Photo by Craig Carlson

We checked how much was left of our sloppy Joe casserole topped with canned french-fried onion rings or our almond chicken salad or our relish tray ringed round with radish roses.

“Doubt may give your dinner a funny taste, but it’s faith that goes out and kills.” — John Updike: Roger’s Version

Mrs. Frederick brought one of two dishes to our church potluck. They were spoken of as “Mrs. Frederick’s famous Swedish meat-balls” and “Mrs. Frederick’s famous sweet-and-sour pork-u-pines.” The pork-u-pine’s “pines” or “quills” were rice Mrs. Frederick blended into ground pork. As the pork cooked, fat melted; pork shrank away from the rice, which left rice grains sticking out of the meatballs. For serving, Mrs. Frederick nestled her pork-u-pines shoul-der-to-shoulder in baking pans, where the little meatballs looked, as Calvary Episcopal ladies were wont to say, “for all the world like baby porcupines.”

Wooden lathing crosshatched Calvary’s parish hall windows in a travesty of the mullioned windows for which Episcopal Church building committees go weak in the knees. Through diamond panes, you could watch tall, bony Mr. Frederick with his windburned cheeks remove a baking dish from his bronze Coupe de Ville.

Mr. Frederick was just about the county’s richest man. He owned a vast hilly ranch that the river ran through, a river swimming with fat trout and hazed over in hot summer with mayfly hatches. According to our local newspaper, Mr. Frederick’s bulls — “prize bulls” — provided sperm for herds all across the United States. Mr. Frederick also owned the slaughterhouse whose cement-block buildings lay along the railroad tracks. Cattle cars unloaded bawling cattle at Mr. Frederick’s before sunrise; refrigerated cars went out at night, packed with silent beef. Outside the block buildings, the cattle, veiled by black flies, milled atop mountains of their own waste. Some dropped to their knees, capsized, and collapsed onto their sides. Other cattle stepped on them, climbed over and walked across them. “Downers,” Mr. Frederick’s men called cattle that fell, “downers.” But all the cattle, fallen or upright, roared as men in overalls prodded them through loading chutes to kill floors. When we drove past, my children stopped their ears. “You can tell the cows are scared,” they said in that overloud voice you get after you plug up your ears. They said, “I wish I could squeeze my nose closed too.”

The smell was terrible. Indian summer hung on, and inversion layers trapped air in the hollow our tiny town sank down into. Then, nothing kept out the slaughterhouse stench. Nor flies. An Egyptian plague of flesh-eating flies that tormented cattle also tormented us. “Close the screen door fast when you come in,” I told the children, as flies darted into the kitchen, headed for the butter dish. I grabbed the fly swatter, slapped at flies, and yelled, “Goddamn flies!” and hated myself for taking the Lord’s name in vain, which I didn’t want to do but did anyway. “It sticks a knife through God’s side, every time you say that,” my grade-school Catholic girlfriend Veronica told me.

Mr. Frederick strode through Calvary’s parking lot, bearing his wife’s dish held high. Mrs. Frederick, almost as tall as Mr. and equally bony, but unlike him, unworldly pale, walked behind, teetering in high heels through parking lot gravel. Alongside Mrs. Frederick walked Mary Bee Dillard, shoulders hunched to hide her big breasts. Mary Bee carried a picnic basket purchased in London in which Mrs. Frederick packed her silver, china, napkins, and Mr. Frederick’s whiskey. Rule was you brought a dish that fed four more people than your family, plus plates, napkins, drinking glasses, silver, and booze if you wanted it. Wine was provided, but it was cheap wine —

jug burgundy and chablis — and we called it all “dago red.”

Winter nights, Mrs. Frederick wore her mink. Snowflakes caught on her wispy faux blond Mamie Eisenhower bangs and glittered on the mink’s lapels. “A full-length ranch mink,” Calvary ladies said when they mentioned the mink to a First Lutheran or Wesley Methodist lady. Our town was proud of Mr. Frederick’s prize bulls; we Calvary gals took pride in Mrs. Frederick’s mink.

Mrs. Frederick was big on wraps. Even on the sultriest, hottest summer evening on record, so without breeze not a leaf lifted on drooping cottonwoods, she wrapped a shawl round her shoulders. Ever since her hysterectomy, Mrs. Frederick said she suffered “torments of the damned from any chill."

The Fredericks, with Mary Bee, came late. “Make,” said my cynical husband, whose family had produced four generations in the county, “an entrance.” Before the Fredericks, car after car nosed into the parking lot, a few Cadillacs, many Plymouths, Chryslers, Dodges, Ford trucks, several VW vans belonging to younger families eyed suspiciously as “hippie-ish,” as “strange elements,” but accepted, because, as my mother-in-law said, “Somebody has to help foot the parish bills.”

Out of our 120-family parish, some 50 families, plus widows, widowers, bachelors, and maiden ladies, regularly attended the once-per-month Sunday evening potluck. “Be careful now, don’t tip it” or “Darling, don’t spill” you could hear a wife warn her husband as he unloaded from a station wagon a bean pot oozing molasses, smelling deliciously of bacon and sugary navy beans.

As we ladies rushed through double doors into the parish hall, a vast high-ceilinged, half-timbered room, we kissed one another’s flushed cheeks. “Oh, look at you, what an adorable dress,” one might say, her hands on the dress’s shoulders. “And you, too,” the adorably dressed responded, “how pretty you look. I love your hair. Is Maggie still doing it?” We cupped cool ivory chins of each other’s children, adding “Rachel, baby, I heard you were star of Mrs. Blaisdell’s piano recital!” and “Keith, how you’ve grown. Any day now you’ll be taller than your father.”

Men hurried to three long tables on which dinner would be arranged and set down their burdens. They glanced about uneasily. No matter how many of these affairs they’d attended, and not a few men, like my husband, came to these potlucks as children with their own parents, the men appeared unsure of themselves, much as teenaged boys will at a formal dance. One after another, nodding hellos as they went, these men edged through the parish hall. Then out the door they strode across the parking lot and joined tight circles at the far end, where gravel petered out, next to parish trash cans. Each can was lettered in black paint, “Calvary Episcopal”; lettering got touched up twice a year on parish workdays.

