Of Saints and Neighbors: The Pathology of Ray
Strange story on a list. The marriage of order to chaos, the need to order the chaos, or the need to disrupt the order and tell what really happened: Is that why I like reading my grandfather’s gossip on the only slip of paper I could find that day in my purse? A grocery list. When they finally caught up with Merlin McNaughton they found that he, too, had a list, and was about to shoot the sixth. This was in the '50s in an Indiana town named Ray. Meet Ray, quiet Ray, Ray with the green gums because he is afraid to stick a brush in his mouth, so that when he eats a sandwich he sort of sucks on the bread until it's gray and soggy enough to swallow. No, Ray is not this person. Ray cleans a gun with his girl's panties, where her soft crotch meets the cotton. Girl as in girlfriend, or girl as in daughter? It makes a difference. Or. Ray is a fickle woman in love with her own abbreviation, the clitoral nub. None of these are true, except the part about the gums and the gun and the nub, or they are true only in defining what Ray is not—a-person-place-or-thing—and how would you know the difference, caught in a list that pits a thing against its name?
I've been told that at the heart of religion is mystery. The Bible is a bad read, for the most part. It doesn't give us the details; it gives us the most basic plot. The Old Testament has thousands of great stories but it doesn't really develop them. We put ourselves in the story. Reading the story, we're going, holy shit, poor Job. What must it have been like, tasting the sand in his mouth? [stapler] What do the gates of Jerusalem look like, anyway? [sun roof] That's the mystery; it's not just what the story says. It has to do with narrative and the amount that we are forced to fill in.
Hazel Kimmel had one boy, my grandfather says. Everything in this meal came from the garden, you know. Sweet corn will be gone soon. Merlin, her husband, came home one day and said we’re going Christmas shopping. He took off with the boy and Hazel never saw either one again. Pass the milk. Merlin was never quite right. He carried a pillow under his shirt because he thought someone would shoot him. Hell if I know. Anyway, back on the Ovid Farm—over by Blackberry Patch—Effie Paul’s two brothers, who were bachelors, lived there together. One day this friend came to visit them. And this friend and one of the Paul brothers both loved the same woman, see. (Ray is a fickle woman…) They quarreled, and the friend ended up shooting Henry Paul, and then shot himself over Henry’s grave.
It has been pointed out that "Ray" is a common nickname for Rachael: Ewe (you) in Hebrew. You've never been called "Ray" in your life, could never be a Ray as you've sketched it here, except you are rather in love with the grotesque, the gums and the gun and the clitoral place: a mere notch on the map. But one that announces itself. On the radio: We have news tonight from London, Paris, Washington D.C., and Ray, Indiana… Where five people have been—holy shit—shot to death.
And now: Where is Ray, Indiana?
The state line goes right down the middle of town, so that on one side is Michigan and on the other, Indiana. The post office sits—well, sat—on the Indiana side. That's why it's Ray, Indiana, not Ray, Michigan, see. The post office used to sit where that garage is now, across the rail road tracks.
Ray. It is somewhere lined with fields, then? Or: It is not a place with smooth sidewalks. It is not a place with more than one bank, one post office, one school with one room and one blinking light that is not green, and not red. But these are just props—moveable if need be. Ray is. (Raise.) Just over the shoulder when you sense you're being looked at. That place. But maybe I am creating mystery where there is none; maybe the narrative is recognizably simple.
The indelible moment, the one I keep returning to: When Hazel Kimmel first realized they weren’t coming back. Did she surprise herself with a laugh? Or clutch the kitchen counter. She knew he was not right, knew he was sick and she couldn’t put it off much longer. Is the narrative a familiar one? After Christmas. I don’t want to ruin Christmas for everyone. And the moments that aren’t familiar, that are unique even though the behavior (paranoid/manic/compulsive) is commonly classified. The alarm is always fresh. Waking up to her hair between the scissors’ legs; It has to go, Hazel, all of it. (Like Samson's castration.) Or perhaps it’s his own head he shaves to better see the scar he knows is there. He’s the only one who knows the truth. He doesn’t leave a note—nothing. Hazel stares at the oil spot in the driveway. It might snow.
Ray is beautiful in only the starkest of ways (stacked tires). Even after Earl moved the buildings—away from stacked tires and railroad tracks—the old grain elevator remains a stark figure, a decrepit castle in the middle of a field, inviting drivers to slow down for a closer look, children to trespass in search of arrowheads.
In a field on our farm there is a well—back in the days when water wasn't piped in, and you had to dip a pail except this isn't Jack and Jill but Cain and Abel with one of my ancestors pushing his brother down the well and filling it in. My cousins and I searched everywhere for it, picking up deer ticks and paper-cutting our arms on the stalks, and it was just as well.
The funeral parlor so packed, five funerals in one week. White columned and green rugged, walls papered, vases three rows deep. Everybody knew the five who died. Everybody knew the places they were when the five everybody knew died. I had just left the bank—
This is a way of grounding. No one foresaw that some day these places, these terrible narrated spaces, would be picked up and moved by the brother of the guy everybody knew shot up the five.
