Hurting People

For three hours the woman remained in our three aisle Health Beauty Aids section -- digging through vitamin bargain bins and stalking up aisles she had thoroughly perused only moments before; and for three hours I piddled around that area -- dusting and rearranging shelves -- watching her. She was probably only five years older than I: around 28 or 29, but she had the deep, rattling cough of someone half a century ahead and medical light-years behind this. Whenever she did cough, which was often, her slight body jackknifed, causing her lank, dirty-blond hair to flutter around her hollowed cheeks and her unfocused brown eyes to water.

Her eyes gave it away even more than her erratic behavior. Her eyes were what told me she was suffering from far more than the effects of a late-summer cold. A few years ago, I had come to recognize that look in the eyes of someone I dearly loved (and still love), and I knew there were drugs pervading her system just as I knew then that there were drugs pervading his.

After wiping down and rearranging everything in those aisles that could be arranged, I finally walked over and asked this woman if she needed help. She draped her body over her cart, coughed a lung up into her hands, rested her hands back on the cart, then looked at me through bleary, bloodshot eyes.

“I’m sick, is all,” she rasped. “I’m bad sick. I’m prolly dying.”

Taking a reactionary step back, I asked, “Have you been to the doctor?”

She mumbled, “Yeah,” and made a loose gesture toward her nasal passages. “He said I gotta let it run its course.”

“Well…” I glanced around, suddenly desperate for escape. “I hope you get to feeling better soon.”

“Thanks,” the woman whispered and attempted to smile, revealing rotten teeth.

“You’re welcome,” I curtly replied and walked off, feeling like my Christian duty had been fulfilled.
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An hour later I was in the miscellaneous section when I saw her cart with its acne medicine, stretch mark cream, and contact solutions parked outside the single-occupancy bathroom. I waited and waited for her to come out. It must’ve been 20 minutes before I went to find my husband, for I honestly feared she had OD’d in our store’s bathroom. Randy (my husband) came up and knocked on the bathroom door. The woman mumbled something unintelligible, and two minutes later she flushed and came stumbling out.

Randy asked her some of the same questions I’d asked earlier.

Digging into her purse for a cigarette she had enough courtesy, even on a high, not to light, she said, “I’m just waiting on my (insert expletive here) ride. My (insert expletive here) boyfriend took all my money ’cause he had to get his (insert expletive here) tire fixed.” Her jumpy movements suddenly ceasing, she looked at Randy for the first time in the conversation and asked, “But they ain’t no tire changing places open on a Sunday--is there?”

My husband smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Well, you see…this is actually Monday,” he explained.

“Oh, oh.” She nodded like this made all the sense in the world.

“Do you have somebody you can call?” he asked.

“I been trying and trying but nobody answers," she said. "I’ve been looking like a (insert expletive here) idiot -- digging through everything this (insert expletive here) store’s got -- waiting on them to get me.”

“You’re welcome to stay ’til they get here,” Randy said. “That’s fine.” And then he and I left to go back into our busy Smart Shopper world.

But 30 minutes later it was obvious this woman either had no one to call, or whoever it was was also too strung out to remember they had someone to pick up. After abandoning her cart with the HBA products still inside it, she pushed open the door and headed out into the searing August sun. Biting my lip, I put down my price gun and followed out after her.

“Can I take you somewhere?” I called.

The woman turned, shielded her troubled gaze with one hand, and flicked a cigarette butt with the other. “Can you? Please? I got diarrhea like terrible,” she said. I was shocked to hear the desperation in her voice.

Going back inside, I enrolled the help of my sister-in-law, Joanne, grabbed my running Mace (for I didn’t know where we would be going or who was actually riding with us), and we walked out into the parking lot where the woman stood, patiently waiting.

“You want me to put this out?” she asked, gesturing to the cigarette while spewing two streams of smoke.

“We’ll just leave the windows down,” Joanne said.

In Joanne’s car I told the woman to sit in the passenger seat, not out of kindness toward her, but so that I could more easily watch her movements.

During our short journey, I stared at the back of the woman’s head: at her unwashed hair, her crudely tattooed shoulder, her fraying, soiled bra strap. What kind of life does she live? I wondered. How’d she ever get to this point?

“Take a left here,” the woman said, shaking me from my thoughts with the motioning of her stringy right arm. My sister-in-law switched on her blinker, and we drove down Sevier Street. I knew immediately where we were heading. The Drug House: a place that has wreaked havoc on that street and the ones tributarying from it. I suppose the local cops think it is easier to monitor one house than to disperse the people in it to the four winds, scattering them and their seeds of substance abuse throughout the county and beyond.

