Buffalo Flats

by Martine Leavitt

Rebecca didn’t always like having such a big church family. Some were hard to love: Sister Isaacs who cried when she said her testimony and then blew her nose with a honking sound; Brother Minder who said “ain’t” and used double negatives; Sister Shepherd who got a miracle every week, it seemed, probably hogging them all for herself. But Mother loved each one of them ferociously. She talked to Rebecca about how lonely Sister Isaacs was since she’d left her family far away, and how Brother Minder told her once that he was ashamed because he had never learned to read, and how always in true need of miracles was Sister Shepherd. Mother talked about the safety such a family brought.

And then, in a somewhat louder voice, she said, “Sister Fletcher, you mustn’t die. I don’t want you to die, and LaRue doesn’t want you to die, and your husband must like you or you wouldn’t have all these babies. And your boys—well, God doesn’t want you to die, either, that’s all. Why you have fallen into the hands of a light-minded excuse for a girl like myself, I hardly know. It is something with which you might negotiate at the judgment bar. But I am proposing that you delay this talk for a time in the distant future and that you stay in this mortal coil long enough to raise this baby, which will be born strong and healthy. Of course, first you must have it. As soon as Mother gets here, please. Amen.”

Mother looked at her with pride. She was truly proud, Rebecca could tell. And now she realized this was not the first time she’d seen that look. Rebecca realized she’d seen it often. She realized, then, that she’d been raised on it.

If she saw God again, she would tell him all this. He would likely know, but he wouldn’t mind her telling him anyway. He was like that. She would tell and tell and tell, until she was done telling. That, she suspected, was part of what eternity was for.

But though her people preached the gospel of love for one’s fellow man, and service to others, somehow, Rebecca noted, Father felt it a shame to accept help from one’s neighbor. Rebecca thought it a perplexing arithmetic problem: take the number of people who are supposed to serve one another, which was everyone, and subtract the number of people who will not be served if they can help it, and you have... But her church family were not troubled by arithmetic. Women brought pots and pots of food. It was all her brothers could do to eat it all. A member of her church might die of despair, but they would do it on a full stomach.

The next day Rebecca rode to the tor and sat a long time. She sat under the gaze of the great-uncle mountains, their usual disapproval tinged by some sort of familial sympathy. She hoped these mountains wouldn’t be ashamed of being loved by her. It was her saddest day. On her saddest day, why wouldn’t he be here? It made you wonder why then and not now. It made you feel longing and lonesome.

“Some people think I am an angel because I do not express contradictory opinions, and they think it is because I cannot. They think I am a shadow and that they can walk right through me. But they misunderstand angels, and they are going to bump into me now. They will see that I will not move to the right or the left, and they are going to have to trouble themselves to walk around me.”

Where was he? What explanation? What of this picking up and shaking? This schooling? Was it meant to mean something? Was that the point? Was that the kindness, in the end? Was she expected to stop being a child of God and become a woman of God? Was she meant to stand and say, I carried this, I carried it, and I testify that I carried it? Was she meant to one day look at God and say, I am your child, I am royal, I have this to say, that I am royal. What you gave me I have loved. God didn’t want her to be timid and shrinking. He wanted her to stand, to know her worth, her infinite destiny. Sitting and sunsets were one thing, but you knew him, really knew him, in the sorrow and in the serving. She understood that now.

Everything would be done for Levi that could be done, as if the dead cared about an orderly house, or what quilt he was wrapped in, or if the chickens had fresh water. But her people were in the beginnings and the endings. They were in the births and the deaths, the weddings and the times of sickness, the worship and the dancing, the weeping and the laughter, the work and the singing. They would do what they could.