Editor’s note: This year, the Presbyterian Outlook partnered with the Presbyterian Writers Guild in a short story contest called, “An experiment with modern parables.” Writers were invited to submit a short story that would “stimulate the readers’ appreciation for an issue confronting the church in a fictional format,” calling for stories that would “introduce the reader to the ethical and theological challenges before the church (a contemporary parable).” The Presbyterian Writers Guild would select the contest winner and the Outlook would publish the winning story in our pages. As it turned out, there was a tie for first place. The other winning story was published HERE.
by Melisssa Bane Sevier
The bedroom felt oppressive at 3:36 a.m. His arm around her, though relaxed in sleep, bound her to time and place, to anxiety and despair. She longed for the dim stripes of sunrise to seep through the partially open blinds, bringing the dawn of yet another pretense of normalcy. Then she would slip from his grasp, wearing the night’s dread into the day as if it were an invisible shroud.
When daylight finally came, she moved silently into the kitchen. Sitting at the table with her pre-timed cup of coffee, she blankly scanned the newspaper as caffeine brought her more awake. Too awake? She tried to keep perfect awareness at bay, because her reality could not bear much scrutiny.
He entered the room at 7:10, as he did every morning. There was fresh coffee, and the eggs and toast were one minute from being plated. “Good morning,” she said in his direction. He acknowledged this encounter wordlessly, as he did every morning, with that smile that others found engaging, but seemed to her a way of letting her know he was always aware.
His question was the same as always, as he ate alone.
“What are your plans for today?” It seemed an innocent, normal question, that any partner or spouse might ask at breakfast.
“I’m going to Betty’s.”
“As usual.”
“Well, sort of. I’m not going to be working today. Her family left yesterday after Olivia’s baptism. She wants me to help eat leftovers, and I’m sure she’s feeling lonesome, so we’ll just visit.”
“And who is Olivia again?” he asked.
“Betty’s great-granddaughter. You remember I told you about the baptism of Julia’s granddaughter? ”
“Who else will be there?”
“Just Betty.”
“No one else?”
“That’s it.”
He didn’t reply as he looked over the paper. She wondered at him. Did he not remember that she’d spent most of the weekend with Betty’s family? Did he not care that she had come home with stories of happy reunion? Had he simply stopped listening? As usual?
They spoke no more before he left for work. The silence between them was familiar, tense, yet a relief. As long as he didn’t talk, there could be no harsh words, no belittling what she did with her time, no more questions.
As she drove the 5.3 miles to Betty’s house (he would check the odometer) she relaxed.
“Millie! How good to see you, dear heart,” said Betty, gathering Millicent into her bony-armed, binding embrace which strangely felt so freeing. These were the words Betty had been saying to her for over thirty years each time Millie walked through the back door into Betty’s kitchen. And she meant them. Betty had been a neighbor to Millie’s parents even before they’d adopted her. As far back as Millie could remember, she would find her way to the kitchen of this woman who baked cookies, sang songs, and told stories.
Millie’s own home had not been a place of sweets, music, or narrative. Everything had a practical purpose, even the adoption. Her parents had wanted a daughter who would take care of them into their old age, and she had fulfilled that and all the other requirements. The social worker had tried to talk them into adopting a younger boy, but their fear was that a boy would grow up and move away. Of all the things she remembered about her growing up years in that house, she did not remember being hugged, or hearing the words “I love you,” either spoken to her or between her parents.
It was Betty’s home where she had become aware of laughter and love. Betty was the “grandma” or “aunt” who took her to church, told her she was special, and fed her meals from scratch. She still did all these things, except now Millie picked up Betty on Sundays because Betty had coasted her car into a ditch one Sunday morning, only to find out church had been canceled due to snow, and her kids told her she shouldn’t drive anymore. Now Betty’s meals were simpler and took much longer to prepare, as she moved much more slowly than she used to.
Betty’s home used to be full of happy noise because of three lively kids and her husband, Phil, a gregarious man who had tons of friends, and whose family and farm made him smile and laugh his way through just about everything until his death a few years ago.
