Blog

Satchel Madness

February 4, 2010

It starts like this.....We had a lot of folks at the Candlemas celebration last Tuesday wonder if they could buy a satchel.  They can.  It is $50.  They fell in love with the perfect size, the strip of social fabric applied the outside of the coverflap, the feel of the bag.  Like most of the design work at Goods of Conscience the things we make are metaphors that pry open an identity.  I have been offered a chance to write a book.  I am thinking of a book that would go into the satchel.  I am calling it: Social Fabric: weaving the skin of the beautiful American.

Texans claim the distance from Oklahoma to Brownsville is greater than from Oklahoma to the border with Canada. Depends if you are driving. A Texan friend from Colorado has a knowing joke: A Texan drove through the Berkshires once and stopped on a farm and asked the farmer how big the farm was. The farmer took a glance to the ends of the lot and drove his finger through the trees. The Texan bragged it could take him an hour or two to drive across his ranch. The farmer replied he had a car like that once.

Driving to Guatemala from Oklahoma is not much further than driving in the other direction to Canada, except it may take you two or three days longer. The difference is gradual and deceptive. Once you cross into Mexico the road narrows. The highway markers are the same shield-shaped border with the highway number in the middle and the license plates are the same as well: rectangular and with the name of the state. Same arid packed dirt too. Mexicans are not as good at telling you the distance to the next exit and accurate signage gets worse as you go south, but then again you have more to look at. The wide open states get gathered and pegged and anchored as the difference between the Atlantic and the Pacific shrinks into jungles and volcanoes. “Roadness” changes. More vivid and red, pocked and rising into the pleasingly straight slopes of mountain after mountain.

The Indian names are odd but feel decipherable when placed in comparison to our familiar Mississippi and Tennessee. “Huehuetenango” is pronounced “way-way-ten-NANG-go.” I think about the odd Irish names O’Shaunessey and McGillicuddy as the sap of centuries puddled in one place: a shivering mountain side that is more air than land and the name is more vowel than consonant. Are consonants from flat lands and vowels from the heights?

In these heights the Indians didn’t die out from imported disease. They look more like Filipinos than that portly Mexican look. More are barefoot than wear shoes. The Altiplano of Guatemala is a region punctuated with crater lakes and endless shiny coffee bushes under cedars, forests, hairy growths of maverick corn. The largest of the lakes is Atitlan, Superior-deep it too seems like a sea except being mute. In the morning a daily white pan hovers over the water until the sun can wedge its way in. Since the high mountain shadow makes the water cloud last so long, work is already underway unseen. In Santiago, the biggest market town, the beaks of the prows ease through the cloud around eight in the morning, the boatmen standing in their dugouts pull in fish, sacks of hard corn and other goods, their long sticks sink as they push and pull closer to the wandering piers. A hundred feet away women squat in the water, they wash and scrub laundry on the smooth rocks, their skirts tied up like diapers. The soap is a bright orange softball that will float if it drops into the water. Processions of men and women carrying plaid plastic bags stream out of the boats and ferries down the docks. In minutes they collect in the market stalls off the square.

 

One typical old man has root brown feet. They look like boy’s feet and they are exposed up to his shins. He is wearing soft white pants with navy stripes, a cowboy hat in straw, but flatter, and has a cup of the hard corn in one hand and a tin-cup brazier of smoking coals in the other. He steps beyond the market up a few stairs into a plaza. On the other side of the plaza is another set of stairs, round and concentric in the shape of a mini volcano. He crosses the plaza and rises up those stairs. At the top of the steps a covered balcony stretches both ways for what seems a city block, draped in men who look the same as the old pilgrim but younger and all leaning and talking. In front of him is the big door of an old church, whitewashed outside and inside. To get in he has to step over a wooden beam that lies over the bottom of the door. Immediately he turns right. A half moon floor pulls out from the wall, a crude bannister follows the step. In the middle a gate arm flips up and he steps into the semicircle and kneels in front of the wall. He spoons in incense and it crackles while he mumbles in his language. swinging the incense can before him. Now he raises his hands and touches the wall. He spills the corn over the paving stove, fans the smoke, cups and herds it into the wall. He cries louder with more song and raises his head.

 

In 1984 the wall was opened. A mason chipped the seal loose with some effort and afterwards scraped clean the cool dust. He swept away the remaining debris in a ceremony and with both hands grasped the square stone and pulled until it groaned free. A jar in the wall was pulled out onto a table and examined by a group of priests and the bishop. It contained the heart of an American who was caught and killed in the next building, because he was strong enough to fight being kidnapped, tortured and then killed. He was strong enough to fling one of the assailants against the door, but the other two rammed him into the corner wall and wrestled him to where they could stab him. When he fell they pinned him still enough to shoot him. The bullet hole is in the floor covered in glass over a wooded box. The blood stain from the stabbing is a faded cloud framed and covered in glass as well on the wall next to his picture. In the picture he is forty years old. It is 1975 and it looks like he must be back up in Oklahoma where he came from. The brick wall has a white metal or maybe vinyl drain pipe blurred behind his ear. The diamond checked shirt looks fairly new. Opened at the collar. No tee shirt. Clipped beard and calm eyes, not too weathered, and a tender smile makes him handsome in a farmer way. He had driven to the mission in an Olds in 1968 from his hometown of Okarche, about ten miles northwest of Oklahoma City.