In spring or summer when you looked out a triangular pane of mullioned window, you might see light flaring off silver flasks men passed hand to hand. In winter, snow covered the ground; next to the trash cans, limbs on spruces dipped low under their weight of wet snow; the men’s breath blew out white clouds. You saw flashes of light as they lit matches or turned wheels on Zippo lighters. Cigarette ends glowed, cigar ends glowed bigger. If you happened to open the doors, you heard laughter and saw heads thrown back, and in winter, you heard the men’s feet stamping frozen ground, as they sought to keep warm. “Anything to stay out there and drink,” my mother-in-law sighed, looking over my shoulder out the door.

Calvary was a hardship post. Priests came and went. Every few years, the search committee geared up, riffling vitae and reading recommendations. My father-in-law, the search committee head, said, “It’s a pain in the ass to hunt down one of these boys.”

We didn’t pay much, so we got men fresh out of seminary, not even 30 and still using acne

medicine, or military chaplains ready for retirement. These old priests and their weary, stand-offish wives (because the Episcopal Church permits, even encourages, priests to marry) mumbled when they preached and wandered and lost the point they were making and rushed Holy Communion. People complained that these men never got our names right and that if you wanted one of them, you discovered he’d taken off bass fishing or been gone to the nearest city for three days. As soon as their retirement day came, these older fellows packed up and moved, and we never heard from or about them again.

The old priest who’d been a Marine chaplain kept his head shaved shiny. He had a bulldog face and thick neck that he didn’t shave; white hairs stuck out from his pink ears and flesh rolls stacked above his tight clerical collar. He carried a belly ahead of him that his legs looked too puny to hold up.

He ended his homilies with war stories set variously in Saipan, Pork Chop Hill, or Quang Tri. His sermon’s hero was always a “raw recruit not old enough to grow whiskers” or a “a big colored boy from the South.” The enemy always rushed the platoon. The boy always scrambled up from his foxhole and tossed grenades into a nest of “Japs,” “Red Chinese,” or “gooks.” The grenades that blew Japs, Reds, or gooks to smithereens blew the boy to pieces. “He gave his life so his buddies might live,” the priest said, pulling on his satin preaching stole. He’d lick his lips and look out at us looking up at him, us with our Sunday suits and dresses and shined shoes. He’d wait, holding our gaze, until we shifted in our pews. He’d croon then, his rough cigarette basso ground down to whisper, “This young boy, he gave up his life just like our Lord did. And probably not a one of those boys that was saved was as good a boy as that recruit [or colored boy], and for sure none of us is as good as our Lord. But He gave himself anyway.”

Sermon over, we worked through Offertory, General Confession, Absolution, Comfortable Words, Sanctus, Prayer of Consecration and finally said, “Lord, 1 am not worthy that Thou shouldst come under my roof, but speak the Word only and my soul shall be healed.” Then the priest walked down to the altar rail, where we waited on our knees, palms up to receive the host. His cotton alb that altar guild ladies kept white with Purex bleach billowed round his big belly. He stood before you, our Lord’s body pinched between thumb and forefinger. His shoulders drooped as if he’d been carrying something way too heavy for way too long. Under the alb, gas rumbled through his stomach, ending in explosions so loud that youngsters stifled laughter. Sulfurous intestinal gas drifted while he dropped the white wafer into your palm and said, “Body of Christ, Bread of Heaven.”

But all this didn’t matter that much. “These guys are just plumbers,” my father-in-law said. “Their job’s to keep pipes open between us and God. Besides, you gals run the goddamn church anyway.”

He was correct about the gals. A cadre of six ladies ran our parish. To the cadre, a priest was no more than a hired hand, preferably handsome and well-bred with an equivalently well-bred and docile wife. As long as he comforted the sick, counseled unhappy drunks who called people late at night, and didn’t sermonize too much about the poor, the cadre remained politely indifferent to him.

When young priests arrived, they arranged in church office shelves their encyclopedias of sermon aids and battered New Testament Greek dictionaries. They set end-to-end Buber’s I and Thou, titles by Kierkegaard, Moltmann, Jaspers, Heidegger, Bultmann, Brunner, and martyred Bonhoeffer. They had Paul Tillich’s sermons in tattered covers and all three volumes of Tillich’s Systematic Theology. They had titles by that peculiar misogynist C.S. Lewis. They had exegeses of St. Paul’s Letters to the Romans and books by both Niebuhrs, Reinhold, and the less impressive Richard.

You could often figure what seminary they’d attended by the titles. Priests from the School of the Pacific in Berkeley and Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge had Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley graduates also owned Latin-American liberation theologians, Allan Watts’s Zen books, and Jung’s popular titles.

Men from General Theological Seminary owned Aquinas’s Summa, Duns Scotus, Bonaventura, John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University, Dom Gregory Dix’s Shape of the Liturgy, and lighter books by Charles Williams, G.K. Chesterton, and Dorothy Sayers. Graduates of Virginia Theological Seminary, where professors were big on arts and existentialism, had Sartre’s No Exit, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, or Eliot’s Cocktail Party. They had Auden’s, Eliot’s, and Gerard Manley Hop-kins’ poetry and Flannery O’Connor’s terrifying stories. Even the most rigorously educated had Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince.

I sometimes went into the priest’s empty office and slipped books from shelves. 1 sat in the armchair where parishioners sobbed out troubles or grumbled about each other and searched for pages with sentence after sentence underlined, where “Yes, yes” was written next to a paragraph like this from Buber: “This is the exalted melancholy of our age, that every Thou in our world must become an It.”

Sunday mornings, pale northern light filtered through stained glass windows given in memory of wealthier Calvary dead. The windows’ colors lay in slabs across the sanctuary floor and caught these young men in a red and blue glow as they gripped the pulpit and searched out our faces and told stories about successful real-estate men with empty souls and lonely wives and children who were juvenile delinquents. They’d learned these stories in homiletics classes, where professors urged them to make the Bible relevant to the modern day. Others of these young priests took to the pulpit as to a confessional and wheezed and blushed through allusions to “thorns in the flesh” and “dark nights of the soul.” Young priests also brought liturgical innovation, guitar masses (for which the hippie-ish element played guitars), and sacred dance. In the latter, our junior high Lolitas, led by bigbreasted Mary Bee Dillard, dressed in white togas; they leaped and swayed and reached their skinny arms heavenward while we sang the Lord’s Prayer to a tune that sounded like the Carpenters wrote it. “It makes me sick,” my mother-in-law said, “to see them encourage Mary Bee to carry on like that.” But Mrs. Frederick approved Mary Bee’s leading the dancers. “It gets her out of herself,” she said.

Three penitential years seemed the longest a priest could bear up under us. One shy, blue-eyed blond bachelor who’d graduated from the seminary at Sewanee, in Tennessee, and who sang with an unbroken tenor and collected baseball cards, didn’t last a month. My father-in-law said it was better the guy left, that he seemed “a little light in his loafers.” When my older daughter asked what that meant, her grandfather tousled her hair and said, “That he might have been a queer, honey.”

At potluck suppers, the old priests couldn’t wait to get out in the parking lot for a slug of booze. The young priests stayed in the parish hall. They set up tables at which we’d eat and unfolded folding chairs and got the coffee urn going and hot water for people who wanted Sanka. They talked to parish teenagers about starting Saturday car wash parties and a junior choir. If we didn’t keep an eye on the teenagers, they slunk away into Sunday school rooms, where they hunkered over on nap mats and smoked, usually cigarettes, but sometimes marijuana.

Part of what made Calvary a hardship post was that the valley in which the town rested was isolated. A dreamy, late-1940s, faded Technicolor movie tenderness pervaded streets. You could easily believe Harry and Bess lived in the White House, North Korea never crossed the 38th parallel, and that the Saturday Evening Post showed up in your mailbox every Friday morning.

The county’s ruling, pioneer society was German, Welsh, Norwegian, Swede, dark-eyed Scotch-Irish, a few English. With the exception of the Scotch-Irish, faces were ruddy and fair and eyes blue or green. Working out-of-doors, horseback riding, and golf turned skins leathery and cancer-spotted. Ruling family names blessed downtown streets and county roads, but not streets winding through small neighborhoods built after World War II with G.I. Bill money; that was for newcomers, people arrived in the 1930s and ’40s. These old families married into families with whom their parents and grandparents went to school. Even when they went away to college and wed what my mother-in-law spoke of as “fresh blood,” these marriages often did not survive. Acceptance for newcomers, even those married to pioneer children, could take decades to earn.

Calvary had the most old families. Next came Wesley Methodist that, together with Unitarians, had most members from the local teachers college. Unitarians were arty types who put up around town posters about peace and sold UNICEF Christmas cards. As for the college, my mother-in-law graduated there. But that was in the old days. Now the college harbored pinkos in poli sci and dope-smoking hippies and queers in art and theater. However, along with ranching and farming, the college provided the county’s economic base. “So,” my father-in-law said, “you got to put up with them.”

Then came Presbyterians, who had the town undertaker, and then Lutherans. The latter had robust blond schoolteachers and registered nurses and a father-and-son chiropractor team. They had the family that delivered to your back door, before sunup, glass bottles of milk ringed from the bottles’ shoulders up with yellow cream. Lutherans had the best food at their potlucks and lace tablecloths on their parish hall tables. But if this “best food” was mentioned, a Calvary lady, perhaps my mother-in-law or her friend Dottie, laughed and said, “But those Lutheran gals, my God, they’re fat!”

After Lutherans came Baptists, Nazarenes, Assembly of God, a Mormon stake, and conservative Lutherans who’d broken from “downtown” Lutherans over a doctrinal point. Any number of small wooden-frame churches came and went that my mother-in-law dismissed as churches for “white trash,” “Holy Rollers,” people who needed “emotional religion.” Roman Catholics had a good-sized parish in a modern structure near one of the post-World War II neighborhoods. RCs were of Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, Slovak descent, many of them children and grandchildren of coal miners who settled early in towns above the valley. Valley Protestants considered Catholics not quite American and spoke of them with humorous condescension as “mackerel snappers.” Catholics went in for religious hocus-pocus, had too many babies, and were ruled by popes and Irish priests. Catholic priests’ premarital counseling, my father-in-law liked to point out, “couldn’t be worth shit.” He’d get that look on his face of a lascivious monkey and say, “Would you want somebody who never played basketball to teach you to lob in the ball? Hell you would.”

Mormons also had too many babies and believed silly things but worked hard and never “took welfare.”

Several Jewish professors taught at the teachers college; Jews drove 80 miles to a small city that had a Reform temple. “Jewed-down” was an expression with which local buyers and sellers felt comfortable. My father-in-law referred to a golfing buddy’s wife as “a Jew woman,” and my mother-in-law sternly corrected him. “Jew-ess,” she’d say, “Jew-ess.”

My in-laws were not the only people who believed and talked this way. For all that the town and valley farms and ranches seemed set in an earlier, more innocent era, and that at church you could easily believe we’d all walked off a Norman Rockwell cover, we weren’t that nice a bunch, or that happy. Husbands blacked wives’ eyes, cracked teeth, pushed them downstairs, threw them out of speeding cars into county road ditches. A teenaged son beat his father almost to death with a bullwhip. My father-in-law and his brother got into a fistfight at a family reunion picnic; they broke each other’s right arms.

It was common knowledge that Mary Bee’s dad, the late Mayor Dillard, when Mary Bee was still in pigtails, began keeping her up half the night for company while he drank and wept about her mother. Mary Bee’s mother disappeared before Mary Bee took her first steps and never, ever so much as mailed a postcard to say hello.

