Easter Hymn

By David M. Howell
(From the collection of short stories: “Not In Your Life”) ©1999

The rectangular yellow clock above the kitchen sink was in code. It was a code that I was soon to break, but for now I was at a loss to understand its subtle hand gestures. Despite the clock’s secrecy, I knew it was early, very early. The eastern sky beyond the three maple trees in the yard was only a paler shade of night.

The day had actually begun even earlier when my father walked into the bedroom my brother and I shared.

“Come on, get up,” he said hoarsely having only recently gotten up himself. “You have to go to church.”

The phrase, ‘you have to go to church,’ was delivered as a command as if church held some special meaning. Whatever the necessity of church, it was lost on me that morning. I thought to myself, even at that young age, what god in his right mind would be up this early just to hear the redundant prayers of seemingly needy people? People, vainly seeking the same answers to unanswerable questions. If god intended us to get up at dawn he would have made it come later in the day.

Before walking out of our sleep, my father pulled the string turning on the closet light. There was no avoiding it now, I had to get up.

The floor was cold and I quickly got my feet on the area rug in the middle of the room. My older brother, who aged me by two years, was already out of bed. He was much better at taking orders than me. Even in my pre-school years, I questioned authority. Of course my method of questioning—confused abstinence—usually brought a flat hand or belt to my behind. It’s amazing to me how that defiance shaped the core of who I would become.

I dressed in the clothes my mother wanted me to be seen in. A dark green pattern shirt with beige fleur-de-lis and a stitched-in-place brown vest. My brother wore a crisp pale blue shirt with a unicorn on the breast pocket. We wore the same clothes my parents had dressed us in a few days earlier for a group photo. With my new sister in the middle, we sat for the first spring picture I can remember. 38 years later that photograph would stand vigil on the mantle of my fireplace. The innocence captured in those eyes still look out with playful wonder. Oh, if I could, the things I would share with the boy that would become me.

The house was cold as I walked into the kitchen, my too-big-for-my-feet, hand-me-down black dress shoes that had been my brother’s last year, clicked across the linoleum floor. Casper, our black dog was indifferent to our early rising and curled before the heating grate absorbing what little warmth escaped.

I learned later Casper was a stray that wandered onto my parents farm. She adopted us and carved a niche in our lives. It would be three years before we got a new dog. Sam, a collie/shepherd mix, would be the dog my brothers and sisters would come to remember most. But that was a long way from this morning.

My mother wore an aqua blue apron over her Sunday best as she prepared breakfast. Her hair, short as was the style, was further tamed by bobby bins. The breakfast she labored over could not be enjoyed until after church. Fasting was the slow approach to denying yourself something you craved. In the corner, the coffee percolated sending its acidic Colombian scent into the room. I would remember the smell of percolating coffee for the rest of my life and always associate it with chilly childhood mornings when life was simple and fresh.

Outside, my father was warming the Pontiac. A tan 4-door sedan with the classic fins on the back. I looked out the picture window in the living room, there was frost on the grass. Frost made the grass crackle when walked on but touch a blade of grass and the frost instantly and mysteriously disappeared. The world I was discovering was filled with wonder.

My father ushered us to the car parked just beyond the white wooden gate. Built by caring hands in a day and age when craftsmanship was the key to success. It would be five years later when the last 4x4 white posts were pulled from the ground and a Sears chain-link fence put in their place. The cold steel of the chain-link better contained Sam, the collie/shepard, as she grew. But it never had the same feeling of space as the wooden fence posts and gate. I miss them to this day.

The car was warm almost warmer than the house when my brother and I climbed into the back seat. It wasn’t really a back seat, my father was a master builder preferring to create from his mind than settle for something that wasn’t quite right.

I remember failing miserably at taping the handlebars of my ten speed bike when I was in high school. My father sensed my frustration and spent an hour in the garage undoing the damage I’d done. He carefully retaped the handlebars flawlessly. I know I thanked him then, but I never expressed how impressed I was with his patience. He taught me a lesson that evening that I carry to this day. Patience in every situation. It has saved me many, many times.

For the car, he built a platform for the back seat of our old Pontiac. I couldn’t begin to explain how this half inch thick sheet of plywood worked or even fit into the car. I can only say that it provided a flat surface which, covered by a gray quilt, created an arena for my brother and me to play in.

This was the last freedom I would ever have in a car. Eventually we would get a white Pontiac station wagon and assigned seats. My father would add a hitch to pull the trailer my parents allowed themselves for our family camping adventures. White with a black strip down the middle and with an overhanging bunk, we traveled the country sheltered from the wilderness we explored. The trailer and station wagon were a dream that morning that would not materialize for another four years.

The gravel driveway crunched like dry cereal under the car as we backed away from our house. A house that seemed so huge at the time. Nine years from now it would be a memory substituted by a much bigger house my parents would build two miles down the road. But that morning, our house, with its huge picture window that gave the façade a grin, was my nest, my security. Twenty years from now, my sister, who curled in my mother’s arms that spring morning, would move into that old house with her husband. Together they changed its old design to better fit their needs. Change is good and what they did certainly improved that old house. But there’s a certain pang for your first shelter out of the womb and this was mine. If granted three wishes, nostalgia would momentarily suggest I go back and visit it before common sense asked for money, power and a universal remote.

We lived on the edge of an old river valley. From the driveway, guarded by two white gates built with the same care as the gate in front of our house, the road swept down as it curved north across the narrow Galien River. The road was lined with massive trees that, even naked in their winter sleep shadowed our path.

Several turns and a couple of miles put us on a brisk two lane road that headed north to the church we went to for special occasions. Like Easter.

Easter, I had long thought this unusual celebration of torture and death was created to offset the Jewish holiday of Passover. This was just a coincidence as I would learn some thirty-five years later while researching a book.

Eostre was the Scandinavian Goddess of dawn. Her name meaning east, the direction of the sunrise. This special festival occurred at the spring equinox to honor her arrival. According to pagan tradition a “Year King” was chosen from the clan. He was ritualistically sacrificed as a tribute to Eostre and the coming growing season. The sacrificed King was then buried in the fields where his body was said to magically come back to life again with the rising grains. Everyone then shared in this miracle by eating the bread made from the “Year King’s” body.

As we silently drove north I watched as Eostre rose on the horizon. Her glimmering gown of orange slowly filled the edges of my childhood. From her zenith she would cast shadows of doubts on accepted thoughts and superstitions. The world was bigger than I ever could have imagined that morning. So big, that even a goddess could only see half of it at a time. The AM radio station my father had tuned in played a classical piece. Wagner or Strauss filled the car as I watched the sunrise on my awaking childhood.
It was the single most memorable moment of my life. Riding that day to Easter Mass with my older brother and younger sister. Listening to the symphony and watching the beginning of a new day unfold.

My childhood would see many things. Two more brothers and two more sisters would arrive over the next decade. Their personalities and very beings woven across the tapestry of my childhood like the pattern of a warm, secure blanket. Today, they just seem to have always been there. Yet on this morning in 1961 the closest of them, my brother Steven, was still over a year away with my youngest sister nine years and nearly as many months from becoming the person I would know and cherish.

I could not imagine all that would become memories of my childhood and who would play roles in acts yet to be written. It was just a morning, earlier than most for me, with the symphony balancing the cacophony of my overwhelming curiosity. I had no idea how early that morning really was. But, oh those precious moments of childhood, they disappear as quickly as the frost on morning grass.