I’m not sure what the word sexy even means sometimes. I don’t even care what it means, normally. It’s the kind of thing you think about at church, though, because there’s nothing else to do. In the end I pretend I’m a girl just long enough to give the award to Samson.
Best Picture? Now this one’s easy. It’s one of David, all the way. Not the king, just the kid. All he’s doing is walking along by a stream, a stick in one hand, a sheep across his shoulders, the slingshot he’ll eventually nail Goliath with dangling from his belt. I suppose the big meadow he’s crossing could be the green pasture he gets made to lie down in before he heads on over to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, but the illustration doesn’t make you think of that. It doesn’t make you think of anything. That’s what I like about it. There’s nothing biblical going on—nobody getting burned or sacrificed or swallowed, no one getting driven out of or cast down from or dashed against anything. It’s just a normal piece of world for once: some nice running water, some strewn rocks, a wide empty grassland. The yellow flowers by the creek could be buttercups. The stream could be packed with trout. The only flaw is the sheep—but it isn’t the illustrator’s or David’s fault that the sheep bugs me. It’s Micah Barnes’s fault. Micah is the new assistant pastor’s kid. He’s the one who told me a year or so ago that some people fuck sheep.
Of course I called him a filthy liar. But he just laughed, popped open his Bible, and actually proved what he’d said! Somewhere in Leviticus, it was. There were no actual scenes describing guys and sheep humping away, but there were detailed instructions on how you had to kill them if they did. The whole idea about made me puke. I mean, why would Moses even mention such a thing? I would certainly never have thought of it on my own! He even went on to list several other types of animals you had to kill guys for screwing.
I feel sorry for Micah Barnes, though. He’s the kind of mixed-up little church rat you meet pretty often in Adventist basements (which is where they always seem to stick the kids). His dad’s an up-and-coming preacher, so Micah spends his whole life stuck in church camps, church schools, church basements. And since all he hears there is how good and holy the Church is and how cruel and filthy the Outside World is, and since he hates his good and holy basement life, he assumes he’d rather be in the Outside World, and so tries to prove how much he knows about it—by acting cruel and talking filthy.
The first time we met, Micah walked up to me, pointed like I was something in a cage, and screamed, “God damn, kid! You got ears just like a monkey! Hahahaha! Monkey Ears!”
Next to the mud pies Everett slings around, this little dirt clod didn’t even wing me. I just gave Micah the cold hard stare and turned to walk away. But then this girl, Vera Klinger, had to stick her oar in. And to complicate matters, Vera has a harelip. You can’t really see the thing, but you sure can hear it. “Nat’s nod nice!” she snapped at Micah. “Nyou soodn’t snay sengs nike nat!”
Micah was stunned for a second. Then he went apeshit: “HAHAHAHA!” he shrieked. “Nough snitty, nittle nirl! Nup nyours! Nup nyours!” So, right there in the basement of God’s House, I had to punch the new assistant pastor’s kid smack in the mouth.
It wasn’t much of a punch. I figured that with a lip like hers Vera must be used to insults, and I could see already that the new kid had strange problems, so I took the kind of contact swing a batter does when the hit-and-run is on. But Micah went down like my fist was a shot put, curled up like a salted slug, screamed like a baby with a diaper pin sticking in it—and then had the gall to tell me later that he was “turning the other cheek,” like Jesus says to do! Of course Brother Beal ran over and tried to find out what had happened, but Vera started nuttering and nurring at him so frantically that he gave up, sent Micah to the bathroom, then ordered me for the first time in my life to go sit in The Corner with the Memory Verse dunces. I was mad for a while. But I ended up enjoying The Corner so much I haven’t learned a Memory Verse since.
Irwin’s HISTORY OF MY DAD continued
Chapter 2. A Year Of Great Confusion
Everett Seniors’s new Cougar coaching job was during the Great Depression, and to prove it Hugh reports actual Washington State Varsity Ballplayers practicing ball in corked logging boots and some guys barefoot even, just to show you how unable they were to afford cleats. Imagine if you will some corked logging booted guy’s logging boot landing on some barefooted guy’s bare foot. YOUCH! to say the least. Imagine also how some prospects had no gloves and injured their hands quite seriously trying to catch the stupid ball at times. These were the hazards of The Grand Old Game in those days, so that we can thank our lucky stars to live now instead!
