Lions

~ ~ ~

Nothing like raising crops on the high plains, Jorgensen used to say, for the spiritual workout of reconciling what you’d expected with what you ended up getting. The place was uninhabitable, too hard, too dusty, too dry, too poor, out of jobs, out of prospects. The wonder was that they had all stayed so long. For years, like a slowly lifting line of birds there’d been a steady, gradual flight out of town. Finally, in this single summer, all but eleven people would go. One at a time in the old brick stores and painted houses the windows were boarded or punched out with stones, eyes blind to a place so many had years ago shed so much blood to claim.

Not until now did the hangers-on allow themselves to consider the real possibility of larger, cleaner houses, of rooms filled with light, of backyard gardens that grew more than bitter turnips, bitter greens, and woody radishes. If the minutes and hours of the day were meant to be filled with industry and improvement, if people were meant by their own toil to increase the abundance with which they’d been blessed, and if indeed God helped those who helped themselves, then life was not meant to be lived in Lions. They ticked it off on their fingers. The drought and heat and emptiness were not so life-threatening as they’d been generations ago, but were still discomforts they had no real cause to endure. They’d been driving to Burnsville for school, for church, and for groceries for years. They cared little or nothing for this land, which rendered them nothing. From within their small, dusty houses they made plans. They talked it over with each other. They called their banks. They called the real estate agents or a schoolteacher or a bartender they knew and made plans for a new life in Burnsville. It was like laying up treasure in heaven. So did most everyone remaining in town come to see themselves at the center of a story of redemption. Somehow the country had been lost to them, and now they would reclaim it. Chuck Garcia, who had chosen Lions as his home base in the county for its quiet and expansiveness, was amazed by this sudden activity and conviction — even in his own house.

“We can’t stay,” his wife said, looking back over her shoulder, holding a folded, coffee-stained doily. “You know we can’t.”

“Why can’t we?”

“Besides. It’s Burnsville.”

“Since when is Burnsville everybody’s answer to everything?”

“There’s actually stuff to do there, for one.”

“Things to spend money on.”

“And so what? Anyway I want a garden.”

“You want a garden. It’s only forty miles away, Emily. It’s the same altitude. Maybe a little higher. The same dirt. You think it’ll be so different?”

“Yes,” she said, and resumed folding napkins and sheets. “Edie knows a woman who has three raised beds in her backyard and feeds her family off that all summer. Tomatoes, squash, eggplant. Gets lettuce straight through October.”

“What does she water all that with?”

“In Burnsville they have the reservoir.”

Life there would be a lot like life in heaven. A number of saved among them were being transported to a newer, better place where everyone would conduct themselves more honorably and get along with each other and in general be much more satisified. Time moved chronologically in accordance with the unfolding of a divine plan. All of this felt right. Leaving felt right.

“Jesus tells you to leave your house and your home,” their minister reminded them in Burnsville. “These are his words, my friend. Not mine. ‘Leave the dead to bury their dead,’ he says.

“Do not be bound together with unbelievers. For what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? We’ve all heard about the man in Lions this summer. Not a coincidence, my friends, but a calling out from the Lord Himself to which we are compelled to respond. Do not hesitate to find and protect your own sacred space from evil. Easy? Of course not. Are you attached to the world? Are you attached to the little things and ways of your life? Because it is not the things of this world we are after, my friends, it is heaven we are after. The Kingdom of God.

“And I know, I know,” the minister said, his thick hand raised in the air, the overhead light flashing for a moment on his spectacles. “You may ask, where am I supposed to go? Well, I’ll tell you. You know we were fund-raising together for six long years. Six long years and we raised the money to build this wonderful place, our home. We picked out these chairs. This carpet. You women baked bread and cookies. You men went door-to-door. You made phone calls. We built this place together. Didn’t we?”

They had.

They nodded.

“‘Come out from among them and be separate,’ the Lord says. There is one path to salvation, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. And here, here in this house, this is where you will find him. Follow Him when he moves you, and I promise you. I promise you. You will be blessed. You will be so blessed.”

None of the old folks from the Evening Primrose old folks’ home who’d been sickened by the water ever came back to town, but those twenty-odd others who had not been sickened left, too. By mid-July the place was closed up for good. Four of Lions’ six children returned from the clinic for the duration of the summer, while their parents found houses or apartments in Burnsville or Denver or Cheyenne or, in one case, back in Nebraska, and — in another case — to family in Iowa. The bank foreclosed on nineteen properties and a ranching/gas-line development company out of Greeley bought up a dozen more for cash, including the nursing home and all its structures. Over the years “For Sale” signs swung and bleached in the sun and wind until the houses were stripped and looted and eventually became safety hazards and were fenced in with chain-link.

If, once they had all gone and settled into their new apartments and condominiums in Burnsville, they were at all nostalgic, it was for a Lions that had never existed. They’d sometimes reminisce, saying the nights there had been uniformly cool and the days full of sunshine. Sugar beets and root vegetables grew as big as your head. The rooms of the schools and even the library were turned into storage rooms overflowing with grain. The name of the place, they said, came from a time when mountain lions roamed the prairie, and there’s a big blond head of one of those lions — a giant male with green eyes — still mounted inside the bar that closed down years after they left. If you peer in the soaped-up windows, you can see him looking out at you.