The Fall of Alice K. (2 page)

The sound of a car slowing down near Ben's driveway interrupted her quiet and private horror. Alice turned and prepared to be embarrassed by someone who would think she was some kind of pervert who liked to stare at animal carnage. The vehicle, a dark Toyota station wagon, did
more than slow down: it stopped, and the heads of three small people stared in her direction. Alice faced them, and for several seconds it was a stare off. Then the vehicle inched forward down the driveway in Alice's direction. As it got closer, she saw that the occupants were foreign—probably Mexican immigrants who worked on one of the big dairies, but the Minnesota license plates didn't make sense. When Mexicans drove in from other states, they usually came from California or Arizona. The driver was a young woman, and she swung the station wagon directly in front of Alice. She was not white, but she didn't look Mexican either.

“Hi,” said the young woman, “what on earth happened here?”

She sounded totally American, but she looked Asian. Alice came to a quick realization: these were the Hmong family that had just moved to Dutch Center.

“Are you the Vangs?”

“Whoa-ho!” said the young woman. “Word travels fast around here. Yes, I'm Mai, and this is my brother, Nickson, and that's my mom, Lia. We were just taking a ride and checking things out.”

Nickson lifted his hand and nodded. “Hi,” he said. The mother, in the backseat, only nodded and smiled.

“I don't live here,” said Alice.

“You sound American,” said Mai.

“No, I don't live on this farm.”

“Looks like you're too late,” Mai commented.

“I don't think anybody could have stopped him. They were Ben Van Doods's hogs.”

“I meant it looks like it's too late to eat them. They smell rotten! Why didn't he butcher them when he had the chance?”

“I don't know,” said Alice.

“Quite a waste there,” said Nickson.

They all had such intense eyes and such black hair. Even the mother had those intense eyes, but she was all eyes and no speech.

Alice didn't like the judgment that had been leveled at Ben Van Doods. It felt directed at every farmer around Dutch Center. She didn't like these brazen newcomers, but at the same time, she did. What would it feel like to be that confident and outspoken in an unfamiliar setting?

2

Alice sometimes wondered if she would go to church if she had a choice. In Dutch Center, church was something people did out of habit, sometimes sleeping through the sermon, sometimes gossiping after church in cruel ways. Alice didn't like the way that the people with the most expensive cars parked right outside the front door. Showing off. Wouldn't people do better by staying home and relaxing in a quiet room, reading their Bibles and asking God to help them make the right decisions? Alice didn't have a choice. In Dutch Center, not going to church would have been like having a bumper sticker that said, “God Is Dead.”

Compared to some of the real wackos, even her mother, with her doomsday fears of the millennium, seemed relatively sane. One church member thought space travel into the heavens was a Hollywood camera trick created by atheists. There was the millionaire retired farmer who thought global warming was the result of the earth still drying out after Noah's flood, and the even wackier jeweler, Gerrit Vanden Leuvering, whose gray head swaying in the second pew harbored the belief that dinosaur bones were leftovers from an earlier creation because this earth and its creatures were created 6,456 years ago. Around these people Alice knew that it was best to keep her mouth shut. Don't pretend to know more than the next person. If she had spoken up, more people than her mother would be saying she was arrogant, somebody too big for her britches. Alice didn't go to church to argue science. She went to hear the music and to find peace. “Getting centered,” some people called it.

She could sing hymns and listen to organ music all day, and often Rev. Prunesma preached sermons that made her think about something other than the judgmental eyes of her mother or the shuffle of
hungry steers. Man does not live by bread alone: at its best, that's what church was all about. Going to church also gave her the chance to wear clothes that made her look like somebody who didn't live on a farm. It wasn't as arrogant and pretentious as parking an expensive car in front of church, and it did give her a taste of the future when she planned to be out of here.

