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By Root 340 0

the mist as our neighbors to the north called their cows to milking: “M’bawssss…M’bawssss…” I tell her how those same neighbors—a pair of bachelor brothers named Art and Clarence—still took the Norwegian newspaper and spoke of my brothers Jack and Jed and Jud as “Yack and Yed and Yud.” I tell her of old men with knuckle stubs where fingers should be, and if you inquired after the digits the story invariably involved firewood and a homemade buzz saw. I tell her of Mr. Kenner up the road who can still tell you about the Indians who blocked the narrow bridge spanning Beaver Creek and charged a cut of tobacco for passage. I tell her of winters when we kids wobbled through the fields on our skates to play pom-pom-pullaway on a frozen drainage ditch carved through the middle of the woods by men serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression. I tell her how we learned to milk cows and how we did flips from the haymow rafters, whirling and dropping through the cold winter air into the giant pile of chopped cornstalks below. Once I overrotated and slammed my knee into my nose. I remember the warm blood flowing out both nostrils toward my ears as I lay on my back. My brother John looked down at me without alarm. Squeezing my nose and looking up past him, I noticed that the nails protruding through the roof were furry with frost.

“Tell me a story from your childhood,” she says, and I simply do not know where to begin.

My father recently joined the community choir. Sounds innocuous enough—sweet, even—but my immediate reaction was to phone my brother John and ask if he thought Dad might be smoking reefer. Four decades I’ve known my father, and he has led an avowedly quiet life. He works hard, he works quiet, he works above all to avoid any public act more conspicuous than renewing his driver’s license. And now suddenly he’s out there on tour (Chetek…Bloomer…Sand Creek…it’s all a crazy blur), ascending the risers to raise his voice in public. For the Christmas concert, no less. My father is deeply devout, so on the face of it singing about the birth of Christ seems a natural match, but ours was a church so fundamental that the December holiday was banned as dangerously contrived pagan silliness—although my parents would certainly state their case in terms more demure.

So when Mom told me Dad had up and joined the choir, it felt like a flip-flop on one of those How To Tell if Your Child is Using Drugs moments. You’ve seen the bulleted lists: change in usual activities; change in friends; new hobbies; drastic change in personality; change in clothing choices (forty years in overalls, and there he is doing fa-la-las in a white button-down and green bow tie).

Seriously. I’m gonna check his sock drawer.

When my father and the rest of the traveling choir perform at St. Jude’s, I attend with Amy in tow. St. Jude’s was the Catholic church in New Auburn. I say was because a regional bishop shut it down en route to earning a significant promotion. That was hard to take, even for a lapsed Protestant like me. When my brother’s wife was killed seven weeks into their marriage, St. Jude’s opened their doors for the funeral without regard to affiliation. And for years now, whenever a Lutheran or Methodist event overflows the capacity of its respective church, the whole production shifts to St. Jude’s.

In closing the door, the bishop cited economic concerns. It’s always tricky when Men of God wield calculators. He showed up to do the job himself, I’ll give him that. He looked pinched but resolute. I attended the final service out of respect for my neighbors, as it was their blue-collar tithing that paid for the shingles, the pews, and the bishop’s remarkable matching cap and bathrobe. His decree has been ameliorated somewhat by the fact that the St. Jude’s auxiliary continues to make the church available for weddings, funerals, and public events—including the community choir Christmas concert.

Huffing and stomping into the foyer from the frozen parking lot, we pack into the pews, cozy in our coats. We all do some swiveling,