Missionary Training

Linford Detweiler

MY first memory is the sound of a trumpet at a camp meeting revival.
The notes pierce my blurry world and bring an evening into focus. I
have been living as if underwater, my brand new mind holding its
seedling breath beneath the surface of distant muffled things, and I come up for
air, gasping at the shiny music, this air flung toward me through a brass bell at the
front of a tethered tent. I maneuver my unpredictable head for a better view, cock
my ear. I am hearing my name. I am being beckoned.

I see the trumpet and strings of bare bulbs and my sister Grace’s braids. And I
am touching and seeing my warm mother who is separate from me for the first
time and who smells of skin and nipples and mouth and washed hair put up in a
bun. Her bright eyes behind dark-rimmed glasses are moist and seem to see
something far away. What does she see? But this music! I awake to discover I am a
member of an audience. And I form my first real thought: I want to be where the
trumpet is.

Now we are on our way home in a roving room that makes the dusky world go
by. My father grips the wide, cream-colored steering wheel with both hands and
steps on the pedals. My brothers and my sister press their faces against the
windows of our Volkswagen bus and look for deer. I am on my mother’s lap in
the passenger seat, exhausted but reeling, newly out of my shell, out of my mind
thanks to the egg tooth trumpet. And I begin to sing, a folded boy wrapped in
the arms of this, my first real remembered night on earth.

My father is a minister in a white wooden church in the tiny coalmining town
of Fairpoint, Ohio. I am in the first grade now. The coal trucks wind and wheeze,
shift and grind up and down the wooded hills past the parsonage, past my school,
past the swings, up and down hills which are being carved and swallowed,
mountains moved and torn apart for coal, as if the darkest secrets of our souls are
being excavated.

There is a creek, bright orange with sulfur, that runs past the white church.
There are train tracks not more than thirty feet from the front steps of the
sanctuary. The train whistle blows during my father’s sermon, and he pauses. My
mother laughs nervously. The crossing bell clangs, the hymnbooks tremble in
their racks on the backs of the pews, and the engines rumble toward us all ironclad
and steel-hearted to shake our Sunday faith, cars heavy-laden with coal, off to
stoke the fires of the world.

Far in the distance we occasionally glimpse a machine called Big Muskie, and it
is the world’s largest earthmover, a walking dragline twelve stories high and
longer than a football field. We learn that the bucket can move 325 tons of earth
in a single bite, and I wonder if God himself is at the steering wheel, busy moving
his mountains. We see God only from miles away, his great lights working long
after dark. We aren’t allowed back in the holy mines because of the dynamite and
the fire and brimstone blasting.

My father has us children (there are six of us now) memorize Psalm 46.
Therefore will not we fear though the earth be removed, and though the
mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar
and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah.
Come behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made in the earth.
King David is my favorite, with his great Goliath sword full of poetry, and my
father explains that these verses may well be referring to California which will one
day be severed from the country and swallowed whole by the Pacific Ocean for
the sins of Hollywood. But I feel like I know the young King David, and if you
ask me, he seems to be intimately acquainted with the ways of God’s coalminers
just over the hill right here in Ohio. My father also explains what Selah means:
Stop and think about it. I think to myself that my father doesn’t have to say Selah
during his sermons on Sunday mornings. The train whistle takes care of it for
him.

Days begin coming one after another. Wherever do they come from? The
hymns begin to have names, and the names of the hymns teach me that words can
be beautiful: “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning,” “When the Roll Is Called Up
Yonder,” “Softly and Tenderly,” “’Tis Midnight and on Olive’s Brow.”
The hymns and my father and mother teach me that we children will one day
be missionaries. We will, Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to all
nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
Martha King comes to Fairpoint, Ohio, from South America to show her slides,
and the slides always end with a Guatemalan sunset. We raise money for Martha
King at the white church so that she can steer a powder blue Toyota Land Cruiser
all her own, and she will drive the Land Cruiser all the way to South America to
translate the Wycliffe Bible for the Indians, her four-wheel drive parked just
outside the prophet Daniel’s window. Lions sleep in their distant den, waiting for
Martha to stir them to life with indigenous words.

