The Godhead

By Mary Omodt

Synopsis of “The Godhead”

At the age of four, and just out of the hospital, Mary sees a head in the corner of her eye. She instinctively knows this is God although God is never mentioned in her home. Her sixth grade teacher, the beautiful and peroxided Miss Kastor, changes Mary’s view that school is a necessary boredom. Sylvia Kastor comes to teach Girls’ P.E. and Health from a small town 30 miles to the east. Unmarried, she leaves behind her four year old daughter for her mother to care for, and she travels home by bus on the weekends. Miss Kastor has a notorious grandmother, Pearl, who spends some time in the Indiana Reformatory for Women for killing her husband with the heavy iron skillet used to cook his meals. Pearl is unrepentant. “Sam was a bad man, and bad men can do unnatural acts with their little daughters.” The little daughter, Ellen, is sent to live with a great aunt until she is married and has children. Ellen’s third child is Sylvia. When Sylvia is in high school, she meets a new girl, Joylene, whose father is an itinerant preacher, traveling in rural areas, setting up a church for one year, and then leaving, much to the chagrin of the congregation, who have grown to love him and his family. The two girls are fast friends, avid readers, and with Joylene’s help, Sylvia begins to think beyond beauty and popularity. Using Jane Addams “Hull House” as their inspiration, they promise each other that they will live extraordinary lives, “even if in ordinary circumstances.”

Pearl is well liked in prison, teaching the other women to read, using the Bible and sentences that Pearl made up, such as “Men are pigs”. When she is released, Pearl marries the preacher she has corresponded with during her incarceration, and together they start “The Home Across the River” for children without parents, with emphasis on the children of the women in the reformatory across the river.

The novel weaves back and forth between Mary, Sylvia, and Pearl, and is told with humor and a celebration of the ordinary life. In “Tales of Limestone Street”, which starts and ends the novel, residents of that old, crumbling neighborhood talk with the new pastor, Joylene, about their lives during the great depression, the war, and the closing of the quarry. “We just live ordinary lives” Frank tells Joylene, when she tells him she wants to write a book about the residents of Limestone Street. “Perfect, Frank”, she tells him. “Those are the stories I want to tell!”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Omodt
• Release date: Mar 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465739032

Mary Omodt

Mary Omodt lives in Sebastopol, California, with Don, her husband of 53 years. Her passions are God, family, writing, and duplicate bridge. Like the Mary in the novel, as far as this life is concerned, she is glad to have been included!

Book preview

The Godhead

The nature or essence of being divine

By Mary Omodt

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Mary Omodt

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Chapter 1

LIMESTONE STREET 1947

FRANK

Age 74

I’ve been living on this street, Limestone Street, all my life. And so have most of my neighbors, those who are still alive. Some left when times got tough, and some didn’t come back from the wars, but most of us stuck it out here. The houses on this street are pretty much all the same, small, gray and stucco. The best thing about these houses is the little front porch to sit on when the evenings are hot and believe you me a lot of the evenings are hot. This was the company town for the Limestone Quarry. We all worked at the quarry and so did our fathers and brothers. The women didn’t work back then. When the quarry shut down some us got other jobs and others just disappeared. Some of those who disappeared came back eventually, looking like life hadn’t treated them very good. When the quarry closed, times were bad and it wasn’t a good time to land another job. Me and my brother got lucky and were hired by the tire company over by the river. My dad was getting old anyway and we told him he was retired. He said he guessed he had no choice. I’m 74 now and believe me, I’ve seen lots of changes. Maybe there haven’t so many changes on this street but our whole town has grown, mostly on the other side of the river where the neighborhoods are nicer and some are downright luxurious. The downtown now has a large department store and lots of small stores and restaurants. I never go there. There’s nothing I really need from there so there’s no need to go, but I hear it’s real nice.