It soon became visible at quite a young age that Hugh Chance was already a better ballplayer than most of Everett Seniors’s actual college players, especially his left arm. This became most visible of all when he was twelve and started pitching BP as batting practice was known as, at which he enjoyed striking out Cougar sluggers one after the next with his fastball until his dad had to start yelling at him. “EASE OFF!” he had to start yelling. “I WANT MY TEAM TO PRACTICE HITTING, NOT STRIKING OUT!” he also yelled. So Hugh eased off, though secretly the whole thing gave him one heck of a kick in the pants.
To jump backwards in time for a more sad instants of his fine arm, Hugh killed a meadowlark right out of the air with an apple at a distance of approximately third base to first when he was ten years of age, causing his father to say it was nothing to brag about and disgusting Marion into sending him to bed without supper. Be darn careful what you aim at even when certain you won’t hit it! is the lesson Hugh claims it taught him.
Not so sad but more illegal was another arm story that happened when he was thirteen and bet several Cougar ballplayers that he could bust the back window out of the Twin Falls Flyer caboose with a baseball in one throw, and I mean the back window here, not just some side window such as any moron or juvenile delinquent could bust. This means the Flyer is flying sixty miles per hour straight away from you so that you’ve got to throw the ball faster enough than sixty to bust glass plus accurate enough to even hit it, the caboose window being quite small. The whole bet however turned into a humble lesson in overcockiness for young Hugh, who bet three guys a buck each then made such a perfect throw that he hit that little cross of wood dividing the older type wooden cabooses’s windows into four pains dead center, and never busted a thing. Cutting cordwood with a bucksaw at a dollar per cord was how Hugh payed off his debts. Such was a youngsters’s future when it came to gambling! is the lesson Hugh claims he learned this time out as he sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed and sawed. Imagine if you can the blisters! While you’re at it imagine a whole cord of wood costing but one dollar! How the world changes is beyond me!
But getting down to baseball here, what young Hugh had going for him in his gifted southern paw was a big strong body for a boy his age plus a fastball that hopped “like a dang jack rabbit!” as Mel Franks, one of the Cougars always striking out on it, used to say. This blazing hopping fastball was also extremely accurate as you can see from the caboose. Which was lucky. Because the odd thing was how every time Hugh went to throw a curveball Everett Senior turned purple and screamed at him. “SAVE THAT ARM!” he screamed. “YOU’LL BE NEEDING ALL THOSE LIGAMENTS AND TENDONS CURVEBALLS TEAR OUT OF YOU AT SUCH A GROWING AGE WHEN YOU ARE A THIRTYSOME YEAR OLD VETERAN STILL PLAYING PRO BALL!” he screamed. This had been Everett Seniors’s own mistake as a youngster, Hugh reports, and being the type of young man who hung himself upon his dad’s every word Hugh never learned a curveball worth a hang due to this screaming, which later had serious aftereffects. But there are payoffs to be had hanging from a dad’s words too, such as getting so sharp at math, science and other subjects that they skipped him a grade, I think maybe the fourth. And even without a curveball as an eighth grader a year too young for his age, Hugh pitched two no-hitters, went 8 and 0, got straigh
t A’s and hit over .500 if you can believe those numbers!
In high school, however, Life was soon to take a far more serious bent for Hugh and his family, especially Everett Senior if you can call getting killed a bent in Life. First off the Depression had ended. Secondly W.W.2 had started up. The third thing: Everett Senior was too old to join the military unless he wanted to. But all along as I have not yet mentioned he had an expired pilot’s license left over from his youthful talents as a barnstorming pilot of small airplanes. So when America started losing the War a little, such as at Pearl Harbor and such, Everett Senior decided we could use a good man who flew and signed up for the Air Force wing of the United States Army.
