Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

  The red tail hawk landed in an Osage orange tree, part of the fence row, and waited. He watched it through the window of the study for several minutes, sitting motionless just like the bird, until with one movement it rose straight up, flapping two, three times and then—wings out, like an eagle riding a thermal, except lower down— it waited and then dropped, disappearing below the level of the window and the road just beyond, presumably pouncing on a field mouse.

  It was a nice break from the arranging of the bulletin, particularly inasmuch as the Old Testament lesson for the week was from Isaiah: They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. It put him in mind of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Windhover. To Christ our Lord the priest had written, and he had always liked the final line about fall, gall, and gash gold vermilion. Now here it was. The hawk, the eagle, the rising up and the riding of the wind. Finally even the vermilion. Surely the mouse must have rendered up vermilion, down across the road, the frail morsel of flesh crunching in the talon grip of the bird.

  It was there, it was everywhere.

  Especially in the numbers. Numbers and letters could be especially plain to the discerning eye. License plates, registration numbers, numbers from the telephone book. Most of the time, he could interpret with the guideline of the first shall be last and the last first. It was a direct, inverse reversing logic. Z is A, 9 is 1. One or A, it could be either. Zero was 0 or null—a space. Other times, though, he would have to work because the message was entwined with other things also present in the day. Things that came to him in the flow of time, in the moment, would tell him where to start. Some days he would sit in his study and say to the walls above the noise of the steam radiator chirping by the window: On Margate sands I can connect nothing with nothing. No one knew how much that phrase helped him in the throes of trying to understand. He liked Eliot, but Hopkins was his favorite. Mine, O Thou Lord of Life! Give my roots rain! But of course in preaching he must stick closer to home. Folks out here would not understand how Eliot or Hopkins could be involved, connected to the Lord in this way. So the Psalter especially helped. Just yesterday, for instance, he had read the appointed lesson from Psalm 139: O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me! Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; thou discernest my thoughts from afar. And here it was—the same motion, down and up in the flight of the bird the achieve, the mastery of the thing! And the numbers also spoke. Psalm 139 was z-x-a. But taken numerically it was 971. 971 spoke. Oh, first, simply the local exchange for this part of the county. Nothing special about that. He often saw it. But then, on the back of the radio in the parsonage when the fuse went out on the same day there it was in the midst of the code and again on the back of the fuel oil truck when he drove over to Chanute at noon for the meeting of the local area clergy.

  Occasionally there would be someone to tell. For instance the local Swedish evangelical pastor might listen. They believed in a living God so perhaps the pastor might believe that God indeed speaks in strange and in mysterious ways. Wondrous ways, really. Perhaps he could get the man to understand. But many clergy and parishioners alike, would give him this blank look and he would be forced to change the subject and just let it go.

  It was his private way. Private. Holy. Deep with its occasional rhythms. Always discovering just how continuous the speaking was. Always coming to him from the numbers, the coincidence of their flow being the grammar of His talking. Numbers. Letters. Patterns. Patterns everywhere.

  So he thought about this during the afternoon. The confirmation class would be in at four. Thought about it in terms of hawk and eagle and windhover and decided that yes this could be a part of his sermon. It was Lent now. Purple and black. A bruised season. Christ the bruised rod. The hawk with the bruising grip. The time of light, yes, the coming of the Light, but also the time of reflection. The confirmation class today would be taught about the Lenten Season. The coming of light is an internal journey in which we seek the Light of Christ’s face and learn to listen to Him. Listen to Him speaking in the little actions of the day. Live with Him day to day. Take Him to school, to the playground, to the ball games.

  The State Championship was coming and Erie was playing Frontenac just next Tuesday. He would go, of course. Sitting with his clergy collar, black in the midst of the puffed, ruddy faces of the people in the overheated gym, the point guard calling the play, the crowd up and down, the coach with a big bull of a voice BLOCK OUT! BLOCK OUT BASELINE! They called out plays and he remembered them late into the night, plays burned into the wood grain of his mind, engraved with a code. He liked the use of numbers which he heard, sitting right behind the Erie bench. During the timeouts he could hear them rising, laced into the noise of the crowd and the blare of the band: Now this time I want you to shift out of the 2-3 and into a 2-1-2 zone if their point man—23—brings the ball up and comes right side. Then in the midst of the night he would wake up with a vision, numbers rising and falling against a black background, the numbers in vermilion perhaps or in gold. And up against the canopy of the space of the vision, just like the wall Belshazzaar could see, would come the names of the plays called by the coach, one of his parishioners: Hazard, Quicksand (the zone trap), Gray Hawk (full court press), Walker (hold the ball, final shot), White Oak (high post), Bramble (low post). The man was an English teacher and one night, at the beginning of the season, Gilbert woke straight up with K-e-n-t-u-c-k-y in green, riding a sea of black with the form of the state in the background and switched on the light and went straight down to the Rand McNally and there they were! All the plays were towns in the eastern part of the State! That’s when he decided he was led to go to each and every game, if he could—if there was no wedding rehearsal or church dinner. And often even with the team on the road he was back of the bench, thrilled to hear QUICKSAND! or GRAY HAWK! rolling across the opponents’ gym floor like a kind of spiritual presence.

  The game was holy. At least at times it was. But it was all around you, really. Invisible. Hardness of heart. A people living in darkness. Walking in it, drowning in it in the spring especially when the low water bridges would flood out, the water rolling down like the very presence of God.