“Girls in trouble,” some as young as 13, were taken for abortions into that same small city that boasted the Reform temple. Several adolescent males shot or hanged themselves; one 14-year-old tightened a Venetian blind cord around his throat, choking himself to death. Two Calvary teenagers late one Friday night were found in a storeroom at the back of Calvary’s parish hall. Stark naked and high on cough medicine, surrounded by life-size Wise Men and Joseph and Mary from the creche that at Christmas decorated Calvary’s frozen front lawn, they fought the young priest who discovered them. He was so banged up my father-in-law feared he’d sue.

But he didn’t.

Pal Thayer, handsome drunkard husband of one of Calvary’s cadre of six, went in and out of a clinic trying to dry out. One sunless January afternoon, Pal carried his Johnny Walker Red Label out to the garage, slipped into his Chrysler, switched on ignition and radio, and let carbon monoxide do its work. Pal’s wife — Nan was her name, and she painted large pale watercolors — got home from Safeway carrying fixings for dinner and found him. “Nan pulled him right out there on the garage floor and gave him mouth-to-mouth, but he was already a goner,” my father-in-law said, adding with a faraway look on his face, “Old Pal loved that Chrysler.”

My practical mother-in-law noted that it was a good thing Nan had her own money, a modest trust whose funds grew out of real estate and blue chips. My mother-in-law and Nan went through school together from first grade on. Pal Thayer, as locals were wont to say, came “from somewhere else.” Pal and Nan met during the war, but where was vague. As for what Pal did for a living, there’d been a sporting goods store, Western-wear emporium with a life-size papier-mache horse at the entrance, a real estate office, a radio station, all financed by Nan’s money. The couple had two sons, both moved away to cities, one married and the other “a queer.” After Pal Thayer’s death, people talked about why Pal “offed himself.” The homosexual son — a ballet dancer in that Sodom that was San Francisco — was mentioned, as was Pal’s “living off Nan” finally getting to him.

All California, excepting Disneyland, was Sodom. Sons of two pioneer families, while away at college, married “California girls.” These women, both blonde, for their California birth were considered sexual hotpots. Older men, when these women were mentioned, assumed roguish expressions. “Those California gals,” they’d say and lick their lips. About the California gal named Robyn, younger fellows sang, “Rockin’ Robin, tweet, tweet, tweet,” and essayed a few steps of the Twist.

As to why the ballet dancer was homosexual, one explanation given was that “stock ran out.” “Stock running out” was a common reason, locally, for troubles in otherwise good families. One way stock ran out was when good county pioneer blood was diluted through unwise unions. To mate with an outsider, an unknown like Pal Thayer or Mayor Dillard’s wife, was to risk “bad blood” ’s taint. Male homosexuality, hermaphroditism, criminality, crossed and wall eyes, ugliness in women, religious mania, artiness, insanity, nymphomania, all could occur when “stock” ran out. As for lesbianism, that was easily explained; a lesbian was too homely to get a man or her “plumbing” got messed up by childhood illness or “gland problems.”

These young priests were buoyed by Christianity as theology. Only a few months before they stacked their books in Calvary’s office, they had been arguing ins and outs of eschatology: Was the Kingdom of God a present, but hidden, reality or was it to be expected only in the future? They had been grinding out in ballpoint pen on their bluebook pages essay tests whose answers were to show whether Barth’s distant to-taliter aliter, wholly/holy Totally Other, or Tillich’s nearer-at-hand cosmopolite Ground of All Being better described God.

These young priests came to Calvary in love with God. But God, particularly a seminarian’s God, is easy to love. He may order up typhoons that kill thousands and let a baby die and let Himself be wrangled over by German theologians, but He isn’t blowing bad breath into your face and yammering about altars or griping about how fast the organist takes recessional hymns. At Calvary, these young priests found themselves forced to try to love people. They’d expected we’d bring them intriguing crises of faith that could be met with those answers they’d written out in their bluebooks. We didn’t. We brought them ourselves.

When a new priest arrived, combatants in the battle over how the church should be run took him aside and tried to win him to their way of seeing things. Since the 1950s, when the new church was built, occasional outbreaks of bad feeling surfaced. The old church was torn down when Safeway offered the parish a fortune for the midtown lot on which church, parish hall, and rectory stood. Even to old-timers, Safeway’s sum was attractive. So that the battle over the new church was never about selling out to Safeway, moving across town, and rebuilding; it was about how that new church should look.

The way I heard the story, architectural differences were easily solved by compromise. The church itself would be “modern.” The result was a rounded, low-lying, brown-shingled heap that from the air looked like a fat hen, wings spread out into the parking lot. I saw Calvary from the air once when at the county fair I won a free plane ride above the town and floated there, for 20

minutes, like a creature out of a painting by Chagall. The attached parish hall would be a one-story brick “traditional,” in fact, a long low-lying ’50s ranch house onto which were pasted Tudor touches, like the mullioned windows.

The fracas came over altar placement. Some wanted the altar as it was in the old church, built against and facing the east wall, which meant that the priest celebrated the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, facing that wall. Others wanted a freestanding altar, which allowed the priest to celebrate Holy Communion facing the people.

That altar placement could cause such a tiff is due to the division between High Church and Low. Conservative High Churchers, spoken of as “Anglo-Catholics” or “spikes,” want to conserve what the Episcopal Church lost 400 years ago when Henry VIII split with Rome. Spikes refer to Holy Communion as “the Mass” and believe Christ bodily, literally present in wine and wafer. Evangelical Low Churchers, or “Prots,” as Anglo-Catholics disparagingly call them, speak of Holy Communion much as would Methodists; they say “Lord’s Supper” or “Communion.” As for the real presence of Christ in the elements, as far as Low Churchers are concerned, whether Christ is physically or only spiritually present, it’s to each his own.

