I’m lagging. I’m supposed to be with a group of little kids on a walk down to the river, but I don’t want to go. It’s a walk they always send us on when we come to the 4-H camp for one of the Iowa Quaker gatherings. An older cousin, Nancy, is leading the group and promises we’ll hike to the river and back before meeting for worship.
When we arrived at the camp, my two older brothers, Chris and Tim, immediately disappeared with our cousin Ron, who is Chris’s age, and a new boy named Bur. Bur and Tim hit it right off. They both have red hair and freckles, and both have read Booth Tarkington’s Penrod books about a mischievous boy much like themselves. Bur is sporting a cast because on Saturday, during the camp’s last night, he rolled off the top bunk in their cabin and broke his arm. His parents had to drive to Des Moines to get it set. The four parents laugh because this is what you might expect from a kid like Bur.
I wanted to go off with the older kids, but they didn’t want me around. Their ditching me felt like a betrayal, especially by Tim, who is two years older than I. At home, we often do things together, but I’m never sure if being with me is what Tim wants or whether I’m simply his default. Maybe he hangs out with me because he and our older brother Chris aren’t at all alike.
Among the brothers, Chris is the serious one in our family and something of a loner, while Tim is mischievous and makes our parents laugh. After supper, Chris goes upstairs to study and practice his horn. If the rest of us study at all, it’s a quick look at our books while watching TV or maybe hurriedly finishing an assignment on the bus the next morning.
About halfway down to the river, I decide to change course and take off by myself on a path that climbs up a hill toward a ridge. With my cousin Nancy watching, I scramble away from the group as quickly as I can and don’t look back. Up on the ridge, it’s thickly wooded. We don’t have woods in Napier, the small Iowa farming community where my family lives. There, the fields seemingly go on forever, and the land is so flat that the tall grain elevator my father manages can be seen from several miles away.
Our town is a mere scattering of houses with a railroad siding for the grain elevator, a Methodist church, a seed research station, and our school district’s three-story elementary school. We moved to Napier when I was only four. I clearly remember the day my father went for his job interview. It was a hot and humid day. We were parked just up the gravel road from the elevator. My mother was slumped in the front seat, the passenger-side window down, a look of exhaustion on her face. She’d given birth to four boys, one every two years beginning in 1948. This was 1956, so my youngest brother Ben was two.
A ragged brown Shetland pony grazed behind an electric fence in a small pasture by the railroad tracks while we likely fussed because of the heat—three brothers in the back and one up front with Mom. I hadn’t a clue what Dad was doing in the office of the grain elevator. At the time, we were living in a house outside the town of Ida Grove, Iowa, where he was working at another farmer’s coop, training and hoping to eventually secure a management position like the one he was interviewing for in Napier.
The move to Napier must have looked promising. Our Ida Grove house didn’t have an indoor toilet; it had only an outhouse. With four kids in tow, the promise of an indoor bathroom must have seemed a godsend for my beleaguered mother. We’d also be nearer to a Quaker meeting in Ames, a plus for my parents. After my father was offered the job, we moved into our first house in Napier, a two-story rental. We four boys all slept in the same big bedroom on the second floor, and my dad began walking to work each day in his co-op uniform.
At the top of the ridge, I stick my cold hands into my jeans’ pockets. I can no longer hear the younger kids’ shouts. Nancy is probably herding them back towards the camp. My route leads me over the hill to look out on the landscape. Below me on the other side, the broad brown back of the Des Moines River glints in the morning light.
Suddenly, I wish I were back with the others. Maybe it was a mistake to go off by myself. I did it because I was angry at Tim, but the whole demonstration now seems foolish since he won’t even notice. Up on the ridge, I panic because I think I’m lost, but that can’t be true. I can strike out in any direction and find my way, but I’m going to be late for the meeting.
Instead of following the overgrown path I’ve been on, I decide to angle down the steep hill. Holding on to trees to break my descent, I take the plunge only to trip on a large root and land on my hands and knees in the cold detritus of dirt, sticks, and decaying leaves. Now I am really angry. Even if we don’t have a lot of money for nice clothes, I’m fastidious about the way I look. The clay mud smears my jeans. I scrape off the hunks of clay, but now I’ll have smeared jeans for the rest of the day.
At the bottom of the hill, I come out of some bushes behind one of the family cabins where a creek runs nearby. We, kids, play in it sometimes, building dams and chasing tiny minnows, but no kids are there now. Up ahead, I see the main building with rows of cars in the parking lot. Everyone must be in the meeting because there’s no one around.
At a boot scraper by the door, I scrape off as much of the mud on my tennis shoes as I can. Beside the door, there’s an outdoor faucet where I wash my hands. The cold water stings, and I see flecks of blood where my palms are raw from my fall. The women hired from the surrounding community to prepare the lunch are talking quietly in the kitchen.
When I open the screen door and step inside, the room is filled with Quakers sitting in silent meditation. I slip into a chair at the edge of the group. My father is one of the tallest people there, so he’s easy to spot. He sits upright on a folding chair, his head held high, and his eyes closed. That’s how he meditates at home, too. I don’t see how he doesn’t fall asleep with his eyes closed, but he doesn’t.
Nearby, my mother sits with her hands folded in her lap. She looks at me as if to scold, but I know she’s also relieved. She would have been the only one to notice my absence. Chris, Tim, and Ron are seated on the opposite side of the room. Tim glances at me questioningly, but since Bur is sitting beside him, I ignore him. Bur cradles his cast with his other arm. He will be Tim’s focus until the meeting is over, and we go home after lunch.
