Good News from North Haven Read online

  A NOVEL

  The Crossroad Publishing Company

  Copyright © 2002 by Michael L. Lindvall

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lindvall, Michael L., 1947-

  The good news from North Haven / Michael L. Lindvall.

  p. cm.

  “A Crossroad Carlisle book.”

  ISBN 0-8245-2012-2 (alk. paper)

  1. Christian fiction, American. 2. Minnesota – Fiction. 3. Clergy–Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3562.I51266 G6 2002

  813'.54 – dc21

  2002006108

  This printing March 2016

  For my wife, Terri,

  who was unfailing in her support

  Does the fish soar to find the ocean,

  The eagle plunge to find the air—

  That we ask the stars in motion

  If they have rumour of thee there?

  —Francis Thompson

  For where two or three are gathered in my name,

  there am I in the midst of them.

  —Matthew 18:20 RSV

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: North Haven

  1. The Christmas Pageant

  2. The Little Things

  3. Merciful Snow

  4. The Ocarina Band

  5. The Affair

  6. Motorcycle

  7. Learning to Dance

  8. A Strange Providence

  9. Reunion

  10. Lamont Wilcox’s Boat

  11. Sherry Moves Home for a While

  12. Air-Conditioning

  13. The Treasure Hunt

  14. The Dreadful Omniscience of God

  15. The Jefferson Street Leaf War

  16. Hunting

  17. Rapture

  18. Christmas Baptism

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  To everyone who ever told me a story I offer my gratitude and apologies. Bits and pieces of a dozen tales have found their way onto these pages. My hope is that even though I have woven fiction from threads of true stories, I have managed to make up tales that tell the truth half as well as life does.

  To everyone who ever listened to me tell a story I offer my gratitude and apologies: to my family, who never seem to tire of listening, to a congregation that laughs in the right places, to supportive friends who told me to write a book.

  I offer my appreciation to Garrison Keillor, Fred Craddock, and others who reminded me that stories are truer and infinitely more memorable than mere ideas.

  – Introduction –

  North Haven

  This is our fourth winter in North Haven, which is a curious name for the place. It’s not clear what it’s north of, other than most all of the continental United States. There is no “South Haven,” nor even a “Haven.” The name suggests a harbor and the proximity of water, which there was before the Cottonwood River altered its course. Now the river itself is a mile away and the old riverbed is a slough on the edge of town.

  It takes about an hour to drive to Mankato, the nearest town of any size. From there it’s another hour to Minneapolis–Saint Paul, “the Cities” to everybody here, as if there were no others. Interstate 90 passes well to the south. That and the river lend to the town an impression of a place that has been passed by. Annie and I never dreamed we’d live somewhere so far away. When we first came to town, people would say to us, “You know, Pastor, this isn’t the end of the world.…” Then they’d hesitate and chuckle. “But from our front porches we can see it.”

  I am the pastor of Second Presbyterian Church. There is no First Presbyterian in town, and there hasn’t been for years. More than a century ago, the newly founded First—and then only—Presbyterian Church enjoyed a fine church fight. Folks still tell the story of the Sunday in June when half the congregation walked out during the sermon and founded Second Presbyterian.

  All memories agree as to what the fight was about: whether young women ought to lead discussions at Christian Endeavor meetings or keep a low profile and ask questions when they got home, as St. Paul seems to have counseled. What memories do not agree on is who was on what side. Some people now say that the Second Presbyterian group that left was in favor of women speaking at meetings; some say they were against it. Whatever the truth, everyone agrees that Second Presbyterian Church was squarely established on the firm foundation of an important principle, even if no one is now quite sure what that principle was.

  First Church’s building burned to the ground a few years after the split, and most people assumed that this was a sign. They had no fire insurance, not because they couldn’t afford it, but because buying fire insurance for churches was seen by many in those days to be sure evidence of weak faith. If you truly trusted that God would guard and prosper His church, this reasoning went, you didn’t second-guess Providence by wasting money on insurance against “acts of God.” In fact, some argued that buying insurance might even “tempt the Lord thy God” and actually cause fires. Most First Church folks switched over to Second Church after the fire. But a handful of stalwarts refused to yield on a matter of Presbyterian principle and became Methodists.

  It was an age of high principles and even higher hopes. The first settlers had arrived in the years just after the Civil War. They came from upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. They were mostly Presbyterians and Methodists with English and Scotch-Irish names. The Swedes, mostly Lutheran, came later, but in greater numbers. They all came first, of course, for the land—rolling grassland with black soil two feet thick that had never been turned by a plow.

  But they also came to found a city—not a village, but a great city. These were people who dreamed boldly of what was to come. They were people who understood themselves to be at the advancing edge of a beneficent tide of civilization and true religion rising westward over the continent. They engaged in a long debate about what to name the town. Among the most favored suggestions were “New Corinth” and “New Athens.” These were names that married the two worlds that the civilizers of the age wished to emulate: that of the Bible and that of classical Greece.

