Jane told Mrs. Dollens she was sick, spent the rest of the hour in the bathroom, and didn’t speak to me again until our twenty-year high school reunion. I had a way of driving girls to the restroom. Jane’s reaction was consistent with all the girls I knew, each of whom had informed me they were perfectly content without me in their lives.
Junior high was miserable in other ways. Mrs. Disney had been the school cook for years, employing local farm-wives to prepare a veritable feast each day for our pleasant ingestion. But she retired and the school switched to government food left over from World War II. It had sat for years in a government warehouse in New Jersey before being delivered to our school in a semi, the diesel fumes mingling with the food, forming a malignant stew. I’ve watched lunch scenes in old jailhouse movies that were eerily reminiscent of junior high school—beaten-down people standing in a sullen line while hard-bitten lifers slung great blobs of fly-specked gruel onto our plates.
After lunch, we were permitted outside to stroll in the cemetery next to the school, where the town’s founders were buried. Suds Norton and I would walk up and down the quiet rows, reading the names, imagining those brave pioneers six feet beneath us, the men in their coonskin caps, the women in their bonnets and petticoats.
Suds would speculate out loud about what the women had looked like in their petticoats. That would occupy our minds until the bell rang and it was time for science with Mr. McClelland, who was to education what Genghis Khan was to gracious living. He made no secret about his motivation for teaching—summers off. His ignorance was so vast as to be breathtaking. Even now, thirty-five years down the road, errors he planted long ago surface, like a bullet lodged in a soldier’s head sneezed out years later. For decades I labored under the notion that an electron was a vacuum cleaner brand, that protons were essential to a healthy diet, and neutrons replaced old trons.
My venture into science was redeemed every Friday when Mr. McClelland sent Tim Hadley and me to the janitor’s room in the basement to siphon distilled water from a fifty-five gallon drum into four large pickle jars. For reasons unknown, he settled on Tim and me early on, never extending that privilege to anyone else. The teachers’ Coke machine sat just inside the janitor’s room. We would deposit a quarter, open the slender door, survey the selection, then pull a bottle of pop from the cold innards of the machine, nursing it down while the distilled water tinkled from the drum into the pickle jars. It felt deliciously sinful to be drinking a soda while our peers labored under the burden of Mr. McClelland’s sorry tutelage.
Tim’s father, Ralph, was the school janitor. He holed up in his basement room, his feet propped on the pail of sawdust he kept handy in the event of an outbreak of vomiting. A squat, bowlegged man, Ralph Hadley attended the Quaker meeting every Sunday. His wife played the piano and he led singing in a high, reedy voice underneath the picture of George Fox, the founder of Quakerism. George Fox was grimacing, as if the congregation had hit a clinker.
By then, I had grown weary of Catholicism and was eyeing the Quakers, attending every now and then with Tim. The Quakers wore their religion lightly and were especially kind to junior high children, who they sensed were troubled enough as it was, so didn’t add to their already considerable burdens. If they thought I was headed to hell, they never said so, while the Baptists were prone to elaborate. The Baptist children would read their Bibles during study hall, poring through the book of Leviticus, then glancing my direction and frowning. It was clear where I stood with them, especially after word got out that I had touched Jane Martin’s bra.
One of the Baptists, an earnest boy named Daryl, showed me passages in the Bible about the Christians rising from their graves on Judgment Day, which he knew for a fact was just around the corner. I certainly didn’t want to miss that and made sure my desk in math class overlooked the cemetery so I could see their resurrection firsthand. I imagined the earth buckling, the gravestones toppling over, the wooden coffins pushing up through the soil and opening, the pioneers stepping out of their caskets, shaking the dust from their garments, and ascending to heaven.
“But not all of them,” Daryl said, “just the Baptists.”
We had story problems in Mrs. Cole’s math class, all of them involving trains, which no one rode anymore. I wondered why there weren’t any story problems about Judgment Day. “If 3,254 Catholics and Baptists are buried in a cemetery, and 38 percent go to heaven on Judgment Day, how many Baptists were in the cemetery?” It would have been a trick question, since Catholics and Baptists weren’t buried in the same cemetery, lest God get confused on the Day of Reckoning and accidentally resurrect an unworthy soul.
