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The Little Trailer on the Corner
Because of the way our first parsonage was sited, we couldn’t see a lot of other houses and, happily, not many people could stare very long at ours, unless they were standing in the middle of the highway. We had the church on one side of us and, on the other side, the river that bounded the town on the south. But from our back windows you could look through our yard, full of two dozen oak trees, our own woods, through the next yard, and get a pretty good look at one dwelling, a beat-up trailer that stood on the next corner.
It was right where I made my turn on my walk to the post office every morning. But I wasn’t really inside it much until the lady living in it began to fall ill and unravel.
Bernice was a quiet, kind person, a faithful church member, mother of one of our council members, and grandmother of some of our confirmation students. She was small and thin, with graceful movements. I remember her usually smiling and looking happy. She was also clearly of African-American heritage, a rare thing in our remote area, where almost everyone was named some version of Lena Johnson or Magnus Olafson. But it was precisely that Swedish presence that held the key: someone told me two of the early farmers, immigrant brothers, free of the American sickness of racism, had married African-American girls. Bernice was one of their children who had remained in the area, though not the only one.
I knew Bernice as pastors know all the little, white-haired, older ladies in their congregations: as part of the regular crowd—not as well as the more active volunteers, much better than the occasional churchgoers. Since I knew her son and grandchildren, I knew her a little better than most, though not much.
Then one day at church she came over and thanked me for standing outside her trailer and singing to her. I had no idea what she was talking about and, when I pressed her, she gave a nervous laugh and looked away, as though she suspected herself that she was being swallowed by confusion, but insisted that she had heard my wife and me singing in our yard and then coming over to her trailer to serenade her. She assured me it was quite nice.
Well, the church had some chimes that played in the evening, there were a lot of shadows from the trees in those yards, lots of kids out and about, so I thought it was just possible some combination of those circumstances had led her to think what she thought.
But she kept hearing the singing and no one quite knew what to think about it. In a small town where there are so many family connections, people become aware of problems among the elderly fairly quickly. Among regular churchgoers, people are always noticed and quickly missed. Everybody liked Bernice so the puzzle she was presenting got a lot of attention. We started dropping in on her, the family started making doctor appointments, but she still seemed to get around well and function well. She just kept hearing the singing around her trailer.
Then the singing stopped and the abuse began: voices shouting at her, ridiculing her, calling her names. You can imagine the names. I’m sure everything she heard from the white Americans she grew up with, everything she swallowed and smiled her way through, was breaking out of her memory and rioting in her mind. I was horrified to think she might still be imagining my voice among them.
At last, what she heard was no longer an occasional serenade or rant but a constant, relentless, vile commentary on everything she said and did, every movement, every thought.
She said to me once, “Hear it? Why is it saying ‘Bernice is rocking, Bernice is talking, Bernice is . . . ’” It drove all sense away from her, she really couldn’t live alone anymore, and she was put into a nursing home.
Bernice still looked happy when I walked into her room. We might converse a little, then her smile would go a little odd, her eyes search above her, and she would ask me if I could tell where the voices were coming from. She wouldn’t repeat everything they said, sometimes just ask “Why would they say those things about me?”
It’s hard to sit there when you’ve known the person in better days. It’s hard to leave them when you have to go, and you have some idea of the world they’re in.
Finally, I was no longer sure, when I visited, that Bernice knew who I was. There are people who call that a mercy, but I’ve never been able to. Those lost to our world aren’t senseless: they just don’t sense us, the order of the human world that’s trying to reach them and care for them. They’re sensing something else and, unless you’re certain it’s not horrible, don’t talk about mercy. In this case, I’m pretty sure it was horrible.
You could say the real mercy was when she died. I can just about make myself do that, though I can say it more easily about physical suffering than about the suffering of the spirit. But the hard truth is, it really doesn’t matter what we say. We’re just trying to make ourselves stop thinking, come up with an excuse to make ourselves feel better, get rid of the gnawing memories. It makes no difference to the suffering.
Most of the time, we do stop thinking, feel better, get rid of the worst of the memories, or at least their sting. I still took the same walk to the post office each morning, still turned by her trailer, still thought about her, but less wrenchingly as the weeks and months went by.
If you live long enough in the same place, you start to see its layers: new things coming along, old things gone. You see the physical strands of its life in space and time: this person, that business, this house, that empty lot, in all their relative permanence and impermanence. In rural Minnesota, when I served, it was the impermanence that came most strongly to you. And something more than impermanence: when this town and the farms around it were first built, they were built in hope, to make a life, a future; now—for those still here—it was a matter of hanging on, hanging on here because there was nowhere else to go.
Older people would tell me they used to walk down the street and be able to name all the people they saw, tell you who their parents were, and probably what they had for lunch. Since I was a child of Chicago, this wasn’t something I could ever do or ever want to do. But it was a way the people here had wanted to live, a way they treasured, that made them feel at home on the earth, and it was gone.
Bernice’s trailer stayed empty for a time, then some young people I didn’t really know moved in. There were a number of young people drifting around the area, renting rundown trailers, houses, rooms over empty stores. Leaving high school might be the last significant event in their lives. They were usually, if distantly, related to one or more of the older families, but they kept away from regular contacts with the community. You’d see them for a while, then you wouldn’t, and they’d be in some other trailer in some other town. You’d glimpse a couple and a child, then only the woman and child, then no one.
As I recall, I was vaguely aware someone was occupying the trailer, vaguely aware there might be a small child, but I can’t say I ever saw them in the yard or ran into them on the street or glimpsed any sign of living going on, happy or not.
Then one night I woke out of wild, violent dreams. Our bedroom was at the back of the house and I saw light filling the room, rippling on the walls, blazing through the curtains. I looked out and saw a great, living fire across the yard, with the trailer dark inside it.
I told my wife to dial emergency, grabbed some clothes and ran outside, round the church to the trailer. If I had any thought of getting someone out, the fire crushed it immediately. The heat was so powerful I couldn’t step from the street to the yard. It was like hitting a wall that started to turn your skin into something else and pull it off you. I looked around and thought at most I could offer shelter if anyone had managed to get out. I stared at the fire, the way you always stare at fires, only this one was rising far above my head and many times my size, and my stomach turned with the sure and certain knowledge that it was as impossible to leave that fire as it was to enter
