From The World Beyond the Window
Love
When I graduated from seminary, I wished that Baptist ministers wore clerical collars. It was a sign that the wearer had received a special calling, that he was set apart from everyone else. It seemed appropriate. I had declared my vocation. I’d gone to college, then to seminary. I had spent countless hours—either paid or unpaid—working in the church. At the time, it seemed right that I should have some sort of badge of spiritual rank like the Catholics and Episcopalians do.
But that was nine years ago. Now, I’m glad that we don’t, not just because I don’t want to be seen as a person with a special calling, but because, in my button-down shirt and Dockers, I don’t feel quite so much like an imposter.
That thought crossed my mind as I hurried up the sidewalk to Love McKinley’s house, wondering what I could say to a family whose wife and mother had committed suicide. Her husband and two grown children had to be bewildered. She was literally here one day and gone the next. She was not old, just about sixty. She didn’t have some sort of terminal disease that took her little by little, allowing the family to prepare for it. She didn’t perish in a car accident caused by some drunk or distracted driver. She simply took an entire bottle of pain pills while no one was at home.
There were a few neighbors standing in the yard talking when I got to the house, little clots of people, talking in low tones, occasionally glancing toward the house. I slowed down to speak and shake their hands before going into the house.
Somehow, the house smelled of death, stale air trapped in the high-ceilinged rooms, wrapped around the overstuffed furniture. I had never been in this house before, so I didn’t know if the air was the smell of death or of just not much living.
§
The King of the World
I was twelve years old when I learned that the King
of the World lived in a chicken coop. The three of us—Li'l Fowler, Billy Royce
and I—had roller skated down to the end of Church Street, and then, after
carefully hiding our skates in the weeds, had walked down the dirt road to the
power plant and taken the path that Li'l had shown us through the woods.
And there it was, just like Li'l had said it would
be. An old, nearly falling down chicken coop with hens walking around it,
pecking on the ground and an old rooster sitting in the doorway. It wasn't
painted. It was just boards. But near the flat roof, over the door, in brown or
what might have been red paint, it said, “Cursed be anybody who steals my
eggs." It was signed, “The King of the World
§
The Measure of Morton Findlay
Morton Findlay wore his ordinariness like a badge of honor. For nearly all of his life, he had determinedly stayed at the very center of any spectrum he encountered. He was neither tall nor short, light nor dark, slender nor heavy. When he was eight, his teacher had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He told her he would like to be an insurance salesman or maybe a bottled water truck driver.
It wasn’t that he was descended from particularly ordinary people. In fact, his brother was a doctor well respected by his colleagues and most of his patients. His sister was a television anchorperson in the 28th largest market in the United States. His mother had won a ribbon — either green or gold — at a county fair when she was only eighteen. But, in the midst of all that accomplishment, some recessive gene injected into the pool by a distant, very ordinary ancestor claimed Morton at a very early age and guided his every decision until the present day, when he was a clerk in men’s furnishings in a department store. He was known for the number of brown suits and solid dark brown ties he sold.
§
One of God's Finest Creations
Now I could see Joe. He was sitting on the edge of his bunk and had his elbows on his knees. He was just staring at the wall. Joe was always a skinny sort, but now all I could see was his knobby wrists sticking out of the sleeves that were hanging off his boney shoulders. Like somebody had sucked all the flesh right off his bones. I wondered how a man that skinny could make an honest living. He shifted down a little so I could sit down on his bunk.
I sat down and stared at the wall with him for a minute. It seemed like what he wanted to do. But I couldn’t help wondering what he’d done that was bad enough for them to hang him.
“How did you get into this mess, Joe?”
“Wasn’t hard. I killed Avery Spence. Then I walked into town and told the sheriff what I’d done.”
“Damn! When was this?”
“Little over a week ago. On a Tuesday, I think.”
“And they’re going to hang you today? That’s real quick.”
“Don’t take long. ‘Bout the only thing I said to the judge was I did it. Seemed to be enough.”
