Jewelweed (52 page)

With similar eye contact, Oskar Hamilton was reminded of the many times Winnie had come to the hospital during his open-heart surgery last winter, and also later, when the incision had become infected and visitors were required to don gowns, masks, and gloves before entering the isolation room. She had read to him from the Bible, smuggled in corn bread and other fatty foods in Tupperware containers in her purse, brought him updated reports on the farm, took back instructions for how to build the new feed bunk and where to plant the oats, and repeatedly assured him that his young wife was spending her few idle hours either at home in the farmhouse or with her sister in Luster.

These and other actions had increased Winnie's moral capital to such an extent that she could sometimes spend some of it in a business meeting, where moral capital had to be used with great discretion because it didn't go very far. Without the support of Oskar Hamilton and Abraham Johnson, Words Friends of Jesus Church would not exist. And just so everyone understood that too-easily-forgotten reality, from time to time the two men faced off against each other like rams on a hillside.

Winnie looked down into the opened Bible, closed it, pressed it against her like an infant, and sat down again.

“I propose that the Building and Grounds Committee hold a search for the missing jack,” said Abe Johnson with a giant sigh, “and report back to us next month.”

“Is that agreeable to you, Chairperson Stanley?” asked Oskar Hamilton.

“Call me Ardith,” she said.

“I'm following
Robert's Rules of Order
,” said Oskar.

“This is a church, not a card game,” said Ardith. She had never played a game of cards in her life, but she had heard that such games were strictly governed by a rule book that sounded something like
Robert's
. “I trust I can speak for the rest of the committee when I say that conducting a search is agreeable to the Building and Grounds Committee.”

The rest of the committee—Larry Fry and Florence Fitch—nodded.

“Thank you,” said Oskar. “Now, Clerk Brasso, would you please read the last minute to be sure we have reached closure on this issue.”

“Now?” asked Olivia.

“Yes, now.”

“‘The floor jack was discussed and the Building and Grounds Committee will report back next month on where it is.'”

“Shouldn't it be mentioned that the jack belongs to my cousin?” asked Abe Johnson. “Just for the record, I mean.”

“The owner's name was recorded in last month's minutes, when it was noted that the Buildings and Grounds Committee would be borrowing it,” replied Olivia.

“Would you please read that minute, Clerk Brasso?” instructed Oskar Johnson.

“Certainly,” she said, turning back a page in her notebook, “‘Chairperson Ardith Stanley reported that the Building and Grounds Committee had located a floor jack suitable for the repair work on the basement foundation, and the committee moved to borrow it from Cecil Johnson, with Ardith Stanley motioning and Florence Fitch seconding.'”

“Thank you, Clerk Brasso,” said Oskar.

“I think it should be mentioned somewhere in there that the jack was red,” said Elizabeth Fitch.

“Last month's minutes have already been approved by this committee,” said Oskar Hamilton. “You can't change minutes after they've been approved.”

“Then I move that a new minute be added, making it clear that the jack was red,” said Elizabeth.

“
Is
red,” added Olivia.

“That's what I said.”

“No, you said
was
red.”

“But we only know for sure that the jack
was
red. We don't know what color it is now. Someone could have painted it.”

“But we didn't know what color it was before we borrowed it either,” said Olivia.

“Elizabeth makes a good point,” said Larry Fry. “I second the motion with
was
.”

“I'm sorry,” said Florence Fitch, looking away from her devotional literature, “I didn't hear the first motion. Could you repeat it?”

After all the committees had finished giving their reports, Winnie presented the monthly pastor's record. During the last month she had preached at four Sunday-morning worship services and four Sunday-evening worship services. She had preached at the Grange Nursing Home on a Tuesday morning, taught five Wednesday-night Bible studies, spoke briefly at Family Night, attended ten committee meetings and a prayer vigil for Horace Grover's sick grandson, visited fifteen separate homes, two hospitals, and three nursing homes, met with the local Ministers Association, gone bowling with the two teenagers in the church, and delivered used clothing to Goodwill and canned goods to the food pantry in Red Plain. From the Pastor's Mileage Fund she had withdrawn $35.46, which the treasurer and assistant treasurer both acknowledged, explaining that the Pastor's Mileage Fund had to be replenished from the special fund donated by the family of Oskar Hamilton after the departure of Mildred Hamilton, who died in her home after a lengthy illness at the beginning of June.

Then Winnie found the courage to stand up a second time. She announced that she had decided to submit her resignation, which would become effective as soon as Words Friends had succeeded in finding another pastor to replace her. She and her family would continue to attend the church as regular members, but she firmly believed it was the Lord's will for her to step down at this time and allow a new shepherd to minister to the flock.

A blanket of stunned silence fell over the room. Violet's eyes filled with tears.

“What will you do?”

“The Lord hasn't made that known to me yet,” said Winnie, “but I have
faith a door will be opened in the future. In the meantime, I shall apply myself to prayer and gardening.”

“Gardening? Did you say gardening?” asked Florence Fitch.

“Yes, gardening.”

Winnie could tell that this made no sense to anyone. With few exceptions, to be sure, everyone in the room either had a garden or frequently worked in one. But gardening wasn't something one did, it was simply something one had. Compared to preaching it amounted to, well . . . nothing.

“Did someone say something unkind to you, or do something to discourage your ministry among us?” asked Abe Johnson, staring in a threatening manner at Oskar Hamilton. “Lord knows you haven't had the kind of support you deserve from some.”

