears with the sound of our eyes. Mom and Dad flopped on the couch and Dad picked up his feathered Bible to make room. This morning he’d been up before everyone and had left it on the couch where he’d done his usual reading. Billy Joel wondered about the boundaries of hope and the virtue of being too far gone to turn back.

Mom and I watched Megan and Mindy smash into each other and spring exactly backwards, two little bodies, one blonde, one brunette, flinging off each other like reflections, their bottoms planted, their feet sprawled straight out facing each other. Mom watched for the quiver of tears. They giggled and turned opposite directions to crawl back up. I looked to see Dad smile at them and caught him with one hand still on his Bible, placing it aside. The burgundy paper cover had gold letters: Serendipity Study Bible. For groups and lay leaders. I caught him lingering over it.

The voice in the air put aside consequences, declared willingness to be a fool, and told everyone listening that what happened next came of his want and his intention. Dad turned to give Mom a kiss, his eyes intent as the record spun.

On the left side of the sanctuary, on the outside edge of the light, I can see myself as a little girl sitting beside her mother. The little girl’s fingers touch the cover of a hymnal, feeling the painted red bookcloth to the edge of the embossed gold letters. The copperplate capitals have sharp cliff edges and flat smoothed valleys. Her finger settles in the valley and strokes the cool center of the t. It’s like the cross on the front wall of the room, above the sunken basin used for baptisms the children walk in dry after Sunday morning service as they jump around the stage steps and hide under the choir chairs.

The sanctuary smells like old hymnals, their edges faded to pink and daubed with inexplicable water spots, the pages cream and knit with the aroma of attics and tape. The congregation tonight is wide and shallow in the varnished pews. The ceiling is low and unspectacular, the carpet and pew cushions scratchy with yellow and green flecks. The back of the church is dark, only the front row of lights is on. In true Protestant fashion, everything here is electrical, practical: there’s no candlelight or arched stone—the dark windows are clear paned glass that opens, in the light, to let the summer breezes in for coolness more than atmosphere.

A man with white hair and glasses is talking at the front of the church, in front of a music stand, with the raised pulpit darkened behind him. The little girl knows he’s a missionary. She’s here alone with her mother, who wanted to hear the man. She’s the only child in the room, her mother like a sort of sister, the next youngest in the group of white hair, pleated skirts, and pinstriped overalls. The man speaking uses no microphone. He’s come from China and will go back there to keep working on translation.

I see the little girl listen, nested in the seat, her sitting body the same size as the angle of the pew. Two ls resting exactly in each other. The wood of the pew hurts her back, but she doesn’t fidget, she’s listening. And thinking.

The man speaks about love and protection. He uses the words ‘heaven’ and ‘Father’ and ‘darkness’ and ‘hell.’ But ‘hell’ with a sadness of loss—his voice lowers as he says it—the way people speak of a child or a friend who has not just left but cut ties and run away, not from any building or person called home, but from the place inside themselves that recognizes it.

Small as she is, the little girl can recognize this kind of hurt. It shocks me to see her see it. She thinks it sounds like birds at night. Loons and geese and the loneliness of flight in a dark sky. I know now she’ll feel it every time she finds herself in an airplane at night, moon or none, and will wonder at how very close it is to peace, how there could be such a small distance between the deepest kind of good and the unbottomed hollow.

Though she doesn’t think this in the church pew, she senses the feather of dark around the back of the sanctuary and the black pressed hard on the window glass. She knows there are two kinds of boundaries—not just between right and wrong—but in all reasons why. She wants them all to be window panes, solid and clear, with the simplicity of being either outside or in. She wants love to be recognizable by noise, to buzz or hum, or duty to give off a smell, like clean porcelain sinks or animals. She wants to know who loves her.

In the church, the white-haired man asks if anyone would like to come to the front. This is an action, a clear separation as easy to read as a window being open or closed. The little girl is scared of hell, but mostly she craves the clarity, somehow wants her body to mark an absolute. She turns to her mother and says, quietly, “I want to go up there.”

