The Cloister Walk (32 page)

—Emily Dickinson

—THE SAYINGS OF THE DESERT FATHERS

At St. John's I discovered the true purpose of vespers, which is to let my body tell me, at the end of a workday, just how tired I am. Often I'd come to vespers after dinner, and in the middle of a psalm, or in the silence between psalms, I'd find that my great plans for the evening—to attend a concert, lecture, or a film—were falling by the way. I'd sometimes notice monks who seemed as tired as I, and recall the maternal mercy of Abba Poemen, who when he was asked about the problem of monks falling asleep during communal prayers, had said, “For my part, when I see a brother who is dozing, I put his head on my knees and let him rest.”

Sitting in the choir, in the wooden seats that hadn't seemed so hard at morning prayer, or at noon or at Mass, I would realize that I'd been running for hours on nervous energy. Grateful for the quiet flow of vespers that had nudged me into acknowledging my weary state, I'd become more willing to do what my body asked of me: let the day suffice, with all its joys and failings, its little triumphs and defeats. I'd happily, if sleepily, welcome evening pered by forgiveness, a symbol of the grace of healing that we long for, for those wounded by rape and sexual abuse, both rapist and victim.

But convenient untruths die hard. In a world in which some cultures still believe that a woman is better off dead than raped, we are wary of accepting the resistance of a Maria Goretti, a Kirsten French. As we read of them, sitting in our comfortable chairs, we think, surely, they had another way. Maybe not. It is not a cipher, but a real girl who says the “no,” who becomes a warrior in the face of death, insisting, “Some things are worth dying for.” Maybe only those who have faced that moment of terrible freedom have the right to agree. Maybe only a saint's example can bring us to forgive.

I have been too depressed to go to the Liturgy of the Hours, and I could kick myself. I only have a few weeks left at St. John's; why, when the liturgy has meant so much to me over the last nine months, am I shutting down inside, unable to embrace it in my last days here?

I force myself to go to vespers but feel so dead inside that not even the poetry of the psalms can penetrate my despair. A few words seem to spark—“You are close to all who call you, who call on you from their hearts”—but the flame I know is in them soon dies down. Still, I'm glad to be here, where I belong. Then the reading comes; the first words of Genesis, words I read aloud in this church over a month ago, at the Easter Vigil: “In the beginning, God.” I am shocked to recall how full of life I was that night, shocked to now find myself taken back, against my will, to the garden of creation.

The words are like the cool voice of rain after heat lightning. I resolve to walk tomorrow through the wetlands and prairie grass restoration areas, and the oak savannah. The monks are engaged in establishing a native habitat arboretum on their land, and I need to drink it in, to say good-bye. Spring has been slow in coming, but now the new pine cones, aglow with pollen, push aside their blood-red cauls. Now the oak buds' embryonic, waxy fingers begin to open in the sun.

It was hard to leave Minnesota: oak trees, birch, and maple; the loons and blue herons and snowy egrets. I will miss them, and the snapping turtles sunning themselves on the log at lakeshore. I was surprised to feel relieved, as if a weight had been lifted from me, at the Mobridge crossing of the Missouri River. It felt good to leave behind the glacial drift prairie and come onto the high, near-treeless plateau of western Dakota: the moonscape, the miracle, of shortgrass country. And when I walked into a truck stop where a young man who looked as if he was born wearing his cowboy hat was saying into the phone: “I'm jes' now gettin' me some lunch,” I knew I was home. “Language is the only homeland,” says the poet Czeslaw Milosz, and here on the range, where there are many more antelope than people, if a discouraging word is ever heard, at least it isn't “deconstructionism.”

 

It was hard to leave the monastery, with its dignified liturgical rhythms, hard to face that moment of truth when—wonder of wonders—I filled out the weekly attendance pad at Spencer truthfully, checking the box marked “Member of this church.” Pentecost Sunday.

It is bone-dry here, and people tell us it's been like that for much of the spring. Yesterday we had one of our rare, quiet, straight-falling-down rains, and today, at my first Presbyterian worship service in ten months, the lay preacher, a farmer, gave a rousing call to worship: “Good morning,” he said. “I guess the first order of business is to thank God for all the rain we got last night. Out at my place, we got just forty-hundredths, but maybe some of you got more—Praise the Lord!' ” Inspired, indigenous, from the heart. Home, home, in the wild West.

