Treachery
I first learned about treachery when my family moved the 3 miles from our small house and farm on U. S. # 19 to a sixteen room house in Mill Village the summer I turned eight. I don’t exactly remember reading that word, treachery, or hearing the word, treachery, used by my parents, but somehow I knew the word meant some kind of deep betrayal, theft and/or trickery by a blood relative or a spouse.
When we moved to Mill Village, I discovered that Mr. Rowe, who used to be the hired man for a widow, Mrs. Whitaker, who lived on a small farm on Camp Mystic Road, a mile or so from our small house, had moved alone to a cottage at the dead end of our Mill Village street. He had sided his new home with square, green shingles. Mr. Rowe kept busy with a few chickens, odd jobs for neighbors, and his garden so meticulous it reminded me of Mr. McGregor’s garden of Peter Rabbit fame. A few months later I overheard my parents saying that Mrs. Whitaker had moved in with Mr. Rowe, though they weren’t married. Seems that Mrs. Whitaker’s son arrived back home and had fired Mr. Rowe. The son then persuaded her sign over her farm to him with the promise that he’d take care of her for the rest of her life. After the deed was transferred, her son started to make plans to put her to the County Home. Just in the nick of time Mrs. Whitaker escaped, moved in with Mr. Rowe. My parents and the rest of our community seemed to approve of Mr. Rowe and Mrs. Whitaker’s living arrangements, and went on calling them Mr. Rowe and Mrs. Whitaker.
However, around the same time I accompanied my parents to a New Ireland Evangelical United Brethren Church council meeting and overheard their discussion and decision to deny a young married couple’s request for membership because both of them had been divorced. Both my parents voted with the council’s majority. I was puzzled and almost outraged. If I had been a teenager, I’m sure I would have questioned their judgment, especially on a New Testament basis. What I took from those two approaches to marriage was that divorce was shameful, unforgivable; but somehow “living in sin” was acceptable if the couple was old.
It’s taken me decades to intellectually and emotionally sort through those treacheries.
So, recently when I read a review of Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night, I immediately downloaded his novel and read it straight through in a day, partly because the main characters were my age and partly because it began with 70 year old, widowed Addie Moore walking a block to her widower neighbor’s home to say to Louis Waters:
I mean we’re both alone. We’ve been by ourselves for too long. For years. I’m lonely. I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk.
Frankly, sex was the least of their arrangement. Foremost was their conversation. And her grandson. And her grandson’s dog. And baseball. A two night camping trip, complete with roasted marshmallows instructions. Mid-western town folk. Addie’s son. And, Kent Haruf’s clean prose, stripped down so far, he eschews quotation marks. Last Saturday, when I read Our Souls at Night, I felt as if I were eight years old reading easily and quickly for the pure joy of moving along through a story. Nothing else mattered, except for Addie and Louis, and treacheries.
Later after I finished reading, I took my bath, slept deeply, dreamlessly. However, ever since I woke Sunday morning I’ve been thinking about that story. I’ve thought about why 40 years ago after my first divorce from an abuser that I so gladly left behind the stern United Brethren to join the grace-filled Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. I am thankful for my education and my career as an English professor and now as a poet. And, I’ve been thinking about how grateful I am that last June, Pennsylvania’s updated divorce laws kept my second husband from draining my savings and enabled me to keep living here in my downtown Pittsburgh condo. Though I do not share my bed, I do have long time women friends who love to write detailed emails and to talk sometimes hours on the telephone.
Onward.