Still, I was so filled with anger and shock as -- sure enough -- the woman said, “Right here, on the left,” that I could only watch as she gathered her shaky frame from the car and asked me, “You wanna sit up front?”

I just shook my head, too overwhelmed for words.

As she closed the door behind her, I was filled with a sudden desperation. No time left to pray with her, I instead just feebly called, “God bless you,” and waved. I waved when what I really should’ve done was whisked her away from that horrid place and those hurting people who hurt people inhabiting it.

In response to me, the woman smiled weakly and pushed a lock of hair behind her rhinestone-studded ear. She then waved, too -- with a cupped hand -- like this was just one big beauty pageant and she, the Fairest of the Fair.

Only when we pulled away from The Drug House did I rest my head back against the car seat, think of my loved one who’s three years free from this death cycle of substance abuse and pain, thank the Lord from the bottom of my heart for it, and cry and cry.

That Azalea Summer

The first weeks of summer before the earth was baked into a brick and the humidity felt like a warm, wet blanket flung across the sky, farmers came rumbling over Springcreek Christian Camp in rusted tractors attached to equally ancient mowers, rakes, and balers. Like a mutant swarm of locust the equipment chewed off the grass, raked it into neat, vertical lines, and then spat it out again into grassy hairballs which decorated the hillsides until the farmers gathered enough incentive to haul it home. I always hated this time of year for as soon as the untamed grasses were nibbled to nubs, buzzards began to circle and then to feast on the smorgasbord of butchered rats, pheasants, foxes, and fawns. I would often search these grasses for a struggling life, but many times all I found were blood-caked remnants of a brutal death.

It wasn’t until that third summer on the camp when Gwen Lebrun introduced me to Azalea, the injured fawn she had found, I realized we’d been conducting the same desperate, creature-saving crusade. The month old fawn’s spindly back legs had been nicked, as if by shaving, with mower blades. The injury was so minor Neosporin and band aids were sufficient in healing the wounds, and soon the speckled fawn was teetering around the Lebrun’s front lawn on the slim, golden legs of a dancer. Azalea’s legs were not the only attribute worth envying: her limpid brown eyes were framed with lashes Tammy Faye Baker would’ve taxidermied her for if given the chance. But the other physical characteristics of our pet fawn were not as desirable. Her twitching ears were stuffed with the white, spiky hair of an old man, and her tiny teeth pointed like glass shards. When she was excited or nervous, she’d prance in place as her black nostrils flared; her tail stood up behind her like a white spear, and shiny, circular turds began cascading as if the lottery to a fertilizing company had been won.

In the beginning, besides these droplets of scat decorating our porches in the mornings, having Azalea on the premises provided us only with pleasure. But as the months passed and her pale spots faded into a glossy dun, she began to grow and her personality to change. Her first mistake was to begin weed whacking every shrub and bush within a 10 mile radius. This wouldn’t have been such a bad thing if she could have differentiated between what was lunch and what was part of the landscaping, but she didn’t. Her second and far more grievous mistake took place when she came into heat and confused me either with her competition or her means of conception.

I’d been walking up to the Gentry’s house to drop off Mother’s pumpkin nut roll when, from behind the chicken coup, I was ambushed by a full grown doe. I knew immediately it was Azalea for she wore a bright orange collar like a slightly irregular sheep dog (Gwen Lebrun did not want hunters confusing her with venison). But even though I recognized her, something glinted in Azalea’s eyes that told my baser instincts to run. And run I did. I took off at a full sprint, dropping the roll in the process, and did not dare look behind me to see her progress. Within seconds, Azalea’s loping strides had easily eaten the distance between us. The impact of her hooves hitting my back felt like the strike of hammers falling. I stumbled under the weight, my knees buckling a moment, but managed to regain my footing. Glancing over my shoulder, I gazed into the crazed eyes and lolling tongue of a doe in heat and knew this was no playful foray. I began running again, and this time, mercifully, she chose not to chase me. I didn’t even knock on the Gentry’s home, but burst inside the side storm door leading into Lydia’s patriotic kitchen.

“My goodness, child,” Lydia said, wiping a hand on the rag thrown over her shoulder, “Whatever is the matter?”

“Azalea...she--she's after me.”

It wasn’t until Lydia lifted my sweat-shirt and surveyed my bruised and bloodied back she realized the severity of Azalea and my altercation.

“We’ll take care of that, sugar,” Lydia soothed, patting my spine. “Don’t you worry.”