We do not have much money, but somehow I have some money on a Saturday
morning. I have a handful of coins, and I want to send my coins to the
missionaries. I want to send my coins to Martha King. I am putting the coins into
a white envelope. I am licking the sticky sweetness on the envelope to seal it. The
coins roll into one corner, and the sealed envelope bends and wilts like an
unwieldy flower, heavy with the weight of its bloom. My parents praise me as if I
have just purchased a hotel room for the baby Jesus who is now welcome to come
in from the barn.

We children sometimes put a few pennies on the railroad tracks during the
pause between Sunday school and the Sunday morning worship service. After the
benediction and the doxology, Praise God from whom all blessings flow, we shake
my father’s hand at the church door and run to secretly collect the thin copper
wafers. We walk around in our Sunday best with shiny smooth suns in our pockets
that we can’t stop touching: missionary suns set in dark places.

There is a book in the church library about missionaries who go to work with
the headhunters in Peru. I look at this book after almost every service. I’m a
Sunday school junkie, addicted to this godly pornography. There are pages of
naked natives with flourishes of bone in their noses and severed, shrunken human
heads strung up on clotheslines. And the skies are so low and bleak and turbulent
that I want to be a native with no clothes. I want to be one of the dark, naked
people with glistening limbs and sharpened spears. I feel strange and wonderful
looking at the book. But I know that I won’t be dark and naked and strange and
wonderful. I will be one of the white missionaries with sunset snapshots.

My father buys an old upright piano, and I know somehow immediately that
this wooden house with elephant ivory keys and pedals like a car will let me write
a story with my life that I can’t imagine yet. I play the piano every night after
supper, and this usually means I do not have to help with the mounds of dishes
dirtied to feed cornmeal mush and tomato gravy to six children with elbows on
the table. My nine-year-old sister Grace tells me that I do indeed have options
when it comes to the piano: I can play the hymns in church, the hymns with the
beautiful names, or I can be what is referred to as a concert pianist, which, she
explains, means I will play the piano for silent movies.

I close my eyes and see myself on a wooden pier by the sea next to a trumpet
player. Somebody is giving an altar call, but it’s all a bit blurry. A missionary
sunset is reflected on the dancing water. I am playing a hymn on the piano, but
the hymn is dancing with melodies I am already hearing in my head, and soon
there is music with no name, and I wonder about these silent movies that I have
never seen and the music with no name that seems to be inside of me.

I see no silent movies, as we have no television, and my parents don’t approve
of going to the cinema. My father says Hollywood is evil and soap operas are
worse and television commercials are worst of all. But we do occasionally get to
see Audubon nature films at a nearby college, and we do see one movie as a family
on television at a neighbor’s house. This movie is called Ben Hur, and it is not
silent, but it is mind-boggling in its appeal, and I am Roman for weeks afterward
with lath sword and swing-set galley ship and bicycle chariot. But what about
these silent movies and the concert pianists?

We do have a record player. My father plays records after we all get put to bed,
and the music floats up the stairway and into our rooms. Mahalia Jackson, Ethel
Waters, the Korean Orphans Choir, Eddie Arnold’s Cattle Call, the Pastoral
Symphony. Does my father like Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony because he is a
pastor? The movement with the orchestral thunderstorm wakes up my oldest
brother Conrad and scares him, and when it’s my turn to pick the music for
falling asleep, Conrad tells me not to pick the Pastoral Symphony. And I do.
Some summer nights while we sleep, my father takes his portable reel-to-reel
tape recorder out across the fields to the swamp to record the frogs and the
crickets and the waterfowl. He also records the sound of the creek and the wind
sighing in the trees. The tapes play during breakfast, and there is no talking as we
eat our hot Cream of Wheat cereal and hear the sounds that were made while we
slept. My father says this is the best music of all.

We do not have television. We listen to stories on the record player just like the
blind man who lives up the hill from the church in his little leaning house with
the dirt floor. He sits and smiles in his dark corner cracking black walnuts. His
breath smells old, and the inky hulls stain his fingers tar black. He listens to voices
reading books, famous stories acted out and recorded for blind people. The blind
man doesn’t mind that his rooms are dark.

