Episode 4: The Gentle Sex
The Broken-Open Heart
“Hound” (Sunna)—many thanks to Ann Palmer for sharing the photo of her beloved companion, and allowing me to use it for this episode
Reminders
In Episode 3, church elder Jens Jensen was horrified by the suggestion that they hire a woman as interim pastor. (An unwed mother, no less!) His misogyny is less dogma than self-defense, as his life to date has been marked by heartbreaks from what his father-in-law called “the gentle sex” that “needs looking after.”
After moving in with Grandpa Sy on Looser Island, Jens and his wife, Evelyn, had two children, Jens Jensen Jr. (who goes by his middle name, Sam, and who shares his mother’s love of poetry), and red-headed Lesley. As this episode opens, Lesley is nine and Sam is eleven, and we are still tracing the history of Jens’ broken—but not yet broken-open—heart.
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NEXT TIME Episode 5: Once More into the Fray. A reluctant lawyer attempts to make peace with his vocation.
The Gentle Sex
Though he loved both his children, Jens was more comfortable with Lesley. Lesley did all the talking for the two of them. Unlike Sam, Lesley had no truck with poetry. As far as Jens could tell she spent her days firmly planted in the here and now, enjoying the feel of a sheep’s wool under her fingers, the tickle of sand between her toes, and the taste of a jelly doughnut.
Which was why he felt it all the more keenly when, the following year, Evelyn packed her clothes and Lesley’s and not much else, and moved herself and her ten-year-old daughter to Spokane, where they joined a commune.
For the second time in his life, Jens Jensen swore off women forever.
“Gentle sex my ass,” he was heard to say, on a fairly regular basis, after Evelyn left.
In the years that followed Jens gave free reign to his taciturnity. He raised Sam with as little dialogue as humanly possible, communicating mostly with gestures, pointing and nodding or shaking his head as they chased twin lambs running in opposite directions, Jens limping slowly one way and Sam dashing the other. When Sam asked for help with his homework, Jens shrugged to indicate he didn’t know the answer. Occasionally, he’d make brief, dour observations on life, trying to give Sam some armor against the vicissitudes of this hard, hard world.
He knew this was not the way to raise a child, especially a child whose mother had essentially abandoned him. (Sam went to visit his mother and sister during every school holiday and for the part of each summer that Jens and the farm could spare him, but Evelyn never returned, and never sent Lesley to visit Jens. Maybe because Jens never asked.) But it seemed to Jens that words, once they left your mouth, became weapons, and so it was better not to speak, or if speech was necessary, to speak only in rebuke, to launch a preemptive attack. His own son was never intentionally on the outside of that defensive wall, but there you go. Sometimes these things just happen.
And yet Sam grew in grace and cheerfulness, never entirely happy with his role as the son of a sheep farmer but generally content with the life that had been handed to him, in spite of the discarded poet chafing in his soul.
After graduating from high school, Sam moved into a one-bedroom tiny home in the Village, a mother-in-law unit built for a relationship that never quite materialized, and got a job as a mail carrier with the post office. Monday through Friday, Sam chatted genially with postmistress Jenny and her son Seth, and delivered sewer bills and electric bills and the dreaded water bills—you wouldn’t think it would cost so much to have water in a place surrounded by it, but it does—and tax refunds and notices saying Open this letter You May Have Already Won Millions, and the genealogy.com results that told Jack Swartout he was related to King Louis the somethingth of France, and organic seed catalogues and the Seattle Times and the New York Times. Sam told everyone this was his way of being a man of letters, and everyone always smiled when Sam said it, because they knew he wished it were so. But he said it in jest; there was no bitterness in him, just gentle self-deprecating humor.
Jens saw that Sam was comfortable in his own skin, and he was envious, but mostly relieved that he had somehow avoided infecting Sam with his own acrimony.
Shortly after Sam turned twenty, Sam told Jens that Lesley had been accepted at the University of Washington, studying pre-Law, and Evelyn had died of lung cancer. Jens searched himself for signs of pride, for Lesley, or grief, for Evelyn, but wasn’t sure he’d recognize the feelings if he found them.
Sam went to Evelyn’s funeral.
Jens did not.
Over the years, Jens and Sam went to church almost every Sunday, more because they had got in the habit of doing so under Evelyn’s management of their schedule than from any sincerely held Presbyterian faith, and also because, on a small quiet island in the Salish Sea, there was not much else to do of a Sunday morning. Sam sang in the choir, and father and son raked the church grounds during the fall church clean-up day, and set up tables for the Christmas bazaar as the holiday approached, and helped with the spring Garden Sale held in the church parking lot, and when at some point, somebody thought maybe it would soften old Jens Jensen’s hard heart to be asked to be an Elder, he was asked, and he assented.
