Читать книгу A River Could Be a Tree - Angela Himsel - Страница 13

For years, the question nagged at me: If my parents had to choose one of us ten kids to eat, who would it be?

It was a Saturday in 1968, and I was seven, sitting in church in a long row with my family listening to another sermon. “In the End Times, the time of the Great Tribulation,” the minister shouted from the pulpit, “there will be mass murder, corpses will litter the streets, and the world will reek of the stench of dead bodies!”

This was the fate of those who, in the End Times, had been left behind at Jesus’s Second Coming, and hadn’t made it to the Place of Safety.

“Jesus will return, like a thief in the night. Do not slumber, do not sleep, do not let your love wax cold! The great God is going to spank this world, and he is going to spank hard! Worldwide droughts. Starvation. Parents will eat their children!”

Alarmed, and with a terrible sense of foreboding, I wondered which of us our parents would devour first. A girl and skinny, I was hardly worth killing. Mary, four years older than me, was the nicest, always helping others finish their chores. They wouldn’t eat her. Wanda was the oldest and bossy. My parents wouldn’t dare eat her. Probably one of my older brothers. They were always in trouble. Jim did not close his eyes during opening and closing prayers, and Ed made blasphemous jokes about prayer cloths.

These small, white flannel cloths came from church headquarters in California. Someone there—an evangelist, or perhaps Mr. Armstrong himself—prayed on the cloth, thus making it a “prayer cloth,” then sent it to ailing members, including me when I had pneumonia. One woman believed that it could also repair her car and asked the minister for a prayer cloth so it would stop stalling. After hearing about this, whenever our car rattled or steam rose from the radiator, Ed would mutter an irreverent “prayer cloth.”

I worried that if I were slumbering when Jesus returned, the rest of the brethren would be lifted into the sky and transported on “wings of eagles” to a Place of Safety, according to the book of Revelation. Herbert Armstrong had identified that place as Petra in Jordan. According to the church’s booklet This is PETRA!, the ancient Jordanian city locked in by mountains and carved almost entirely of stone was the Place of Safety. Some members of the church were actively looking forward to living in caves.

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According to the church’s booklet 1975 in Prophecy, the world would end in 1975. A German-dominated Europe would:

. . . blast our [US] cities and industrial centers with hydrogen bombs . . . and so now God is about to punish! . . . It’s later than you think! You have been warned! . . . and I say to you on authority of God Almighty that it is absolutely sure!

The words were accompanied by illustrations that resembled horror movies or science fiction: a barren landscape with a hand sticking up from the ground; people fleeing a city where a hydrogen bomb flamed against the backdrop of the buildings; skeletal figures whose eyes popped out of their sockets; and frightened faces cowering against giant hailstones crashing from the skies.

I later learned that many of the horrors the church described were based on the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. The church itself was fashioned with a Nazi-like structure. The administrative offices in Pasadena, California, were referred to as “Headquarters,” and its hierarchy paralleled that of the military. Herbert Armstrong, the “apostle,” was akin to a general; and the counterparts to the church’s evangelists, preaching elders, local regional elders, local church elders, deacons, and members were colonels, captains, first and second lieutenants, sergeants, and privates.

This structure even extended to families. At one point, the church required children to address their parents as “Sir” and “Ma’am,” not Mom and Dad. Five-year-old children sharply and obediently said, “Yes, sir! No, ma’am!” as if they were speaking to a sergeant in boot camp. And just like in the military, you didn’t dare question authority. “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,” said the ministers, quoting the biblical verse. God who loved us was also a totalitarian dictator.

My father tried to maintain order in our chaotic household by insisting that we say “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir,” “Yes, ma’am,” or “No, ma’am.” My mother took to calling my father “sir” as well, and we all knew that it was a taunt of sorts, much the same as the way she snuck bits of beef tongue into the potato hash without my tongue-hating father knowing it.

As terrible as the horrors of the Great Tribulation, Jesus’s Kingdom was a fat, juicy, delicious carrot dangled in front of us. Once the Tribulation was over, as described in Matthew 24, “Then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be,” then Satan would be bound for 1,000 years, unable to make mischief in the world, while Jesus ruled His Kingdom.

I prayed fervently that I would manage to get into the Kingdom. I prayed to have a converted mind, prayed for God’s Holy Spirit. I desperately feared being left behind when Jesus returned. Even though I went to church every week, even though I knelt each night at my bed and prayed, even though I tried not to be rebellious, there was no guarantee that I would get into the Kingdom.