Place can stick to us in western South Dakota. Walking past the high school on a wet day, it is easy to tell which of the cars belong to the country kids. They're caked with mud up to the windows, having come the twenty or more miles to town on slick gumbo and gravel roads. It's easy to lose track of place, too. My friend Alvie in the nursing home talks often of her ranch house on the Grand River. She says, in a tone of wonder: “I can't remember if we sold it, or if it's standing there empty. But I sure like to picture it, and the wild plums in spring. I remember it all the time.” Periodically, she'll ask me, “Is this Lemmon or Morris-town?” the town some twenty-five miles to the east, which is where she lived as a child, where she moved when she and her husband retired. Alvie has misplaced her place, but in the far reaches of her mind it still comforts her.

Alvie tells me that her father always told her she was my grandfather Totten's first patient when he got off the train in Morris-town in 1909. Of course the town knew a doctor was coming, and her father had been lying in wait. He grabbed him and took him straight to the apartment above their hardware store, where Alvie lay ill with both measles and pneumonia. I have no idea how much of this is true, how much is family legend. But it's good to see Alvie so alert; telling this story always perks her up. My grandfather stayed with the family for three days, she tells me, and her dad never forgot it. Stories like this place me here, as do the graves of the two small boys in our family plot in the Lemmon cemetery. My grandfather had been unable to save his own sons in the influenza epidemics of the teens and early twenties. Somewhere in the dusty shelves of the house are their photographs, toddlers playing in the yard, being dandled on my grandmother Totten's knee.

To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it. The space I was born into in Washington, D.C., is now a parking garage; the hospital, like most urban medical centers, has for years been following its Manifest Destiny, building bigger and better buildings surrounded by a wasteland of parking lots. Miraculously, the field across from our house in Beach Park, Illinois, between Waukegan and Zion, where we lived until I was eleven, is still being farmed. Chicago's development seems to have gone more to the south and west. That field once gave me an uneasy taste of earth. Bigger kids, the ones with more daring, used to sneak through the field to a grove of trees at its center, and one day in spring I decided to go by there myself. I must have been seven or eight years old. I had no idea how steep the furrows would be, how far down my feet would sink into the rich, moist earth.

All I could think of was the folk tale about the girl who trod on a loaf, being too vain to soil her new shoes. I wasn't wearing new shoes—I wasn't that foolish—but I couldn't get the illustration from my book out of my mind: the peevish girl sinking deep underground, pretty new shoes and all. With great fear and trembling I got out of that field, and never went back. I contented myself with visiting the pussy willows in the ditch, and the small pond behind our house.

Hawaii is the next place I remember well, as my family moved there in 1959, just before statehood, and has remained ever since. I graduated from high school in Honolulu. It doesn't take long, in Hawaii, to register the dramatic, usually dreadful impact of change, and experience a discontinuity with the past. I remember when the Honolulu airport was one room, a hanger open on both ends. You went in the front door to buy your ticket and a flower lei, and walked out the back onto the tarmac to board your plane. I remember when the site of the vast Ala Moana shopping center was a lovely swamp, full of birds whose names I never knew. When Robert Louis Stevenson lived in a hut in Waikiki, he used to walk through this swamp on his way to and from downtown Honolulu.

I once had a job in the library of the Bishop Museum. There, under the vigilant eye of Miss Margaret C. Titcomb, I labeled glass negatives of Honolulu that had been taken around the turn of the century. I knew the city well by then and was shocked to discover that many busy, downtown intersections had once been stream beds with flower-laden banks. The streams had been paved, or made to run underground. I gained a new respect for the power of money, of business interests, to simply sweep place away.

Like many young writers from other places I lived for a time in New York City. The hothouse atmosphere of its literary world was not necessarily good for my writing at the time—my poetry then was hopelessly cerebral, as was the fashion—but there have been residual benefits. Most important is the respect I gained for poetry as an oral art form, listening to readings by poets as diverse as W. H. Auden, Richard Howard, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Tomas Tranströmer, Diane Wakoski, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright.