Limbo by A. Manette Ansay Page A

wheat. Once again, there’d be that little white farmhouse beside its red barn, a windmill in the courtyard slowly turning. Another herd of Holsteins, larger perhaps. A meadow lark balancing on a telephone line. A ragged cluster of purple-headed thistles, day lilies rising around it in a fiery cloud.
    This was not a landscape that encouraged individual interpretations, diverse opinions, conflict. The CatholicGod we worshipped was a God who did not permit negotiations, a God who came and went like the seasons, a God who moved in mysterious ways. There was no mention of anything like a personal relationship with Christ . There were rules, there were beliefs, and you could like them or lump them but you had to obey. The madder you got, the harder you smiled.
    If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all .
    You did what you were told. You believed what you were taught. Dear Senator , I wrote with the other members of my catechism class. Please stop the murder of helpless unborn babies. Dear Senator, Homosexuality is a perversion of God’s most sacred laws .
    Dear Senator. Dear God . It terrifies me, now. I would have written anything, believed anything. Absolutely anything at all.
    God was Love, yes, but the icy stream that fed this love was Fear. When storms blew in off Lake Michigan, turning the sky an almost supernatural green, where did the lightning strike? Not the fields or the roads. Not the low-lying houses and milk sheds, the chicken coops and corn cribs. No, it struck the windmills, the power lines, the stands of hickory trees. It scorched whatever dared to stand up, stand out, stand alone.
    â€œWhat should you do,” my mother drilled my brother and me, “if you ever get caught out in the open during a storm?”
    But we already knew the answer. It was something we learned in school.
    Lie down. Keep still. Wait for the thunder to pass.
    Â 
    Each time I left Grandma Krier’s house, she pressed her faith firmly into my hands, like lunch money, like a map should I ever get lost. Her Catholicism reflected the view she saw every day from her kitchen windows: few shadows. Straight lines. A precise, uncomplicated horizon.
    Her name, until her marriage, was Margaret Catherine Jacoby; her birth certificate, which I learned of after her death, read Margaretta Katarina Jacobi . She loved to tell the story of how my grandfather’s parents, who owned the adjacent farm, had carried him, a babe in arms, to the wedding of her mother and father. “We made the boy,” they said. “Now you two make the girl.”
    And her mother and father did.
    From the time she was born, in 1899, it was understood by everyone that my grandmother would grow up to marry Otto Krier. Even as children, they’d loved each other. My grandmother followed him everywhere, like an adoring younger sister. At school, my grandfather made sure the other boys included her in their games. When the first world war threatened overseas, and speaking anything but English was forbidden, they stood side by side in the schoolyard, scratching notes to each other in the dirt.Neither of them knew English very well at that time; they spoke Luxemburg with their families, German with neighbors and friends. Both would end their formal educations after finishing eighth grade. There was too much work to be done at home. Advanced education was a luxury.
    Grandma Krier was never one to voice regrets, but several times, when I was growing up, she said she wished she’d gone to high school. “So I would be smart,” was how she put it, her tone flat, without self-pity. And yet, she’d continued to educate herself by reading the English dictionary, which she kept pushed to the center of the kitchen table, in easy reach. She also read the Bible, the newspaper, the almanac, in addition to a number of religious publications. She spoke and wrote Luxemburg and German, as well as English, and could carry on a