Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Art and Writing

Holy Glass.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

::This story originally appeared in Winter: A season of writing on the prairie. This book was edited by Corrine Kenner and myself, and is filled with stories we collected from writers around North Dakota. This story is one of three I contributed, along with the book's cover illustration.::

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Holy Glass
by Julie Neidlinger

Bob Carney never figured out a lot of things. To be honest, it was a pure and simple miracle that he figured out the glass. It took some effort. He'd done it, though, sure enough.

The glass was stacked vertically against the wall of the shed, looking pretty unimportant to the average person, with enough there to outfit the Chartres Cathedral if it ever decided to get out of the stained glass business. Oodles of glass, all from one window, regularly replaced.

Just wait until winter, Carney probably thought. Just wait until winter when that glass springs to life like an accountant during tax time. Just wait until the world sees how blessed I am despite the fact that I raise pigs. They'll see.

The problem was, no one could see it. The community saw Carney as the crazy nut who kept ordering new glass for his front window, and almost single-handedly kept Vern's OK Hardware going strong.

"More glass, Mr. Carney?" Vern would ask, standing behind the counter at the hardware shop, pulling out the catalog. He'd almost memorized the procedure for sending the order in to the glass distributor.

"Yeauh," Carney'd reply, spreading his arms out and drumming perpetually grimy fingers on the counter. "Need some more glass for the window."

There were no golf courses, no driving ranges, no kids playing baseball. There was a lot of nothing happening out Carney's way, and a lot of nothing going on with his glass. Unless his pigs had truly learned to fly, but were unable to navigate without going through plate glass windows, the community couldn't figure out why so much glass kept going down the road to Carney's place.

No, Carney wasn't any more crazy than the average bachelor farmer, living alone in a silent, rural setting. Carney raised pigs alright, occasionally came to the local cafe smelling a little ripe, and once spent an entire noon meal at the front cafe table with a bee buzzing about in his ear without his knowledge. These were all acceptable addendums to his regular character.

It was the glass that drove everyone crazy. It was the glass, and what Carney claimed to see in it.

"The virgin Mary, you say?" asked the Schwan man as he delivered ice cream to Carney, looking a little incredulous. "You saw the virgin Mary in your window."

"That's right. I did. Plain as day, this morning before the frost burned away," Carney replied.

Three times it was Mary, and Jesus appeared twelve times, the all-time winner. The pope made sketchy appearance just once, a questionable one if you asked Carney, but you couldn't expect too much of that kind of thing from a Methodist, which is what Carney was.

"You'd swear someone was trying to make me a Catholic," he said one day as the local men shook dice at the cafe. "It's me and John Wesley and that's all there is to it. Don't need no more visits from the pope."

But Carney still saved the pope pane, despite his protestations.

Elvis showed up once, according to the gas man, who heard all about it when he delivered propane.

"Usually, I just get religious visits," Carney said as the propane was pumped into his tank. "Now Elvis ain't religious, unless you're into that kind of thing. Then again, maybe he is. Too bad about him dyin' in the bathroom like that."

Carney's Elvis sighting almost made a national tabloid, front page photo spread and all, but was beat out when the doorway to hell was found near Starkweather.

"Never seen no devils on my glass, I can guarantee you that," was all he said about missing his 15 minutes of fame. "They can have their doorway to hell."

The thing about the glass visitations was that it was entirely seasonal.

Carney never took to traveling south for the winter as others his age did. For one thing, he wasn't married. But mainly, he didn't want to miss out on the visitations. And of course, they only showed up in the winter, when the windows awoke in the morning with frost patterns splayed across in intricate designs. Carney spent a good part of his morning, each day, examining the glass. He was often the last one to arrive for breakfast at the cafe, and no doubt endured many questions on what holy miracle he'd witnessed before coming into town.

With all this religious fervor happening for Carney right in his own house, it was a bit of surprise that he never went to church. He was one of those non-attending Methodists.

"What's the preacher gonna say to me that I didn't catch from the apostle Paul this morning?" he might reply. The apostle Paul had shown up twice, one of those times looking very angry.

This kind of attitude did not endear him to the church ladies, who heavily relied upon bachelor church members, such as Carney, to single-handedly support their fund raising bake sales and bazaars.

"You get in here and buy a cake," they'd insist.

"I don't need none of your stained glass finery," he'd retort.

Then came the fall where the deer numbers were high, and every hunter decided to do something about it. Bullets were flying out in the country barely missing pick-up trucks and grain bins, although the deer weren't necessarily dropping. The local bar's recent sale on cases of beer - buy one, get the second half price - might've had something to do with that. No one in town doubted that someone or something was going to get shot, and they were right.

Maybe Carney should've painted his shed blaze orange, or cover it with beer logos. Hunters would never shoot one of their own.

But it was just red, plain old barn red.

He'd been hearing the shots get closer that day and figured the big buck that had been eating his spirea bush bare was finally getting what was coming to him. But it wasn't that way at all. The last of six shots rang out, its encore the unmistakable shrieking of glass breaking.

When the glass panes Carney'd been saving over the years were shattered by a wayward bullet that had ripped through the wall of his shed, he shattered too. Each pane was unique, he'd always insisted, and once a visitation was made on it, the pane was taken out and replaced. His collection of unmolested glass panes was impressive, saved for a person or reason no one from the local area could figure out. But now, instead of religious artifacts, there was a pile of shards that came about from the bullet, and over 30 years of lost history.

Carney lasted a little while after the bullet incident, but didn't get any more visitations. When he died, at the age of 78, they didn't hold his service in church. The funeral home was actually the perfect spot: it had five floor-to-ceiling glass panes in the foyer.

People talk about Carney and his glass to this day, usually as a joke or a way to impress city visitors with stories that proved they had rural character. No one ever questioned, aloud anyway, what was so important about that glass that made Carney's life seem tied into them. They kept their comments at the surface, instead, making jokes. But they all wondered why he saved the glass.

Maybe, when Carney woke up from a day and night of being alone, a frosty virgin Mary smiling down on him was a welcome sight, one to keep him going, making him think Someone cared he existed. Or maybe he put his lifeblood into something easily broken because he really just wanted to get out of a lonely life. He just wanted to go.

Either way, Carney is gone, and Vern's OK Hardware is closing at the end of the month. It's really a shame.