Of course, I knew from science class that bodies couldn’t rise in the air without adequate thrust. The Bible was silent on the subject of propulsion, which I pointed out to Daryl, but his mind was made up on the matter and he wouldn’t budge.
“With God all things are possible,” he said. And that was that.
I wanted to believe all things were possible with God, but God wasn’t knocking himself out proving it to me. My prayers for divine intervention went consistently unanswered. I’d started small, so as not to tax the Lord, asking for a date with Denise Turner. But she never agreed, in spite of my fervent supplications. I asked Daryl his thoughts on the matter. It was his opinion that God had turned off the spigot of blessings because we’d been dancing in P.E. According to Daryl, God was death on dancing.
While God and I saw eye-to-eye on the dancing question, we agreed on little beyond that. We’d gotten off to a poor start at St. Mary’s Catholic Church when it turned out everything I enjoyed was a sin—daydreaming about Denise Turner, contemplating marriage to Denise Turner, getting Denise Turner in a family way. Yahweh, I knew, was death on such matters. In junior high, I began to seek out a kinder, gentler deity, preferably in a church with pretty girls, which is how I ended up among the Quakers. (I’ll tell you more about this later.) It is somewhat disconcerting, thirty-five years later, to realize my career as a pastor was launched by hormones, but the ways of the Lord are mysterious and not for mortals to understand. That is precisely what William French Harper said when he’d returned home after being kidnapped by the Indians. But everyone saw right through him, as they saw through me, we minister-types being too transparent for our own good.
Chapter 14
My Sporadic Uprisings
When I was growing up, a boy could wreak havoc without his parents hauling him to a doctor to be drugged. Indeed, youthful rebellion was expected and if sporadic uprisings didn’t occur, parents assumed the worst—their boy lacked the vital spark and his days were numbered. My brothers and I took full advantage of this relaxed oversight and waged campaigns of terror that left our town’s citizenry deeply traumatized, if not permanently scarred.
My father was an unwitting accomplice in most of our misdeeds, providing the means, inspiration, or both. Though his vocation was selling bug spray, his passion was bartering. He returned home each evening bearing various treasures he’d gotten in exchange for bug poison. His finest acquisition, the one that shines brightest in my memory, was a female mannequin.
Aside from her wooden personality, she was perfect in every way—agreeable, shapely, always ready for a good time, and even-tempered.
Doug was unusually modest for a teenager and suggested we clothe her. Our sister was away at college, so we raided her closet for clothing, dressing her in clothes she was no longer able to wear since becoming a Baptist—a miniskirt, halter top, and socks with individual toes in them that dangled empty, the mannequin lacking digits. David scrounged up a woman’s red wig from Suds Norton, who seemed curiously reluctant to part with it.
“What should we name her?” Glenn asked.
We batted names back and forth before settling on Ginger, of Gilligan’s Island fame.
The first few days we did the usual things one does with a mannequin—dangled her legs out the car trunk, used her to moon passersby, arranged her in provocative poses under
the streetlight in front of our house. But on a hot summer evening, in our second week with her, our association would reach a pinnacle in an event still talked about in our town.
A quarter mile south of our home, on the road out of town, was a railroad bridge whose arches rose high above the road. Like most old bridges, rumors swirled around it, chiefly that it was haunted, that during its construction in the early 1900s a worker had plunged to his death and could be heard screaming each night.
My cousin Matt had come for his annual visit from southern Indiana. We’d soon exhausted all avenues of entertainment and were seated on the front porch early one evening, mulling over possible leisure activities.
“What we ought to do,” Matt said, “is throw her off the bridge in front of a car.”
This seemed to the rest of us an exceptional idea, a fitting end to the day. We lashed her to the back of Doug’s Sting Ray and pedaled the quarter mile to the bridge, hiding our bicycles in the rushes along the creek bank, and hauling her to the top. Matt carried her over his shoulder, her limbs sticking out at hard right angles, as if she were stiff with rigor mortis.
