One Thing After Another

The protests in Harrisonburg, in front of Representative Cline’s office, can be elating. The sun beats down, hot enough to boil your arm hairs, and you get the sullens chugging by in their rusted trucks or shiny, with gargantuan tires. But lots more people, turning their heads in time to catch your niggling band of the righteous, beam and toot their horns. The solidarity buoys you. The staccato honking, the cheers, the screams. The noise echoes downtown, one block south.

“But what’s the point?” I asked Johann, last time I joined in. He and I were standing in the middle of the street. Nobody was running us off. Although the swaths of rural red—voters loyal to Cline—assure him his job, the city is blue as the thundering sky. Maybe the Trumpies only drive in for their groceries.

“Aren’t we just talking to ourselves?” I asked Johann. “Sometimes Paulson and I consider holding a neighborhood picnic, getting acquainted with the locals.” Out here in our nowhere neck of the woods, it’s almost too daunting to ponder. I can’t stand the mentality. They shoot guns. They set off fireworks way late. Their cows get loose, wander the road. But mostly, they go for Cline. They’re how he keeps winning. You’d think he’d take the opportunity to set the records straight. Stand up in front of his majority constituents, explain the facts—climate change, fascism, immigration’s boons—and try to whack some sense into their heads. But then he’d lose.

I told Johann, “Shouldn’t we be doing that, instead? We never actually do it—the picnic. We don’t mingle.”

So this time, holding my sign, I felt like I’d walked into the lions’ den.

It was just me, probably being an idiot, outside the Walmart north of the city, opposite the sliding-doors entrance. Red country. The crosswalk lines were busy enough with treading feet, but not clogged. The shoppers enough spaced, we had chances to give and get looks at each other.

I’d altered my sign. I’d added a Mr., to show some respect. I’d changed likes to approves. I’d deleted LIAR. Now the sign didn’t say CLINE likes LIAR TRUMP. It said Mr. CLINE approves TRUMP’S LIES. The true-life quotes on the back side remained, pointed behind me toward the parking lot.

I wasn’t alone. Almost right away, a young woman hurrying from the store with her purchases mouthed Thank you. Just that, oh my. I kept hugging to myself her words. But when an older woman with a husband along stepped my way, on the attack, ug.

“What lies?” she demanded. “Tell me one lie.” Totally kerfuffled, I couldn’t begin to answer. “Well, everything,” I mumbled. “There are so many.” I had no statistics. I managed to ask, “Do you read the New York Times?”

“No, I don’t read the New York Times,” she spat. “It’s trash.” That word trash smacked me right in the face.

Mostly, though, the men were the scary ones, scruffy, grinning. A few let out wisecracks. “I approve, too.” One came near and held up his phone, interminably. Was he fake filming? I don’t know.

Families walked by, the kids slowing, deciphering the words, lips moving silently. Were the parents wishing me to disappear, or thinking “Don’t look, don’t look”? But little girl with her grandma waved and smiled. Maybe the grandma’d told her, “That’s a good lady.”

The cops on the premises let me be.

The old man, though, beat all. His ancient pickup drove past, window rolled down. He had a surgical mask on, low, around his neck. He didn’t appear to see me. I figured someone who masked on account of germs wouldn’t be a Trumpie.

He emerged after some time in the store and headed back to his truck. But then somebody came up behind me. He—the old man—had a rolled-up dollar bill in his hand. “Oh,” I gasped, “no, no. It’s about Trump. I’m just, you know—” I held my sign close to his face.

He took a good look, grinned. Then away he went. Soon the truck came rolling along, slowed. Out the window, his head a few inches from mine, he said conspiratorially, “I bet the thousands of people who lost their jobs would agree.”

We were both smiling.

The sky started to drip and I took my sign to the car. In Walmart—cool and pristine, unlike the bigger, junked-up Walmart in Harrisonburg with crowds of shoppers—I glided my cart around. Other carts glided by. Everybody, including me, stuck to our own business. Things seemed so cool and peaceful and lovely.

The next morning, Paulson wanted me to read a letter to the editor in the Daily News-Record from a Betty. He’d laid it on the table. After he left for town I took a look.

