So he trembled at the priest’s lot: here one is, having dedicated one’s life to God, and yet here one is, because of it, lumbered with one’s fellow man. Joe spends a good deal of time pondering this situation: “Running a parish, any parish, was like riding in a cattle car in the wintertime — you could appreciate the warmth of your dear dumb friends, but you never knew when you’d be stepped on, or worse.” I have no doubt that my father’s leeriness of people kept him fixed on this particular aspect of the priesthood. In 1944, in Sandstone, Minnesota, where he served thirteen months in prison instead of going to war, he wrote to his sister: “There is a justice, hardly poetic, in the way I find myself tied up in destiny with millions of people when what I want most is to be separated from them.”
For him, art was as much a spiritual vocation as the priesthood — a more exalted one even. “You, God-like,” he once said, “make a character who lives, who didn’t exist before you made him out of the slime of your dictionary.” But art, by contrast to the priesthood, allowed no compromise. In the novel, Joe’s failure to achieve an immediate relationship with God is ultimately a triumph: a parish priest’s job demands engagement with the world. My father, however, felt that daily life could only be a distraction from his calling. Tragically, in the years that he struggled to write Wheat, he was often lost in a wilderness of petty detail and procrastination, wasting hours repairing and polishing his shoes, rubbing emollients into his leather-bound books, battling bats, mice, and squirrels in the house, and gophers under the sun; caulking windows, spackling cracks and holes, gluing, taping, and tapping in tacks.
In the end, though, in Wheat That Springeth Green, as in Morte D’Urban and his many stories, he achieved something of what he wanted: work that reflects and distills what he called God’s sense of humor; work which so deftly makes language one with event and character that you need not be Catholic to understand it, have religious faith to believe it, or possess anything, but a sense of humor yourself, to laugh and know it is true.
— KATHERINE A. POWERS
WHEAT THAT SPRINGETH GREEN
To
GGG and HFX for helping
OSB for providing
RAG for waiting
BWP for being
PART ONE
1. SEE ME
“SEE ME,” JOE said, in his pajamas and slippers now, coming into the living room to say good night to the party people again. “Oh, look who’s here!” they said, glad to see him again. But Ivy came in from the kitchen and got him. “Good night,” he said. “Good night, good night,” they said, sad to see him go. In the kitchen Ivy said, “Roscoe,” but Roscoe was just a cat, “whut I tell this boy?” (Ivy had told him what she always told him, “Don’t do no bad stuff, boy.”) She shooed him up the back stairs. He got into bed again. Then he came down the front stairs again, but stayed behind the portieres, peeking out. He wanted the pretty black-haired lady in the pretty orange dress to see him. “Oh oh,” she said, “See Me’s back again.” He came out from behind the portieres, saying to her (he didn’t know why), “I eat cheese.” She and the other party people, and even Mama and Daddy, laughed. It was a joke! “I eat cheese! I eat cheese!” Uncle Bobby, Mama’s brother, picked him up and carried him around the room, pinching his bottom, but not hard. “I eat cheese! I eat cheese!” But Uncle Bobby fooled him and carried him out of the room, up the front stairs. Uncle Bobby stood a silver dollar up on the table by Joe’s bed. “Keep an eye on it, Sport, or it might run away.” Joe didn’t think it would. It didn’t. So he came down the front stairs and stayed behind the portieres, not peeking out. “Last Sunday we took the boy to church,” Daddy was telling the party people. “The new man was going on about the Dollar-a-Sunday Club, and I was going to sleep, when the boy, in that clear voice, says, ‘Daddy, what does she want?’” The party people laughed, and Joe came smiling out from behind the portieres, and then didn’t know what to say. But the pretty black-haired lady said, “And now you go to church, Joe?” “I go to church,” he said. The party people laughed. It was a joke! “I go to church! I go to church!” The party people laughed, but not as much as before. “I eat cheese! I eat cheese!” The party people laughed, but not as much as before. “Good night, good night,” they said, and Daddy said, “Good night.” Mama took Joe up the front stairs. She told him to stay in bed. He told her he would. “Promise?” she said. “Promise,” he said. Mama gave him a kiss. He gave Mama one. Mama liked him. Daddy did. Uncle Bobby did. The party people did. Ivy did. Roscoe didn’t, but was just a cat. Frances, next door, didn’t, but she didn’t like boys or jokes. At her birthday party — no boys — when Frances and her friends were playing a game in the yard and Joe was sitting on the stone wall watching them, the birthday pony went poopy on the grass. “Poopy!” Joe yelled. Frances’s friends and the maid laughed. It was a joke! But Frances yelled, “Shut up! You little squirt!” Frances didn’t like jokes. Her friends did. The maid did. The party people did. They were sad Joe had to go to bed. No, if he went downstairs he’d break his promise, and that would be bad stuff. Stepping on ants was bad stuff. So was giving Roscoe a little kick. But Roscoe did bad stuff. He caught birds and ate them up, but not all the feathers. Joe had told on him, but Ivy had said, “Yeah, well, that’s his business.” Ivy said Roscoe could see God, but Joe didn’t think he could. Ivy said Roscoe was thinking of God when he purred, but Joe didn’t think he was. “Boy, can’t you just tell?” Joe couldn’t. “Ivy, what’ll God do if I do bad stuff?” “Plenty.” “What?” “You go and hurt yourself — fall down, bump your head, bite your tongue—that’s whut.” “Ivy, that’s bad stuff.” “That’s whut you think.” “Ivy, why does God do bad stuff?” “Boy, that’s his business. Shut up.” “Shut up’s bad stuff, Ivy.”
2. CARRYING THE CROSS
THE LITTLE TOWER that bulged out of the attic was where Joe went when he didn’t know what to do, where he’d gone to pray before and after Ivy died, where nowadays he went to smoke Daddy’s Herbert Tareytons and Uncle Bobby’s Camels and sometimes to be what he might be when he grew up — seeing one of Daddy’s trucks (HACKETT’S COAL IS HOT STUFF) go by in the street below, he might call long distance, his fist the phone, his cigarette a cigar, and order a million short; hearing church bells, he might turn his baseball cap around, back to front, and show himself in the window (no balcony) and smile down upon the multitude below, his right hand busily blessing it, his left idly smoking behind him.
If he decided to be a businessman, he wanted to be one like Uncle Bobby and get a lot of fun out of life. (It was too bad, since he was Daddy’s son, he didn’t want to be one like Daddy, but he didn’t.) The trouble wouldn’t be, as it was now in sports and in crowds, that he was short for his age (nine) — so was Uncle Bobby (thirty-one). The trouble would be that he would be like Daddy and not like Uncle Bobby.