|
I will not claim that my wife, Celeste Teale, comports herself in a ladylike manner at all times, but I recall, in the six years I have known her, only two occasions on which she appeared to use the Lord’s name in a profane way. The first was on a December Saturday about a year into our acquaintance. In mid-afternoon Celeste had driven us, in her 2009 Ford Taurus, from our town of Fjord, Wisconsin, straight south the twenty miles on County Road C to the Sun Prairie Costco store. The road had some patches of ice and packed snow but was not too terrible for travel. A few flakes were falling. By the time we finished our shopping, however, the day’s light was gone, and snow was coming down in what seemed like snow-globe clumps. Several inches of new snow blanketed the Ford and everything else in the Costco parking lot. We idled the Taurus, heater roaring, while I brushed snow from the hood, roof, windows, and trunk, but by the time I finished, the hood and windshield needed brushing once more.
Celeste’s night vision is not the greatest; she asked if I would do the driving to return to Fjord. I do not like C in a storm; it is a crowned road, narrow, with skimpy shoulders or no shoulders at all for much of the way. Winter winds blow mightily across the marshes and open farm fields along the route, often rendering the limits of the pavement invisible even in daylight. I asked Celeste if she would mind if we went back to town by way of Highway 51. She said fine. We headed west on 19 and turned north on 51.
Plows had not yet come through. No salt or sand had been put down. The snow was deep enough, slightly slushy enough, to make a menacing growl against the underside of the car. A single set of tire tracks marked the southbound lane and another faint set designated the northbound. The posted limit is 55, but I chose to go about fifty, and after a couple miles a couple of cars were trailing us but staying a respectful distance behind. The Taurus’s back window was snowed over, but I saw in the side mirror that a light-colored, sporty sedan was coming up behind and attempting to pass us all. “Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it,” I muttered aloud. The driver managed to slot the car into the southbound tire tracks and was right beside us when a set of oncoming headlights came into view, way too near.
“Idiot!” I said. I lifted my foot from the gas pedal while the idiot continued to accelerate, and, soon as the sedan cleared the front of Celeste’s Ford, the driver tried to return to the northbound tracks but set that vehicle skidding sideways in front of us, looking as if it were only inches off of Celeste’s front bumper. In that moment, staring directly at the passenger door of the skidding sedan, Celeste exclaimed, with a great huff of a first syllable, “HO-ly Christ!” and, in the next moment, the east-facing sedan left the roadway, spun ass-end to the north and then to the east, and dropped into deep drifts in the ditch. We could now glimpse the driver, a startled, pale male, presumably uninjured, in the motionless sedan.
“Dave, are you going to stop?” Celeste asked me.
There was nowhere to pull over. “No,” I said. “That’s a good place for him. Someone else will stop.”
So. That was one time. The other occasion when I heard Celeste utter a prayer of urgency was just this past October, while we were on vacation in Door County. I was driving again, this time in our RAV4, a fact that, I guess, has no special relevance to this story, but you might be interested in knowing that Celeste still has the Taurus, safely garaged for most of each year and untouched by snow or salt in any of the four winters that we have been married. It’s our three-season luxury car.
On that recent October day we had enjoyed many miles of wandering on the Door Peninsula, photographing trees at the peak of their colors, with the sky sometimes clouded but affording us one last blinding blast of sunshine as we rounded a curve on Highway 57 on our way back to where we were staying in Bailey’s Harbor. I noticed a meadow sprinkled with spruces and with a wall of shadowed aspens beyond. The setting sun was making a more distant wall of maples glow like gold. Cars were following us, and we had just about passed this scene, but I wanted to try for a picture, so I excitedly told my wife, “I’m going back!”
“Jesus Christ!” she shouted.
“What the hell?!” I shouted in return. “Okay, I won’t go back.” We were both tired and hungry, and I assumed Celeste was claiming I had used up my allotted number of picture stops for the day.
“No, no, Dave,” she explained, “there’s a billboard up against those trees we just passed that says ‘Jesus Christ’ in giant letters! Go back. You have to see it.”
And so we did. I found a place to park, and we both were able to get a few shots before the last light left the treetops. The billboard was in shadow, and it was painted in colors very much like the October trees, and so I had not seen it at all as we drove by. When we returned to our home in Fjord and examined our pictures on the big-screen TV, I noticed that the concise message of the billboard included a helpful annotation: “Romans 10:9.” If I can find the person who painted that sign, I am sure we will enjoy an illuminating conversation.
♦
|