I believe that what we are seeing today in our society is literally good vs. evil. The chaos, confusion, disruption and hatred does not have the hand of GOD (read 1 Corinthians 14:33) on it but certainly the hands of Satan, the evil one, and his minions. We can fight the good battle by choosing good over evil and turn to the Holy Word, GOD’S instructions to us for living in peace. So many on the left seem to want all of this chaos, the hateful rhetoric, the physical attacks etc. It is their way of expressing the beliefs they have. No civil conversation can be held with them, their hatred is so ingrained in their mindset. Whether they want to believe it or not, GOD’S hand is on President Trump, and their hatred for him will be overturned by that hand.

Now this of course was ridiculous, except for the part about hating. Trumpies, ug. I’m not Jesus-y. I’m spitting full of hate.

A while later, in the bathroom, pulling wet wash from the machine, I heard Buster. From the tiny little bathroom window I could see him up on the picnic table, barking. Who? I wondered. I had to move to a different window. Oh, a delivery truck.

I stepped onto the porch. Buster had jumped down, dropped his pose. “He’s friendly,” I said.

“I didn’t know,” said the man. “Some dogs look really friendly and then they chase you. I heard a little growl from him, so I didn’t know.” Now he was letting Buster sniff all he wanted. He was nosing at the man’s hand in hopes of a biscuit (some delivery people come equipped). “He smells the Lab I just saw,” said the man.

I pulled the jar of stale rice squares from the porch shelf, fed Buster some. “You give your dog the cereal you don’t want,” I joked.

“I give mine to my chickens,” said the man. His gaze moved to Paulson’s picked tomatoes laid out on a different shelf. “Those are nice,” he said. “Mine are turning orange, or cracking.”

“Must be the rain,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Do you want one?” I asked.

“No no, we have tomatoes. Purple, too. You can smell them across the room. A Roma, you get your nose right up and you still can’t smell anything.”

He mentioned the curry his wife and her mother make with Romas. They cook a whole bag of onions—he has to escape the kitchen. His wife is African, from Ethiopia. “Here, see my little girl?”

He pulled out his wallet. “She’s all white.”

I saw curly curly, gorgeous. “Ethiopia?” I said. “Did your wife come through Church World Service?”

“No, the lottery.”

“Yeah? That’s amazing.” I gave myself a couple seconds. “Are you a Trump voter?”

“We-ell, yes. I didn’t want Camilla.” Camilla, he said it, like in vanilla. How to even write it, here? Kamilla would be just as wrong. “The other time, I might’ve voted for, what’s her name? It wasn’t even on the ballot.”

“Jill Stein?”

“Yeah, Jill Stein.”

I don’t know how long this went on. He didn’t want to go. The whole time, his van sat idling in the driveway, maybe leaking AC fluids. Amazon paid him $88 for four hours, but he could finish earlier—pretty good, eh? Owner of land, chickens, and a 150-year-old house, he admired our woods. Was ICE in his town? I asked. He didn’t really know. Every day, his mail run, he passed underneath the bridge protesters. They had their flag hung upside down.

“Well,” I said, “it stands for something different now. Lawlessness. Lies.”

“I know what it means,” he said. “It means ‘in distress.’ I don’t fly mine upside down. I love my country. I served. People can come here legally. They come illegally, they might get sent back.”

I could see his point. I could see a good man on my porch. But he would talk all day. I picked up the package I’d laid aside, put my hand on the door. “Well, thank you,” I said, cheerfully.

Back to gathering up the wet items from the washing machine, I caught sight of some gunk on a T-shirt. I rinsed it off at the bathroom sink. Unloading the rest, I found at the bottom of the washer a tiny smear of that same gunk and a hideous black bug, dead, in two pieces.

Out at the wash line, my morning severely compromised, I had to paw through the load for more splotches the color of guts. Everything had to go back into the washer.

I can see how people might want this purging of our land. But they’re wrong to think it only theirs, same as I’m wrong to be hateful, besides weirded out by that bug on the windowsill, now, in two sections. A stag beetle, Paulson says, native to here, lucky lucky. Stags feed on sap flows. The larvae hatch in rotting stumps and logs like in our woods and sip the juices. It’s not a bad life. Just, you can’t stray, leave home. Can’t skitter past the arf-arf-ing dog into someone’s house. Can’t burrow into her dank, dark, dirty-wash pile for safety and then fall headlong into the suds.