Read Online The Missing Person by Doris Grumbach - Free Book Online Page B

house with a green veranda that went around three sides, ringed by a few wind-breaking cedars, three silos, and huge white barns, was the hub of their lives. There they slept and ate, played and rested, joshed, and said their prayers, and asked their little concerned questions of each other: “Better today, Maw?” and “Still hungry, son?” and “Any of that plum jam left?”—loving queries that made up most of their conversation.
    Their house was a good quarter mile from their nearest neighbor’s; it was, somehow, self-sufficient. Everyone in it felt surrounded by warm, protective mutuality. Before the family settled down at any gathering, for a meal or on the veranda in the early evening where they told jokes or made farm plans or gossiped about the outside world, they went through a familial ritual of checking: “Did the bandage hold right on that ankle, Tun?” or “Pretty good day for drying, Maw?” and “Find the stuff from the store I picked up, Dad?”
    The Buttses were selfless, generous people who took on a strong sense of themselves only when they were assured of the wholeness and safety of those around them. The climate of the family was masculine, all the children being boys. This accentuated the small flame of frail femininity that burned in Emma Butts. Gentle, almost humbly ashamed of their gross good health and utile bodies, the Butts men hovered over their wife and mother, carrying things for her, waiting on her, in a synecdoche she always used when describing them, gratefully, to the neighbors, “hand and foot.”
    None of the Buttses smoked or drank, or much liked to read or even listen to the radio except for the baseball games. Now and then on a Saturday night they all went to the movies in Prairie City. But their pleasures were primarily muscular. They loved large meals, working outdoors, throwing footballs to each other or kicking them against the barn. They walked because they loved the feel of dirt roads and grassy paths under their feet, they talked to each other about the farm, the seasons, sports, they drove farm machinery with the pure pleasure that came to them from visible accomplishments and physical activity.
    They loved the rituals of Sunday, the early-morning baths, clean clothes, ties and shined shoes, then the wait on the veranda for Maw. The five men drank their coffee together there, standing up, looking out at their fields. There was the customary jostling for position when Emma came down looking like a bird shining after a rain, to go to church with them. On her narrow neck she usually wore oversized white plastic-ball beads. They made her look pathetic and proud.
    â€œSpiffy. You look right spiffy,” said the Reverend Butts to his wife.
    Three sons squeezed into the back seat and one sat over the hump in front to give Maw enough room. The church was only a few miles away, in the heart of Prairie City, and had a congregation of sixty-eight. Wendell Butts read the service and then delivered his sermon. It was full of down-to-earth sense, his “grass-roots approach to living and to God,” as he liked to call his sermons. His figures of speech were invariably athletic. He talked of his service to God as being “God’s waterboy.” Fighting against sin he described as “keeping the opposition, the Devil, off balance.” A happy family was an “all-star team.” To the farm families and the townspeople in the congregation these football references proved Butts’s acquaintance with the wider world. He made them feel cosmopolitan and knowledgeable. To the Buttses listening with admiration from their pew, his allusions combined in a cheerful, Sabbath way, their abiding interests: God, football, the farm, and their love for each other.
    The Buttses took great pride in good health, even Emma who had little of it herself but seemed to be sustained by the display of theirs. The oldest son,