When somebody asks my parents what kind of stories we listen to, they say,
Character-building stories, of course. The needle drops on our spinning world,
and our first two stories are about missionaries.

There is a missionary in a plane lost in the clouds at night, fog covering him
like too many blankets, too many blankets, whatever will he do, he can’t see to
land. We hear the sound of the prop plane on the record player. Suddenly, after
what seems like a long time, there is a break in the clouds, and the missionary
pilot is able to land after all beneath Abraham’s stars. Years later, when he comes
back to the United States on furlough, he discovers that at the very minute the
clouds parted, an old lady had felt the urge to pray for him. I think to myself, it’s
not much of a story, but I get the point.

The other story is about a missionary who preaches to people who worship a
god named Pélé. Pélé lives in a volcano. The missionary taunts the people who
worship the volcano: Pélé, he not God. Jehovah, he is God. The volcano rumbles
hungrily and hisses, and the people moan and wail and fear for their lives. When
Pélé gets angry, he vomits lava that runs down into the village and burns things.
They want to throw a girl into the volcano to make Pélé happy so he won’t get
angry and vomit lava. The missionary says he will walk up the volcano to prove
that his God is stronger than Pélé, and the people moan and wail some more.
This is really asking for trouble. But sure enough, the missionary begins to climb,
and after reaching the top he shouts down the mountain for all to hear, Pélé, he
not God. Jehovah, he is God. The people are bewildered.

We children walk around Fairpoint, Ohio, saying, Pélé, he not God.
And there are secrets. I don’t plan for there to be secrets: they accumulate
without my permission. My brothers and I walk for miles along the curving roads
between Fairpoint and St. Clairsville on warm Sunday afternoons after church,
after Sunday dinner, and pick up cigarette butts or sometimes part of a cigar.
Sometimes we find whole cigarettes, and we build a fire in the woods, and we
smoke. Jonathan explains, You have to breathe in—you don’t blow into the
cigarette. I say, You’re kidding. Conrad smokes the cigars. Later that night in
bed, Jonathan says, Linford, we better pray and say we’re sorry about the
cigarettes. I know he’s thinking to himself about hell and the fact that
missionaries do not smoke. We lie awake and silently tell God our secrets.

One day after school, I am walking around Fairpont with a neighbor girl, and
we crawl through one of the church basement windows so that I can show her the
inside of my father’s church. We walk up to the pulpit, and I show her the tiny,
hand-painted church with the slot in the roof for coins. I explain that people who
have birthdays during the week put in the amount of money that matches their
age. If someone turns forty-two, they put in forty-two cents. If someone turns
twelve, they put in twelve cents. If someone is a hundred they put in a dollar.
Sometimes the grown-ups who are not a hundred put in a dollar anyway. The
money goes to the missionaries on the foreign fields.

And then the two of us look at each other, my friend and I, in the silence of the
sanctuary with the light streaming through the stained glass Jesus. He’s holding a
lamb in one arm and a stick with a hook in the other. We turn the church upside
down and shake it like an uprooted tree full of forbidden fruit. The apple coins
clatter and drop into our palms like thirty-odd pieces of silver.

Now we are looking at each other and making it up as we go. We are holding
this unanticipated birthday backing, this original sinful windfall. We run down the
aisle away from the altar, down the steps to the church basement, and crawl back
out into the open air. She goes first as I hold up the window. We look around.
We are alone.

The stained glass Jesus, who on the inside of the sanctuary glowed warmly,
backlit with evening Ohio sun, now that we are outside is just a dim, charcoal,
unintelligible pane, covered with chicken wire. For the time being, Jesus has gone
dark.

We begin walking. I look up, and we are standing in front of Piatek’s, the pale
green, cinderblock building with the rusty metal Seven-Up sign on the side.
Piatek’s is next to the post office, a mere half block from the parsonage where my
family lives. It is a tavern, one of seven (within just a few miles of our Mennonite
church) which I have heard my father denounce from his pulpit. Seven taverns
and no grocery store.

Piatek’s is where I have seen Pistol Pete, the town drunk, ease himself down the
steps, holding the rail with both hands as if he were blind and afraid of losing his
balance on a high-wire far above the earth. White-whiskered and grinning
toothlessly, he touches his feet down tentatively on the sidewalk. He turns,
fumbling and mumbling, toward his invisible friends, trying to lean first on one
and then the other.

