By Chuck Fager
Chapter Three
Up from the South at break of day,
Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay.
The affrighted air with a shudder bore,
Like a herald in haste, to the chieftain's door,
The terrible grumble and rumble and roar,
Telling the battle was on once more....
--Thomas Buchanan Read, Sheridan's Ride
I knew Goode from his pictures, as, obviously, did Eddie. "Christ," he muttered under his breath, "what's he doing here?"
"Beats me," I whispered back. "But I'll bet he hasn't come for training in silent worship."
"Wouldn't do him any harm," Eddie said.
"Hey, Bill," a woman's voice cried, "you made it! Gimme a hug."
I turned toward the door, just in time to be gathered into a bear hug by a large, smiling brunette.
"Rita," I said, reddening a bit. "You're here, too?"
Grabbing Eddie by one arm, I introduced them. "This is Rita Gillespie, Presiding Clerk of Metropolitan Half-Yearly Meeting in New York City. My old radical comrade."
"Don't say old," she objected with a laugh, stepping back and putting her arms akimbo. She wore a long, shapeless shift of brown and purple, and her dark hair made a convex frame for her face. Then it twisted into a long, thick braid that bounced halfway down her back, held in place by a carved clip made from something like mahogany. I noticed, though, that now the braid was flecked with grey.
Rita wasn't even remotely fashionable in her look. Her figure, once trim and full, was rounder, its curves now more in line with gravity. She was, there was no denying it, older and heavier than I remembered.
But then, so was I. And with her grey eyes, full lips and good teeth, I found her very striking. Rita waved a long, strong-looking finger at me.
"The Columbia student strike wasn't all that long ago. Barely twenty years." There was just a hint of wistfulness under her jocular tone, an inflection I was becoming increasingly familiar with.
"Right on," I said. "I think I can still make a fist, but I forget which one we were supposed to raise when we shout 'Power to the people!' I'm afraid they'll laugh at me at the next Sixties reunion."
"I have the same problem," she said, "so I just fake it and raise both fists. My ex-husband says it makes me look like a Trotskyite, but what does he know?" She leaned toward me and adopted a stage whisper. "Some committee meeting we're having," she said. "Lots of surprises."
"It certainly looks that way," Eddie put in. He gestured with his head toward Goode and Penn, now the nucleus of a cluster of suits across the foyer from us. "Where did he come from?"
"Curiouser and curiouser," Rita began, then the cluster of suits started moving in our direction. "Just a stretch break," she said, "and I gotta pee. Tell you all about it later." She hurried off toward the women's room.
Ex-husband, I thought. That was news. I remembered them from Wichita in '77; she had been one of the married ones. He was getting a doctorate somewhere and they were still almost newlyweds. Rita had been slimmer, and radiant in the way of recent, well-bedded brides. It had made me feel lonely just to look at her.
She was still attractive, I realized, and now, perhaps, eligible. This would bear further exploration.
The pastors filed back into the auditorium. But they were silent as they passed us, and two or three gave us significant, distant stares as they passed. Lem Penn nodded, but there was an anxious furrow bisecting his wrinkled forehead.
The librarians came along behind them, smiling weakly; then Rita, who winked, squeezed my arm, and hissed, "Don't trust anyone over 30!''
"Well, that's a kick in the head," Eddie murmured when the doors had closed. "Let's go find out what they're up to."
"Wait a minute," I urged. "Why don't we center down a minute first. I think we may need it."
"All right," he agreed, and we stood there quietly for a moment, two Quaker initiates performing their secret cult ritual. He closed his eyes briefly. Then he opened them and nodded. "Come on."
Pushing through the doors, we saw the committee, beyond the rows of old wooden seats, around a big rectangle of trestle tables set up on the stage. There were steps at the center and on both sides, the backdrop was white acoustical tile, and a podium with a microphone had been shoved to one side of the stage, next to a piano.
Notebooks were open, ballpoint pens were poised, and all eyes were on Lem Penn, who was just getting up, and saying, "Rita, will thee take over for a few minutes?" Then he turned and headed briskly down the steps in our direction. "Could I see you outside," he asked quietly as he passed.
We followed in his wake out the doors and back to Table Number three. "William," he said when we got there, "good to see thee," and stuck out his hand.
I shook it, reflecting again on the fact that Lemuel Penn, the Quaker patriarch of the Alleghenies, was one of the few Friends I knew who could say thee and thou to me without it sounding affected. Like the handful of others I had heard using this old-fashioned Quaker plain speech, he was old, early seventies at least, and the practice would probably be gone forever with the passing of this quiet remnant, which surely could not be many years off.
