Finding the Gate

Finding the Gate by Bob Sloan A Sunday School choir was here today , brought by a grinning preacher to sing hymns for the old folks after dinner. As they were leaving, a boy looked at me and stuck an elbow in his friend's rib. "That old lady must be older than God," he said, his voice low enough I'm sure he didn't think I heard. The boys laughed, and so did I. They didn't mean to hurt my feelings. It was the sort of thing Stevie might have said. Besides, sometimes I feel older than God. The young nurses who work in this place believe in options. I hear them often, earnest and convinced, telling one another every woman has choices beyond doing what men want. Perhaps I had choices too, and made only bad ones. But looking back, it seems to me things just happened. Even with Stevie. Fm old enough to have turned twenty after the first big war, and was educated, by the standards of that day. I finished high school and spent two terms at the "Normal School," where the college is 58 now. If someone asked why I spent so much time at learning, I told them I wanted to be a schoolteacher. When I was a little girl, I once heard a preacher compare the high flint ridges that rise all around us to the caring, cradling arms of Jesus. It was a pretty image but even then, to me, these Kentucky mountains seemed more a fence so high we could neither cross nor see beyond it. I talked about teaching school; what I wanted was a gate through that fence. Then I met Steven Ray Bell, red haired, broad shouldered Steven Ray Bell from Ashland, who came to see me at school. Every evening for five months I heard him whistling as he climbed the hill road to my boardinghouse . From a window I watched his intense, long legged daily march, amazed. No one ever courted me so earnestly. I married him because he wanted me, because I was feeling a bit desperate with no other marriage prosFects , because for a few months in 1919 let fear make me believe there was no gate. We grew tobacco and paid our taxes. That's all Steven talked about after we set up housekeeping: whether tobacco was doing or would do well, and high taxes. Sometimes, when he needed money to buy more land, Steven worked at the brickyard, and I managed the fields without him, chopping weeds in his precious tobacco, waiting for the day we'd be "settled," when I could teach and begin searching for the gate. By the time I was twenty-five I had four daughters, and I felt old, emptied of everything but more babies. When I was twenty-six my son came, and he was my saving. The birth was hard, and I spent a week in bed afterward. I hadn't done that when the others were born. Steven was frightened, and even bought me a present . He'd gone to Ott Taylor's auction, looking for tools, and carried home instead a bushel basket of old books. "You like to read," he said. "Maybe you can find something you like in here." I threw dozens of the books out. I didn't want an advanced Latin text, and most of the others were just as useless. But I found the atlas, with maps and Eictures of every place I'd heard of and undreds I hadn t. I found political divisions in a dozen colors, annual rainfall and principal products and population densities, racial distribution, heights above or below sea level, all one could wish to know about any piece of earth important enough to have a name. I can close my eyes and still see the mapped roads into all those corners of the world. It was wonderful. The baby had his father's hair color, and later the world would differentiate between "Big Steve" and "Little Steve," "Big Red" and "Little Red," but so long as he lived, I never called him anything but Stevie. He nearly killed me, screaming...