“The first thing we do is tie a rope around her,” Matt said, fashioning a noose around her slender neck, his hand grazing her wooden breast.
“Knock it off, you pervert,” Glenn said, slapping Matt’s hand away.
We sat with Ginger in the dark, watching toward town for the stab of headlights.
“Here we go,” Doug said, the whine of an engine audible in the distance.
The car approached the bridge, Matt cinched the noose tight around Ginger’s neck, and pushed her off into the black night. She came to a snapping halt at windshield level, swinging back and forth in front of the headlights, her wig a blood-red smear, her eyes wide and vacant, staring at the driver.
“Crap,” Matt said. “It’s a cop.” He hauled Ginger up, hand over hand, her miniskirt bunched at her feet, her halter top down around her waist.
It was not just any cop. It was Charley Williams, the chief of police, on his evening rounds.
Chief Williams peered upward into the bowels of the bridge. He was well past sixty-five and not inclined to climb up after us. He retrieved the megaphone from the trunk of his car, aimed it toward the bridge, and yelled, “You come down from there or I’ll send the dog up.”
We began to convulse with silent laughter. Danville’s police dog was an arthritic German Shepherd that had to be lifted out of Charley’s car. It also had a sinus condition and couldn’t smell a rose an inch from its nose. It had been trained in Germany, didn’t know a word of English, which didn’t matter since it was also deaf. The town had purchased the dog years before for two hundred dollars. We’d had a fundraiser at the school to buy him. Every child brought in a quarter, except for Bobby Darnell, whose family lived over the hardware store and was poor. He dropped in a washer.
Charley Williams was an inveterate whistler, constantly at it, the only man I ever knew who could whistle and talk at the same time. He poked around the bushes—whistling, whistling, whistling—then shined his flashlight into the rushes along the creek. We lay in the arches of the bridge, death-still. My father was president of the town board and technically Charley Williams’s boss, but we took no comfort in that. My father had told us countless times that if our activities ever drew the attention of the police, we would spend the rest of our lives in jail before he bailed us out. Eventually, Charley grew tired and left. We loaded Ginger back onto Doug’s bicycle and rode home, inordinately pleased with ourselves for escaping detection.
Over the course of that summer we had much wholesome fun with Ginger, until an accident with a truck resulted in the loss of her legs. We carried her to the end of the driveway on trash day, where she was loaded onto Doc Foster’s pickup truck and hauled to the dump. It was an ignoble end for someone who had brought us such pleasure, and all these years later I still feel guilty we hadn’t given Ginger the Christian burial she’d deserved.
That same summer my father had gotten it into his head that we had too much time on our hands and were at risk for juvenile delinquency. So he traded several cases of bug spray for a hundred tomato plants and had my brothers and me plant them in the garden behind our barn. No calculator exists that can accurately extrapolate the tons of tomatoes generated by a hundred plants. By July, we had wheelbarrow loads of tomatoes each day and were eating them at every meal, in combinations limited only by my mother’s imagination—tomato soup, tomato salad, tomato pie, tomato juice, tomato stew, tomato loaf, tomato hotdish, tomato casserole, tomato goulash, and Great God Almighty, on a hot Sunday afternoon, homemade tomato ice cream.
My father was delighted. “The land is feeding us,” he marveled one evening over a slice of warm tomato cake. “Next year I’ll see if I can’t trade for some zucchini seeds.”
We ate so many tomatoes our fingernails turned red.
“If I have to eat another tomato, I think I’ll puke,” I said to Peanut one summer afternoon. I’d had a tomato and jelly sandwich for lunch that day and it was threatening to surface.
Peanut sat quietly, pondering my dilemma.
“What we have to do,” he said finally, “is get rid of the tomatoes quicker than your mother can cook them.” Then, in a conspiratorial whisper, he told me his plan.
We met at the tomato patch that night after dark. Peanut, Suds Norton, and I. Peanut was carrying several large buckets, which we filled in no time.
“Follow me,” he said, seizing hold of a bucket.
