|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
The summer after my father died I remember gazing through the flawed, air bubbly panes in the hand blown glass of the church windows and could see summer racing past me like the Portland Rose. The old coal burner that chuffed the body of my stepfather back to Pocatello still came every two days. It stopped at the station in Appelton across the valley for just five minutes, and if there were no passenger or freight transfers the U.S. mail was hooked and the train never rolled to a stop. That’s how fast the summer was going, that’s how long it seemed to last.
The summer vacation was only a week gone in fact. Fidgety Willy Smith and the slow muddy matrix of Maxwell Taylor’s eyes tracked and swiveled at the girls, while my attention was to the window and my deliverance. Biff Sullivan was also veering surreptitious glances through the windows as if watching for the train, daydreams concealed, expectations momentarily dulled by the endless sermon of the catatonic Bishop. Bishop Rich stood at the pulpit like a concrete pediment and droned away in a voice full of lime and sand.
Biff Doyle, handsome as the day was long, in the opinion of many, had his eyes fixed attentively now on Bishop Rich. He was a consummate actor. My mind was a million miles away at the moment, but it came back to explore more intimately the slim white neck of Jeanie Young three feet in front of me.
I never could figure out Clay Booth, who was bucktoothed, quiet, and in a kind of worshipful awe of Biff and Max and Willy and I. We tolerated him– that is the best way to put it. His father was wealthy– the merchant-burgher always of status above the farmer– and we used Clayton shamelessly, but he never seemed to be aware of it.
And now he held my life in his hands.
But I was thinking of the Portland Rose.
Beyond the somnolence within the heat-creaking church, honeybees drowsed in the lilac and honeysuckle scented air, elm and apple trees were fully leafed in iridescent scrabbles of green. To the east, across the dandelion-strewn pastures, I could see the cottonwood’s smoky leaves large as silver dollars.
Out of the tall, west facing windows, through the warped, handmade glass, I could see the snows that still crowned the high, encircling bowl of our part of the Rocky Mountains. The mountains formed arms on three sides of the valley, containing the jewel that was Immigration Valley that had warmed to a swimmable, testicle shrinking fifty degrees.
I found myself wishing I were one of those cud-chewing, non-church-going cows that stood dumbly among the dandelions making milk.
We were four manly adolescents innocently awaiting the coil of fate while sitting inside a snoring hundred-year-old building, as confined as the cows. We knew when Bishop Rich was finally finished with his exhortations and ministrations there would be no real relief. It was just a warm-up, I glumly thought, then brightened with the knowledge that this would be the last hours I would ever have to throw away in this hateful place. But for now, that expectation might as well have been of the next century. Only the blameless passage of time, and our blameless conduct would release us.
As soon as Bishop Rich had concluded his unemotional exhortation to stay away from the temptations of the flesh, there came the time that I dreaded; time for the Bearing of one's Testimony.
“Viola’s gonna do it, Andy,” Willy Smith twanged in my ear which resonated with the dryness of the foot pumped organ. Ruby Shelton’s little feet stomped noiselessly as she briskly keyed “Come, Come Ye Saints.”
“Sure as hell,” I whispered, showing my contempt for the Church by cursing right there in testimony meeting, and caught for my troubles Biff Doyle’s elbow in my ribs so hard my teeth knocked together. Biff was big.
“Shuttup, old man Rich is lookin’ at you,” Biff lipped like a ventriloquist, looking toward the speaker’s platform serenely, his handsome face and gold-capped teeth clenched. Biff was the pride of the Alma Second Ward, his parents, the school, the whole damn world, I thought. He was as resilient as crepe paper. He was a marvel. I tried to elbow him back in retaliation, but his eyes flicked toward me in warning. Biff could flatten a bale of hay if he sat on it, so I slid a hand under my old tight plaid sports jacket and nursed my ribs in silence.
All of my life, until my father died, had seemed to be an endless summons of Sundays. It was beyond any question that attendance at Sunday school and Church was obligatory. We were to be drilled in that peculiarly American religion that spoke of the glory of the individual and squashed you like a pariah dog if you were to exercise individuality. And laymen who knew neither guile nor sophistication delivered all of this peculiar theology. There were no hard questions. It was dreary beyond imagining.
Six days of the week there was work enough for everyone in the valley. Hard, high country winters, brief bursts of spring followed by summers so–quirky– that getting a living was nothing but a gamble with prayer to cover the spread. However, if all was well with our behavior, and if none of the gang had been caught skipping off to fish on a workday, or pulling a prank in Sacrament meeting, or committing any one of hundreds of other transgressions, we would be released to get on with the real business of living. Like cedar bark cigarettes and group masturbation. There was also fishing, swimming, shooting, and plotting how to get a glimpse down the neck of Bonny Valentine’s voluminous bodice.
