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Authors: Marie Bostwick

BOOK: River's Edge
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The noise died down as the children trooped away from the altar to join their families. I sat down next to Mama, and she gave my hand an approving squeeze.
Papa stepped up to the pulpit and paused for a long moment, inclining his head as he looked down at the open Bible in front of him as though considering what he should say. The sanctuary was perfectly quiet, pricked with anticipation. Even the babies ceased their fussing and seemed to be waiting to hear what their minister would say. Finally, he looked up and slowly scanned the room as if trying to make direct eye contact with every person in the crowd.
“If you've read your bulletin, you know that the title of my sermon is supposed to be ‘The Star That Leads to Bethlehem' and my text is taken from the second chapter of the book of Matthew. Until about five minutes ago,” he said in a voice that sounded surprised, “I thought that was the message I would be preaching, but I believe God wants me to speak of other things, and so I will.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Junior and Cookie exchange questioning glances. Papa had been practicing his Christmas sermon for at least three weeks. At this point any one of us could have delivered that sermon word for word. It was amazing to think that now, at the last minute and after so many hours of preparation, Papa had abandoned his prepared text and was going speak without notes. This was an intriguing development. I leaned forward to hear what he had to say.
“Instead, I'd like to speak about the Christmas story as it is presented in the second chapter of Luke, but perhaps not in the way you are used to hearing it. You know that story well, how the angel of God appeared to shepherds abiding in the fields who were watching their flocks by night and told them that Christ had been born. In fact, many of you know that story so well that you can probably recite it verse for verse.
“It is a marvelous story, the story of God's coming to earth as a man that he might bring salvation to an undeserving world, but I am afraid we may have heard it so often that it is beginning to be sound like just that, a story—something that happened once upon a time in a faraway land. We'd like to believe it but can't quite bring ourselves to the point of credulity.
“Can it really be true? Does it make sense to think that God would come down on earth as a baby born in a manger? If God the king is coming, then why doesn't he appear as a king, entering His dominions with power and wrath? And then there is this whole business of angels making announcements to shepherds. If God wanted to announce His arrival on earth, why not send angelic messengers directly to Herod himself? Why not surround Herod with a great company of the heavenly host and make him sore afraid instead of the shepherds? Does it make sense to think that the first people to be told of His coming would be a band of poor, dirty, seminomadic shepherds who were sitting around a fire at night, telling stories and trying to keep warm?”
Papa considered his own question for a moment before continuing in the same straightforward manner, as though he were just having a conversation with a friend.
“I think it does. You see, these shepherds were simple men, men of the earth who worked close to the land to make their living, like most of you. Being people of the land, like you, the shepherds already knew something about miracles. They were daily witnesses to the miracles of life and birth, the regularity of seasonal cycles, the mysteries of seeds and harvests. They were surrounded by miracles every day. They were dependent on them.
“Kings and princes aren't too good at being dependent. They are used to relying on their own riches and power and armies to make things happen according to their own will and to satisfy their own lust for more power, more armies, more riches—often with nightmarish results.” Papa's voice became more hushed as he said this last part, and I knew, as everyone else did, that he was thinking not of infants murdered by Herodic decree but of the war raging across the sea that seemed to draw closer every day.
“Then, as now, simple people of the land must depend on God's grace as shown through the miracle and provision of creation to survive. Shepherds are familiar with miracles. Just like you. So when this greatest of miracles was announced to them, they were prepared to believe. They did believe.
“The second the angels left, these shepherds ran, literally ran, to Bethlehem to see this miraculous thing they'd been told about. And something about that sight, something about that child, must have been truly miraculous, because the shepherds told everyone they knew about what they'd seen, and those who heard their story were amazed. Their lives were forever changed in ways they could never have anticipated. If you already believe the truth of this story—if you've already stood by the manger in amazement and gratitude to look on the face of God come to earth out of love for you, then you understand what I'm talking about.”
Papa smiled and looked around the church to acknowledge the nodded agreement of many listeners. Their faces glowed with an emotion I could not quite name, but their eyes held the same quiet peace I'd seen so often in Papa and Mama's gaze. I suddenly felt very lonely.