  They settled on New Haven, not that there was an old Haven, but because “haven” is such a welcoming word and it seemed a less prideful name. People say that the “New” became “North” after the first winter, the surprising harshness of which impressed upon the settlers the northerliness of their new home. Winters are hard, of course, but it is more their length that dominates life here. Annie said to me just the other day that what she likes most about Minnesota weather is the almost guaranteed white Christmases. What she doesn’t like is the white Easters. I am most impressed by the sharp distinction of the seasons. Each has a strong personality that dominates the mood of the place for the length of its stay. Life moves with the seasons here, much more so than in places less attached to land and blessed with a moderate climate.

  The town fathers laid out North Haven on a grid. The streets running north and south were named after Presidents, in order of their tenures. The avenues running east and west were named after the states in alphabetical order. Today the streets stop with Grant, and the last avenue is Indiana. Most of them just end at a field on the edge of town. If I stand in the middle of Adams Street in front of our manse, I can turn north and see the wind moving in the corn where the street ends, and turn south and see the heat rising off the
soybean field where the asphalt stops at the other end. The Main Street business district is four blocks long and is dominated by the Lyric Odeon Theatre in the middle, the Skelly gas station on one end, and the towering Farmers’ Union grain elevators at the other. There is a drugstore, a coffee shop, a Woolworth’s, Emma’s Notions ’n Stuff, the Piggly Wiggly grocery store, and the Blue Spruce Bar and Grille. There are also half a dozen empty storefronts.

  Recent years have been unkind to the fond hopes of the past. It’s a lament sung by many little towns in this part of the world. Farms are bigger, and with mechanization it takes fewer people to run them. Good roads have brought larger places closer. There is just not enough work. Young people leave. Few of those who go off to college return.

  Those who stay do not despair, but they worry. They worry that they, too, may have to leave. The vision of a great city that so animated their great-grandparents came to be realized in other former villages, like Chicago and Minneapolis. But many of the great-grandchildren of those dreamers would not now choose to live in such proud places.

  Second Presbyterian Church is small. It has two-thirds the members it had a generation ago. The church sits on the corner of Main and Jefferson. It’s a white frame building with a disproportionately small steeple. When I remarked on this to someone, I was told that the building committee had instructed the architect to make sure that the steeple was shorter than the town’s water tower, so that lightning would strike the tower and not the church. It was a prudent plan. Lightning does strike the water tower and has never once hit the church. But the steeple looks too short.

  The congregation’s pastors mostly come fresh out of seminary. Usually they grew up in large suburban churches. They stay about three years and return to the world they know better. They often come with hopes to do very grand things.

  My predecessor in the pulpit, the Rev. Gerry Paulsen, was here only two years. On his last Sunday he preached a sermon on the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Exodus in which he represented himself as Moses and the congregation as the Children of Israel, a “stiff-necked people” reluctant to be led out of Egypt into the Promised Land of Canaan. By Canaan he meant, of course, his vision for Second Presbyterian Church. When he finished the sermon, he took off his pulpit robe, laid it over his arm, and walked down the aisle and out of the church. He and his wife got in their car and drove off, skipping the farewell reception the Women’s Association had arranged in the Fellowship Hall. Such rudeness mystified these good people. But the sermon escaped them altogether, for it has always been clear to them where Canaan is—the rolling grasslands of southwestern Minnesota.

  Four years ago, my wife, Annie, and I and our two children, Jennifer and Christopher, then nine and three, came here with our fond hopes. We are both children of the suburbs. We came partly out of an urban arrogance that fancied we could bring something to “these people.” We came partly because we were romanced by a nostalgic vision of small-town life. We came mostly because it was the first place that would have us, and we needed the job.

  What we have found is a little less than we expected and a great deal more. The little less was the realization that people here and anywhere are just people, often stiff-necked, a little vain, a little jealous, and a little afraid. The great deal more has come in witnessing grace at work, so gently and surprisingly, in these same people. One can see it in any place where people live together, but in a small place like this, where life moves a bit more slowly, you see it more easily. It comes simply, in the “things that happen,” in daily dramas that you come to recognize as tales of grace.

  – 1 –

  The Christmas Pageant

  The Christmas pageant is over. It was, in the end, wonderful, and now that it is past, my blood pressure and, in fact, the church’s communal blood pressure have dropped about twenty points. We got through it again without schism and with no divorces. None of the kids got grounded this year, but it was close.

  The whole saga of the Christmas Pageant really began precisely forty-seven Christmases ago when Alvina Johnson first directed Second Presbyterian’s “Children’s Christmas Pageant,” something that she continued to do through ten pastors, nine U.S. presidents, three wars, and who knows how many Christian Education Committees, for the next forty-six years, but not this year, and that’s the story. International alliances came and went; wars were fought and peace made; ministers were called and then called away—but Alvina Johnson directing the Children’s Christmas Pageant was like a great rock in a turbulent sea.

