A Pie Plate Pilgrimage by William Loewen
Chapter 22 - Spiritual Pruning
Benjamin Worsley assured Lydia that they wouldn’t need to come in unreasonably early. Together they agreed that starting at ten o’clock would allow them to leave at a comfortable time and give them enough time to get the jobs done. When she pulled up in front of Oscar’s apartment at eight, he was already waiting in the lobby for her. He walked out to meet her and they headed off toward the farm.
“So what are you going to do with the cash?” he asked when she showed him the letter she had received from Gerald.
“I was sort of thinking that maybe I could still publish the book,” she said, asking a question as much as she was making a statement. “I haven’t talked to Zack about it yet, but I’m sure he would like the opportunity to finish the project, and if you’re interested, I think that the three of us could put together a pretty good final product.”
“Oh, I was just thinking that five thousand dollars is a lot of money to pamper yourself with. Are you sure that would be enough money to publish a book?”
“Well I haven’t run the numbers just yet, but if we volunteer our time, and if I can call in a few favours from friends at the office, I don’t think I would have to borrow too much money on top of that.”
“Would you get in trouble for selling the rights to a rival company?”
It was an idea that had crossed her mind, especially after getting those emails from Marlene, but she wasn’t quite ready to give up control of the project.
“Did Zack tell you that he’s talking to another publisher?” she asked.
“I haven’t talked to him much lately,” Oscar said. “I’m not on campus much these days, and when I have seen him, he’s been a little awkward around me.”
“That’s too bad,” Lydia said with a few theories developing already as to why. “How do you think he’ll do with a different publisher?”
“Without you and me pushing him to be better, I don’t think his new book will be as good.”
“Very funny,” she said sarcastically. “Does that mean you’re on board with my idea?”
“It all depends on Zack,” Oscar said. “Even with your windfall, we wouldn’t be able to offer him much money, and he would be stuck working with a couple of people who’ll give him a hard time about making his book more accessible. If he goes with the other company, they will pay him and probably just ask him to church up his writing a little more. Given that choice, I’m not sure he’ll pick us.”
“Good point,” Lydia said, “but I think I’ll still call him and see what he says.”
Once they had made it out of the city, Lydia started watching the farms beside the highway for clues about the kind of work they might be doing. There was no activity on any of the fields they passed, and it looked like they hadn’t been touched since last year’s harvest.
After a while Lydia noticed he was just staring off into the distance looking at nothing in particular.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m still just waking up I guess,” he said.
“It’s nine o’clock, Oscar.”
Oscar hesitated for a while before finally saying, “It was two months ago today.”
“What was?” Lydia asked.
“Breaking up with Evangeline,” Oscar said. “I didn’t think she would hold on this long.”
“I thought you said that you knew she would never apologize?”
“I didn’t think she would say sorry, but I thought she might recognize in some small way that she had done something wrong. I hoped she would be willing to reach out at some point. That’s the way it always went, I would give in a little and she would give in a little and things would go back to normal, except it was always me reaching out first. Why won’t she just admit she did something wrong?”
Oscar hadn’t talked this much about his fiancée for a long time. Lydia didn’t see this coming. She didn’t know if she should pretend to indulge him or if she should reassure him that he had made the right decision and say again that he was better off without her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t want to hear about this.” He genuinely regretted having brought it up and of all people he didn’t want Lydia to hear him talk like this.
“Sure I do,” she insisted, trying her best to sound convincing. “Why wouldn’t I want to hear about it?”
Instead of answering the question, Oscar was happy to change the subject. “Did Ben say anything about the kind of work we’d be doing today?” he asked.
“No. All I know is that he thinks that after this I’ll see his spiritual point of view more clearly.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s too early to be sowing seeds or pulling weeds, and it’s far too late to be harvesting anything.”
“I didn’t think you knew that much about farming,” Lydia said.
“I don’t. I’m just trying to think of the agricultural metaphors in the Bible.”