They tended to skip the formal ordination process on Looser Island, and no one on the mainland was the wiser, so that really was all it took.
“I do not believe we have come to such dire straits that we need to have a female minister,” Jens says now, speaking slowly, succinctly, to be sure the other Elders can hear him over the cacophony of echoes bouncing among the rafters of the church.
Susan looks at her lap as if seeking patience. Or possibly plotting revenge. It is a gesture Jens remembers from the days when Evelyn was still here, and it makes him angry.
John smiles gently. “I don’t know why we’d need to be in dire straits. Susan is well-liked, she has a nice speaking voice and some training, and we need her.”
“I know there were no female ministers in your day,” Jack adds. “But it’s the twenty-first century, Jens. Women in ministry are commonplace now.”
Unexpectedly—to Jens, at least—even Celia Prewitt agrees. “It’s time to evolve,” she says crisply, “and allow women to take their place in leadership roles.”
Jens glares at John, and Jack, and Celia. “Not on my watch,” he says.
Painfully, with creaking and groaning and protesting in every joint, bone, and muscle, Jens rises from the cursed pew, and makes his way slowly toward the exit. Jack moves to appoint Susan, and John seconds it, and there’s a unanimous vote of approval, the words chasing Jens into the August afternoon the way the other children in the schoolyard used to chase him until he fell, yelling Tag You’re It, not knowing he can’t run, can’t be It, not understanding the game is torture for him, because of his one short leg.
Outside, the day has grown wild, as it is sometimes wont to do here even in mid-summer, making a mockery of the season. Iron gray clouds glower over the sky, and the wind whips the trees into a frenzy and then falls eerily still, only to repeat the performance a few seconds later. Getting into his truck, and driving the narrow roads to his farm, Jens glowers back at the clouds, daring them to rain on him before he makes it home.
The raindrops demur, holding back until he’s inside and he’s set the kettle on for a badly needed a cup of tea. He drinks his tea on the porch, looking out at the gray downpour.
Hound, an ancient, vaguely herding dog(ish), rests his grizzled head on his master’s equally grizzled knee, silently commiserating on the awful state of affairs.
Sam shows up after a bit to help with the sheep, and share dinner with Jens, as he does every Sunday.
“Kettle’s still on,” Jens says, but Sam doesn’t go inside.
“You can’t sit and mope all day, Dad,” he says. “We’re having a female minister, and it’ll be fine.”
“How’d you hear about it so quickly?” Jens says.
“It’s a small island, Dad,” Sam says. “And we’re all connected,” he adds, “by email. And text message, and social media, and WhatsApp. You name it.”
Jens nods, at once resentful and resigned. Suddenly he feels like Old Jens Jensen, hopelessly antiquated in an insidiously modern world.
“And,” Sam pauses. “I like Susan.”
Jens can see there’s more, can see it’s the schoolboy version of “like” (even though his son is nearly forty), but he refuses to ask questions, or give Sam a chance to say more.
The wind picks up again, ruffling the leaves on the birch trees in front of the house the way an affectionate uncle ruffles the hair of his favorite nephew, dispersing the clouds and the threat of more rain. The sun shoots its last ray of farewell before dipping behind the horizon, warming just for an instant Jens’s tired, aching bones.
“I guess we’d better get to the sheep,” Jens says. “Get yourself a cup of tea and turn off the stove, and I’ll meet you in the yard. We can fix supper afterward.”
The following Sunday, Susan preaches.
Jens Jensen stays home, which is a surprise to no one, and a disappointment to few.
Afterward, Sam reports to Jens that Susan said nothing earth-shatteringly wise, or shockingly new, and the general consensus is that she did a fine job. Also, Sam says, Susan’s daughter Marta wiggled a little in the front pew, looking proud and embarrassed.
Jens can see the hope in his son’s eyes, that maybe he will unbend a little. He would like to fulfill that hope, but finds he cannot.
Ignoring church is one thing, but skipping the Looser Island Water District Board meetings would mean remaining hopelessly in the dark about anything happening on the island, which could make life difficult, even for a confirmed curmudgeon. So Jens attends the August meeting, along with practically everyone else who is upright and able to attend.
Chairwoman Cherry natters on through the Agenda and Minutes and other matters and then, after a while, Ella slips into the community center, leading a young man with dark skin and darker hair. She interrupts Cherry (not a bad thing, in and of itself, Jens thinks), and introduces the man as . . . Paulo, maybe? It’s so goddamned hard to hear in these meetings. Everyone just seems to whisper and mutter, no one ever speaks up or speaks out.