In Everett Seniors’s (now known as Master Sergeant Everett Chance’s) last letter home to Hugh and Marion, he told how he had started flying a little Piper Cub recognisance plane around France, Switzerland, Beljum and such. “I have finally made it up to the Cubs,” was how he put it, “even if it is only the Piper and not the Chicago!” Young Hugh cracked up heartily over this. Old Marion however never grinned a lick, for as a Pacifist she hated Piper Cubs, Churchill and Hitler, ovens and bombs, Eisenhower, Italy, and all else to do with the World Situation at such a tough point in History.
Hugh on the other hand decided he should try even harder to do all the things which he decided to try and do, and to prove it he made the varsity baseball team his freshman year and went 6 and 2, then as a sophomore went 9 and 1 and hit .420, including his first no-hitter. But smack into the middle of this great ballplaying dropped the bombshell him and Marion had hoped all along not to be waiting for. Everett Seniors’s Piper Cub had either broke down or run out of gas deep behind enemy territory. The lousy Germans had him captured!!
For many months the terrorized pair of Hugh and Marion went about their business in a daze of sad suspense, hearing not a word of what was happening to their nearest and dearest prisoner in all the world at a time when it was crawling with them. As a junior on the ballfield Hugh played his worried-sick heart out, going 12 and 0 with two one-hitters, one two-hitter, three three-hitters and no no-hitters, all of them shut-outs, as his high school Marcus Whitman High (named after the famous missionary and his wife who told the Indians Jesus would help them and when He didn’t massacred them) won the State Championship. To top it off Hugh got Straight A’s, made first-team All-State, and was elected Scholar Athelete Of The Year for the whole state of Washington for his age, thereby putting one heck of a crimp in Marions’s bichbichbiching about the study-time he wasted playing ball.
But a lot of thanks he got! For next came the bitter pill any boy on earth hopes never to have to swallow! In a Defense Department envelope arriving practically minutes before the War would of ended with everyone fine, there it was, the bitter pill: Hugh’s dad had gotten shot! probably in the back! hundreds of times for all we know, knowing the stinking Germans! while escaping from prison camp.
It was official: he was now DEAD!!!!
For Hugh this came as quite a shock. Barely knowing who or what he was, he entered into an awful period of what felt like thick fog all around him during which he started smoking Lucky Strikes, his brand to this day. After this long Fog Period he reports entering more of an Angry Period where his senior year on the ballfield he spent like some strange machine or zombie mowing down team after team on almost pure fastballs, getting nicknamed SMOKE because of it, going 14 and 0 in the middle of it, setting a State Strikeout Record that will never be broken since they play a different number of games today, and winning a second straight State Crown for Marcus Whitman High practically one-handed.
On the other hand I have to report his grades that year went totally to pot. He just didn’t care was the problem, he later reported. Marion was a basketcase, Hugh himself was in his Foggy then his Angry Periods, Pro Scouts were after him like flies beating down him and Marions’s door trying to talk the sad-faced young man and his gereaved mom into becoming a Bonus Baby his eighteenth birthday instead of heading on to College as planned, etc. Life in general was such a total mess overall that before long Hugh could do nothing but throw fastballs, smoke Lucky Strikes, and hold on tight to one last straw. “If a scout from the Cubs comes and makes me a square offer, I will sign, in memory of DAD!” was the straw. “Otherwise it’s college for me!” was the other segment of it. But no Cub scouts ever came, and later on Hugh forgot his own good advice. And no wonder, for,
“YOU ARE READY!” those clowns the Scouts kept screaming while “YOUR SCHOOLING!” screamed his destroyed mom while “SMOKE! SMOKE! SMOKE!” screamed Whitman Highs’s berzerk fans while “DAD! DAD!” Hugh screamed in his own brain. For what Everett Senior would have said concerning all these mixed-up compartments in life was what the big lonely southpaw was wondering at this rugged point in time.
This was a year of great confusion for young Hugh Chance.
Kincaid:
Sabbath School
When the time comes, all you have to do to get out of The Corner is tiptoe over and whisper the Memory Verse to Sister Durrel. If you blow it she even helps you with it. Then you go take a seat in Brother Beal’s crowd while he polishes off the morning with a short sermon that’s like a pre-game warm-up to get you a little bit bored before the Big Bore of Elder Babcock’s sermon upstairs in church.
