Читать книгу Mormon Mayhem - Keaton Albertson - Страница 5

Therefore, strengthen your brethren in all your conversation, in all your prayers, in all your exhortations, and in all your doings. -Doctrine and Covenants 108: 7

Throughout my adolescent years, I used to fight constantly with my two older brothers, Stinky Steve and Bobby Boop. This fighting was not much different than the typical sibling conflict that takes place in every other household. The only extraordinary element about the warfare between my brothers and I was that it was actually encouraged by my father.

There were many evenings when my father would stoke up a large blaze in his fireplace, sit back in his easy chair, and supervise the wrestling wars between his three sons. Sometimes my father would enjoy a large bowl of homemade, buttery popcorn while observing these battles. Most of the time, however, he just nodded off to sleep under the cacophony of the squabbles that took place in front of him. When any of these wrestling matches got out of hand, my father would occasionally intervene with a verbal warning of redirection. On the whole, however, he let most of the physical combat slide unless blood was drawn from one of us three boys.

There was a brief reprieve from the incessant bickering between my siblings and I when my father would completely prohibit all fighting. During the several minutes of family prayer that took place before dinner each night, my father had zero tolerance for any sibling conflict. As every good Mormon family practices, mealtimes are designed to be activities of pleasant communication and family bonding. Dinner is supposed to be prepared at a structured interval every day, when all family members eat at once, seated around the table together. Just before the evening meal is served, a family prayer is typically offered. This traditional ceremony involves all family members who are positioned around the table to kneel down beside their chairs and engage in group prayer. The prayer itself is commonly lead by the priesthood leader of the household, which is generally the father of the family. But as the children get older the father may call upon anyone to offer the family prayer before dinner.

My father’s mealtime monologues to the heavens, which were complete with prolonged utterances of catch phrases and obsequious tripe toward Joseph Smith, seemed to go on forever. During these long stretches of litany, I often found myself impatiently waiting for the prayer to end, keeping my opened eyes fixated upon the oval-shaped, shag rug that my mother had spread out beneath the kitchen table. Amongst the yellow-colored fibers of the shag material, I usually discovered large swaths of crumbs and food debris that my mother had failed to collect with her vacuum. As she usually just vacuumed a wide path in the middle of the floor while cleaning, my mother would commonly leave the peripheral carpet edges and any areas around the furniture completely untouched for weeks. Thus, although the carpet looked superficially clean, it was actually quite filthy and littered with food particles.

I occasionally entertained myself during the many minutes of family intercession by organizing the food bits found on the shag rug into homogenous piles. Dried chunks of scrambled eggs would be cordoned off into one pile with Cheerios and bits of Wheaties into another. Bread crumbs would compose a separate order while miscellaneous detritus was gathered its own pile. When there was not a great deal of food pieces to be found, it usually meant that the shag rug had been scoured over by an invading ant colony before dinnertime. I would occasionally observe long trails of these minute, black creatures while kneeling around the kitchen table during family prayer. I marveled at the little insects as they carted off the spilled oatmeal or hauled away amorphous chunks of Malt-O-Meal that made its way to the floor after one of my mother’s “eat it or wear it” campaigns against my brothers. It was when the ant population began to swell that my mother actually took it upon herself to move the kitchen table and the chairs out of the way so that she could vacuum the yellow rug. Until then, the food crumbs were fodder to be flipped, flung, and launched at my siblings during prayer time.

While my two older brothers kneeled down in reverent prayer around the kitchen table, I would sometimes select hard pieces of the food particles from the shag rag and flick them at their faces. This action would evoke a look of scorn from my brothers, occasional cursing, and inevitable retaliation, as they would eventually respond by tossing crumbs back at me. The crumb exchange would involve a few volleys from either side until my father heard the commotion in between his prayerful words. He would then pause his humble prayer just long enough to knock one of his three boys upside the head while we were kneeling beside him, only to resume his homage to Joseph Smith once we were silenced.