The Kingdom, God’s harvest of souls, was exemplified in the annual harvest holiday of the Hebrew Bible, the Feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkot. It represented the Second Resurrection, the time when those who had died without knowing the Truth would have a chance to be saved. I did not know then or for a very long time that our holidays were Jewish holidays, and that modern-day Jews continued to celebrate them. I assumed God had created them just for the church.

My parents took us out of school to celebrate the eight-day holiday of Sukkot. My mother woke up her ten kids before dawn and bundled us into the car to drive to one of the church’s Feast sites. When we pulled onto the empty road, the stars were not yet absorbed into the still-gray sky, and I imagined that only God and my family were awake.

One year we drove to the church’s Feast site in Texas, another to Georgia, and once to the Poconos, but mostly we went closer to home, to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, staying at church-arranged hotel rentals and cabins. Just as the Israelites had not lived in permanent homes during those forty years in the desert after they escaped slavery in Egypt, we’d left our physical homes behind to remind us that they were temporal, but God’s Kingdom was forever.

In what almost amounted to a caravan, church members from around the country flooded the Feast sites with our beat-up cars. Every morning, clad in our Sabbath dresses and suits, we left our motel and drove off to attend services in the immense, aluminum-sided, unheated “tabernacle building,” where we sat from oldest to youngest on the typical hard, metal folding chairs.

Throughout the eight days of the Feast of Tabernacles, we heard sermons and sermonettes, morning and afternoon, from ministers and preaching elders and evangelists from around the country. At the top of the page of our notebooks we wrote the dates—October 8, 1968; October 17, 1970; October 15, 1973—and the titles of the sermons: “The Coming Armageddon,” or “The Plan of God,” and the name of the minister, preaching elder, or evangelist such as Mr. Waterhouse, whose legendary rambling, four-hour sermons filled me with dread.

Mr. Waterhouse had a genial southern accent, made self-deprecating jokes about his golf game, but leapt from topic to topic in a way that was difficult to follow. At the end of services, the various deacons passed around an offering basket. Down each aisle it went, and we all put in our money, some sealing it in envelopes, others laying the bills in a pile. We were incredibly proud when they tallied the money and told us the next day that we had exceeded last year’s offering.

It would be over thirty years until I discovered what Mr. Armstrong was doing with that money. The tithe that was intended to go to the needy instead went to his Rolls Royce cars, his private airplane, Swiss bank accounts, gold mines in Africa, extensive real estate, gold, silver, and much, much more.

At that time, though, it did not seem wrong to me that Mr. Armstrong was running around the world on his private jet while church members subsisted on food stamps and welfare. My own family replaced broken windows with squares of cardboard, just so we could continue to send our tithes to the church.

During those eight days of Sukkot, in the company only of other church members, I felt like I was one of the Israelites who’d left Egypt: special. To imagine that I was like the biblical Hebrews, part of a select group that God Himself had chosen, was intoxicating.

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In 1969, when I was eight years old, in preparation for the world ending, my parents sold our big house on Main Street in Huntingburg. My older siblings were in high school and had friends. The last thing they wanted was to move out to a farmhouse in the boonies of Jasper. I was starting third grade and had no clear idea how my life would change, nor did I know why we were moving. What I did know was that worldly goods were unnecessary because Jesus was soon to arrive.

Our new home was a dilapidated two-story farmhouse. Cornfields flanked the house, and behind us were woods where we played in the creek. On summer afternoons, Abby, Liz, John, Sarah, and I packed peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches on whole-wheat bread and trudged down the path, past the mulberry tree, across the swampy bottom, and into the woods, where we stayed for the day. We dug in the smelly sand alongside the creek, and made dungeons and castles and moats, placing sticks in the castles for flags and flat pieces of bark in the sides for windows. If the water was warm enough, we ran through the shallow creek, splashing and yelling and screaming, “Clear the wa-aay!”

My older brothers liked to hunt and trap, and set up traps for mink and muskrat, though the occasional raccoon was caught in them as well. Ed ignored when deer season began and ended and hunted as he wished. He even liked to tease the younger siblings by chasing us around with the skinned carcasses. The game warden was tipped off, came to the house, and found the carcasses of deer that had been hunted out of season. Ed spent several weekends in jail as a result. He was definitely the one my parents would eat.

