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Prayer
He was the size of man who could throw open a heavy,
plate-glass door with his thumb. He was wearing a ball cap, a short-sleeved
T-shirt, denim overalls, and fabric-and-rubber, ankle-high work boots. My
horse, Chief, followed me nicely, albeit sideways, staring at and absorbing the
foreignness—and by that, I mean stench (Chief’s term)—of the burros across the
road. Chief, like all horses, was brain wired to believe he was a prey animal
the size of a rabbit, so everything unfamiliar, like burros, probably was
deadly. For that reason, I had dismounted and was leading him for comfort. I
had owned him only two months. He didn’t know me yet.
The man was watching me from his riding lawn mower, canted
at a thirty-degree angle on the ditch he was mowing in front of his house. I
strode straight toward him and smiled brightly and waved in order to melt the
guarded expression he wore that told me he wasn’t sure how friendly he should
act toward a strange woman. Too friendly, a woman might feel threatened; but
friendly means polite in this country, so I believed he was torn. A
fifty-four-year-old woman leading a horse loaded with saddlebags, rope,
canteen, and collapsible bucket through waist-high grass on a bar ditch in
rural Miami County, Kansas, bore watching.
There was no full dental coverage in this man’s world. Nor
likely cashmere sweaters packed away in his wife’s cedar chest while her summer
things had been brought out for spring. Like me, everything she owned probably
fit well enough into a six-foot-by- three-foot closet. I’d walked toward this
man feeling like he was a friend I hadn’t seen in years, which happens among
people who’ve haltered horses a thousand times. You can tell horse people by
the way they look at your horse. The head goes back half an inch. The eyelids
drop, then click on the horse’s hip, legs, chest, neck, head, back to the hind
quarters. Then you. If you’ve got a decent horse, the eyes get serious—with
respect. He gave me that look.
This man’s eyes were shaded by wraparound sunglasses shaped
like stretched-out sports car windows and likely cost him as much as dinner for
six in Kansas City. Conservatism applies to utility out here, like his
sound-but-rusty stock trailers across the blacktop that more than likely took
him and his grandkids to trail rides. There was probably a $45,000 pickup
backed out of the sun somewhere.
I answered his questions. I left three days ago to ride my
horse alone through Kansas and Missouri. I have everything I need. No, I’m not
worried about somebody hurting me on my trip. I needed to get down and dirty
and see my country. We gabbed nonstop for fifteen minutes.
“Do what is in your heart to do,” he said, “and you’ll be .
. .” What? What did he say? I’m a writer; how could I not have said, “Excuse
me, I have to write down what you just said,” and stepped to my pommel bag for
my pad and pen? My later notes say, “He could have been a Unity minister.”
You walk up to a stranger and say you’re doing what you’ve
wanted to do since you were a little girl, and conversation leaps not to what
makes the car payments, but to what brings tears to your eyes. That doesn’t
often happen with people you know. He and I had nothing to guard. We might
never see each other again.
I could see his intelligence well enough through those
orange glasses, so I paid no mind to his remark about not having a lot of
schooling, because I already could tell he probably was better read than me.
Lord knows, I’ve made such apologies since I gave up hope of finishing college
in my twenties, then in my thirties, then again in my forties for different
reasons. We know we’re smart, he and I, but we have nothing to prove it. What we
do have, we can’t seem to admit.
“I can’t believe in evolution,” he said. “Look around here.”
We both looked around—toward the greening furrows that led
in the distance to a bumper of newly leafed hedge, oak, and locust trees
mingling their limbs. We stood in silence at the five kinds of herbs my horse
snatched and chewed.
“If the big bang is true, then all this perfection and order
is just an accident,” he said.
“I know what you mean.”
I did. Of course, I believed in natural selection. There
also seemed to have to be a God, one way or another; though in truth, I think
my atheist friends are smarter than I am. Maybe they would not think of me as
an idiot if they could feel this presence—capital P—that I feel.
The corners of his mouth jerked down. He flicked both cheekbones
under his sunglasses with the tip of his index finger. I pretended not to
notice his tears.
In the thirty years I lived in the country, I never felt
threatened by my dear friends and neighbors who thought there was only one way
to interpret the Bible, and that my way was wrong and lethal. The worst that
could happen was they’d pray for me and feel sorry I was going to hell.
The girls at the Christian Church in Hume, Missouri, where I
attended high school, had never known a Lutheran before meeting me, but they
knew one thing: I had not been properly dunked. Nor had I come “straight way up
out of the water.” I hadn’t made a decision. I’d been given cheap grace
by my church, so after trying to get me to come to their church and be saved,
they invited me to a revival at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin,
Missouri. I was sixteen. This was the culmination of months of prayer and discussion
among them on my behalf. The dark auditorium and the music, my best friends
straining toward the lights on the stage, and the call to action, lifted and
carried me forward, a spirit, out of my reasoning mind to become a silent
observer, above. I floated toward the stage and hovered.
