A Friendly Letter, The Blog.

One day in my junior year of high school, I discovered that my stomach muscles were unusually strong. Here’s how I found this out:

Jamie, whose locker was a couple down from mine, came into the locker room, grabbed me by the shirt, slammed me up against my locker, and punched me in the stomach.

I don’t think Jamie was angry at me when he did that, at least not especially so. He just felt like punching somebody, and there I was.

I had been punched in the gut once or twice before, and a couple other times had been hit there accidentally. The effect was always the same: it doubled me over in agony, unable to breathe for a moment or two. We called it, “having the wind knocked out of you.”

It was very scary the first time, until I realized I wasn’t going to suffocate, and every time it was painful.

But what happened that day was completely new, and it wasn’t clear who was more shocked by it, Jamie or me.

Somehow I knew what was coming when he grabbed me, and in the split second as he was shoving me against the locker door, managed to tense up my stomach muscles. When the punch came, his big fist bounced off my hardened belly.

“Jesus Christ,” Jamie said. “What’s this?” He frowned thoughtfully behind his thick glasses, and then, deciding to take a scientific, experimental tack, calmly punched me a second time, harder.

My head and back thumped against the steel door, but his fist again bounced off my belly. My stomach hurt, of course, but I could still breathe, and stand. Jamie had not knocked the wind out of me. He shrugged and turned away. I had, in a limited but important sense, defeated him, at least for the moment.

Who knows how my stomach muscles got so hard? I wasn’t athletic, and had done no sit-ups or other special exercises. But I realized at once that if it could get that hard again, my sore belly could be an important survival tool.

Jamie and I were cadets at St. Joseph’s, a Catholic military boarding school in western Kansas. It was 1959. At St. Joseph’s we went to church three times on Sunday, and twice every other day. We wore ROTC uniforms and marched wherever we went outside the building. Despite all this, I liked it there. Why I liked it is a long story, having mainly to do with being from a large Catholic, military family and wanting to get away from home. St. Joseph’s was also Catholic and military; but it was far away from home, and that was enough for me.

Here I am in my SJMA uniform, 1958 in Hays, Kansas, a beardless youth.

Or at least, it would have been if I could figure out how to keep away from Jamie. He was no taller than me, but weighed about twice as much, most of which was muscle. Rough-looking, with pimples and thick glasses, he was well-muscled, and he swaggered. He claimed to be a black belt in karate, and to have been in all kinds of rumbles and fights back home. I could believe this, although I also knew he bragged a lot.

But what really surprised me was that he also insisted he was an Eagle Scout. Maybe he was just bragging about that too; but I didn’t doubt it then. I just puzzled over how he had fooled the scout leaders. How did he get them to see him as a person of upright character and all the other nice guy stuff that supposedly goes into achieving that highest scouting rank?

Anyway, Eagle Scout or no, Jamie was a bully. More than a bully, really. That year I had begun reading some psychology books, and soon decided he was more like a psychopath, or maybe a sociopath, the kind of person who would kill somebody and never give it a second thought. He talked that way, and treated me and others that way too.

Actually, I didn’t think he might kill me, because he didn’t take me seriously enough. The gut punches were, for him, just fooling around. Even so, except for when I had to be at my locker, I gave him a wide berth, and he mostly ignored me.

My buddy Leroy was a different matter. Leroy’s locker was a couple down from mine, farther away from Jamie’s. He and I were buddies for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones was that we were among the few non-Catholic cadets at St. Joseph’s. This was no big deal for Leroy–he had been raised Protestant and never gave it much thought. But it was a big deal for me, especially because it was very new: my family was Catholic, and one reason I had been sent to St. Joseph’s was because there was no Catholic school near where my family lived.

But that year, besides reading psychology, I had also been plowing through some philosophy books, and soon realized I didn’t believe all this Catholic stuff they had taught me since before I started school. I decided I was probably an atheist, or at the least an agnostic.

I wasn’t ashamed of my new lack of faith; in fact, I often debated with other students about God, Jesus, miracles, hell, all that stuff. The arguments were fun, but at the same time, this was very much a minority outlook at St. Joseph’s. So I was anxious to find some comrades, somebody, anybody I could speak plainly with, and Leroy was one of the main ones.

Leroy was tall, with a handsome face and dark hair which he frequently slicked back with a pocket comb, which was a cool thing to do in those days. And like Jamie, he bragged a lot. He bragged about what a Romeo he was. He bragged about being a musician. And he also bragged about being tough, a fighter.

Maybe he was a Romeo; you could never be sure about that at our isolated all-boy’s school; and he was something of a musician, playing the saxophone quite seriously. But as far as being a fighter–well, that was mostly in his head. The fact was that Leroy was rail thin, and when he took off his shirt, there were huge patches of scar tissue all over his skinny chest. He had been severely burned as a child, and skin had been taken for grafts on his face and neck. I think the aftermath of those burns had also kept him physically weak.

Just the same, Leroy talked as if he was a veteran of all sorts of physical combat, in which he had kicked butt left and right. And he often swore he’d beat up anybody who tried to mess with him right here at St. Joseph’s. But the truth was that if it came to a fight, I could probably have beaten him myself, and I was no fighter.

None of this bothered me, because we were buddies; and it didn’t seem to bother most other cadets either, because it was easy to see that Leroy lacked the equipment to back up his bluster.

But everything about Leroy seemed to irritate Jamie. I often thought about this. Was it Leroy’s smooth-skinned good looks, at least above his shoulders, that made Jamie jealous? Or maybe his bragging just brought out Jamie’s meanest streak.

Whatever it was – I only know what I saw: The more Leroy talked, the more ticked off Jamie got. And it didn’t take long to figure out that this meant trouble.

But Jamie and his big fists were not all I thought about then. As the year at St. Joseph’s unfolded, I learned many things, and had my share of fun. Much of this was shared with Leroy, because our outsider status increasingly threw us together.

For one thing, while girls were mostly distant figures, they weren’t completely out of reach. In town there was a Girls Catholic High School, where the students all wore identical billowing blue dresses, and as time passed we each developed crushes on one or another of them. I admired a girl named Sue Ellen, mostly from afar.