Papa paused and inclined his head slightly toward me. “Yet, some of you are not yet able to believe, though you may truly wish to. That's all right. All right for now. But in the meantime, prepare for belief. Prepare yourself for belief now so that when the moment comes, when the angel announces the arrival of the king, you will be able to respond and run into His presence. Draw closer to God by acknowledging the simple and the wonderful in the miracle of creation—the stars in the night sky that seem to hang like so many diamonds in the heavens. The transformation of the fields from fallow, to seed sown, to providential harvest and back. The river that gives life to the valley and whose streams make glad the city of God. Acknowledge these miracles of creation, believe in them for what they are, and, in time, you will acknowledge and believe in the presence of God Himself. “
I swallowed hard in an effort to dislodge the lump in my throat, and I could feel my eyes sting with tears that I refused to release. He was speaking to me. I wanted to believe in whatever it was he was describing, this presence that seemed real to everyone except me, but I could not believe it was as simple as Papa said. If he would just tell me what to do, I would do it, but there had to be more to it than what he was saying.
“Be patient,” he said gently, as if he knew what I was thinking. “This is not a test you can study for, or a task you can master through your own strength or power of intellect. God reveals himself in His own way, in His own time, to those who least expect it and least deserve it. Prepare yourself to believe, and belief will come.”
That night I lay in bed with my eyes closed and said a prayer to the God I did not believe in. “If You are there,” I said, “I am willing to believe, if You will show me how. I can't do it myself. It will have to be up to You.”
I kept my eyes shut tight. Waited for something to happen. Nothing did. I opened my eyes, and the dark room looked just like it had a moment before.
Silly,
I thought and pulled the covers up tight under my chin and went to sleep. For a long time, I forgot about the whole thing.
Chapter 9
“
C
ookie! Elise!” called Mama from the bottom of the staircase. “This is the third time I've called you. Your eggs are getting cold.”
She stood silently, waiting to hear some sort of movement from our room, and when none was forthcoming she tossed out her most effective threat. “Girls! Don't make me come up there!”
At this last, Cookie leapt out of bed and promised she'd be downstairs in five minutes. I lingered under the covers a minute more, dreading the moment when I'd have to put my feet on the chilly floorboards. How could it be so cold this late in May? Here it was the last day of school.... The last day of school! I suddenly remembered that the spelling bee was today. I threw back the covers and got out of bed.
Cookie was nearly dressed by now. She didn't speak to me or wait for me. That was nothing new. Cookie scurried out of the cold room with her shoes and clean stockings in hand so she could finish dressing in front of the stove in the kitchen. Fine with me. I stayed where I was. Better to dress in the cold bedroom than spend any more time than I had to with Cookie. We'd be together again soon enough. Our desks were right next to each other, and with each passing day our proximity increased our mutual dislike.
I looked out the window as I dressed. There was a silvery glazing of frost on the grass, but the sun was shining, throwing a gleaming reflection onto each blade of grass. It would not take long for those bright rays to melt the frost and warm the fields. In the distance I could hear the rattle of a tractor starting up. Someone was thinking about planting.
Spring had finally come to New England, but—cold floorboards notwithstanding—I wished it were still winter. During the winter there had been little talk about the war. Every once in a while someone would shake their head and “tut tut” a bit about the poor Poles or the poor Finns, but winter is a quiet time for battles. After a while it seemed like people forgot there was a war. Father's letters regained their vague and impersonal nature, only rarely giving a hint of what might be going on in his life. That made it easy to imagine he simply was a businessman away on some extended journey involving details of commerce and economics that were too dull to write about rather than a warrior. When youth and an ocean separate you from the harsh realities of life, it is easy to ignore all sorts of realities.
But whereas spring came late to Massachusetts, it arrived right on schedule in Europe. As the pages on the calendar turned from March to April to May, German tanks began rolling again. Day after day, the newspaper headlines screamed
Invasion!
The list was long: Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France. Suddenly the talk around the Muller table was all about war and rumors of war. Would America fight? Should she fight?
But no matter the state of world affairs, farmers are always farmers, and as the weeks passed, the main topic of conversation in Brightfield shifted from worries about war to worries about when planting could begin. Even Mrs. Ludwig said she couldn't remember a spring as cold and wet as this one, and she had seen more springs than anyone in town.
Today the sun was shining. It wouldn't be long before the barren fields would be transformed into verdant, humid tobacco jungles and people would be too busy to think about the war.