With my mother living on the edges of awareness, my grandmother gone back to the city to re-arrange her life with the goal of returning to Immigration Valley, this was the Sunday of my release, and the ceremony I dreaded most; the monthly bearing of one’s personal testimony to the experience of the truth of the Church. It was a Sunday at the top of the list of our agonies, boring us to the point of stupefaction. With one exception– Viola Sleight– it was a script with no variations. And it was a duty, nay, a commandment that from time to time even the young Deacons had to share our experience. We were, on the penalty of hell and suspicion of lack of faith– the latter more compelling–forced to mouth convictions we did not hold, or understand; it was one of my first, essential introduction to life’s inscrutable contradictions.
Pete Olson, my once and future boss, my real savior, had once told I that there were things in life one just had to suffer, like hives, wives, and testimony meeting. Pete was a cynical champion of the faith, an anomaly amidst rank upon rank of conformity.
The air in the church was becoming close, moist with the exhalations of Viola’s insanity, if that is what it was.
I made my announcement of manumission from religion to the other three that morning. Pete Olson had asked me to work Sundays through the rest of the summer. They were sick with envy. I told them, proud as a rooster that today was my last church session for the rest of my life.
I was to work on Sundays! It was scandalous, but as it was financially necessary the Bishop clucked in disapproving sympathy. Even my addled mother had to relent amidst lamentations that we– the both of us– would spend the next life in Hell.
I had begged Pete to allow me to work Sundays. Money was the issue, I rationalized, not religion. When my father died the social security amounted enough to pay for the food. Pete Olson knew that, and said all right to the job with the remonstrance that I needed my mother’s blessing. She had no other choice but to relent. I was the man in the family now with Jonathan Lattimore gone.
Perhaps that was why Biff Doyle’s digs into my ribs were so vicious this morning. Sheer envy. I felt smug as a chimpanzee. I took a tentative retaliatory jab into Biff’s thick ribs to forestall my thoughts, and was pinched so viscously on the top of my thigh it was black and blue for a month. Biff was tough. Better sit with Max between us next time, I vowed. But then the realization that I would never have to sit anywhere in this mausoleum again made me forget where the Portland Rose was headed.
In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, testimony bearing was obligatory sooner or later for everyone over the age of 12, just to maintain a standing in the community. From time to dreaded time, bearing aloud one’s testimony to the truth of the Mormon faith was performed if for no other reason than to save face, or face a good whipping.
Between fidget and squirm on hard oak, and unpredictable erections, testimony meeting was a vivisection of Eternity. It seemed to take that long. I had always suspected that the Book of Mormon had been cribbed from the Bible– which it had– but had no way of confirming it. Even at that age Lehi and Nephi and the Lamanites and Christ coming to America sounded like ghostwritten flummery, I thought dimly. If Christ came to South America why didn’t he bring with him the wheel? Some of the stories about the magic of the Urim and Thummim peepstone were simply incredulous, although I believed in Superman with no difficulty and worshiped 1949 Mercury’s with fenders raked backwards so as to give the chariot a mean and low look like a white charging stallion.
Golden Plates? Max and Willy and Biff were guileless believers. You’d have to write on the soft gold with a penknife, or lightning, I reasoned. But even then I knew that my friends would never break with the faith despite their sins. And I wondered if the sinful blood on my hands had doomed my soul.
The wheezing of the organ changed timbre and Ruby Shelton glided into some transitional mood music for the bearing of the testimonies. It was then, in that change from the traditional to the classical– Bach– that Ruby looked solemnly down from her perch and into my eyes. I saw a sadness and a fury there. How could she have known? What whisper of premonition could she have had? If I felt fairly doomed as a boy with the blood of my stepfather on my hands what do I feel now? Her gaze made me feel as if I should jump aboard a freight train that very day, so whatever horror of the future would never converge.
After a few desultory mutterings from regular breast beaters, Viola Sleight rose center stage. Faith had a surer tenacity among the Immigrations than the native born. For me, faith seemed to thin with repetition. After the death of my father it was torn into scorn. There was nothing convincing enough left to drive the ramrod fear of God into me. However, if God caused hard-ons, and if in fact it resulted in marriage, and then children then how come it was condemned as the Devil’s work? Satan’s Rod?
Fair doom was what I saw when Viola rose to her feet. I sat quietly, my thigh throbbing, blood rising to the top of the muscle, burning like a coal. Viola had mistimed. Bishop Rich stood again to announce that the robin’s-throat voices of the mixed choir from the visiting Ward was going to favor the congregation with a stirring rendition of “Nearer My God to Thee” at service’s end.