Leroy did better. Because St. Joseph’s didn’t have a band, he was allowed to go into town regularly to play in the local high school band. There he found a girl named Joann, and actually managed to have a few dates with her. He swore they also did some serious making out – but I wasn’t so sure about that.

Then there was music. For Christmas my parents sent me a small portable record player, and I managed to get a single earphone connected to it. On it I played some big classical LP records I bought at a local supermarket for ninety-nine cents. The earphone was tiny, and clipped over one ear. The sound was very tinny. But to me, tinny Mozart in one ear, was better than no Mozart at all. (I would stand by that view today.)

Leroy put up with my Mozart and Beethoven, but never quit trying to convince me that modern jazz, especially the music of Stan Kenton, was the greatest stuff ever written. I heard him out, but stuck stubbornly to my classical convictions.

By the time the snow melted and the leaves were returning, Leroy and I often took long walks in our limited free time, across the dark plowed fields next to the school grounds to the wooded creek beyond it, talking as always about all sorts of things. We chattered and argued about music, girls, and even religion, because I kept reading new books that raised new problems with various beliefs I had earlier taken for granted.

Before long we also talked about how all this reading was getting me in trouble with the priests who ran the school. They could put up with a few quiet Protestants around, but somebody like me, who had loudly abandoned their Catholic faith, was a real problem. In fact, we soon heard out that one of the cadets I had argued with had reported me to Father Thomas More, the Director of Student Life. I think my unbelieving notions scared him, as if they were a kind of virus and might be catching. And maybe he was right. In any case, the goal of St. Joseph’s was to turn out good Catholics, not good atheists, and that’s what I thought I was becoming. So one of these days, I announced, the priests would be coming after me.

Leroy said he’d stand with me when they did, and he was as good as his word. One Friday afternoon we had to see Father Thomas More to get permission to go into town after class. Fr. T-More (as we called him), turned us down flat. Leroy’s grades, he said, were not good enough.

We knew there was more to it; for one thing, my grades were excellent It was Leroy who lit the fuse: “Was there anything else, Father?” he asked.

“Yes!” Father T-More almost shouted. He turned to face me, eyes blazing, and said they were disgusted by my disloyal debates with other cadets.

“It takes more humility than that to get into heaven, Fager,” he cried, and then preached at me for what felt like an hour.

I stood still, staring back at him the whole time, saying nothing, denying nothing. This was an important moment in my life: confronting the Church which had raised me, and declaring my independence of it, even if only by my silence. And Leroy stood there beside me, echoing my quiet defiance the whole time. It’s not a small thing to stand with a friend who’s being told he’s going to hell, and I was grateful for that.

But what would happen next, I wanted to know. Soon a rumor circulated that they were planning to expel me from the school. Would they really do that? I still wanted to come back the next year and graduate from St. Joseph’s; I had more independence there than at home, and didn’t want to give that up. I had even ordered a school ring, gold with a red garnet stone. Would the priests send me packing, and tell my parents their son was a vocal atheist? What would my mother, who was very religious, do to me if they did?

Leroy and I talked about this a lot on our walks. And he had an idea: “Don’t be a chicken about it,” he challenged. “Walk right in there and ask them. You’re not afraid of the priests, are you?”

Well in a way, yes; but in another way, no. So one afternoon I took his advice and went into the office of Father Augustus, the school’s President, and put it to him straight.

Father Augustus smiled kindly at me. “Oh no,” he said reassuringly, “nothing like that has been proposed. We haven’t even talked about such things.”

The main building at St. Joseph’s, circa 1959. It wasn’t quite this grey, but it’s an old picture. The president’s office was just to the left of the main door in the center.

That made me feel better, and I was happy to go back to my tinny Mozart, and friendly arguments with Leroy about jazz versus classical, if God existed or not, and whether he really did make out with his girlfriend in town. We talked, and walked.

As the weeks went on, we also talked a lot about Jamie. The current of antagonism between him and Leroy was rising, as surely as the creek after the spring rains. The tension level when they were both in the locker room was palpable. What were we going to do about that? What could we do? What could I do?

Jamie had tried his belly-busting punches on me a couple more times, probably just to see what would happen. Once he even called over a couple other big guys from a few locker rows away, to take their turns at this abdominal novelty. All the punches hurt, but none of them could knock the wind out of me; I still can’t imagine why. But I had had enough. After that, the next time Jamie grabbed me, I mustered all my courage and pushed him away.

“Stop it!” I shouted. “If you’re gonna beat me up, then go ahead and do it. You know I couldn’t stop you. But otherwise, leave me alone!”

To my surprise, after that he did. At least somewhat. He still threatened me, and bragged about all his fighting, but he mostly kept his hands off. After all, like I said, I wasn’t important enough to beat up seriously.

I wish the same could have been said of Leroy. But it couldn’t. This was as much Leroy’s doing as anyone’s, though. He taunted Jamie from his locker, called him ugly and stupid, and said he wasn’t afraid, he’d take Jamie on anytime.

Leroy made the mistake of baiting him one afternoon as I was coming in, and Jamie went for him. They only scuffled for a few seconds, thank god, before some other guys pulled them apart and I pushed Jamie back. He could have tossed me aside, but there were others crowding around.

Behind me, Leroy was shouting and cursing: “Put me down, damn it! I’ll clobber him! I’ll kill him! Put me down!” I turned and saw that one of the basketball players had grabbed Leroy and was holding him about six inches off the floor, his fists and feet flailing the air like angry matchsticks. He was that lightweight. If it had been any other time, I would have burst out laughing, he looked so ridiculous.

But Jamie shoved past me, and pointed a thick finger between the shoulders of the other guys between him and Leroy. “I’ll tell you who’ll kill who, you punk” he bellowed. Then he pulled his hand back, made a fist, and smashed it loudly into a locker door, shaking the whole row and leaving a dent in the metal. “Like that.” He backed away and stalked out of the locker room.

The basketball player let Leroy down, and the other guys wandered off.

I was shaking. “Leroy,” I whispered, “let’s get out of here.”

We headed down the hall and out the door, going as far as we were allowed, to the plowed field, toward the creek. As we walked, a couple of things became clear to me: one was that Jamie wasn’t kidding. He would want his revenge on Leroy, and it would be a bloody one. Another was that when the time came, I had to stand with him, just as he had stood with me in my face-off with Father T-More.

