THAT OLD TIME RELIGION

© by Ardis Coffman

Dora McLaren sits at her dining room table pasting wings on angels made from detergent bottles. She does this every year at this time in preparation for the church Christmas pageant, but tonight her craftwork goes badly. Glue sticks to her fingers. The sequined wings hang askew. Her thoughts are not on her handiwork.

Something is going on in her town, and she cannot fathom what it might be.

People are behaving oddly. For months some part of her mind has registered a hazy awareness of things awry. Tuesday the thought rose to consciousness.

After dinner that evening, Dora sat down to call her branch of the prayer tree. Marcia Harris had emergency gall bladder surgery that morning. Dora would ask the women in the alliance to pray for her. She took a cup of tea to the phone and settled in for a long chat, knowing everyone would want the details, and that they would eventually wander off to other subjects. Prayer tree provides a fine opportunity to stay abreast of activities in Arcadia, and Dora likes to know what is going on in her town.

She called Tia Garcia's number and was told Tia was not at home.

What's more, her husband gave no explanation of her whereabouts. Dora called Ann Davenport. Her daughter said she was also out. "Can I reach her later?"

Dora asked, expecting the girl to say where her mother has gone. "I don't know when she's coming back," said the daughter.

"Well really," Dora complained to the telephone receiver as she slammed it into place. Out where? Where does one go on a Tuesday night in Arcadia? To a movie or to the Hi-Vee? In that case, why not say so?

Dora gave both women an opportunity to explain at church the following Sunday. "I tried to call you Tuesday," she said, "but you weren't home."

"Right," said Tia.

"I prayed for Mrs. Harris," said Ann.

They are hiding something. Dora is sure of it.

It is December 21st, the longest night of the year. In the living room, Christmas tree lights blink on and off, on and off, in an erratic pattern. One string of bulbs near the top is dead.

The Rev. Bob McLaren, Dora's husband, stops in the doorway and looks at her over the top of his bifocals. He carries a book of sermons and a pink felt highlighter.

"A string of lights is out on the tree," he says.

"Why don't you fix it?" she replies.

Bob has wild white hair and a paunch that hangs over his belt. He wears bedroom slippers and a gray robe tied with a cord. Dora glances at his book of sermons. In a few moments he will crawl into bed and spend the next two hours plagiarizing other ministers. Next Sunday his material will sparkle, but Bob will not. As he speaks, the congregation will figit in the wooden pews and check their watches. Tia Garcia will compose her week's grocery list. The ushers will step outside for a cigarette.

Earlier in their marriage, Dora tried to help Bob with his sermon delivery. Hopeless. Not that he ever had his facts wrong or mispronounced a name. His scholarship is excellent. It is his sense of drama that's missing.

Accurate, meticulous and boring - that's Bob.

I should be the minister. The thought comes bubbling to the surface and Dora, out of habit, stuffs it down. It is a long time since she preached, but, oh Lord in heaven, she was good. Sometimes the ways of God seem twisted, she thinks. He gives an artist talent and strikes him blind. He bids the composer make music and takes his hearing. He creates a brilliant preacher and makes her a woman.

She has worked hard to be a good minister's wife, but she knows she is flawed. Her caustic comebacks are legendary in Arcadia. Hr tongue betrays her lack of Christian charity. Last month, when the City Managers wife, who is known to be a heavy drinker, failed to attend a dedication, her husband said she slipped on the ice.

"Really," Dora commented. "How did she get her foot in the glass?" That remark was repeated all over town. Dora would have cut out her tongue to be allowed to take it back.

She loves making an entrance and delivering cutting exit lines: "Nate's had so many face lifts, he has nipples on his neck." Most unChristian! But you are getting better, she tells herself. God still has hope for you. When you look at what he started with, he's done okay.

She had been a strange child, full of drama and secrets. Nights she sneaked out of her room to walk barefoot along the creek under the full moon.

Trees were her special friends. Dora climbed to the highest limb, up near the clouds, where the houses and people looked small. Perched there with arms outspread, she shouted up at the sky, in a language known only to her. Below, her mother called for her to come down, that she would die if she fell.