But God’s word was falling out of the blue June sky that morning without so much as a commercial or a whisper.
Big Walt Armitage, the Sergeant of Arms, could detect a narcoleptic youth like a mosquito came to an exposed patch of flesh, smelling blood and bruise. The young women seemed to be immune to his evil eye. We were sure he was a Danite. A pistol-packing Porter Rockwell in shiny serge. A killer.
Nodding off in church was a severe offense for anyone under the age of 18. Over eighteen it didn’t matter to hell in a woven, Hebrew hand basket. Some of the best naps the overworked people of Immigration Valley ever caught were in Church, especially testimony meetings. Sunday was a day of rest, after all, according to scripture.
“She’s gettin’ warmed up,” Willy whispered into Max’s waxy ear, trying to look cool like Biff Sullivan naturally looked.
Willy’s lips were moving in a grotesque and comic pantomime across his hay rake teeth. I giggled. Then he sensed that his ribs were going to get played like a xylophone by Biff, so he clammed up. But I was smug, and would not have to sit next to anyone next week. Hell, for me there would be no next week! I had a sanctioned Sunday job! I had a mother to support.
We were agreed, secretly, that Viola Sleight was worth the price of admission. A German Immigration of fifty years, she lived alone in a Teutonic darkness with many cats. She was like watching a prizefight between Satan and the Angel Moroni, or the righteousness of a Randolph Scott movie. We glanced across the aisle and down a few rows of the hard wooden benches and could see her beginning her warm-up, rocking in the cradle of the bosom of the lord that moved her back and forth in an increasingly rhythmic motion. The spirit moved slowly at first until at last it would burst forth in all of its incomprehensible rock and roll glory. She jiggled like Jerry Lee Lewis, she wailed like Elvis.
Viola spoke with such a heavy German accent that most people thought she was speaking in tongues when she was ordering a pound of bacon in Shepherd’s Market. All of the gang, including myself, would cross a street to avoid the eyes of that ancient woman who wore the same flat black straw hat with an live African violet in it, a black dress, black shoes, and the darkest, most knowing eyes in the universe, as far I could tell.
While Viola was heating up her diodes, I could see the presiding Bishopric beginning to gird themselves, stifling yawns, sighs, sometimes even rolling their eyes heavenward when they saw Viola begin to tune her receiver to get on the wavelength of the Holy Spirit.
Bishop Hyrum Rich and Councilors Nate and Drummond looked like a pair of those Gargoyles the Gentiles put on their Churches back there in Europe. I knew about Gothic cathedrals in France from the slick-paged, dog-eared set of Wonder Books, my only set of golden plates.
The presiding authorities were dressed in identically severe black suits with revelations of white athletic socks at ankles like bunched flowers. Except for Bishop Rich, who wore gartered black silk stockings purchased in Salt Lake City at a store that exclusively outfitted missionaries. The stern-faced presiding authorities in their Sunday best still looked like Sons O’ Dan, ready to draw knifes and cut throats.
Old Bishop Rich had the ability to sleep with his eyes wide open, glazed but open, one of the secrets of success in the hierarchy of the Mormon Church, I guessed. Most of us could feel the all-knowing eye of the Masons behind their blindly glazed eyes plumbing our darkest secrets. The Bishop’s eyes, like God’s eye, knew the time, place, and promptings of every one of our sins right down to when we had sneaked our last smoke, uttered a cuss word, and the means of our masturbation.
Viola was on her feet, her dry cracked black shoes creaking with age. It was unknown to those not privy to the missives from Salt Lake City that the Twelve Apostles had been quietly trying to discourage any display of the Gift of Tongues since the ‘30s, but Viola Sleight had never got the word, and nobody had the nerve to enlighten her of the shifting mood of the times.
Viola was one of the last in the entire valley with enough lava in her gut to proclaim the faith– any faith– as it should be proclaimed. Later, I would come to remember her as a unique piece among all of God’s works after the Portland Rose took me down to the sea.
The instruction to downplay the displaying of the gift had come from on high from Salt Lake City as one of the Lord’s true revelations from the Twelve Apostles, including Ezra Taft Benson, so it had the effect of marching orders. Viola’s glossolalia was an embarrassment; it smacked of snake cults and free-love utopianism although the Gift was a venerable tradition when Joseph Smith was young. The very last thing the church wished was ecstasy in worship. It was unseemly. It was a cult calling a cult black. Those orders, however, could be tactically modified as the circumstances dictated throughout the world and Zion itself. By then the practice was all but dying anyway.