One day Phil was on his tractor pulling a wagon load of rocks that he’d collected from the fields when he saw a little girl stumbling across the rows of corn seedlings. Where had she come from? Her direction seemed to indicate she had walked from the Willis farm, the one that bordered his east field. But the Willises didn’t have children. He shut off the tractor and climbed down, remembering the Hershey’s bar he had in his pocket for an afternoon caffeine and sugar surge. She looked up at him with huge brown eyes. Her face showed no fear, sadness, or happiness. No emotion at all. He tore open and offered the candy, which she took, also without emotion.
“Hey, honey. Are you lost?”
No answer.
He smiled at her, held out his hand and she took it, and they walked back across the field to the Willis house. He’d start there, looking for her place. “Let’s go see if we can find your family.”
May Willis opened the door just a few inches to his knock, and she looked down at the girl with the same nearly blank, emotionless look that he’d seen in the girl’s face.
“I found this little darlin’ out in your field alone,” said Phil. “Do you know where she’s from? Someone’s got to be worried about her.”
“She’s ours.”
“Yours?”
“We just got her.”
“What do you mean, you just got her? You mean she’s a foster child?”
“Adopted.”
“You adopted her? When was that?” He wasn’t sure he believed her. Why would the Willises adopt a child?
“Last week.”
“Well, she shouldn’t be out alone. Things can happen on a farm. You know that, May. The road isn’t far from your house, either.” He struggled to control his tone of voice.
“I knew she’d come home.”
“No. How could you know that? She’s just a little thing.”
“Come in,” said May to the girl, and opened the door a few more inches.
The girl walked into the house. May closed the door.
Phil stood there. What was this? How can people not seem to care what happens to a little kid? He’d never liked the Willises. They didn’t take care of their farm very well. Their animals seemed slightly less than well-fed. The fences needed work. Robert still hadn’t planted the corn, even though the weather and soil conditions had been just right for it.
For the first time in his life, Phil left his tractor out without taking it to the barn. He walked straight back to his own house.
“Betty!” he called. She was in the kitchen and immediately sensed something important in his voice. He told her the story of the child.
Within hours, Betty had loaded pans with hot pork chops and rice, green beans and corn thawed from the freezer, a salad of spring lettuces, and a chocolate cake she’d made for her family but now believed it had a higher calling. She wrapped the hot things in towels and placed it all in the back of the station wagon, drove out onto the road, went east to the next drive and then back to the Willis house. It was a neighborly visit, and it was a reconnaissance mission.
She knocked. The door opened a few inches. May’s face appeared.
“Hi, May. I hear you all have a new child. Congratulations! I brought supper for you.”
“You think I can’t cook?”
“No, of course not! It just seems that the coming of a child is reason for celebration, and I wanted to bring you something special.”
“It’s not like we gave birth to her.”
“Please, May. This meal is for your family that has just grown by one precious child. Phil says she’s a sweetie. Could I meet her?”
May wordlessly opened the door so that Betty could come in with her pans, and she called down the hallway. “Come here.”
The child appeared. Betty analyzed her with a practiced eye. The girl was maybe three years old. She was clean. Cleaner than what Betty could see of the inside of May’s house. But she seemed so … blank. Distant.
Betty squatted down and said, “Hello, dear heart. What’s your name?”
“Millicent,” said May.
“Oh, what a lovely name,” said Betty. She cupped the girl’s chin in her hand and said, “Millicent, I think we are going to be great friends.”
And they were.
Before long, Betty and Phil had bought her a little pair of farm boots, which Betty still kept in a closet upstairs, three decades later.
By the time she was four, the girl insisted on being called Millie. She would stomp her foot if anyone besides her parents called her Millicent. Maybe it was her young way of separating the world inside her family from the world outside, a skill she would develop as she grew. A mechanism of survival that would stay with her.
Nearly every day of her young life, she would walk across the fields to Betty and Phil’s farm, to sit in the kitchen, to help mix the cookie dough, to ride on the tractor with Phil, to play with the kids. Her parents never minded, as long as she did her chores at home.
Teenagers when Millie arrived next door, Betty’s and Phil’s three children loved her like a baby sister, played with her, taught her to ride a bike and roller skate, let her swing on the grapevine over the creek when their parents weren’t looking, gave her Froot Loops in front of Saturday morning cartoons, and read to her on the porch swing.