 

Those standing around the table were witnesses around during the events that lead to his death. They knew him and worked with him. They were also American, North American, from the United States. They testified that his heart had not turned to dust. The blood was still liquid in the bottle. The matter-of-fact way they said it held the meaning in abeyance.

 

The old man can kneel on the paving flags for a long time. He has the bones of birds. When he rises he retreats into the ebb and flow of the day. Giant doll saints on poles lean along the wall. The church is a breathing body with lungs and heart. Out on the porch the view of the lake and mountains is blue and stained with woodsmoke. bowls of piled corn-paste pass by ready for patting and turning in a white pan for fresh tortillas.

 

I returned from Ireland to Connecticut in July 1981. I had taken a year off after high school and went to Europe to find myself. I flew back the day after my mother’s birthday, July 20th. Incidentally, she was born the same day as Jackie Bouvier and the impression of the First Lady Jackie Kennedy in an interview in French to a journalist in Paris during the inaugural visit of the First Couple influenced my mother’s sending four of the middle children of nine to learn French when we were living in Indiana. I was nine and could learn language quickly. Not only that, I learned that language skills are a passport I felt I could use and did as soon as I could. Full of European perspective, I remember reading the article in the New York Times of letters he wrote that were published after his death. I pictured his death in the mountains of Guatemala with the eyes that comprehended little of the politics of the incident but a lot of the message. Here was the beautiful American. Now I know better.

 

CRY FROM GUATEMALA; Following are excerpts from a letter written on Jan. 5 and 7, 1981, by the Rev. Stanley Rother, a 46-year-old Roman Catholic priest who was shot to death on July 28 in the rectory of his mission in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. According to the Rev. David Monaghan, a spokesman for the Oklahoma City diocese, which sponsors the mission, Father Rother ''learned in mid-January that he was targeted for death and left Guatemala for about three months.'' He returned on April 11. This letter, written to a friend of Father Rother in Oklahoma City, was made available by William L. Wipfler, the director of the human rights office of the National Council of the Churches of Christ.

 

By STANLEY ROTHER (The New York Times); Editorial Desk

August 15, 1981, Saturday

Late City Final Edition, Section 1, Page 23, Column 2, 1077 words

 

Written January 5th, 1981

 

Dear John,

 

Hope you were well during the holidays. I had a touch of the stomach flu Christmas eve and couldn’t have mass, but was able to concelebrate Christmas evening.

 

Things have been pretty quiet that past couple of weeks until just last Saturday night. Probably the most sought after catechist had been staying here in the rectory off and on, and almost constantly of late. He ad been eating and sleeping here, and usually visiting his wife and two kids in late afternoon. He had a key to the house, and as he was approaching Saturday night about 7:45, he was intercepted by a group of four kidnappers. Three apparently tried to grab him at the far side of the Church as he approached the on the porch that fronts the Catholic Action offices, the Church and the rectory. He got within 15 feet of the door and was holding on to the bannister and yelling for help. The other priest heard the ruckus outside and stepped out to see them trying to take him. He considered trying to help, but was scarred by their height. He called me fro the living room where I was listening to music but also heard the noise, and by the time I realized what was happening, grabbed a jacket and got outside, they had taken him down the front steps of the Church and were putting him in a waiting car. In the process they had broken the bannister where the rectory porch joins the Church, and I just stood there wanting to jump down to help, but knowing that I would be killed or taken along also. The car sped off with him yelling for help and no one able to do so. Then I realized that Fr. Pedro, Frankie Williams from Wichita and I had just witnessed a kidnapping of someone that we had gotten to know and love and were unable to do anything about it. They had his mouth covered, but I can still hear his muffled screams for help. As I got back in the rectory I got a cramp in my back from the anger I felt that this friend was being taken off to be tortured for a day or two and then brutally murdered for want a better life and more justice for his pueblo. He had told me before, “I have never stolen, have never hurt anyone, have never eaten someone else’s food, why then do they want to hurt me and kill me?”

 

Sunday morning we heard that all the passengers of the late bus from the City hear the kidnapped yelling for help as they met the four-door sedan led by a military jeep and followed by a military ambulance. Soon after the kidnapping that night we went out and found his hat in front of the Church and his right shoe and the bottom of the steps. Since thy were so tall and had his head covered, we weren’t sure it was him. But several identified the shoe and the hat as his. he was 30 years old, left and wife and two boys, ages 3 and one. May he rest in peace!

