Faithful Unto Death

Theology

‹lled with notions. Anna’s more like a real daughter to me, kind, and tries to spare me trouble. Charlotte, now, she’s never seemed able to warm up to me too much. You’d think, being the younger, she’d remember less of her own mother, but somehow it’s as though she feels like it’s her biggest job in life, to carry that memory around and decorate it like it was a fancy wedding cake.” She spoke with no bitterness, but with a certain wry amusement. “I expect it’s hard, being a step-ma,” Henry observed.“You’d want to take an interest in the children, but if you understood them too well, they’d rightly resent that as if you’d stolen it from their real ma.” Elvira smiled at that insight, as if she’d been given a gift. Theology “my boys, look upon the works of the Lord and marvel,” intoned Professor Cottrell, as he led his botany class along the through the woods to the west of campus.“This maple tree has labored through the summer, storing up all that it needs to survive through the winter. Now it paints itself in glorious raiment to delight our eyes in this season of harvest.Then, during the long, bleak days of winter, it produces syrup with which to delight our taste in spring. Yes, Mr.Thacker?”This last, wearily. “Doesn’t the tree really produce the sap for itself, though, and not us?” “Yes, but God has given Man dominion over all, and it is because of Man’s own wisdom and labor, given by God, that the tree produces its sap, its wood, its color, for Man’s use. The tree provides for itself in order that it may provide for our wants.” Henry had hoped that higher education would answer some of the questions that constantly roiled in his mind. Somehow, this wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, though Henry wasn’t sure what was lacking. “But what about the plants and animals that aren’t here to provide for us? Why do they do the things they do, then? Why, for instance, do some of the woodpeckers always walk up the trees and some of them always walk down, and some go around in a spiral?” And the answer from the science and mathematics teacher would be an annoyed “Because God made them that way, Mr. Thacker. Your assignment for Wednesday is to observe and write an essay on the habits of one of the useful animals on this list.” 30 How things worked, why they looked and sounded as they did, was always interesting to Henry. The way the milk splashed into the pail, and how the same milk poured from pail into jug or churn or bowl.The way waters spun and eddied through the little streamlets along the Betsie River. His father and other men who farmed were surprisingly astute in reading the predictions to be found in the patterns of wind and water. They needed these for their livelihood, but Henry had hoped that college would explain more of the why of these phenomena. Why the weather came in little cycles, through a pattern of warm and warmer, then damp and heavier, until the wind changed and a storm resulted. How cool and light the air was afterward, then gradually warming and growing heavy again. And the little cycles fell into the larger ones of the seasons, the storms themselves becoming cooler, now producing some sleet, now some snow that became rain, now returning to cold crisp days, now returning to heavy gray skies that could dump two feet of snow in as many hours. “But when you look at the waves out on the lake,” he wondered aloud to some of the other young men, “they just keep rolling in the same direction like the water is going somewhere. Why doesn’t all that water pile up higher and higher, and end up on the shore?” “You’re very queer sometimes, Henry,” observed Lot Nevius. But in fact, they all knew that in the winter that’s just what happened . The waves didn’t exactly march on to land in neat, orderly rows like soldiers, as Henry had envisioned, but crept up in a stealthy way, the layer on top freezing and the powerful winter waves sneaking beneath the frozen layer, shoving it shoreward and freezing in their turn, building fanciful turrets and...