From the window I could see Curt playing next to the big oak. He called to me and waved a greeting. I waved back. He was such a sweet boy, I thought, as I did up my braids. It was a shame the rest of his siblings weren't more like him.
I didn't feel the twins truly disliked me; they just followed Junior's lead because he was their big brother. They ignored me rather than going out of their way to truly hurt me. Actually, in a way they kind of ignored everyone. They were so complete in their own relationship and usually so absorbed in their latest project or invention that they didn't seem to need anyone else.
Junior was another matter. Almost from the moment he'd met me, he disliked me, and the situation had not improved as the months passed. It was too bad, I reflected, because in many ways we were a lot alike. We were both proud, and we both liked to be right. He ordered his brothers and sister around like the captain of his own private army. Yet, in spite of his clear position as the commander of his siblings and his habit of taking them down a notch when he felt they got out of line, he was intensely and fiercely protective of his family. I respected him for it. Why couldn't he do the same for me? The pastor's son and the officer's daughter, we both carried the unwanted weight of family expectations. I wished we could have been friends. Had we been, I would have told him I understood how it felt to have everyone expecting so much of you just because you'd been born into a particular family. As it was, I couldn't remember the last time he'd spoken directly to me.
Cookie was just as skilled as her brother when it came to enforcing the silent treatment; however, when it came to her, I almost never entertained a kindly thought. For that one brief moment before harvest supper she had seemed to thaw toward me, but the minute she saw me dancing with Papa the chill was back in the air. My success in playing at the Christmas service and the ensuing admiration I received made everything worse. It made me mad every time I thought about it. It wasn't as though I had asked to be dropped into the middle of the Muller family!
The jealousy between us had reached glacial proportions. If we'd been boys somebody probably would have thrown a punch and we could have worked the whole thing out with one good fistfight, but girls' means of proving themselves are slower and leave more scars. Cookie and I were both good students and both driven to excel in our studies, so the classroom became our boxing ring.
As Father had predicted in his letter, I struggled a bit with reading and writing in English initially. However, considering that English was not my native language, I did quite well. Soon Cookie and I were jockeying for position at the head of the class, and, in the previous few weeks I had actually pulled ahead of her. The other children in the class began teasing me by calling me “teacher's pet.” Cookie joined in their catcalls with vigor, though she herself had been the victim of such taunting only weeks before and had seemed bothered by it. Now it appeared as if she would prefer nothing more than to regain her former status as the object of schoolyard derision and jealousy. Not if I could help it.
At the beginning of the year I had understood Cookie's irritation with me, at least in part, just as I understood her drive to be first in her class. But the more I excelled in the schoolroom, the more Cookie made fun of me in areas where I was less adept, especially when it came to schoolyard games and domestic chores.
My Saturday lessons with Mrs. Ludwig were slowly improving my cooking skills, but I was still nervous and afraid of making a mistake when I was in the Muller kitchen. Hearing Cookie's sighs or seeing her roll her eyes whenever I did make an error did not improve my confidence. Once, I was absolutely certain that she deliberately tripped me as I was putting away a stack of coffee cups and caused me to drop and break one, though I could not prove it. I wanted to get back at her, and I knew how to do it.
The eighth-grade spelling bee was the last event of our last day in grammar school. First prize was a beautiful illustrated dictionary bound in blue leather with page after page of color drawings and photographs. Mr. Flanders, president of the school board and owner of the five-and-dime, donated the dictionary and would personally present it to the champion speller. It was as fine as any book in Papa Muller's study and I was determined to win it.
So was Cookie, and that made me want it all the more.
 
The good-natured joking and smiling carelessness of the spellers who had gone down in the early rounds had been replaced by a sense of mounting tension and suspense as the students still standing dwindled down to the final few who actually had a chance to win and desperately wanted to do so. John Harkness, the class bully who was known as Hark, had been the first to be eliminated when he spelled
paragraph
with an
f.
I had been next in line after him. When I spelled my word correctly, he gave me a glare and coughed a derisive “Kraut!” into his fist, but the teacher hadn't heard the insult, so I pretended I hadn't, either.