I know that my setting foot in this shadowy room will be like an Israelite
marrying one of the Malachites that King David hacks to pieces practically every
weekend in the Old Testament. And I don’t think children are supposed to go in.
My friend isn’t worried. Her parents and their friends go to taverns all the time.
And now we are inside.

There is a long counter with stools lined up alongside, and a married Malachite
couple standing behind it, smiling. My own private Eve takes me by the hand and
leads me toward the back of the low-lit bar. She shows me a machine in the
corner and which slot to drop the coins into. She grips a knob and pulls.
Something drops. She removes a bright yellow bag of potato chips from below
and says, See?

I can see, and now I’m using stolen missionary money to buy my own bag. She
lets me pull the knob. Maybe I’ll just go ahead and get all my transgressing out of
the way early, all at once, right now, the knowledge of good and evil during my
grade school years. She grins and takes another bite. And so do I. So do I.
We walk through the tavern with the potato chips inside us, looking neither to
the right nor to the left, back out into the open air. It’s a miracle to me that we
are not apprehended within a few minutes. I usually get caught red-handed at
times like this. My father says, Beware, your sins will find you out, and, My son, if
sinners entice thee, consent thou not.

One sinful evening after dark, my brother Jonathan produces a secret BB gun
that he has borrowed from a friend. We slip out into the cricket-singing night to
shoot out the streetlights. We’ve done this before, but on this particular night,
Jonathan will systematically shoot out all five streetlights in Fairpoint, Ohio. The
bulbs gasp when hit, let out a lungfull of translucent, sickly yellow steam like a
dying breath, and then go dark as crow feathers. Fairpoint is now completely
bathed in black, which is just the way we like it, because we are Indians on the
move. I’m Cherokee, and Jonathan is Apache. We move through the new
darkness silent as shadows, back home to our village in the basement of the
parsonage. Later there is a knock on our door, and one of the neighbors explains
to my father, the pastor, that he doesn’t appreciate what we boys are doing, and
my father takes off his belt practically before the door is closed.

So I have more secrets to tell God. And God seems so close. I tell God that I
want to do great things for him like Jacob and Joseph and Samuel and David.
And Solomon, during his good years, before he got carried away with the wives
and concubines. I want my name to be remembered like theirs after I’m gone. I
promise I’ll try not to be wayward like the Israelites who would watch the sea part
one week and build golden calves the next. I’ll try to quit pretending that I’m an
Indian brave, smoking peacefully with my brothers around fires in the woods. I’ll
try to start pretending that I’m a white missionary.

As I’m falling asleep, I discover my penis.

We have a book about a duck named Ping who is supposed to dive for fish.
Ping is owned by Chinese fishermen. At the end of the day, Ping and the rest of
the ducks are called back to the boat, and the last one on gets swatted with a
switch. One evening Ping realizes he’s going to be the last one on the boat, and
he opts to spend the night on his own and has some misadventures. But this is all
beside the point, which is, whenever I look at my penis, I see one of those
Chinese fishermen in their funny little pointed hats. If I touch my penis, the
fisherman stands up straight, and after a while can send an incredible shiver of
something utterly beyond and electric through the lower half and then some of
my body.

When I march out a few days later to show my mother this amazing discovery,
she is shocked and aghast. She takes me straight to the bathroom sink so that I
can wash my hands with soap and warm water and tells me to sleep with my
hands on top of the covers from now on. But I don’t like to sleep with my hands
on top of the covers. And a few days later, when the little Chinaman is really
standing up straight, I go to my older brothers’ bedroom to show and tell the
two of them how it works. They seem tickled, but they shoo me away when I
want to demonstrate while wearing nothing but my pajama top.

It’s the early seventies, and almost every neighborhood boy (except for me) has
a box full of discarded magazines in the garage, and the magazines are full of
naked white people, mostly women. I look at the naked women in the magazines,
and I feel strange and wonderful again, and it seems odd that God would put the
special hair between their legs and give them such beautiful bottoms and bosoms for
their babies. I think about how God gets to look down from heaven and watch all the
women he created in his image. He doesn’t need a magazine in a garage.