  Alvina is “Mrs. Johnson,” although there is no “Mr. Johnson.” There was a Mr. Johnson for only three and a half weeks, forty-nine years ago. A few days shy of their month’s wedding anniversary, Mr. Johnson (nobody remembers his first name) left, although Alvina never puts it that way. She prefers to say, “He just ran off to Minneapolis,” with the accent on Minneapolis, as if it were that notorious place and Mr. Johnson’s morally feeble nature that lured him away from wife and home rather than anything having to do with Alvina.

  Nobody here ever talks about why he left. They all know, just as they know why rain falls down and grass grows up. One might call Alvina “stubborn,” but that word isn’t quite enough. Alvina is intractable, intransigent, unmovable. This, everybody assumes, Mr. Johnson easily discovered in the space of three and a half weeks. When folks around here get put out with Alvina, who is disguised as a sweet and demure seventy-year-old lady, they refer to her, under their breath of course, as “the iron butterfly.”

  But Alvina does what she says, always, exactly, and forever. Forty-seven years ago somebody asked her to do the Christmas Pageant. She said yes. They didn’t say, “Would you do the Christmas Pageant this year?” so Alvina, who is a literalist in all things, assumed that they meant forever, and she is a woman of her word.

  Alvina’s Pageants always had precisely nine characters: one Mary, one Joseph, three Wise Men, two Shepherds, one Angel, and one Narrator.

  The script was simply the Christmas story out of the King James Bible, which meant that two six-year-old shepherds had to learn to say, “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.”

  Auditions for the nine parts were held the last Sunday afternoon in October for forty-six years. Rehearsals for the nine lucky winners were held for the next five Sunday afternoons. Alvina’s goal was nothing less than perfection in Christmas pageantry: perfect lines, perfect pacing, blocking, enunciation, perfect everything, which is not easily achieved with little children, even nine carefully selected ones. Critics said that Alvina would have much preferred working with nine midget actors, if she could have gotten away with it.

  Time and again people tried to get Alvina to open things up so that every kid who wanted a part could have one. “Alvina,” they would say, “Scripture says that there was a heavenly host, not just one lonely angel. Alvina, why not a few more shepherds, then everybody could be in the Pageant?” or “Alvina, if there were shepherds, there had to be sheep, right? We’ll make some cute little woolly sheep outfits for the three- and four-year-olds.” “Nope,” she’d answer, “too many youngsters, too many problems.”

  Early in the fall, however, something happened that deflected the inertia of nearly half a century of always doing it the way it had always been done. The Christian Education Committee included the three young mothers of last year’s rejected Mary, Joseph, and Wise Man Number Two. And these young mothers pulled off what they call in Central America a coup d’état. At their September meeting they passed the following motion: “Resolved: All children who wish to be in the Christmas Pageant may do so. Parts will be found.”

  Alvina heard about it that night and was in my office the next morning at nine o’clock sharp. She began by asking me if I thought the decorations on the Christmas tree in the church parlor were appropriate. I had not noticed them, I said. Well, she informed me, they were walnut shells decorated to look like little mice with tiny stocking
caps on their heads. “What,” she asked, “do mice have to do with the birth of our Lord?”

  Now, I knew this wasn’t the problem. I, too, had heard about the committee meeting the night before. “What’s the matter, Alvina?” I asked. “Young mothers,” she said. She spit these two words out as though “young mother” were an illicit occupation. “Young mothers,” she continued, “who have no knowledge of or experience in the proper direction of a Christmas Pageant. Young mothers are behind those walnut-shell mice, and they are behind the destruction of the Christmas Pageant.” She then resigned as director and said, “If these young mothers know so much, let them try to do it.” She was angry, maybe even angry enough to quit the church and become a Methodist, but she didn’t. I suspect that she wanted to hang around at least long enough to see the young mothers fall flat on their faces.

  The Pageant was last week. The young mothers didn’t fall flat on their faces, but the Pageant was, well, different from what everybody had come to expect over the last forty-six years. It seemed as though there were a cast of thousands, even though the actual number was fifty or so, which was every kid in the church up to about eighth grade. At this age, they would sooner die than get dressed up in their father’s bathrobe and pretend to be a biblical character.

  There must have been a dozen shepherds and ten angels (a veritable heavenly host). Then there were the sheep, a couple dozen three-, four-, and five-year-olds who had on woolly, fake-sheepskin vests with woolly hoods and their dads’ black socks pulled up on their arms and legs. The Pageant was a lot of things, but smooth it wasn’t. And one of the chief problems was these very sheep. Now, in suburban Christmas Pageants, I imagine sheep are well behaved and fairly quiet, but suburban kids have seldom seen real sheep. The only sheep most suburban kids have ever seen are on the front of Sunday church bulletin covers: peaceful, grazing sheep who just stand there and look cute and cuddly.