PRAY FOR OUR INTENTIONS

 

As dusk fell around the edges of her father-in-law’s childhood home in a small Iowa farm town, the four of them sat in beach folding chairs having long degraded into woven tatters. The close evening air brought no relief from the ninety-degree temperatures of the day. The father and son drank Mexican beers and the wife and mother-in-law uncomfortably crossed and uncrossed their bare legs. The wife looked up nervously at the perfectly still tree boughs above. Father-in-law Mitchell was holding forth, as was his wont.

Mitchell’s father assembled a Craftsman home all by himself in 1936, when a man ordered a kit from the Sears Roebuck Catalogue and built it beam by beam to accommodate his wife and children. Every morning she walked by the family burial plot sectioned off in a grassy cemetery just down the street from the house: grandmothers, grandfathers, babies born too early (or too late)--all the forefathers who begat Mitchell. His father descended from a 12-year-old boy who left the Azores as a lone stowaway in 1810 to work in the Rhode Island whaling industry. At some point he must have grown tired of seafaring life, because when the lure of cheap Midwestern land presented itself, he seized upon the chance to become a farmer and never looked back. The erstwhile whaler married a solid frowning Scotch-Irish woman, her perpetual discontent forever preserved in daguerreotype artfully placed on the living room credenza, nestled in the center of countless other unsmiling stout women and affable thin men with slightly lopsided smiles wearing rumpled waistcoats

The wife’s husband recalled his childhood in another midwestern town where Mitchell later taught literature at the local liberal arts college struggling to thrive. Population peaked at 500 souls. I left as soon as I could crawl, he mused. Some of the worst people, he affirmed, did not live in anonymous urban centers. True degenerates lurked in so-called all-American towns, where everyone knew each others’ secrets and helped the old widow next door while preparing to sell her out to the highest bidder.

But back to Mitchell. His Portuguese father and German mother ran a movie theater where he watched classic films of the forties and fifties in exchange for sweeping up popcorn after the shows. They didn’t own; they managed. Curiously, the wife’s grandparents did the same, although several continents away during the same period. As soon as he graduated college in the early 1960s, Mitchell was accepted into the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he rented a bedroom in an old woman’s boardinghouse. 

Above their heads, swifts darted between tree branches, fast-moving birds snatching invisible insects from the sky. Mitchell clarified they were in fact bats. Why wasn’t she afraid of them? The real fear, in fact, was realizing that she had mistaken them for birds. 

A bat flew into my room one night, he marveled. When I came home, it was trapped. I grabbed a broom and tried to sweep it away, but it flapped around pitifully before settling in the wastebin. I went to bed, and in the morning it was gone. 

Mitchell had opened the window wide; during the night, the bat politely obliged and flew away. He related the memory not with fear but wonder. 

At Christmastime, Grace set out festive bowls of nuts in the living room. 

When I was growing up, do you know what we called these? Mitchell held up a dark brown Brazil nut between his fingers like a curious gem. 

Nigger toes.

During a family trip to the Florida Keys, the conversation turned to ocean life. Mitch offered up another single pearl. Do you know what we called groupers? Grouper are brown bloated bottom feeders encrusted with parasites. Particularly ugly sea creatures. No one guessed. 

Jewfish. 

To be fair, there were not a lot of Jews in Iowa.

Mitch would typically finish these pronouncements with a self-satisfied, slightly sheepish smile. They offered polite but supportively awkward giggles. Mitch was a nice enough fellow, a published poet and professor emeritus, so what did it matter?

Grace grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father died of tetanus from stepping on a rusty railroad nail. Or so they were all told. After extensive genealogical research, the wife’s daughter discovered he in fact died of lung cancer, according to the scanned photocopy of the coroner’s report. Mythology was instilled with sad romance, because Grace was only 12 years old and became caretaker of her two younger sisters, Peg and Anne, while her mother worked to support the family. After her work day, mother settled in front of the television and Grace took over. She prepared dinner, fed the little ones, cleared the dishes, and cleaned the kitchen while her mother continued to sit, chain smoke, and drink beer. She still maintained an elegant appearance, her thick dark hair upswept into a tidy beehive. The wife’s husband was young when grandma died of throat cancer. He never saw her, he recalled, without a cigarette in one hand and a cold can of Budweiser in the other.

One would think that Grace would wash her hands of mothering after leaving home to attend the University of Missouri on scholarship, but no, she had more to give. After meeting a young, handsomely bookish Mitchell, they married and had four children–one of them the woman’s husband.  

One June the husband and wife visited them in Ohio. The woman was five months pregnant. Her doctor had prescribed exercise to control her weight, so she woke early to march briskly over the green hills of the local college from which Mitchell had retired. Eventually she had to slow down because her belly started to cramp. When she reached the top of a grassy mount, she paused, panting, the sun illuminating the weedy flowers brushing her legs. 

They celebrated her son’s third birthday in the back of the Craftsman home. Mitchell’s sister attended with her much older husband, who sat quietly near the porch pondering his 90th year. The woman’s small son greedily eyed the wrapped gift his great aunt had brought, piled among others on the picnic table. Mitchell’s sister lost her first baby, a daughter, many years before. No one knew why–no autopsy or inquiries ensued. It was simply something that happened to people.  

