went after him.
“No one can serve God while hurting others and no one can serve God unconsciously,” she said, walking briskly beside him. “That’s impossible. Service is a form of worship, and worship requires more conscious attention than anything else.”
“Being conscious of a lie and insisting everyone must believe it doesn’t strike reasonable people as reasonable,” he said.
Winnie’s long legs matched his, stride for stride. She continued: “I’m afraid you’ve committed another error in your thinking, which is common among people just beginning their spiritual journey and you should not feel badly about that. Dogmatism plays the part you are attempting to cast for belief. In truth, the same vital intuition that informs reason even further informs belief. Believers are more ardently concerned with removing the Great Lie than nonbelievers.”
Followed halfway around the block, the man stopped and turned. “Leave me alone. My parents used to talk just like you. I’ve had many very bad experiences with cruel, greedy, and ignorant people who call themselves religious. They beat you until their fists are bloody and then read from the Bible. My childhood was a nightmare of perverted religion.”
“Oh,” said Winnie, touching her face with her hands. “Oh, I’m sorry. Really, I didn’t know. What you talk about is a real problem, for sure. I’m sorry. Believe me, I’m very well acquainted with nightmarish childhoods. My own was—”
“You’re a hopeless fool,” he said. “I doubt if you’ll ever amount to anything or if anyone will ever care anything about you.”
The man stepped from the curb and moved quickly through traffic to the other side of the street.
Winnie walked back. You did it again, she whispered to herself. You did it again. Why can’t you pay attention! It’s not right to intrude too far into other people’s lives. Let them say whatever they want. You must learn to respect that. You keep forgetting. How many times do you need to be whacked on the head by something you already know?
Back inside the barbershop, the older gentleman who earlier had been sitting beside her had taken the place of the man with sideburns on the elevated chair. Winnie sat down, folded her skirt carefully around her boot tops, and blushed.
The barber grinned from ear to ear. “There are some people born to preach and I believe you are one, young lady. You’ll do a bang-up job. And I know for a fact there are many churches looking for pastors. My sister, for example, attends a little church in Words, Wisconsin, which is an area so rural that God left His shoes there. They haven’t had a full-time pastor for over a year.”
“What an astonishingly odd name,” said Winnie.
In the library that evening she looked up Words, Wisconsin. Then she found an old Wisconsin map with Words on it and immediately experienced several short bursts of panic, beginning in her stomach and radiating into her extremities. The area in southwestern Wisconsin where God had left His shoes and apparently intended to send her was not far from the town that her father and mother had grown up in, as well as the place they had lived together, married, and eventually separated when she was a child. But she trusted that her guardian savior would not allow her father to hurt her again, even if he found her.
To be further satisfied that no harm would come to her, she found a telephone book for Thistlewaite County and searched for all the listings under Smith. There were of course a number of them, but none with the first name of Carl, and she assured herself that the others had no relation to her.
HUMPED FLOORS
RUSSELL (RUSTY) SMITH NEEDED SOME WORK DONE ON HIS house. The paint had peeled, especially around the upper windows, and the roof leaked in two places. But the retired farmer had long ago stopped climbing ladders. After sixty years of milking cows, carrying sacks of feed, and jumping off tractors and wagons, his knees had given out. He also had problems inside, where the hardwood floor in the guest bedroom buckled into hills and valleys. To make matters worse, his wife’s sister had called, announcing her intention to visit at the end of next month, and after hanging up the phone his wife, Maxine, had instantly reordered her collection of things to worry about, placing house repair at the very highest peak of concern.
Rusty called all the lumberyards—even in Kendall, more than fifty miles away—and was told there were no construction crews available. He called all the listed carpenters and contractors.
“This is always the worst season,” said Rodney Whisk at Whisk Lumber. “Everyone puts off construction until frozen ground is just around the corner. There’s more building now than you can shake a stick at.”
“I need someone,” said Rusty, flipping his spent cigarette to the asphalt and grinding it beneath the pointed toe of his cowboy boot. He tried to keep from reaching again into the pocket of his insulated vest, failed, found another cigarette, and lit it from a disposable lighter.
“Everybody works for the big boys now,” said Rodney. “Pete Hardin was in last week looking for someone to finish the addition on his house. He finally hired some Amish.”
“Don’t want Amish,” said Rusty. “Don’t want to encourage them to keep moving in.”
“Appears they don’t need any encouragement,” said the lumberyard owner as a tractor-trailer load of Canadian plywood backed toward them from the street.
“The wife doesn’t like to drive at night,” said Rusty. “Afraid of hitting ’em.”
“They finally put electric lights on their buggies.”
“Didn’t do it until they forced ’em.”
“They’re hard workers,” said Rodney. “Give them that.”
“Never said they weren’t. Never said they weren’t. Just think they make poor neighbors.”
Rusty paused to remind himself why he had a right to complain about religious groups and anything else. He had grown up in an always-hungry family that never took charity. His father never held a steady job for more than three months, never owned his own home, and didn’t live past the age of forty. Rusty had dropped out of school in the eighth grade to work as a farm laborer, as did his younger brother.
From one rented room to another, Rusty had worked seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, year in and out. He had worn other men’s clothes, slept on cement floors, and hidden rice in soiled pockets of his overalls. He’d plowed with horses, shoveled manure, butchered animals, and cleared timber. He had worked for some of the most miserly farmers in the area—well known for their cruelty to family, animals, and themselves.
When he was old enough to be legally employed, he had worked nights as a grinder in the foundry. At thirty-eight he finally made a down payment on his own farm and a year later married a school-teacher. Then for the next thirty-five years he farmed with a moral ferocity that more resembled mortal combat than work, until he had paid, in full, for every blade of grass and splinter of wood on his property. Meanwhile, his wife had raised their two daughters, who eventually attended the state university, married young men from the suburbs, and provided his two grandchildren with lives of nurtured indolence.
Rusty Smith had the right to talk about other people. In a culture that valued work, he was a living testament to that virtue, a gnarled emblem of relentless toil.
He continued, “The Amish