That building down the street on the corner used to be the school. All the kids in the neighborhood went to that school, and so did me and my brother. Dad said we needed to go to school through the eighth grade, but our teacher said no, we needed to go to school through the ninth grade. So we did what our teacher said, but dad, my brother and me couldn’t figure out what good that extra year did us. It was just a year we weren’t making any money, and we were glad to get out of school and go work at the quarry. As the neighborhood got older there were fewer and fewer kids and pretty soon the school closed. For a while it stood empty, and then one day it got turned into the offices for the people who ran all the schools. There was a lot of construction to make our old classrooms into offices, and then when it was all finished, they all moved in. I didn’t mind. It was good to see things happening there again. I went by one day and decided to go inside because I was curious about one thing. In the entrance to our school was a floor that had colorful tile, and in the middle of the floor there was a round fish tank that was made out of the same colorful tile. In the fish tank were gold fish swimming around. Every morning we kids would say good morning to those gold fish on our way to our classroom. When I went to visit the new offices in the building that once was my school, I went in the new front door, and I was happy to see that those tiles were still on the floor and the round fish tank was still there. A woman sitting at a desk saw me and asked if she could help me. I told her no that I was just wondering if they still had the fish tank. We have the fish tank she told me, but we put plants in it instead of gold fish. I looked in and sure enough, where there used to be gold fish there were little plants with pricklies on them, cactus I think. We don’t have time to take care of gold fish she told me. I wanted to tell her I had the time and I would be glad to take care of the gold fish for her but she was already back at her desk typing so I left. I didn’t go back. Imagine a fish tank with no fish. I know a lot has changed over the years, but that just plain makes no sense.

Across the street from the school is a church. It’s been lots of other things over the years but I know it started out as a church because there’s a cross on top that’s made out of the same stucco as the church. A couple of years ago a young couple came and started up a church again. I heard they are both pastors. I never heard of a woman pastor but like I said, a lot has changed over the many years I have been alive and living on Limestone Street.

You would think that most of us on this street would know each other pretty well, having lived on the same block for decades. The truth is we’re a private bunch and we mind our own business. I could have told you more about what was going on fifty years ago with everyone than I can tell you about them for the last ten or twenty years. The young couple from the church started coming around and visiting. The young woman pastor dropped in on me. When I told her I wasn’t religious she said that was ok, she just wanted to talk so I did the polite thing and invited her in. Even in a house of just men, my dad and my brother and I were always polite to each other. Mom died when I was little. I barely remember her, but I’m sure she would have wanted us to be polite. The lady pastor sat on the couch and just looking at her there made me laugh. She asked what I was laughing about and I said she looked so nice and bright there on my grey couch. In fact I said I guess the whole room is gray whereas she was anything but gray. She had on a blouse that was red with little flowers on it, a red skirt with stripes, and red shoes. I never saw so much red on a woman before. Let’s brighten the room up she said and she asked if I had a pair of scissors. We went outside and she cut some lilac and brought it inside. We went into the kitchen and found a water pitcher and she filled it up with water, put the lilacs in the water and put the pitcher on the dining table. They look pretty I told her but I wish they were red. When spring comes, she said, my husband and I are going to plant some flowers in front of the church. I’ll come and plant some in your yard also and make sure some of them are red. I told her I wasn’t sure I’d still be around in the spring or even wanted to be, but she said I would, because I was still young. She was right about that, I was one of the youngest on the street. Charlie, two doors down, was already 90. After we talked for a while she said a surprising thing. I’m going to write a book she said, about the people on Limestone Street and their lives. I’m planning on publishing the book, so of course I need permission from all of you to include your stories. I laughed, even harder this time, and again she asked what I was laughing about. Are you also planning on someone reading this book? I said to her. If so, I’d get a different subject. We’re pretty ordinary around here. We all live ordinary lives. She looked up at me and smiled her pretty smile. Well, that’s perfect, Frank, she said. Those are the stories I want to tell!

Chapter 2

MARY

I first saw God as a head. It was really a head in profile, and the profile looked something like my dad’s profile. We had a bunch of old pictures in the attic and mom would bring them down occasionally. I loved looking through those old pictures. One was of dad when he was in college, in profile. That’s what the head looked like, a classic nose, handsome features, you know, just like my dad’s picture. The difference was I knew the head wasn’t my dad. I knew it was God, even though I didn’t put that name to it yet. The head wasn’t smiling but it wasn’t at all unfriendly. It appeared when I was four, shortly after I got out of the hospital. I was sitting in my upstairs bedroom, and suddenly, there it was. I could only see it out of the corner of my eye. But, whenever I thought to look, it was right beside me. I wasn’t surprised, or scared about it, not at all. And I didn’t tell anyone for a long time. It was my head and I wasn’t into sharing in those days. You know how four year olds are.