Once she moved in with a Korean family who owned a farm a few miles from town. She told them her mother and father abandoned her. Recent immigrants, they were too new to the country to understand they should inform the authorities that they harbored an unclaimed child. Besides, she was a good worker. Dora was just beginning to speak Korean well when the police tracked her down and took her home.

Her parents called her their wild child, and sent her away to a religious school, hoping to civilize her. It worked. Dora liked the discipline, the predictability of religious life. The ritual pleased her even more. For once, she knew what was expected of her. Within a few weeks, she discovered that if the exterior Dora followed the rules, the interior Dora could think and imagine anything she pleased.

She was really good at passing out leaflets. She never cared if people were rude as long as they noticed her. She made several sidewalk conversions before she was 13.

Later, she enrolled at the Bible Institute where she excelled at public speaking. All of her passion, most of her strangeness, channeled into her sermons. She was good, the star of her class, but by the time she graduated, she knows she would never be a minister. God does not mean women to preach.

After all, none of the apostles were women. A talented woman finds a good man and helps him in his work. That is the way things are.

Dora chose Bob because he was cool and unemotional. She feared a fire still burned in her that could rage out of control. She needed a husband like Bob. She needed a damper.

Calm is the watchword of their marriage, a great overriding calm, like a lake on a still summer day. Placid, motionless. Now Dora organizes prayer trees for gall bladder patients and pastes nylon net on plastic Ivory Snow containers... and wonders if there might be something else out there - maybe lightening and thunder over the nighttime lake. At her age she doubts she will ever find out.

As her middle years draw to a close, she sees herself as unfinished, though she is not sure what she needs to complete. The last of their four children married last year. Now she has time for her own interests, but what are her interests? Lately she seems to chew on this question like a piece of old gristle she can't get out of her teeth. Where does she fit in a world changing so fast she feels she had wandered onto a set of a science fiction movie?

Yesterday, in Drew Drug, she found a whole shelf of herbal remedies where the ointment and salves used to be.

"What is this stuff?" she asks Conrad Drew, the pharmacist.

Conrad, busy plugging data into a portable computer cradled in his left arm, points to a sign over the herbal display: "Drew Drug does not recommend alternative medicines. The safest course for any medical problem is to consult a physician."

"But you give that junk shelf room," Dora says.

"People buy it. This is a business."

"Who buys it?"

"Any number of people."

"Conrad, that is not an answer to my question."

"Dora, dear," Conrad smiles and pats her arm, "it is not my practice to discuss my customer's purchases."

And then, on Thursday, she had an unsettling telephone conversation. Dora called Melody Perkins to invite her to the Women's Missionary Alliance. Melody and her husband were new in town and attended services a few times, then stopped coming.

"May I be honest with you, Mrs. McLaren?" Melody's lovely voice had an annoyed edge. Dora assured her that honesty is always best.

"I'm beginning to have my doubts about traditional churches. Is there really a place for women? We can't be ministers or deacons or even serve on the Board of Trustees? Do you think women are really wanted there?"

"We are all God's children, Melody. We belong in his house."

"Well, I've been doing some reading and some thinking and I'm changing my mind about some things."

"What things?"

"Christianity, I guess. It's a great religion for men, but what's in it for women?"

Dora reminded herself not to speak sharply. Melody is young and impressionable. "I certainly support you in your desire for knowledge, dear, but it is also good to remember that on judgment day, God is going to ask us what we have done, not what we have read."

"I'll bear that in mind," Melody said, then she hung up.

Dora mulls the conversation in her head. Melody Perkins doing some reading and some thinking?

She summons the mental image of the beautiful Mrs. Perkins, creamy skin, long auburn hair, model's figure.

"She thinks too?" she asks aloud. Who would suspect Melody of an introspective nature?

"Something is going on in this town. I just know it," she says.

She empties more sequins out of the plastic bag. She is almost finished with the angels. Two of them are lopsided, but they will have to do. She has used all the Ivory Liquid bottles. She places the winged women in a circle on the red and green tablecloth. They remind her of something -- Arcadia Park --

women in a circle --like the soap bottle angels.

