of stars crowded the black sky. Then we made our way sleepily to the car, and all around us the farm was quiet save the chirping of crickets.
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I grew up with these hardworking, beer-drinking, potbellied, red-faced, old-time, bib-overalled men and gray-haired, Dutch-talking, coarse-handed, strict, and reserved women. I went to Strassenfests, or street fairs, and at parties I sang, “What’s that smell comin’ from over the sea? Must be the smell of old Germany. Singin’ glorious! One keg of beer for the four of us! Glory be to God that there ain’t no more of us, ’cause one of us can drink it all up. Damn quick!”
If the world didn’t end before I became an adult, I would take my place among them, continuing the traditions that had been passed on for more than a century, from the barn-raising and butchering days of old, to the Sundays of the 1960s.
I couldn’t imagine that in just over a decade, the wren would give up the wooden shoe and leave the nest, exchanging ribley soup for matzah ball, the Midwest for the Mideast.
CHAPTER 3
If Sunday belonged to family, then Saturday, the seventh day of the week, belonged to God.
The Sabbath began at sunset Friday night and ended at sunset Saturday night. On any Friday night, as the sun set behind the red barn and after we’d eaten the usual fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy for supper, we then-ten children gathered in the living room for Friday night prayer and Bible study. We took turns reading aloud from the church’s children’s Bible stories.
The gray, soft-backed books retold biblical events and were illustrated with black-and-white drawings: innocent Job, covered in boils, though he was sinless; Lot’s wife looking back over her shoulder, though warned not to, her eyes wide and frightened, before being turned into a pillar of salt, God’s punishment for her disobedience; Joseph, full of himself in the multicolored coat that got him into so much trouble.
I loved the stories, loved thinking about them and trying to figure them out. Joseph was thrown into a pit by his jealous brothers and then ransomed into slavery in Egypt. God destroyed the world in the flood, and only Noah and his family survived. Cain killed Abel, his own brother. They were harsh stories, and within them, God walked and talked and communicated with people. I was a literal-minded child, and I imagined God hanging out in their neighborhood, popping up on the street unexpectedly. I wished God would do that still, show up at the courthouse square in Jasper or maybe just appear in the backyard while we were playing red rover.
Friday evening ended with us kneeling at the couch and chairs, heads bowed, and our father led the prayer. “We thank you great God for your Sabbath, and for all of the spiritual blessings you’ve given us, and we pray that you will continue to bless us and open our minds to your Truth, in Jesus’s name we pray, Amen.”
I added my own private prayer: that my parents would get along; that my extended family would join our church so we could all be saved; that I would get into the Kingdom; and that I would receive God’s Holy Spirit.
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On Saturday mornings, my father roused us with “Boys, girls, get up! You got to make hay while the sun shines!” We exited our rooms—there were two or three or four siblings per room, depending on the year, and we fought over access to the one bathroom. My brothers had it easy—they could go outside and pee behind the garage.
Then we ate a quick breakfast of oatmeal or Cream of Wheat. My mother was a devotee of anything natural and unprocessed and authentic. Wheat germ and blackstrap molasses were mainstays. We looked suspiciously on Cap’n Crunch.
My four brothers, scrubbed and pink-cheeked, ears jutting out below the almost military-style haircuts the church demanded, wore ill-fitting hand-me-down suits. My five sisters and I wore dresses that came to the middle of our kneecaps, in accordance with church doctrine. Just as Saturday was set apart from the rest of the week, I felt distinctly set apart from, and indeed superior to, our neighbors on the Sabbath. But still I longed to belong. I learned early to squelch personal desires like exchanging Valentine’s Day cards with my classmates, giving and receiving Christmas presents, eating turtle soup at my grandparents’ house. Anything that didn’t fit in with the life I was supposed to live. Anything that prevented me from getting closer to God.
Usually running late, which my father blamed on my mother, we piled into one of the rotating, fixer-upper, ancient Cadillacs and drove past weathered barns and billboards that urged us to “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco.” Stacked on top of one another in the car, we grumbled and complained. We were bored. Jim took up too much room; Ed was deliberately bumping his legs up and down, causing Liz, who was seated on his lap, to lunge forward almost into the front seat. Wanda wanted the window rolled up because her AquaNet-ed hair was getting messed up, and Paul was sure that I had deliberately elbowed him. Within minutes my father yelled, “Would you kids PIPE IT DOWN!”
It was an hour and a half drive to Evansville, where we attended church services at a seedy gray building that the church rented from the Order of Owls, a fraternal society founded in South Bend, Indiana, in 1904 open to white men only. The church had no connection to the Owls, except to rent “The Owl’s Home” on Saturday afternoon. The church did not build or own houses of worship. This would have cost money and deprived it of money needed to preach the gospel to the world. Instead, rented movie theaters, Masonic lodges, auditoriums, and various other public spaces served as our “church” for Saturday services.
During the long ride, my father railed against the evils of drugs, miniskirts, evolutionists, and women’s libbers, all of which seemed to have overtaken America like a scourge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was the time of Woodstock, the Summer of Love, the long-haired Beatles, and women burning their bras.
Incensed that women no longer knew “their place,” Dad made his case: “God created a role for everything in the universe. Just think what would happen if a river thought it could be a tree! God is not the author of confusion, it says that in the Bible, and women are confusing the way God intended them to be. They’re so mixed up these days that they’re mixing everybody else up. A wife is supposed to submit herself to her husband, for he is her head even as Christ is the head of the Church.”
The ministers often quoted this verse from the book of Ephesians, the apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus, to justify why wives should neither make decisions on their own nor work outside the home if their husbands didn’t want them to. In all things, one’s husband had final say.
“And Mama,” my father continued, “you should know that. It won’t work, with you pullin’ gee, and me pullin’ haw.” I imagined my father hitched to the plow, calling, “Haw!” while my mother shook her head and pulled in a different direction, “Gee!” He often accused her of deliberately undermining him. Which she did: covering for my older teenage siblings when they went out on Friday nights, the Sabbath, and turning a blind eye to my older sisters rolling up the waistband of their skirts to shorten them when they left for school.
I tuned out my father’s loud, tiresome, and contentious diatribes that made my heart jump and immersed myself in a word search puzzle or reading Trixie Belden. With books, I learned the useful art of tuning out things I didn’t want to hear.
When I was in my teens and the 1970s women’s movement—Ms. magazine; Roe v. Wade; Helen Reddy’s feminist anthem song “I Am Woman”—was in full swing, I challenged my father on this sexist and patriarchal attitude that I thought all religions should have long abandoned. While I still believed the Bible was God’s sacred word and contained laws that regulated how we should live, I thought the Bible could be interpreted in more than one way. I questioned why things had to remain the same.
I argued, “Daddy, I don’t believe that God created men and women unequal, or that one of us is supposed to serve the other. We’re all the same in the eyes of God.”
“Tater Doll,” my father literally threw up his hands and said, “you’re so stubborn,