Lem was not tall to start with, and his years had given him a definite stoop. About half bald, his hair-streaked pate had a weatherbeaten look that reminded me of a rocky outcropping on one of the hillsides he owned a few hours drive from Winchester, where he grew some of the finest apples and cherries in southwestern Virginia.
In fact, it was apples that had introduced me to him, at a weekend Quaker conference in Boston. It was autumn 1969; he was the main speaker, but everybody shared the chores, and he and I were assigned to buy the food for the first night's dinner. We took the MTA downtown to the open air market in Haymarket Square to get it.
There we had cruised past the pungent sausages swimming in their own fat and stepped over the rotten cantaloupes and tomatoes in the gutter, dodged the flies and yellow jackets, ignored the stench of decaying vegetables, and picked up some eggs and several pounds of potatoes from one of the wheeled stands.
The harvest display was rich and colorful, but the glory of that season at Haymarket were the apples, red, yellow and greenish pyramids of them all around the crowded, smelly block. Northern Spy, Rome, the regional favorite McIntosh, others whose names I didn't know--and of course, mounds of the sleek, Establishment varieties, red and yellow Delicious.
While otherwise firmly anti-Establishment, this embarrassment of riches left me opting for the safe course, fruitwise. Opening a paper bag, I was about to start filling it with some shiny Red Delicious, when I felt a gentle hand on my arm.
"Not those," Lem said quietly. He was not bald then, only barely stooped, and wore a venerable fedora over a shabby brown suit. There was a retired, second string insurance salesman look about him, yet his hands, stubby, strong and callused, undercut any sense of softness. From more than a few feet away you wouldn't notice him; but close up, there was to his carriage a certain indefinable but solemn dignity that I could recognize as both uniquely personal and, at the same time, distinctively Quaker.
He turned away from the pile of Delicious apples, and gestured for me to follow. I did, recalling that he had been explaining about his apple orchard on the subway downtown. The orchard did not produce much profit; but he did not need much. His wife was dead, his two children grown.
More than money, the orchard yielded time: most winters, with the branches bare and the hillsides chilly he was free to travel, while a neighbor kept an eye on the place. And travel he did, pursuing his many Quaker concerns, about four months of the year.
John Woolman had done that two centuries ago, using much of the time to visit Quaker slaveholders and plead with them to free their chattels, with some success. Woolman was something of a saint for American Quakers, and clearly a role model for Penn. Like Woolman, Penn lived simply and traveled lightly, unhampered by anxiety about Dressing for Success.
But Penn's interests ranged more widely than Woolman's. He was particularly interested in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, in what he persisted in calling the Holy Land. He was well read in the history and issues of that tangled and dangerous region, had travelled there several times, and was planning a trip back the following spring, adding the Quaker qualifier, "if way opens," the way a Muslim might say "Inshallah."
But Penn was also, by occupation, an expert in apples. And now I followed him in the bright autumn sunlight among and between wooden carts and rusty pickup trucks loaded with different varieties, pausing here and there to point out a batch that looked particularly glossy or ripe. Each time he shook me off and kept walking.
Finally he pulled up and said, simply, "There. These," and spoke to the vendor, who snapped open a paper bag.
"These?" I questioned, unbelieving. The fruit he proposed to foist on our unsuspecting Friends at the conference were small, colored an indeterminate brown and yellow, with only tinges of maroon, and pocked by what looked unscrubbed pores. And they weren't any cheaper than the Delicious or the McIntosh, either one of which would have been a safe bet.
He only nodded and plucked one from the pile to toss to me. I rubbed it on my pants and, still skeptical, took a bite.
It was terrific. Firm, sweet, with a unique tang, it was to the Red Delicious what technicolor was to black and white.
Penn saw my eyes widening as my mouth worked, and he grinned modestly.
"It pays to know what's good," he said, selecting an apple for himself, and extracting a few dollars from an ancient wallet to pay for our produce.
On the way back to the conference, while I ate another of the succulent apples, he talked about one of his other main concerns: promoting greater understanding among the fragmented branches of American Quakerism. "It's not right for us to claim to be peacemakers in the world, if we can't maintain some kind of peace among ourselves," he insisted, his voice rising, the soft southern accent noticeable amid the hubbub of more nasal New England conversations around us. "It makes us hypocrites, scribes and pharisees."
In pursuit of this mission, he had recently gotten himself appointed as a representative from Tarheel Yearly Meeting to the North American Friends Association. NAFA, as it was commonly called, theoretically brought several of these branches together; but the union was an unstable one; ever since I joined Friends a year before meeting Penn, it seems that NAFA was always on the verge of flying apart, as one faction or another threatened to walk out over some theological or political outrage, real or imagined. In those days, with the Vietnam War in full bloody flower, such intramural Quaker quarrels seemed impossibly arcane and irrelevant. Later, I saw it differently: This peculiar Quaker community had helped me survive the war years. And as I settled into it, I could see how these schisms threatened that fragile community. So if they were still arcane, they were no longer unimportant.
