pick him out. Not because, like some men, his work suited him so well, but because he blended in with the light. Maybe it was simply he was as dusty as the air around him, but looking for him I always had to start down low, let my eyes run across the straw-scattered floor, and find his shoes: brown, scuffed, solid. Then, there he’d be, looking back at me, some kind of far-off question in his eyes.
I always had to search to find my father. In the barn in my elastic-waisted jeans or at church in a cotton floral dress and patent leather shoes, it wasn’t hard for me to see him, but it was always the seeing of watching. Watching him stand in a brown suit by the carpeted stairs of the sanctuary and nod in conversation with a few of the men, the deacons, his brows furrowed over marble-blue eyes. Or watching him jog over to help Mrs. Mattson carry a great dish of foil-covered casserole across the leafy parking lot.
My mother, I didn’t watch; her presence more like a smell than an image, an aroma to live in, she was the given, burlap warp to my weaving, shuttling weft. We’ve always looked so much alike—small-framed, large-eyed, with slender Welsh noses and small busy hands—people recognize me instantly as ‘one of Diane’s girls.’ My mother and I look and sound the same, but I am a daughter with her father’s substance. Even from the time I was young, barely to his knees, Dad and I have swung out from my mother’s quiet cord looking at each other past her fibers, our shared complement.
It may sound demeaning, giving my mother the substance of essence, only the weight of an anchor. But in it she’s blessed. Because she’s never been a symbol. Her chestnut hair and light coffee alto have always only stood for her: Mom, Diane. My father and I have had the great struggle of being to each other symbols. And so it is, we’ve watched. I watched because it suited me and because it answered me; they said in church God was like a father, so I had every reason for watching mine.
I watched especially at the beginnings and ends of days, the spaces where he had to cross boundaries, the moments between roles. From the wobbly dining room table, behind plastic cups and slick paintbrush, I would stop swinging my legs and try to see the slice between provider, father—what he was when he wasn’t supposed to be anything. This, I thought, the moment between gears, was the place to find the tenor of identity. A difference or a habit, when none was required, would show me the motor behind action, the vision that framed decision. From before I was old enough to think it, I believed this was the place to test where father linked to Father.
At the end of each day on the farm, when afternoon errands and chores were finished, my parents would meet each other in the kitchen, each empty-handed. Mom would raise her heels off the scuffed linoleum, and I would watch my father lean his neck down and their thin lips would touch. They always kissed with their eyes open: hers quiet but wide like they’d met too many flashes in the dark, his squinting like he’d spent his life examining the sun. I’ve always known my eyes, older, would be split between them: externally, large and round like Mom’s, internally, ground and sharpened by hard light.
My parents never lingered or rushed, but ended their kisses with the snap of their lips separating, a click like a latch rejoining. Then she would go back to stirring a bubbling skillet and he would walk into the house to clean up, both of us watching him go, while I puzzled out which pieces of life were which father’s choice. Even in my small mind, marking out the territories of love and duty.
The honey-paneled room is bright, Sunday morning sunshine tapping through the glass block of the high basement windows. Rows of folding chairs face the long wall and in the far corner, on the edge of the kitchen serving window, an old aluminum percolator puffs and steams next to a stack of Styrofoam cups and a cut-glass sugar dish. The room is bright and full in the way only children’s voices can redeem a tired, yellowed space.
Jesus wants me for a sun-beam, to shine for him each day,
In ev’ry way try to please him, at home, at school, at play.
A sun-beam, a sun-beam, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,
A sun-beam, a sun-beam, I’ll be a sunbeam for him.
In the front row stands a familiar little girl, her eyes like a swirl of blue and brown paint on a palette or a photograph of blooming nebula deep in the fecundity of space. Her cheeks are like apricots, round and still soft with baby fuzz and her brown hair bobs around her cheeks and brows like a cap. She sings with her mouth wide open, her nose pressing up as her throat opens for the high notes. She’s like the smallest bird in a forest singing simply because birds sing.
Jesus wants me to be lov-ing, and kind to all I see,
Showing how pleasant and happ-y, his little ones can be.
She looks around as she sings, her arms at her sides, her gaze touching the posters of Bible stories on the walls. Jonah and the whale, David and Goliath, Jesus with loaves and fishes. They all look like coloring book pages with the black outlines filled in flat colors. There are no shades on anything and Jesus and Peter, and the three women at the tomb, stand facing each other like simple facts, without backgrounds or context. The little girl knows all these stories by heart.
I’ll be a sunbeam for Je-sus, I can if I just try,
Serving him moment by mom-ent, then live with him on high.
A sun-beam, a sun-beam, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,
A sun-beam, a sun-beam, I’ll be a sunbeam for him.
A woman in a flowered skirt asks the children to sit and the little girl climbs on her chair. It makes her hands smell like pennies. Her dress sticks out from her knees as she waves her ankles. She’s always been small for her age, surprising women and old farmers in the grocery store when she speaks to them in full sentences. The woman in the flowered skirt sits next to an empty board propped on a chair and covered with olive flannel. She picks up a paper cutout and sticks it to the middle of the board.
“Who can tell me what this is?” she asks the children.
“Lion!” “A lion!”
“Has anyone ever seen a lion?” she asks, looking back and forth to meet the eyes of the older children in the back rows and the younger ones in front. Several shake their heads. “Well, today we’re going to learn the story of Daniel, a man who had to spend the night with a bunch of lions. Joshua, sit down in your chair.”
“But I can’t see.”
“Then come sit in the front on the floor here.” Joshua, a young boy in a striped shirt, brown pants, and blonde crew cut runs around the outside to sit on the floor.
“Daniel,” the woman in the flowered skirt says as she takes down the lion and puts up a picture of a man with a beard and long blue robe and sandals, “lived in a city called Babylon and worked for the king.” The little girl looks at the man on the flannel board carefully, her eyebrows crinkled as she listens. “The king’s name was Darius—can you all say ‘Darius’?” The little girl mouths the word. The woman smooths a cutout of a man with a crown onto the flannel.
“Good,” the woman in the flowered skirt continues. “Well, Daniel worked very hard for King Darius and the king put him in charge of the whole kingdom.” She reaches to the floor and picks up a cutout of a gold sash with colored stones in it and places it across Daniel’s shoulders. The cutout slips and flutters to the floor. She picks it up and holds it between her fingers and looks out at the children: “But, the other men working for the king were jealous of Daniel.” The little girl fixes her round eyes on the new cutout of a group of three men.
“The men convinced King Darius to pass a law saying no one could pray to
