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The Preacher's Daughter Second Place, 2005-06 Jo Cleveland Creative Writing Contest, H. University E.A. Blevins Ed thought instruments in church were a sin. Ed was a severe old man who never smiled and ignored me when we passed each other in the halls. He was an elder in our church; he was retired, had a sweet wife, and they lived across from the church and owned peacocks. Ed's wife, Vonda, loved my hair. She probably also loved that I was quiet, docile, and sweet, which you kind of have to be when you're a preacher's kid. She sat on the stairs in the half-light of the yellow hallway bulbs, and I stood beside her, ducking my head and hiding my pale, eleven-year-old face behind a long, heavy swathe of hair. She picked up a lock from where it hung near my waist and toyed with it, smiling. I peeked out and smiled back. I was tall for my age, but felt small. I had thin wrists and an oval face, and I wanted to crawl into her lap and let her love me. She pulled me to sit beside her. I was shy and pale and yearning on the stairs and remembered the time I walked through a patch of sunlight in a farmhouse kitchen and got caught in the midst of a troop of petting, gasping, and admiring old women. "Move back," they said, and, "Oh, will you look at that!" And I wanted to step out of myself and see what they saw, but I had to content myself with a blush and the scent of the nearby trash can as it wafted over to me sweet and rotting. "I was wondering," Vonda said to me on the stairs, her pale grey hair pulled back in a bun and her long skirt shrouding thin white ankles with blue varicose veins, "if you would let me be your adopted grandmother?" I slipped a pale hand into hers, ignoring the twinge of betrayal I felt toward my real grandmother, and whispered, "Okay." I always wondered if she knew, then, that her husband was mistreating my dad, and I wondered if she expected me to love her more than my dad and not blame her or her family for what happened. My senior year of college, I took a church conflict management class. I hauled my backpack into the classroom and swung it onto the desk in front of me, rustling in the bottom of my purse for a pen. I always lost pens down there my purse was a pen-vacuum. I wore a yellow school sweatshirt that was big and droopy around the neck. I had a messy bun of red hair and no jewelry except for a wedding ring on a hand with chewed-up fingernails, and my wrists were still thin enough that I could put my hand through a chicken-wire fence halfway to my elbow. My professor looked young, around his late thirties a slim, short, bald man with a crinkling, cocky grin and the easy movement of a former collegiate wrestling champion first runner up in the world. He was friendly, practical, and had a whole history of crazy, terrible stories. After he'd told us several of them, stories full of church conflict like horror movies, he said, "I've told you all of this because I want you to know that you can go through this and survive." The first day of class, I found out that it wasn't uncommon for elders to make a minister's severance package dependent on the minister keeping his mouth shut about the terms of his release. It shocked me . . . but I was also oddly relieved. What my dad had gone through it wasn't just him. Dad had a big, firm stomach like an overstuffed teddy bear and hair that reached around the back of his head, ear to ear, like a broken wreath. "I have something to tell Jim, and I'd like to say it in front of everyone," Ed said at the mens monthly business meeting on my dad's first anniversary. He stood up, putting his hands on his hips, and looked at everyone, enjoying the attention, before settling his eyes on my dad. He smiled, slapped dad on the back, and said, "You have done something none of our other preachers have done. You have been here a whole year and I haven't heard one bad thing about you from anybody." Ed said he was pleased and hoped it was a good sign of things to come. Soon, they decided to hire a youth minister. My dad loved the idea because he was working ninety-hour weeks and wanted more time for his family. Dad was in charge of formulating classroom material for all of the classes from the infants to the elderly. He and the youth minister became favorites with all of the teachers because they prepared all of the class materials, even down to the pictures for the kids to color. They hired Mike. He had a daughter my age, a son my brother's age, and a dark grey fringe beard, like Santa Claus. I remember that he smelled like breath mints and that I kept him talking to me before one of the youth group Bible quiz contests just so I could inhale. His being there, though, didn't change much of the workload. Instead of dad working less, he and Mike both had to work 80-100 hour weeks. Ed was retired, so he really had nothing better to do than obsess over church matters. When he had a hip replaced, his biggest concern was that the other elders couldn't "watch" my dad and Mike like he could. "Watching" included a daily log that the preachers and secretary had to keep. Dad said that Ed "had one for the office where we had to sign in and out each time we entered or exited the door. Not only that, but we were to keep a daily log of where we went, how long we were there, and what we did while there. Even on our 'off days.'" Ed lived across the street and tended to get up before dawn, so he was able to watch when they showed up for work. Ed would pop in to check on them several times a day, and the secretary, a sweet woman with a daughter a year younger than me who loved horses, told them that