The mother’s heart turns over in her chest. She takes the little girl by the hand and they walk up the side aisle, up the stage steps and into a shadowed corner. There’s a shuffling at the front of the church as someone goes to find something: they weren’t expecting children. The white-haired man talks to the little girl. He has glasses and a square sort of face with baggy cheeks like a grandfather who always has a book. Someone brings a small pamphlet, the best they could do: a tract with cartoon people drawn in it. The little girl looks at the people in the pamphlet in their balloony red and blue clothes and at the black-lettered words around them. She smells the flat walked-on carpet.

She listens, and she thinks.

She’s heard people talk about what it feels like to do this: light, like the moment at the top arc of a pushed swing. She wonders if doing it will help her see why there are storms. Or why Dad brings flowers or stops for signs—because he wants to or because he should. It’s important to her to know which.

The little girl breathes through her nose and feels the man’s warm hand on her small shoulder. After he finishes talking, she wraps her fingers around each other, closes her eyes and tilts her head. She doesn’t feel anything, no swinging, or hear anything, not a hum, so she figures all this must have to do with what you see. With her small nose almost touching her soft knuckles, she prays, decides to become one of the faithful, and frames the world so duty is the entryway to love.

Now that we’ve moved, Mom and Dad whisper a lot. Dad comes home from the bank in suits and ties, his hair is short now above the shirt collars, and they whisper in the kitchen before dinner. And we don’t pray “God is great, God is good . . .” Dad prays quietly thanking God for things like “sovereignty” and “strength.” After dinner, Dad sits in the living room with papers from the bank and Mom does dishes in the dark kitchen and tells us to go play in one of the bedrooms. I ask why. Mom says, “Daddy needs some quiet.” Mindy says, “Why?” Mom says, “Sometimes it’s hard for Daddy to be at work.” Megan says, “Why?” Mom says, “It’s hard for Daddy to work with Grandpa at the bank right now.” Grandpa didn’t come to Christmas this winter.

I heard there was an emergency at the bank and Grandma had to call Grandpa when he was away. She started calling all the hotels to find him at his conference. But when the hotel people found his number, a lady answered the phone.

Grandma and Grandpa went to court over the bank. The court said Grandma gets it, and Dad’s still going to work there. I wondered at my birthday if that was why Grandpa didn’t send a present. I asked Mom if that meant Grandpa didn’t love me anymore.

Before she answered, Dad yelled from the corner of the table: “Moo-oo-ooo-Wah-Ah-Ah-Ah!” and Meg and Mindy ran away screaming, “April, run!” “The Monster will get you!” Dad belted the monster laugh again and I ran from my chair to Meg and Mindy. We tore around the house hiding in closets by the sleeping bags or squishing behind the doors. Mindy and I peered through the hinges while Dad stomped up to the door. “Where are those little girls?” he said in Monster voice. We peeked too hard and he caught us through the crack. “I see you! Moo-oo-ooo—Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah!” We were trapped and he caught us and put us in the jail in the entryway. Before he walked away we yelled to Megan: “Megan! Come save us! We’re in jail!” We warned her he was coming upstairs to get her. She slid down the stairs on her butt, we heard the thump-thump-thump, then her sharp eyes ran toward us and she tagged our hands.

After our game that night we had birthday cake. It was shaped like an owl with coconut and licorice eyes. Dad said a prayer before I had my wish. He said, “Heavenly Father, thank you for April and how special she is to us. Help her to know that nothing will ever change how much we love her.”

I can see the moon out my window tonight. It makes the tops of the cars glow as they drive by. Mom and Dad are saying prayers with Megan and Mindy in their bunk beds. We danced in the living room tonight when Dad got home so Meg and Mindy got to stay up past their bedtime. I came up to put my pajamas on and to crawl under the covers. After Mom and Dad tuck me in, sometimes I get up and turn on the light again so I can write. I keep a notebook with light purple paper and a pencil behind the little sliding door at the top of my bed.

