A Quality of Light (26 page)

The Gebhardt’s nodded solemnly. They took a few steps and Mrs. Gebhardt stopped and looked anxiously back at her son, mouth moving as if searching to remember how words were formed. Her hands fluttered to her cheeks, her waist, and then she clutched them in front of her chest before staring nervously at Johnny again, nodding and turning to begin walking after Ben, who was already halfway up the aisle.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Me too.”

“What?”

“Nothin’. Let’s go.”

We walked into the hallway. The crowd had formed a huge semicircle in the foyer with the four boys and Mary Ellen standing in front of them all. Mr. Holmes, Mr. Reid and Neil Metzger stood directly behind them as solemn as judges themselves. Johnny and I traded glances and walked slowly towards the gathering.

“Boys, I believe you have something to say to Joshua and John,” Mr. Holmes said firmly.

The four boys looked at each other and finally Chris Hollingshead stepped forward. “Look … I’m, uh, I’m sorry. I was wrong,” he said shakily and added, “You’re all right, Kane. You’re all right.”

“For an Injun?” I asked, with a grin.

He looked at me. “For anything,” he said.

One by one the others stepped forward, offering terse apologies and handshakes. None of them made eye contact when they spoke and they left, one by one, wading through the crowd quickly
until there were just Johnny, Mary Ellen and me in front of the crowd. She looked at us and then at her father.

“Johnny. I’m sorry. It shouldn’t have happened. I hope … we can be friends,” she said reaching out to shake his hand. Johnny looked at her, unmoving, and then very slowly took her hand and shook it firmly, solemnly.

“Joshua,” she said. “I’m really, really sorry. You’ve been brave and kind, forgiving and understanding through all of this. I’m sorry I didn’t see that in you before.”

“I’m sorry too,” I said. “You think we might have a dance sometime? I practiced.”

She looked at me with tears building in her eyes. “You’re amazing,” she said. “Yes. Sometime, yes, I’d love to have a dance with you.”

I watched her leave with her parents, who’d been silent throughout everything. I thought then, that everything would be all right, that we, all of us — Johnny, me, Mary Ellen and the boys — had passed an enormous benchmark in our histories, a first great hurdle in our passage to maturity.

T
hreshing came and went, the Mildmay Fall Fair saw my father claim top prize for Sarah, a recalcitrant heifer, I joined the school cross-country running team, Johnny began working for his father after school and weekends and my mother set a record for the most preserves jarred by one person in history. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, life had settled into a comfortable pattern again. School was an exhilarating place. The antagonism of those first weeks did not resurface. In fact, Chris Hollingshead and I became the anchor of the cross-country team, generally finishing one-two for Walkerton in every competition. We became teammates and, very slowly, casual friends. Our little circle, which included Johnny, Ralphie, Connie and a member
of my confirmation class, Karl Tabinger, studied together in spare periods, went for pizza, bowled Friday nights and talked on the phone long into the evenings. They all came to see me become a member of the church that Thanksgiving Sunday.

I understood why they called them confirmation classes. Everything I’d learned in six weeks of classes had only confirmed what I already knew. The church was a living body of the people who gathered under its beams and arches, and its strength came from a shared faith and belief in the benevolence of a God who asked only that we enter this world learning to treat each other well. True worship of this God was reflected in how well we lived rather than in how well we prayed, sang or attended. And this God, a living God, was present in all things, unseen and eternal. I eagerly awaited the Sunday when I would step forward in front of our congregation and proclaim, by celebration of my first Communion, that I believed in that living body, that tribe of God as Pastor Chuck put it, and wanted to live my life by its precepts and teachings.

My parents planned a party with Pastor Chuck, my confirmation class, Johnny and the rest of my friends and their parents at our farm following the service. There would be a big open-pit barbecue, a sing-along around a bonfire and even, perhaps, a baseball game. By the time we piled into the car Sunday morning, I was filled with a joy and expectation that was indescribable. I had put my faith in the God of this church; He had answered with a resolution that I could not have planned, an outcome that was better than anything I could have imagined or hoped for. This joining was my commitment to always seek that guidance, to always come in earnest, humble prayer, asking for strength, inspiration and motivation to live according to His will. It was my first act, my first choice, as a mature, free-thinking person.

The service was beautiful. The four of us who were being confirmed that morning selected the hymns and text. After I’d shared the metaphor of the walls of Jericho being the walls of ignorance, everyone agreed to use it as the text, and our hymn selection was exuberant. I chose Pastor Chuck’s rewritten version of “Blowin’ in
the Wind” and the others asked for “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and, quite naturally, “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho.” The church music combo replaced the organ and the St. Giles’ Players performed a skit about John the Baptist. Pastor Chuck’s sermon focused on the difficulties involved in battling the thick, mighty walls of ignorance and misunderstanding and how the horn of God, His teachings and principles in action, can bring those walls down. We were welcomed as new members of the church as the rite of Communion was solemnly performed. As I chewed the bread and tasted the wine that morning, I felt lifted up, buoyant and suspended, and I realized that for me, being saved, as our more evangelical brethren call it, was beyond mere rescue. No, saved was not so much a verb as a noun. Saved. Something cherished and wonderful, gathered lovingly, protected, kept whole and shining, a singular treasure. I cried as I looked at the faces of my parents, and they cried too.

I don’t know how much Johnny understood of either the service or my commitment, but he stood with us, silent and reserved, arching his eyebrows now and then at an enthusiastic response to song, a line of text or the vigor and flourish with which Pastor Chuck brought the message to us. I caught his eye as I stood at the front of the church that morning prior to Communion. He was staring at me, offering a clenched-fist salute in front of his chest. I was glad he was there.

