Godsend
On top of the water, the sky rippled thinly. Lake Macatawa was clear and cold that fall. My paddle cut through the surface, carving circles that spread outward, overlapping as they went. Eddies swirled and collapsed before the water was made calm again. Symmetry revealed itself so persistently back in Michigan, I felt certain it was a reflection of heaven as well.
Father’s old canoe was still in Veenstra’s boathouse, sticky with cobwebs and pine needles, but perfectly sound. I had no trouble putting it in the lake. Back when I was a girl, Father used to take me fishing at an hour when mist hovered over the water. I still remember the excitement, the tug, the slick wet thrill of a fish on the line. My earliest memory is of Father at home, his face floating above my bed in the dark when I was just an infant. The side of my crib was held by a tricky, rickety metal latch. Mother had the knack of it, but when Father came for me in the night, he shook and rattled the bedrail with a most violent conviction. Calamity itself woke me into this harsh world.
The new minister was a godsend. He spoke like a learned man. I’d never heard such theology, no one at church had. We said God the normal way, with a vowel sound like baa. Reverend Hoekstra pronounced God with the sound of awe in the center, all reverent and drawn out like that. I tried not to smile when he preached. I’m so toothy I can hardly stretch my lips all the way around my face.
The Reverend lifted the whole congregation from our mourning stupor after Father’s passing. He was tall, even for a Dutchman, and so handsome it would’ve been improper to be around him, were he not the minister and all. He had blue eyes and a dimple in his chin, exactly like Paul Newman. We didn’t keep gossip magazines at home, but all the ladies from church pored over his picture at the beauty parlor on Saturday afternoons.
No one had ever noticed me before. I was shortsighted and thick around the middle. My hands were an embarrassment, all red and torn. I wore gloves to church on Sunday, of course. Saturday mornings, Mother and I still scrubbed the church floors, the aisles and the vestibule. We couldn’t expect his wife to do it.
Our lawn was square and tidy as any yard in town. We hung our bleached bedsheets on the clothesline out back every Tuesday. Dark wash was on Wednesdays. The cemetery next to the plant was just as neat, though more solemn. Mother and I clipped the grass and deadheaded the geraniums on Father’s grave on Sunday afternoons.
Reverend put a hunger inside me that nothing could touch. I’d been ravenous for weeks. On my way to work in the morning, I went to the IGA and bought vanilla wafers, a Hershey bar, some beef jerky, and a package of windmill cookies. On my way home in the afternoon, I stopped at the bakery. Donuts were half price after four. Mother liked them, too.
The minister’s wife was from a good family, Grand Rapids money. Furniture people. She wore pastel colored suits and sat in the front pew. She was trim and pretty with tiny, square white teeth.
When he smiled, his eyes lit up like a miracle. They shone more darkly in anger. Once I saw them go a deep violet hue, and from the pulpit, when he warned of God’s wrath, they flashed so mightily, I believe they saw everything, all my unworthiness.
I worked at General Electric out on East 16th. It was steady, and they were nice to me. I had my very own desk off the shop floor and all the paper and pencils I could use. Our plant made motors for refrigerators. Engineers upstairs did the electrical designs, but someone had to do the math, long division and logarithms, mostly. Father taught me algebra when I was still in grade school, and I was pretty handy with a slide rule. I did my sums on blocks of manila paper, then copied thin columns of numbers into hand-sewn books with shiny green covers. I went full-time after finishing the eleventh grade. Mother and I needed the extra money once Father was gone.
Sometimes I was overwhelmed with the profusion of God’s detail, the sheer recklessness of it. I’d never seen such hands, for example. Reverend’s palms were narrow and concave, capable in the air as angel wings, and just as graceful. With the tiniest gesture, he put new life into a tired old parable we’d all heard a thousand times, and when he raised his arms above his head, drawing Jesus down into the sanctuary, there was perfect stillness in the pews.
I watched the sinews at his wrists, fine and taut as puppet strings. They contracted when he held my head between his hands. I closed my eyes, and they covered my cheeks, my neck, my chest. His robe was deep and dark as gravity itself, and I fell in to the center of him, and when he reached inside and tore my secrets open, I believe something holy passed between us. For days afterwards, it burned between my legs, memory of his hands like a hot flight of spirit.
I understood the facts of biology, of course. It wasn’t ignorance, but something more complicated that pressed in on me, a weight like the heavy summer heat, its smell of cut grass, chemical and vaguely anesthetic, wafting up from the square green lawns.
It smelled like iron, exactly like the water in Lake Newaygo with its taste of rusty nails. I might’ve been horrified by all the blood, the shocking color of it, more orange than red. It came in a profusion, clumps so sinewy I was afraid the mess would clog the plumbing. Instead, I was thrilled and I wept, buoyed with relief. I’d been overfull of tears and a painful kind of longing, the sort of shame I sometimes relieved with a hot water bottle and secret caresses in our dark four poster bed. If I waited until Mother’s snore was regular and rhythmic, I could feel myself quite alone with it.
Deep inside the gory mess, a veiny mass with two clouded eyeballs, gray and unblinking. Bloody as fish entrails.
The wax paper in the vanilla wafers box was sturdy, so I folded it into a tiny envelope making sharp white creases with the edge of my fingernail. Then, down on my knees, I cupped my hands around the meaty, red soul of it. Mostly, it slipped back into the toilet water. I saved what I could. I folded the packet, then I put it inside the cookie box and tucked it in my pocketbook. Burying the thing was out of the question. No place to dig a hole without an explanation.
Lake perch swam under the canoe in parallel formation. I wondered how they managed such precision. I envied their fishy vector fields, the Lord’s call to order so plainly manifest in the world. Theirs was a more intuitive kind of math, perhaps, watery and biological.
I lowered the tiny packet over the gunwale and let it slip into the lake. It slid away smoothly without a sound or a splash, not even the smallest ripple. I had feared the wax paper would float, but thankfully, it sank straight down.
A far flight of seagulls skimmed the lake. One bird fell away and dived down into the water for food, perhaps, or sport, then all together, the flock lifted again, pulsing wings driving them upward and away. I watched till they disappeared, following their ascent toward the sun setting out over the Great Lake, the great, reddening hell of it, and for a moment, I was blinded by its exquisitely round circumference.
ξ
"Godsend" was first published in Gulf Coast.
Mary Peelen is is the author of QUANTUM HERESIES, winner of the Kithara Book Prize. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Massachusetts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco and Paris.
Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.