A Notion of Pelicans Page 2

  Toni had been listening with half an ear. She sat bolt upright and slid forward in her chair. “Let’s do something about it,” she said.

  We stared at her. Do something about Elizabeth? About Lucy’s sleeping?

  Toni didn’t notice. “I want to go back,” she said, “I want to take us back to where we were saying . . . we were saying we don’t pay enough attention—you know, to what’s meaningful.” She turned to Anna. “I’m happy, Anna, you’re not going to throw away the TV. We need to stay abreast—local news, world events. The problem isn’t what’s going on out there, it’s what’s not going on in here.” She touched her hand to her heart, then her head. “It suddenly occurred to me what we should do. We need to stop living on autopilot, the way we do. We need to be mindful—where we are, and where we’ve been. So, how about this? Before our next meeting, let’s each write down some of our story. A mini memoir. And then let’s come back and share them.”

  “Share? Out loud?” Anna said. The expression on her face was, what now? Toni gets that look from the ladies a lot. Anna shook her head. She said what all the ladies were thinking. “I couldn’t. I’m just Anna, from nowhere to speak of. And if I did have anything worth telling, my words would tangle up. No, no. It’s not for me.” She turned to Lucy. “But you, Lucy. You’ll have stories. Your life is . . . glamorous.”

  Lucy, digging in her purse, snorted. It might have been affirmation.

  Toni’s forehead had crinkled into furrows. She said, “Now, wait. Anna, you’ve lived through the Great Depression, World War II. You’re going to tell me you don’t have even one story?” She cast an eye my way. “Tell her, Rena. You’re the writer here. Everyone has a story.” All I could do was nod, because she never stopped talking. “Everyone is a story, in a larger narrative, like a panel on a quilt. I’m not talking fancy here. A lot of us like patchwork. We like running a finger across Aunt Hildy’s paisley housedress, we love dozing off wrapped in our corduroy jumper from first grade.” She was practically levitating off her chair. “Your words will come out just fine. Take stock of your life. To yourself, at least, admit what you hope. Come right out and say what you fear.”

  Mabel is married to the undertaker. I don’t think she was thinking about piecrust when she said, “Ohhhh. No.”

  “If I lived where you live,” Judy said, “I wouldn’t want to think about it, either.”

  That’s when Orv Anderson’s silvery mop-top appeared in the doorway. He rapped on the jamb and said, “Excuse me, ladies. How are you all today?”

  Blessings come in many disguises. “Good,” I said. I was happier than I should have been, I suppose, that he’d derailed Toni. Maybe I could get a word in. “Toni was just convincing us we need to change our lives.”

  “No, no,” Orv said. “You’re good, just the way you are.”

  Orv runs the men’s group. Now, the guys do a lot, but the fact is, when someone around here needs something—a pan of bars for a meeting, a congregational meal, a female eye for redesigning a space or redoing the landscaping—we’re the ones they come to. Once a year, during the Christmas season, the guys make a gesture. They cook and serve a women’s breakfast. That’s why Orv was at the door. He said, “So—the sixteenth. It’s good, for breakfast?”

  We all looked at Naomi. “The sixteenth is good,” she said. Anything having to do with food is Naomi’s call.

  When Orv left, the ladies started filing out right behind him, and Toni’s mini-memoir plan deflated mid-stroke like a kid’s water ring. Of course, I didn’t even get to float my idea. I’d wanted us to do something to remember Lavinia on her birthday. She’s in the church cemetery because she was a founding member, the founding member. The church exists, it got its name even, because of her.

  So much for that—the day came, and all she got was mums.

  Like everyone who lives along the shores of Lake Superior, we’re under its spell. In college, we used to drive up when we heard the smelt were running. The trunk of Richard’s junker overflowed with buckets and nets. We’d bring hot chocolate and coffee, and we’d build a fire on the beach. The stars were so intense, the air so clean. Toward morning, we’d drive back to school and go straight to campus or straight to bed.

  Superior. It’s the perfect name, synonym for huge, changeable, tempestuous. Some days, the surface stretches inviting and tranquil, a benevolent deity dominating the landscape. Others, it turns choppy and dangerous, angry little whitecaps building to huge, famous swells. I swear, the color of the surface changes by the hour. It’ll be a shade of slate, or turquoise, or aquamarine—then it turns red, rusted-fender red, when the wind blows hard and churns up iron in the shallows. There’s iron in my shallows, too. Growing up, I walked iron-red roads, jumped iron-red puddles, breathed iron-laced air. It’s no surprise, I suppose, that a lake buttressed by iron, criss-crossed by freighters carrying iron, draws me so.

