Driftless (15 page)

Winnie didn’t know what the dream meant, but it felt like an omen, resonating with significance. It called for interpretation, yet apart from the phantasmagoric images themselves, nothing communicated—it was a billboard of an empty color.

Winnie finished her second piece of buttered toast and checked the calendar next to the refrigerator. She tried not to notice anything but the scribbled notes, but couldn’t help seeing more. Her birthday, October 17, stood out like a face in a crowd and she filled with anxiety at the sight of it. She tried to squeeze off this faucet of worry, but having a family meant everything. She felt she would never be complete without children. Nothing, it seemed, could cancel the divine design that caused her to need them. Even as a child she had wanted children, and as the age of thirty-five approached, stalking her like the expiration date on a can of mushroom soup, it became harder and harder to wait for the time when God would give her a real family. Because if she became too old to have children, that would mean God did not intend for her to have them. But that was impossible. It had to be. It was written in Scripture.

To arrest these alarming thoughts, she returned to her attic bedroom, sat on her bed, and brushed her long brown hair, feeling the hypnotic tug of the bristles and watching her thin hands working. But another unwelcome thought informed her that her hair extended to her waist, and even below, for only one reason: her hair was a vow, a promise she kept to herself, a defiance of the fashions of the world and a commitment to never cut it until she had a child of her own—someone to love without reservation. Her thoughts, her hair, everything about her spoke out against the submissive and accepting person she believed she should become.

Downstairs again, in the office behind the kitchen, Winnie prepared for the evening Bible study, jotting down some of her more relevant thoughts on the second chapter of First Timothy. Two phone calls interrupted her, one to ask if she had seen Ora Good’s casserole dish, and one to remind her of a scheduling change for Faith Committee.

At nine-thirty she changed into brown corduroy pants, a cream shirt, and a pair of brown loafers. Like most idealists, she did not bother looking at herself in the mirror before leaving. She tossed her purse over her shoulder and drove to the Orchard Grove Home in Grange.

Stopping at the nursing station to check if any of her people had changed rooms since her last visit, she went to the common room, where three staggered rows of occupied wheelchairs waited. Holding her Bible open before her, she talked for ten minutes about the mansions Jesus prepared for His friends, followed by a group prayer. Then as the nursing staff wheeled her congregation out of the room, she stood in the hallway and shook hands with each one, smiling into their faces even if they were sleeping.

Nancy Droomiker waited for her in room 445, staring from beneath the heavy, pressed sheets with enormous eyes.

“Good morning, Nancy, how are you doing?” she asked, seating herself in the chair beside the bed. Nancy was, as she knew, not doing well. Her whispered speech came with great difficulty, and to spare visitors the discomfort of listening she pretended to have nothing to say. At ninety-six, her body had decided to slowly, methodically shut down.

Winnie opened her Bible and read from Luke, where she had left off the week before. It was a familiar passage, and the older woman’s pale lips silently mouthed the words as Winnie read them. Fifteen minutes later, Winnie planted a kiss on Nancy’s forehead and said a prayer.

“I’ll see you next week,” she said, stepping out the door.

In room 423 Elizabeth Shelton contemplated Winnie with total disregard, as though she were a quart of air. “Hello, Betsy,” Winnie said, knowing that what the nurses called dementia would prevent Betsy from responding in any normal way. “I wanted to stop in and say hello before I left this morning. I saw your granddaughter Casey the other day. She is certainly a pretty girl. I think she said she was in the fourth grade this year. I understand she enjoys playing soccer, and I’ll bet she is an excellent athlete. She sent this card, which I’m going to put right here on the nightstand. One of the aides can read
it to you later. I hope you remember me—Winifred, the pastor of the Words church. Your son and daughter-in-law, George and Janice, attend there. You did too, not that long ago. One of the pews still has your name on it. It’s toward the front, which means it’s still in good condition. You know how people will do anything to avoid sitting in front. Well, I see my time is about up, so I’d better be going. Let’s pray before I leave. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for the life of Elizabeth. We know we can trust You because You told us You will never forsake us. Please help Elizabeth to remember who she is, if that is Your Will, and if not—if You are the Only One to know who Elizabeth is—may she find peace in some other thoughts. Give health and courage to Elizabeth and her family and bless our prayer, for we ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen.”