One afternoon two weeks ago, Dora decided to walk in a remote part of the park down by the river. From the ravine ahead of her rose a peculiar humming sound. It grew in pitch until it became a scream. As she reached the top of the hill, she half expected to see a space ship taking off. What she saw were twelve women, several of them members of her church, standing in a circle. Had they been making that odd noise?

Surely not.

Dora knows this group often meets in the park in the afternoon. They have been getting together here for twenty years. When their children were pre-schoolers, they brought them to play each day. Later, when the children went to school, the mothers continued to meet and talk. They were Arcadia's first encounter group. Dora has always hoped she might be invited to join them, but they have a long history, and she is not part of it. Anyway, ministers wives put such a damper on things - almost as bad as ministers.

She glances out the dining room window at Ardelle's house across the street. Lights blaze in every window. Is her chubby black neighbor throwing a Christmas party? She has not seen her for a month, not since the day they talked by the curb. Such an odd conversation. Part of the puzzle.

She was sacking leaves and carrying the bags out to the pavement last month, when she became aware that her neighbor engaged in the same activity.

Dora dropped her bag and crossed the street to say hello.

"Are you ready for Thanksgiving?" Dora asked in a manner she likes to think of as bright. "Seems it's just over and it's Christmas again."

"Don' celebrate that, just winter solstice and Kwanza."

"How interesting. That's the African holiday, isn't it?"

Ardelle ignored her. "The tree sleeps now," she said, looking up at the bare branches of her oak. "She gets undressed."

"Well, I wish she'd learn to pick up her clothes," Dora said, pointing at the bag full of leaves. "I get sick of tidying up after her."

"The work of the goddess," Ardelle said.

"Goddess?"

"Caring for the earth. That's the work of the goddess."

Dora allowed the corner of her mouth to raise in a semi-smile. Ardelle could be so peculiar. She was the only black woman in Arcadia, the widow of a Navy officer. Since her husband's death ten years ago, she had begun to dress and speak ethnically, though Dora suspected she frequently got it wrong. Ardelle came from a wealthy family in Illinois. Her father was a judge.

"People lookin' to save the earth ought to be lookin' to the goddess,"

Ardelle said. "You worship the one male God, just look where he take us."

"I'd hardly blame the destruction of the earth on God."

"The goddess, she never 'low men to hurt her. She in the earth. She be the earth."

"Excuse me, Ardelle, but that sounds more than a bit blasphemous. 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me,'" Dora quoted.

"Now ain't that just a man - worryin' who's on top."

Dora backed away, talking about completing her work. "It gets dark so early now." She scurried to the safety of her own side of the street. Ardelle was becoming just too peculiar. She would avoid her in the future.

A sound outside Dora's window attracts her attention. Two cars pull up in front of Ardelle's house. Seven women unfold from the vehicles, stop to greet each other on the sidewalk, and enter the house. They wear long dresses under their coats.

A party? Dora knows nothing of a Christmas party, but then why would she? She has stayed away from Ardelle. Still, it is rather bad manners not to invite the neighbors.

A large van rounds the corner and parks behind the other two vehicles.

Dora moves closer to her window so she can see who gets out. It is Ellen Mason and Melody Perkins, the same Melody who told her just the other day that she was questioning Christianity. She wears a long dark cape. Another capped figure passes on the walk in front of Dora's window. Before crossing the street, she throws back the hood in order to see left and right. Dora recognizes Summer, the newspaper columnist, who lives several doors down.

Summer crosses the street in long, confident strides, approaches Ardelle's front door and rings the bell. As the door opens, light spills into the night, along with a strange sound, the same humming Dora heard in the ravine in the park. At least she thinks it is the same. Hard to tell through her thick storm windows. Dora switches off the dining room ceiling light to improve her vision.

The moon casts a pale glow in the cloudy sky. A few flakes of snow flicker in the street lamps. Through the chain link fence across the street, Dora sees a dark form in Ardelle's back yard. Someone is building a bonfire in violation of city codes. Shadows from the flames leap and dance on the side of the garage. Sparks swirl upward in the night air. More dark figures join the fire builder. Most wear long capes, although one or two seem to wear ski jackets over long dresses. They huddle around the fire.

