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A Pilgrimage

I

I’ve read many stories of revenants and apparitions, but my ghosts merely disappear. I never see them. They haunt me by not being there, by the table where no one eats, the empty window that lets the sun in without a shadow.

Few memories give me a sense of my childhood—perhaps, later, more will surface. Among those few is the darkened room from which proceed my mother’s moans. This is not a particular moment that I remember; it is the background of many years, nearly all my early life. She moans for so many reasons that it will be difficult more than to suggest their range. Probably I am ignorant of her most exquisite pains. I know enough not to make light of lamentations.

Sometimes I could get her to play the piano. She sat at the battered old upright, her eyes shut, picking out what she could remember of a Chopin polonaise or some cheap waltz from 1920. And then—what really moved her—“Brilliant Variations,” by someone named Butler, on “Pass Me Not” or other hymn. I was fascinated by the way she kept her eyes closed. To glance at the music, just as to read a paragraph of print, gave her migraines.

I knew, of course, the words to the hymns she played, and, whether or not I sang them, they sounded in my inner ear, even through Butler’s brilliance.

Some day the silver cord will break

And I no more as now shall sing

Ghosts gather in such lines.

But O the joy when I shall wake

Within the palace of the King.

It is not for her that I write this. She is dead, safe at last, out of all relation. I can recall, still, what she looked like at particular times, how she moved in certain spaces. But little by little she fades, replaced by an unsubstantial description somewhere in the memory. Best to make it as definite as possible. All we remember, finally, is words.

“I was always so weak,” she said. “My heart.” She held her throat between thumb and index finger, which is how she took her pulse. “When I was sixteen, the doctor said”—an unaccustomed pleasure in her voice now—“I shouldn’t ever have to work, I was made to sit on a velvet cushion.”

She taught piano while still in high school. (How little I actually knew her, her life extending back into the blank before my time—when I was asked for details, after she died, I put down a wrong place of birth.) As my father studied law and then went to work on the railroad, so she went to the conservatory, graduated, but then, fleeing her parents, married and, as they say, had children.

It was not my father that she married—he came later. I have two pictures of her first husband. In both of them, the left arm is in a Napoleonic position, as if he were holding a glass in front of him, but the hand is empty. “He posed that way,” she told me. “He was proud of his wrist watch.” He showed up, years later, with a second wife named Bessie, a sad-faced, decent-seeming creature who apparently kept him with her, and under control, by means of small but frequent doles. He was then (I mean, at his re-entry) a barber in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

My mother’s favorite image was that of the church considered as a great speckled bird, which she took as a simple parable. Alien down here, humiliated and despised, the saints would eventually, at the Rapture, soar. Her favorite color was green, signifying restfulness. She maintained that a room with red wallpaper would drive one crazy.

She grew up in Missouri, an only child, but moved with her parents to Redmond, Oregon, where she went through high school. Whether she was in fact content there, I have no way of knowing, but certainly ever after she looked back to those days as a lost happiness and Oregon as paradise. Just a few years before her death, when she realized, not only that nothing had turned out right, but that there was no longer time for any good to come—no horizon left for any miraculous rescue—she began to retrieve what memories she could of Oregon. There were many eligible young men in Redmond, though her parents were watchful. If she stayed out too late, her mother in a fret sent after her. Her father, mild but dutiful, would seek her out, take her home. When her affections settled too firmly on a certain Lindsay, they took panic, packed up their things, and fled with her back to Missouri.

My mother’s high school graduation picture

(Redmond, Oregon)

At Nebraska Wesleyan Conservatory of Music

But Lindsay came again to mind, and one day she wrote him at his old address in Oregon—this must have been in 1972. He not only got the letter, but wrote back. And what he wrote was that he had never married but had waited for her. I was stunned when she talked, not altogether coherently, about going back to Oregon, to marry Lindsay.

My mother’s first husband, Charles

“When did you actually last see him?” I asked her. She had to think, to count it up.

“Nineteen seventeen.” She was too ill by now to go anywhere.

The history of my mother’s religious opinions should be told as the record of a pilgrimage. As I imagine most pilgrimages, it was less the struggle toward a given end than a continual flight from disappointment and unhappiness. Neither the joys of heaven nor hell’s worst prospects provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world.

Before her first marriage, she played the piano for Methodist services. Probably at that time she thought little about religious doctrine or religious experience. It was, she said later, “an old formal M.E. church.” But once she married handsome Charles—under what circumstances I never heard—and was delivered of their first child, also a Charles, her relation to those early services must have changed. Ill soon after giving birth, she was kept awake one night by sounds of a party in the next apartment. Charles senior, his hair slicked like Valentino’s and his wrist watch gleaming, went to quiet them down, and joined the party.