The lighter Saturday morning traffic meant that they got out of the city in record time. Despite stopping for coffee along the way the two of them arrived at the Worsley farm twenty minutes early. When Ben didn’t come out to greet them Oscar suggested they walk around the property to look for him.
The farmer emerged from the old wooden barn just as they were about to go in and look for him there. After greeting them, he looked over what they were wearing and remarked, “You guys are going to need some rubbers. There’s lots of mud out there and your shoes will be caked in the stuff by the time we’re finished. Don’t worry, I’ve got lots of extra boots in the shed that other workers have left behind. I’ve got some gloves in there you’ll need too.”
There was a pair of boots that fit Oscar fairly well, but the closest Lydia could find was a men’s pair that was one size too big. With their new footwear in place, they hopped in the back of Ben’s pickup truck and rode out to the northeast corner of his farm. Lydia had never ridden in the back of a truck before and certainly not one without a tailgate.
“This is where I grow my cabbage,” he said when he pulled up to a small field among the trees. “The extra shade from the forest keeps the leaves crisp and because the ground is a little lower there’s plenty of moisture and the heads grow a little bigger.”
“Hence the mud?” asked Oscar.
“You got it,” Ben said. “I’m gonna come by here with the plough when you two are finished, but what I need you to do is go along the edge of the bush here and cut back about two feet of this overgrowth.”
Then he waded into the long grass and explained to them the kind of things - tree branches, thorns and shrubs - that he wanted to be cut down.
“Any questions?” he asked after the demonstration.
Lydia and Oscar shook their heads. They understood the instructions and the foremost questions on their mind weren’t ones that he was going to answer, questions like “Why are we here?” and “Don’t you have a machine to do this?”
Mr. Worsley gave them two tools, a long sickle and a pair of pruning shears. “They might look like antiques, but I ran them over the grindstone just this morning. They’ll cut what you want them to, and if you’re not careful, they’ll cut what you don’t want them to as well.”
“So you’re not going to help us?” Lydia asked.
“No,” he replied. “I’ve got a bunch of things to do back in the barn. Besides, if I stayed out here with you, none of us would get any work done with me yammering on the whole time. I’ll check in on you in an hour or so.”
“Which one do you want?” Oscar asked Lydia when Ben had driven off.
“That thing looks a little creepy,” she said, pointing at the sickle. “I think I’ll use the scissors.”
They struggled with the overgrowth for a while. It took quite a bit of adjusting before she figured out how to hold the long wooden handles right and what type of plants she could actually cut through. Like most men, Oscar had never swung a sickle before, but soon developed a sense of rhythm with it. She would cut down the branche
They didn’t talk much as they worked. Lydia was focussed on doing the job right and on what she was supposed to be learning. Despite the silence, they had managed to work well together. After an hour of working, Lydia’s thoughts had produced very little fruit.
“What do you think he wants me to learn through this?” Lydia asked.
Oscar pulled the hood from his sweater over his head and held the sickle in front of him. “Yeah, it seems odd that he would want you to have the experience of the Grim Reaper following you around all day.”
“I hope that’s not it,” she said, laughing at his attempt to be intimidating.
“Maybe he just wants some free labour,” Oscar said.
“He offered to pay us.”
“Well, even if I knew, I’m pretty sure he wants you to figure it out on your own so I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Just get back to work,” she said, picking up her shears again.
They kept working and the more progress they made on the field, the more confused Lydia got. Her arms were aching more and more and they seemed to be barely inching along the edge of the field. The more pain she felt, the more she wondered why he had given them this task in the first place.
Ben came out just before twelve with a thermos of soup, a bag of crackers, a few cans of pop and a plastic container of homemade cookies.
“You two got a lot more work done than I thought you would,” he said as he spread the lunch contents across an open patch of grass. “What’s the matter, this guy got nothing interesting to say?” he asked, nudging Oscar with his elbow.