I was born in 1937, the youngest of three girls, with my sisters Eunice and Claire five and ten years older than me. My dad had gone to college right out of high school, and he was the first in his family of twelve to do so. After two years of college, he quit to join the army. He felt that it was his duty to fight in World War I, he told us later, and so he was sent to Germany. Dad survived, came home, and went back to college for another four years. During his last year in college, he met mom who was working as a secretary in an office on campus. She was also going to school and majoring in Home Economics. They married and had three girls, the first one in 1927, the next in 1931, and then me in 1937. By the time I was born mom was 37 and dad was 42. That made them a lot older than any of my friends’ parents, which at one time led me to wonder if they wanted a boy that third time around. Dad did like to fish, and there was a time when he did some hunting. I was a tomboy, running through the small woods behind our elementary school, clicking away on my silver six-shooter, playing cowboy and Indians with my friends, but it wasn’t the same as actually being a boy. My middle sister, Claire, said, Yes, you were suppose to be a boy, if you were suppose to be at all, accidents do happen, you know. I wasn’t quite sure what Claire was taking about but I had already decided that she was not the final word on everything. Mom was. A boy? An accident? Good heavens, where did you get that idea? she said to me with appropriate shock. We love our three girls! she added, while continuing to play her solitaire game on our big dining room table. We had a great dining room table. The surface was very shiny and mom protected it with a custom made table pad that folded into fours, and she had extra pieces that covered the leaves also. When we were not eating on the table, mom put on a crocheted tablecloth that she and her mom, my grandma, had made. The tablecloth had big holes and you could see the shiny wood beneath. This was just pushed aside for solitaire games. For other games that mom, my sisters and I played, the pads were put back in place. We were a game playing family, all except my dad who was always reading. My oldest sister, Eunice, usually won, and she always thought we would all be as delighted about it as she was. There was no such thing in our family as throwing a game so the littlest one – me – might win occasionally. So I hardly ever won, but as Claire pointed out, I was lucky to be around to be included.

Mom was funny and pretty. She always wore a dress and stockings that were held up by plain garters. When she sat on the floor and washed the kitchen linoleum, she rolled the stockings down below her knees.

She was an only child. Her parents divorced when she was a baby, and she never saw her father again. I was eight when she told me this and I was horrified. How could he never see you again? You were his child! I can’t imagine dad never wanting to see Eunice, Claire and me. You must have felt terrible. Well mom told me, I don’t really remember him. And then my mother married the man I always thought of as my father, your grandpa. And as a bonus, he brought his daughter with him, my stepsister. She was my age and my best friend. So, it worked out very well, she added. Still I said hotly, it was an awful thing for him to do! Yes it was mom agreed, and she continued. The way I heard the story, my dad told my mother that he was leaving her because she was always sick, and he was tired of it. After he left, your grandma miraculously became healthy. I laughed and mom laughed with me. We had the same sense of humor. Where’s your dad now? I asked her, even though I knew the answer. He’s dead now mom said. I heard he had died a few years ago. His widow sent me a note, so somehow she knew I existed. She said he had a lengthy illness, and she had to take care of him for many years. I think that’s what’s known as divine justice. Not for his second wife, poor thing, but for my dad. You reap what you sow.

I’d heard that expression many times before. Mom was a firm believer that you reap what you sow. When I got into trouble at school, she said that I knew the rules, and if I didn’t follow them, I could expect to get into trouble. When I fell out of our apple trees, she pointed out to me, as she was cleaning up my wounds, that she had reminded me many times to watch where I was stepping when I was up there. If I came home upset because a friend was not speaking to me, she wanted to know what my part in it was. And yet, she was always on my side. I could go to mom with anything, and I could tell her anything. She could be irritating but she was the best, and I knew it even then.

Mom’s step dad ran a small grocery store in a town near us. He and grandma lived above the store. I loved going into that store, and I always got a treat. After grandma died, grandpa married a few times, and then he ended up living with his daughter in California. We went to visit them when I was a junior in college. I was dating my future husband at the time, and writing him letters every day. Grandpa was a sweet old man, delighted that I had a boyfriend. It’s good to have a love, he said to me. But not good to have so many his daughter replied. He’s still in hot pursuit, she told mom and me. He just takes off walking, and starts talking to old women. Mom was very fond of her step-dad. We was very kind to me, she said, and the only father I knew. He was the only grandfather I knew, and I was very fond of him also.