Paulo tells his story, and almost everyone responds with kindness, which surprises a loneliness in Jens. Here is this immigrant, an illegal if Jens is hearing it correctly, being welcomed into the fold while he, Looser Island resident for over forty years, remains outside the circle. When Lauren stands up and offers Paulo a job, and says her son is going batshit crazy working for her, rage gathers itself at her casual grace, that she can stand there so comfortably swearing and embracing a stranger, as if it is easy, and Jens objects to her profanity, though he knows swear words are not the problem.
“May we please have some decorum?” he says. Pleads, really, though no one else in the room can hear the plea through the growl in his voice. As if decorum might have prevented Evelyn from moving away, and taking their red-headed daughter with her.
The others ignore him, as always. He is irrelevant.
And yet, more quickly than Jens would have thought possible, he becomes accustomed to seeing Paulo dusting shelves that had, as far as anyone knew, not seen a duster during the entirety of Lauren’s management of her family’s store. Or seeing him at the other end of Molly’s leash, being dragged mercilessly through the Village while Markus and Ella walk behind, chatting genially.
It’s as if Paulo has always been here.
And so when Lauren, with palpable sadness, announces at the November Water District meeting that the government showed up and Paulo ran away, Jens mutters goddamned bat-shit crazy government, but everyone else, focused on Lauren, misses the glimmer of humanity he let slip.
It's a mistake he’s not likely to repeat. Better to foreclose friendship than risk the loss of a friend.
Not that he’d ever be friends with an illegal, he thinks, but almost simultaneously realizes it’s too late, too late to convince himself he doesn’t care, and now there is nothing between Jens and the feeling of loss he’d worked so hard to avoid.
January roars in, and on its tail lambing season starts. It always seems to Jens that evolution must have been having a laugh, setting lambing season when the frigid fingers of winter retain their icy grip, cruelly diminishing the chances of survival.
Jens and Hound hover over the ewes that have trouble with their labor. Hound seems to know, despite being mostly blind and deaf himself, when quiet encouragement is needed, and he gently nuzzles the ewe. Occasionally, if the ewe is too exhausted to care for her lamb, Hound will curl his stiff old body around the baby until the mother has recovered enough to take on her maternal duties.
A few ewes miscarry, but most of the lambs survive, rising to face the miraculous world with wondering doe-eyes and trembling legs.
Jens no longer sees the miracle; raising sheep for slaughter, he had to learn early on not to linger over the revelation that is a newborn lamb.
The owner of Looser Island Flowers passes away, and Jens thinks he should say something to her family, but he no longer knows what is expected of a man at a time like this. He’s not even sure he can be trusted to hand a tissue to a grieving friend, he who has forgotten how to grieve, and so he says nothing, does nothing.
Afterward, at home in his barn with a ram who went lame and is now recovering, Jens allows himself to dig his fingers into the heavy, oily warmth of its wool. They are lost in there, his fingers, and it is hard to tell where his body ends and the ram’s begins. A drop falls from Jens’s eye onto the ram’s cheek.
Stupid, he says aloud, roughly. You didn’t even know the old lady who died. Not well, anyway.
And you never bought flowers from her.
At the beginning of February, perhaps carried away by crocus bulbs presaging the libidinous yawp of spring, Sam asks Susan to accompany him to the Looser Island Theater’s production of As You Like It. Sam tells Jens that Susan said yes, but only if she could bring Marta along.
“We’ve actually dated a few times before,” Sam says, as if confessing his sins, “but she’s made it clear she just wants to be friends,” he says. “I just keep hoping that will change.”
Jens overhears Lauren saying when Bill heard about the not-date between Susan and Sam he took the next ferry back to Seattle. Bill has been asking Susan to accompany him (on a date, for life), Jens knows, and she has been saying No ever since discovering she was pregnant with their child. Jens understands this preemptive strike, the shutting out of the possibility of still more grief, understands that Bill cannot stand by to see if Susan ultimately says Yes to Sam.
Without Bill, Lauren is left shorthanded at the Apple Cart.
Again.
Sam is a little ashamed of having been the cause of this chain of events, he tells Jens, but his feelings for Susan outweigh his guilt, he says.
Jens shrugs at the report. Such goings on have nothing to do with him any more, and he is inclined to believe they never did. His time with Miriam, and then Evelyn, that all seems like a dream. Romance and broken hearts are for fools. The sheep and his tea and his dog are all the reality he has, all the reality he needs.
Whenever Jens gives himself over to these thoughts, Hound nudges him. No time for ruminating, the nudge suggests; there are sheep to be tended.
A brief aside before sharing the paid content: “The Broken-Open Heart” is a reference to a phrase used by Parker J. Palmer to describe a response to suffering that does not involve closing off one’s heart to avoid further suffering. Read “The Alchemy of the Broken Heart” on Substack.
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