Someday I’ll have a woman too, and even if we’re missionaries, I hope she will
be naked from time to time so I can look upon her.

One Sunday morning my father is preaching, and at the end of the sermon he
asks if anyone would like to make a decision for Christ, heads bowed, eyes closed,
no one looking around. But I am looking around, and nobody is offering to make
the decision. So after a while, I raise my hand to try to help out. My father says, I
see that hand.

After Sunday dinner, my father takes me down to the swing-set underneath the
trees, and we sit down side by side, just the two of us. He pulls a little yellow
book out of his shirt pocket called The Four Spiritual Laws and begins reading
through it and asking me special questions. If I were to die, do I know whether or
not I would go to heaven? All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.
My mind is wandering because I know my brothers will want to go build a fire
in the woods, and I don’t want to get left behind. I begin to think that maybe I
should tell my father I raised my hand because I just wanted to help out. But I
answer all the questions and when we get to the end of the little yellow book, we
read a prayer out loud together, and my father says that I can know now that I am
going to heaven. But, he says, I have to tell people about my decision for Christ.
Otherwise, I guess the salvation doesn’t necessarily stick. I nod my head that I
understand. Now it’s really time for me to start getting in the missionary frame of
mind, even though I’m still only in Fairpoint, Ohio. My father seems thoughtful
and pleased, and I like the look on his face. I am excused to go play.

As I walk away to find my brothers, I think to myself that I sure do want to go
to heaven. But I also know from listening to my father week after week that he is
very opposed to any idea of “Once saved, always saved.” (That’s what the Baptists
teach, and they twist the Scriptures all up and ignore important parts that are
plain as day according to my father. I guess the Baptists are in for a surprise
somewhere down the road, because they all think they’re going to heaven.
They’re wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing.) I know that I have to ask God for
forgiveness on an ongoing basis and not get too sure of myself, or I’ll go into a
backslide. My father has taught us children that certain sins, especially divorce and
remarriage, can really foul everything up and get our names crossed out of the
Book of Life.

My father didn’t mention these dangers while he had the little yellow book out,
but I know I shouldn’t feel overly good about my heavenly prospects just yet. I
do know that my father expects Jesus to come back in the very near future. I
asked him once what the price of gasoline might be like when I was a grown man
of say, thirty, and my father put his tanned gardening arm around me and told me
that there was no way I was going to make it that long. So maybe, if I’m lucky,
I’ll be saved long enough to get by until Jesus comes back in the next few years,
although, if Jesus does steal the show, white horse across the sky, the sound of the
trumpet, graves opening, the dead rediscovering memory, I suppose I won’t get
to be a missionary after all.

I can’t find my brothers anywhere, and this puts me in a foul mood, because
now I’m stuck at home all Sunday afternoon, and they’re off in the woods
building fires. My father must have told my mother about what happened at the
swing-set, because later she says that I’m sure not acting like it’s my first day of
being saved.

But after our Sunday evening supper of popcorn, grape juice, and canned
peaches, when we’re all getting ready for church, my father takes me aside and
reminds me that later, in a little while, at the informal Sunday evening service,
there will be a time of sharing. It’s a perfect time to talk about what happened at
the swing-set and help make the salvation stick.

At the service in the church basement, we sing the hymns with the beautiful
names, people calling out their favorites, and then my father asks if anyone has
something they would like to share. Certain people say certain things about who
is in the hospital and who is out of the hospital, but I know my father is waiting
for me to share about the swing-set, and my face feels like it’s on fire, and I am
studying the zig and the zag of my shoelaces, sitting with my brothers and their
friends, the Androsko boys. The Androskos are going to sell their farm to the coal
company and buy a brand new doublewide trailer on a lot on the edge of town.
The Androskos are also going to buy a brand new Chevy Nova. And my father is
waiting. The coal company will push the Androsko farm aside and peel back the
earth and carve out the coal. The Androsko coal will rumble by our church on the
train.

My father waits a long time, then asks again if anyone has something they
would like to share, and then waits some more. I can’t share about the swing-set,
and I have to keep my eyes on the basement floor of the church. My father says,
Let us pray, and there is no more sharing.