But how could I do that so it made a difference? Jamie could flatten Leroy with one fist and me with the other; and where would that leave either of us?

Still feeling shaky, I spotted something in the grass by the creek. It was a length of two by four lumber, about two and a half feet long. It was damp from laying out there in the dew and rain, and that made it heavy. A notch had been cut out of one end, giving my hand a good grip on it, and it swung with a real heft to it.

I whacked it against a tree a few times. The blows were solid, tearing big gashes in the tree’s bark, and making my palm and fingers hurt. But I didn’t drop it. In fact, with each blow I felt stronger and swung harder, and harder at the tree.

And then, like an electric shock, an idea came to me.

This two by four was not just a piece of wood. It was an equalizer. Looking down at it, I stopped shaking. It could solve our problem with Jamie: In my mind’s eye I could see how it would go down, as clearly as if it was actually happening:

I would walk into the locker room, and find Jamie attacking Leroy. Really beating him up, smashing that smooth face he hated so much, or maybe choking him. Leroy would be gasping and bleeding, maybe flailing around, maybe unconscious.

As usual, Jamie would hardly notice me, walking over to open my locker as if I was utterly oblivious to what was going on a few feet away.

But then I’d turn around, step quietly behind Jamie and raise the two by four high over my head–maybe holding it with both hands.

There would be only one chance, I figured. One blow. One heavy stroke across the back of Jamie’s skull, swinging with all the concentrated force of a year’s accumulated rage. I could almost feel the bone give way under the board, the way the tree bark had split and flown off in sappy chunks.
I turned from this vision to Leroy, there by the creek, and told him very calmly what I planned to do. He believed me too, even though he still thought he could take care of himself.

With that settled, all we had to do was smuggle this weapon into the building. He went ahead of me, to signal from the hall doorway when the coast was clear.

The two by four was too long to fit under my shirt, but its weathered color was close to the khaki of my uniform, so I just walked quickly down the mostly deserted hall, swinging it in time with my right leg. In a couple of long moments, it was in my locker, hidden by an old uniform shirt.

After that it was only a matter of waiting and watching. Each time I came into the locker room and saw Jamie, the palms of my hands began to tingle, as if they were ready to close around the hidden lumber. But I felt calm about it, and kept up my usual careful deference toward him, and I don’t think he ever suspected a thing.

At this point, it would be satisfying to say things worked out as I expected, that my knotty pine equalizer made the difference, saved the day in a final, maybe fatal confrontation. And there were days when I felt that moment was coming close.

But it never happened. The year ended in anticlimax: Jamie’s folks came and got him a day or two early, or Leroy’s parents came to get him; I don’t remember which anymore. Either way, that ultimate, climactic showdown was headed off more or less accidentally, by disinterested forces beyond our control. Or maybe it was the grace of that God I didn’t believe in.

Anyway, a few weeks later, back with my family, my mother called me to the kitchen table, where she put an envelope in front of me.

I opened it. It was a letter, from Father Augustus. It said that because of my vocal unbelief, I would not be allowed to return to St. Joseph’s the next year. Having me around was too hazardous to the other cadets’ spiritual welfare.

“Well?” Mother asked grimly. “What about this?”

I looked at the letter again, then at her, and took a deep breath. Finally I said, “It’s true.”

She didn’t give up, of course. But that battle was lost; I was done with the Catholic church.

A few weeks later, a small package came in the mail. In it was my St. Joseph’s school ring.
At first I thought I should send it back. But looking at the red and gold, I began to wonder about many things connected with the year at St. Joseph’s, things I still wonder about:

What ever happened to Leroy, or Jamie, neither of whom I ever saw again? Would my belly muscles still stand up to one of his punches; it’s been a long time. Did the priests go through our lockers that summer and find my two by four? If so, what did they make of it?

I also wonder, if that final crisis had come, what would have happened after I swung that two by four? Or, more recently, what if the weapon hidden in my locker hadn’t been a two by four, but a forty four, a gun? Would this story be written from a prison cell? Would it be written at all?

These are questions to which there can be no answers. But there are three things I do know.

The first is that I meant what I said to Leroy about what I would do with that piece of wood. I can still see myself swinging it in the locker room, almost as if it really happened.

The second thing is that as I looked at the red and gold band and wondered all this, the ring took on an entirely different, and much more important set of meanings than it had had when I ordered it. I put it on, and have been wearing it ever since.

The third thing–but this came later–is that I’m not an atheist anymore.

My St. Joseph’s ring, in April 2013. It’s stayed on my finger for 54 years, and counting.

Copyright © by Chuck Fager — All rights reserved.

 
At first I was pleased when told that Quakers had a Testimony on Equality. That idea yielded a substantial chunk of the pride in being a Quaker that I wore, with appropriate humility.
 
But then I made a big mistake: I read some Quaker history. Even more grave, it began to sink in. And a few aspects of what it taught seem worth mentioning here, as they bear on topics like the role of Quakers in the world.
 
The first thing that turned up in the Quaker history of the Equality Testimony is the complete absence of the latter from most of the former. Yes, even in books of Faith and Practice published well into the middle of the twentieth century, there’s no mention of it. Further, in the original Disciplines, from 150 years before that, the term is absent and their spirit is quite the contrary. (Thee can check this for thyself right here, Friend.)
 
As to the earliest Friends? Well. Just to mention a few items: George Fox approved of owning slaves. William Penn actually owned slaves. John Woolman labored and sacrificed for thirty years just to get one yearly meeting to agree that slavery was a bad idea. 
 
Then there’s Robert Barclay, the outstanding early Quaker theologian.  In his magnum opus, The Apology for the True Christian Divinity, he insists that quaint early customs such as permitting a Quaker’s servants to (occasionally)  speak up to their masters without invitation, by no means portended any “levelling” of the social hierarchy, but to the contrary put this class ladder on an even firmer (because more truly Christian) foundation. (And thee can check on THAT right here. )

For that matter, Barclay also declared that just because the Society of Friends did without a pope and bishops, that did NOT make all Friends, or all Meetings, equal either. For more than 200 years the books of Discipline backed him up, making “inferior” Meetings explicitly subordinate to “Superior” ones, and setting up an internal establishment (mainly those few on the elevated “facing benches”) to “keep a tender care of” (i.e., oversee) the rank and file many in the cheap seats.
 