Of course, no one, including Bishop Rich, dared suggest to Viola that she modify the Moving. She did have the gift, no doubt about that, but there was an unspoken fear, I suspect, that to chastise her might invite some wrath in the hereafter. Revelations from Salt Lake City were touchy things. Revelations were a convenience to Joseph Smith that got him out of many difficulties. Though they were infallible, they took some getting used to– like the recent thunderbolt handed down by the Lord to Spencer W. Kimball that black men could hold the Priesthood.
The revelations come with an astonishing timeliness.
* * * *
I was unusually reticent to criticize Viola, for I had been a witness to a miracle, which was confirmed in pages of the Alma Post– Est. 1867– in the summer of 1955. I remembered the day clearly, the last summer my father was still alive. It was about this time of the year, a summer day for sure. I later bore solemn witness to the gang in awed wonderment.
I was near the entrance of my father’s cabinet shop after sweeping it out. When I heard the thump and squall of tires I rushed out into the street. At first I saw nothing but a dust cloud setting lazily back toward the dirt road. Owen Zims, an odd, gangling Gentile printer from Iowa who was our main source of tobacco, brushed me aside, and ran to the accident.
As the dust cleared, I saw a 1938 Chevy Roadster high-centered on Viola Sleight’s large body, balanced there like it had hit a big rock, all four wheels off the ground. As I waited for Viola to begin to quiver with the Power I shivered at the memory of her lying under the heavy Chevy roadster, an image that still informs my dreams.
Each testimony meeting when Viola turned on the valves of her pipeline to God, I remembered the look on old man Gottleiter’s astonished face. He was beached upon the hulk of Viola, hands suddenly steering air. Bewilderment did not become first generation Germans, so Gottleiter’s face seemed to suggest that he thought he had been ascended, was being taken direct to Glory with a full tank of 15 cent per gallon gasoline.
Ephriam Booth, Clayton’s father, burst out of his grocery store. The hardware storeowner, Harley Nate, swung through his glass door thinking perhaps of selling a few nuts and bolts for repairs. How could Bishop rich, who was just coming out of the Post Office, have the omnipresence or prescient knack for always being close to bloody disaster? Taft Budge, the Postmaster, rushed out of the post office, shouting orders. He had been in the war.
The strength of the five men was as the strength of ten, for they seized the shiny green Chevy Roadster by its bumpers fore and aft and hoisted it off Viola’s bulk as if it were a kid’s red wagon. Old Man Gottleiter thought it was the Second Coming when they dropped him and his car to the road with a loud bang and shuddering of springs.
Viola, flattened on the gravel road, was unconscious for a few minutes, but by the time Doc Rich (close and maverick relation to the Bishop) arrived she sat up with a decided bewilderment. In a moment she dusted off her black dress, re-arranged her crumpled hat, looked with disapproval at the bruises on her arms and the torn sleeve of her only dress, stood dizzily, and then sailed away down Main Street. Her woozy eyes were fixed on some distance none of the astonished men could fathom. I thought she had been killed, but she had risen, so I was careful of just how far I went along with the gang’s unanimous cruelty toward her.
The automobile accident did not increase nor diminish Viola’s vigor. It was as if it had never happened. I thought she was a dead and resurrected a wart-stricken Angel with an African violet in her hat.
At the moment one could detect her first utterance, Henry Edwin shouted her down, to our disappointment, and took precedence over her because he was a Male. Viola stopped mid-message, frozen, waiting, hitting a pause button while Edwin had his say. Henry Edwin, hardscrabble farmer, spoke humbly, his recitation and reconfirmation of his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and the Prophet Joseph Smith had been memorized once in 1916, and he had recited the same litany every time the spirit so moved him. It forestalled Viola for the moment. He was proud of his testimony. In a moment of inspiration, on a Mission to England he said, when he was 20, he told the stupefied congregation, these words had come to him, as if a revelation. His brevity was awe-inspiring:
“inthenameofthelordjesustchristibeleiveinjosephsmithamen.”.
The gang loved him.
Viola waited, communicating silently with angels whose wings had hard edges, her body in some kind of contortion that looked as if she would require Exorcism ere long if she couldn’t relieve the pressures.
None of us wore watches. Only older men wore watches, few of them on the wrist. Most of the Patriarchs had large pocket watches with elaborate chains and fobs; some of them of gold, some silver, and some made from elk teeth. But the gang knew how to measure time by the sun and shadow as accurate as any Hamilton in the building. It was pagan time keeping. Time’s feet were bound, crippled, sprained, and limping through each endless second of eternity.
“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted
Main Table of
Contents