Even so, to be honest, I must admit that understanding the course of the American Civil War was much more intriguing to me than tracing the various separations among Quakers. Federals versus Confederates, the Blue and the Gray, seemed like a much grander and more compelling saga than the squabbles between the Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers in Philadelphia 1827, or the Wilburite and Gurneyite Quakers in Ohio a generation later.
So while Lem Penn, between trips to the Holy Land, stayed with NAFA and within a few years was its Presiding Clerk, I settled in Washington, worked as a reporter for obscure legislative newsletters, and spent my free time becoming conversant with such matters as the location of the little Dunker church in the Antietam Battlefield, identifying just where The Angle was at Gettysburg, walking the entire circumference of The Petersburg Crater, and puzzling about why McLellan was so reluctant to attack Lee during the Peninsular campaign.
Being a liberal, I also took pains to learn about the struggle of blacks to join the Union army; and being a Quaker, I had haunted the section of the National Portrait Gallery which had been used as a hospital, listening for the shade of the Quake-ish Walt Whitman moving silently and lovingly among the huddled ghosts of his many dying patients.
With such preoccupations, I hadn't thought about NAFA in years. Thus I was a little surprised when Lem Penn had called me last winter, just as the Gulf War was about to break out, wanting me to join the planning committee for the All-Friends Conference. "But Lem," I protested, "what do you want me for? This is a summit conference, a gathering of weighty Friends. Assistant Recording Clerk of Washington Monthly Meeting is as weighty as I get, and that doesn't remotely qualify."
This was not false modesty. Quakerism was my faith, true. I even managed to get to meeting on Sundays--or, in proper Quaker-speak, First Days--about three weeks out of five when in town; and I did send a check to the treasurer every month. When called on to fill in for the Recording Clerk, I took careful minutes of our business meetings.
But I was hardly a pillar of the Meeting. I was not, for instance, one of the dedicated cadre who always volunteered to teach First Day School (my one effort at it, substituting for a sick friend amid a roomful of definitely nonpacifist eight year-olds, had been a disaster). Nor was I among the sanctified elite who regularly arrived at our monthly potlucks with large serving dishes full of some steaming, aromatic and savory concoction whose main ingredient was something other than elbow macaroni.
To be sure, I seldom missed the potlucks; they were one of the few places a single guy could get decent home cooking without unwanted romantic entanglements. But my typical contribution to them, if I remembered at all, was likely to be a supermarket pie from the day-old rack, or--if I had just read another article about carcinogens in processed foods--a bag of oranges, hastily sliced onto a plate at the last minute.
Only when Penn told me the conference location, and his idea for my role, did it begin to sound like fun. "I need thee to organize local history field trips," he said, "for the Friends from afar. Winchester is full of such history, as thee well knows."
So I did: The city that now styled itself the apple capital also had been the site of three major battles; several more had taken place nearby. The city itself had changed hands between Union and Confederate forces something like seventy times. "Now that sounds interesting," I admitted.
He waited patiently on the other end of the phone, until I let out a resigned sigh.
"Okay," I said, "as long as I don't have to come to meetings."
"No problem," he said. "I'll list thee as an alternate member from Potomac Yearly Meeting, and thee can start thinking about some easy daytrips to take."
Thus relieved of the need to take up the Quaker form of the cross--going to committee meetings--I had happily done as he had asked, and begun reading up on the Civil War in the Shenandoah Valley.
It was a rich field, I discovered, as well as a relatively underdeveloped one, at least historiographically. I didn't understand why it was so neglected, what with Stonewall Jackson, Jubal Early, Phil Sheridan, the cadets from Virginia Military Institute, raids by Mosby's Rangers, and lots more, with Winchester right in the middle of it all. But for my purposes, that only made it more interesting; it wasn't as well-worn as Gettysburg, or as exhaustively chronicled as Appomattox.
Of course, skipping the committee meetings also meant I had arrived in Winchester with no idea of what was actually going on with the conference. This, I realized as Lem Penn led Eddie Smith and me out of the auditorium, meant I probably had a lot more to learn about what I had gotten myself into.
And when Penn turned and stopped at Table Number Three, pointed to Eddie's big display, with all its happily-married couples beaming out at us, and said quietly but firmly, "Friends, I'm afraid this can't stay here," I knew I had a whole lot yet to learn.
"What the hell do you mean?" Eddie demanded.
Copyright © by Chuck Fager. All rights reserved.