In the basement, a wood and coal furnace provided heat. For a long while, we had no washing machine, so we relied on a wringer washer to do our laundry. Each piece of clothing had to be fed between the rollers individually to squeeze out the excess water. I loved to feel the rollers pull a sock or a pair of underpants from my hands and watch it squish and suck the water out of it so it resembled a flattened cartoon character.

An indoor wash line was strung across the back of the basement so we could dry our clothes downstairs during winter. In the corner, a small, dark, spider-webby room dubbed the “root cellar” contained shelves full of peanut butter and jars of olives. Nobody liked them, but they were free, army-surplus food. The same room housed my mother’s homemade goods: jars of blackberry and grape and elderberry jelly, as well as canned apple butter, tomatoes, beets, pickles, and other assorted vegetables.

Wooden barrels held my father’s various homemade wines—elderberry, blackberry, strawberry, and grape from the grapes we picked at my father’s aunt Almeda’s and which we delighted in crushing with our hands. The church would kick a member out for smoking cigarettes, but drinking alcohol was fine as long as it was in moderation. Apparently Jesus drank wine but didn’t smoke.

With three bedrooms upstairs, two down, and one bathroom, we played musical beds. In Huntingburg, I’d slept with Abby and Mary and Liz. In Jasper, it was mix and match. Sometimes I shared a room with Wanda and Mary, but two years after we moved in, Wanda had graduated from high school and moved out. Then it was Liz and Sarah, while Mary and Abby were together.

The two floors of the house were filled with stuff, lots of stuff, both because twelve people lived there, and also because my mother compulsively collected and kept items from Goodwill, yard sales, and relatives. Broken furniture, bags full of huge granny underwear, musty-smelling books—if it was free or practically free, my Depression-era mother took it. I often thought how deprived my mother must have felt as a child that she couldn’t let go of anything.

Once, my father saw a laundry basket filled with jeans to be patched and shouted, “Mama, what’s this? What if Jesus Christ appeared right now, would this be any way for a Christian to live? Junk stacked to high heaven? Let me tell you, Satan and his demons have got their feet in this door, and we have got to get our house in order!”

My mother argued in her defense, “It’s my stuff, and you have a bunch of junk cars outside. Why don’t you do something about them?”

My father said, “Mama, you don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. You’re talking out of your rear end again. I think you got a demon in you, I really do.” Said with complete seriousness. I looked at my mother anew and wondered if the demon would manifest itself somehow. I couldn’t imagine how a demon might affect my even-tempered, kind mother. Later, my mother muttered, “He’s got the demon.”

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What remained consistent was my mother’s free-floating parenting style versus my father’s attempt to keep everything under control. He was the head of the household, and on his shoulders had been placed a particular burden—to keep his kids in church, to make certain we did the right thing, and to ensure that we all made it into the Kingdom.

To my father’s dismay, our house was a teeming, frothing cauldron of meanness. We stomped, slammed doors, kicked, screamed, punched, wrestled, chased, and threatened one another on a daily basis. We locked each other out of the house, chased each other up trees, called each other ugly, stupid, dumb shit, asshole, and pig. We teased and tortured, threw hairbrushes and baseballs at one another. We pulled chairs out from under each other, laughing hysterically when someone fell onto the floor. We made off with the peanut-butter sandwich that a sibling (John) had painstakingly prepared for himself. We were territorial over our own things, but ignored our siblings’ boundaries. We fought over the one telephone (a party line shared with our neighbors down the road) and, especially, the one bathroom.

“Get out, you’ve been in there over five minutes.”

“Are you reading comic books or did you fall in?”

Then, when the bathroom hog exited, there was a mad rush for the hotspot.

“I was here first.”

“No, I was.”

“You lost your place in line when you got the phone.”

“Sarah saved my place.”

“No fair saving someone else’s place.”

“That’s not true, the rule is you can save someone else’s place if they’re only gone for five minutes.”

We never said excuse me, please, or I’m sorry. We threatened to beat each other to a pulp, to whup the other, to choke, disfigure, or maim the other. Yet, despite how vigorously and aggressively we teased and taunted one another, we knew that we were in this together. Only we could ever truly understand what it was to be a member of this specific clan bound by blood and history. So we settled in to wait on Portersville Road for Jesus to return and rapture us to Petra. Soon. It would happen soon, but only if we continued to support God’s work. My mother and my father were consistent about one thing: the world was coming to an end, and only through the church could they make it to salvation.