What were Merlin's demons? Manic depression. Schizophrenia. I imagine them, Merlin and his boy, in the cab of a pickup truck. Maybe they cock their heads the same way, a little to the right. But the boy has Hazel’s namesake eyes, gold speckled. Does he see where they’re heading? His dad’s hands shake a little; he pops the clutch and they jerk forward, the boy’s hands gripping the dashboard, so fast it prompts my own flashback: “St. Chris” on the dash of my first boyfriend’s truck. He was Catholic, bore a name with an Irish spelling (Sean) and preferred a buzz cut, though his head was small and lumpy. He looked like a baby eagle to me, and I let him pet me up and down on the floor of his parents’ living room, fingering the buttons of my jeans. Third one undone, I made him take me home, Christopher bobbing resentfully with every sharp turn. While airborne, passengers may pray for the intercession of Elijah, the Old Testament prophet, who ascended to Heaven in a flying chariot. 1 We took a corner going forty, pelvis pressed against the seatbelt. I’d like to think I didn’t cry, I’d like to think I reached up and rubbed his baby eagle head faster and faster. Instead I prayed: If I make it home safely—O Elijah!—I promise I will_________, I promise I won’t_________ again.
What is a list but a threshold, hinged between things and their names. The liminal state is purgatorial, one of anxiety, transformation; at the co-op the truck’s door creaks and slams shut again and the boy is left to stare after his dad, walking quickly now, his shadow stretching long and skinny. The boy has to squint because it's bright with snow, and maybe those two older men waiting for their wagons to fill with feed are squinting because they don't see Merlin until he's right up close. What happens next is anybody's guess. A cop-out. A loud pop pop and a flock of starling burst from a tree, swiveling out and up and landing on the mill's roofline in perfectly synchronized order.
From my Saints Preserve Us! Travel Journal, I read the first inscription at the top of the page: “The most famous Patron Saint of travelers is surely Christopher, the gentle giant whose image—carrying the Christ Child on his shoulders across a raging river—adorns many a dashboard.” 2 The entry strikes a chord in me. My younger brother Jonathan, an airline pilot, wears Christopher’s icon around his neck, beneath the starched uniform. A gift from my mother, who lost her dad and both brothers in a plane crash thirty years ago this past September. The icon gives her comfort, knowing her child is doing the work that killed half her family.
My uncles and grandfather farmed for a living, and when they died, thousands of acres needed harvesting, and thousands of cattle needed tending. The neighbors rallied and brought the crops in— just fields away from where the plane's wreckage lay planted three feet into the ground—and sold the cattle off one-by-one. To this day my mother and grandmother talk about the Grace in this, their neighbors' profound efforts that harvest. At the heart of religion is mystery. The current rushing Christopher's knees. He is holding a staff in one hand, and with the other, clutching the Christ child who sits precariously atop one shoulder. Christopher is huge and gentle. His beard engulfs his mouth. The Christ child's small head is bent toward Christopher's—out of affection, it seems, but probably for balance, too.
The sentimentality is quickly countered by Rogers and Kelly's treatment of the saints—a kind of kitschy humor. On the journal’s back cover is a picture of a vintage charter bus, the kind featured in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, when “Doc” boards the bus alone at Lula Mae/Holly’s insistence. I’m not Lula Mae anymore, Doc. Above the bus hovers the figure of an angel, pretty in her pink gown, standing three stories tall above its yellow aluminum roof. She has one hand raised, and appears to be blessing the bus.
Merlin McNaughton, my grandfather says, left to go Christmas shopping. And he had a list. I wish I could resist him checking it twice. I feel like a child. He would’ve been Merlin McNaughty to the neighbor kids, except you can’t make a joke out of what he did. What did he do? He shot up the town of Ray. Why? I don’t know;he was crazy. He had a list of people, and he went down it one by one until they caught him.
Was Grandpa on the list?
No, I don’t think so. Grandpa didn’t have many enemies. But anyway, those people didn’t deserve to die.
Is he in hell now?
What do you mean now?
Sainthood and suffering go hand-in-hand. Always facing persecution (by fire, by hanging, various body parts being stretched to the point of castration), life-long poverty and illness (leprosy, dysentery and other “bowel disorders”), is it no wonder those in pain call on the saints who experienced it most extremely? Those suffering from sea sickness should implore the assistance of Saint Elmo, a/k/a Erasmus, whose entrails were extracted in the course of his martyrdom. 3 How does our pain translate? (Sea sickness= disembowelment) How is it mediated? I can’t help but imagine Elmo’s protests from the ship’s bow: You wussy; my intestines were ripped out.