“No, no, no, no,” said Winnie. “My years as your pastor have been the most precious gifts anyone can imagine. It's just that the Lord has other plans for me, I guess.”

“I object,” said Olivia.

“To what?” asked Winnie.

“To your resignation. We won't accept it, or at least I won't. After the anointed are called out of the world to live as ministers to the Holy Word, they can't ever quit. They've been set apart. My own father preached in this very church for over thirty years, despite untold hardships and with no regard for his health and personal welfare. And all that time he had a garden too.”

“Twenty-five years,” corrected Violet. “It was twenty-five years, and he never stepped foot in that garden.”

“Just the same, he didn't leave the ministry until death was nearly upon him,” replied Olivia.

“Is it the money, Pastor Winifred?” asked Oskar. “Lord knows your salary is hardly enough to keep a rabbit alive, and yet I know someone in this room who was opposed to giving you a raise last year, in spite of the fact that the rest of us were in favor of it.”

“That's a lie,” said Abe.

“I think we have a minute to that effect,” said Oskar, knotting his hands into fists. “Clerk Brasso, would you please find the minute from last year, the one referring—”

“Please don't, Olivia,” interrupted Winnie. “This has nothing to do
with my salary. You all have been more than generous. I'm asking you to release me now.”

“This is terrible,” said Violet.

“Why are you doing this?” asked Florence.

“I told you. It's the Lord's will.”

“Yes, I know, but why are you really doing it?”

“I have to stop. The forms are going empty inside me.”

“I move not to accept Pastor Winifred's resignation,” said Olivia.

Silence.

“And I second it,” she added.

“You can't do that, Clerk Brasso,” said Oskar. “It's against
Robert's Rules
.”

“Then I move that we postpone this item of business until next month, when Pastor Winifred will have changed her mind.”

“Second,” said Violet.

“All in favor,” said Oskar.

The meeting ended in prayer, and a short time later, Winnie and Jacob's cars were the only ones in the parking lot.

“August and I were thinking about driving into Grange for some ice cream before we go home,” said Jacob. “Why don't you come with us?”

“You two go. I have some things to do here.”

“We can bring you back something,” said August. “The choices are practically unlimited.”

“I'm afraid it would melt before you get home.”

“No it won't, Mom. Dad will drive fast.”

“Then bring me something with bananas in it.”

“Will do,” said Jacob. “Let's go, August.”

Through the sanctuary windows along the west-facing wall, Winnie watched them walk across the parking lot. The sun lay low in the sky, and the colored light made the air look soft and embracing. August's face glowed as he climbed into the old jeep next to his father. Her son was trying to explain something with the help of many hand gestures, and Jacob was nodding and smiling.

Winnie turned away from the windows and sat down in a back pew. The sanctuary seemed provocatively quiet, and Winnie remembered the first time she had come here, many years ago. She'd lived in the parsonage behind the church. She was young then, and the rough country around her had seemed even younger, as if it had just been formed and inhabited.

Winnie began to think about a river of history flowing through this place, connecting her to the past. Many years ago, the area had been taken over by immigrants—homesteaders arrived from Europe with their families, farming methods, and cherished religions. Reminders of those sturdy folks were everywhere, in many cases walking around inside their descendants, who had grown taller and generally lived a lot longer, but still looked alarmingly like them.

She shivered with gratitude for having been allowed to participate in such a unique drama—one that would never again be performed in exactly the same way. After their homes were built, those homesteaders had constructed churches with wood hewn from local trees, and flocked into them Sunday after Sunday to sit reverently and listen to someone hired to stand in front of them and read from translated historical writings that themselves originated in a place they had never seen and from a tradition they did not understand, someone hired to instruct them on how to enter a place of eternal salvation called heaven, to condemn them for having sinful thoughts and desires, and to lead them to a heightened state of remorseful bliss.

Throughout the Midwest, these churches grew and grew, filled with pictures, stories, and children's drawings of camels, donkeys, Egyptian water jugs, miniature stables, and thin people with long hair and white head scarves living in deserts. While growing crops and raising children, the immigrants reserved a sacred place in their minds for imagined events from over two thousand years before. They thought about them deeply, in many cases identifying so profoundly with these stories that they believed themselves in moments of unusual clarity to be in direct relationship with the characters themselves, referring to them by first names such as Moses, Jeremiah, Jesus, Paul, Simon, Mary, Martha, and John. They even gave these names to their children, hoping in some way to empower them with a remnant of that ancient mythical power.

Even when scholars rose up among them, studied their holy scriptures in distant theological schools in Chicago and New Haven, and returned with the news that Moses did not write the five books of Moses, and that Jesus, if he lived at all, was not born on December 25 and would not have recognized the concept of the Holy Trinity, they listened patiently and quietly discounted everything they heard.

It seemed like simple foolishness to their parents. How could children
not know that there were different kinds of facts? There were facts that depended on objective, verifiable evidence, and then there were those evinced through a thrilling verdict in the heart. So long as those old stories still resonated, they were true. The holy traditions had been set in place by holy ancestors, and they still held individuals and families together.

Sunday after Sunday, generations of Midwesterners had poured into the pews and prayed with flowing tears and gnashing teeth, then rose from their pews and sang at the top of their lungs—songs with joyful images of faith, courage, reunion, strength, celebration, and triumph, songs written by inspired men and women who had been filled with the same resurgent spirit that filled the singing and offered transport from their often bleak and difficult lives.