What in the world is going on over there? She has to know. Dora moves through her darkened house to the hallway and takes her winter coat from the closet. She pauses for a moment, listening for Bob. The light from their bedroom spills into the hall at the top of the stairs, but she cannot hear him turning pages. He is probably asleep. She opens the front door and quietly pulls it shut behind her. She stands for a moment in the gloom of the front porch, watching the flames on the other side of the street. Then she descends the porch stairs and makes her way down her front walk, keeping to the side of Ardelle's house, away from the bonfire. Her slippers leave prints in the powder snow as she crosses the blacktopped street.

Several large trees decorate Ardelle's front yard. Dora hides in their shadows, moving from one to the other, until she slips into the darkness along the side of the house. She presses her body close to the building, sliding slowly along in the shadows.

The voices are clear now. She is sure the group is all women. An odd Christmas party, she thinks.

"Let's get started; I'm freezing," someone says.

"Get closer to the fire."

"No thanks, I know what happens to our kind." Laughter. They speak in unison:

"Our Mother who lives in the Earth

All womankind seeks thy name.

Thy queendom lost

Shall be restored

As it was in the beginning.

Thanks we give for your bountiful gifts

Forgive us our misuse of them

As we forgive those who misuse us.

Lead us not into exploitation,

And deliver us from ego,

For thine are the mountains and the forests and the plains Forever and ever. Blessed be.

The cadence is the Lord's Prayer, but the words are strange. Somehow, Dora cannot imagine Summer or Ardelle involved in cult activities -- and certainly not Ann Davenport. She's a Republican, for goodness sake. She moves closer to the edge of the house where the fence begins. The revelers are just around the corner. Cautiously she leans out, just far enough to see, but not so far that she is visible outside the shadow of the eves.

A gust of wind fans the bonfire in the center of the yard. Flames suck in a great breath, expand and then leap into the night. Sparks, like a million fireflies, rise and land in nearby trees. Puddles of melted snow surround the firepit and reflect the flames.

A hooded woman -- Dora believes it is Ellen Mason -- approaches the fire, tip-toeing through the mud, holding her cape above her ankles. Her shadow enlarges and becomes a crouching monster on the garage wall. She carries a parchment scroll in her hand. She walks three times around the fire.

"Widdershins I go," she says, "on the night of the winter solstice. I wish to attract to me what is written on this paper."

She throws the parchment into the flames and watches it burn. One by one the other women come forward, shadow figures in the firelight.

Dora cannot hear clearly what they say, so she slides around two garbage cans and moves a step closer. Suddenly, a high pitched screech tears through the night, and a dark form shoots out of the shadows and up the chain link fence onto the roof. It is Ardelle's cat, Houdini. Dora starts, jumps backward, hitting the metal can, which bang into the wall. She turns to grab the can, to rebalance it, but she looses her footing on a patch of ice and falls, bringing the can down on top of her. The crash reverberates through the snowy night.

The gate in the fence opens and Ardelle is above her, robes flowing. More women appear staring down at her.

"Dora, what in the world?" asks Ardelle, extending a hand.

The other women grab her shoulders and lift her to her feet.

"Are you hurt?" The voice from under the hood is Melody Perkins'.

"I think I'm okay." She brushes wilted lettuce from her coat and shakes string beans from her sleeve, giving herself a moment to think. An explanation of some kind is in order.

"I saw the light over here. I thought there might be a fire and nobody home, so I..." Her voice runs down. She doesn't expect them to believe that.

Not with all the cars parked in front of the house.

Ardelle smoothes it over, "Damn neighborly. Come on in and get warm. We got hot herb tea."

"Oh no, really, I can't. You're having a party."

"Shoot, honey, that's no party. It's my goddess group. You know most of the women. Come on in."

Dora tries to stand, to refuse their hospitality and return to the safety of her home, but when she puts weight on her foot, a sharp pain radiates up her calf. Her ankle is sprained. She is at their mercy. Three women half carry her through the gate and into the kitchen of the house. They settle her on one chair and put her leg up on another.