Miss Gleason stood at the front of the room calling out the words. Mr. Flanders, a man of considerable bulk, was wedged into a desk in the front row, observing the scene with folded arms. I was surprised to see how many students had been confounded by even relatively simple words, words we had gone over time and time again in class and which had made up the previous weeks' spelling tests. I noticed that Miss Gleason's jaw clenched every time a student missed one of these words. However, her spirits appeared to lift as the words became harder and the competition between the remaining spellers became more intense. Her encouraging exclamations of “Excellent!” and “Well done!” seemed genuine and more enthusiastic as we progressed to more and more challenging words like
mellifluous, financier,
and
abhorrent.
Finally it was down to Cookie, Betsy Semple, and myself, but Betsy went down on
pellucid.
I was relieved that Cookie was after her, because I had never heard the word before. Cookie rattled it off without a moment's hesitation, and we went on.
The pressure mounted. The room was perfectly quiet, and in the silence I could hear my own heart beating harder and louder as Miss Gleason announced every new word. I can't remember how many rounds we went through before the clock finally struck two. Miss Gleason got up from her desk, closed her spelling book, and said, “Well, we certainly have two very talented spellers here, but I'm afraid we have run out of time.” She smiled apologetically.
There was an audible groan from the students. I was surprised by their reaction, thinking they'd all be impatient to leave and start their summer holidays, but they'd become wrapped up in the drama and were anxious to see the conclusion.
The noise of a male throat being cleared sounded from the front row. Mr. Flanders pried himself loose from the grip of the desk and got to his feet. He took a step up to the front of the room and stood next to the petite and pretty Miss Gleason, utterly dwarfing her with his bulk and imperious presence. He grabbed one of his lapels with his left hand and addressed the class in a booming bass voice. “I think these two young ladies have done a wonderful job. They are clearly both excellent scholars and a credit to our school and”—he nodded toward Miss Gleason—“to the skills and dedication of their teacher. She deserves a round of applause!”
The students clapped enthusiastically, and Cookie and I joined in. Some of the boys whistled enthusiastically. Just about everyone in the class liked Miss Gleason. She was blond and pretty, with big blue, laughing eyes. The girls tried their best to ape her breathless way of speaking and her hairstyles, and most of the boys were a little in love with her.
When the applause died down, Mr. Flanders continued in his best oratorical style. “And I also think we need to congratulate our two champion spellers!” The students began clapping again, and I couldn't help but notice that Betsy Semple, whose eyes were still a bit red from the tears that she'd unsuccessfully tried to suppress when she'd been eliminated, was applauding harder than anyone else and smiling at me and Cookie. I felt ashamed of myself. The whole competition seemed suddenly childish and stupid. I was glad it was done with.
“You girls have done a great job,” Mr. Flanders said as he turned to us with a beaming smile. “I think I'd have been hard-pressed to spell quite a few of the words you two were given.” He chuckled warmly at his own joke, and a few of the students joined in, some more vigorously than was proper. Mr. Flanders was right in his assessment; more than once I'd noticed spelling errors in the hand-lettered signs posted in the window of the five-and-dime advertising specials on everything from
Burma-Shave
to
knockwurst.
Miss Gleason quieted the class before the laughter got out of hand, and Mr. Flanders, who suddenly realized that he had become the butt of a joke but wasn't quite sure how, continued in a voice even louder and more pompous than before.
“As I said, both of these girls are champions, so I think the only fair thing to do is to declare the spelling bee a draw and congratulate our two winners!”
The class broke out into applause again, but Ernest Rohleder, who clearly found this to be an unsatisfactory solution to the problem, interrupted. “You can't do that,” he protested. “There's only one dictionary. Which one of them is going to get the prize?”
“I will donate another dictionary,” Mr. Flanders hissed through clenched teeth, obviously irritated that he would have to spring for another prize.
This seemed like a perfectly fair and reasonable solution to me, especially after my earlier observation about the difference between Betsy's attitude and my own. I was more than ready to declare the contest a draw. But before I could speak, Cookie surprised everyone and said, “That's not fair. It's not what we agreed to. You can't just go changing the rules in the middle of the competition.”
The room went dead silent. No one could quite believe that Cookie, who was known as one of the most polite members of the eighth-grade class and a special favorite of every teacher in the school, was standing there contradicting the president of the school board and practically accusing him of being a cheater! Mr. Flanders sputtered and looked at Cookie as if she'd lost her mind. Miss Gleason, who could not have been ignorant of the increasingly heated rivalry between her two best students and probably guessed that a showdown was inevitable, came to the rescue.

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