Millie felt a profound loss as each of the three children grew up and moved away, all of them making successful careers which had nothing to do with farming and their place of origin. Even decades later when Betty’s children visited the farm they welcomed Millie into their family circle as much as John would allow.
Time turned into years and Phil discovered that he finally had a protégé. Whereas his own children did their chores as needed, they never enjoyed farm life. Millie, on the other hand, came to love everything about it. When he’d tried to teach his own kids about farming, they inwardly marked time until they could get to homework, friends, television. Millie soaked up every bit of wisdom and knowledge, absorbed Phil’s love for the land, avoided homework, friends, and television so she could practically live on the neighbors’ farm. Every night Betty set a place for her at the table. Every night Millie came in with Phil, washed up, and ate like a farmer.
As Millie grew, she developed a farmer’s patience. Never overly eager for the end of one season and the arrival of the next, she lived in anticipation and appreciation of each day, waking up in her west-facing bedroom and looking out the window to see what had changed on Phil’s farm since the day before. There was always something new—a change in the color of the dirt or crops because of rain or the lack of rain, variation in light as seasons moved over the earth, blossoms in the garden, or blossoms fading in the garden. She never lost the awe that had been born in the seasons of her childhood.
She saw how spring awakened the farm, slowly at first with forays back into winter’s cold. Then the speed of change accelerated to a nearly shocking urgency. When the soil was warm enough, the dark, disked fields and crazy earthy smell intoxicated her.
She sneezed her way through summer as corn and soybeans grew. When it rained heavily she loved to stand just inside the barn, taking in the roar on the metal roof, watching water pour over the edge of the run-in shed, inhaling the essence of life as it cleansed the air and renewed the soil.
For many farmers, autumn was a relief from summer labor, a time to cash in through the sale of crops, or a yearly loss of purpose. Millie, though, found it refreshing, as crops were harvested and fields were relieved of their long, hot labor. She loved the cooler temperatures and being a witness to the dozing off of the farm before its sudden plunge into winter.
Winter. Oh God, the stark beauty of sometimes-snow-dressed emptiness made her heart surge with adoration of the land in its barest, most intimate state. She was most aware of the particularities of the farm during the winter, when everything about it was nakedly visible. She loved the palpable potential, the bold hope just beneath the surface of the land’s self-awareness.
Then came another spring, and the annual resuscitation back into the cycle.
Millie understood in her very core how farmer and farm participated together in this cycle. Either without the other was inadequate for the rebirthing. It was obvious that the farmer could not, through work and determination, recreate the land each spring. Soil and sun, plant and animal, insect and weather, also worked in concert to create new life. She instinctively knew, though, that the farm also needed the farmer. It would become an increasingly useless jumble of growth without the farmer’s attention to—or even awareness of—its needs and capacity.
She saw this as the deepest difference between Phil and Robert: their approach to both farm and family. Love versus aloofness. Joyful labor versus lifeless obligation.
Millie still cherished her surrogate farm home where Betty lived and Phil’s presence was in every outbuilding, every piece of machinery. It was sanctuary. So much so that when she graduated from high school and went to the University of Kentucky twenty miles away (though her parents made her live at home), she studied agriculture so she could better understand and protect what had given her life. It was as though the farm itself had loved her, had made itself into her home.
The house in which Millie had lived, the farm that contained the house, had never seemed like home. It meant little to her beyond work and requirement. Even now, when she looked east out Betty’s back door across to the farm Millie had been left in her parents’ will, the fence line looked like the division between acceptance and detachment. She was grateful for the current tenants, lovely people who kept up the house she owned, the barn, the fields. Who rotated crops with her approval and raised chickens and cattle. She sometimes felt their goodness was redeeming the farm from its painful past. She rarely set foot upon that piece of land, but for some reason she couldn’t let go of it. She wasn’t finished with it yet.
As Millie and Betty sat down for a cup of coffee and a chat on that Monday after Olivia’s baptism, they heard the crunch of gravel in the driveway when another car pulled behind the house. Millie looked at Betty.
“Oh. Did I forget to tell you I invited the preacher for lunch?”
“You invited Reverend Marks? Why on earth?”
“I thought it would be nice for you two to get to know each other a little. She’s a lovely person.”
