The God Dam

2.

 

Voices in the Wilderness

 

God cannot be defined without being confined;

and if confined, it can no longer be God.

It’s like trying to capture the wind in a Mason jar:

the moment it is captured, it ceases to exist.

 

It was the first week of September, 1965, and in her thirteen years of teaching kindergarten at Maple Street Elementary School, Carol Hanson had never encountered a child quite like the small, blond-haired boy who had chosen the desk nearest her own. With large, brown eyes that rarely blinked, he followed her every move with such concentrated intensity, that she experienced a self-consciousness that she hadn’t felt since her first day on the job. Tyler Rose was simply the most serious-looking five-year-old she had ever seen.

He sat so perfectly still and erect, Miss Hanson noticed when taking attendance, and his face showed no expression – not eagerness, not wariness, no smile and no frown. If he were wearing a suit and tie, she thought, he would look like a five-year-old corporate executive posing for a company photograph.

After taking attendance, Miss Hanson began the class by teaching her new group of kindergartners the Pledge of Allegiance, writing it across the blackboard, then touching each word with her wooden pointer while reciting it phrase by phrase. After five renditions, the children were able to recite it back to her without her assistance.

“Very good children,” she said. “Any questions?”

One hand immediately raised in the air.

Miss Hanson smiled and aimed her wooden pointer.

“What is God?” asked Tyler Rose, referring to the phrase, ‘one nation under God’. It was the first time he had heard the word without it being attached to ‘damn’ or ‘damn it’.

Miss Hanson hesitated. Most children, by the age of five, have at least some concept of God. Most have been to church, or have been taught a prayer by their mothers. Were Tyler’s parents atheists? If so, as a teacher in a public school she had to be careful – according to the United States Supreme Court – about how she explained God to her students. How much easier that would be, thought Carol Hanson and many other teachers, if the same United States Supreme Court hadn’t been so silent when Congress inserted ‘under God’ into the Pledge of Allegiance in the first place.

But before she could form a generalized, ambiguous reply to Tyler’s question, a loud bell began to clang. It was not like the bell that went off prior to the beginning of class – the one that sounded like Josephine’s alarm clock only louder. This bell was slow and precise, like the solemn clangs of a grandfather clock at midnight – only louder.

“Okay class,” Miss Hanson said, “this is an air-raid drill. Everyone stand and form a line at the door.”

Without further explanation, the children were ushered out into the hallway, then instructed to clasp their hands behind their neck and lean forward against the wall. Some of the children soon began to cry, while a few others called for their mothers. Tyler turned to the boy standing next to him. “What is this?”

“The bomb!” the boy whispered. The boy was Bobby Evans, and he was making his second trip through kindergarten. During his previous year of kindergarten, he’d been through this many times, but had never gotten used to it. The air-raid drills had always been at different times, on different days; they were always a surprise, and he never knew whether it was another drill or the real thing.

“There’s a bomb up in the sky somewhere,” he informed Tyler, “and it’s gonna blow up the whole world!”

“Right now?” Tyler whispered. A bomb blowing up the world was one thing – but on his first day of kindergarten?

“I don’t know,” Bobby replied. “Could be this is it. But it might not be, either. We won’t know unless the bell goes off again.”

And so, they waited. The few children who were crying seemed to accept their fate, and quieted to stoic sniffles, while Tyler held his breath and tried not to imagine a bomb falling from the sky.

After ten long minutes the bell finally began to clang again and the children returned to their classroom to resume their education – which would not include any specific information about the Cold War or the daily possibility of global thermal nuclear annihilation. The only thing the children would really learn from the air-raid drills was that their world, and everything in it, could end at any moment.

While the day seemed to drag for some of the children, it passed too quickly for Tyler. Before he could finish his first fingerpainted masterpiece – of a seagull in flight, trailing a long string, with a little blond-haired boy holding onto the other end of it – Miss Hanson announced to the class that it was time to clean up and put on their sweaters and jackets. Five minutes later the bell rang, and all but one of the children hurried out of the classroom.

“Don’t you want to go home, Tyler?” Miss Hanson asked.

“What is God?” he asked again.

Miss Hanson was initially confused by the direct, seemingly unprovoked question – then she remembered. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I guess we got interrupted by the air-raid drill.”

She pulled a chair over to Tyler’s desk and sat down, then began to explain her own beliefs in the most generalized way that the Supreme Court would allow. “God means many things to many people. Some people believe that God is the Creator.”

“The Creator?”

“Yes, some people believe God made everything – the earth, the trees, the sky, the stars – even the first people.”

“Where does God live?”

“Some people say God lives in heaven.”

“Where is heaven?”

“Way up in the sky, beyond the stars.”

“Is that why the Pledge of Allegiance says ‘under God’? ’Cause God is up in the sky, and we are under the sky?”

“That’s right,” Miss Hanson smiled.

“But we can’t see God, right? ’Cause it’s ‘one nation under God invisible’?”

“In-di-visible – but yes, God is invisible.”

“So what does ‘goddamn it’ mean?”

Miss Hanson gasped, then tried not to laugh. “You shouldn’t use that word, honey.”

“I don’t. My mom says it alot, though. What does it mean?”

“It’s just something adults sometimes say when they are angry.”

“I know. My mom is always mad when she says it.” But that did not answer the question. “What does it mean?”

“Well, a long, long time ago, it was a curse – asking God to punish something.”

Tyler pondered that for a moment, then connected it to everything else. God made everything – including the world. God lives in heaven – which is somewhere in the sky beyond the grey cloud. And when people say ‘goddamn it’, they are angry, and they are asking God to punish something. “Is that why we have the air-raid drills?” he then asked.

Miss Hanson tilted her head. “What do you mean?” she asked, not following the logical progression of Tyler’s thoughts.

“Does God have the bomb? Is God gonna punish the world?”

Carol Hanson felt a dull ache in her chest. The air-raid drills – they were the only part of her job that caused her grief. She was a kindergarten teacher – a child’s first school teacher – expected to perform a delicate, if not impossible balancing act: Present education as fun and necessary to a child’s future, while teaching them, at the same time, that there may not be a future.

“No, darling,” she finally said. “God doesn’t have the bomb – and he doesn’t want people to have it, either.”

“People have it?”

Carol Hanson reluctantly nodded.

“And it’s gonna make the world blow up someday?”

Damn the Supreme Court, Carol Hanson thought, damn the air-raid drills, and to hell with what was possible, if not probable. “No, Tyler,” she said. “God would never let that happen.”

Tyler had his doubts. “If God would never let it happen, how come we gotta have the air-raid drills?”

Carol Hanson didn’t have an answer.

And so, the air-raid drills continued throughout the year, interrupting Storytime, games of Duck-Duck-Goose, and fingerpainting contests. They interrupted learning to count beyond the limits of one’s appendages, and learning to add and subtract. They interrupted the learning of new words, and how to spell and read them as well. And then there was the slowly spinning globe on Miss Hanson’s desk, and learning about oceans and mountains and countries and peoples, interrupted by a sudden loud and solemn bell, and ten frightful, silent minutes of wondering if that globe would ever spin again.

It was a year in which time either stopped completely, or fled as if it were being chased, and Tyler Rose could not learn fast enough.

 

In June of 1966, school out for summer and report cards in hand, Tia and Tyler walked...