I am quite sure that I am going to get in trouble later, and I agonize for the
entire informal service about what’s to come, and I think about how Jesus felt in
the garden. But later, my father doesn’t seem upset by me not sharing and just
smiles as if we have a secret of our own, and I can be happy again. I can begin
breathing again.

And I do hope that somehow the part at the swing-set about my sins being
forgiven and going to heaven is true.

My father brings home a record that really turns our heads, called The Guitar
Genius of the Ventures. He plays it, and we drown in an ocean of echoing electric
guitars. My father decides after several days that he doesn’t like the Ventures so
well after all, and he ends up hiding the record away out of reach, but we boys
sure like the sound of all those red guitars, and we know where they’re hidden.
The next Sunday morning, we rush home to the parsonage while our father is
still shaking hands in the shadow of the steeple, and we turn the Ventures up
loud, louder, and listen to the red guitars. If I understand correctly, when the
guitars start getting turned up, after a certain point, it’s a sin. So one of us
watches out the window until we see the rest of the family walking slowly home.
When they get too close, we put the red guitars back in their hiding place until
next week, and we put on Duane Friend. Duane is pretty amazing as well. He also
plays electric guitar, which we like, but he is more soft-spoken than the Ventures,
and plays hymns. My father must have decided that if one electric guitar was
good, four or five would be even better. But it didn’t work out that way.
We have moved just a few miles outside of Fairpoint to a little house on twelve
acres, and my father has a grand, green vegetable garden with watermelon, green
beans, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, leaf lettuce, cabbage, carrots, sweet corn,
rhubarb, and all manner of squash—butternut, acorn, zucchini, summer. He
plants pink and white petunias all along our property, and the mailman says he
can smell the petunias even before he turns onto our gravel road. My father plants
special trees in carefully selected places around the house. One day I discover a
swarm of bees clinging to one of the trees, a crawling, fanning, universe of
stingers and wings, a miniature city of activity the size of a small, golden child,
and my father gets a man from town to help him put the bees into a white
wooden box on the edge of our property. Soon we will have our own honey in
the comb. But my father’s specialty is strawberries. We children help keep the
runners snipped primly, and if there is a late frost warning, we gather armloads of
blankets from the house and cover the tender plants.

Although my father keeps busy from dawn till dusk with his gardening and
pastoral duties, he is supremely interested in what we children are doing and
thinking. I’m guessing this has to do with the fact that we’re going to be
preaching the gospel to all nations.

He buys art courses for Conrad and Jonathan, and they both paint like
adolescent Renaissance men. But what Conrad and Jonathan both really love is
the outdoors. They especially love to fish, though my father would rather they
work in the garden. If my brothers complain about having to work a lot, my
father says, You’re getting off easy. You should have been around when I was a
boy.

My father and mother usually get up early in the morning, and this comes from
growing up on Amish farms. If my father’s chores weren’t done by six a.m., his
father would complain that the day was shot. And when my brothers complain
about getting whipped too much, my father says again, You’re getting off easy,
you should have been around when I was a boy.

According to my father, when he was young, he was interested in painting and
poetry and music and in being an artist. But he grew up on an Amish farm where
it was important for a boy to be strong and adept at handling the Percheron
workhorses. I sometimes wonder if my father got ridiculed as a boy. Maybe he
wasn’t as tough as his brothers and their friends. Maybe he didn’t fit in too well.
There was no real use for painting, because there was too much farm work to be
done. Musical instruments, except for the harmonica, were forbidden by the
church.

I know this is true, because my cousin Serena in Iowa, who is my age, bought
an upright piano with her own money. She wasn’t allowed to bring the piano into
the house because of the church rules. She had to keep it in the chicken house.
When we visited, I would sit in the chicken coop with the Rhode Island Reds and
play Serena’s piano for her, and she would smile at me. There would be a hen
roosting up on top of the piano two octaves above middle C.

Now that he is older, my father seems to want to give us children opportunities
that he never had growing up. That’s partly why he left the Amish church and
bought the art courses, and that’s why he brought home the upright piano, right
into the house. That’s why he bought a record player and records with all
different kinds of music.