But what about permitting women to speak? And have their own meetings? Yes it was an advance. But look closer, and you’ll see that the Women’s Meetings were firmly subordinated to, and all their actions subject to review by, the Men’s Meetings. 
 
Better than other churches? Yes. “Equality”? Not exactly. (That’s why, in the end, the women insisted that their meetings be abolished; separate was not equal there either.)
 
While all this is inside stuff, it was not, to use the technical phrase, chopped liver. And there’s yet another, outward side to this earlier story too: a theological one, to wit:
 
Early Friends lacked a Testimony on Equality with the outside world because, to speak plainly, they (the Friends) were quite sure that those outside were NOT their equals. 
 
 A striking example of this is found deep in the famous 1660 Letter to King Charles II, from Fox and a dozen or so other leading Quakers — the one which announced what we now call the “Peace Testimony.” 
 
In a part of the letter which does not get quoted on meeting house wall posters, Fox & Co. explain to the king, “for your soul’s good,” why he should avoid persecuting the Quakers. It was not merely because they were peaceable folk, innocent of plotting his overthrow; but more important, because to do so would mean he was fooling with “the babes of Christ, which he [Christ] hath in his hand, which he [Christ] cares for as the apple of his eye; neither seek to destroy the heritage of God . . . .”
 
And here we have early Quaker theology in a nutshell: Friends were God’s chosen people, “the apple of his eye.” In the Bible, the counterpart is referred to as a “royal seed.” Maybe the Friends were not destined to rule the world outwardly, sitting on actual thrones; but surely they were commissioned to show it the true way to what the Lord had in mind, and they needed to be able to do the Lord’s work unhampered.
 
So were Quakers “equal” to other humans, even the king? Not hardly; none of this lot came anywhere near their level as “the heritage of  God.”
 
To be sure, in the next few generations some hard edges were scraped off this outlook by persecution and internal tension. Nevertheless, the nub of it survived for a long time: and I contend much of it is with us still, tho we have mislaid the history-tinted glasses which would enable us to see it.
 
Consider those old Disciplines again. From their first printed editions, through most of the 19th century, all these handbooks, both Hicksite and Orthodox, opened with the same introductory paragraph, which restated the sentiment of the 1660 letter. Here it is:
 
“As it hath pleased the Lord in these latter days, by his spirit and power, to gather a people to himself; and releasing them from the impositions and teachings of men. . .  these have been engaged to meet together for the worship of God in spirit, according to the direction of the holy Lawgiver . . . . For this important end, and as an exterior hedge of preservation to us against the many temptations and dangers to which our situation in this world exposes us, rules for the government of the Society have been made and approved from time to time…” 
 
In short: the Discipline protects the Chosen People from the awful outside world (and those awful people in it).  
 
Now, go ahead: squeeze a commitment to equality out of this if you can; I can’t.
 
But what about ending slavery? A noble crusade indeed. Yet, as has been amply shown in the book Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship, most Quakers who were totally opposed to slavery, were also totally okay with segregation, and this attitude was still widespread into the 1960s.
 
So where did the “Testimony of Equality” come from? And what exactly does it encompass? (Does it commit us, for instance,  to “equality of opportunity,” or rather to “equality of results” in worldly circumstances? Some mix of the two? Something else?)
 
All good questions, and I don’t know of any substantial work exploring Quaker seeking and discussion of possible answers. As said earlier, I haven’t found the term listed as a “Testimony” in books of Faith and Practice til well after the 1950s; but maybe I missed some. Maybe the unnamed “prophet” who coined the acronym SPICE,  which I only encountered in the late 1990s, was the real culprit.  (Personally, I think SPICE belongs in a jar in the kitchen; unless it’s old — then it’s an after shave. But I digress.)

Smells nice — but is it a TESTIMONY??

Of course, Friends today are not bound by what Fox or Penn or Barclay believed, and many of the rules in the old Disciplines have been altered or abandoned. 
 
Still, it is one thing to change the past, and another to escape it. The very complicated and ambiguous Quaker relationship to “equality’” both inside and outside our Society is still with us.

George & The Cottonmouth
A Story By Chuck Fager

In Memory of George Fager

(c) Copyright 2000, 2012. All rights reserved.

The first thing I noticed when we drove into my grandparents’ front yard was not their small frame house, not the field behind it, nor the barn at the other end of the yard. The first thing I noticed was the outhouse. And I can still remember it clearly after more than forty years.

The outhouse, the barn, the river and the snake, that’s what I remember best from that summer visit when I was about ten–in 1952, or was it 1953? The year, like a lot of the rest has faded from my mind, and since I can’t go back there anymore, I want to tell what I remember, so it all doesn’t fade away, or at least not as fast.

My grandparents lived in St. Paul, Kansas. St. Paul was–and is–a little town in the grassy southeast corner of the state. It was such a small town that mapmakers often forgot to put it on the Kansas road maps. Even when they remembered, it was just a tiny bump on the thin black line connecting two other dots marked Erie and Girard.

We drove into town on that thin black line, which was Kansas State Highway 47. About the only stretch of Highway 47 that might interest a mapmaker, or any other grownup, was a mile or two west of St. Paul. There it crossed the shiny steel tracks of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, which was called the Katy Line, and then mounted a rickety-looking bridge over the muddy Neosho River.

I’ll get to the river, and the railroad later. When our dark red Lincoln turned onto that highway, on the other side of town from them, we had driven a thousand miles or more, from California. It must have been an awful trip; there were five or maybe six of us crammed into the car. It was hot, and we had been driving for across vast empty spaces in Nevada, Utah, and eastern Colorado, stopping to sleep crowded into undersized motel beds. the kids, of which I was the oldest, had probably been bored and squabbling much of the way.

Fortunately, that part of the trip has completely faded from my memory, and I don’t mind at all. After all the driving St. Paul must have looked good to my parents, and I know it looked like heaven to us kids. It was strange, it was new, and above all, it was our destination. If nothing else, getting there would mean we could get out of the car and run around.

We came in from the east, on Highway 57, and the first sign of the town was a big stone Catholic church built by missionaries who had tried to convert the Osage Indians. Converted or not, the the Osage Indians were long gone by this time, and so were the missionaries. But the big stone church was still there.

