The Church

The Honest Season

Chapter 15: The Church

The church was on Third Street in Culbertson, two blocks from Broadway, the white clapboard building with the steeple that rose forty feet above the sidewalk and that held the bell that rang on Sunday mornings at nine forty-five, the bell that had rung at nine forty-five every Sunday since 1924, the year the congregation built the church, the year the farmers of the Culbertson area pooled their money and their labor and erected the building that would hold their worship, the building that was the community's vertical statement of faith the way the elevator was the community's vertical statement of commerce, the two tallest structures in town, the steeple and the silos, the soul and the grain.

Zion Lutheran Church. Missouri Synod. The denomination that the Scandinavian and German settlers brought with them when they came to eastern Montana in the 1910s and 1920s and 1930s, the denomination that traveled in the same wagons as the plows and the seed, the faith packed alongside the tools, the spiritual equipment that the settlers considered as essential as the physical equipment, the faith that would sustain them when the ground would not, the faith that would hold them when the harvest failed.

Ruth went on Sundays. She went most Sundays. She went not every Sunday because some Sundays the work demanded her — the spraying that could not wait, the equipment failure that required Sunday attention, the harvest that ran seven days a week and that did not pause for the Sabbath because the wheat did not pause for the Sabbath, the wheat ripened on its schedule and the farmer harvested on the wheat's schedule and the wheat's schedule did not include a day of rest.

But most Sundays she went. She went because she had always gone, because Tom went, because Carl and Maryann went, because going was the thing the Engers did on Sunday mornings the way planting was the thing the Engers did in April, the habitual act that was not questioned because not questioning was the nature of habit, the nature of the thing you do because you do it, because your family does it, because the doing is the identity and the identity is the doing.

She drove the seven miles. She drove the F-150 on the county road and then on Route 16 and then on Broadway and then on Third Street and she parked in the lot beside the church, the gravel lot that held twelve cars on a full Sunday and eight on a normal Sunday and four on a winter Sunday when the wind was blowing and the roads were drifted and the faithful were the truly faithful, the ones who came regardless, the ones whose attendance was not contingent on conditions.

This Sunday was a July Sunday. The lot held seven cars. Ruth's F-150. Dale Peterson's Dodge. Betty Hoffman's Buick, the Buick that was fourteen years old and that Betty drove at exactly the speed limit because Betty was eighty-one and because eighty-one-year-old women who drive at exactly the speed limit are the safest drivers on the road, the predictability of their driving a form of courtesy, the courtesy of a driver who tells you exactly what she is going to do by doing exactly what the law says to do. Three cars Ruth did not recognize — visitors or new residents or the occasional traveler who found the church by the steeple and who came in because the coming-in was the reflex of a person who saw a church and who needed what a church provided, which was stillness, which was the cessation of the road.

And Gus Lindgren's maroon Dodge Ram. Gus came every Sunday. Gus had come every Sunday since he retired and moved to town, the regularity of his attendance replacing the regularity of his farming, the Sunday service substituting for the daily service that the farm provided, the service of work, the service of rising and tending and harvesting, the service that was its own worship, the worship of a man who expressed his faith through the acts of his body rather than through the words of his mouth.

Ruth entered the church. The entrance was through the double doors on the south side, the wooden doors that were painted white and that opened into the vestibule, the small room that held the coat hooks and the bulletin board and the wooden table where the bulletins were stacked, the folded papers that listed the hymns and the readings and the announcements, the order of worship that Pastor Lindquist prepared each week on the computer in the parsonage, the computer that was the church's one concession to modernity, the one technology that the congregation accepted because the typing was faster than the mimeograph and because the bulletins looked better typed than handwritten and because looking better was a form of respect for the congregation, the respect that said: your worship deserves legibility.

Pastor Eric Lindquist. No relation to Ruth's Lindquists — the name was common among Scandinavians in eastern Montana, the name that half the county shared, the shared name that was not kinship but was origin, the common root in a country across the Atlantic that sent its children to the plains and that gave them, along with the Lutheran faith and the wheat-farming knowledge, the surname that peppered the county records and the cemetery headstones and the church membership rolls.