Back at the farm, we had the barbecue ready in no time, with corn roasting over the fire, hamburgers, hot dogs, a few salads, three or four homemade pies and marshmallows for later. Pastor Chuck offered grace and we ate, the whole lot of us strewn across the verandah on chairs, on the steps and railings. When we’d finished, Johnny hiked a thumb over his shoulder. We excused ourselves, stopped to pick up our gloves and a ball from the garage and slipped away behind the equipment shed. The paint had faded from the strike zone, and our old wooden slat of a home plate had long since disappeared, although it still looked like the same place. We quietly thumped the pockets of our gloves, staring around an area that once was like a shrine to us.

“Ever wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t found those books in the library, Josh?”

“Yeah, sometimes,” I said. I looked at the sky. “I guess we would have found another way to get by.”

“But I found them.”

“Yeah. You found them.”

“Think it was coincidence? Luck?” Johnny asked.

“My dad says coincidence is just God working anonymously. Our lives are just His unsigned portraits.”

“Your dad said that?”

“Yeah. Well, the first part. I said the last part.”

“That’s pretty good.”

“The last part?”

“Nah. The first part!” He punched my shoulder, laughing.

We stood there until I finally flipped him the ball. He caught it, turned it slowly over a few times in the pocket of his glove and asked quietly, “You think we meet people the same way we find books? The right ones when we need them? Even if we don’t know we need them at the time?”

“Yeah, I guess we do,” I said.

“Me too. Ever wonder why we met?”

“No,” I said, smiling at him. “No, I never did.”

“Why not?”

“I guess because it never felt like I had to. Why’d you ask?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure a lot out lately. Why you’re here, why I’m here, why we’re
all
here. Remember when I asked you if you ever wanted to be someone else?”

“Yeah. You still wanna be someone else, Johnny?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind finding out who this self is first, really. I kinda got a confession to make.”

He looked at me with that pure, wide-open gaze and I could sense, right then, the wounds he walked with. I wanted to hug him to me, letting him know that everything would be all right, that we were still Laughing Dog and Thunder Sky, that we always would be despite the choices and changes we’d lived through.

“Remember the Maze? The last one?” he asked.

“Yeah. That was the toughest maze ever.”

“Know why it was so tough?”

“No.”

“Because there was no end.”

“What?”

“There was no end. I didn’t build one. It all just doubled back on itself.”

I was shocked at the meanness in the idea.

“I wanted to see how long you’d stay in there wandering around through the heat and the dust and the darkness before you finally gave up.”

“Were you gonna pull me out eventually?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I was pretty close to doing that when you pushed out yourself.”

“So why are you telling me this now?”

He sighed and looked away across the fields, absently turning the ball in the pocket of his glove. When he spoke it was in the quietest voice I had ever heard him use.

“I guess because I see you solving your own maze right now. Your life, you know? Like, you didn’t know where the end was in all of that school shit but you kept on trying to find it. Because you believed that there
was
an end, just like the maze in the hay mow. You stayed in there a long time because you believed I’d built in an end to it all, that you’d tumble out into the light eventually. And when it finally got to be too much, you decided to get out. You
decided.
Just like the decision you made when you couldn’t find your way out of the school thing. You didn’t know where the end was but you decided to get out. Only when you pushed out of the maze at school you pushed out into your faith. And that was the end for you. You solved the maze.”

We were both quiet for a long moment. Me, while I considered what he’d just told me, and Johnny, I believe, to allow himself to feel what was roiling in his chest.

“Life is like a maze, Josh. You wander through all the switchbacks and drop-offs believing there’s light and air somewhere. That someone’s designed an end to it all. Except I don’t think there’s an
end to mine. I just keep on tunneling around in the darkness, pushing on bales. I wish I had your faith. I wish I could stand up and say
enough.
But you know what I’m afraid of?”

“No, Johnny. What are you afraid of?” I asked softly.

“I’m afraid that when I push out, there isn’t gonna be any air or light. That there isn’t gonna be anybody there to help me learn how to breathe again. That all I’m gonna find is another maze.”

“I’m gonna be there to help you, Johnny.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“I’m proud of you, Josh.”

“You are?”

“Yeah. I’m proud because you hang in there and don’t get ruined by any of it. You’re a warrior.”

“Thanks, Johnny.”

“No problem. Think you can still handle my curve ball?”

“I didn’t know you had a curve ball.”

“You didn’t?”

“Nah. The only thing you ever threw that broke was a cow chip!”

And we fell into the game we invented. When the rest of our crew rounded the corner of the shed, they found us laughing, teasing and running like boys, the men we’d briefly exposed tucked away again in the shelter of our youth like nestlings. We played a scrub game for an hour or so and then wandered back to pile wood for the bonfire. As the evening arched slowly into the deep pocket of night, we sang, laughed, ate, drank and talked. The line of people walking towards their cars was a satisfied line, deep in the tranquil fullness of feast and merriment. As we watched the last taillights flick out like fireflies in the distance, our house, our farm and our hearts were still. The four of us stood out beneath a canopy of stars, staring away across the great bowl of the universe, immersed in the ancient light of a billion distant suns. So many possible worlds. Amazed.

A
s I flew over the undulating conversation of Ontario and then the eloquent hush of prairie, I thought about how very much our lives are like the land. The lives of the wounded are scant, stark and remorseless — the barrens, almost. While the lives of the saved are lush, arable and gratifying — a heartland. The wouded are nomads, moving like ghosts, incorporeal, ethereal, leaving no sign on the territories they cross. And the saved, well, the saved are enlightened émigrés, permanent homesteaders, edifices scrawled like joyous graffiti across their homelands. The saved in their plenty dream of travel, and the wounded in their barrens carry dreams of permanence. Johnny and I had not changed. It’s just that he had always wandered alone in the vacuous maze of the wilderness and I had taken the guided tour.