Faith
and Practice
Dorothy Shaw sat beside her husband Grayson, headmaster of Clear Spring Friends School, on the Elders’ facing bench at the front of the Meeting House. The tension in his long fingers splayed across his
sharp knees warned her he was about to speak.
“I am wrestling with Spirit. True witness to peace must go beyond prayer. Action is called for, civil disobedience. This Meeting must join in the effort to send medical supplies to North Vietnam. We must defy
the government.”
There was conflict in Clear Spring Meeting over how far to go in putting the Quaker peace testimony into practice; the Meeting was at war with itself. Grayson sided with the activists, the radical members of
the Meeting. Although he was descended from one of Clear Spring’s oldest families, Dorothy worried that his provocative stance could hurt the school. It was already on the brink financially, dependent upon
the continued support of the Meeting.
Eight years earlier in this room, Grayson had issued a different kind of challenge:
“We of this Meeting are called to found a school.”
He’d persuaded Anna White, last in line of one of an old family, to donate her orchard and overgrown fields. At the regional Yearly Meeting, Grayson canvassed until enough money was promised to break
ground. The school rose out of the fields across the road from the house where he had grown up, and where he and Dorothy still made their home.
At first, she’d just helped out in the office. This role expanded into her present variegated one: admissions, counseling, discipline, surrogate mother to the boarding students. She could hardly tell where the
job stopped and she began. Peace in Vietnam was abstract compared to the welfare of the school. But Grayson was weary of the school’s demands, restless. He’d been offered a job with a new peace
organization called AQAG – A Quaker Action Group, a radical splinter from the established Friends Service Committee. Dorothy had insisted he turn the offer down, telling him it was wrong to abandon the
school before it was stronger.
“You could run the school without me,” he’d said.
“No,” she’d replied, and they both knew that was true.
Even after seventeen years, she was still an outsider in Clear Spring.
Now a student was standing in the balcony – Todd, a boarder from Florida. “This place is a bunch of hypocrites. All this crap about peace. They kicked my friend out of school this week. He’s eighteen.
He’ll be drafted. Go ahead, send medicine to the Viet Cong. Send my buddy to war.” He stamped downstairs and outside.
Todd’s friend had been suspended twice the year before, for smoking. This time it was marijuana.
“Strike three,”
Grayson had said, and expelled him. Dorothy was relieved to have him gone, though she hated losing his tuition.
There were nervous coughs as the Meeting settled back into expectant silence after the boy’s outburst. To quiet her mind, Dorothy studied the plain, beautiful room, looking up at the heavy beam across the
center of the Meeting House ceiling where the partition between men and women had been two hundred years ago. How shocked Grayson’s ancestors would be at her students sitting in the balcony, holding
hands. Across the room, the old glass in the windows warped the light, spreading it across the white plaster wall like a watermark on paper.
The benches creaked; the clock ticked. At the end of the hour, the Clerk of the Meeting initiated the customary ripple of handshakes. Meeting was over; next were the announcements.
“I’m driving down to the Vigil,” said Bruce Williams, the biology teacher.
“Several students have already signed up. If anyone from the Meeting wants to join us, we’ll leave in the school van after coffee.”
Bruce drove to the silent Vigil in front of the White House every Sunday. Sometimes Dorothy joined him.
Grayson scoffed at vigils. He said they were cheap and easy, too passive.
“So how would you suggest we teach the children to bear witness for peace? Pour blood on files? Immolate ourselves?” she retorted.
No one in Clear Spring had known the Quaker who set himself alight in front of the Pentagon, but the violent, tragic gesture haunted her.
From the broad porch of the Meeting House she watched a phalanx of honking geese fly overhead. There was smoke in the air, burning leaves. Standing here last April, after the impromptu Meeting called
the night King was killed, it had seemed possible to smell the bitter smoke of buildings burning in the riots just fifteen miles away in Washington. The next Sunday she’d accompanied Bruce and his vanload
to the Vigil, driving past charred blocks and looted storefronts. Then, two months later, Bobby Kennedy was killed. The year had been a crescendo of violence – assassinations, riots, the war.
Her husband’s cousin Helen joined them on the porch.