  My father was an engineer for the Colgate mine, which sent its spidery veins deep beneath our house. The neighborhood, called Colgate Location, had the look of a mining company town—row after row of small, square houses terraced like mushrooms over Colgate Hill. Our house, larger than most with an open front porch running the width of it, stood out like a portabella in a patch of button mushrooms.

  Mom and Pops had devised a timeline by which their only child was to reach the major milestones. They’re a piece of work. After my young lifetime of being guarded and forbidden, when it came time to prepare me for the responsibilities of womanhood, they pushed me off the dock. I turned fifteen, and the next day Mom announced it was time for me to start babysitting. I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d told me I was going to be a big sister. Before long, I had a number of families relying on me, most of them folks around Colgate.

  Before dark one Friday in early November, I walked up the hill to sit for Dottie and Bud Buckner. Theirs was the pug-faced house across from the abandoned Colgate Hospital. It was a reasonable place to sit, with mindful children, color TV, and the latest romance magazines, which Dottie freely offered. At our house, true romance was strictly contraband. My mother would have pitched a fit if she’d seen me reading it. I’d have heard, “Serena Amanda Leann”—they must have known they’d only have one kid, since they gave me so many names—“what is that in your hands?” What the Buckners didn’t offer, but I had discovered, was girlie magazines in a kitchen drawer. Even Pops would have had a conniption about that. I looked at the pictures with a kind of hunger, wanting to be grown up, like those brave, naked women, flipping the last magazine shut with a vague sense of danger.

  “Lock the door,” Dottie Buckner said, and I dutifully did. The boarded-up hospital made me nervous. The keys to the Buckners’ doors—skeleton keys, like at our house and every house—had been lost, the locks never updated. Anyone could have gotten into just about any house in the location. That thought never left my mind. After Dottie and Bud exited through the back door, which was in a windowless alcove off the kitchen, I slid the flimsy bolt across and snapped it down.

  At ten o’clock, the cuckoo whirred out of its little hut above the couch. The kids were long asleep, and I was deep into the story of a woman in love with a man about to take vows as a Jesuit—a girl likes the thought of besting a worthy competitor, and you can’t get any worthier than God. Just as the heroine was stepping from a cab to confess all for love, the phone rang.

  “Rena. It’s Dottie.” Her voice was tight. “I need you to do something for me.”

  “The dishes are done.”

  “Thank you, dear, but no, not the dishes. Bud and I . . . we’ve . . . we’ve had a fight. He took off in the car, so . . . I’m waiting for a taxi. Here’s what I need. If he shows up before I do, don’t let him in.” There was silence. I could tell she was considering what to say. “You hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “No matter what, don’t let him in.”

  I promised. By the time I dropped the phone into its cradle, my fingers were ice. What did she mea
n, I shouldn’t let him in? How could I not? I stood an eternity by the back door, thinking how flimsy it looked, how little the bolt. If Bud Buckner knocked at that door, I knew all I could do was pretend to be asleep, way off in the living room.

  Anxiety lends to the ears an eerie sort of vision. As I stood beside the door, willing Dottie’s cab safe transit and speedy passage, my ears saw the tires that rolled into the gravel drive. They saw the turn of a wrist that cut the motor—so, not a cab? My heart dropped and began to pound, no, no, no, no, and then the slamming of a car door, and footsteps. Footsteps heavy, too heavy and slow. Finally, the creaking arc of the storm door as it opened on the porch. I slid to the side of the door as if I might be invisible there, my back to the wall.

  More steps, then three thick, assertive raps hit the door, followed by dead air.

  The porch floor creaked under shifted weight. My body had slowed to the speed of wood, all but my heart and my brain. I was leaning into the wall so hard, my spine was two-by-four and plaster.

  More raps, harder, louder. Three raps, four. Then again. Then car keys clattered to the porch floor.

  “Shit.”

  It was Bud, for sure—Big Bud, Mr. Buckner. He leaned down to pick the keys up, and his shoulder hit the door. He cursed, rattled the knob, and hammered so violently that the wall behind me rumbled and rocked.

