Ironic Witness. Diane Glancy
up in my journals.
—
Journal entry, May 2: I hear Daniel on the stairs at night. I hear him in the yard. I think he’s talking to someone I can’t see.
“If you hadn’t named him Daniel—a man crazy with visions,” I said to Frank when we visited the cemetery with a bundle of wildflowers. Daniel, who died in a car accident at thirty-eight, zagged on drugs, as he had been for years.
“I saw a vision that made me afraid, and the thoughts on my bed and visions in my head troubled me,” Frank said. “From Dan 4:5, the twenty-seventh chapter of the Old Testament.”
I took Frank’s arm as we walked back to the car. My accusation wasn’t a reproach as much as a manner of conversation between us.
“Daniel in the Bible survived his visions, unlike our Daniel,” Frank said as we drove back to our place, and I returned to my work shed.
Journal entry, May 23: I write to you foreclawed in Christ our Lord.
Sometimes, I read to Frank at the breakfast table before I went to my work shed. His eyes were not what they had been, and he read most of the day on his own, often with a magnifying glass. I started with the Bible that was not his favorite translation.
“‘You keep my eyelids from closing’ (Ps 77:4),” I read from the New Revised Standard Version.
Frank looked at his Bible. “‘You hold my eyes waking,’” Frank said. “That’s the King James Version, the one I prefer.”
“It means I can’t sleep because of your snoring, your voyages at night. The troubled waters of your sleep. You call out from your rowing. I can’t sleep, Frank. I think I’m moving to the other room.”
“Hopefully, Winnie or Warren won’t return.”
“It happens.”
“Yes, more all the time. But it doesn’t look like ours will be back soon,” Frank said. “They’d give us warning if they were coming.”
“They just have.”
“When?”
“I opened the e-mail before I fixed breakfast,” I said.
“For a visit or permanent?” he asked.
“A visit.”
“Short or long?”
“Winnie didn’t say,” I said.
“You didn’t ask?” he questioned.
“I haven’t answered her,” I said.
“Don’t make it seem like they aren’t welcome, or that we’re wondering how soon after their arrival they’ll leave,” he said. “What’s the purpose of their visit?”
“To see us. To make sure we’re all right. To see if we need to be put away. I’ll get Mrs. Woodruff to clean before they come.”
“You’re the only woman I know who calls her help by her formal name,” Frank said.
“I’ll have Edna Woodruff clean the house, so they know we’re still with it.”
“Don’t make them too comfortable.”
“Don’t drive them away too soon with your ranting,” I told him. “If they think you’re off, they might stay to corral you into some sort of reasonable presentation of yourself.”
“I won’t scare them.”
“I don’t know why it’s so hard for you to make yourself presentable,” I said.
“Because I’m looking at the lightings,” Frank continued, with his nose glued to his Bible. “‘His lightings lightened the world; the earth saw it and trembled’ (Ps 97:4, KJV).”
I looked at the Bible. “His lightnings, Frank. Not lightings.”
“I misread that for a purpose,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking of lights in the heavens. I was thinking of the lightings of the Word. I think God speaks with fire. There’s a physical light of sorts in the biblical language. I think I see it at night. I dream sometimes there’s a bright light blinding me. Each reading is a visit from God. In Scripture, there was light before there was the sun. There’s a mystery there.”
“Your children don’t like to hear your emanations,” I said. “I wouldn’t have them while they’re here. Our independence depends on their assurance that we’re still functioning. You can’t go on about his lightings lighting the world. You sound like you’ve not quite landed this morning.”
“No, I haven’t,” he agreed. “But it’s not from a voyage. It’s from somewhere in flight.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“You won’t be moving from the room until after the children leave?” he asked.
“No, maybe not then—if you’d stop your snoring.”
—
Once, I had asked Winnie and Warren how they had been affected by Daniel’s death. They were sorry, they said. They still grieved for him. As the oldest, Daniel had been the front-runner. They were closer in age, more friends with one another than Daniel. He had been absent for years. If he came to the house, he was distant, already disengaged from the family. Finally, his visits were dreaded. Winnie and Warren remembered him in his own world, even as a child.
—
“What does a passage mean in relationship to what came before and after it? What is riding on it?” Frank asked that evening. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself or me. Maybe Frank was addressing us both. “We’re not dealing with an ordinary house made of beams and timbers and walls and windows. What roof does righteousness have? What shingles cover justice?” He sat at the table, hardly tasting the dinner I had made—roast lamb with gravy he always liked. It had been work. Could there be a conversation? No, it was a one-way street, if there was a street there at all. Had he been working on the same passage all day? But hadn’t I been with the same ziggurat all day in my shed?
“What does that mean, ‘His lightings lighted the world’?” Frank continued. “The stars. The suns. The moons. The comets and meteors. The fire-tails of their frictions. How is it applicable to us here in our little lives? In our studies? At our tables and desks? In our work sheds? At our books? What hope is there that we could understand?”
I called him back from despair with news. “You misread the words, Frank. It’s hard enough when you read biblical language correctly. How much harder when you don’t?”
But he considered it a divinely inspired mistake. A misreading of the highest order. He would spend the evening and the next several days seeking the meaning of that mistake. Where was it guiding him?
I looked at the photographs of our three children, Daniel, Winnie, and Warren, as I listened to Frank. They were on the wall behind him, with their wild Winscott hair and freckled noses.
“When you say ‘lightings,’ you make it sound like the heavens are wired with electricity and God just throws a switch and there is light.”
“I don’t want the children hearing our arguments over semantics,” Frank said.
“I don’t want them hearing us argue at all,” I insisted.
“If you want to argue, let’s make it something that counts.”
“Let’s argue over the pile of leaves you leave in the yard,” I told him. “Maybe Mrs. Woodruff’s husband or son would rake for us. Maybe I’ll get out there while she cleans the house. Maybe I’ll do your work for you. Let the children see that.”
“Eugena—” He used my full name. Not Gena or Jean. Not Euge, which reminds me of “huge,” which I am not. Or any of his other words for me. Leaving me to figure out exactly what he meant—leaving