“I’ve known her since I was a teenager,” said Millie, a little irritated.
“Of course. But have you ever really talked to her?”
“Sure. At church. Nearly every Sunday.”
“I mean really talked to her. Today isn’t church. It’s more relaxed.”
“What are you up to, Betty?”
Betty smiled around the edges of her pursed, coffee-sipping lips.
Millie had told John no one else would be at lunch. She felt her chest tighten. But, she thought, how would he find out?
She knew, of course, that Betty and the pastor were friends. Betty often told her how Joan Marks would come by at least once a week for happy hour. Over the years they had become a sounding board, each for the other. The pastor could talk freely to Betty about non-pastoral stuff, with no judgment. Betty talked about her life of farmhouse, family and aging, knowing that not a word of it would be repeated to anyone else — not even her children.
This particular morning the pastor breezed through the back door in shorts and running shoes, bearing a calm smile and a few bags of groceries. She saw the surprise on Millie’s face.
“It’s my day off,” she said. “I don’t always wear a robe.” Her smile broadened. “How are you, Millie? Betty told me you’d be here.”
“I’m fine, Joan. Betty didn’t tell me you would be here.”
“Oops. Sorry, Betty. I didn’t know I was a secret.”
Joan started putting away groceries. She got down a cup, poured herself some coffee, topped off Betty’s and Millie’s cups, and sat down at the table with them.
Millie knew that Joan and Betty were close, but she didn’t know how she felt about someone else having such familiarity with Betty’s kitchen. Then she scolded herself. Of course Betty could and should have other friends who cared about her, picked up a few things from the store, felt at home here.
“It’s nice to be here for lunch for a change,” Joan said, “instead of cocktails. Hey, you should join us sometime. I’m sure you know Betty makes the best G and Ts. And she’s always talking about how wonderful you are for her and for the farm. She won’t mind my saying in front of her that she never says you’re like family. She says you are family. A huge compliment, it seems to me.”
“Betty has been my family as long back as I can remember.”
“Really? I think that’s a story I’d love to hear. Let’s do have happy hour here sometime soon.”
“John wouldn’t let me. I need to be home working on supper during the cocktail hour.”
Joan raised an eyebrow.
“He wouldn’t approve,” said Millie. “He wouldn’t even approve of my running into you here today.”
“You need John’s approval.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. That’s just the way it works.”
Betty said, “That’s the way their marriage has always worked. You know I have never liked the way he treats you, Millie. I have to confess something to you, dear heart. I invited Joan today because I thought it would be good for you two to talk about some things.”
“What things?”
“About whatever you want to talk about. You need friends, Millie. After you left last night all of my kids said how much they missed you. And how much they worry about you.”
“Why do they worry? I thought we had good conversations this weekend.”
“You did. But they know that once they leave, all you have is me. They know that John is, well, John. They know you don’t have friends you can talk to, listen to. So I thought maybe we three could just get together for lunch. And talk.”
And they did talk. The three of them. Not about John, but about everything else. And they laughed. They talked about farming. They talked about church. They talked about the presidential race from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump. They talked about Syria and ISIS, about world religions. They shared a surprising number of opinions and preferences (and aversions). They began a three-way relationship where before there had been a couple of two-way friendships, and a somewhat formal acquaintance between pastor and parishioner. With Betty at the literal and figurative center of this conversation, they connected. When they said goodbye that day, each woman had the sense that something new had just begun.
Millie knew she should be offended that Betty had crossed some invisible line. She knew she should be extremely wary of John’s reaction if he found out about the day’s interactions. But for a reason she couldn’t name, she felt contented, renewed, hopeful, accepted. Until this day, Betty and her family had been the only people with whom Millie had felt she could have a real and mutual relationship. This day, something changed in her.
Later, as Millie lay awake with John’s arm across her, as always, she realized with surprise, fear and excitement, that her own awareness was starting to shift. This time her wakefulness felt different.
She began to formulate a plan.
Melissa Bane Sevier is a teaching elder in the PC(USA) who, after more than 23 years as a pastor, chose in 2015 to leave the pastorate and focus on her longtime ministry of writing and photography. You can find her weekly faith blog at melissabanesevier.wordpress.com. She lives in Versailles, Kentucky, with her husband Jerry.