High Churchers like incense, every-Sunday celebration of Holy Communion, psalms sung responsively in plainsong, a Mary chapel, individual confession, Stations of the Cross during Lent, and an altar against the wall. Low Churchers want a Bible-based sermon, Holy Communion on one or at most two Sundays per month; they think General Confession a sufficiency, want no incense, no Romish carrying on about Mary, no oddball services like the Stations, no squawky plainsong, and on Sunday they want the whole shebang over, fast, and they’re all for freestanding altars. “Otherwise,” my father-in-law said, “it gets too hocus-pocus. Why not just go be a mackerel snapper?”

A Low Church Calvary priest once told a confirmation class for parish adolescents that if he wanted, he could turn grape Kool-Aid into our Lord’s blood. “It’s the thought that counts,” he said. High Church parents demanded the fellow’s dismissal but didn’t get it.

Visitors to an Episcopal church can get some idea of who’s High Church and who’s Low. A High Church person, entering the sanctuary, will, unless he or she is crippled, genuflect when passing the altar. A Low Church person, at best, will nod. During recitation of the Nicene Creed, if, during the phrase “and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary,” the person genuflects deeply, he or she likely is High Church. The person who does nothing is Low Church.

Which church you attended and your position in that church’s hierarchy were, out in the town, social markers. Within her church, a woman was expected to be “faithful.” The faithful Calvary lady showed up on Sunday for church, children in tow and made to behave, went to her guild’s monthly meetings, worked on the Christmas Bazaar, church cleanups, Bishop’s Spring Tea and contributed crafts and food to these projects.

Nan Thayer contributed paintings to the Christmas Bazaar. Her paintings sold well. Just as we spoke of “Mrs. Frederick’s famous sweet-and-sour pork-u-pines,” so we all spoke of Nan Thayer’s “famous watercolors.” But after Pal died, she began producing paintings quite unlike her pre-Pal’s-death oeuvre. Those had vases filled with pale flowers or landscapes dotted.with faraway horses and cows. In Nan’s new paintings, red and black squiggles spiraled out at you off Nan’s rough watercolor paper. They were so scary that you wanted to cover your heart when you looked. We propped these up on bazaar tables, and my mother-in-law’s friend Dottie said, out of Nan’s hearing, “These are about Nan getting Pal out of her system.”

When you got a new desk calendar in December, by which time ground was frozen and trees leafless, you marked down third Thursday afternoons for guild and fourth Sundays for potlucks. You looked for Ash Wednesday and Easter week and X-ed the Wednesday evenings between for Lenten Bible study. I’d begin thinking what I’d wear to Bishop’s Tea and what I’d knit and bake for next year’s bazaar. I was proud my knit hats sold out the first morning and that older Calvary ladies praised my workmanship. I was proud that at potluck my pickled beets, made from beets in my garden, got eaten up, as did my beef pot pies and cheesecake topped with canned cherry pie filling to which I added red food coloring to make it brighter red.

Nights when I couldn’t sleep, I sometimes thought about what to make next. I never expected to make my way into the cadre of six, but I wanted to make my husband proud. If my husband were awake. I’d crawl up close to him, breathe across his bare chest, and ask, “What do you think about my making for potluck that chocolate pound cake you like, except I’d bake it in the bundt pan and drizzle it with mocha icing?” Whatever I suggested, he said, “If it’s not too much trouble, sure.”

All us younger women longed to produce a dish that would be spoken of as “Mrs. Weaver’s famous apricot cinnamon rolls” or “Mrs. Delacorte’s famous sweet potato-pineapple Hawaii luau bake.” Fame wasn’t easily come by and was made more complex by unspoken protocols. For instance, even though a 25-pound roasted tom turkey, stuffed with cornbread and onion, or a baron of beef would have been ooohed over, and even though diners would have left not a bite, to bring either to the potluck would have been “flaunting.” You would have been marked as a showoff. Dishes regarded as exotic or too foreign or too “gourmet” were “putting on the dog.” And, no one should even consider variants upon Mrs. Frederick’s pork-u-pines or Mrs. Hopper’s Tater Tot casserole.

Tater Tots are balls of chopped potato, browned and frozen. Package directions suggest either baking or frying. Preparing this casserole, Mrs. Hopper made meatballs from ground beef mixed with bread crumbs and several packages of dehydrated onion soup mix. She fried the meatballs, and then, without pouring away gathered beef fat, added cans of cream of tomato soup and cream of mushroom soup. To this “gravy,” she stirred in sour cream, canned mushrooms, and garlic salt. In another skillet, she fried Tater Tots. Into a large baking dish she poured the meatball/sauce mixture and then Tater Tots. While baking, meatballs sank to the bottom and Tater Tots rose to the top.

This cadre who ran the parish were themselves ruled by Mrs. Frederick and Mrs. Hopper. Mrs. Hopper was wife to an eye-ear-nose-and-throat man looked up to by men and women for his virile holiness. (The Hopper vehicles, including the horse trailers in which Mrs. Hopper took horses to shows, had bumper stickers that read “Even so, come Lord Jesus Rev 22:20.”) Raised in the Episcopal Church, baptized and confirmed, Dr. Bud Hopper nonetheless put faith in Billy Graham. When Graham’s crusade neared our state. Dr. Hopper canceled patients and took off. Night after night, Bud answered Graham’s altar call, was saved and re-saved. After his Graham conversions, Bud took people aside during coffee hour after church. He gripped your elbow and got his long nose close to your face. What he said to me on one of these occasions was, “God really did something to my heart this time.”

A physical opposite of pale Mrs. Frederick, Mrs. Hopper had a sturdy, waistless body. She wore Pendleton plaid suits in winter and sleeveless dresses that exposed tanned, muscular arms in summer. A horsewoman, she cleaned her barn with help from a gangling retarded fellow with B.O. (a “simpleton,” my father-in-law said, who ought to be “de-balled” before he raped some girl). Dallas, they called this fellow, after the city where Dr. Hopper found him at a Graham crusade. At church, Dallas knelt between the Hoppers; he babbled loudly and drooled when he prayed. At potlucks, he hunched between them and choked on his food and vomited it onto his shirt and tie. The Hoppers smiled and dabbed away the mess and kept right on talking about horses or how good they thought the father’s sermon had been that morning or how well the 30-year-old Dallas was doing, learning his ABCs.

