Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

When I was a kid I stood in fields pretending I was a scarecrow. It was a sin to pretend we were something other than what we were but I have always enjoyed standing very still in fields. And often, when sin is used in the name of farming, Mennonites look the other way. Farming is very important to us. And I’m talking very important. When I was a kid we played a game in Sunday school, although we didn’t call it a game, we called it a pod. Our teacher played the roles of different people in a skit. First, she was Professor Knuf, and she couldn’t get on the heaven train. Then she was Rockin’ Rhonda, also not allowed on the train. Then the next Sunday she was Slugger Sam and again was denied access to the heaven train. Finally she was Farmer Fred and she was allowed onto the train because she had Jesus in her heart. It was a fun game. We all clapped for Farmer Fred and afterwards drew pictures of the other three people crying at the gates of heaven and Farmer Fred just sailing on by, with spokes of light coming off him. I enjoyed drawing very short shorts on Rockin’ Rhonda and a lipstick-stained cigarette dangling from her bottom lip. I drew Slugger Sam next to her, about to slam her over the head with his bat, and a word bubble coming from his mouth that said Jezebel! I didn’t quite get why Professor Knuf didn’t make the cut, unless it was because he was a professor of science and believed in facts. I considered giving Farmer Fred a word bubble that said Fry, Knuf, fry! but then I realized that that would be gloating and farmer or no farmer, you don’t gloat on the heaven train.

One afternoon when I was standing still in my grandma’s sugar-beet field I noticed two black dresses, the ugly Fortrel kind that many old women in our town wear on a daily basis, flying around like large crazy birds way up in the sky near the water tower. I hadn’t realized, right then, that they were dresses but I figured it out after a while. I stood and watched as they flew all the way over to my grandma’s yard. I was amazed that they were flying so close together and I thought it was great because they were dancing all over the place, seriously shaking it in this crazy, free, beautiful way until finally one of them fell onto the roof of my grandma’s barn and the other one coasted in for a spectacularly gentle landing right at my feet. It was one of the best things that had ever happened to me, watching those dresses dancing wildly in the wind.

I didn’t touch the one lying on the ground beside me, it seemed like some kind of sacred object, but I kicked a little dirt over it and then put a rock on top of the dirt. I said goodbye to it like I was a little kid who didn’t know the difference between a dress and a person and I completely ignored the dress that had dropped onto the barn roof. It might still be there. I should check one of these days.

Travis and me just got back from driving around. We drove around and around, not on Main Street, like Bert and his girlfriend do in Bert’s Red Phantom, but on country roads with a six of Old Stock between us and some reasonably good shit on the radio. We get dusty when the windows are open but we swelter to death if they’re not. I put my bare feet up on the dash and Travis gets bugged when I leave toe prints on the windshield. I can work all the knobs on the radio with my feet and even change the tape and put it back into its case.

Sometimes we race farm dogs, but I don’t enjoy that very much because I’m always afraid they’ll get caught up under the car wheels. It hasn’t happened yet. Sometimes we stick messages of protest onto cows, with wide black electrical tape. HANDS OFF, FARM BOY. Things like that.

Today we climbed a solitary tree in the middle of a field and took turns jumping from higher and higher branches. We saw a gopher that looked exactly like the old guy who bags groceries at Tomboy. Same expression. We thought a flock of crows was plotting to kill us like in the movie The Birds which we had never seen but knew about and then remembered that a flock of crows was called a murder. We threw pieces of dried-up dirt at them and they flew away. We accidentally broke a bottle in the field and spent half an hour picking up all the little pieces so that the cows wouldn’t step on them and then another half-hour burying them deep in the dirt. Then I taught Travis how to braid long pieces of grass and we made a little tiara and placed it on the head of a cow that was just lying there and didn’t seem to care at all. After that we just sat in the shade under the tree and I asked him if he’d donate one of his kidneys to me if I ever needed it and he said yeah and I said good, thank you, and then he said wait, will having only one kidney affect how much I can drink? And I said probably, and he said then, hmmm, he’d have to think about it.

On the way home I asked him if we could stop at my grandma’s old barn to see if the dress was still up there. He asked me what I wanted to do with it and I said nothing, I just wanted to see if it was still there.

My grandma died in the fall while watching a Blue Jays game on TV. Her feet were up and her hair was in curlers and there was a can of tomato soup simmering away on the stove. Now her house was used for missionaries to live in when they were home on furlough.

Travis and I drove up into the driveway and got out and stared at the barn. We went inside it to see if there was a ladder somewhere but there wasn’t so we drove his truck around to the back and then he stood on the cab part and I climbed up onto his shoulders and then up onto the roof. The dress wasn’t there. I had really been hoping that it would be and when I couldn’t find it I felt tired and pissed off and hot and stupid.

Where do you think it went, Travis asked. And I said I didn’t know. I don’t know where anything goes, I said. Don’t be sad about stuff like that, okay, he asked me. He put his arm around my shoulders. I said yeah, okay, I wouldn’t be. He picked some dandelions that were poking out of the dirt next to the barn and handed them to me and I said thank you and held them the whole way back to my place. At least if I couldn’t have one of his kidneys I could have weeds.

He had to go do some stuff for his dad. Did you have fun today, he asked me. I nodded and smiled and hugged him. He said he’d call me later and then he lifted me up off the ground.

My parents had their first date at church. It consisted of walking side by side for three whole beautiful blocks to the gravel parking lot where my father said to my mother: Well. And my mother said: That’s deep. They cracked each other up. Thank God I wasn’t there. English wasn’t their first language, so jokes were a particular type of achievement. Their mother tongue was an unwritten language . How do you write things down, I’d asked Trudie. We don’t, obviously, she said, not in that language anyway. The stories are passed around. They come to us.

Should we go inside? That was my dad wondering. He often wondered. Of course, said my mom. We’ve come all this way. Three blocks only, said my dad. He, like the doomed Professor Knuf, enjoyed specificity. He liked to take note of irrefutable facts. In fact he liked to take hold of irrefutable facts as though they were life rafts. Things, unlike wives and daughters, that would not go away. I think he would have walked forever with my mom if she’d suggested it. They’d be walking still. They could be in New York by now.

He had a hard time making decisions. It was tough. The guy arrives at his pre-planned destination with his girl and then wonders if they should go in. It seems…he said. It seems what, my mom had asked. He didn’t know. Take off your jacket, she said. It’s so warm. It’ll be hotter than stink in the sanctuary. Normally, when my mom made a suggestion, my dad followed through. But not when it came to his suit jacket. It was like Batman’s cowl or Samson’s hair. No…no, he said. I’d better leave it on.