What is my fascination with the saints? Do they not also pose a liminal posture? Somewhere between here and there. We pray to them, hoping they will mediate on our behalves, negotiate our fate. But why them? The saints were tough. I try to imagine believing something so hard I'd burn alive for it. I can't. Their humanity, then. Their everyday likeness that lends them compassion, empathy. The gods of mythology are like this, straddling both worlds—but this also made them deeply flawed: jealous, vindictive, horny. I'm not taught to pray to those gods. Instead, I open my journal to find The Patron Saint of Places. The list is long, alphabetical: Africa, Saint Moses the Black; Australia, Saint Francis Xavier; Europe, Saint Benedict of Nursia, and so on. 4
This is why the saints are invoked during travel; they belong to places. Even the starkest. The town of Ray; what's there now? Rows of peeling paint, bikes abandoned, some clotheslines. Welcome to Indiana, or someplace just like it. No wonder Earl (re)moved its history so easily. And its other history, the one that Merlin made: We have news tonight from London, Paris, Washington D.C., and Ray, Indiana… Merlin the wizard with a magic pillow under his shirt (should someone shoot him), the shooter.
My mother recently drove me by the old post office that Merlin's brother, Earl McNaughton, paid big bucks to move. Earl—once the president of First National Bank of Fremont—convinced some people to give him their loan money, and began moving buildings from the town of Ray over to a field on Clear Lake Road. I finally had to see it for myself, making the five-mile trek across the state line into Indiana. I took my camera.
Indeed, in the middle of this field lined with woods and barbed-wire fence sat a large brick building, as though it had always been there, as though everything that was once surrounding it got up and left quietly. I wanted to trudge up field and peek inside the windows. I wanted to see an antique cash register on a long wooden counter, maybe a swinging gate that whooshed every time the post mistress left for lunch.
I wanted to picture McNaughton stick 'em up, pointing a pistol he polished with his girl's panties—not Suit Details Loan Scheme on the first page of Angola's Herald Republican that my mother saved for me in case I might write an essay about this. She sends me clippings fairly often, usually authored by her favorite Detroit Free Press columnists (I think she had aspirations that I would join their ranks some day), and I can't tell her that I'd rather write McNaughton caught in the throes of an illicit affair with the post mistress.
Instead, the article details an “insider borrowing scheme” in which Earl McNaughton, while serving as president of The First National Bank of Fremont, “gained funds [. . .] through loans taken out in other people’s names.” 5 He did so by convincing other people to take money out on his behalf. Once McNaughton secured these funds, curiously enough, he invested them “in antiques, estimated to be worth $11 million or more, as well as [in] some property." This second piece of information reads innocuously enough. But that’s where the neighborly gossip fills in the blanks, say, over a lunch of tomato sandwiches.
Earl’s (great-great?) grandfather started the bank in Ray, and when, when the big fire took out most of the buildings there, he moved to Fremont and became very successful. Owned half the businesses in town. Guess Earl learned from him that you could always pick up and start over, ‘cause when he took over his grandfather’s uh bank he just picked up the remaining buildings in Ray and moved them—most of them, anyway. First he moved the post office, this brick building on a cement slab. He moved it across the fields so now it’s over on Clear Lake Road. There was a what we call the elevator in Ray that ground feed and wheat and he moved that out of Ray, and then there was an old one behind there; I don’t know what it was originally but when I was growing up they had coal in it. Why? Well, see, he had an addiction for antiques. McNaughtons always been strange, every one of ‘em. So he moved old houses, too. No thanks; Gloria’ll kill me if I have a second piece. ‘Course you know he went broke, lost the bank, and is in Mexico now. If he ever comes back, if they ever catch him, he’ll go to jail.
The saints; Ray, Indiana and the McNaughtons. Is violence the transcendental signifier? On the other side of martyrdom is murder.
Or is it God? God's son conquered violence. Yet Christ is curiously absent from this list, except on a pedestal, atop Christopher's shoulders. What does he see from up there? That we can't help ourselves. Help me, Christopher/Anthony/Patrick, etc. But Earl McNaughton didn't want a mediator; he helped himself and moved half the town his ancestors built. Is there Grace in this? He took it all back and built a little cemetery in a field. Each building, a marker, the last line of a narrative: Here lies Ray. Where meaning stops dividing and comes to rest.
The five who died. If I could name them, would it help describe their lives? What do we do with mere fragments, and with those beyond our reach? My grandfather and uncles crashed in a field. My grandmother says they were killed; violence isn't always attributable. The three caskets—Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen—were closed. My mother names what she wanted most: to hold her dad's hand. He had these huge hands. He was a very big man. (Christopher crossing the current.) She wanted to hold his hand, but there was nothing.
In a field they lie down angled toward each other. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but between the body’s weight and the ground is a space felt by something and that’s why it wants to be filled; to feel its waiting is unbearable. To know it as character is reflexive. And to list is always a bending away from and into itself, buried deep somewhere grassy. The narrative lies in that liminal space—somewhere between doubt and truth. Meet Ray, dirty Ray full of Grace.
1 Rogers and Kelly. Saints Preserve Us! Travel Journal
2 Rogers and Kelly.
3 Rogers and Kelly.
4 Ibid.
5 Oberlin, Amy. "Suit Details Loan Scheme." The Herald Republican: A1-7.