Although Quakers drive cars and use electricity, non-Quakers might confuse some of the elderly worshipers with the Amish because of their dress. At this Midyear Meeting, some elders are still dressed in the old-time plain clothes—the men in dark suits with open collars, the women in gray dresses with bonnets covering their heads—and they speak in the plain language, using thee and thy instead of you and your.
Usually, I avoid the old Quakers, but sometimes my grandmother makes me talk to them. She calls me over at these meetings to introduce me. Why she does this to me, I don’t know. My mother’s Quaker heritage goes back through many generations and spreads out into a large web of relations on both her mother’s and father’s sides. But the old Quakers in their plain clothes and bonnets seem as strange to me as pilgrims from a history book, and talking with them makes me squirm. I’m not sure whether to be afraid of them or make fun of them for looking old-fashioned and comical.
During a silent meeting, we’re supposed to be listening for God to speak through us, but it’s also a time to examine ourselves. As Quakers, we’re taught that it’s our job to mold ourselves into being good people, and there are many sins to guard against, including envy, pride, and coveting things that other people have. For Quakers, anger isn’t good. I know this, but it doesn’t help. I’m still feeling angry with Tim for abandoning me.
If truth be known, Quakerism, with its many moral imperatives, causes a war in me. None of my friends at school are Quakers, and consequently, they don’t have to endure the constant moral scrutiny. Clearly, I don’t have either my anger or my worldly desires under control. At Christmas, I’m always disappointed. Whatever presents I receive won’t be as big or as many as my friends’, but I’m not supposed to compare. I’m not supposed to want more, but of course, I do. When our father gives in and buys us a race car track that he sets up before we wake up on Christmas morning, the joy lasts as long as it takes me to see that our neighbors, the Sniders, have a bigger, more elaborate track.
Tim and I share this desire for things. We want clothes, and we like money. We also want to win, especially in sports. But Tim and I are also different. Tim doesn’t think like a Quaker. If Tim wants something, he just goes for it, without guilt, without questioning himself. That’s not me. I want things, but I also want to be a good and conscientious person, maybe even a good Quaker. Still, I have a huge appetite, and Tim is my ally in that fight. And so, as the meeting drags on, my anger at him gradually dissipates.
After lunch, our family will go home together, and Tim will tell me about Bur. Maybe upstairs in his bedroom, he’ll let me in on what the older kids did without me, and though I wish I had been with them, it’s just the way things are for now. This time they didn’t want me, but next time maybe they will. In any case, it’s a given that the stories about Tim and Bur from that weekend will become legendary in our family, while my time alone on the ridge won’t even be noticed or remarked on.
This meeting for worship will go on a lot longer than our home meeting in Ames. That meeting lasts for forty-five minutes, and that’s long enough. Quakers always close meetings with handshakes. As it is, I’m ready to explode from my chair, and I can’t help but fidget and squirm. When the meeting finally breaks, I wriggle my way through the crowd, angling toward Tim and Bur, but when I reach them, I can tell that they are already saying goodbye to each other. After lunch, the two families will go their separate ways, and we will never see Bur again. As if to make it up to me, Bur gives me a smooth brown nut that he says comes from a buckeye tree. I’d never seen a buckeye before. It looks like a deer’s brown eye, and I keep it in my dresser drawer for several years, reminding me of Bur.
In the car going home, the three older brothers squeeze into the backseat, while Ben, the youngest, sits in front between my parents. Since they both claimed a window seat, I’m scrunched in the middle between Chris and Tim. Chris is already too tall to fit in the sedan’s backseat, but when he complains that I’m not giving him enough room, my father refuses to get involved in our bickering and stares straight ahead as he drives out of the river bottom. The argument ends as quickly as it began, and for a moment, the car is quiet as we wend our way out of the woods, heading home.
When I think about my family, I cherish an image of us four brothers traveling in that car with our parents. I felt then that nothing could touch us. My brothers and I—that was all there was, and all there would ever be. I wanted it to stay like that forever. In my fantasy, we don’t age; we are always together, and the car we were traveling in simply keeps moving. But of course, that can’t happen. It isn’t going to be like that. Even then, we were already locked, each in our own thoughts, pulling and pushing, trying to make sense of what had been given us, trying to figure out who we might become and how we’d move through the world.
Still, on that day, in my mind, we were so intertwined that such separations seemed unfathomable, even unthinkable. But this was a center that could not hold. In the future, each brother would get out of that car and go on to make a life very different from the other three. There wouldn’t be much time left before the picture I created would begin to unravel. We were already pulling away from one another.
Back home, the neighborhood kids are organizing a football game in the churchyard, where the trees at either end serve as goalposts. The whole neighborhood has come out for the game, the Sniders, the Waltons, the Winters, the Roes, and my brothers and me, even Ben. Since I am one of the younger ones, I’m not one of the first ones to be picked, but that’s OK.
We’re playing touch football, which means the player carrying the ball must stop when an opposing team member touches him with two hands below the waist. Since there’s no referee, many arguments arise over whether a runner is downed. Because he’s the tallest and almost the oldest and because he wants to be fair, Chris’s judgment often holds sway.
With every play, I think I can show my older brothers that they should value me, but I rarely get a chance. The older kids hog most of the action like they always do. It takes all my patience to wait for Chris in the huddle to turn to me and say—Jonnie, you go out fifteen steps and just turn around—which I do. Chris pumps his arm to throw the ball, and amazingly, it’s coming my way.