Sometimes it’s hard to fall asleep at night. Dad has the same problem. When he sneaks me popcorn after bedtime, he’s never surprised I’m still awake. I tell Mom that my body is tired but my mind just keeps going. She asks what I think about but Dad never does. I think he knows that the thoughts are usually big to fit into words and sometimes they feel like things it would be bad to ask.

Even when my mind is quieter, I never know how to lay. I like to lay on my side or my stomach, but neither of those work. On one side, I have my back to the door, and that makes me afraid because I can’t see if there was a scary noise and I needed to know if someone was there. On the other side, I have my back to my stuffed animals and I can tell from their eyes that they are a little sad already and putting my back to them would make them more sad. My stomach is most comfortable, but I can’t do that because then my back’s to God and you should never turn your back on God. So the only thing to do is lay on my back because the devil’s down there. It’s hard for me to fall asleep on my back, but at least I know it’s okay to put my back to the devil. He can get as mad and he wants and that won’t change anything. I think.

Lately, I’ve had a lot of questions for God so before I go to sleep I write them on the purple paper and make sure they have a question mark at the end. I just write one question each night and then I put the pencil and the paper on top of my headboard. I don’t understand why God answers some prayers and not others. Like, how I got my Kangaroo shoe out of the storm drain when my leg slipped in, but how we had to move from the farm or how Grandpa doesn’t talk to Dad.

Right now I write little, curious questions. Like “What is heaven like?” and “Are there cats there?” Then in the morning I check to see if God wrote an answer there. He hasn’t yet, so I don’t write any big questions. Questions like, “Do you love me?” I wonder that. Because God loves everybody just because he’s God, but I wonder if he loves me all alone. Because even though Dad and Grandpa love each other, Mom says so, Grandpa doesn’t love Dad all alone, he just loves him the way he has to.

I just don’t think I could write the love me question. Because I don’t know what would happen if I already prayed to love God and then he didn’t answer.

Last night Mindy came to my room in the middle of the night. She had a bad dream so she ran up the stairs. Most the time we go in Mom and Dad’s room when we have bad dreams, but it’s scary to wake up mom because she jumps so high. I always sneak across the hall and as soon as I cross the line on the carpet I whisper “mahhom?”

Their room is darker than mine and the shadows change as soon as I cross the line on the carpet. When they are sleeping, their room is scarier than mine is. My room has light spots and dark spots, but Mom and Dad’s room has lots of grey, nothing is just bright or dark. When Mom doesn’t move, I step closer and then check behind me. “Mahhom?” Nothing. Then when I’m right next to her I touch her arm, “mahhom?” “—HHU?—WHAT?” She’s sitting up and loud and her eyes aren’t even open. She can’t see without her glasses so she reaches for my face to feel if it’s me or Megan or Mindy before she opens her eyes. “It’s okay mom I just had a bad dream I just had a bad dream it’s okay it’s okay” “Alright Sweetie, shh. Grab the blanket on the end of the bed and you can sleep here on the floor, but be quiet so we don’t wake up Dad.” Someday I’ll tell her that she’s the one who’s so loud.

So, when Mindy came to my room I heard her run up the stairs so I was awake when she came in. I gave her the pink afghan and told her she could sleep on the floor. I should have two blankets because my carpet is crunchy to lay on and it makes pokey marks on your arms and cheek. I was scared too when I heard her coming up the stairs—I looked past her when she was in the doorway to be sure no one was following her. When she was laying down I tried to make sure she didn’t see me checking the door. But her scaredness made me less scared. I told her it was okay. “It’s okay, Mindy.” She believed me.

When I woke up this morning one of the corners in my room had grey in it. It made me wonder if Mom and Dad and God lie sometimes too, to make things more simple, to make us feel better. I wonder if that’s okay. And I wonder if lying is something different if you do it because you love someone or because you feel like you have to.