Overall, I think that my father believed that he was doing a good thing by letting his children release their physical aggression upon each other rather than demonstrating it toward strangers. Maybe he figured that if he supervised the fighting at certain points and sanctioned it during inappropriate times, such as family prayer, it would teach us proper interpersonal boundaries. Perhaps this was an effective means to parent three unruly brothers. But what my father did not know was that the fighting between my brothers and I was not always for sport, and it did not always take place while he was supervising us. Some of the more serious altercations occurred when my father was away from the home at work or endeavoring upon some church business with his wife.

On the occasions when my father was not present to supervise the sibling battles, the fighting between my brothers and I often resulted in the incidental destruction of property inside our house. More than once, my mother’s knickknacks were broken during the course of a pillow fight gone wrong. Several vases were shattered over the years, in addition to a few large, ceramic animals that my mother had collected during the 1970’s. Miraculously, it was never discovered that any of these items had been broken. This was largely due to the various concealment tactics that my brothers and I used to cover up the crime scenes. With a few rearrangements of the knickknacks on the shelves, the missing, broken pieces could be obfuscated. Larger items were replaced with houseplants. And, on at least one instance, a wall-mounted fixture that had been smashed during the course of our fighting was replaced with a puzzle that Bobby Boop had quickly glued together, framed, and hung on the wall. These props were never questioned and my mother never seemed to notice the quantity of her possessions dwindling over time.

Not all of my brotherly fighting took place inside my parents’ house. There were many times when our sibling brawls spilled out into the backyard or developed near my father’s chicken coop or within his massive garden. In these instances, all implements were fair game to be used as weapons. Rakes, hoes, and shovel handles were complemented with dried sunflower stalks, corn cobs, and dirt clods. Various fruits and vegetables were also used as weapons.

When my father was at work, my mother attempted to intervene only during a few of these outdoor fights, especially when they became particularly violent. There was one flagrant incident when she witnessed all three of her sons engaged in mortal combat within our father’s garden and she rushed outside to stop the battle. After my mother cursed up a storm and commanded us to stop from afar, my brothers and I continued to fight, undeterred. My mother then looked for a more effective means to end the altercation. “Where’s something I can throw, goddammit?” she hollered, searching the ground around her to find something to aid in her intervention.

“Here you go,” I yelled back at my mother from the garden battlefield, “use this!” I hurled a large potato at my mother, lobbing it through the air in her direction. Being unable to deflect the flying tuber, the lumpy potato struck my mother squarely in her chest. Wounded, she grabbed herself and crumbled to the ground, spouting some religious nonsense about being a martyr as she fell.

The fighting in the garden immediately took pause.

“Holy shit,” Bobby Boop said to me, looking back and forth between me and our fallen mother. “You just hit mom in the tit with a potato!”

No I didn’t,” I stated. “I didn’t throw nothing. That was you.”

“I just watched you throw it. You’re in trouble now, Keaton.”

“I am not,” I fired back. “You’re in trouble. You did it.”

“Nah-uh, you did!”

Seconds later, the fighting resumed. All the while, my mother lied upon the grass, crying, holding herself. No one came to her rescue.

~*~*~*~

In addition to holding regular family prayer, each Mormon household is encouraged to maintain a garden and to keep a sizeable food storage. This practice stems from the belief that families should be self-reliant so that they might be able to weather the storm of any political or financial hardship that may befall them. From the early days of the Utah Pioneers to present time, Mormons have passed on their knowledge of agriculture through many generations. My family was no different from the typical Mormon collective, as my father kept a massive garden and often enlisted the slave labor of his three sons to keep care of it.

