Universal Harvester(33)
“It’s a very different sort of church,” she said, again taking hold of his hand and squeezing it, gently, the way you might with a child who doesn’t and can’t grasp your meaning because he is too young to understand. Several years later, at a Greyhound bus station in Minneapolis in the winter, he remembered this exchange, finally recognizing it as the moment of clarification he’d been hoping for in those then-recent days. It can really get quite cold in Minneapolis in the winter.
5
A while later she began saving food scraps in a little plastic bucket on the kitchen counter. It sat just to the left of the sink. She found the bucket in the garage one day while Peter was at work; it had some oil rags in it, which she took out, laundered, folded, and replaced, neatly stacked, on the shelf where the bucket had been. Peter either didn’t notice or didn’t mind; a small bucket for food scraps on a counter is the sort of thing that can pass without notice almost anywhere. When he’d been a child, his mother had kept a pail under the sink for potato peelings. She fed them to the chickens.
Peter and Irene Sample had no chickens, of course—I say “of course” even though there’s really no reason why they couldn’t have. It would have been a thrifty move on Irene’s part, to have Peter build her a coop one Sunday: save on eggs, save on meat. But back in Tama her house hadn’t been that sort of house, and Peter was unsentimental about his childhood. He didn’t miss cleaning up after the chickens.
There is at least one different version of Lisa Sample’s story, one where the plastic bucket on the counter in Crescent is indeed for some chickens who live in the backyard, pecking and scratching; anything left over Irene uses for compost, and the lesson young Lisa takes from the bucket is “waste not, want not.” She sees the fat, happy chickens outside and eats their eggs each morning, yolks dark and yellow, almost orange, and she’s a smart kid, she makes the connection. She grows up to be a person who dilutes the dish soap several times before buying a new bottle: who cleans the windows with vinegar and old newspaper instead of Windex and a paper towel. She unplugs electrical appliances that aren’t in use, and waits until evening to bathe, having learned, from her mother, that over time these small choices add up to real savings, which can be kept on hand in case the day should come when a reserve is needed, when new supplies are scant.
In this version of the story she learns all the same lessons, but not from her mother.
*
Irene attended services in Council Bluffs again the following Sunday, and on several subsequent Sundays through July. She kept up her Wednesday night Bible study in town for most of the summer. One Wednesday in August she came home early; Peter and Lisa were sitting on the sofa watching Wild Kingdom together. She closed the front door behind her with greater force than it needed.
“You’re home early,” said Peter.
“Daddy! Shh!” said Lisa. On the screen a lioness was stalking an antelope, Marlon Perkins narrating in his deliberate cadence, his voice high and clear.
“You’re home early,” Peter repeated, stage-whispering. Irene looked distracted, her mind elsewhere; she shook her head once or twice as if to dislodge something caught in her hair.
“I think I have some disagreements with the Wednesday Bible study,” she said.
“Mommy!” said Lisa in an admonishing tone. Peter got up; he followed Irene to the kitchen, but continued to whisper.
“You walked out of Bible study over a disagreement?” Peter said. He was trying to picture the scene; there were only three other ladies in the Wednesday night group. You couldn’t just sneak out the back as you might in a big church on Sunday.
“Pastor Brian had this passage about the church in Macedonia,” she said, a little carefully now, calmer than she’d been when she came through the door. “But I know this verse. Michael’s gone over it several times.”
“Michael’s your Council Bluffs pastor,” said Peter, filling in the blanks for himself, making sure he hadn’t missed something.
“He’s gone over it several times,” she repeated, and then she stopped. He saw it happen; he’d seen it a couple of times since June, hardly worth noticing the first time. Just a little tic. But it wasn’t like her: to cut off her thought mid-stride, to suddenly seal herself away like a bird who sleeps with its eyes open.
“What’s the passage?” he asked.
“It’s all right,” she said. There were some dishes in the drainer. She started putting them away into their cabinets and drawers.
“Well, it can’t be worth fighting with anybody about,” he said, playfully, lightly, in the old style from long ago.
“Oh, I didn’t fight,” she said. She sounded more cheerful now. “I only asked a few questions. I just feel like they don’t like my questions.”
“But you’re home early,” he said.
“I did come home a little early, yes. I told them I’d forgotten something.” She was finished with the dishes; she went back into the living room and sat down in front of the television next to Lisa. The lioness was resting in dry dirt at the foot of an acacia now, yellow sun setting behind her. Peter stayed behind in the kitchen for a moment, thinking, finding compartments into which he might file his questions where they wouldn’t bother anyone until later. But he didn’t go back to them later. They were fine right where they were. If, in the future, he found he had need of them, he’d know where to look.