  It suddenly stopped. There was silence, except my breathing.

  “I know you’re there,” Bud said. His speech was slurred, his voice wheedling. “C’mon. Unlock the door.” He paused. “Jes’ reach up an’ push back the bolt.”

  I was so freaked out there was no logic to my thought. He sees me, feels me, right through the door. My mind leapt. What would he do if I didn’t let him in? Or if I did? I backed up harder into the wall. A night sky had bloomed inside my head, and constellations were wheeling in it. My muscle and blood began to shower sparks.

  Bud Buckner punched the door once and shouldered it hard.

  “Open the go’damn door!” I didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t take my ears off the skinny bolt rattling in its sleeve. “Bitch,” he muttered. The porch door slammed. Finally, I heard his engine gunning, all the way down the hill.

  Only then did I begin to shake.

  When Dottie got there, she was embarrassed and terse. “I’d walk you home, but if he comes back, he’ll lock me out.” She pressed four one-dollar bills into my hand, though she owed me only three.

  Beyond the porch light, out of Dottie Buckner’s sight, I started to run. A pack of Colgate boys roamed the streets at night. Something about it made people nervous—that something that, if she thinks about it, makes a girl afraid. There had been incidents. Something—no one was sure exactly what—had happened to a girl in an old mining-company shop building. I ran like hell down the cold dark stretches between streetlights, my breath pluming against the lights farther down. I flew, terrified that hands were going to hook me from behind, too terrified to blink. My heart was crowding my tongue, and there was a poker in my side. Streetlight after streetlight, I didn’t let up or let down until I was in striking distance of my own yard. Just as I thought to relax, a cigarette flared in the dark. I stopped short, squinting, my breath heaving in ragged gasps.

  “Serena?” It was my father, sounding surprised from where he was seated on the step that connected our walk to the city’s. “What are you doing out there? Those people didn’t drive you home?” Pops gathered me and took me in, whereupon my mother had some choice things to say, most of them to Dottie Buckner over an icy-hot telephone line. I never sat for Buckners again.

  I’ve replayed what happened that night again and again and concluded that, fifteen or no, the situation was one that allowed no good way out. As frightening as the episode was, it left no lasting ill effects. I’ve never forgotten, though, that the one I trusted sent me out into the dark.

  Of course, maybe Richard would offer a few thoughts from his perspective on the ways in which I am warped. “We’re all a bit warped,” he says. Small consolation. Fortunately, I have Lavinia for comfort. She liked to keep track of things. Our first year here, Richard and I read her account of the church’s origin in a history I found wedged beneath the drawer of an old desk. Naomi and I had taken on the balcony storage room on spring cleanup day, and we discovered the desk under a mountain of junk.

  Naomi’s a brick. She’s got her hands into so many things. She’s one of those women no church could survive without. She has the soft, double-folded eyelids of an older woman of her ethnicity—Finnish, as many here are—and the comfortable demeanor of someone who’s been a member most of her life. She knows her way around the place. Sanctuary, sacristy, kitchen, nursery, library. From the loftiest loft to the smallest nook or cranny. Naomi was married at Pelican. Her children, all eight of them, were baptized and confirmed, her daughters married, at Pelican. Except, of course, Esther, who’s the radical of the Kinnunen bunch and ran off to St. Paul. Naomi’s parents and even her husband Einar, last April, were buried through Pelican. She has her own funeral plotted out, right to the placement of her casket—carved mahogany, she’ll have you know, the scene from the Last Supper—and the composition of the floral arrangements depending on the time of year. She’s informed Richard her hymns are to be “Rock of Ages” and “How Great Thou Art,” and rumor has it she’s given Mabel a list of women to serve at the luncheon. She’s allowing Richard to decide for himself what to say in the eulogy.

  “I think you know me well enough by now, Pastor,” she said, one Sunday as the coffee hour was winding down.

  “Why, thank you, Naomi. I think I do, after all the Lenten soup and sandwich suppers you’ve prepared, and the thousand urns of coffee.”

  “And the new member receptions.”

  “Those, too. You take the prize for tater-tot hot dish.”