Our parish had two women’s guilds, St. Anne’s and St. Martha’s. St. Anne was mother to the Virgin Mary. St. Martha was sister to Mary Magdalene. The tenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke has Mary Magdalene, seated at Jesus’ feet, listening while He talks. Martha, scuttling about fixing dinner, turns to Jesus and says, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to get on with the work by myself? Tell her to come and give me a hand.” To which Jesus answers, “Martha, Martha, you are fretting and fussing about so many things; only one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen what is best; it shall not be taken away from her.” Theologians call upon Martha and Mary to illustrate the argument between “faith” and “works.” Martha represents the “active” life of “works” and Mary Magdalene the “contemplative” life of “faith.” St. Anne’s sponsored the annual Bishop’s Tea and Christmas Bazaar. St. Martha’s sponsored the spring and fall rummage sales. A third group of women, rather like independents in colleges that have sororities, belonged to neither guild and sponsored nothing.

All the cadre were St. Anne’s ladies and, excepting Mary Bee Dillard, were married or widowed and connected, by birth or marriage or both, to old county families. You did not ask to join St. Anne’s; you knew if you belonged. The only outsiders invited in to St. Anne’s were priest’s wives.

Most St. Martha’s gals worked. They were secretaries, CPAs, social workers, bank tellers, teachers, nurses, librarians, lab techs, travel agents. Non-working members were wives of Forest Service rangers, county employees, professors, school teachers, realtors, agricultural extension agents, shop owners, and ranchers.

St. Anne’s had no divorced members. Had you married into a proper family and been abandoned by your husband or left him after you couldn’t take drunken beatings or his giving you VD, you drifted away from St. Anne’s. You did not join St. Martha’s. Nor, had you been a St. Martha’s member and married into a leading family, could you join St. Anne’s.

Sunday evening potluck had its own ritual. Three long tables were set out for serving. Salads and vegetables and breads went on the first table, main dishes on the second, desserts and milk and Kool-Aid pitchers, half gallons of dago red and chablis, and coffee and tea urns on the third. Beyond these tables were tables that seated eight and four. These were where we ate, always with our own families. As soon as you deposited your dish at the proper long table, you chose the table where you’d eat and put out placemats and dishes and silver.

St. Anne’s was responsible for arrangement. (St. Martha’s, after dinner, cleaned up.) At meats and casseroles, you began with so-so dishes prepared by ladies of small social consequence. Thus, the sixth-grade schoolteacher’s macaroni and pimiento cheese (elbow macaroni, white sauce, Velveeta chunks, and chopped pimiento, top with bread crumbs) could go first; followed by the assistant city manager’s wife’s turkey tetrazzini (five cups shredded turkey, one pound thin spaghetti, two cans sliced mushrooms, three cans cream of mushroom soup, topped with grated Parmesan cheese); followed by the grade school librarian’s tuna and potato chip loaf (half-pound crushed potato chips, two cans tuna fish, two cans cream of mushroom soup, two whole eggs, mixed together and baked in loaf pan).

Several more dishes followed, perhaps a St. Martha member’s seafood divan (cream of celery soup, canned shrimp and canned crab, canned mushrooms, pimientos, cooked cauliflowerets); and a tuna casserole gussied up with chopped green olives. After these, we laid out offerings prepared by more august ladies. Thus, a lifelong St. Anne’s gal’s tamale bake and her daughter’s spaghetti meat pie would be given harbor next to Mrs. Frederick’s pork-u-pines (for whose last-minute arrival we waited) and my mother-in-law’s fried chicken.

My mother-in-law hated cooking. When I was first married to her son, she “fried” chicken by coating the birds’ pieces in Shake ’n Bake and tlien baking the chicken. During the early ’70s, Kentucky Fried Chicken announced they would open in our town. Unlike slow-growth liberals in big cities who fought chains’ arrivals, we, who had only Dairy Queen and A&W Root Beer, were thrilled. My mother-in-law, from KFC’s opening day, brought the 30-piece KFC tub to potlucks. Had she not been one of the cadre of six, KFC would have been taboo. She, however, could get away with it and be praised.

In the parish kitchen, which we’d outfitted with two six-burner ranges and two new refrigerators from Christmas Bazaar sales, ladies tied aprons over “good” clothes and warmed in the oven Tahiti sweet potato casserole (canned sweet potatoes, orange pulp, brown sugar, cooking sherry, marshmallow whip topping) and pigs-in-a-blanket (“So cute,” someone would say, touching pinky-sized sausages, around which were wrapped American cheese and refrigerated biscuit dough). Another lady stirred cheddar cheese soup for broccoli loaf; and next to her, another woman, cheeks rosy from heat, kept her eye on simmering cream of shrimp soup that at the last minute she’d pour over cauliflower-broccoli medley. Hungry, overexcited children, warned by mothers to slow down and show some manners, to put back Lenten pamphlets they’d grabbed out of the rack in the narthex, chased each other across the parish hall and repeatedly had to be corralled. Somebody always had to go look for the teenagers.

Summer nights, gelatin salads puddled. So if you brought golden glow (chopped carrots, crushed pineapple, cream cheese molded in orange Jell-O) or Hawaiian heaven (fruit cocktail, miniature marshmallows, banana slices, crushed pineapple, Cool Whip in lemon Jell-O) or frosted lime-walnut (walnuts, celery, crushed pineapple, cream cheese in lime Jell-O), you set them in parish refrigerators until right before time to eat.

Older ladies who didn’t drive we took turns bringing to potlucks. These ladies specialized in buttermilk biscuits, yeast rolls, and corn sticks. They brought these, with homemade jam, in baskets covered with white linen tea towels. Older women also baked pies and cakes and, in summertime, fruit cobblers. When my husband was a boy, his paternal grandmother, long dead when we married, paid him to go up into the hills on his bicycle and pick blackberries and huckleberries for her cobblers.