When the multitude of our garden crops grew ripe in the fall, my mother would spend many days bottling and preserving the nasty vegetables. She canned beets, pickles, asparagus, and corn, along with peaches, crabapples, and plums from my father’s many fruit trees. The produce that derived from my father’s garden and small orchard was far more than my mother could process through her laborious bottling endeavors. Further, the food storage in my parents’ house soon expanded to outgrow the holding capacity of their basement stockpile. Whatever produce that could not be bottled was given away by the bushels every year. But still there were leftovers, lots of leftovers. This excess produce provided ammunition for a fall tradition of neighborly exchange known as: Harvest Wars.

Each Autumn, the kids around my neighborhood would collect all of the unused vegetables from their respective gardens. They would then gather their forces, typically in small hordes of siblings and close friends, and wage war upon their closest neighbors by using the unused garden produce as munitions. My brothers and I usually did not fare well during Harvest Wars. This was largely because Bobby Boop and Stinky Steve were both limp-wrist pantywaists. The other major complication toward my wartime success was that the produce from my father’s garden was substandard. Where I had potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and the occasional zucchini at my disposal, my neighbors generally had larger gourds, melons, and eggplants available to them. This match up was the equivalent of being armed with a pistol and waging war against an enemy that had heavy artillery. No matter how many spoiled tomatoes I had, they did not compare to the firepower of a large squash.

After several consecutive years of getting my ass kicked during Harvest Wars, I suggested to my neighbor rivals that we organize the event into a competition of sorts, as opposed to all out warfare like we had usually conducted. It sometimes became difficult to determine which opponent had lost at the conclusion of our previous Harvest War campaigns, as both victor and defeated enemy alike would be covered with vegetable stains all over their clothing. With so much carnage all around, arguments often erupted as to which faction truly had won the war. Organizing the event into a clear competition, I argued, would make it so the winning side was easily identified.

My idea was quite simple. I suggested that each neighborhood kid take a turn riding their bicycle down the street. As they did so, the enemy forces would be allowed to bombard the rider with whatever garden produce that they had at their disposal. If the rider made it completely down the block without wrecking his bicycle or being forced off it through the vegetable bombardment, they would win the competition. In the end, whichever team had the most kids make a successful bicycle run down the street, they would be declared the champions. After a brief negotiation with the other neighborhood juveniles, my tournament suggestion was accepted and a date was set for the Harvest Wars competition to commence.

Once the competition was underway, several of the kids encountered terrific wrecks on their bicycles as a direct consequence of having vegetable matter caught up inside their wheel spokes or pedals. Others were unable to make it half way down the street before getting pelted off their two-wheeled chariots by fruit that was hurled by my brothers and I. Several of the neighborhood children’s bicycles were significantly damaged during this competition. And, of course, many of the participants received physical injuries.

When it was my turn to navigate the treacherous street on my bicycle, I became apprehensive. In the minutes preceding my run, I had sent several kids home, crying in pain, and I became worried that I might meet their same fate. As I started pedaling down the road, I became more confident with each passing yard. Tomatoes splattered against my shirt. I pedaled on. Cucumbers struck my legs. Still I pedaled on. With the finish line in sight, I ducked my head down low and furiously pedaled, picking up valuable speed. Out of my periphery, a cantaloupe soared through the air. Then another. I steered around the melon onslaught just as a lumpy, yellow squash spun toward my head. With splashes of orange, seed-laden pulp, all around me, I dodged the squash and made my final push toward the finish line.

My bicycle run was cut short by an eggplant. The rotten, purplish nightshade slammed into my head with such force that my eyesight momentarily went blank. Flung from off my bicycle, I stretched my arms out and did a Pete Rose maneuver across the asphalt, scraping away my flesh like a cheese grader. Fifteen feet and several blood stains later, my battered body came to a rest. My bicycle was lying in a crumpled mess in the middle of the street, my broken body not far from it. As I looked up from my prone position spread out across the street, I saw my neighbors congratulating each other with high-fives and cheers over my defeat. I slowly picked myself up and dragged my mangled bike over to the curb and swallowed the hard truth that I had yet again lost Harvest Wars.