My grandmother died when I was eight. Since they didn’t live in our town and they didn’t have a car we would go see them about once a month on the weekend. Grandma would always have a list of things for my dad to fix when we were there because grandpa was impossible at fixing anything. I guess he wasn’t all that great at running a grocery store either, since mom said that grandma had some money when they married, and it was all gone in short order. I was told that I stayed with grandma and grandpa for a week when I was a baby while the rest of the family went to Colorado. I said I remembered it clearly and I was annoyed that I wasn’t included in the vacation. Mom called that a slight exaggeration, and she was right because really I was too little to remember staying with grandma. When grandma was dying, we all went to visit her. I remember going up to her room and giving her a kiss. Then I went down stairs and sat on a bench in the store with dad, Eunice and Claire. After a long wait, mom came down the stairs, crying. She said she could hear the angels singing mom said, through her tears.

My dad was smart and mostly serious. It seemed right that our household revolved around him. As mom said, he brings in the bacon. So his schedule was our schedule, and the food we ate was the food he liked. He got some poison gas in the war, so his stomach was sensitive. He couldn’t stand the smell of onions, so mom never used them. It’s a bit of a problem in some dishes she said, but I can season in other ways.

Dad was part French, so we had a last name that no one could spell or pronounce. I loved my unusual last name, and I loved filling out the school forms. I would proudly fill out my name, and just as proudly fill out Father’s Occupation: Director of Buildings and Grounds for the Public School System. Dad is not your teachers’ boss, mom told me. I knew that, but he did have an important position in the school district where the teachers worked, so I thought it might help my reputation a little. And my school reputation sometimes needed a little help.

Dad worked at the district office along with the Superintendent of Schools, Personnel Director, and many others who were assistants of all kinds. Mom said that dad worked really hard, and had too big a job. It’s really two or three jobs, she said, and it was. He was in charge of all the buildings, the custodial staff and the groundskeepers. He also was the one who worked with the architects when a new school was being built or an old one updated. Every day he came home for a lunch mom would fix and then he would take a short nap in his chair. I had lunch at home also when I was in elementary school. I would tiptoe past his recliner when I went back to school. Dad and I had a favorite lunch: eggplant dipped in egg, cracker crumbs and fried in butter. I could eat that every day, and dad said he could too. Even Eunice, who hated every vegetable she had ever met, said she liked mom’s eggplant if it was sliced really thin.

Dad was born in Illinois, where his family had lived for generations. Mom told me that dad’s great-great grandmother was the midwife to Abraham Lincoln. After finding out what midwife meant, I used that story for show and tell for years afterwards. And I became interested in Abraham Lincoln. My mom was always trying to get me interested in something, and I would try, mostly unsuccessfully. But I was always interested in Abraham Lincoln. He was my hero. And, we were practically related.

My wonderful 11th grade social studies teacher had the class memorize the Gettysburg Address. I already knew it, so he had me memorize Oh Captain, My Captain. I cried when I recited it.

My paternal grandmother lived in the same old house my dad had grown up in. She had a hump on her back that fascinated me, and I was told not to stare. I remember being somewhat afraid of her. I had seen Wizard of Oz and grandma reminded me of the wicked witch of the east. Also, I could tell that mom didn’t like her all that much. She never said so, but once she told me that when dad had told grandma he was going to college, she replied, But that’s for smart people. Mom said when dad got to college, he looked around for those smart people, couldn’t find any, so he decided he fit in just fine. I couldn’t imagine that grandma would have said that to my very smart dad and I said so to mom. She took grandma’s side. Grandma was a farm woman, and no one of her family had ever gone to college. Your dad was one of ten children, all raised on the farm, and it was expected that they would all be farmers or marry one. Mom continued, while washing up the lunch dishes. When dad was 16, his father had a tractor accident and he lay in the upstairs bedroom for many months until he died. Grandma took care of him, spoon feeding him, even changing his diapers, as well as running the farm and tending to ten children. And one of her sons, your dad’s brother, Samuel, died when he was 19. She had a hard life. While mom was telling me this, I was sitting with her in the kitchen, finishing off the crumbs in the skillet from the eggplant. They were extra yummy this time because mom had fried them in both butter and bacon grease. I always put lots of salt on top. Dad was already snoozing, and mom kept her voice low. Mom was a great storyteller and when she