Oscar laughed. “She just doesn’t have a sense of humour when she’s getting her hands dirty.”
Lydia just rolled her eyes as the two men laughed at her expense.
Ben sat down on the ground and invited Oscar and Lydia to join him. Normally she would hesitate to just sit down on the grass, but since her legs and arms badly needed a rest and her clothes were already dirty, she wasn’t going to be picky about where she wanted to sit.
Ben took off his hat and asked Oscar if he would say thanks for the meal, so Oscar pulled back his hood and said a simple prayer. It was quiet for a little while as they ate. The simple meal tasted a lot better than Lydia had expected it to.
When he was almost finished eating, Ben looked back over the field and said, “Looks like you should have it licked in another hour or so.”
“Can you remind me again why we’re doing this?” Lydia asked.
“You were right, Oscar,” the farmer said. “She doesn’t have a sense of humour when her hands are dirty.”
“I can handle the work,” she insisted, “but it just doesn’t seem like it’s worthwhile. We’re only adding about two feet to the width of this field and that can’t be any more than one row. No offense, but it seems like you’re being a little greedy to do all this work for just a few extra heads of cabbage.”
“You know, I had to do this same thing two years ago,” Mr. Worsley explained. “In that time, this forest has slowly been reclaiming this field. I’m not making my field any bigger, I’m just taking back what I’ve lost since then.”
“So this stuff just grows that quickly?” Oscar asked.
“Exactly! That’s what I wanted you to see, Lydia. No matter how hard we humans work to destroy it, God’s creation is fighting back. If I never did this, if I never trimmed along the edge of this field, pretty soon I would have no field at all. Gradually the forest would reclaim the field. God designed these plants to work that way, and long after we’re gone, they’ll do just fine. In fact, they’ll thrive without us here.”
“If Lydia’s learned her lesson, does that mean we don’t need to finish?” Oscar said.
“Now who doesn’t have a sense of humour?” Lydia joked as she picked up his work gloves and threw them over to him again.
Lydia was hoping Ben would talk more about the point he was trying to make, but he and Oscar kept joking around, and the tone of the conversation shifted. During a lull in the conversation, Ben stood up and started to clear up the lunch dishes. Oscar and Lydia followed his cue and picked up their tools again.
“I’ll check on you every hour or so,” Ben said as he climbed onto the tractor, “but it shouldn’t take you much longer.”
With her hands on the shears again, Lydia looked a little closer at the plants she was cutting. In some cases she could see evidence on the tree branches that they had been pruned before, but those cuts had healed and the branches had grown out again. Suddenly the accidental and impersonal nature of the way she understood life to have evolved seemed inadequate. Wherever it was coming from, what was unfolding in front of her seemed to be a well orchestrated process, one that could be guiding life all over the world.
Soon they were approaching the end of the field. Lydia thought about how this would need to be done once more in a few years. She wondered if it would feel even more futile if she were the one to come back then and do the job all over again. Thinking that far down the road she started imagining where her life would take her in that time. Would she still be working at the same company? Would she have gotten a promotion by then or would she be stuck at an even lower level than she was already at? She also wondered about what sort of relationship she might be in. Would Oscar ever get over his breakup with Evangeline? Would it even be worthwhile for Lydia to wait for that to happen?
Lydia arrived at the end of their section before Oscar, and when she looked back, she saw in the newly expanded field a little bit of her own life. She saw her job, a position that required constant effort, not only to move up and get promoted, but also to remain relevant in the industry and to be a necessary employee for her company. She also saw a number of her relationships that, if left unattended, would eventually disintegrate. She also saw more clearly than ever the faith that Oscar was talking about. His convictions, his desire to accomplish good in the world and his hope for humanity must need to be reviewed and nurtured over and over again so they weren’t overcome by the cynical, depressing and spiritually empty forces he faced every day. Maybe her own view of the world needed the same attention or else the same pessimistic influences would reclaim any spiritual ground she had made. It wasn’t a moment of absolute clarity and she didn’t think she had unravelled the mysteries of the universe, but it felt good to come to a deeper understanding of what was happening.