And sometimes my father will read books to us in the evenings, the whole
family gathered around. My father reads well and pays attention to the words, and
sometimes we all get to laughing. And he plays his harmonica that he learned to
play as a boy. My favorite harmonica song is “Redwing.”

In addition to the books that are read aloud, my father and mother buy us a
large collection of records containing hundreds and hundreds of characterbuilding
stories. Since we don’t have television, we listen to these records a lot.
We have to make our own pictures inside of our heads. We quote our favorite
lines from the stories, and certain parts and certain sound effects make us laugh
until it hurts.

But my father doesn’t seem to be too happy with us children. For one thing,
we don’t eat properly. I guess that someday we may have to set the example for
natives or aborigines with no education (and possibly no clothing), and how are
we going to preach the good news of Jesus convincingly when everyone can see
we have such bad table manners?

My father explains that we hold our silverware the wrong way, we take bites
that are way too big, and we don’t sit in a correct fashion. If he can hear our teeth
knocking together when we chew, or if we’re chewing something that is making a
lot of crunching—even if our mouths are closed—it will upset my father very
quickly, and he’ll compare us to farm animals eating in the barn of his childhood.
If we drip soup from a spoon or drip cereal milk on the way to our mouths, he
looks exasperated and tells us to take smaller bites. If we drink from a cup and get
something wet above our upper lip, my father explains to us that we’re not
drinking properly and shows us how to purse our lips and drink without wearing a
moustache. We aren’t ever allowed to fold a piece of bread and wipe extra gravy
off of our plates with it. We have to cut a piece off first and put it on the end of
the fork.

Quite often one of us will have to leave the table in the middle of a meal,
because we can’t get it right. Sometimes it is just announced that somebody has
to leave the table, and that person has to go away and try to guess what they were
doing wrong while they miss the rest of the meal. Other times we lose our
appetites, because one of our brothers or sisters gets a good switching in the next
room, while the rest of us are passing around the lettuce with my mother’s
homemade salad dressing.

My father also cares a lot about the English we use. For example, if we say,
There’s some clouds up there in the sky that look just like three white rabbits,
we’ll never get away with it. There are some clouds up there. If I run in and say,
Dad, Me and Frances just saw five deer, my father will say, Frances and I, Frances
and I. If we say, Hand me that garden rake, please, it’s, Hand that garden rake to
me, you’re not handing yourself. If we ask, Can us kids go play on the wild
grapevines, my father will say, May we kids, may we go play. If we say, There’s
this girl at school, my father will stop us and say, There’s a girl at school, she’s not
right here in front of us, is she? If we say, C’mere instead of Come here, he talks
about our lack of enunciation.

My father explains that he only had an eighth grade education. He says, What’s
wrong with you children that you can’t talk properly? He makes us write
sentences saying the words the right way. For my fifty sentences, he catches me
writing each word in a column instead of writing the whole sentence over and
over, and that really upsets him. How will I ever learn to communicate the gospel
effectively if I’m just mindlessly writing columns of words? My father reminds me
occasionally that people who preach the gospel should be the best communicators
in all the world.

And my posture really bothers my father. He explains to me over and over that
I’m going to be a hunchback when I’m older. He wants to buy me a back brace
out of a magazine. Occasionally I see a hunchback around town, and I try to
remember to straighten up. Nobody is going to take a hunchback quoting
scripture seriously.

I will say one thing about my father for sure: he loves my piano playing. He
gave me my first chance to play in front of people. At the little white church in
Fairpoint, Ohio, during some missionary meetings, I got to play “I’ll Fly Away”
on a Wednesday night. (That was the first time I got to be where the sound of the
trumpet was.) And yes, whenever people visit, my father always wants me to sit
down and play for them. Always.

And when we come home from Sunday evening services, I sit down and start
playing the music inside of me, and my father makes me feel like I’m the most
amazing composer in the whole wide world. He just can’t get over what I’m
playing, and he asks me if I’ll remember it. I usually say, I don’t think I’ll
remember it. He’ll shake his head as if the world just lost something of immense
importance. I guess the Sunday evening music was a gift that I tried to give to
him. That was my father’s music.