Ed would even come in every time he saw a car gone and look to see where they went. Dad had a flat tire once and got into work at 8:20 instead of 8:00; Ed upbraided him at the next business meeting for being "lazy" and quoted Hebrews 13:17, "Obey those who rule over you, and be submissive . . ." Dad read the rest of that verse later: ". . . for they watch out for your souls, as those who must give account. Let them do so with joy and not with grief, for that would be unprofitable for you." He found it ironic, since none of the elders really seemed to care as much about anyone's soul as they cared about keeping things running smoothly. To do the elders justice, one of them was in and out of the hospital so much that he didn't really know what was going on. Another one resigned rather than help fire my dad though he joined up again after the deed was done. He had the same birthday as me, and he brought a pie over when we were packing up to move. He felt bad. But that didn't excuse the fact that he didn't do anything to protect my dad from dirty dealing. When I think of it, I want to go back and throttle and sob on one of those nice, clueless adults: "Didn't you know what was going on? Didn't you care? Didn't you want to save us?!" In my thoughts, I get shriller as I go and grip the front of their shirt so hard my hands hurt. When I think of it late at night, I still cry. The problem was that the rich members didn't like dad's sermon on being "poor in spirit." They'd worked for everything, they'd grown up in the World War eras where you obey authority unquestioningly, and they quoted verses like "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." Dad and Mike believed that "we have to recognize our poverty and that we have nothing to offer God," that there was nothing they could offer God because they had nothing and were in need of all things. Anything that Christians acquired, they argued, would be at the mercy of and by the grace of God. They used examples of where the same Greek word for "poor" was used elsewhere and that each time it meant "poverty stricken." It was, essentially, an anti-materialistic and a salvation by grace, not by works, sort of message. Dad and Mike were fired within six months of each other. Mike first. Dad second. "We realized," dad said about the period when he was told at every leaders' meeting that someone had complained about him, "that we were hitting two things: people's pocketbooks and their pride." Dad asked, every time, who those people were, but no one ever told him. So he preached often and vehemently on the principle that if a Christian had anything against a brother, he or she was commanded to go to him alone and tell him his fault. But to no avail. Dad told me, "The church we're at now, I compliment them all the time on the way they treat each other and work out their differences. And they look at me, kind of befuddled, and say, 'Thanks, Jim, but it's just the way we do things we don't know any other way.'" Dad smiled when he said that and shook his big head, his chin sinking to his chest with neck-wrinkles of satisfaction. The businessman in Ed was concerned about losing the contribution of the wealthy members who were criticizing dad. They were threatening to leave and take their money with them if he didn't fix things they way they wanted. So Ed got worse meaner. He would go into Mike's office, and, when he left, Mike would go into my dad's office, crying. I don't know what Ed said or how my dad tried to comfort Mike, but I know that Ed must have been really rude and that my dad would have listened to Mike with his "distressed" look, which is actually more intimidating than his "intimidating" look because he would drop his chin onto his chest and glower fiercely and silently at the floor in front of him. In his "intimidating" look, it just meant that "you better turn around and get your feet out of the air during church, young lady." But I mostly saw that one when I was too young to know better. Because Mike was the penultimate nice guy, he, like any really nice person, was easy to take advantage of. Ed called him names in leadership meetings: "Ed would call him a jerk," dad said, "but to Mike it was the same as swearing. It really hurt his feelings." Problems became more important than people. Winning usurped compassion and competition overruled kindness. Sometimes, I learned in my conflict management class, Christians get so wrapped up in what a Christian should believe that they treat those that disagree with them in an unChristian manner. Dr. Willingham taught us that the issues are never as important as how we handle them. Part of what Jesus teaches us through his death is that relationships are worth dying for people were and are worth more to Jesus than all the religious battles the Jewish leaders could come up with. We must be good to each other but good in the sense that we will neither start pointless fights nor avoid necessary ones. Good in the sense that we will fight fairly when fight we must, and that the good of our fellow Christians is always at the front of our minds. During this time, I was distracted by teenage drama. The two girls at church who had sleepovers and swimming parties had stopped inviting me, though they included Mike's daughter, who wasn't afraid to approach the cutest boy in the youth group. I understood, even if I didn't like it. If she approached him, then they could go along and talk to him she was their vehicle to him, and I was the pale, quiet girl with a weird sense of humor who hid under the water in the hot tub when the topic of boys came up. "Who do you think the cutest boy at church