Light Keeper

She lives in a patch of light amidst the dark whispers of the pines.

I am twelve again, and through the arching tunnel of old tree limbs and rustling pine needles, I pedal up the grassy median of her gravel lane. A shaft of sunlight outlines the hunch of her mountainous back there on the edge of the crumbling porch.

Mrs. Marjorie Knight, and the painful curvature of her aged silhouette, hangs over a black dog pooled at her feet. One frail arm rises to wave me up through the pressing shadows. Tippy’s midnight tail, with its tip baptized a pristine white, thumps my welcome.

A craggy pine trunk stand as hitching post for my fenderless bike. I shyly smile and step pass Mrs. Marjorie holding open the ripped screen door, and into her dim kitchen. Pine branches shift and scratch against a window pane. The aroma of bread baking mingles with the faint scent of yellowed photographs and musty papers. Mrs. Marjorie shuffles past me with that quiet chuckle that gilds her every word: “Well, if you care to take a seat, girl, we could butter up a slice of bread together. And a glass of milk, too?”

Her ebony cat eye glasses with the rhinestones in the corners fall down her nose. I think its her ceaseless waves of laughter and the rolling curve of her spine that do that. She laughs again and slips them back into place.

I sit down on a high back chair. Dimly lit corners, heavy doors cracked open to unknown rooms wallpapered in faded roses, and long, dark hallways leave me a bit afraid and with few words. And too, I am taken with Mrs. Marjorie’s relentless laughter that pushes back the sadness.

She creaks about the kitchen, her hunched back crowned with thin silver hair, wiry like a worn steel brush. She stands in a stream of light now, slathering butter generously on two slabs of steaming brown and I wonder of the austere stories she never tells me but the community rumors. I want to ask her if its true: that Goldie Knight plainly proposed to her forty years ago because he thought it cheaper to marry her than pay out her weekly wage as the hired girl. That she really bent over piles of manure in the cow stanchions, pitchfork in hand, only to hear the barn filling with voices of neighbor men. Mortified of being found forking manure like a man, work that no husband would rightly have a wife do, its reported she laid down in the rank muck to hide from the shame. Mr. Locking said not a word to Goldie, but told every farmer on the twelfth line what he witnessed in the Knight’s barn. And too he said how Goldie felt no shame in the least driving the horses down the field, or showing one of his sons how to hold the reins, while Mrs. Marjorie forked and tossed all the manure off the wagon, softly singing hymns. Just that Goldie blithely boasted that she was much cheaper than a chain driven manure spreader, and could unload nearly as fast.

I confess, I felt no sadness the day the black phone with its long dangling cord rang in our kitchen, and my mama pressed the receiver close to her ear to hear the news on the party line: Goldie Knight had dropped dead of a heart attack that morning coming up the lane from getting the mail. He was 48 years old when he collapsed under the pines. Mrs. Marjorie looked a haggard sixty-five, but for her deeply etched smile and child-like laugh that softly shook that humped back.

Her oldest boy ignored the will (what hired girl really stands to inherit land?), took over the farm and its profits, and left Mrs. Marjorie with a pile of wood to split and stack if she intended to keep warm on howling winter nights. He instructed the neighbor women to take their mother into town for food once a month. My Mama picked Mrs. Marjorie up for Sunday morning services at the yellow bricked Knox Presbyterian, and then sent me down on summer evenings to bend over rows of beans with Mrs. Marjorie, pulling out meddlesome red-root pigweed. Mrs. Marjorie knew about hunching over work.

“Like this, girl,” she chuckled. “If you lean so, you can use both hands to pull. There. Now we fly,” she laughed lightly, like sun falling soft and dappled through bean leaves.

But sitting there fingering the frayed edge of her tablecloth, watching her pour the fresh milk that Mrs. Noreen Barlow brought weekly, I wonder if Mrs. Knight’s arched spine was, in some way, about faithfully protecting the fragile flame of joy that flickers in the cup of the soul. She keeps hers well.

The oncologist who found the cancer that filled her diminuitive frame said there was nothing that could be done and had sent her home to die. And yet here she stood, living and laughing. My father said it a thousand times if he said it once, “What keeps that woman alive is a medicine no doctor can give you. That joyful heart of hers is healing her.”

I could see it, as she hobbled over with my glass of milk and slice of bread. Her joy was wholly, always, hers. She had spent a lifetime of giving, but she gave no person or circumstance the responsibility of tending the wick of her happy light. She solely and tenderly took her happiness up as her own, and committed to kindle and guard it, stoke and shield it. Preserve it.

I swallow cool milk and mouthfuls of melting bread that evening in Mrs. Marjorie’s kitchen. But I fill on the knowing: One is always responsible for one’s response. Isn’t that what holiness is? To be “response-able”, able to respond like Him who is our Light of happiness, oblivious to the forces bearing down.

The wind, indifferent and cool, could rush up through the pines. But it was impotent to snuff out the flame that illuminated the soul of that gentle, hunched-back sage.

Joy kept her warm.