I had been inside the church, and recalled it as being mostly dark inside, with tall grey columns holding up a distant arched ceiling ceiling. Statues of saints stood on either side, their plaster hands raised longingly toward the big white cross above the front altar, their painted faces half-lit by glowing rows of candles that flickered in red and blue glass cups at their feet. I also remembered the sound of a priest’s voice, murmuring Latin words I didn’t understand, echoing through the dimness along with the drifting smell of incense.

We drove past the church, all the way to the other end of town, which was only about four blocks away, to where Grandpa and Grandma Fager’s house stood on the corner. Grandma and Grandpa had raised nine children in their little house, of which my father was the oldest. They were all grown and gone now, scattered across half the country. All, that is, except the youngest, my uncle George, who was about nineteen, slim and muscular and tanned brown from working in the summer sun.

My other grandparents, the O’Briens, lived in St. Paul too, in a larger brick house a few blocks away. I was born in that house, while my father was away learning to fly bombers in World War Two. The O’Briens had had seven children, with my mother in the middle, and they were all grown too. On this trip, though, the Fagers were the main ones we had come to visit.

As I said, Grandpa and Grandma Fager were farmers, and behind their house was a field and a barn. The barn was where the first big excitement of our visit happened, when my sister and brother and I climbed up into the hayloft with our cousin Bernard–

But wait. I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to go back to when we first pulled into the front yard.

Grandpa Fager was a tall, slender, grey-haired man in overalls. He stood by while Grandma, who was shorter, rounder and more lively, greeted us with wide smiles and big hugs. Then when the car was unloaded, Grandma took all the grownups into the front room to sit and talk for awhile.

The other kids wandered off, but I followed the grownups inside. There were a couple of big smoky blue overstuffed chairs in the front room, with white lace doilies draped over the back, and a couch of the same color. Nothing in the front room looked like it was used very often, and when I sat down on the couch, its covering felt stiff and bristly.

Within minutes I was bored stiff. I couldn’t follow much the grownups’ talk about the trip and the weather, the Caseys across the road and various relatives. Also, sitting on the couch made my legs itch.

Looking for something else to do, I noticed that across the room an old sewing machine stood against the wall, one that you made turn by pushing with your feet on a heavy iron treadle underneath it.

Wandering over to it, I stretched out on the floor, to see if I could make the big flat treadle go with my hands. Sure enough, by pushing hard, I got the treadle started rocking back and forth, with a rhythmic hum-hum sound.

This was okay, and I started doing it faster and faster, like pushing a merry-go-round, and the hum-hum was getting louder. But then mother shushed me; too much noise for the grownups conversation.

So I stopped, and was sinking into boredom again, when suddenly I remembered what I wanted to do. Murmuring that I was going outside to play, I left the front room and headed quietly out the back door, avoiding the sounds of my younger brothers and sisters, which were coming from over toward the barn. I’d play with them later. First there was some solitary exploring to do.

In a moment I was pulling open the big outhouse door, not worried that the grownups would hear the squealing rusty hinges.

This outhouse looked like the ones I used to see in magazine cartoons sometimes, built like a big phone booth of wide wooden boards, with a slanted roof and three small holes at the top to let the smell out. Inside was a flat bench seat with a hole in it.

The boards were sunburned a dark grey and sanded by the Kansas wind until the looping wood grain stood out in wavy ridges that looked like a giant’s faded fingerprints. I stepped in, pulled the door closed, and sat carefully down on the bench — yes, with a bare bottom.

Of course, my grandparents had a bathroom inside, now. But the outhouse had been used by them and most of their children, summer and winter, for a long time before. To my parents, of course, this was just an old leftover, something to ignore. But I had never been this close to one before. The bench felt warm and ridged, but worn smooth, and much more comfortable than the prickly couch in the front room. Resting there, it felt like I was traveling back in time.

I looked around and listened. The air was dim except for slivers of light coming through cracks between the boards. The outhouse smell was not as strong as it must have been once. Beside me on the bench a thick old Montgomery Ward catalog leaned against the wall. The curling pages were yellow and brown, and about half were gone, used long ago for toilet paper.

It was warm and stuffy in the outhouse, but the sense of mystery deepened as I sat there, as if I was listening to it, hearing something I couldn’t quite make out.

I sat there until a big horse fly started buzzed loudly around my head. The buzzing mademe think of wasps, and I wondered whether there were wasps nests under the bench. Wasps, you know, can sting and sting, and I suddenly thought there was probably nothing they’d like better than a fresh bare bottom.

That thought brought me abruptly back to the present. So I tore a crinkly page, finished and pulled up my pants, and watched the horsefly warily. When it lit for a moment on a dim rafter above me, I jumped and ran, banging the door behind me as I hurried past the edge of the field toward the barn.

The field was not very big, because the Fagers’ farm was not very big. Only one cow was in the field, and it chewed its cud and studiously ignored us the whole time we were there. The barn also was pretty small as barns go, but it too had to be explored.

In the barn, tattered, dust-covered spiderwebs hung in the corners of all the rafters. They were more than a little creepy, but the smell of hay was strong and welcoming, and before long my sister Evelyn and my brother Clair and I were climbing all over the place.

As I said, it was in the barn that the excitement started a day or two later, but not on purpose, and it wasn’t my fault, really. It was Bernard who did it–cousin Bernard, who lived a few blocks back into town.

Bernard was an O’Brien cousin, and about as much of a city boy as you could find in little St. Paul. When his mother sent him out to play the next day, he decided to get a look at these Fager relatives who had driven all the way from California. We all soon ended up in the barn, which seemed as new to him as it was to us.

The floor of the barn was open in the center, where there was a large haystack. Most of this hay had been pitched down by Uncle George with a pitchform from a hayloft. The hayloft was half-filled with big boxy hay bales, pale yellow and prickly and tied tight with wire.

We climbed up to the hayloft on a wooden ladder built into the wall at one end. After clambering over and around all the bales up there awhile, someone–yes, it was probably me–got the idea of jumping down from the hayloft into the haystack below.

It wasn’t very far down, only six or eight feet, and landing in the straw was fun. So soon we were making a circuit from the haystack, up the ladder, then to the edge of the hayloft for a cannonball jump into the closest thing St. Paul had to a pool. That was all right, but like kids at a swimming pool, we soon started horsing around, and somebody pushed somebody else off the edge of the hayloft.