is?" Shea asked me with an impish smile. She had big brown freckles and clear skin. We were all in our swimsuits in the youth minister's hot tub. Mike and his wife had already gone to bed, but his daughter Sarah, a lean, athletic girl who was used to talking sports with boys, had her knees drawn up to her chest and was looking at me, curious. I knew the answer. I did. But after staring at Shea for a silent moment, I plugged my nose, held my breath, and ducked under the water. I had a few moments to think, there, and realized that I didn't want to tell them. It wasn't just embarrassment, though that was a big part. It was that though I wanted to be able to tell these girls who the cutest boy at church was, and though they already knew perfectly well who it was, I couldn't do it. I didn't feel close enough to them to trust them with such a personal opinion. Shea was the kind of girl who fast-forwarded the movie Casper to get to the Devon Sawa part and then complained that Christina Ricci was getting into all of the movies he was in because she had a crush on him. I was the kind of girl who appreciated the fine acting skills of a computer-generated ghost. Emily, who was a sweet girl and probably would never have followed the others so closely if they didn't make the boy of her dreams easier to talk to, helped Shea pull me out of the water after a few seconds. I wasn't in any danger, but their looks concluded that I had just done something incomparably weird, and I think that my underwater evasion sealed the realization that I wasn't like them and that they didn't need to associate with me anymore. Vonda was ill. She was in constant pain, but she and Ed hid it from their friends and the congregation. Dad thought it would be good to tell the church about her condition so they could pray for her, but she staunchly refused. Ed was telling Vonda, by this time, that my dad wanted him to resign being an elder, that my dad was doing stupid things and being unprofessional. It may have been true that my dad didn't want him as a boss or a spiritual leader, but Ed's view of professionalism was skewed and he had monetary reasons to want my dad gone. Vonda, though, reacted as any wife would. When she and dad were in public, she was nice to him but she became a different person when they were alone. She was cold to him, prickly and defensive of her husband. Dad was the bad guy. He wasn't innocent, of course. Mom said that dad's parents never taught their children to talk openly about some things, and dad could be hard to reason with (usually when his blood sugar was off he had diabetes and wasn't great at checking his blood sugar). Dad also had his own pride to take care of mom called it "two strong-willed men butting heads." So of course it would be hard for him to deal with constant coldness from the wife of the man who was treating him like crap. Mom said that she heard him be "kind of rude" to Vonda once, during the period where he was convinced that it was the elders' wives who were pulling the strings, and mom was sure it got back to Ed. She promptly informed me, in the way my mom has of being fairly sure that I don't know sensible things, that "it is never a good idea to offend your boss's wife." We had an outreach program in that last year, bringing in some poor children. Some of the older folks and their families were really worried about it. They were attached to that building in what was probably an unhealthy way, and they were concerned about bringing in poor children because they might "tear up" the building. I liked the building in a different way. For me, it was a castle. It was a big brown-stone building with heavy doors big doors, the kind you open to let down a drawbridge. The kind of doors a princess could live behind. I felt like it was sacrilege when they replaced them with glass doors, "To let in more light." I'd wander around the building in the grey dusk after church, sometimes when my dad would have me go get something for him, pretending I was a princess, flitting from room to room and imagining wraiths behind every door and chair. I'd run, bright-eyed, exhilarated, half-frightened, through the connected classrooms, trying to avoid being grabbed by ghosts. Some older people were offended by the way some of the poor children dressed one girl in particular. Inappropriate. But rather than say anything to the girl or her mother, to resolve the matter privately, the people concerned complained to the elders. Ed, in turn, wanted my dad to stand up in the pulpit and tell the young girls that their modern skirts were too short for church and to tell them what to wear. He wanted dad to force them to be decent. So Dad's sermon was entitled "You Dress Your Wife, I'll Dress Mine." His message was that individuals and individual families ought to define their own code of modesty based on Biblical standards, but he was effectually telling Ed, "Yes, I'll preach on modesty but I won't dictate to these people for you. It's none of my business how grown women dress. It's a matter between them and their husbands, or girls and their parents." I heard from a couple that used to go to that church that one minister was fired almost as soon as his wife came down with cancer mostly because Ed was afraid that the church would have to help foot the medical bills. My dad knew about this and so, his last year there, he would go into work even though he was sick. "Id get to the church at eight," dad said, "pretending everything was all right. Id nod to the secretary, go in my office, lock the door, and put my head on the desk until it was time to go home. Sometimes Ed came in and I would have to pretend