In the hallway, she spoke briefly with Reverend Winchell from the Grange Congregational Church. As he talked to her in a professional, lecturing tone, he frowned, and Winnie suspected that he did not approve of women pastors, or at least of women pastors wearing brown corduroy pants.

Walking out of the nursing home, Winnie looked at the sky and was immediately reminded of her dream from the night before. The blue seemed intensely and especially blue. On the sidewalk, she lingered for a moment, going over the errands she had to run in town. The air had turned cooler and she wished she had worn a coat.

It was from this point forward that Winnie, for years to come, would review in her memory every thought and action, looking for some way to explain what later happened. She walked to her car, drove to the Piggly Wiggly on the corner, and purchased groceries—no frozen items because she did not know how soon she would be back at the parsonage. She walked across the street to the hardware store and bought five twenty-amp fuses to replace the ones that burned out when the washing machine, furnace, and refrigerator all came on at the same time. At the bakery she selected three doughnuts and a small, round loaf of bread. She deposited her salary check at the drive-through window of the bank, withdrew fifty dollars in cash, filled her car’s tank with gasoline, considered purchasing a lottery ticket as a visual aid for Bible study, but was momentarily
possessed by a demon of frivolity and bought a package of red gum instead.

Her next stop was at the home of Muriel and Don Woolever, an old couple who lived outside Grange. Don had a heart condition that severely limited his ability to get out, and Muriel still suffered from a broken hip.

When Winnie knocked on the farmhouse door, no one answered. She checked the garage and after finding it empty she scribbled a note on a piece of paper and taped it to the front door.

While she was backing her car out of the driveway onto the road, Winnie wondered where she would end up if she drove south on the road instead of north. She had never continued past the Woolever’s home. And because of the leaves blowing from trees like torn brown parchment pages and thin ribbons of steel-gray diaphanous clouds stretching out of the horizon in trails of lost grandeur, Winnie drove south, following the winding road between irregular stretches of oak, birch, and pine.

The blacktop changed to gravel and the road narrowed, not well traveled. There were no houses. Neither were there signs of telephone or electric service.

The road narrowed again. She climbed a steep hill, turned left, then right, and descended into a valley marsh.

Cattails, skunk cabbage, wood asters, and thick-bladed grasses rose out of standing water on both sides of the road. There were few trees taller than hedge height, with the unsightly, bowl-shaped nests of herons lodged thickly in them. Three deer stood knee deep in a shallow pool, eating floating vegetation and staring at her car in wide-eyed disbelief, water streaming from their narrow, delicate mouths.

Still she could see no houses, driveways, or mailboxes. She drove over a narrow bridge with wooden planks, rusted iron sides, and a hand-painted sign in orange letters, EIGHT TON LIMIT. The wooden planks thumped loudly against her tires. On the other side Winnie parked next to a stand of sumac and returned with a doughnut to stand on the bridge above the little stream.

Not wanting to get her clothes dirty, she refrained from sitting on
the planks and leaned against the iron railing. The clear, cold water ran beneath her brown shoes and she ate the pastry with great satisfaction after discovering the filling to be custard. Overhead, a skein of geese flew in a disorderly V-shaped line, calling in hoarse, plaintive tones. Once again she was reminded of her dream from the night before. Checking her desire to eat the remaining portion of her pastry, she tossed it into the water as an offering of thanks and watched it float downstream and around a switchback. Crisp autumn wind moved through her thin shirt, touching her skin. A sugary buoyancy filled her stomach. She contemplated both sensations on her way back to the car.