Everyone crowds around. They study her ankle, which is turning red and purple,as they debate appropriate treatment. Some favor ice, others heat.

Tia Garcia looks at her with narrowed eyes. "What were you doing out there anyway?"

Before Dora can answer, Ardelle hands her a cup of tea. "She see the flames, think we got us a house fire," she says.

"Really" Tia says, "I would have thought..." Ardelle glares at her and she shuts her mouth suddenly.

"Wolfsbane," says Summer. "That's the best." The women defer to her superior knowledge. She does, after all, write a column on herbal healing.

"You have some drying in the attic?" she asks Ardelle.

Ardelle nods.

"Get some leaves," Summer says, " We'll put them on her ankle and then alternate hot and cold compresses over the top. It'll draw the swelling out."

"This is awfully nice of you," Dora says. "Impolite of me to interrupt your... meeting like this."

"Think nothing of it," Summer says. "We'll do a healing ritual for you.

Haven't done one since Ann's hysterectomy.

Dora stiffens. "What do you mean a ritual?" she asks frowning.

Tia laughs. "Don't worry. We're not going to crucify a toad. We only do white witchcraft."

"Witchcraft!" There the word is out in the open, hanging in the air like a black balloon.

Summer laughs. "Well, it's out now. We practice the old religion. We've been doing if for about a year."

"Why?" Dora asks. "Why would you do such a thing?"

"I guess we got bored with our Encounter in the Park group. You can only whine that the world is unfair for so long, until you stand up like a woman and do something about it."

"But you don't believe in magic and spells?"

"Well, I don't know," Summer says. "It's a fine line. A ritual keeps you focused. When there's something you want, you're more likely to get it, if you keep reminding yourself what your goal is."

Summer pauses and studies Dora seeing that she does not understand.

"Let's say you hope for a promotion. Every morning you burn a candle while you think about what you want, and what you'll do that day to get it."

"That's not magic."

"Isn't it?"

Ardelle returns with the Wolfsbane and Summer arranges it around Dora's ankle. Then she covers the leaves with an ice pack.

"That should help," she says, and indeed Dora feels an immediate relief from pain. "Where do you get your rituals - from old books?"

"Nah," says Tia, "mostly from Waldenbooks. They got goddess shit all over the place. And sometimes we make up our own."

"Who's your leader?"

"No leader. It's men got to have a boss. If someone feels like taking charge, we let 'em."

"You've finished your tea," says Summer. "Melody, come over here and read her leaves." She confides in an aside to Dora, "She's really good at this."

"No, thank you,.." Dora says, but Melody crosses the room and picks up the empty cup.

"Mmm," she says. "I see a robed women with arms upraised. She is a priestess. A powerful speaker. A leader. It's you, Dora."

Dora laughs nervously. "It's probably those silly angels I was making earlier tonight."

Melody looks again into the cup. "I don't think so. See down here by her feet. She's standing in a pentagram. She's a Wiccan priestess."

Dora's mind flashes to the way it used to feel to preach, to hold an audience in her hand, to make them laugh and cry. No, she says to herself. I will not listen to this. There is one God, and He is male, and anything else is heresy and a crime to even consider.

"I'd better be going now," she says.

"You're welcome to join us. One member of the coven moved away. We plan to add another person," says Summer.

Dora is suddenly irate. How dare these women think she'd even consider such a thing? "I'm afraid not," she says. "You're all risking eternal damnation. I don't want any part of it." Then she remembers her manners. "But thanks for the herb wrap. It really did help."

Summer shrugs, "Suit yourself. We have a lot of fun."

"You're committing a sin."

"My biblical scholarship is shaky," says Tia, leaning against the sink,

"is there a commandment that covers hiding in garbage cans and spying on the neighbors? Seems like that might be a sin as well."

"I'll go now," says Dora rising from her chair and putting on her coat.

She hobbles to the kitchen door and opens it. Snow swirls around her. A cold wind stings her face as she walks out into the night. Behind her she hears Ardelle say:

"She be back."