Oscar didn’t know why she was smiling when he caught up to her, but he started smiling too. He sat immediately beside her in the grass and they looked back over the work they had accomplished. Soon the silence was broken when they could hear Mr. Worsley’s tractor approaching.
He waved at them as he entered from the adjacent field. Positioning himself along the edge, where Oscar and Lydia had just finished working, Ben lowered his plough into the earth and slowly made his way around. Two years worth of grass, weeds, bushes and branches were being worked into the ground, and fresh new topsoil was being turned up over it. The two volunteer farmhands watched in silence as the machine approached. The steady knocking of the old engine grew louder the closer it came and soon its diesel fumes wafted into their nostrils. As the tractor passed by, Lydia was overwhelmed by the sound of twigs snapping and stems, roots and leaves being cut up by the unforgiving blade of the plough.
Oscar stood up and reached his hand out to Lydia.
“Maybe we should make our way back to the farm,” he said as he pulled her to her feet.
He picked up their tools and starting walking along the side of the trail left by Mr. Worsley. Until that moment Lydia didn’t know that soil had a scent. It smelled new and hopeful and whole. Ahead of her was a clear line with a field on one side, which she had just helped to extend and which would soon bring life to plants that w
From: Marlene Eriksson
To: Lydia Phillips
Subject: Re: Christian book publishing question
Hello Lydia,
Thank you for your impressions of Mr. Mackenzie. We’ve been impressed in all of our dealings with him as well.
I also appreciate your openness to discuss your book project. There’s a natural tendency in our profession to simply pore over the material, look for typographical errors and focus on marketability. It’s easy to forget sometimes that the books we’re producing still need to be meaningful to us first if they have any hope of impacting people outside our industry walls. I would love to hear you elaborate on what you’ve learned from the process.
Thanks,
Marlene Eriksson
Tablet of the Heart Press
From: Lydia Phillips
To: Marlene Eriksson
Subject: Re: Christian book publishing question
Hi Marlene,
I did learn a lot while I was putting this book together, but I’ve never really had to lay it out in front of me. Looking back now though, I wish I had asked different questions. Zack and his friend Oscar were great at trying to help me understand the Christian demographic we were targeting, but I think I only scratched the surface of what I could have learned from them in that context.
It’s funny to think about how my impression of this project changed from beginning to end. At first I thought I wasn’t qualified to lead the team or oversee the book, and since I guess I would have called myself an agnostic I certainly wasn’t comfortable with the subject matter. As it got moving though, I started to feel validated and important because I felt like I was working toward something bigger than myself. Then, when it was cancelled, I felt like the only thing tying me to the company I worked for was gone. I’ve come to terms with it now, but I think that maybe my problem was that I was holding the book up on a pedestal, dreaming of a time when a perfect finished product would be completed. I should have been just as wrapped up in the process of making the book. The book and the process by which it arrives cannot be separated from each other. I’ve come to realize that whether I’m forming relationships, working on my career or developing a book like this, the journey itself isn’t more or less important than the destination, it is the destination. As long as I keep working to make it as good as I can, I am where I should be.
- Lydia
From: Marlene Eriksson
To: Lydia Phillips
Subject: Re: Christian book publishing question
Hello Lydia,
It sounds like you really did learn a lot from the process. Maybe I should contact Oscar, this friend that you and Zack have both mentioned.
I don’t suppose there is a chance that I would be able to read the documents your team had put together before it was cancelled?
Thanks,
Marlene Eriksson
Tablet of the Heart Press
From: Lydia Phillips
To: Marlene Eriksson
Subject: Re: Christian book publishing question
Hi Marlene,
By some stroke of fate, my company no longer actually owns the copyright of the documents, I do. How about you send me a signed non-disclosure agreement, and I’ll send you everything I’ve got?
- Lydia
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