Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

  ##

  Gilbert wanted to say something to Jerrod the next Sunday, second Sunday in Lent, but he went out the side door, and Gilbert got stuck with Mrs. Childress, a forward-thinking woman, who wanted to share her plans for the May Day Celebration in which the congregation would be joining church women’s organizations from all across the nation—Church Women United—to celebrate the coming of Spring and pray for peace. So he saw Jerrod’s fuzzy head with a hint of alfalfa cowlick gliding into Fellowship Hall and gone. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to say to the young man, except that it had been an exceptional event. He imagined, too, that the red mark now had worked its way up into a mighty bruise. Maybe not raised, but blue-black with streaks radiating out from where the capillaries had broken under the blow. It connected with this morning’s sermon about the bruising of Lent. The Suffering Servant. Bruised reed. But there was no way Jerrod would want to listen to this sort of thing over coffee cake and juice and his saying anything would make a stir, so he let it go.

  Let go and let God. Breathing in and breathing out. “You must learn to calm yourself Gilbert,” his mother had said after the last revelation. And he had agreed that there was a need in his life for a kind of spiritual yoga. In and out. Ying and yang. Take what He gives you. Take and treasure and learn. But then let it go. Let it go before you work yourself up into an almighty sweat. Still waters run deep. Let it go and keep quiet for the Lord’s sake. Pastor them in ways that they will understand. Silence can be a kind of bruising, too. Silence in Lent. Quiet. The reflective life. He settled on that, Sunday afternoon, just before drifting off during the NBA game—Havlicek in one of his last— missing the numbers from the final score.

  On Monday they would drive together over to Chanute and down to Coffeyville so he could get his Volkswagen tuned up. She always came with him. A tradition with them. Take a Monday, get up late, late breakfast. Leave about nine. Drive down to be in the shop by ten-thirty. Get the loaner car so she wouldn’t always be walking. Window shop. Eat a leisurely dinner. Shop for groceries. Then pick up the car for the return around three. In February, they could easily pick up all the perishable items that they avoided in July or August. Two or three times a year they did this, depending on how many Lutherans got sick and up to University Hospital—how many miles he’d drive. Between tune-ups they did the oil changes down at the Erie Garage. And tires, brakes and belt work. It was a good system, and his mother liked getting out for a change, making it a special day.

  Off they went. Like clockwork. Out of the parsonage lane at nine, down the gravel township road and on down State 39 to Chanute. There was a little black ice down in one of the dips of the road where a creek bottom came up close to the black asphalt, but no traffic. Highway 169 was clean as a whistle to Coffeyville, very few cars. It was a quiet drive. No license plates, no craning of the neck, no passing slow cars to get to more information, following license plates of same-side traffic, message after message becoming a continuing rope of meaning, plate after plate, sign after sign: B-U-R-M-A-S-H-A-V-E! His mother drifted off to sleep on the blue ribbon of highway, waking up halfway through his detailed conversation with the service manager.

  The morning went smoothly enough. And in the afternoon, after dinner at Thomelson’s Family Diner, she had sent him over to the fresh vegetables, just as soon as they had entered the grocery mart. Gave him a basket with the plastic kiddie guard stuck in the up position and one wheel that wobbled whenever you pushed down too hard and sent him over, hard left, into the place where the ceiling was lowered, and where the U-shape of shelves and bins housed all the fresh produce Coffeyville could manage in February. Fact was, they did pretty good. She had a rather long list this time, and he labored through grapefruit and lemons, Romaine lettuce and spinach, even finding the little packages of bean sprouts. Since dinner he had been feeling it and that last package of the sprouts set his appetite for the rest of the store. He knew why she always shoved him over here and went away. Except for the sprouts and the alfalfa sprouts packaged in plastic with printed descriptions and with bar codes, there were no numbers.

  In earlier days she would come up behind him in the middle of a lane filled with canned goods, reading a label from Dinty Moore, the can inverted, figuring the possibilities. Gilbert, you don’t really want that beef stew, do you, dear? Taking the can in a surprisingly strong hand, twisting it out of his paw, shoving his cart down the lane at the same time. Getting out of there. He knew. She knew. Too much time with the Lord.

