Triptych. April Vinding
children get up to find their parents and the woman in the flowered skirt gathers the cutouts from the floor. As she bends to pick them up, Daniel’s sash flutters down again.
The little girl’s mother comes to pick her up and the men begin folding the chairs and leaning them against the wall as the women peel plastic wrap from trays of frosted and unfrosted zucchini bread.
“Hi, Sweetie—should we go get Megan and Mindy from the nursery?” Her mother’s voice is quiet and young like she’d only begun using it recently.
The little girl turns around and climbs backward off the chair. Her mother picks her up under her shoulders and lifts her to her hip. They walk toward the upstairs nursery to get the little girl’s sisters. “What did you learn in Sunday school today, Sweetheart?”
Faithful: love, protection.
We lived in the country, God’s country, where Bible Belt and Bread Basket were not demographic or economic but theological. Bread, yeasty and rising, its belly stretching in the bowl, came from hands I knew: seed to soil to a green Tupperware measuring cup and a glass bowl on a familiar cream countertop. The smooth black belt in a deacon’s jeans or parched leather on his Bible came from helping cattle birth on New Year’s and chasing cows from a frozen pond that Thursday in February. Things beyond the grasp of calloused fingers were in God’s hands, and there was no in-between because no one else was involved. Provisions were evidence of hard work and Provision. Like heredity, a difficult but direct simplicity. Sometimes it took a while to parse out where the responsibility lay, but, in the end, there were only two choices.
Every day on the farm, Dad came in to have lunch. He’d wash up to his elbows and we’d all sit up to the table by a streak of sunlight piled on the floor glowing through the yellow gingham curtains. He’d pray, or we’d say “God is great, God is good, and we thank him for our food. A-men” and Megan and Mindy, with their fine hair and liquid eyes, would get to “Amen” a beat behind. We’d eat apples and pickles and sandwiches with Mom’s garden tomatoes. Every day, Mom asked Dad what he wanted to drink; every day he said milk. After we ate, Mom laid Meg and Mindy down for naps and Dad would sit in the battered recliner and stretch out his legs. The brown and avocado chair leaked a pouf of dust into the slanting sunlight when he sat, and I’d play Tinker Toys or Lincoln Logs on the carpet while Mom went back in the kitchen to start supper, both of us feeling more secure knowing he was close. Dad would start snoring, narrowly though his Danish nose. The stroganoff would bubble and then we’d hear him: “Shoot.” He’d take off his glasses and rub his eyes, crank the leg rest back, and mumble another “shoot,” cursing himself for wasting time.
One sunny afternoon while the hotdish bubbled and Dad was gone on errands, Mom took Megan, Mindy, and me out to harvest green beans. Well into motherhood by 23, she used the rhythm of her work—the garden, the house, us girls—as a ladder for climbing out of abuse. She’d left Cedar Rapids for college to escape the alcohol on her father’s breath and never moved back. Now, through motherhood and witness of my dad’s childhood homestead down the road, she was learning what it could be like to have a family. Each task, learning to can vegetables, sewing us dresses, bringing rhubarb crisp for church fellowship, was a rung toward normalcy, another proof there were things you could stand on.
This afternoon, she tied a kerchief behind her ears and, surrounded by tall sweet corn stalks, wandering cucumber vines, and curling bean bushes, she kneeled on the soil and first pulled weeds. She bent into tendriled bushes, her brown eyes bright under the red kerchief. Megan and Mindy toddled in their pink overall corduroys, and I explored the towering cornstalks, bringing leaves and rocks for them to play with in their grassy camp.
I bopped between standing over their bonneted heads to boss their play and squatting my elfin body next to Mom’s nymphish frame. She showed me where to snap the juicy necks of the beans, right under their hats, and I listened to the crack of the fuzzy pods as the juice sprinkled my fingers.
When our bushel basket was almost half-full, Mom flexed her back, fingers draped over her hip, and looked up to shoo a fly. Past her hand she saw a white wall, blanking the landscape, swallowing the trees and phone poles.
She dropped her handful of beans, hefted the basket to her hip and scuttled us to the basement. She sat at the top of the stairs with the phone cord stretched from the kitchen, catching Dad at some register counter or in the FHA office negotiating payments. By the time she had told him what she’d seen, the storm churned like a titan tiller. She hung up when they lost connection, then started us on puzzles while we waited in the gloom.
When it was quiet, we went upstairs and outside. The ground was white. I stepped off the deck and started collecting ice balls in my play teapot and asked if we could keep them. Mindy started crying because she was afraid the kitties weren’t safe. Mom took us back inside and we put my filled teapot in the freezer and sat at the kitchen table stringing the beans. The sun came back out, brighter through the oak branches than at lunch. The trees in a seven mile stretch were stripped. The corn crop beyond them stood three inches high.
That night Dad brought roses, three for Mom and one for each of us girls, like there was something to make up for, either on God’s behalf or his.
“In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.” My grandfather’s voice begins the familiar story, its tenor timbre the same whether asking for the gravy, telling his sons where to plant, or reading from a columned Bible on his knees. A loose violin string, on the rim of squeaking, his voice is a bending thing. It comes out his lips as if trying to avoid touching his tongue.
“So Joseph went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.”
Grandpa reads the story from an armchair in the farmhouse living room, the long horizontal space between the floor and ceiling lit with the ivory pools of lamps. He is the patriarch in his home: behind him, generations of the faithful, before him, his family. His wife perches on the blonde stone of the hearth, gazing at her usually-busy hands. He reads an important part of the story: genealogy—important because your ancestors say something about the danger and power that live in you. The room rolls out before him with the colored lights on the tree silently blinking off the tinsel. His round belly pushes the Bible to the end of his lap, his head squarish from the missing hair on top and graying stripes on his temples, and his feet awkward and naked in plain stockings on the flat carpet.
“Joseph went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son . . .”
Dotted across the room, his children are surrounded by their children. The new babies, Adam and Andrea, balanced on crooked forearms, the burst of toddlers, Mandy, Megan, Mindy and Sara, lit on dads’ knees, and the two firsts, Jeremy and me, cross-legged on the floor, all of us grandchildren in candy-colored pajamas, the white vinyl soles and toe caps wiggling as we fidget, the zippers snaking from ankle to collarbone, elastic scratching on our wrists.
“And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks by night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shown around them, and they were terrified . . .”
We always read about the shepherds—never the gospel with the wise men—because here, surrounded by fields and stars and animals, the shepherds are kin: someone run out to do the chores between supper and presents, someone doing the Christmas milking late after the kids are tucked away on floors and piled in beds together—they are people with no reason to lie, the context of their lives so commonplace that had they imagined the story, there would be no angels or singing, no new stars. To people like this, simply a bountiful crop was miracle enough, proof of abundant love; a leveling of nature was the sign of shirked duty, the result of disobedience or an unworthy sacrifice.
“When the angels left them and had gone into heaven, the shepherds hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in a manger. When they had seen him, they returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they