John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Though they were silent, both Joan’s father and mother were more deeply religious than the official policies of the churches they’d grown up in. Joan’s mother had been a Roman Catholic, and in a sense was still. When she settled her heart on marrying a Baptist, a boy she’d grown up with and loved from the beginning, whose virtues and defects she’d come to know like the back of her hand, she quietly scrapped the opinions of her church — not without some stress, even superstitious fright — asserting and affirming that the God she worshipped could not conceivably be such a narrow-minded fool as to despise Donald Frazier for the doctrinal persuasions of his parents. Religion for her had always consisted, essentially, of two things: a timid but deep love of ritual — an appreciation, fundamentally aesthetic, of the gestures of the Mass, of music and vestments, of statues and wide convent lawns (there was a convent in Florissant, not far off) — and, secondly, an unostentatious devotion to basic goodness, the quiet morality, fair-mindedness, and general optimism she observed in her parents and in her older brothers and sisters, some of whom were grown up and had moved away when Emmy — Emily — was born. Though she was by no means unintelligent, she had never especially concerned herself with theological questions — no more than had the rest of the countrified Catholic congregation she grew up with, or the dirt-poor, absentminded priest who served them. But she understood fairness: it was unfair to make a husband switch to Catholicism and break his mother’s heart, and unfair to her family that she shift to the camp of those who most openly denounced them. Forced to leave the Church or else renounce Donald Frazier, for reasons not even her father was sure of — as he all but admitted, turning from her sternly, pulling at his beard — she quietly moved her Catholicism to another building, the bland, friendly House of God as the Methodists understood him, and no one was especially troubled except, of course, Donald’s mother. Emmy was robbed, in the Methodist Church, of ritual, and sometimes even here she must sit through tirades against the religion of her parents; but even in middle age she would look over at Donald, who sat with his head tipped up, as if politely listening, or sat with his elbow on the wall of the pew, the inside of his hand across his forehead, eyes closed — he was fast asleep — and she would decide again that she’d been right, that God was Love, simply; it was as plain as the nose on Donald’s face. In her later years she would seldom go to church, but nothing had changed. She found her ritual in the comings and goings of birds, the rise and decline of her roses, in sunrise and sunset, the exactly punctual five o’clock phone call from her sister Cora, and the ten o’clock news before she and Donald settled down to sleep. As for basic goodness, her children were a great satisfaction to her — even James. For all the unhappiness in his life, he was happy in his work, and good at it. And Donald, with hair now whiter than snow, was an amazing man, a saint. When you came right down to it, she asked herself — or meekly asked God — how many parents (not that she’d dream of mentioning her opinion to a living soul) had a daughter like their Joan?

Joan’s father’s religion — or at any rate so Martin Orrick would describe it in one of his later, more unreadable novels — was “of a sort virtually impossible to defend in a world which finds its fundamental verities in the New York Times , the San Francisco Chronicle , or the St. Louis Post-Dispatch” —the world Martin Orrick would howl at with all the volcanic rage of his convulsive, misanthropic soul (much to his profit, ironically, so that the rage would grow more fierce, more unjust and cruel, the prose more eccentric and bizarre).

Joan’s father was a more or less classic Midwestern Protestant. He’d been raised in the Coldwater Baptist Church not far from Possum Hollow, a house of rabid Scotch-Irish fundamentalists where even those who were inclined to moderation must sooner or later be swept into the current of avid self-righteousness and cowering self-hate by loose talk of heaven and the slime of the earth, God’s abundant love and wild-animal rage against all who offended his dignity or law. Martin Orrick would write: “Such churches have grown rare in America; not, one suspects, because people have grown wiser but because the weather has changed. Such churches thrive — not cynically, but in answer to ancient human needs — on extreme poverty, ignorance, and the unhealthy certainty that can come from living too far from books, too close to nature, whose laws are not ours; they thrive on a high rate of infant mortality — cholera, diphtheria, scarlet fever, plague — and a profound distrust of strangers. It is a curious fact that for the most part the warnings and admonitions of such a church, however dire, however vivid the imagery that engulfs and enflames them, are not aimed at the present congregation at all but at those who have stayed home on a given Sunday morning, breaking the community’s phalanx wall, or the warnings are fired, like shots into a woodlot in the middle of the night, at the prowling, potentially dangerous unfamiliar — the German, the Frenchman, the Negro, or the sharp-eyed Injun boy over by the woodshed. It was the stranger, not the Baptist, who drank, swore oaths, and did no work. It was marriage to the stranger that led to madness or idiocy or the rolling-eyed human mule. It was only when they slipped into the stranger’s ways, taking to drink, or taking into bed some gentile wife (as an earlier breed of intransigeants had it) that the wrath of the Fundamental Church came down like an axe on the heads of its own. When Donald Frazier set his mind on marrying a Catholic, the staddle on which his mother’s church was built had already begun to crumble, the walls inclined to lean, the dark-stained windows were beginning to crack and let light in. In short, he understood what they were saying, but did not believe them.

His father, it was said, had been in his youth a happy-go-lucky, footloose man who might have come to no good; but he married Lulu Thompson, who seems to have been, judging by old photographs, a stunningly beautiful woman except that she had deep-set, evil eyes. (Joan and Buddy, when they visited — she was then over ninety — would hear from her stories of hammer murders and the lynching of “coloreds.”) But photographs lie, and country wisdom is sometimes worth crediting. The children she reared, with John Frazier’s help, were all secure, decent people. The eldest died a hero in World War I, and John Elmer, the least successful of the sons financially, was a man Martin Orrick would years later describe, borrowing from Homer, as a man “such as men were then and are not now.” She was a religious fanatic, apparently; but she lived in harsh times. A central story in the family legend is that once they had a neighbor, a no-’count Frenchman, who would go on drunken benders and come shoot at the house with his gun, also at their chickens, sheep, and mules. According to one version — the version Joan Orrick was inclined to believe (her father wouldn’t speak of it, would only chuckle and blush and look down and say, “Well, you hear a lot of stories”) — the neighbor came one night into her grandpa’s pitch-dark barn, and her grandpa was up in the mow with his rifle, waiting, and shot him through the head when he walked through the door. Then her grandpa took off on the horse he had waiting and rode to the house of William Burke, a mile away, who was sheriff at the time, and turned himself in. “What John,” William Burke is supposed to have said, blinking the sleep away, rubbing at the roughness of his thick red neck, “you didn’t, John! Aw shit!” and got out of bed and woke up his sons, and while John Frazier sat smiling, sipping at William Burke’s whiskey (to calm his nerves), they rode half the night, to every neighbor for miles around, and they all congregated at John Frazier’s farm and shot holes upon holes into the dead man. Though they might’ve lawed John Frazier, they could hardly law the whole county, so they left the thing lie.