I don’t know who did it first–it could have been me that time too–but then my sister Evelyn came up the ladder and headed for the edge. She stood near the edge for a few seconds, hesitating. Then Bernard jumped up from behind a hay bale and shoved her over the edge.

He didn’t mean any harm, but Evelyn was too close to the end. She missed the haystack and hit the wall as she fell. When she got up, her wrist was hanging funny and her face was turning white.

The fall had broken her arm. In a moment Evelyn was crying and holding herself, Bernard was standing wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and I was dashing to the house, yelling for the grownups.

When we all came hurrying back, I saw Bernard dart out of the barn, across the yard, and then turn onto the sidewalk, running flat out toward St. Paul’s one-block downtown.

I veered off and chased him, angry now that he would leave the scene of the accident. But the pursuit was hopeless: he had a good lead and knew where he was going, and soon vanished around a corner. We didn’t see him again during that visit, and I don’t think he ever came back to apologize.

When I got back to the barn, huffing and puffing, Evelyn was being walked slowly to the car, holding her arm and sniffling, still very pale. In a moment, my parents pulled out of the driveway, headed for the nearest hospital, which was in Parsons, twenty miles away, west across the river and then south.

They couldn’t go west across the river, though, because when we had woken up that morning, the Neosho River was flooding, something I guess it did pretty often in those days, and the water was creeping up Highway 47 toward St. Paul. So they drove off the other way, taking a longer roundabout way to Parsons.

They were back a few hours later, with Evelyn feeling better and sporting a new white cast on her arm. Everyone crowded around her at first, asking if it still hurt and feeling the plaster that was still a little damp and smelled like wet cement. But my sister didn’t get as much attention as she would have otherwise, because now the flood was on everybody’s mind.

After supper, when evening coming on, we all walked down the highway to where the blacktop disappeared under the water. My parents announced strict orders that we were not to get wet, and that was an easy rule to obey because the water was brown and ugly, like a lake full of mud and trash.

Grandma and Grandpa watched the water with serious faces, but their voices didn’t sound too worried when they talked about it wit the other grownups. They had seen floods before, and I guess they figured this one wouldn’t come all the way up to their house, or the town.

As we stood there, the sun sank behind some clouds on the horizon. With dusk falling, I suddenly noticed something flashing up ahead, red lights floating on the water. Pulling on a grownup’s sleeve, I pointed. Was somebody trapped out there? Was it a boat?

Mother shaded her eyes to peer into the gloom, and then, with the sun’s glow nearly gone, everybody could see them: two red lights blinking silently on and off, on and off, on and off.

I think it was my father who figured out what hey were: the railroad signal lights where the Katy tracks crossed the highway.

The water had tripped the switches or something, and the lights were flashing nonstop. Their warning blinked on and off all that night; I could still see them from the upstairs window when we were sent to bed. And when the breeze was just right, it brought us the sound of the bell that hung just above the lights and rang when they were on, clanging urgently but faintly in the distance.

The next day the flood had crept farther up the road, closer to the house. By squinting carefully across its gray surface, we could make out the railroad signals in the daylight, still blinking faintly but steadily, as if the longest freight train in the world was going by on the Katy Line, all underwater. There was something spooky about those lights. Their silent, rhythmic warning added to the sense of menace carried by the spreading water.

The next evening, after another somber sundown, some of us were walking back from the edge of the flood, feeling thoughtful and worried, when a child started screaming somewhere behind us.

It was the neighbors’ girl, little Annie Casey, who had been tagging along behind my little brother Clair. She saw a rabbit hop into the grass by the roadside, and had followed after it. Now she was shrieking and running in panic towards us, yelling something about a snake.

A grownup whirled to snatch her up and hold her close, while others hurried back down the road to see what she had seen. Uncle George was in the lead, and he stopped short for a moment, then came sprinting back past us, going faster than cousin Bernard had when he fled from the barn a few days before.

“What’s the matter?” someone called out to him anxiously.

“Cottonmouth!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Water moccasin. Keep away!”

We did, but we were also curious, and we didn’t rush back to the safety of the house. A Cottonmouth Moccasin was a very poisonous snake, a relative of rattlers, nothing to fool with.
But how many of us had ever seen a real poisonous snake? What did it look like? Was there, I wondered, really cotton in its mouth? And where had George gone? To get some weapon–did he have a twelve gauge shotgun? A deer rifle?

George came racing back a moment later, and sure enough, he was armed. But not with a shotgun or a rifle; instead, he was brandishing a garden hoe. We held our breath as he slowed down several dozen yards beyond us. Then he bounded off the pavement, raised the hoe high over his head by its long wooden handle, and swung its metal blade down into the grass with all his strength. He raised and swung it again, again, and again.

Watching the slashing strokes of the hoe, I couldn’t stay away, and started walking back down the road toward him. The younger kids followed close behind. By the time we got to George, there was no hope of finding out about the cotton, because he had pounded the poor snake’s whole head almost completely flat. Blood was trickling from its crushed jaws into the dirt, and it was very, very dead.

Dead, yes; but not quiet. Uncle George prodded it with the hoe, and its long brown body twisted and turned over, showing a yellow belly with streaks of black.

We jumped away in fright from the long writhing thing. “Don’t worry,” George said confidently, “snake’ll do that when it’s dead.”

He scooped the hoe under the cottonmouth’s middle and lifted it up. It hung limply from it like some kind of giant dark shoelace, or a length of thick hose. George turned and walked back up the road, with the dead snake swinging out in front of him like a trophy of war, and us kids following as if he was the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

But here, with the sight of our motley Kansas victory parade, is where my memories fade out again, because I can’t recall what he did with that dead snake. And I don’t know what happened with the flood either, because we left soon after that, piling into our car and heading east on Highway 47, starting the long, hot, cranky trip back to California.

A Cottonmouth Snake

I suppose George threw the snake out in the field. And presumably the water quit rising and ebbed back into Neosho’s riverbed before it got to Grandma and Grandpa Fager’s house; otherwise, someone surely would have told me. Then the railroad lights must have quit their constant blinking, except when a train went by. And in the barn, no doubt, the hay came and went from the loft, while the one cow continued to chew its cud and ignore strangers, and the old outhouse still sat there, unused when there were no curious children around.