“Do something about that boy. That’s no way to behave in Meeting.”
“He’s young,” Dorothy began, but bit back the defense. Helen sat on the Meeting’s Finance Committee. “I’ll speak with him.”
Dorothy and Grayson started home through the cemetery. Most of those buried beneath mossy stones were his kin; she’d lie here one day too, beside him. He opened the gate to the path through the fields.
Runaway slaves had hidden here among the corn stalks, helped along their way to Canada on the underground railway by his grandparents. Sometimes now young men came to stay with members of the
Meeting, also on their way to Canada, seeking a different freedom. Last year the Peace Pilgrim, had appeared at Meeting one Sunday. The elderly woman had been walking back and forth across the
country for fifteen years, since Korea, carrying out her vow to remain a wanderer until there was peace in the world. She stayed the night with them. After she left, Grayson had said she was engaged in a
pointless exercise.
At the spring from which the Meeting took its name, two students were necking on the bench beneath the trees. Grayson chuckled.
“It’s not funny,” Dorothy hissed.
Students lolled against each other everywhere, it seemed. On campus she had to keep the music practice rooms locked or they were used for other kinds of practice.
“You know the rules about public display of affection,” she called out in her sternest dean’s voice.
“It wasn’t public till you got here,” the boy said, standing up and shaking back his long hair.
It was Todd. He’d ignored her dress code; velvet bell-bottoms dipped beneath his jutting hipbones. Bright but a lazy student, he was popular, especially with the girls. It was just a matter of time until she caught him with pot, too. His father, a real estate developer, was always proposing a “significant gift.”
The school had yet to receive a check or stock certificates. Was it a promise or blackmail?
The girl was Miriam Street. Dark hair and dark eyes, she looked like a gypsy in her long skirt made from an Indian bedspread. Her blouse was a skin-tight purple leotard, no bra. Dorothy would have to add
underwear to the dress code; it seemed that nothing could be left to common sense or modesty.
Miriam was the child of another old Clear Spring family. Her mother, Garnet, had died that year. Garnet had been the first to befriend Dorothy when she moved from Philadelphia to marry Grayson. Soon
the two women had been pregnant together, but Dorothy miscarried. She’d never conceived again; the friendship languished. Years later when Garnet became ill, Dorothy felt guilty, as though her jealousy
of Garnet’s healthy child had caused the cancer.
Miriam’s father, Gil, a physicist, had recently lost his job with the Department of Energy over his participation in a vigil against biological weapons. Sometimes the price for bearing witness was too high,
Dorothy thought. Since losing his wife and his job, Gil had been drinking and neglecting his daughter. Dorothy had convinced him to let Miriam come live on dorm, belatedly trying to make amends to the
girl’s deceased mother.
“I’ll expect you both for Stewardship tomorrow,” she said to Todd and Miriam.
Students were assigned extra chores as meaningful punishment. Sweat equity, Grayson called it.
The boy smirked and grabbed Miriam’s hand, lacing their fingers together. Dorothy itched to yank them apart. Insolent students infuriated her. Maybe it was just as well she’d never been a
parent; at least she could leave them, go home at night.
“It’s time the two of you were heading back. We’ll walk with you,” said Grayson.
No one spoke as they tramped in double file, older couple behind the younger one, through the woods. They arrived at the rail fence where the school property began.
“Come have a bite with us, Miriam,” said Dorothy.
She’d rescue her from the predatory boy.
“Thanks, but I’ll just go on back to the dining hall.”
“I’ll call the dorm, excuse you from lunch.” The invitation had become an order.
“See you,” said the boy, climbing over the fence instead of opening the gate.
The couple, Miriam in tow, crossed the road. The sign beside their mailbox read Grayson Shaw, Cabinetmaker and Luthier.
“What’s a luthier?” asked the girl.
“Maker of stringed instruments,” said Dorothy.
Grayson had been a woodworker before he started the school. Former customers still called, but there was no time for cabinetry. “Running a school is like running with a wild woman,” he
sometimes joked. He found time for his dulcimers, though, late in the day or at night. It was as necessary as breathing for him to be doing something with his hands....
Published in Backbone Mountain Review: 2010
