Novembering

As a girl growing up on a farm in Edson, Michigan, I knew about sex from an early age. With breeding animals around, it’s something you learn, something as common as wind bending wheat on a summer’s day. And still, I was naïve. I’d seen plenty of genitalia, even watched my father plunge his arms inside a cow’s uterus to help deliver a calf turned sideways, yet I didn’t know about the dark underbelly of the world. I’d never seen up close how darkness could harden men’s hearts like tombstones.

Standing by my parents’ graves in Queen of Angels Cemetery, I’m amazed I was in my sixties before I realized this. Pulling a rosary from my coat pocket, I think, what a sheltered life you had, Eulea. For a woman who spent so many years teaching school, you’re an awfully slow learner.

It’s November, the month of the dead, and I’m at the cemetery to pray for souls on the other side of the veil. My mother called this Novembering. As children my siblings and I were taught to always remember our departed loved ones, to never assume they’d traded the pains of purgatory for heavenly bliss, and so we prayed for them year-round, but especially in November when the days cooled and even trees mourned the loss of their leaves.

I’m the youngest of five children and this year I’m also praying for my oldest sister Marlene, a widow who died earlier this month at her home in Port Austin, and who, along with her husband, always claimed the CIA killed President Kennedy in November of 1963, because he was going to dismantle the military-industrial complex. I never believed the CIA theory, even though after the Zapruder film was finally made public, I no longer accepted the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman nonsense:  It’s obvious Kennedy was also shot from the front, the way his head snapped backwards and his brains blew out behind him like chaff from a combine.

The day after the assassination my father fell eighty feet from a grain bin ladder, so our family mourned doubly that year. Then in November of 1971 my nephew Cole was killed in Vietnam, and in November of 1983 my favorite cousin Gladys succumbed to the diabetes she’d battled since childhood. Every month has its sorrows, especially if you live long enough and start counting all your dead, but when I’m not careful, when I don’t remind myself of my blessings, November can be as hard as the ground that met my father.

It was last year in November of 1989 that the school superintendent, a young man fond of vested suits, walked into my third-grade classroom with a yellow legal pad and stood near the back wall. I asked if I could help him, but he just shook his head and started writing on the legal pad. He stayed about ten minutes, watching me and the children and writing, and then he left.

“He wants to get rid of you so his wife can have your job,” said our union president, the high school drafting teacher. “That’s why he made up this crappy evaluation.”

The previous spring, the superintendent’s first year in Edson, he approached me while I was outside with my class at recess, and casually asked if I planned to retire. Surprised, I said, “Oh, no… I love teaching,” not mentioning that, never able to attract a husband, my students were my children, and I hoped to keep mothering several more years. He said I had taught long enough to receive a full retirement and was also eligible for Social Security. I told him it wasn’t a question of money, and didn’t think much more of the conversation until he called me that summer and said the school board had agreed to give me a bonus package if I retired. I thanked him and declined, noticing the irritation in his voice before he hung up the phone, but never dreaming what he would do.

My principal, Seamus O’Rourke, who’d always evaluated me and the other teachers, was outraged when he learned of the superintendent’s ploy. Seamus and my colleagues urged me not to retire, but I didn’t have that type of fight in me—which I suppose the superintendent knew. I submitted my retirement papers, effective the end of the school year.

St. John of the Cross says our souls are like damp logs, and just as a fire must dry those logs before they can take on its essence and give off heat, so too our souls must be purified before they can achieve union with God. While not being indifferent to created things, we need to acquire a healthy detachment from what isn’t the Creator, from any love preventing our mystical embrace. Or as my mother put it, all our lives is a learning to die to ourselves. Did I love teaching too much?

Seamus protested my forced retirement with the school board, but that only caused more controversy and eventually got him fired. The Flint television station covered the decisive meeting, which I watched from home, and to my horror the reporter mentioned my name. Even though Seamus had been elementary principal for sixteen years, and scores of parents attended the meeting to support him, in the end, the board members went along with the superintendent’s scheme to eliminate all obstacles to his wife getting my job.

That was when I knew the CIA had killed Kennedy.

I finish my Rosary and put the beads in my coat pocket. I drive back to my house where, this November, I have no papers to grade, no projects to plan for next week’s classes—no hope of ever mothering that way again.

I take off my coat and make a cup of tea, then build a fire in the fireplace. From a bookshelf in the spare bedroom, I grab an old devotional called Psalms for Every Occasion. Sitting on the couch, I thumb through the pages to the psalms of thanksgiving. As the fire crackles, its warm breath spreading across the room, I read psalm after psalm after psalm. I’m trying to set my soul ablaze.

Augustine Himmel's stories have appeared mostly in print journals, but "Heroes" is available online at the Valparaiso Fiction Review, "Greenberg" at the Blue Lake Review, and "7 & 7" at the Barcelona Review. His online essays are "Praying for Hemingway," which appeared in America Magazine, "Only the Humble Are Happy," in the National Catholic Register, and "OxyContin, the Holy Spirit, and Townes Van Zandt," in OnePeterFive.