Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [9]
The missus understood. She never bothered anymore to ask him if he wanted to go to church. He went on Easter and on Christmas. If the choir was putting on a special performance, he might go. He liked singing the hymns, the old hymns. God and he had an understanding: God could watch over the world and Harold Peabody would watch over Pepin County.
Harold had been working on the Durand Daily for fifty-one years. It had truly been a daily when he first started writing as a cub reporter in 1950. Old Mr. Lundberg owned it then. Harold had bought it from him in 1970. After ten years, he stopped publishing the Saturday and Sunday editions. They had changed from Linotype to offset press shortly after that. Saved a lot of money, but he missed the smell of the hot type being spit out by the machine, and reading the paper upside down on its metal bed.
He didn’t figure he’d be at it much longer. He wondered if he put the paper up for sale if anyone would even buy it. Revenues weren’t high, but he had his steady customers who advertised every week. The community counted on his paper to tell them who was getting married, who had died, and who was having a rummage sale. In this rural community an announcement for a wedding was often made in the paper rather than the couple sending out individual invitations, since everyone in town was usually invited.
Maybe he’d retire in the next year or two and start to work on his memoirs. That Frank McCourt had done so well with his memoirs. Americans found terrible Irish childhoods so romantic and exotic. Would they feel the same about a tough Wisconsin childhood? He remembered his family trying to make it through the Depression years. Many nights they ate beans. Some nights they didn’t eat. Harder to look at your own poor. Nothing romantic about that. But he didn’t think the young people of today realized how tough it had been during those years. It might be worth trying to write about it so that the Depression wasn’t completely forgotten.
He had been one of the lucky ones. He had been sickly, so he couldn’t help out that much in the fields. And he had been bright. His mother had fought for him and kept him going to school, years after most children quit. He had been the first child in his family to graduate from college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
He was working on his usual Sunday-afternoon project—the column called “Fifty Years Ago Today.” It was his excuse to spend hours looking through the archives, remembering the past, studying it. How little we seem to learn from it, he thought. And yet, there had been no big world wars for nearly sixty years now. That was something to be thankful for.
Agnes and he were childless. After they found out they couldn’t have children, they talked about adopting, but they just never got around to it. To be truthful, he figured they liked their lives the way they were. But sometimes, on his Sunday afternoons, when he was paging through a century’s worth of news, he wondered about the future. He felt oddly adrift from it. Because he had no progeny, he felt he didn’t really care what happened to the world. He heard so many people go on about the sacredness of human life, and yet every day some small creature, the end of a species, was dying. No one did too much about that. He thought the world might be just as well off without any humans. Such egotistical critters. Who knew what wonderful being might come to take their place?
This was one of the reasons he didn’t go to church. Everyone there seemed to want to believe that God, the so-called higher power, was a kind of father. Harold didn’t buy it. He did believe in a power, but it was beyond words. In the day, he would stare into the blueness of the sky and dive into it. At night, he fell into the stars. Both movements of falling gave him the same feeling he had when he tried to imagine the vast extent of this power. So beyond us. Yet we try to reach it with our minds. Harold figured it was good exercise and did it often, but felt like most religions