I’m guessing about all that, though, because as I said, I can’t go back again to check. Oh, I’ve been to St. Paul again, just a few years ago, in fact. Just as in the 1950s, it’s still small and sleepy in its grassy corner of the state, and it still gets left off the Kansas road maps sometimes. The Neosho River flows, and the Railroad runs, though the Katy Line is gone and it’s now called the Union Pacific, I think.

In the big stone church at the other end of town, rows of candles continue to flicker red and blue under the faces of the saints, who reach longingly toward the big white cross above the altar. I know that too, because I did go there, and to the cemetery across the road from it, where Grandma and Grandpa Fager are buried now, along with my other grandparents, and lots of relatives I never met.

Everything else from that trip is gone though: where Grandma and Grandpa Fager lived, there’s now a discount gas station, with an empty asphalt parking lot around it. The house, the barn, my my citified cousin Bernard, the cast on Evelyn’s arm, the outhouse, the flood, and of course, the poor snake, who was probably just trying to get away from the water and didn’t mean anybody any harm.

All gone now. The only thing I have left is a cluster of fading memories. Those, and now this memory story.

II: The Dangers of The Unseemly Practice of Mirth

Dinner the following evening was a somber and largely silent affair. Esther’s parents seemed ill at ease and said little, never mentioning the evening’s plans. Jonah wolfed down his food as usual, but punctuated his gulps with significant glances at Esther. Piety had developed an unspecified stomach distress and stayed upstairs.

Afterward, her father offered to drive her to Meeting in the wagon, but Esther declined, saying she preferred to walk. She threw her long knitted shawl over her cap and went out quickly, before her parents had a chance to say anything further.

It was autumn on Nantucket. Out on the island’s moors the heather and scrub oak had carpeted the low hills with deep red, magenta and brown. In town, the street Esther walked up was flecked with the fallen yellow and orange leaves of the young maple trees that line it. The evening was cool and still, and the dusk gave a purple tint to the grey cedar shingles on the plain houses.

Two blocks from home a lane cut across to the next street, on which the Meetinghouse stood several blocks further down. The lane was quiet and shaded by thick bundles of shrubbery that climbed over the back fences of the houses along it. Esther liked this lane, and she often walked it when going to town or to her school, which was a few blocks beyond the Meetinghouse. She and Will had taken it many times too on their way home.

She took it now, thankful for its secluded course. It fit her frame of mind; she was still deep in thought, waiting for clarity about the task before her.

At its far end, the lane rambled past the new Unitarian church. As she approached the corner, Esther heard singing, and the clean white clapboard building was made brilliant by the many glowing candles reflected off the brass chandeliers and shining through the big clear windows. The Unitarians were just beginning their midweek Meeting; by the doorway she saw the minister, her own cousin Seth Coffin, greeting people as they entered.

Something about the scene made her stop. She stepped to the side of the lane, near a large clump of ivy overhanging a fence, from which she could observe the church unseen. What drew her was not the music, though she had always, somewhat guiltily, enjoyed hearing the hymns that so often filled the air around Nantucket town’s other churches. Rather it was the people who were walking up the street and turning into the gate, pausing at the door to shake hands with Seth Coffin and let the men take off their hats.

Esther had suddenly put together two incongruous pieces of awareness about the figures in this scene: first, they were heathens; both parties in her Meeting, Thomas Macy and her father Micah Swain alike, agreed on that. But second, she, Esther Swain, was personally acquainted with many of them, and was related to most. This combination was what made them suddenly fascinating to
her.

As she watched, another feature of the group struck her: many of these people had been raised as Friends. Some still wore a modified but recognizable version of the plain dress. It must be hard, Esther mused, to change suddenly from three or four generations of Quaker grey, brown and white to the gaudy and sinful colors of the world.

Hard, yes, but perhaps exciting as well. Seth Coffin’s congregation was growing steadily, that much was evident. Maybe the singing made the transition easier.

The minister went inside, closing the door behind him. The singing swelled to a final chorus, then died away. Esther waited another moment in the ivy until she heard Coffin’s deep voice begin to speak to the group; then she stepped out and turned past the church toward the Meetinghouse.

At that point a man emerged from the shadows across the street and came toward her. “Esther,” he called. It was Will.

Without thinking, she raised one fist in a gesture of mock anger. “Will Macy, was thee spying on me?” she demanded.

The tall, slender man, his face shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat, grinned broadly. “I most certainly was,” he affirmed. “I had a leading thee would come this way, and waited for thee.”

“And as usual, thee was rightly led,” Esther said.

He fell in step beside her, still smiling. “As usual,” he agreed with feigned modesty. “How is thee, Friend Esther?”

This would not do at all, Esther told herself, even as she smiled back. All he had to do was say her name, and at once she was giggling and wanting to play, forgetting why she was on that darkening street. But then, it was Will’s ability to be playful with her, without neglecting the serious parts of life, that had as much as anything drawn them together in the first place. “After all,” he had said when they first talked of marriage, “what good is a husband who thinks that all of life should be like Meeting for Worship?”

“Or a wife,” she had added, and they both had laughed.

Indeed, from the looks her mother sometimes gave her, it seemed they spent altogether too much of their time together laughing. If there was nothing in the Discipline specifically warning against the practice of mirth, still there seemed to be an unspoken limit to how much it might properly be engaged in, a limit they seemed regularly to transgress. But, she realized, I haven’t laughed since I last saw Will.

Esther put out her hand to take his arm; but then she hesitated and drew it back, instead catching the bottom of her shawl and twisting it between her fingers.

Will understood the nervous gesture, and with only a slight change in tone spoke her thoughts. “A committee visited thee, did they?”

She looked at him, startled. “How did thee know?”

He grinned again. “Ah, our Orthodox spies are everywhere,” he bantered. Then, more soberly, he said, “It’s a small island, Esther. Besides, father has spoken to me, too. And that is Committee enough for us Orthodox.”

Esther’s stomach suddenly felt hollow. The lightness and pleasure of their meeting vanished, blown away by Will’s last words like a scud of cloud in a gale. She walked in silence for a moment, her thoughts tumbling over themselves and blocking her words inside her. Finally she forced some out, in barely more than a whisper: “What is thee led to do, Will?”