The next week, as Gwen stood in the distance and sobbed against her husband's chest, Azalea’s orange collar was cut off by a game warden, and she was loaded into a cage with the lack of pomp and circumstance of a retiring circus animal. She was then transported to Land Between the Lakes where a hunter must’ve counted himself lucky when Azalea came striding out of the woods toward him; for her curious nature and penchant to be with people would have made her an easy target.

Mennonite Modesty

One of the first things my parents did after our pilgrimage from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to Nashville, Tennessee in ’89 was to find an Amish or Mennonite community to reassure themselves southern savages weren't the only ones around. For my father, their presence provided security because if the world “blew up” and took all means of transportation with it -- something he predicted every time a Democrat weaseled his way into office -- the Amish or Old Order Mennonite horse and buggies could take us back to PA. My mother, more relational than survival centered, craved the companionship of their community, for they understood the world we’d left behind and made the transition into a foreign, nuance-infested land that much easier.

To prevent offense by our everyday Englisher dress, whenever we visited their homes Mother clothed herself as conservatively as a Quaker, and I was not exempt from this Little House On The Prairie transformation. My usually beaded and beribboned hair was braided into scalping pigtails, and I was forced to wear plain cotton tops, long jean skirts, and tennis shoes. Even at such a young age, I knew this was a fashion faux pas.

But the smile on Mother’s face soon revealed how much our ridiculous costuming had been worth; for, unlike the Southern Belles (whom Mother thought only made biscuits and chocolate gravy), these buxom women in their dark cape dresses did not have to ask what the main ingredient in ham loaf was; they just wordlessly clunked out a cistern of lard and began kneading everything into a cholesterol-laden mound. Oh, but this was not all. Their cupboards were crammed with King syrup -- the only brand that could make shoo-fly pie look like tar but taste like heaven -- their cold cellars had ceramic crocks filled with cloth cheese; everything from a baby to a bed was draped with a crocheted something; their coffee tables were neatly stacked with laminated picture books made from farming magazine scraps. And, most importantly, when addressing groups they said you’ins and yous guys with an endearing, Dutchy accent rather than the grating, Redneck y'all.

Long after our connection to the Amish community in Hopkinsville, Kentucky was established, Mother attempted to make extra money by peddling pies stamped with the name Beulah Beiler’s Amish Baked Goods. The business proposition Mother offered Beulah came as no surprise to the community for she was, by far, the best baker this side of Lancaster, and her behemoth figure confirmed this. What did come as a source of surprise -- and my acute embarrassment -- was how Mother sold them. She simply pulled into the Wal-Mart parking lot and opened the doors of our black conversion van--where, stacked as high as the van’s ceiling, were plastic tubs crammed with steaming baked goods. But regardless of Mother’s methodolgy, word soon got around of how wonderful everything was, and she began selling out as quickly as she set up. (Convenient since it kept her from paying an illegal solicitation fine.) Mother then knew, with relief, her waitressing days were over.

Once my little brother, Caleb, was enrolled in kindergarten at South Haven, Mother moved her bakery from the back of the van to a dingy-gray pizzeria with cheap rent. We scraped, scrubbed, and scoured until the grease the previous owners let accumulate was gone. Father painted the gray white, replaced the rotten shingles with a green tin roof, and built shelving for the baked goods. Mother washed the windows until they sparkled and sewed green gingham curtains for them. On the freshly painted walls she placed the portraits of our plain-dressed grandparents with captions stating the closeness of our relation to the Amish/Mennonites.
For this was the only strike against our opening an Amish store: technically, we were neither Mennonite or Amish. Mother thought she could remedy the situation by purchasing a girl's Amish outfit at the Hopkinsville community’s annual yard sale. The only problem was she couldn’t wiggle into that cape dress, but it fit me perfectly. I could smell a set up, and although Mother told me she wasn’t going to pay my wages unless I dressed plain, I refused. I’d rather waitress at Sonic -- even if it meant putting up with the sleazy football players -- and wear my Englisher clothes than humiliate myself by putting on a cape dress and a prayer covering.

Finally, after many fierce battles that left us both spent, Mother and I reached a Mennonite modesty compromise, and I spent two scorching summers working at Miller's Amish Country Store's produce stand while garbed in tennis shoes, plain cotton tops, and culottes.

Breaking El Shaddai

Three months after we moved to Tennessee, my Grandmother Charlotte was diagnosed with Stage Four Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Even when the cancer began nipping at my grandmother’s bones until more were broken than whole, Mother continued sending her prayer cloths made limp with anointing oil and letters crammed with verses of healing and hope. When my grandmother died, some of Mother’s faith seemed to be buried with her. She would spend long hours silently staring out over the meadow next to our cedar-sided home; and perhaps to recapture the innocence of childhood found on the Hilltop Road Farm in Pennsylvania, it was during those times she started yearning for a horse.