  “Of course,” Naomi allowed, “Bugs helps me with most of it.” As I said, she and Bugs were in diapers together. You see one, you’ll see the other. Bugs’s real name is Borghild, which her little brother couldn’t say, hence Bugs. “Except,” Naomi continued. “That time her gallbladder went bust and she dumped the mother-daughter dinner on me with a day’s notice. Not that I didn’t pull it off.” As Richard nodded sympathetically, she said, “If you live long enough, things happen. You handle them. I just want you to know, Pastor, I trust you not to embarrass me.” Which meant, of course, she didn’t trust him at all. Even bricks have their idiosyncrasies.

  “Oh ho!” Richard laughed. “Is that how it is? Well, thank you again, Naomi, but I’m generally more worried about embarrassing myself.”

  Naomi had never seen the history before. “My word!” she said, whatever word she was laying claim to clearly on the outskirts of profanity. “Floyd—” she said, wheezing with humor at the picture in her head, “Floyd will be drooling worse than Scout when he gets wind of this.”

  We shared an understanding laugh. Floyd is our church historian, whose clumsy but affectionate English setter has sparked life into many a gathering at Floyd and Carol’s place, moving from knee to knee, resting his head to stare up adoringly and leaving horseshoes of slobber. I don’t know how Carol can stand to live with that dog.

  I took the history home and sat down with a cup of Darjeeling. The book was thin, clearly penned when there wasn’t much to record. The paper, once white, had gone to beige, curled in places, and smelled strongly of dust, of heat and of damp. Thin though it was, it felt full. As I held that slender volume, I felt every funeral, every wedding, every christening it had been witness to. I had a sense of every sermon, as if I were hearing them simultaneously from a distant room, a hushed, intricate weaving of voices.

  Lavinia’s story, coming across the years in her own words, put her at the table with me. Church lore is that she and Henry didn’t have children, something that, before my first pregnancy, I lived in fear of for myself. Even after I got pregnant, I waited for things to go wrong, especially carrying the twins—no one dodged more petrochemica
l bullets or sidestepped more electromagnetic fields than me. When I finally held Andy and Scott, and then Chelsey, in my arms, I was able to let go of that fear. But I found new things to obsess about. As someone famous once said, the unvexed life is not worth living. Or something like that.

  Lavinia’s father left her an inheritance, which she and Henry used to buy some land. Their acreage had a crow’s-eye view of the big lake and was heavily wooded except for a clearing that edged a rocky bluff. Lavinia had been born among the hills of Massachusetts, so the spot above the lake spoke to her. What she wrote about it made her seem as alive and real as any woman I know: “I had a notion to build a white house with green shutters, plum and apple trees blooming all around. That notion was replaced by one, sudden and certain, that arrived on the wings of pelicans.”

  Lavinia had never seen a pelican except in naturalists’ sketches—then she saw not one or two, but a flock. She was out on the new land, waiting, who would guess, for Henry, when a migratory group swooped in on the winds of a storm and circled above her. She had some sort of mystical experience. She was a reader of folklore and knew church tradition. As the birds flew off and she gathered her wits, she remembered the pelican was a symbol for Christ. That homely bird—clumsy, top-heavy oddity—is said to love its young so deeply, it pierces its own body to feed them with its blood.

  Now, Lavinia claimed her word was enough for Henry. She told him what had happened. The two of them talked, they prayed. In the end, they took it as a sign and gave up their own plans for the land and donated a parcel of it to be the site for a church. The congregation they belonged to was discussing a purchase of land, and Henry and Lavinia floored the assembly by rising and, hand in hand, offering the prime section of theirs.

  People then were as likely to shoot pelicans as celebrate them, between wanting the feathers and competing for fish, but the strange story of Lavinia’s pelicans had gone through town as if on the birds’ own wings. People wondered, were the pelicans sent by God? Were they God, a manifestation of God, in some mysterious way? The congregants, every last man and woman, accepted the Hansens’ offer. When the church finally stood above the lake, its sanctuary doors opening onto the water, Lavinia spoke at the consecration. She observed it wasn’t the house of which she had dreamed, but one the land shaped. God’s house, built literally on rock—yes, on a bluff, which she thought the Divine Wordsmith must get pleasure from. A house of rock. The congregation was a practical bunch, and they’d raised the walls stone by stone from glacial rock dug out of their fields. In remembrance of the pelicans—birds that to this day gather on breeding grounds to our west—the members gave the church its simple, peculiar name.