Today’s Memory Verse is in red ink in my Bible. Red means it’s Jesus talking. “Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child,” He’s telling somebody or other, “the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” I repeat the Verse to myself seven times without looking. Then I peek at Sister Durrel, and start trying to suck up courage. This is the hard part …
I know what’ll happen first. I’ll say, “I’m ready, Sister Durrel.” Then she’ll say, “Call me Nancy, Kincaid. You make me feel like a nun!” Then I’ll feel horrible for making her feel like a nun, but I’ll keep calling her Sister anyway, because I’d die if I ever called her Nancy. That’s one thing about Brother Beal. The guy can walk right up to her and say “Nancy” as calmly as if he was saying “soup” or “cement” or “pencil.” I guess if Sister Durrel had to get engaged, it might as well have been to Beal. I didn’t feel that way at first because he acts like such a big weenie here at church. But last summer at Camp Meeting a thing happened that showed me there is a lot more to him than you’d ever guess from knowing him on Sabbaths only.
It was a Friday, near sundown, and we’d been playing softball all afternoon. I was pitching for both teams to make it even—just underhand bloopers—and Brother Beal was coming to bat for about the tenth time. Beal was a baseball star at Walla Walla Adventist College a couple years ago, and even went on to play semipro ball till his manager canned him for refusing to play on Sabbath. It’s hard to blame the manager, though. Beal, like all Adventists, believes the Sabbath begins and ends at sunset, so he was missing both the Friday night games and the Saturday doubleheaders, which were about three-fourths of his team’s schedule.
Anyhow, he was quite the slugger when he played. But there at Camp Meeting he’d just been bunting all day to tease us, since he was so damned fast we couldn’t get him out anyway. Right as the sun was sinking, though, Sister Durrel showed up with a lawn chair and sat down to watch, and Beal gave her a big cocky grin, and she smiled back a smile so much more beautiful than anything he’d ever deserve that when he kept right on grinning as he stepped to the plate, then said, “This one’s for you, Nancy,” I just couldn’t take it. I decided to wipe the grin right off his face.
Fast pitches are illegal in Camp Meeting softball. Overhand pitches are even more illegal. I threw one anyhow. Winding up fast to increase the surprise, I blazed a perfect strike in there—and Beal’s grin did vanish. The problem was, so did the softball. The problem was, Beal’s body coiled and uncoiled in a split second, there was an eerie boaf!, and that flat blob of a ball just disappeared. He obliterated it. The speed of the illegal pitch only made matters worse. I turned to the sky and started looking, finally spotting an ugly l
ittle grass-stained moon, still rising in the company of a flock of swallows, high over a meadow so far beyond anything we’d ever considered “outfield” that it was like something out of the Book of Revelation had happened. The ball flew so high and far it made our diamond and players and the entire afternoon’s playing seem as if a bunch of pygmies had been shooting marbles on a rug and calling that a ballgame. But it was what happened after the ball returned to earth and bounded on into a lily pond that changed my mind about Beal for good.
About the time he reached second base, a few of us began to notice something odd about the Brother’s baserunning. It wasn’t hard to put a finger on, either. He wasn’t running bases at all. He was dancing them. Our first reaction was to gawk. There stood our big pious weenie of a Sabbath School teacher on second base, eyes closed, body motatin’, zonked face impossibly unembarrassed as his hands mojoed a solo on a sax no more visible than the Holy Ghost. Then he stepped off the bag, swivel-hipped his way toward third, and the second reaction set in: kids started to laugh. Their parents didn’t, and I didn’t, but almost everybody else did. They couldn’t help it. Beal’s neck was working like a chicken’s; he was doing snaky, Egyptian-looking things with his arms and hands; and he was sliding his big sneakered feet sometimes forward, sometimes back, and sometimes into such quick, drunken, graceful tangles that you weren’t sure whether he’d fall on his face or take off flying.
The Brothers K Page 9