But with only her waitressing and my father’s construction job to cover the needs of two young children and a mortgage, my mother knew her desire would only remain a dream. Time shuffled by, and my family moved on to Springcreek Christian Camp as its caretakers. Even though my mother knew we still could not afford to buy a horse, she could not stop herself from falling in love with a sleek sorrel who grazed in a pasture bordering the road she drove every day while taking my brother and me into school.

After weeks spent murmuring prayers every time we passed, Mother could not take it any longer. She careened our Subaru Station Wagon into the drive, knocked on the door, and asked the stocky beef farmer what he would take for his horse. Hobbling down the porch steps, he grabbed his Stetson between fat fingers, beat it on his leg -- sending a whirlwind of grime flying -- spit a strip of tobacco, and said, “Lorda Mercy, Lil’ Lady, I don’t think ya know what she is! That there’s Sonny Dee Bar’s daughter, Winifred!” Giving my mother a look of pure country condescension, he continued, “She’s a prize-winnin’ Quarter Horse--not jest some purty pony to look at.”

On the way home it became obvious, even to my naïve seven-year-old ears, that his response to her inquiry had not thwarted my mother’s determination to one day own his horse. But even with her weakness for romanticism, she knew the creature could not be acquired through normal means. So, despite her faltering faith due to her mother’s death when she’d asked God for her healing, she continued to pray every time we drove by Winifred, the prize winnin’ Quarter Horse mare.

Months passed, and the crackling heat of summer slurped at the land. As my father futilely tilled the parched earth in between the camp’s garden rows, he shook his head and sighed. Little did we know that through the draught, mother’s prayer of petition had been heard.

When my mother first spotted Dell and Gwen leading the sleek sorrel down the camp’s lane, her heart twisted. She assumed our more affluent camp neighbors had purchased Winifred for themselves and were taking her to the pasture across from the slave quarters where we lived. It wasn’t until they had all crested the hill, and she saw Jerry Brodie zoom in on her face with his video camera, that she folding in on herself like a collapsed fan and began to sob.

“Bev, she’s yours,” Gwen said, putting the lead rope into my mother’s hand.

My mother, with tears still curving down her cheeks, ran a hand over the horse’s flank and turned to look at the group. They were all there: the now five-member Brodie family; Jim and Lydia Gentry, and Dell and Gwen Lebrun--those lovable, musical hippies who’d orchestrated it all.

“How’d you know?” my mother asked.

A wry smile tweaking his silver mustache, Dell said, “I think you might’ve mentioned it once or twice.” He laughed a moment and then paused. “But, seriously, we talked to the owner about it, and it just so happened the horse kept driving his cattle away from the water.” Dell shrugged. “There was nothing he could do except sell his horse or lose his herd.”

“Oh, one more thing,” Gwen added, her green eyes bright with tears. “She’s expecting a foal in the fall.”

My mother -- always the pursuer of signs regardless if they were literal, figurative, or imaginative -- began to both laugh and cry while running her hands over the sleek sorrel’s belly. And months later, on a crisp fall day, when Winifred birthed a toddling colt, my mother named him El Shaddai: Hebrew for “God Almighty.” To her, the small foal’s birth was a seed of faith planted in a day of draught.
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When the camp’s relationships disintegrated due to a denominational divide that could not be crossed, the women were subjected to the witch hunt first. Gwen’s artistic temperament and love for animals were deemed New Age; Mother’s feisty personality and doctrinal viewpoints were said to resemble those of a domineering Jezebel. So, as punishment, Jim Gentry, the camp’s owner, simply told the women no animals were allowed beyond the borders of their yards. To Gwen, this was more of an atrocity than if Jim Gentry had placed her under house arrest. For, despite her pet fawn’s certain demise after she was sent to Land Between the Lakes, Gwen had continued rescuing every stray creature with a broken bone, back, wing, or womb, and there was no way her motley crew could cram within the confines of her yard.

For Mother, this was like knifing open a wound that had been carefully stitched shut and sealed with time. The comfort she’d found through our Quarter Horses was remarkable. It was as if every time she brushed down their sleek sorrel coats or picked out the pebbles wedged inside their hooves she was taken back to the days of her childhood when her mother was still alive, her sister Cecilia was by her side, and her dreams had not yet been diminished.

The day we sold three-year-old El Shaddai the sky festered like a boil and a warm rain began pelting the men as they cross-tied and led the horse -- whose will had never been broken -- into the trailer.

“You shoulda named him You Shall Die not El Shaddai,” the man muttered, wiping a mud-splattered hand against his Carhart jacket. “If he don’t quit carrying on, he’s gonna do us all in.”