They had arrived at the Meetinghouse gate. Will swung it open for her, then followed her through. “I have prayed on the matter,” he said, “and my leading has not changed, Esther.” He opened the big oak door, and she moved past him.

Inside, the unadorned Meeting room seemed more severe than usual in the yellow light of the spermaceti candles. Esther was unsure at first where she should sit; the two groups of elders had each taken one side of the aisle, with the Orthodox, which Will joined on the women’s side.

Esther felt strange sitting down in the section which had, all her life, been a male preserve. But that was where the Hicksites were clustered. It was evidence of how deeply the group was split that they were now divided by faction rather than by gender.

The meeting was already underway, and the tension was tangible. She slid onto a bench behind her father and Reuben Starbuck. Reuben was just rising to speak.

Next: Not Within The Walls of This Meetinghouse

The Progressive Friends were a group that hasn’t yet got their props from Quaker historians. There isn’t space here for an outline of their fascinating history, except to say you can find out more here and here.

But in sum, they started as liberal rebels in mid-1800s America, who took on a hidebound Hicksite Establishment. And they ended, invisibly but unmistakably, as the seedbed and founders of modern US liberal Quakerism. The fact that almost nobody knows this is a shame, but no surprise given the general ignorance of Quaker history among Quakers. (I’ll rant about that some other time.)

One of the Progressives’ big issues was abolition of slavery, which the Establishment wanted kept in a quiet, secluded corner, visited only occasionally. The Progressives couldn’t sit still for this. So another of their issues became a protest against the reality that Quakerism in those days was a two-tier group, with Ins ruling over Outs.

Thus in the course of time, there was a peculiar kind of a split among some Hicksite groups, and in 1853 the rebels in Pennsylvania formed their own Pennsylvania Progressive Friends Yearly Meeting.

PA Progressive Friends & their Meetinghouse in Kennett Square PA, in 1865.

But the Progressive “split” was a peculiar one. In PA they abolished what were called “select meetings” (The official In-crowd), but they didn’t go around disowning all the folks who differed from them, as had happened in earlier splits.

In fact, they never got around to setting up much of a formal structure, and some of the best of the Hicksite activists came and went among Progressive circles, without ever formally quitting their Hicksite home meetings. My hero Lucretia Mott was perhaps the most effective of such double agents, and you’ll find more about that here.

Lucretia Mott, Double agent

Anyway, at the Pennsylvanians’ founding session in 1853, they wrote and issued a manifesto, a document with a clunky title, The Exposition of Sentiments. But if the title was clunky, the Exposition could knock some Quaker socks off — I know because it completely disappeared mine when I read it 150 years or so later.

So look it over; but in the meantime, back to their founding session. Among the attenders was Sojourner Truth, the rough-hewn but singularly eloquent advocate for abolition.

She is what moved me to cobble together this post. Here’s what the minutes say:

Sojourner Truth, an emancipated slave mother, after uttering few impressive sentences, expressed herself as being deeply moved to sing, and she accordingly sung the following lines:

“I pity the slave mother, careworn and weary,
Who sighs as she presses her babe to her breast;
I lament her sad fate, all so hopeless and dreary,
I lament for her woes, and her wrongs unredressed.
O who can imagine her heart’s deep emotion,
As she thinks of her children about to be sold ;
You may picture the bounds of the rock-girdled ocean,
But the grief of that mother can never be told.

The mildew of slavery has blighted each blossom,
That ever has bloomed in her pathway below;
It has froze every fountain that gushed in her bosom,
And chilled her heart’s verdure with pitiless woe:
Her parents, her kindred, all crushed by oppression,
her husband still doomed in his desert to gay;
No arm to protect from the tyrant’s aggression.
She must weep as she treads on her desolate way.

O, slave-mother, hope! see — the nation is shaking!
The arm of the Lord is awake to thy wrong!
The slaveholder’s heart now with terror is quaking,
Salvation and Mercy to Heaven belong!
Rejoice, O rejoice! for the child thou art rearing
May one day lift up its unmanacled form,
While hope, to thy heart, like the rainbow so cheering,
Is born, like the rainbow, ‘mid tempest and storm.’”

Thank thee, Friend Truth.
Of the Progressive Friends, there will be more to say in future posts.

The bulletin below is from News.Aus.com (Australia):

Buy grifulvin V Update — No Rapture” />

Friends: South Central Yearly Meeting just adopted the minute below. Please share it widely.

One of the main authors of the minute is Phil Newberry of Stillwater, Oklahoma Meeting. (OK is Manning’s home state.) Phil is already going on the road, to share the Minute and his concern with Friends and others in Kansas, Missouri & Iowa, in hopes of building ongoing support work around Leavenworth prison while Manning is there. I invite those interested in this developing work to contact him at: newcat@sbcglobal.net

The Minute:

We, the SCYM of the RSOF (Quakers), feel it is our moral and religious duty to speak out on behalf of PFC Bradley Manning. For more than 3 centuries, Quakers have borne witness to the mistreatment of prisoners, and we strongly believe that Private Manning is the victim of mistreatment.

Since Buy endep online July, 2010 he has been incarcerated in military prison under harsh conditions without being formally charged or tried. Pvt. Manning is accused of leaking classified information including the video “Collateral Murder.” While people may have different views on the ethics of whistle-blowing and the apparent misdeeds of the US military, we contend that the treatment of Pvt Manning is, in any case, unjust and reprehensible. We appeal to the conscience of members of the American military and the executive branch to recognize Pvt. Manning’s basic human rights.
- - - -
Please share widely.

Over at the Quaker House blog there are some thoughts on the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” an ugly policy that was long overdue for the chopping block.

The change has implications beyond only the individual soldiers and sailors who will now be able to serve openly.

Check the post out here.

Over at the Quaker House Blog, I’ve got a new post which considers how the ending of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is confidently predicted to portend the end of the US military as we know it.
Gotta check it out.

I didn’t write what follows. I’m not sure I would agree with all of it.

But I have great respect for the prophet who did, who asked me to post it for general view and discussion.

The Prophet Elijah, hiding in the desert, by the brook of Cherith, being fed by ravens. 1 Kings 17:5-6

Barack Obama: You are that man.

Barack Obama, you are that man.