  The Lord was omnipresent now in Barnstads, since the bar codes. The bar codes with those little numbers just above the vertical lines changed everything. Message piled upon message as they went down the aisles. Boxes of croutons, dried mushrooms in jugs, peanut butter in tubs of clear plastic, cereal, syrup, even packages of Everlight batteries, three to the box, all began speaking. Began and stopped. One message would just get started in the arc it made from shelf to cart, when another would come from the side and rest gently, placed over part of the first. Fragments. Fragments of the Lord speaking, speaking, speaking. Lord speak to me, that I might speak in living echoes of thy love. He would just get on track, making the connection, when another message would pull him in another direction. Jerked. Old Testament. New Testament. Early church fathers. One time he had plucked a loaf of spun white bread off the shelf when a bar code number led him to Athanatius. This, in turn, led him to the creeds to the Arian controversy and all of this during a week when the Epistle Lesson for the coming Sunday was from Colossians. Colossians 1:15: He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible…

  He remembers going in to the study with the loaf of white bread, right past the Hoveys who were in to clean the church on a Friday afternoon. Smiling, remembering how they thought they were in for a different communion with that white bread. Standing in the study with the bread down on the desk, looking up references to Athanatius in Harnack’s History of Dogma and then in LaTourette’s History of the Christian Church, he especially had liked the part of visible and invisible—that was so important to being able to listen, being able to see—and stressed it in the following sermon.

  It was everywhere.

  He was just getting started with all those fragments when his mother came up with three or four cans of water-packed tuna, dropping them into the sea of words jostling in the cart, saying, “Gilbert, go on down Number Two and get us a good twenty-five pound sack of bakers. I’m not up to lifting today,” and with that he was off, obedient son, the messages left alone in the chrome bin of the cart, labels from the shelves a blur of color as he took his customary long strides, shouldering the spuds and finding her at the check out.

  On the drive home, he reflected on how it was always so hard unpacking, too. Packing and unpacking in the welter of the possibility of His speaking. Speak, Lord, for thy servant listeneth. The drive back got them behind a Yellow freightliner probably heading up to Lawrence or Olathe and obediently doing the speed limit. There was a call 1-800 message on the back of the truck to alert motorists to the company’s safety program and another about joining the winning team. The license plate was partially covered.

  Oklahoma mud, he supposed. He got past in Chanute, taking the side-street by the Methodist church, and then up State Route again when about a mile and a half past the Neosho River bridge it all jammed up. Mostly eighteen wheelers ahead of him and a pick-up or two. All jammed up. Some people way up ahead of him already out of their cars.

  He had seen it coming. The numbers had been telling him. First in the parking lot of Barnstads he had seen B-E-W-A-R-E. Not numbers, mind you. Just the letters on the plate of a flat-bed pickup, an old 1950s model with the cab and underbody in primer gray, tire chains jangling, dangling on the rack and large, stiff, extra-wide mud flaps with Back Off! and this cartoon character with pistols drawn—what was his name?—staring at you. The black edge of the bed
had another message which he saw just before the plate itself: Insured by Smith & Wesson. So it was a somber, reflective, almost-Lenten drive back to the dealership. And then—several times along the way back—the mark of the beast, 666. A Colorado plate passed—no numbers to be seen at that speed, but just the ^^^^ of the Rockies at the top of the plate—and suddenly he thought of the Psalter, no doubt reminded by the Lord: I lift up mine eyes to the hills, From whence does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.

  So driving out 39 he was still thinking about Beware, the presence of evil and the help of the Lord when they came upon this mess. Who knows how long it would take to go just the few miles up to the Erie junction where they could turn north and home.

  When they came up the next rise, they began to see smoke. A little early to be burning fields, he thought, and then the flash of yellow and of red. Pumper on the scene. Highway patrol.

  The truck was mostly settled over the car. Kind of like a big beetle with fire in its belly, fire rolling out from beneath the truck where the car was supposed to be. Men were still running back and forth with hoses. The roof of the car was completely gone, covered by the truck. Squashed, he supposed. They inched past. In and out of gear. The officers at the side waving them through, but everybody watching. He wondered if he should stop. Did they need clergy? Where were they? Had they been carted off. The last policeman was in County Sheriff brown and he recognized Ira. Hadn’t seen him too often at church during the last months, but always at the home games, doing security.

  “Think I should pull over?” he had asked through the open window.

  “No need to, Reverend. Happened too quick.” Ira lifted and replaced his hat.

  “What happened?”

  “They were just off the side there on the north and he come over the ridge and must not have seen ’em. Hooked ’em with the bumper and just drove them off the road. Real sad. Well, better move on now. See you, Reverend.”

  The line inched along. At the Erie junction they turned off, the black smoke just a wisp now, curling in the rearview.