SHADOW OF A STEEPLE, Chapter 1
“Are you telling me I can’t?” I pushed against a box with my toe. “You know what happens then.”
Jon hoisted the box, carried it across the living room and stacked it on top of another, which caved slightly.
“There’s no better way to motivate you, is there?” he teased. “Miss Do-It-Just-to-Show-Them.”
I loved that Jon knew everything about me, even this, and loved me anyway, especially on a hot day, a moving day, a day when everything was ending and beginning, all at once. I rushed to reward him, “It’s not that I mind waiting for you—”
“Then wait.” Jon picked up another box and hoisted it onto the stack. “We can go over together, the three of us, as soon as they’re done.” He thumped the top of the box with the flat of his hand to punctuate the word ‘done.’
“But I’ve been waiting for months. Now we’re here. Next door. I want to see if it’s like I remember.”
Jon hoisted a fourth carton onto the stack. The tower of boxes swayed and we both put out our hands to steady it. My eyes went from one label to the next—each said “Books”—and I wondered fleetingly why I hadn’t been more specific. How would I find my New Testament commentaries for next Sunday’s sermon? The thought of actually preaching every week made me as unsteady as the boxes.
“Don’t you want to go over as a family?” he said. “Ava hasn’t seen the place yet.”
I glanced over my shoulder into the dining room. A bare window was propped open with a stick in a vain attempt to help the air circulate. Beneath the window Ava had pulled the ladderback chairs into a circle. Inside her impromptu corral she was unloading dolls from a laundry basket. It was a sweet scene, but something about the curve of her shoulders told me she was getting ready to wail.
“I’ll just be gone a minute,” I said. “And Ava’s occupied.”
The moving men passed us, carrying our queen-sized boxspring. They maneuvered the unwieldy item up the stairs, tipping it over the carved banister at the turn halfway up.
“I didn’t even remember that banister,” I said.
Jon nodded. “It must have been there when you interviewed. I sure didn’t notice it being so wobbly.” He grasped it and the whole railing shifted.
Another wave of unsteadiness seized me and I put my hand on my husband’s arm. The moving men completed the turn and disappeared into the upstairs hall.
I said, “I’m going. Now.”
I banged out the screen door, thumped down the wooden porch steps, and followed the sidewalk to the right. My breath came quickly and I kept my eyes down. In about 50 steps I came to the “T” where the church walk branches off. I had the urge to dart across the grass before I could think. Or maybe turn around and run back to the manse. I stopped. At least I could look up quickly and get that first glance over with.
But there are some things you only get to do once, so you should do them properly. I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, lifted my chin, and looked. The church was a stone’s throw in front of me, white and square.
My church.
Those two words pricked a queer feeling in my insides, not nausea exactly, but an uneasy rippling. I thought of the earliest stage of labor, that first pang that warns of big changes underway. But how crazy to think of that now! Giving birth to Ava had taken everything I had, but becoming a minister was a whole different experience. That unsettled feeling must be from the sour smell of heat, of corn and dirt without a breath of wind. I’d get used to it. I had conquered seminary. How hard could this be?
I strode down the walk, attacked the church steps, and reached for the tarnished doorknob. Except. If this beginning was anything like childbirth, I maybe had no clue how my life was about to change. I looked at my hand on the doorknob and told myself to push.
The door complained but didn’t budge. Maybe it was locked. I remembered how Dottie DeVries made a big point at my interview: “We never lock the church. That’s the country way. That’ll take some getting used to for a city girl like yourself.” Since I was coming from Dubuque, Iowa, population 50,000, a flash of irritation at Dottie’s labels made it easy to shoulder the door open.
I stepped inside, then leaned back on the door until I heard the click of the latch. The no-going-back sound.
I had seen the church once but things never look the same when you see them the second time. What I remembered was the simplicity of the sanctuary, and a clean feeling. But today the air felt full of dust, like a museum. Yes, like a place that exists outside of time somehow. Were suits of armor and broadaxes lurking in a corner? The only light filtered through faux stained-glass windows, bright blue with swirls of yellow.
Maybe this was all a mistake. Maybe the moving van could turn around and take us back.
I was being ridiculous. I’d been working toward this moment for years.
“Welcome,” I called, hoping for an echo that didn’t come. I walked down the sloping aisle, focusing on one thing at a time. The communion table of dark polished wood. The open Bible with an ornate green bookmark, fringed in gold. The leaded glass cross suspended over the communion table. Steps to the pulpit.
Behind the pulpit, I let out my breath. So this would be my view while I proclaimed the word of God: fifteen pews on each side of a center aisle, with the church door standing sentry at the top. Behind me were three red throne chairs and I perched on the middle one. It looked straight into the backside of the pulpit. How amusing. From the congregation’s side, the pulpit was as massive and unalterable as a cemetery monument, but from the preacher’s side, the pulpit was a hollow cavity made of rough pine covered with polished oak veneer.
Jon pays close attention to two things most people ignore: words and things left lying around. He’s a linguist by training and an anthropologist by temperament.
“Artifacts are facts,” he says. “The silent words of a culture.”
I studied the pulpit shelves for clues to my new life: A dented box of Kleenex. A yellow pencil pocked with teeth marks. A stack of four green hymnals, their spines laid open to a white skeleton of binding. Three mismatched water glasses, cloudy with residue.
I wanted to run next door and find Jon. He was the one who’d encouraged me to take a church in Iowa, saying the rural experience would be an adventure. He’d been game to teach high school French and Spanish, and had visions of finding arrowheads in cornfields. Maybe the arrowheads would surface later, but right now I’d found battered Kleenex and wounded hymnals.
What, exactly, did these artifacts say about our future?