It was a story I had heard repeated many, many times as a kid. My dad would be talking to one of his old cronies, maybe at the car dealership business, or maybe at the bulk oil plant. The men would be swapping stories, and I would be sitting on a chair, swinging my feet clad in leather cowboy boots, listening but not listening to the conversations going over my head.

One of the stories that repeated itself right around this time of year was my dad’s Easter story. It was one of his favorites, or must have been because I heard it more than once, and to me it was family lore.

We were farmers, and as anyone who has been around farmers at all know, the weather plays a powerful part in their lives. In Montana we didn’t get enough rainfall to support the corn, sugar beets, alfalfa hay, barley or oats, so we would have to irrigate using water from the Big Horn River. In Iowa and the Midwest, weather could be more impactful because they relied on consistent, reliable rainfall for their crops. But that didn’t mean weather didn’t play a part for Montanans.

Dad would lament about too much rain in the spring, so crops didn’t get planted soon enough. Or too much rain in the fall so the beet harvest would be a muddy, mucky mess. Or cutting hay and then having it rain, so that we couldn’t bale it until it dried. Or a frost in June that would kill the sprouting crops. It was always something, and a person could almost always blame some or part of the problem on the weather.

But unlike some, he didn’t pray for good weather. He wasn’t much of a praying kind of guy.

Reading my mom’s diaries that she left for us after she died shed some light on this part of my dad’s character. Mom had been active in the Buddhist church in her community, noting Sunday school, church choir, and church socials. After she married, she made a few comments that she missed church activities, but didn’t engage in them because my dad, her new husband, wasn’t so inclined.

When Tom and Emmy, my folks, moved to Montana, my mom said that she and her mother talked about religious upbringing for us kids. She said, because there was no Buddhist church nearby, her mother advised her to join a church so that we would have some kind of religion; Something was better than nothing.

So we grew up going to the Congregational church. I attended Sunday School there until I was five or six. And, unbeknownst to me, our entire family went to Easter Church service every year, until 1958. I have two 35mm color slides of our family lined up in front of a late model Chevy station wagon. It was Easter Sunday, and there are two photos, one with my father anchoring the right side of the lineup, and the other with my mom. There was no tripod and timer to get everyone into the photo at the same time.

We are all dolled up, ranging in age from me at almost 4 and my eldest sister Carol at 15. My brothers are in suits and ties, all of us girls in dresses and hats, the older girls with purses, nylon hose, good shoes. This was a family outing. I wonder how much wrangling my mom had to do to pull us all together.

I am sure my sisters helped me get ready. My mom made a lot of our clothes, so I would be surprised if she didn’t make all our clothes. But I am sure the hats were store bought. I inherited some of the short white gloves from Mom’s house after she died. We all stood in front of that late model car, big enough to hold all of us for the mile long ride to town. As we stood there for the picture, the rain turned to snowy flakes.

I’m sure we huddled, then piled into the car, trying to get out of the rain and snowy blend. My dad drove to town, Robert and me tucked between my mom and dad in the front seat, four in the front bench seat, because we were the smallest. We got to the church, and piled out to go into the small white church. The rain turned furious, but we were safe in the pews within the church. But as we sat safe in the House of God, on one of the holiest days of the year, we could hear the pounding rain turn into distinct sounds of striking hail. The church was being pummeled by rain turned to snow turned to hail.

I’m sure I don’t remember any of this. It all comes from stories passed down, year after year, from my dad and my siblings, and even my mom, who didn’t talk about these personal things too much.

That photo is the only and last evidence that our family went to church on that Easter Sunday. As we filed out of church, our car dented from hail stones as big as golf balls, my brothers running to pick up the ice balls and throwing them at each other. We loaded back into the car. This time, my mom drove, my dad pulled a cigar out of his pocket and bit down on the end, clenching the stogie between his teeth, not bothering to light the end.

We drove north to the home place, the boys tugging at their neckties, us girls pulling our skirts down. We all looked out the windows of the station wagon, seeing rows of sugar beets that had just an hour ago had leaves that had been reaching across the rows, now just stems of beet tops along the rows.

Leaves from the cottonwood trees were stripped off, the trees looking like mid-winter. Rows of crops look like they had just been planted, not months after germinating.

The crop was lost. I don’t know what my dad was thinking. If it had been me as an adult, knowing that the fields that were meant to pay the bills were destroyed, I would have had a clutch in my gut, tears threatening, pale, worried.

But I was four years old. I was thinking about my Easter baskets that my mother always had prepared for us. There were probably colored eggs hidden around the house for us to find.

We drove beyond the house, looking at the destruction the storm had wrought. Field after field was stripped down to stems. Trees with bare branches. Cars that we passed were pasted with leaves, obviously they had been parked under trees.

As we drove, us kids would say, “Look at that field!” or “The hail looks like a snowdrift by the ditch,” or “I wonder how the livestock survived?” My dad was silent.

We turned back to the house, my mom driving in silence following my dad’s directions. As we pulled into the drive, my dad said, in no uncertain terms, “That’s the last time I go to church. I go to church and the crops are ruined. NO MORE. God doesn’t want me there.”

And that was the last time my dad went to church.