us in, leaving the bathroom light on for Abby.
Now, because of her heart condition, Abby could no longer race me around the house or chase me during a game of frozen tapper. She was not the sturdy child with rosy cheeks, shiny reddish-brown hair, hazel eyes, and a big sparkly smile. She was lethargic, and because she couldn’t play outside with us, my mother bought her paint-by-number oil paintings of dogs and rural scenes to work on so she wouldn’t get bored.
The four little ones—me, Liz, John, and Sarah—trudged down to the creek and played in the sand and built our castles without Abby. Sometimes I told them I didn’t want to go, and I would stay at home, spread a blanket on the floor underneath Abby’s hospital bed that she periodically used. While she very seriously and quietly painted the two collies, filling in first all the tan of their fur, then the blue sky, I entertained myself with a book or with my Barbies. I flew them through the air and took them on adventures in distant lands.
My parents also relaxed the no-television rule and purchased a black-and-white television with rabbit ears and spotty reception so Abby could watch television during the day. We sat on the couch and watched Gilligan’s Island, and I very pragmatically wondered how it was that the castaways kept blowing the chances they had to get rescued. When Perry Mason was on, I slid closer to John and grabbed his hand when the scary music began. It took very little to frighten me, just a few bars of “bu-dum-dum-dum.”
We watched The Brady Bunch, noting that Florence Henderson grew up in nearby Dale, Indiana. She and Abe Lincoln, whose formative years were spent in Little Pigeon Creek, less than sixty miles south of us, were Hoosiers that we were proud of.
The Waltons premiered on television in 1972. A family drama set during the Depression, it chronicled the lives of seven children, their parents, and their grandparents in the Blue Ridge Mountains. While the family fought, they always made up and discussed things rationally. It was a wonderful, feel-good show, but even more far-fetched than I Dream of Jeannie, which we watched furtively when my father wasn’t around. Anything with supernatural elements was obviously off-limits, according to the church. Demons.
When my father came home, he invariably sat down in his easy chair for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Whether it was the casualties in the Vietnam War, the 1969 moon landing, Martin Luther King’s death in 1968, or the antiwar riots in Chicago, Cronkite signed off with his trademark “And that’s the way it is, Monday, September 11, 1972,” or whatever the date. My father’s inevitable comment was, “Well, this old world can’t last much longer, that’s for sure.”
We attended church services less and less often, because Abby couldn’t go. My older brothers and sisters quietly did whatever they wanted on the Sabbath. They had after-school jobs and made their own money, so they had cars and went to basketball and football games on Friday nights. My brother Jim was on the wrestling team, and he competed on Friday nights and Saturdays. Ed was on the high school basketball team, and Paul played for the middle school team. Sometimes my mother attended both the wrestling matches and the basketball games on the Sabbath. I worried about her salvation. Was she breaking the Sabbath, just by being in attendance?
Wanda wore makeup and went to the Calumet, the local dance hall that featured rock ’n’ roll bands and where you could buy beer without showing ID. She went to the drive-in with boyfriends.
As the only ones in the county who belonged to the Worldwide Church of God, it wasn’t at all easy to have a social life while practicing the church’s doctrines.
My father sporadically yelled at my older siblings for their transgressions, while my mother insisted, “They’re just going to a get-together at a friend’s house.” No one was fooled, least of all my father, who was most preoccupied with making a living for his family, while worrying about Abby, but those little lies enabled us to live with one another.
The rest of us—the younger ones—continued to observe the Sabbath, and we didn’t shop or participate in events on Friday night through Saturday. Nor did we eat pork or unclean meat or fish. In our own way, we remained in the church, even if we rarely attended services. And, of course, my parents tithed. Not tithing kept you out of the Kingdom.
From the moment that Abby got sick, we prayed for her, ending our Friday night Bible studies kneeling at the couch and chairs in the living room and, hands folded and heads bowed, we prayed to God that His will be done, that she would be healed, in Jesus’s name we prayed, Amen.
We had faith that God would heal her, just as we had faith that this world was coming to an end and a better world was around the corner.
CHAPTER 6
Once a month, the bookmobile visited Boone Township School, the three-room brick schoolhouse I attended from third to fifth grades from 1969 to 1972 after we moved to Jasper. Surrounded by fields, a blacktop road wound past the school, and our isolation was broken now and then by a tractor’s hum or a pickup truck rattling along. Although any vehicles were cause for celebration, the green-and-white bookmobile conjured the free-spirited adventurer I dreamed of becoming. On the days the bookmobile came, I was on the edge of my seat waiting for our teacher to say, “The bookmobile is here now. Remember, walk, don’t run!” The row of first-graders, then the row of second-graders, and finally the kids in my third-grade class took turns entering the bookmobile to choose our allotted four books.
It was dim inside and smelled like old paper. Being inside was like actually entering a well-loved, dog-eared book. One of my favorites was a thick book with a picture of a mother and five children on the cover. Back in my classroom, I lifted the wooden desktop and placed the book inside. Then, while my teacher taught the story of King Midas, I quietly raised the desktop and immersed myself in the 1880s and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Undisturbed by the sounds of the teacher and the other children, I spent the afternoon with widowed Mamsie and her brood, who said peculiar things like, “My whockety!”
I made my way through all of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men and Little Women books, as well as Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House in the Big Woods series. In nineteenth-century domestic dramas about families who prevailed despite hardship and loss, the authors drew on their own lives to write their novels and thus were more intimate and honest than the Trixie Belden and Boxcar Children books I’d favored.
In fifth grade, I migrated to the back of the bookmobile, where I discovered the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, and a whole section devoted to the doctor/nurse romances of Cherry Ames and Clara Barton, as well as Donna Parker, special agent. Although I identified with the Peppers because they were poor and their lives were filled with adversity, the romances suggested something completely new: that a girl didn’t have to choose between a career and a boyfriend. She could have both, a notion the church vehemently decried as impossible, even heretical and anti-God’s plan.
For three years, I moved with the same nine classmates from one room to another, from one wooden desk to another. But when I opened a book, I could visit Heidi in Switzerland, share the adventures of the Boxcar Children, or time-travel to nineteenth-century America’s frontier. I was far removed from my sick sister and also from the world that was about to end. I imagined exotic places filled with drama, different in every sense from my taciturn, proud, stubborn, stolid German community who never asked forgiveness and never forgave. They were as uncompromising as the language they still considered their own. In German, the verb was always second in a sentence, there was no way around it, and never try to bend the rules or change them. Obey.
I have often thought that the bookmobile contributed not only to my love of reading and passion to write, but also to my belief that the written word equaled possibilities. Civilization. I was