While we admired each new dish as it arrived and determined placement, we kept an eye out for the Fredericks and Mrs. Frederick’s Mary Bee. Whoever first sighted the Coupe de Ville called out, “Fredericks! The Fredericks are here!”

After her two daughters married and moved away, Mrs. Frederick took Mary Bee under her wing. Mary Bee was in her late 20s then, and orphaned, a heart attack having toppled Mayor Dillard. Mary Bee’s big brown eyes (“pinwheeling,” my husband said, from the anti-psychotic drugs) stared out from a square, ruddy, horsy face above which shimmered a corona of thin, pale hair, teased and ratted to add fullness and height. After high school, Mary Bee volunteered in the town library. Every few years, beginning in junior high school, Mary Bee went “off her nut” (my father-in-law’s expression) and quit bathing, talking, and eating. She’d refuse to crawl out of her bed even for the bathroom. An ambulance then drove up the circling road to the Dillards’ house on top of the hill, next door to Fredericks’, and took Mary Bee in restraints to the clinic where Pal Thayer went to dry out. A month or two later, Mary Bee returned, apparently restored. (While she was gone, we offered her name in the list of prayers for special concerns.)

Not long after the mayor’s heart attack, Mrs. Frederick had her hysterectomy, an operation, she said, that “did her in.” So Mrs. Frederick moved Mary Bee in with her. Next door, the house Mary Bee grew up in, stood empty. Mary Bee wanted to save it, she said, for when she got married, which my father-in-law said nobody in his right mind would do except to get his hands on Old Man Dillard’s money and Mary Bee’s big boobs.

When the Coupe de Ville pulled into the parking lot, we hurried coatless out into the cold or bare-armed into heat. We carried in baking dishes and footed and filigreed real silver gratin dishes into which Mrs. Frederick fitted her baking pans. The progress from Coupe de Ville to parish hall was a matter of many trips. After the first, which bore Mrs. Frederick into the parish hall, Mary Bee lifted off Mrs. Frederick’s mink and slipped it onto a wooden hanger; or were it July, say, or even a warm, rainless May with sky turning pale yellow to pink, Mary Bee tucked the shawl of the evening closer about Mrs. Frederick’s shoulders.

In the last minutes we stacked paper cups next to the dago red, and Mrs. Hopper strode to the door. Hands around her mouth to form a bullhorn, she called, “Come on in, guys.” The men turned laughing faces to her. “Okay, okay,” they said, and ambled across gravel, slapped each other’s backs, and guffawed. Only when they reached the parish hall did they lower their voices and shutter their faces into a pinched, pious look.

Meanwhile, we who had children gathered them and stood at our tables, holding the backs of our folding chairs.

The priest took his place in front of the long tables. Our noisy talking stopped. “Let us thank God for our blessings,” the priest intoned into a silence broken only in summer by fans suspended in the ceiling. Husbands and wives and children and maiden ladies and widows, we closed our eyes and held hands and recited, “Thank you, God, who in Thy great glory has vouchsafed to feed us....”

We picked up our plates and formed a line, the priest and his wife and the Fredericks with Mary Bee at its head. Given that on a good night, 50 families plus a dozen or more little old ladies and assorted singles came to potluck, you can imagine how many bowls and baking pans and baskets and platters lined these tables. We began at relish trays, salad, vegetables, and breads and worked our way to meats and casseroles, where Mrs. Frederick’s footed silver gratin dishes gleamed at the table’s center and her heavy silver monogrammed serving spoons stuck out jauntily from pork-u-pines or Swedish meatballs.

Even those who for 50 years had attended these potlucks burst out with “Oh, my gosh, look at all this food!” And, “I always look forward to Mrs. Cummer’s lovely pea-and-baby-onion salad!” and “I can’t help but want more than my share of Mrs. Gibbons’ cheddar biscuits!”

Again, rules, unspoken but strict, existed as to how one served oneself. The first time a diner went through, he or she chose dabs from at least every other dish, excepting items like creamed spinach, which you either loved or hated. The second time through the line, after everyone served himself, you could take larger portions of dishes that remained.

The Hoppers invited new people to share their table, along with the priest and his wife. The Fredericks, Mary Bee, and my in-laws, and Nan Thayer sat together, with my mother-in-law’s best friend Dottie Reynard and Dottie’s husband Jack; the men at that table drank more from their bottles than they ate, and they got loud right away. My husband liked to eat with guys who fished and urged against getting stuck with schoolteachers. (“They bore the shit out of me.”) If his fishing buddies weren’t there, he’d tell me to get a table with old ladies who’d known his grandmother, because he liked their stories.

Looking down at daubs of food on my plate, I knew who fixed what, and in my mind’s eye could see the woman and her kitchen, the view from her kitchen window, her husband and children. I thought of the work that skinny Aggie Milam, wife of the big-bellied shoe store owner (he cheated on her), put into her tri-color (red, green, yellow) gelatin salad. Saturday morning, while the three Milam children screamed for breakfast, she had to oil her turban mold and pour in the red gelatin and canned fruit cocktail and then set the turban mold in the refrigerator and wait for the red to jell; after the red jelled, Aggie poured in green gelatin and miniature marshmallows, waited for that to set; then she poured in bright yellow gelatin and maraschino cherry halves, walnut bits, and cream cheese chunks. All Saturday and Sunday she had to keep her children and husband from opening the refrigerator door and sticking fingers into the yellow gelatin to pry out a walnut. Sunday evening, when Aggie brought the turban mold, white platter, and parsley to the parish hall, there came that terrible moment in the kitchen: Aggie upended her mold and prayed that the tri-color turban would slip out in one piece onto her platter. We all said, “Yea, Aggie!” when the red, green, and yellow-striped turban stood shimmering atop its parsley.