The Krayenbraaks walked down the aisle in their usual long-long-short-long order—Father, Mother, Aldah, Alice—and sat in their usual pew: left side, sixth from the front. People said Alice resembled her father more than her mother, and she thought about that as she watched his dignified and stately walk that he reserved for church. Compared to her mother, he looked well groomed when he went out into public. Alice had never known him when he wasn't bald, but he still fussed with the little hair he had left. You could have held a carpenter's level to the edge of his sideburns.

In church, her father did not look like a farmer, and she hoped she did not look like a farmer's daughter. She knew they both looked different when they were on the farm. On the farm, he had an undignified but still controlled, pumping-forward efficiency in his manner. When she was working outside with him, she thought she looked like somebody who was following the mandate of the hymn that said, “Work, for the night is coming.”

The church sanctuary was a no-nonsense place of worship.
Simple and huge
is how Alice thought of it—like a large auditorium. The ceiling slanted in straight lines of wooden rafters above them to a peak that was fifty feet over their heads. The smooth oak benches had no cushions, and though narrow arched windows lined the walls, the stained glass patterns were simple designs that did not hint of “graven images.” A large wooden cross stood against the wall behind the lectern, which was centered on the raised pulpit—centered to remind everyone that in this church the preaching of The Word was central to the worship service.

The church didn't have a choir, and it didn't have any fresh flowers or stenciled banners. Bright colors of any kind would be a distraction. The congregation didn't want their house of worship cluttered with any New Age garbage. Of all the churches in Dutch Center, this was the one that
had the largest number of farmers and the smallest number of the local Redemption College students.

Just as the organ prelude was ending, the Reverend Prunesma walked in from the front of the church, followed by the eight-member consistory of elders and deacons, who seated themselves with their families. At the same time, some young people—probably students who would be starting at Redemption College in a few weeks—also walked in. In her mind, Alice quietly forgave them: they didn't know that you should come early enough to be seated before the minister and consistory arrived. But then, after the ushers had already sat down with their families, there came the Vangs, the very last people to enter—Mai leading with Nickson and Lia close behind. Such short people, but such quick, confident steps. Rev. Prunesma was already standing behind the lectern, but he waited, smiling benevolently, as the Vangs made their way to the front of the church and sat down in what was usually old lady Waltersdorf 's pew.

Alice watched the Vangs through the opening benediction and opening hymn. They were familiar with the order of worship, and even recited the Apostle's Creed without having to read it. At least Mai and Nickson did. Their mother kept looking down.

After the long congregational prayer, after the church offering with two collection plates going around—one for the General Fund and one for Christian Education—and after the follow-up hymn, Rev. Prunesma's sermon began. His text was Psalm 23, the familiar “The Lord is my shepherd” passage. Alice knew Psalm 23 as well as she knew the Lord's Prayer. She knew it as well as “Little Bo Peep.”

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” he began. “Brothers and sisters in the Lord, what does that familiar text mean to you? ‘Shepherd.' What does that mean to you? Do you see a large bearded man with a heavy staff ready to strike you down? Does a shepherd strike his sheep? Does a shepherd beat his sheep into submission? No! No! That is not what King David is saying in this passage. Shepherds do not strike, they do not whip, they do not poke, they do not abuse. No, shepherds guide their flock lovingly.”

He opened his arms as if to embrace the whole congregation.

“What about that big long staff we see in pictures of shepherds? you
ask. Does that thing look like a bullwhip? Does it look like a cattle prod? No! This staff is used for giving direction, not for beating. The shepherds of David's time only used their staffs aggressively to ward off lions. For you, His people, the Good Shepherd uses His staff to ward off the lions of temptation. With you, His sheep, He uses His staff as a gentle prod to keep you moving down the path to glory.”

The Rev paused, rubbed his hands together, and stepped to the side of the lectern.

“But. But,” he went on with sentences that he chopped into questions: “Does this mean?—that He is a cozy companion? Does this mean?—that He is someone?—who has no expectations?—from His people? Is this what it means?—to think of Jesus?—as the Good? Shepherd?”