 

About 20 minutes after teh kidnapping , I went to the telephone office and asked the pokice in San Lucas to investigae a car coming their way. I told them it was a kidnapping and that they were armed. They said they would see about it, but they probably hid instead. We heard yesterday that four or possibly five were kidnapped there that same night. Coming back from the call, I was informed that a fragmentation grenade was found in front of the Church. It was probably dropped during the scuffeling.

 

That makes 11 members of this community that have been kidnapped and all are presumed dead. Only one body has been positively identified and buried here; there are possibly three buried in a common in Chimaltenango. They were picked up in Antigua and the follwing week I went to all the hospitals and morgues in the area and got a list of their characteristics and clothing.

 

For these 11 that are gone, there eight widows and 32 children among the group. These people are going to need emergency help. Others have had to flee also to save their lives and to find work in exile is almost impossible. They will also need help.Some of these have had their salaries in the radio, artisan coops, health promoter, etc. and haven’t engaged in subsistence farming. They will need time to find other means of income, and for the widows and the children, this will be extremely difficult. Letters asking for help are on their way right now to London, two different places, and they will very likely send some money. This was organized by someone else and I accepthed the task of funneling the mongy to where it is needed. Since helping these people could very easily be considered as subversive by the local government, we have asked that he money be deposited directly in the bank there, and that there be no direct communication between the donors and me. I will transfer the money to our bank here and then find some way to distribute it to the needy. (Sentence deleted) This appeal is not only for Santiago, but all the pueblos on this side of the lake that were served by the radio. I sent your name, John, as our contact there in Oklahoma, and you may possibly get some correspondence from either “War on Want’ or “Christian Aid” in London. Be careful about sending letters here mentioning relief etc. We never know when the mail may be intercepted and read. This letter is being hand-carried to the States and I can say things that I ordinarily wouldn’t using the local mails.

 

I am not ready to call it quits yet. What happened last Saturday was indeed scary and happened at our doorstep, but we don’t know i his presence here with us will affect us directly. We have not received any direct or anonymous threats nor are there rumors that we are considered immanent targets. We have a diocesan meeting witht he Bishop Friday the ninth and I am sure that there will be lots of discussion about our situation. Other towns in the diocese are being hit harder than us at present. In the past couple of months three priests of the diocese have had to leave because of direct threats, and two others got scared and left. All but one were foreigners.

 

This is noon on the sixth and I just got word that the army has vacated the camp they had outside of town. Close to midnight last night before I got to sleep I heard several army trucks go thru town, but I don’t know what direction. We can now identify those trucks from way off, a distinct whine of the engines. If it is true that they moved out, then the informers will now be scared and looking for a place to hide. It could be that some guerrillas will come in now and take care of the leaders at least of the informers.This is an interesting change of circumstances. The Benedictine priests of Solola had exiles from the left and the right at the same time, but I don’t know if I could offer help to one of these informers. I know quite a few of them and some had been apparent friends. It could be that the army group from here was recalled to help out in El Salvador because the war there is now picking up in intensity. This whole central american area is in the process of change and if the governments don’t want to do it peacefully, then it will be done by war. It is sad but may happen. I haven’t been able to confirm the report that the army did move out.

 

Just say a prayer on occasion that we will be safe and still be of service to these people of God.

 

Sincerely,

 

Stan

Stan left shortly thereafter for the States with the help of Frankie the woman from Kansas City who had aided the mission for years and who had dedicated herself to helping Stan. With them was a newly ordained priest whom Stan had raised from youth. They went back to Oklahoma. Greg Kelly, the priest friend of mine who suggested we go on retreat to Guatemala in 2004, remembers his visit to the seminary in Irving, Texas. One story has it the a neighbor of his in Okarche, Oklahoma, after having heard Stan speak on the situation in Guatemala at the home parish called the Guatemalan Embassy in Washington and said that Fr. Stan Rother wanted to overthrow the Guatemalan Government by force. He may have been aware of his status when he chose to return. An interview on CBS Evening News has him calm and collected. The Times article mentions his return on April 11, 1981. He stayed in the Maryknoll Mission in Zona 10 in Guatemala City. Fr. Bill Donnelly said that he remembers him praying late at night, agonizing about going back. When he did return he stayed in seclusion, changing his location frequently. When the feast of St. James came around in July, he came out in the open, camouflaged among the puppet saints.

 

Entering the room where he was killed was the moment of revelation for me. I could smell him I felt. It was a strong presence in the scent. I began searching for a body to fit the spirit. The handwoven cloth, the rumors of natural dyes, the idea of a shared legacy captivated my short moments there on the January retreat in the mountains of Guatemala.