Peace Be With You by Angela Townsend
An Essay
I showed up thirty minutes before the end of the Peace Fair. I should have planned better, but the Peace Fair is a convocation where you can let your etiquette droop. It is your grandmother’s kitchen when the muffins are still warm. It is your friend in mismatched earrings, whose couch has an indentation the dimensions of your bottom.
The Peace Fair is a half-acre of unshaven seraphs behind repurposed ping pong tables. They encircle the Greenville Friends Meetinghouse. You can smell sage from the next time zone. I wish the Peace Fair were as ceaseless as the trippy beasts who cry “holy, holy, holy” in a bongo circle around the Ancient of Days. Urgent-care doctors could prescribe Peace Fair for high blood pressure and nihilism. But the Peace Fair only happens on the third Saturday of September, and Quakers say “holy” with softer syntax.
I blithered something at the Welcome To The Peace Fair table. They folded my apology neatly and put it back in my hands. A woman jingling with lapel buttons and no lapels made me a sandwich, her hands on either side of mine. “It matters that you’re here.”
An Indiana Jones hat, presumably containing a man, confirmed. “A lot can happen in thirty minutes.”
Quakers are the spiritual SEAL team for believing that things happen. This is why they are so brazen as to call themselves Friends. If you talk about miracles, they get frogs in their throats and redirect you to sign up for the potluck. When you are not looking, they disarm the dogma. But on Sundays, the people from the ping pong tables get together to say everything necessary, whether or not anyone speaks. They expect a Wild Goose to land on someone’s crown or nip their earlobe.
At the Peace Fair, I forget I am a pastiche of Presbyterians and Pentecostals. I have broken off pieces of my life and dunked them in grape juice. I am soggy. I am an acquired taste, with a Master of Divinity degree that led not to the pulpit but to the animal shelter. The Peace Fair proposes that I am not discarded.
Every year, I tell myself I will report directly to the Book Barn, a dust storm of dollar volumes with no attempt at organization. I have found Meemaw’s Meatless Revolution and multiple copies of Gibran’s Prophet. I should know by now that I will not make it to the Book Barn for at least forty-five minutes. There is too much eye contact along the way.
I have learned to pass undetected through supermarkets and family Thanksgivings, a feather on the far tip of the branch. I am ordinary. But the Peace Fair is covered in eyes, all over its body. If my light bumps into another, they will stop for each other, with or without my permission. I was wooed by a purple tapestry and wound up smiling at a woman in overalls. I did not intend to tell her, “you guys are my entire theology.”
But she was with Welcome the Stranger, and the sight of all that purple goosed me. “That’s the finest thing I’ve heard all day!” She laughed. Her woolly hair was as long as mine had been in second grade. Back then, my pride was consolidated in having hair long enough to sit on. I wondered if the woman quarantined hers the same way.
I gave her five dollars and signed up for her mailing list. This is what small animals do at the Peace Fair. She asked if I would join the delegation to speak with Congressman Fitzgerald. She answered questions before I asked. “We don’t believe in writing anyone off. He is a person just like us.”
I thought of the pungent placards about Congressman Fitzgerald on the highway, and all the times I’d nodded. “When are you going?” It was a Monday. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I work full-time at a cat shelter.”
I received another hand sandwich. Quakers do not have a liturgy, but they dispense sacraments without checking ID. Pressing my palms between hers in some patchouli panini, she nodded. “You are part of the work. Go to it.”
For people who spend nights and weekends serving noodles at the women’s shelter and decoding legalese with refugees, the Peace Fair people are stubbornly blithe. There is time to tell a meanderer that her shoelaces are untied, then to vault over the ping pong table and personally tie them.
“Thank you.” I stared at the top of a pecan-sandy head.
The man looked up, John Denver’s ghost in a sunflower T-shirt. “We don’t wantcha trippin’ now.”
“What group are you with?” At the Peace Fair, curiosity is the best form of thanks.
John pointed at the Peace Café, a yellow canopy over a grill. “I make the vegan frankfurters.”
“You feed the peace.”
“I disturb the peace.” He leaned in. I leaned in. He was about to tell me something that made his grandchildren shriek with laughter. “I make the whole place smell like farts.”
Quakers are honest enough to know when to speak and when to remain silent. John Denver’s ghost told the truth. The Peace Fair has been going on for thirty years, but no one has yet invented veggie hot dogs that do not smell like flatulence. I gave John Denver five dollars and signed up for the mailing list to help at next year’s Peace Café.
It was 4:45, and the vendors were beginning to pack up. I hurried over to a couple surrounded by wooden animals.
“Did you bring me a hot dog?” The man’s shirt had been washed so many times, you could hardly tell it was once tie-dyed. “I’m Fred. I like your top.”
You get more compliments at the Peace Fair than in your grandmother’s kitchen. I was wearing a shirt with the Francis of Assisi quote, “Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you a preacher?”
When I am not at the Peace Fair, I answer this question by creating a diversion. I bend the question mark into a farm implement and poke the other person’s soil with a “how is your mother-in-law?” or “What are you looking forward to these days?”
But I was at the Peace Fair. “I have no idea what I am.”
“Me, neither!” All I saw of Fred’s wife was the backside of ruffled shorts covered in daisies. She spun around with eighty years of glamour. “I’m Delores!”
“You’re stunning.” You don’t always get to write your own lines at the Peace Fair. I think this is what the Quakers mean by the inner light.
“You’re gonna buy some heads.” Delores had a disembodied owl in each hand. “The day is done, and we gotta move these heads.” She pressed them into my palms. “These are the ones that were too cute to add bodies. Just little happy heads.”
I looked at my holdings. They were pine balls with googly eyes. I never knew anything googly could be earnest. “I think you just answered my question.”
“What question was that?” Fred rocked in his picnic chair.
“What I am.” There are no heretics or backsliders at the Peace Fair. “I think I’m a little happy head.”
This caused Delores to pirouette with such force, she fell into Fred’s lap. They convened with each other’s eyes and nodded. Fred got to do the talking. “Then they’re only two dollars for you.”
I bought twelve heads. Fred wrapped them in burlap and tucked in a cross with a bluebird on top. “Free of charge.”
“Thank you.”
“Next year, bring me a hot dog.” He put his hands around mine, and Delores put her hands around his. “And write me a sermon.”
I had to be honest. “I can do one of those things.”
Delores winked. “Choose wisely.”
It was four o’clock, and I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone. I trundled my bag of heads back to the car and remembered I was out of cat food. I thought it would feel incongruous going from the Peace Fair to Super Walmart. But the Peace Fair is larger than a half-acre.
The employees were doing inventory when I arrived, so the Pet Supplies aisle was blocked by a moat of carts. As I surveyed the gauntlet, I heard the loudest sound of the day. Three people in blue vests sat on the scuffed linoleum, surrounded by cans of Savory Shreds. They were laughing harder than the sum total of six lungs. Their hands were on each other’s shoulders, and when one started to calm down, the other two revved back up until they were all helpless. Perhaps other employees in other departments were snickering at gossip or piling on the schadenfreude. But this laughter was whole-wheat. I got to hear it. I thanked unsupervised angels for bread and wine.
Angela Townsend (she/her) works for an animal sanctuary. She is an eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, twenty-one-time Best of the Net nominee, and the winner of West Trade Review's 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, JMWW, The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, and Witness. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College. Angela has lived with Type 1 diabetes for over 30 years and laughs with her poet mother every morning.
Simultaneously funny and profound like usual for Angela's essays.