As she climbed behind the wheel she was startled to feel her name spoken. “Winifred.” She climbed out and turned back to the bridge, hoping to find someone behind her. She was alone. But she was certain of having heard her name spoken in a clear voice with throaty personality. It had felt to her like the voice of her mother, yet not hers, a voice she knew yet couldn’t place. Most of all, it had resembled her own voice speaking without the usual interior echo—from the outside. She walked back to the bridge, stood in the middle of the planks, and listened.

Once again she heard her name spoken, this time in its more familiar appellation: “Winnie.” Accompanying the sound came the sense of someone beside her, behind her, before her, around her, someone she couldn’t see and couldn’t touch, someone whose presence was intensified through the absence of anything to attribute it to.

The feeling of buoyancy she had earlier experienced in her stomach delightfully changed and spread through the rest of her body. She felt light enough to float. It seemed as if the breeze moving across the marsh could carry her with it. She held this feeling for a moment and then realized something very uncommon was happening. The grasses in the ditch appeared to be glowing. The red, cone-shaped sumac tops burned like incandescent lamps in a bluish light unlike any she had ever seen yet instinctively recognized. And the pleasure of recognition—discovering the familiar within the unknown—comforted her with its stillness. She looked at her hands and they seemed to be lit from the inside, her fingers almost transparent. The
light glowing within the grasses and the sumac glowed within her, within everything. They sang with her through the light, jubilantly, compassionately, timelessly connecting to her past, present, and future. Boundaries did not exist. Where she left off and something else began could not be established. Everything breathed.

She understood her predicament: the world, experience, sensations, memory, time, and dream could not be separated. The realizations taking place were not taking place “inside her,” but all around, everywhere. The problem lay not in establishing the objective truth of what she perceived but rather in establishing how the truth had come to be perceived—how otherness had been obliterated. She participated in being looked at as much as looking. She was not simply having a vision of something; she was something in a larger vision. A Great Omnipresent Looking had turned upon her and she looked through it. The whole world participated in awareness.

The miracle of consciousness, the hiding place of God, split open like a fruit too large for its peel. Time lost its linear appeal and assumed the form of the wholly holy. Events, forces, and mind were the same thing, creatively at work. The world and the Kingdom of God became factually identical; each existed one in the other. The sun reflected from the clouds in avenues of colored ideas. The contradiction of conceptual antagonists stood side by side, making sense. The solitary miracle of Pure Grace held everything else inside it, wonder and peace. Death stood before her and she recognized it—a mere shadow cast by life, not a separation; the breathing of life bound it up as shape binds substance.

She walked down the embankment and into the stream, where the cold rushing water swirled around her ankles, calves, knees, and thighs in such a happy, embracing manner that tears filled her eyes. The water was alive. And as her sense of herself as an autonomous individual migrated into everything around her, her sense of isolation and loneliness merged into belonging. She found her true home and her true home found her. There was no “other” place. The grasses were part of trees, part of the smallest organisms in the water, part of the water, part of the worms in the soil, part of the soil, part of the air, part of her. All were constantly changing into and out of each
other. And all of these were part of God, that infinitely small and infinitely large spirit that loved her, whatever she was, whenever she was, without reservation, and the realization of this love brought the numinous splendor of divine, mobilized thoughts flooding through the world. It felt like waking from a nightmare of harsh and brutal illusions into welcome beyond measure. A banquet of celebration had risen up inside and around her—more and more life, larger, richer, and more joyful life.

A white pickup came clanking down the narrow road, thumped and rattled across the little bridge, and came to a stop not far from Winnie’s little car. A man in a work coat climbed out and stood for several minutes looking between Winnie’s opened car door and Winnie in the creek. He climbed down the embankment and walked along the edge of the stream.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” said Winnie, the water rushing around her.

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.”

“You’re crying.”

“If I am, it is different than you think.”

“I was afraid you might be having some trouble. My name is July Montgomery and I farm in Champion Valley. That cold water will ruin your health.”