Pastor Lindquist was sixty-two. He had been the pastor at Zion for eighteen years, since 2008, since the previous pastor, a young man from Billings, left after two years because the young man's wife could not tolerate the isolation and the wind and the two-hundred-mile drive to the nearest movie theater, the intolerance that was common among the spouses of rural pastors, the spouses who came from cities and who found that the pastoral calling did not include a calling to the plains.

Pastor Lindquist stayed because Pastor Lindquist was from the plains. He was from Plentywood, ninety miles north, the town on the Canadian border, the town that was colder than Culbertson and smaller than Culbertson and that had prepared him for the particular demands of a rural pastorate, the demands that were not theological but were agricultural, the demands of a congregation whose faith was seasonal, whose worship was punctuated by planting and harvest, whose prayers were for rain and against hail, whose theology was the theology of the ground.

Ruth sat in the pew. She sat in the same pew every Sunday — the fourth row, left side, the aisle seat. Tom sat beside her. Tom sat between Ruth and the wall, on the inside, the arrangement that they established in 1990 and that they maintained for twenty-six years, the seating that was not assigned but was claimed, the territorial agreement that churchgoers maintained through repetition, the same seat every Sunday, the same view of the altar, the same angle on the cross, the sameness that was not monotony but was comfort, was the physical familiarity that allowed the mind to focus on the worship rather than on the logistics of where to sit.

Tom was not beside her. Tom's space was empty. The space was the width of a man's shoulders and the depth of a man's body and the space was not occupied and had not been occupied for three years and Ruth did not look at the space because looking at it was not necessary, the space was present without looking, the absence was felt without seeing, the way the wind was felt without seeing, the way the cold was felt without seeing.

She did not move to the center of the pew. She did not fill Tom's space. She sat in her seat and Tom's seat was empty and the emptiness was the arrangement, the current arrangement, the arrangement that would persist until Ruth changed it or until Ruth stopped coming or until the decision about the land changed the geography of her Sundays, the geography that currently included seven miles of county road and a white church on Third Street and a pew in the fourth row.

The congregation was thirty-two people. Ruth counted. She counted because counting was what she did — she counted tillers, she counted bushels, she counted degrees of soil temperature, and she counted the bodies in the church because the bodies were the church's vital signs, the church's tiller count, the number that indicated health or decline.

Thirty-two was decline. Thirty-two was less than the forty that came five years ago. Forty was less than the sixty that came ten years ago. Sixty was less than the ninety that came twenty years ago. The decline was the decline of the community, the shrinking that occurred as the farms consolidated and the families left and the children did not return and the population of Roosevelt County dropped from 12,000 in 1960 to 10,000 in 2000 to the 714 that lived in and around Culbertson now, the 714 that was not a stable number but was a number in motion, a number moving downward, the downward that was the direction of rural populations across the Great Plains, the emptying that the economists described and the sociologists studied and the farmers lived.

The emptying was visible in the pews. The pews that were full in 1960 were half full in 2000 and were a third full now, the wooden benches holding fewer bodies, the spaces between the bodies widening, the gaps that were not architectural but were demographic, the gaps that said: the people who sat here are gone, the families that filled these rows have moved to Billings and Great Falls and Denver and Seattle, the children have left and the parents have aged and the aging has moved them to facilities in Sidney or to graves in the cemetery or to houses in town where they sit in recliners and watch television and do not drive the seven miles on Sunday morning.

Pastor Lindquist stood at the pulpit. The pulpit was oak, built by a carpenter named Svendsen in 1924, the wood darkened by a hundred years of hands and hymnals and the oil of human skin, the patina that time applies to the surfaces that people touch, the darkening that is the record of contact, the evidence that this surface has been used, has been present for the pressing of hands and the resting of Bibles and the gripping that preachers do when the sermon requires emphasis, the gripping that communicates through the hands what the words communicate through the air.