I had learned to hover that way as a girl, when what was
expected fell so far out of line with reason that I could do nothing else. This
happened often in the home of my father, who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder
from the Great Depression and having been a prisoner of war in World War II,
and from being, according to some, a jerk from birth. There is not space here
to explore the nature of a father who had never known security but tried to
provide it for his own family in a way that seemed as if he were left-handed
and all the tools given him were right-handed. I learned to hover when my
father lost his temper and Mother smiled at me behind his back, “Nothing’s
wrong with Daddy. Don’t you say there is.”
I registered, and floated, in silence.
At the revival, I was given a cotton gown and dressed behind
the stage curtains. I was led forward in a line of other teenagers. We
approached a small pool that reminded me of a feed lot’s concrete dipping
trench full of liquid pesticide that cattle are run through to kill lice.
Strangers held my hands on either side before the baptismal pool. I descended
the three steps and went under where the water washed my nature, which, in the
words of the Nicene Creed I learned in catechism, was sinful and unclean. At
least I had that concept in common with the fundamentalists.
My friends at the revival cried for me. Once dressed, I even
took the microphone and channeled something about having been Lutheran and
suggesting that other people listen to what was being said here. That went out
over the radio. I boarded the bus feeling like I had just given away my most
precious possession—as precious as my horse, Honey. I didn’t speak to anyone
all the way home. My best friend looked out the window, bereft, when I wouldn’t
talk.
I had undone my religion. Three weeks later, my friend asked
me, again, if I had told my parents I was saved. For the first time, I talked
back to her—maybe to anyone—“No! I am so ashamed,” I said. “Just leave people
alone!” She draped herself over the seat back of the car I was driving and
sobbed. It was never mentioned again.
I didn’t hold it against her, and don’t now, but I was
stepping away.
Years later, at a friend’s Baptist church, the minister
repeated no fewer than six times, “God hates divorce!” My grown daughter put
her arm around my shoulder and tilted her head into mine. I had been divorced
twice.
God hates? I thought. The Great I Am? The
omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Love—the God-is-love, God—hates? “People,”
I wanted to shout, “if we must have a god, let’s not make him need anger management
classes like us.”
Growing up, I never viewed my fundamentalist Christian
counterparts as anything but dear, regardless how they viewed me. This man on
the mower was taking me back home to that time. I wanted to pull him onto my
lap, wrap my arms around those broad shoulders draped with his graying hair and
say, “It will be okay. Let God worry about the big bang. You and I will take
care of the love.” We stood in the gradually building heat, cooled by a breeze
that still smelled of morning.
“What is the right-of-way like between here and Block
Corners?” I asked. “That’s where I’m headed, to hit as much gravel road as I
can going west.”
“It’s not bad. A lot like this. You’ve got some culverts to
cross along this stretch. Probably be just as easy to hop up on the road for
those.”
“That’s a relief.”
“After you turn and head west, again, on John Brown Highway,
the right of way is still pretty good. You’ll go through Henson. There’s
nothing there but an elevator and railroad tracks. I’m sure he’ll have no
trouble with that.” He gestured at Chief. My horse made me proud, standing
obediently, which he always did where two or more humans were gathered.
“He’ll go through anything. He’s been a little freaked since
we didn’t turn back for home two days ago. He’s not nearly as brave by
himself.”
“None of them are. It’s good to make them go out by themselves.
You get through Henson, and you’re still on John Brown Highway. In about two
miles, you can cross the blacktop and ride along the bottoms. There’s no fence.
It hasn’t rained in a while, so it shouldn’t be sticky. Once you hit Block
Corners, it’s gravel for days.”
I recognized the precision of his description as coming from
one who had traveled four miles per hour on horseback. He understood the
impact of terrain and distance at that speed. I was beginning to understand
that he, and others like him, might keep me safe on this trip.
“You need anything?” he asked, looking my saddlebags over.
“Would you pray for me?”
“What’s your name?”
“Lisa Stewart.”
“What’s your horse’s name?”
“Chief.”
“Okay.”
He didn’t begin to pray righ
t then, so I knew he would do it
in private.
“Be careful,” he said.
I mounted up and rode the way he told me.
________________________________________
Copyright © 2020 Lisa D. Stewart
The Big Quiet: One Woman's Horseback Ride Home
meadowlark-books.com
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