El Shaddai’s piercing neighs caused both his mother and my own to begin pacing back and forth, frantically trying to soothe his pain while realizing no remedy could be had.

When they loaded him up, he kicked his legs and struck the man on his right. After they pulled the man out, his knee cap shattered, El Shaddai continued flailing around so much the trailer looked like it was on shocks. El Shaddai had filleted his flank and -- white-eyed and frothing with pain from the chain bit slicing into his tongue -- he finally surrendered to his fate and stood still.

We continued watching the horse trailer until its winking red tail lights no longer penetrated the gathering darkness. It was then that my mother knelt in the mud and began to weep with the sleek sorrel’s whinny echoing her cry.

The Mending Ground of Marriage

As I write this my husband, Randy, is hunched in a New Holland skid loader, grinding gears, scooping rich clay dirt into the bucket, jostling the machine back up the earthen ramp, and depositing said dirt into an ever-growing pile. You see, we are breaking ground for our first home, and although I know “breaking ground” is a term derived from the fact that you have to break open the earth to build on it a solid foundation, I think it should be called “mending ground” instead.

For, from the tattered, rag-bag remains this fallen world has provided, my husband and I are stitching together a life, and although he and I are a juxtaposition personified -- tall, short; dark, fair; flannel, sparkles; introvert, extrovert; pragmatic, idealistic; fiscal risk taker, fiscal nester; early bird, night owl; woods, ocean; nonfiction reader, fiction writer, ect. -- I know I have found in him the perfect match.

Take the other weekend, for example, when I borrowed our neighbors’ vacuum and within five minutes of my rip-snorting use had its belt torn in two. My husband did not say: “Look here, woman, this is the third vacuum you’ve broken in a year! I think you and I need to have a little what you-can-suck-up-with-a-vacuum-and-what-you-can’t chat.” No, my dear husband simply said, “It’s okay, honey. This thing’s as ancient as it comes.” Then, he promptly overturned the vacuum, popped off the belt, and that evening we drove to Lowe’s and found one for $2-something to replace it. I returned the vacuum the next day, no worse for my wear.

And just this week, when I dropped my phone down a plumbing facility (aka la toileta), and the finicky thing stopped letting me dial from the 7 down to the hash tag, my husband got online and ordered a different one--albeit, used. When it came in the mail, his only admonishment was to say, “Puh-leeze, honey, don’t wash this one, pour juice on it, drop it on the cement, in the toilet, the bathtub, dishwater…” Raising one brow, he gave me that wide, white grin. “Really. It’d probably be best if you don’t even look at it.”

There are also the moments when we are supposed to be on the way to or at somewhere, and he’s impatiently waiting by the door, twirling his keys. Hearing this tell-tale jangle, I holler from the bathroom, “Almost ready, dear!” After a year and 10 months of marriage, Randy has learned my language and effortlessly decodes my “Almost ready, dear!” into “I still have to put on my shoes and earrings, fluff the pillows on the couch, wipe down the counters, sweep the floor, grab my cell phone, purse, water bottle and…oh, wait! and go to the bathroom.” Bless him, sometimes it gets so bad by the time we are both sitting in the Jeep, Randy turns to me and says with somewhat baffled relief, “We made it.”

In my idiosyncratic defense, my husband is certainly not without his. Here’s proof right here: He thinks Gorilla Glue, Duct Tape, PVC pipe, and screwdrivers are medicinal staples. He’s such an aggressive driver, on interstates I clutch the door handle as if a life-line to escape. He eats eggs like all the chickens have just crossed the road and didn’t survive to answer why they did. He pours applesauce on top of soup, cottage cheese on anything the FDA deems slightly edible. He dusts my culinary creations with cayenne before they have even been tasted. He changes his socks two (sometimes three!) times a day because he doesn’t like the feel of sweaty feet. Whenever he washes his hands, he splashes so much water on the sink, mirror, walls, and ceiling (okay, that last one might be stretching it) it seems the bathroom’s been bathed in the Niagara.

But, you know what? Just writing my husband’s quirks down makes me want to toss this laptop to the side, run out to that New Holland skid loader, climb into its cage-thing, and throw my arms right around my man. I know from having watched my parents’ 31-year union (and counting) that a long-standing marital structure will only come through loving the other person for their quirks, not in spite of them. And if we do this, then the little things that could drive us batty if we let them won’t keep piling into something huge that has to be scraped out of our foundation and dumped to the side. Instead, the quirks will just bring layers of relieving humor, so that when we are faced with stress or sorrow, they will not break up our marriage’s foundational ground but mend it.