When Mitchell’s sister was diagnosed with a cancer that ate her from the inside out, she requested to be buried next to the baby, who had been placed in the casket wearing the christening dress she wore three months earlier. Two things that happened. But at the birthday party nobody was thinking about why babies and mothers die 40 years apart to reunite in a family plot in Dubuque.

She once attended the wedding of her husband’s friend. They met a man there who had pancreatic cancer. He was happy that a new drug was giving him more time with his family. His cheap suit hung loosely around his bony shoulders, and his quiet young daughter, a teenager, stood primly at his side wearing tan pantyhose–pantyhouse!--in late July. Stockinged  toes peeked out from her wedge sandals.

Six months later, her husband dressed to attend the man’s wake. She glanced at the folded page featuring tenderly selected prayers and hymns. The man’s face hovered in repose on the white paper background, his eyes closed. His disembodied head was now framed by the collar of a more expensive suit. Her husband selected a somber navy blue silk tie. She stood behind him as he draped it around his neck in a deft twisting motion and tightened it into a knot.

Grace and Mitchell were flanked by oddballs. One angry man with four Jack Russell Terriers running in circles within a fenced enclosure. A lonely woman with two no-good sons who came and went at all hours in a blue pick-up truck pulling up in the driveway. She sold cockatoos and marijuana before the local police shut her down. Beyond a wooded area bordering the backyard, however, she introduced herself to Walt. 

Walt was a retired engineer with a knack for cultivating a sprawling, inventive garden. Jerusalem artichokes, tomatoes, and corn. Asparagus, rhubarb, potatoes. Mustard yellow marigolds nestled in between rows of vegetables. She rested on the large stump of a long-dead tree listening to Walt describe how he re-purposed huge concrete pipes from construction sites. He had a long face and lanky frame, loping between the pipes: pruning, watering, and waiting.

A few years later, Grace incidentally mentioned that Walt had had a stroke and passed away. His wife sold the house and moved to Cincinnati to be closer to her daughter and grandchildren. And that was that. The woman didn’t bother venturing past the woods after that. The gardens lay fallow, and she wondered how the new occupants made use of the now empty space.

Walt’s adult daughter, the flight attendant who’d moved away, was preparing for landing after an eight-hour transatlantic flight. She sat stiffly upright, pulled the belt across her chest, and slumped slightly as the buckle clicked. Her mother asked her to text on take off and landing, so she removed her phone from the pocket in her serving apron hanging on a blunt hook. Afterwards, she sat in silence, eyes closed, as the familiar roar of the jet engines rumbled within.

When the wife left her husband, the birthday cards from Grace dutifully arrived for a few years, until they didn’t. But she knew both had regrets. As devout Catholics, the very notion of divorce repelled them as a rupture against the natural order. Her daughter reported Grace once pulled her aside at Thanksgiving, clasped her small hands, and shared, “Tell your mother we miss her very much.” They had to accept a third wife, much younger, sharply angled, and eternally ungrateful. One who didn’t appreciate Jerusalem artichokes. A girl who faced deportation when the man announced to his children he was remarrying, and everyone but him saw why he acted so hastily. The man who once marched ten paces ahead of his family like an Arab sheikh was now ready to surrender everything to the insatiable new wife. He resumed drinking heavily. The woman resumed a new life offering latent pleasures she’d long missed, and it lacked all previous connection.

She lived by herself and liked it. It was a safe enough neighborhood to take her dog out for early morning walks when the sky pinked with dawn. More than once she passed a small Catholic church with an adjoining enclosed garden for sitting and quiet contemplation. Only one wooden bench on which to sit surrounded by trees and grass. A statue of the Virgin Mary, her veiled gaze turned slightly downward, presided over nature with composed humility. The woman was too embarrassed to sit alone in the garden, in case someone walked by. Her community frowned upon frank religious expression reserved for simple people residing in the South and Midwest, not her neighbors who planted yard signs espousing truisms countering what they perceived to be the coarsening political discourse of the day–to which they enthusiastically contributed. 

Every morning she eyed a curious small cabinet affixed to a short pole located on the side of the entrance of the garden with a small label, inviting anyone–even her?–to place their intentions therein. She started writing them down at home in a tiny wirebound notebook, the kind reporters used to jot down their observations while interviewing witnesses.

She believed an intercessionary saint was required rather than direct appeals to God.The woman felt too insignificant to appeal directly to Him, so she chose St. Francis for his intimate affiliation with the natural world, specifically animals. Brother Sun. Sister Moon. Brother Fire. Sister Death. Sister Death. He respected the dominance woman exerted over life's boundaries: the tides, fertility. Death finally came for St. Francis after years of chronic illness, in the form of a woman whom he did not fear and was eager to embrace. A woman who, in the end, smothered him.

She tore off a single personal intention every morning. Focus your meditation on a singular appeal. Thank God Catholics have templates, she thought. The woman pictured her late father, a disavowed member of the Church, kneeling and methodically crossing himself before silently slipping into the pew to kneel  beside her. He hadn’t set foot in a church in 30 years. Because the Jesuits saved me.

Open the cabinet door. Drop a single intention to represent one of many anguished pleas destined to echo in a domed hushed vault, softly falling like so many burning embers singeing the bowed heads of the faithful.