to be okay for a while." He would come home afterwards, throw up, and go to bed. He only ate when mom forced him. The doctors at the Veterans Hospital found scar tissue on his heart and told my dad that hed had a heart attack around the time wed been at that church. Dad said he understood then that hed worked straight through a heart attack just to be able to feed me, mom, and my brother. Dad still talks about it that's how I know the story so well. When he met my husband's parents, he talked for two hours about Ed and that church. Sometimes at family reunions or Thanksgiving, he'll just start talking about it and even mom can't get him to stop until he's talked himself out like a kid with too much caffeine at bedtime. He says, every time he tells the story, that he's forgiven Ed. I believe him, but every time I also think, "He hasn't forgotten." Dad may not hold a grudge, but he'll never be rid of the scars on his heart that experience carved too deeply into the souls of both of my parents for them to be able to forget it. Dad was allowed to attend church after he was fired, but, as I've hinted before, he was not allowed to speak. "If I had told anyone why I was being fired," my dad said, "Ed wouldn't have given me my severance pay. It had stopped being a matter of right and wrong your mom and I needed that money to feed you kids until I could get another job." Ed stood up in front of the congregation and presented a list of reasons that dad was leaving. Most of them were either untrue or warped versions of the truth. I've heard two of them that I remember: Ed said that attendance was down (it was higher that Sunday than it had been in months) and that dad had skipped Bible studies to watch wrestling (Bible studies and wrestling did not happen on the same night). What hurt my mom was that no one asked her what was going on. They just accepted it. "One of the things I remember that was most hurtful," she said, "was the way that people stopped talking and dispersed when I approached, and the awkwardness people had around me because they believed the things Ed was saying." She told me, hushed and almost secretive, as if unable to believe that anyone would go to such lengths, that Ed spread the rumors to other churches within a fairly wide radius making sure that not only would dad not be able to preach at that church again, but that he couldn't get hired at any church nearby. "He just wanted your dad gone." My brother heard Vonda tell her friend, "I'm not sorry that we're losing Jim but I will miss Marlene and the kids. You know, I really regret not being able to raise Beth like one of my own daughters." My brother said it scared him to death at the time, because her daughters attended that church and he didn't think well of them, and sometimes, thinking about it, I want to go back. I want to walk down the blue carpet aisle, people scattered amongst the pews and talking, almost dreamlike, on either side of me. I want to shake Ed I want to rage at Vonda in the form of that little girl she loved so much: "How could you do that? How could you expect me to understand how could you not like my dad and claim to love me? How could you believe what that man said about him? I love my dad! He's my hero! And I will always love him more than you!" I say that I love my dad more than Vonda, always. But what it means is that part of me will always love Vonda. No matter how mad I get, or frustrated no matter how much I cry over her, I'll love her. Most of the time, I know that she trusted her husband to tell her the truth about my father and he betrayed that trust. She assumed, naively, that we (she and I) would be okay. My final night at that church, I went alone. It was a Wednesday, and I didn't know why my parents didn't want to go back. I hadn't been at the spectacle of Ed reading out my father's fabricated crimes I had wanted to attend, but I was told to go to the teenagers' class instead. It was dark when church let out. I stood on the sidewalk, looking around myself, watching the people drift out of the building. No one approached me, they just milled about with the light spilling out on their backs, talking and studiously ignoring me. I thought, then, that they just didn't notice me, but now I know that they were avoiding me the way they avoided my mother. They were embarrassed for me, because of my father, and they didn't know how to deal with a little girl who had the misfortune to be born to a man that was just then being dismissed in disgrace. The stars were obscured by racing grey clouds, like chariots in the sky. I wanted to jump on one of them and let it carry me out of there. Shea and Emily were talking to the cutest boy and his brother. I approached and Emily smiled at me, then turned back around to the conversation. Shea didn't even glance up she was talking. And though I stood at their shoulders, at the space between Shea and Emily, neither of them moved to make room for me. I was closed out by the wall of their backs, and I felt sad and heavy with the knowledge that no, I wouldn't be going back to that church again. Not if I wasn't wanted. My mom drove up and hovered on the street, waiting for me. She hadn't done her hair or makeup she looked flat and sad and anxious to be out of there. There were lines around her mouth, and I think she knew that I was fighting off tears in the dark. I wouldn't talk to her. In stories, princesses get locked up in their castles. I got thrown out. It's disconcerting to feel that nobody cares if you come or go and there are no white knights because all the knights have left in protest. |
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