“Well, maybe if you had a good reason, they wouldn’t hang you for it.”
“I guess my reason was good enough. I guess hanging’s good enough, too. I don’t want to go down to Alto for the rest of my life.”
He went back to staring at the wall. I did too. But in a minute, there was something else I wanted to know.
“Why did you kill Avery Spence?”
“Seemed like the thing to do.”
§
The Spirit of Ava Gardner
By the time his scarred brown brogan hit the edge of the two-track path that May morning, Cory Messer knew that he was just going to keep walking. That time of the morning, the grass growing up between the tracks, still dew-wet, whisked the legs of his overalls, and the air had just a little bit of the heat that would wrap itself around him in a few hours.
This was the same path he went up every day, getting to the tobacco field or the cotton or the vegetable garden beyond the cotton. Some days he had a hoe over his shoulder, and some days he was on the old Farmall F-30. It was nearly 20 years old, but it would still pull a disc-harrow. But today was different. He didn’t have his tools. He wasn’t going to the fields. He was just going.
Cory didn’t know where he was walking to, but he knew what he was walking away from. There was Agnes, his wife, and the angry words she’d shouted at him last night. There was Junior, the son he’d hoped to raise to be a good farmer, but no matter what Cory did, he couldn’t make Junior feel the pride of being on his own land. Cody was the first person in memory to farm his own land. His daddy and granddaddy had farmed on shares and lived as best they could from one crop to the next. He’d tried to convince Junior to take some pride in it, but Junior didn’t seem to care.
Cory walked. Head down. Shoulders bowed forward. He had always stood up straight since he had become a man at about thirteen or fourteen. His mama and his daddy had spent a lot of time teaching him how to be a man. To keep his word. To help his neighbor. To show respect and demand respect. Going to church and reading the Bible. But somewhere in the last three or four years, when it seemed that bad years followed one after another, He felt like the world was wearing down on him, pushing his head down, bowing his shoulders, and mashing something inside him so hard that sometimes he thought would explode.
§
The World Beyond the Window
I can’t claim to be wise. I’m only twenty-four, and I think it takes a lot longer than that to accumulate wisdom. I do know a lot more about comma splices, dangling participles, and subject-verb agreement than the high school students I teach, but that’s just education. Hopefully, they’ll know the basics of English grammar by the time they graduate; then, they’ll sound like they have an education.
Wisdom is another thing entirely. You don’t get it from a book. And–at least in my short experience–it doesn’t come without pain. And, unless you’re some kind of genius, you don’t get it all by yourself.
There are a few things that I’ve learned that might be the beginnings of wisdom:
If, as they say, life is a journey, you shouldn’t expect to end up in the same place you started. That can be either a good thing or a bad one.
We are developed not just by our own experiences, but also by the experiences of other people. Life isn’t really a straight line; it’s more like a cobweb. In fact, if it wasn’t for some other people’s experiences, some of them terrible, I wouldn’t be trying to convince Teddy Sommers that every paragraph needs a topic sentence and that “him and I” will probably cost him a job one of these days. If I was anything at all, I’d be stuck in the mountains, married too young, and never knowing what was on the other side of the ridge.
And, finally, love is not overrated. Real love is everything it’s cracked up to be. It’s the difference between shivering in your bed at night, afraid you’re going to disappear completely and feeling secure enough to get a good night’s sleep. It’s the difference between waking up to dread and waking up to a world that has possibilities. For me, it may have been the difference between life and death. Or a life that was worse than death.
That’s the reason I’m spending this summer week by myself in a little cabin in the mountains, staring through the window at the green growth, beautiful at someplace near the midpoint between the new birth of spring and its flaming end in the fall. It’s cool and crisp here, a perfect place to sit and think. I came here to remember the two women – and me. We all had stories that started differently, and just because the two of the women are no longer with us, they still don’t end. I hope I pass some of what they knew, what they did, and what they believed to somebody else, and when I’m no longer here, and the stories will just keep going on.