He shook his head slowly but emphatically. “Oh no. Oh no.” He raised his right hand and wagged his forefinger. “Jesus is not your
chum!
Jesus is not your
pal!
Jesus is not your
buddy!
Jesus is the Lord God Almighty, ruler of heaven and earth!”

His voice bounced off the ceiling and reverberated through the sanctuary. Alice loved that energy, even though what he had just said contradicted the soft image of God that he had been extolling a minute earlier. Rev. Prunesma was showing his true colors: he was no softy. He was proclaiming the majesty of a fearsome God. A gentle shepherd and an almighty God—not exactly a Holy Trinity, but a Hefty Duality.

Through the brief silence that followed the reverend's exclamations came the sound of beating wings: the Rev's voice had startled and launched a starling from somewhere in the back of the church, and it flew in short, urgent bursts over the congregation, smacking into one window and then another. When it landed on the baptismal font and started drinking, the Rev continued his sermon as if nothing had happened. The starling sat still, seeming quite content with its current situation.

Thrilling as Rev. Prunesma's exuberant digression and the flight of the wayward starling had been, the duller truths of the world sat next to Alice. Aldah was bored. She may have been the only person over ten in the entire congregation who did not know Psalm 23 by heart. Rev. Prunesma's loud exclamations did not stir her, and, to Alice's surprise, neither did the starling. Her mother had given Aldah two pink peppermints to get her through the sermon. Aldah put them in her
white handkerchief and chewed on the prune-sized bundle until sweet pink juice oozed into her mouth. Her mother pretended not to notice, so Alice wasn't about to stop her either.

Rev. Prunesma was going through Psalm 23 line by line, explicating every sentence. It was mostly a dull walk through references to the Hebrew and Greek, but when he got to the “still waters,” he had Alice's full attention again.

“‘He leadeth me beside the still waters.' When we think of still waters today, we think of tepid water. But here, David is contrasting ‘still waters' against the alternative of tempestuous, dangerous waters. This water, we should believe, is clean and calm.
Clean
and
calm.
”

His repetition and emphases were puzzling. Rev. Prunesma worked at making the Old Testament relevant to the present, but was he hinting that the clean waters of Psalm 23 were everything that cattle feedlot runoff holding tanks were not? Was the Rev suggesting that farmers were at odds with the message of Psalm 23 by turning calm waters into stinky polluted waters? Was he about to lecture the farmers in the congregation that they were polluting the clean earth that God had created?

She turned her head to catch her father's profile. In church, she could never tell what he was thinking. He had on his stern church look. She wasn't sure what look her mother had on. Maybe it was her let-the-end-come look. Aldah kept chewing on her bag of pink peppermints, and some of the juice ran down her chin and onto her white blouse.

“‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .'” the Rev went on. “Here again, we should turn to the Hebrew,” he said. “A translation from the Hebrew might read, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of bottomless darkness.'”

He started pumping his arms. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of disgraceful behavior from our leaders! Yea, though I walk through the valley of falling cattle and hog prices! Yea, though I walk through the valley of self-doubt and mental turmoil. Yea, though I walk through the valley of not knowing what the millennium will bring! People of God!” he shouted. “We are all in the valley of darkness as the millennium creeps toward us like a devouring beast in the night! Are we ready?”

With that, the starling came back into the worship service, this time by plunging into the baptismal font and bathing itself in a furious
fluttering of wings and splashing of water, some of it landing on the floor and some of it splattering onto the carpet of the pulpit. The reverend stopped preaching. The starling launched itself energetically into the large open space over the congregation's head, flying even more desperately, as if energized by its recent refueling and bath.

Everyone, including Alice, held their breath. The Rev nodded. Whether this was his acknowledgment that some great Forces of Evil were at work in God's House of Worship or whether it was a signal to the ushers, several men did get up to open all the doors of the sanctuary as a way of showing the starling the light it was probably looking for. The Vangs had their own response to the renegade starling: all three of them held church bulletins over their heads.