He read from the lectionary. He read the Gospel. He read and Ruth listened and the listening was the same listening she did in the field, the listening that was attention without analysis, the receiving of words the way the soil received rain — openly, without resistance, without the filtering that the critical mind provides, the listening that allowed the words to enter and to settle and to do their work in the dark, the way the rain did its work in the dark, the percolation that was invisible and essential.

The sermon was about stewardship. Ruth heard the word and the word landed in her the way a seed lands in a furrow — precisely, in the place that had been prepared for it. Stewardship. The care of the thing entrusted to you. The tending of the gift. The responsibility that comes with receiving, the obligation that accompanies the having.

Pastor Lindquist spoke about the parable of the talents. The master who gave talents to his servants and who expected a return. The servant who buried his talent in the ground and who was condemned. The servants who invested their talents and who were praised. The parable that every farmer knew, the parable that every farmer understood, because every farmer buried something in the ground — not talents but seed — and every farmer expected a return, and the return was the harvest, and the harvest was the stewardship, the honest accounting of what the farmer did with what the farmer was given.

Ruth listened and she thought about stewardship and she thought about the land. The land was the talent. The land was the thing entrusted to her — entrusted by Arvid, by Carl, by Maryann, by Tom, by the chain of custody that began in 1938 and that led to her, to Ruth, to the woman who sat in the fourth pew and who held the land and who was deciding what to do with it. The land was the talent and the question was: what had she done with it? Had she buried it? Had she invested it? Had she produced the return that the master expected?

She had farmed it. She had planted and tended and harvested for thirty-eight years. She had produced wheat. She had produced the return. The return was forty-two bushels per acre on Section 12 and twenty-six on Section 22 and thirty-eight across the farm and the return was honest, was the faithful stewardship of a woman who did not bury the talent but who put the talent to work, who invested the talent in seed and labor and the daily attention that the talent required.

But the parable did not address the selling. The parable did not say what happened when the servant was offered $4.2 million for the talent. The parable did not address the question of whether selling the talent was burying it or investing it, whether the money was a return or a liquidation, whether the converting of land to cash was stewardship or abandonment.

The hymn was "Beautiful Savior." The congregation stood. The congregation sang. The singing was not beautiful — thirty-two voices in a wooden building, the voices of farmers and farmers' wives and retired farmers and the few remaining children, the voices that were not trained and were not strong but that were present, were the voices of people who sang because singing was what you did in church, the way planting was what you did in April, the act performed not because you were good at it but because it was the act, the required act, the act that the service demanded and that the congregation provided.

Ruth sang. She sang in the voice that she used only in church, the voice that was different from the voice she used in the field and the voice she used on the phone and the voice she used in the kitchen. The church voice was softer. The church voice was the voice of a woman who was not giving instructions or reporting soil temperatures but who was participating in a communal act, the act of voices rising together, the act of sound filling a wooden room and bouncing off the plaster walls and the oak pews and the stained glass windows and returning to the singers altered, amplified, the sound becoming more than the sum of its voices, the sound becoming the thing that church sound becomes when it works, which is a presence, a hovering, the acoustic evidence that the people in the room are together, are doing the same thing at the same time, are unified in the act of singing even if they are not unified in anything else.

Tom had a good voice. Tom sang bass. Tom's bass was the foundation of the hymn the way the subsoil was the foundation of the topsoil, the low frequency that held the higher voices, the rumble that Ruth felt beside her in the pew, the vibration of Tom's chest producing the notes that the hymnal prescribed, the notes that Tom sang without looking at the hymnal because Tom knew the hymns by memory, had known them since childhood, had absorbed them through the same repetition that he absorbed the tool order on the pegboard and the seeding rate for SY Ingmar and every other system that he learned through practice and that he held through use.

The bass was gone. The bass was absent from the hymn the way the wrench was absent from Tom's hand, the thing that should be there and that was not there and that the absence of defined the space, the acoustic space in the fourth pew where a bass voice used to be and where now there was only Ruth's voice, alone, the voice of a woman singing without the foundation, the voice that was unsupported, that was the topsoil without the subsoil, the voice that did its best without the thing beneath it.