1 didn’t like the taste of much of the food, and it wasn’t what I cooked at home. I don’t think that many of us brought to potlucks what we regularly fed our families. (The only Campbell’s soup I kept in the pantry was chicken noodle, because the children asked for it when they were sick.) Recipes for much of our potluck food came from the Family Circles and Women’s Days we picked up at the checkout counter at Safeway. These recipes ingeniously used products that came to market shelves after World War II. Potluck food, excepting the older ladies’ desserts, celebrated the post-World War II culinary democracy, the melting pot. It was public food, like “good” clothing, and when someone like Pal Thayer died, the food that you went in Nan’s back door and left off on her kitchen counter, along with a note you wrote saying, “Our prayers are with you in your time of bereavement.”

When we ladies went back the second time, usually with a still-hungry child, for we pretended to have delicate appetites, we checked how much was left of our sloppy Joe casserole topped with canned french-fried onion rings or our almond chicken salad or our relish tray ringed round with radish roses, gherkins, peanut butter-stuffed celery curls, almond-studded black olives, homemade dilled okra, and salami twists in which you took a half slice of salami and rolled it around a chunk of cream cheese. A woman who’d tried, say, something curried that didn’t go over had to keep herself smiling while she heard diners next to her at the serving tables praise the frank-and-three-bean bake and watched Dr. Hopper and my father-in-law spoon out a few more pork-u-pines.

Some dishes didn’t go over. You’d see a wife whose beans, for instance, didn’t soften up in baking, whisper to her husband to please go take a big helping so that her bean pot wouldn’t stand there, still half full.

That “hippie-ish” element associated with the teachers college that my mother-in-law tolerated for its pledges to the parish treasury made casseroles with bulgur and brown rice and salads aquiver with alfalfa sprouts (which my father-in-law enjoyed saying, when he was in his cups, reminded him of pubic hair), dense heavy muffins, and cookies made with honey, all this in the era when anyone who ate yogurt was referred to as a “health food nut.” This group, busy forming organizations to save wetlands and build bicycle paths, spooned out helpings of their offerings. Everyone else, excepting the younger priests, avoided these dishes and spoke of them as “hippie food.”

Desserts we ate last. Desserts were Calvary’s pride. Not only did older women bake from-scratch chocolate, angel food, and lemon cakes, their butterscotch meringue and lemon meringue and rhubarb-strawberry pies and peach and berry cobblers and apple puddings, but several younger women who took cake-decorating classes in back of the downtown hardware store made sheet

cakes and cut from them, say, a Mickey Mouse figure, with Mickey’s big ears and sad round eyes; or a big duck frosted in white frosting in feathery strokes on the duck’s plump body and with shiny yellow frosting on its feet and bill. The children loved these cakes, as did my father-in-law, who pored over them, shaking his head, saying, “Well, I’ll be damned.” For holidays, these same women who took cake decorating made fancy cookies. For St. Patrick’s they made shamrocks sprinkled with green-colored sugar, green as bottle glass; and near Christmas, gingerbread men and women whose icing suits and dresses had buttons made from silver dragees.

People moseyed around the parish hall, balancing dessert plates and coffee mugs. The older men kept drinking and talking louder, about rents on downtown stores and good buys on car insurance and the cattle market and local football and basketball teams and frozen pipes and lawn mowers they were buying. They got so boisterous that they woke toddlers asleep in their mothers’ laps.

Ladies said how especially good the turkey tetrazzini tasted and how tender Mrs. Junken’s pie crust was and wondered aloud how she cut her crust lattices. “With pinking shears,” she told us, blowing smoke in our faces. Mrs. Junken was 80-something, hopped about with a cane, painted her droopy eyelids with blue shadow, and had been smoking Chesterfield non-filters since World

War II. If she weren’t hospitalized, Mary Bee Dillard, hand cupping Mrs. Frederick’s elbow, led Mrs. Frederick from group to group. Mrs. Frederick complimented each of us on dress, children, potluck dish, or some task we’d completed, like touching up paint in the sacristy. Somebody always said to Mrs. Frederick that her sweet-and-sour pork-u-pines proved irresistible, and Mrs. Frederick always smiled at Mary Bee and told us she’d helped and how she couldn’t do without her.

Mr. Frederick, if he got you alone in the dimly lit hallway when you were coming from the women’s room (where Christmas Bazaar money went to buy a pretty Oriental carpet and full-length mirror), hugged you close to his bony chest and whispered in your ear and pinched some soft spot on you, a breast or chub at the waist. He might even nibble your earlobe and invite you to meet him at the Crossroads for a drink some afternoon before your children got home from school. His breath gave off bourbon, and he said filthy things in your ear and pinched you again, harder, and then said, “I bet you’d like it like that, wouldn’t you.”

I never told my husband about Mr. Frederick, and I’d wager that nobody else told her husband either. Why I didn’t say anything was because I knew, as we all knew, that Mr. Frederick’s talk and touching was how things were and that to tell my husband would only make those things worse. Once I did say to my husband, though, that I bet Mr. Frederick chased after Mary Bee at night after Mrs. Frederick went to sleep, that he probably couldn’t resist that bosom of hers. My husband said, “Maybe, maybe not.”

One summer afternoon at a St. Anne’s meeting on Mrs. Hopper’s patio, the younger of us women were talking and it slipped out that Mr. Frederick was somebody to stay away from. Mrs. Hopper, passing by with the teapot, heard us. She put her free hand on my shoulder and said, “The world, my dear, has got enough hurt without our adding to it.”

By 9:30 on potluck nights, women started collecting their empty bowls and platters, piling plates and silver into baskets or doubled-up Safeway sacks. Husbands carried sleeping children and lidded casseroles out to cars. Mary Bee Dillard got Mrs. Frederick’s mink. But nobody left until whichever priest we had then went to the front of the hall and lifted his right hand and said, “The Blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be among you and remain with you, always. Amen.” High Churchers crossed themselves, and everybody began shaking hands and kissing cheeks and saying what fun we’d had and how much we looked forward to the next potluck. Any minute then, St. Martha’s gals could begin swabbing down tables and taking trash out across the gravel parking lot to the cans lettered in black paint “Calvary Episcopal.”