All Hands Stand By to Repel Boarders. Cordell Strug
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out why the sirens went off last night, and finally bump into someone you’d been trying to contact for days. Depending on the character of the postmaster, she (or, less often, he) could be very much the ringmaster of this arena, having final judgment on matters of fact and practicality. Depending, again, on the postmaster, I could sometimes spend an hour at the desk, catching up on current events or filling in the history of local feuds.
I tended not to vary my path, and I couldn’t have varied it much. So my walk there was almost an extension of my office hours: people knew when I’d be passing by, and it was a good way to contact me if you didn’t want people to wonder what you were doing at the church. It wasn’t odd for me to spend an hour on the half-mile walk.
I would pass the jumbled life of the old small towns: houses, welding shops that still rang with the blacksmith’s hammer, a grocery store, a body shop, a gas station. I could just glimpse the closest farms and watch the plowing or harvesting. In our second parish, if I walked far enough out of town, I could see the plowing being done with horses, since we had a growing Amish community around us.
My walk in our second parish took me past a small branch of the regional library system, housed in an old building with the town museum. (Where we first served, the nearest library was fifteen miles away, the nearest decent library was fifty miles away, and the bookmobile stopped every three weeks for about forty-five minutes.) I could continue up the hill out of town and drop in on the staff at the high school.
The big difference in my walks was that, in our first parish, the parsonage was next to the church, so my walk was to the post office and back, while, in our second parish, the parsonage was a half-mile from the church, so I continued on after my post-office visit to the church office. I had stops along the way in each town, about mid-journey, very important for my survival when the temperature was below zero and the wind was howling, always important for my spirit because I found the most pleasant people there and they always lifted my heart.
In our first parish, it was the gas station, run for a minimal profit by a couple named Danny and Patty. Stopping one day, I heard classical music on the radio behind the counter and I knew I’d found some friends. Danny could laugh and Patty could fume at almost anything. Knowing them was like watching a great comedy team. But they were both lively, funny, interested in music, books, and movies, and—I hope—as pleased as I was to find someone else who was.
When I lingered there, I would often bump into one of our substitute organists, Judy, the daughter of one of the matriarchs of the town (whom I thought of as the Queen of Hearts). Judy was a survivor of one of the more radical versions of the ’sixties and would drift into town and out of town on no one’s wavelength but her own. My service there overlapped with one of her longer stays. She was an excellent keyboard player and, oddly enough, loved the most elaborate liturgies we used, because they reminded her of Native American ceremonies she’d seen. She dabbled in natural medicine and was always trying to cure me of problems that usually sounded more like hers than mine. She had a deep, explosive, sexy laugh and, sometimes, I’d walk her home and we’d share stories about our youth. It was, I thought, like a dialogue between Passion and Sanity. Once I impressed her by adjusting the idle on her VW bus.
In our second parish, it was the bank, staffed by a group of women I thought of collectively as the Bank Babes. One of them, Mel, was a member of the church we served and the other two, Ginny and Faith, were members of the Methodist church just across the street with which we shared Lenten services. Not only were these women unfailingly pleasant, happily talkative, and very pretty, but all three were also dog- owners and -lovers. As our children were gone by this time, we often needed people to tend to our dog when we were at all-day meetings, two-day church conventions, or late events in the Twin Cities. This was another piece of good luck: finding people I could trust absolutely, without hesitation.
I was happy to leave our second parish: they made it easy to go. But I almost broke down, the day we left, when I went to say goodbye to the Bank Babes.
There were many people I encountered on these walks, regularly, through the years: the jolly woman who owned the grocery store, who would trade mystery novel recommendations with me; the ex-merchant marine seaman, who still swayed as he walked and ran a kind of men’s coffee hour that got out just about when I hit the post-office corner; the mercurial Roman Catholic woman who asked me to help her design a tattoo of the Holy Trinity to put on her left breast; my friend Rick, often congregational president, always a wise leader in church and community, who taught history in high school and could burn an hour or more with me dissecting the political scene.
It was always a good way to start the day.
About a year after we retired, we served as interim pastors in a new church built out in the country. We had to drive everywhere. There was nowhere to walk, no one to meet casually. During the week, I’d stare out the window at the empty parking lot. It made me feel completely immobilized.
The Little Trailer on the Corner
Because of the way our first parsonage was sited, we couldn’t see a lot of other houses and, happily, not many people could stare very long at ours, unless they were standing in the middle of the highway. We had the church on one side of us and, on the other side, the river that bounded the town on the south. But from our back windows you could look through our yard, full of two dozen oak trees, our own woods, through the next yard, and get a pretty good look at one dwelling, a beat-up trailer that stood on the next corner.
It was right where I made my turn on my walk to the post office every morning. But I wasn’t really inside it much until the lady living in it began to fall ill and unravel.
Bernice was a quiet, kind person, a faithful church member, mother of one of our council members, and grandmother of some of our confirmation students. She was small and thin, with graceful movements. I remember her usually smiling and looking happy. She was also clearly of African-American heritage, a rare thing in our remote area, where almost everyone was named some version of Lena Johnson or Magnus Olafson. But it was precisely that Swedish presence that held the key: someone told me two of the early farmers, immigrant brothers, free of the American sickness of racism, had married African-American girls. Bernice was one of their children who had remained in the area, though not the only one.
I knew Bernice as pastors know all the little, white-haired, older ladies in their congregations: as part of the regular crowd—not as well as the more active volunteers, much better than the occasional churchgoers. Since I knew her son and grandchildren, I knew her a little better than most, though not much.
Then one day at church she came over and thanked me for standing outside her trailer and singing to her. I had no idea what she was talking about and, when I pressed her, she gave a nervous laugh and looked away, as though she suspected herself that she was being swallowed by confusion, but insisted that she had heard my wife and me singing in our yard and then coming over to her trailer to serenade her. She assured me it was quite nice.
Well, the church had some chimes that played in the evening, there were a lot of shadows from the trees in those yards, lots of kids out and about, so I thought it was just possible some combination of those circumstances had led her to think what she thought.
But she kept hearing the singing and no one quite knew what to think about it. In a small town where there are so many family connections, people become aware of problems among the elderly fairly quickly. Among regular churchgoers, people are always noticed and quickly missed. Everybody liked Bernice so the puzzle she was presenting got a lot of attention. We started dropping in on her, the family started making doctor appointments, but she still seemed to get around well and function well. She just kept hearing the singing around her trailer.
Then the singing stopped and the abuse began: voices shouting at her, ridiculing her, calling her names. You can imagine the names. I’m sure everything she heard from the white Americans she grew up with, everything she swallowed and smiled her way through, was breaking out of her memory and rioting in her mind. I was horrified to think she might still be imagining my voice among them.
At last, what she heard was no longer an occasional serenade or rant but a constant, relentless, vile commentary on everything she