I don’t know where the music inside of me comes from, but music seems to be
a secret language that I can use to say what I’m really feeling. And I still haven’t
seen the silent movies that my sister Grace told me about: I have decided the
silent movies are inside of us.

When David was still a boy, he used to play his harp to calm King Saul down
when Saul was in a bad mood. Saul would occasionally hurl a spear at him, but for
the most part, it worked. I think to myself that I’m glad I don’t mind playing the
piano a lot, because it seems to bring my father a great deal of peace.
I am glad my father left the Amish and tried to change his life. I am glad he
brought home the upright piano.

I am in junior high. My parents have moved every few years, but this time my
father points to a spot on the map that looks especially interesting, and we move
all the way to Whitefish, Montana. Whitefish is closer to Prairie High School in
Three Hills, Alberta, Canada, where Conrad, Jonathan, and Grace are attending
boarding school. In Montana, I meet the Mennonite missionary that I am named
after, and he’s the only other Linford I have ever met. He is a missionary to the
Indians way up north in the Northwest Territories, and Linford and I meet in a
little white church near the Flathead River, the icy river where we learn to fish for
trout, my brothers and I: the cold and slippery rainbows, the moody, determined
cutthroat, the suspicious brownies, all bicep and brain, the lightning-fast brookies,
the toothy Dolly Vardens. My brothers love to fish even more than the disciples
in the New Testament, and I love my brothers and want to be with them, so I fish
too, though I am more interested in the beautiful names of the trout than in the
casting and reeling.

The music inside of me tries to find a home in Montana. I work odd jobs. I
mow an orchard, milk cows, save a little money, and buy a motorcycle. I want to
fit in with the other boys in Montana with their motorcycles, but I don’t know
where to begin. One day the dairy farmer says he’s been doing some cussin’ and
discussin’ and has decided to let me go. I thought I was just getting used to the cows
and the herringbone parlor, but he thinks the cows will get along fine without me.
In Montana, I feel like I’m living in the wrong world. I’ll never fit in. Was this
how my father felt when he was a boy?

My parents send me away to boarding school when I am thirteen, the same
missionary training school where Conrad and Jonathan and Grace studied before
me. I am in the ninth grade up north on the great Canadian prairies where
sometimes on a clear day I can see mountains a hundred miles off in the west. I
am surrounded by oceans of windy, brown grass, and sometimes, walking on a
clear night, I see the northern lights, the aurora borealis, fondling the edges of
the sky, outdoing the stars, dancing like tall sisters in flimsy gowns that flicker and
shift in the footlights of a vast, dark stage. It feels like the arctic circle could be
just over the horizon. Why have the ice floes sent these luminescent lovers to
dazzle and woo me? They seem to be whispering, Linford, there are secret worlds
everywhere which you will only glimpse in this life. But tonight, they say, swaying
their arms above their heads, enjoy our little cabaret show in the sky for free.
Beauty is a gift. It doesn’t have to accomplish anything.

And now the whole spinning world is my record player. The coal black, starry
sky begins to revolve. I hear sinfully loud music in my head. Therefore will not we
fear. The music drowns out everything else and wants to wash me clean, and my
life is a story that I must record, a character-building story, of course, like the
ones we listened to over and over with the blind man in his leaning house with
the dirt floor. I want to tell my secrets to the wide world in the best English I can
muster. I want to drop the needle on my lost life and sing to the whole world
what I have seen so far and what I haven’t seen. I want to laugh at God’s bad
manners as he drips milk from his celestial cereal all the way across the night sky
with his heavenly spoon. I want to be forgiven and to baptize the whole sleeping
world with the ensuing joy and sadness. I want to wake Martha King’s sleeping
lions forever. I want to shoot out the streetlights, take the whipping and live to
tell about it. (So this is what it feels like to be born again.) I want to pack my
suitcases and close my eyes and go to foreign fields that I’ve never seen and can’t
imagine, foreign fields within me and without. I want to preach the gospel to all
nations. I am a missionary.

And tonight, beneath these Canadian stars, while I look up at the northern lights and listen to the music inside of me, the gospel is this and only this: what must I do to make my life a true story?

Visit Linford Detweiler as Image Artist of the Month for December '07

Issue #30 • Spring 2001