The service ended. The congregation filed out. They filed past Pastor Lindquist at the door, the handshake, the greeting, the brief exchange that was the pastor's assessment of each parishioner, the weekly check-in that allowed the pastor to gauge the condition of his flock the way Ruth gauged the condition of her crop, by looking, by reading the surfaces, by the visual assessment that experience provided.

"Ruth," Pastor Lindquist said. He held her hand. His handshake was different from Grayson's handshake — warmer, longer, the handshake of a man who held your hand not to transact business but to convey care, the pastoral grip that said: I am holding you, I am here, the holding is the ministry.

"Pastor," she said.

"How's the crop?"

Even the pastor asked about the crop. Even the pastor's ministry was agricultural. Even the pastor understood that the spiritual condition of his congregation was linked to the agricultural condition of their farms, that the prayers were agricultural, that the anxieties were agricultural, that the faith was tested not by theology but by weather, not by doctrine but by the price of wheat, not by the abstract question of God's existence but by the concrete question of whether the rain would come.

"Crop's good," she said. "Filling."

"Good," he said. "That's good."

He held her hand a moment longer. The moment was the pastoral extra, the additional second that said: I know about more than the crop, I know about the offer, I know about the decision, I am not asking because asking would be an intrusion but I am holding your hand for an extra second to say that I am available, that the church is available, that the wooden building and the oak pulpit and the fourth pew are available for whatever you need them for, including the sitting and the thinking and the quiet that a decision of this magnitude requires.

She drove home. She drove the seven miles. She passed Gus Lindgren's maroon Dodge, headed in the opposite direction — Gus driving east, Ruth driving west, the two trucks passing on the county road, the wave, the lifted hand, the acknowledgment.

She pulled into the driveway. She parked. She sat in the truck for a moment. She thought about the sermon. She thought about stewardship. She thought about the talent buried in the ground and the talent invested and the return that the master expected.

The land was not a talent. The land was the ground. The land was the thing that received the talent and produced the return and the receiving and the producing were not the servant's work but were the ground's work, the ground's function, the thing the ground did without instruction, without theology, without faith. The ground grew wheat because the ground grew wheat, because the soil biology and the solar energy and the water cycle combined to produce the growth that the farmer harvested, the growth that was not faith but was fact, was the factual outcome of physical processes that occurred regardless of whether the farmer prayed or did not pray, believed or did not believe, went to church or did not go to church.

But Ruth went to church. Ruth went because the going was the habit and the habit was the identity and the identity was the belonging, the belonging to a community that gathered on Sunday mornings in a white building on Third Street and that sang hymns that were old and that listened to sermons that were earnest and that shook hands at the door and asked about the crop and went home to the farms that the crop grew on and that the faith grew in, the faith that was not separate from the farming but was the same thing, was the expression of the same impulse, the impulse to plant in the ground and to trust the ground and to accept what the ground produced, the impulse that was faith and was farming and was the thing that held Ruth in the pew on Sunday mornings and in the field on Monday mornings and in the barn on every morning, the impulse that said: do the work, trust the process, accept the result.

She went inside. She changed out of her church clothes — the clean jeans, the blouse that she wore only to church, the shoes that were not boots. She put on her farm clothes. She went to the barn. She had work to do. The work did not stop for Sunday. The work did not stop for worship. The work was the worship. The work was the thing she offered to the ground the way the hymn was the thing she offered to the air, the offering that was not compensation but was participation, the participation of a woman in the systems that held her — the system of the church and the system of the farm and the system of the season, the three systems that organized her life and that asked of her the same thing, which was presence, which was attention, which was the honest engagement of a person with the thing she was given.

She walked to the field. She walked into the wheat. She touched the heads. The kernels were filling. The season was working.

The church was behind her, seven miles west, on Third Street. The steeple pointed at the sky. The sky looked down at the wheat. The wheat grew in the ground. The ground held everything — the seed and the talent and the dead and the faith and the question that Ruth carried and that the season was answering, one Sunday at a time, one sermon at a time, one hymn at a time.