Peanut struck off through the night, up the street, avoiding the streetlights, making his way through the Martins’ yard and down their back hill to the Laundromat. The Laundromat sat on U.S. 36, our town’s Main Street. Built into a hill, the rear roof of the Laundromat sat a scant four feet off the ground. Peanut scrambled onto the roof.
“Hand me the tomatoes,” he said. Suds and I lifted the buckets onto the roof, then climbed up ourselves.
“What we have to do,” Peanut said, “is hide behind the sign and throw the tomatoes out onto Main Street. Aim for the cars. When the tomatoes hit their windshields, they’ll think they ran over somebody.”
For reasons I still can’t fathom, this struck me as a perfectly laudable idea, and we began launching tomatoes from the Laundromat roof.
“Throw ’em like grenades. Like they do in the movies,” Peanut said, lobbing a tomato high over the sign. It arced above the parking lot, narrowly missing a Chevrolet before splatting in the middle of Main Street. We dialed in the sights, and our accuracy improved. Tomatoes glazed across windshields, leaving a meaty, seedy smear.
Traffic snarled to a halt. Charley Williams arrived in his patrol car. He lifted the police dog out of the back seat, then studied the red gore on the road, trying to determine whether it was flora or fauna. The dog lapped up the tomatoes, indifferent to the vegetable carnage that had been visited upon the civilian population.
Charley walked around the building, whistling, and said, “Come on out, boys. I know you’re somewhere around here.”
We lay on the roof behind the One Hour Martinizing sign, not budging, knowing capture would mean our demise. This time we’d gone too far. It had been one thing to toss a mannequin off a bridge, which, though distressing to passersby, was technically not illegal. But throwing a tomato at a car was a crime, perhaps even a felony, which could result in our being sent to the Indiana Boys School, where the highlight of our week would be playing checkers with the old men from the Quaker church who visited on Thursday evenings.*
Charley Williams walked up to the Laundromat, the police dog limping along beside him. He rattled the door, checking the lock. “Think anyone’s in there?” he asked the dog. We stopped breathing and listened closely, hoping the dog would say, “Looks empty to me. Let’s go home.” Instead, Charley circled the building, shining his flashlight, whistling, whistling, whistling. The dog went back to eating the tomatoes, looking up occasionally and licking his chops, which glistened tomato-red in the
streetlight, like Cujo in the Stephen King book.
After a while, Charley hefted his dog back into the cruiser and drove off. We stayed on the roof, lying on our backs, looking up at the stars and contemplating our sins.
“That was the most fun I’ve had since Denise Turner’s bikini top fell off at the pool last week,” Suds Norton said.
“Wow!” Peanut said. “Did you see her boobies?”
“Yep.”
“What did they look like?” Peanut asked.
Suds thought for a moment, smiling fondly at the memory. “Tomatoes,” he said. “Nice, ripe tomatoes.”
I knew exactly what he meant. Everything I saw that summer reminded me of tomatoes.
At the height of the tomato harvest, my father traded bug spray for six dozen Ball canning jars. “Now we can have tomatoes year-round,” he said, positively giddy with joy. The next morning, after he’d left for work, my mother and I hid the jars in the coal bins behind the furnace. For the next several days, Dad wandered around the house, peering into closets and scratching his head. “Now where did I put those jars? Has anyone seen the jars?” Fortunately, my father was easily distracted. After a while something else would catch his interest and he’d forget about the canning jars.
The next week all the tomato plants were ripped from the ground, thrown into a pile, doused with fuel, and set on fire. We never found out who did it, though Glenn seemed inordinately pleased by their destruction and smelled suspiciously of kerosene.
With the tomato curse now lifted, my brothers and I turned our attention toward more noble pursuits. As is often the case, the next grand adventure fell into our laps when we weren’t even looking for it. It was a rainy summer day. We’d gotten on my mother’s nerves, and she’d banished us from the house. Exiled, we took up refuge with Suds and Peanut in the loft of the barn where our father stored his cases of bug spray.
We were draped across the boxes, discussing Denise Turner’s many qualities, when Doug began reading the label on a can of bug spray. “Listen to this,” he said. “Contents under pressure. Do not puncture or incinerate.”
I Love You, Miss Huddleston Page 9