She described the scene. It was one of those that stuck with her, humiliating still after thirty, after forty years. She got up, the noise having increased after his leaving. In her housecoat she went to the next apartment and knocked and asked for her husband. Charles, embarrassed in his turn by the appearance of obligation in the shape of this frail form at the door, went with her, but explained the exit to his friends of an hour with a wink and a formula: “She’s a Sunday School girl.”

With their first child Charles, Jr.

I am convinced that, at that moment, the formula was wide of the mark. Probably poor Charles never in his life figured anything quite correctly. But this must have been one of the incidents pushing her toward the church as a refuge from the world as represented by “old painted women” (her colloquial old not referring to age) and by the routines of a loveless marriage. By the time I could remember anything, she was taking me to the Free Methodist church at the corner of South Avenue and Commercial Street in Emporia, Kansas.

The Free Methodists split off from their parent church (the old formal Methodists) about the time of the Civil War. It was one of the many groups preaching a return to Wesley’s doctrine of “Christian Perfection.” Sanctification, they teach, is a distinct act, subsequent to justification. To be justified, or “saved,” is to have one’s sins forgiven, but to be sanctified is to have the carnal nature, the taint of original sin, removed. They also call this state “holiness” and they are aware that the world dismisses them as “Holy Rollers.”

For they have also kept the ecstatic side of Wesleyanism. What I retain most vividly of the church in Emporia (which I attended until I was fourteen) is the way services were always rescued from dullness by what I learned to call the demonstration of the Holy Ghost. What in fact happened, Sunday after Sunday (and at Wednesday night prayer meeting), was that two women—I remember their names as Sister Eliot and Sister Faulkner, though it now sounds unlikely to me—fell under the influence of the spirit and began to behave in exactly opposite ways. They were opposites already: Sister Eliot was strawberry-blond, open-faced, outgoing, and when the spirit hit her she ran down the aisle, shouting. Sister Faulkner shrank back, twisted, moaned, and often sank to the floor, a small, swarthy woman, weeping bitterly.

My father, Arthur Waldrop, at the Santa Fe yard office

(Emporia, Kansas)

Their performance was joined in by the congregation in general, most of whom confined themselves to Amen’s, shouted or murmured, but they were the natural leaders. What, I wonder, would they have done, have become, if the church had not been there? Perhaps it is well to add that these services had nothing Erskine Caldwell about them. Powered by sexual energy perhaps (what other source is there?) they were chaste and even, I would say, dignified. And they gave some meaning to lives otherwise lost in weekday blankness.

My father thought all females in terrible league against all males, but the center of the plot was among the Free Methodist women, whom he pictured as the hags from Macbeth sitting in unholy assembly to pass judgment on him. He felt them sitting; their weight bent his shoulders.

“Your mother,” he would tell me, “didn’t have a dime when I married her.” He always started that way. “She had one damn cardboard suitcase.” If he were drunk enough, he would go on, getting louder. “Not a pot to piss in. And those three brats.” Charles, Elaine, Julian: before Julian was born, the elder Charles had taken off. Julian was born in Leeton, Missouri, at his grandparents’ house. My father had already two daughters and was close to twenty years older than his second wife. I have no idea how they met, let alone what drew them together. “Now she runs off down to that damn church. They turn her against me.”

The spookiest story I ever heard was told me by a friend, who may have written it down somewhere, but I know it from her directly.

She was in England, traveling with a boyfriend. At some point they found accommodations in one of those country houses where the family lets rooms to pay the monstrous upkeep on anachronistic grandeur. She and her friend were shown into the largest room they had ever seen, with high windows, oak paneling, huge four-poster, a room from what was to them a storybook era. A grandiose fireplace dominated the room, but there were none of the usual paraphernalia—screen, fire-dogs, bellows. Instead there was only, half in the great fireplace and half out, a cradle. They wondered at the cradle—of the old-fashioned kind, like the one Lillian Gish rocks in Intolerance—and went to dinner.

But later, when ready for bed, they could not quite manage to disregard it. They tipped it, finding that it rocked with a sort of bulky motion, soon coming to rest again. It had somehow a great weightiness to it, a dense heaviness that struck them both as incongruous in a baby-bed.

Perhaps what happened next was their effort to escape the fascination of the cradle there on the hearth (she never said so, made no attempt at explaining anything). In any case, they began horsing around and her friend, before she realized what was happening, picked her up and put her in the cradle. And then he ran across the room and turned the lights off.

And it was dark then, of course, but it was not a darkness that she recognized. It was as though there lacked not light, but the flow of time. It was not, across the black room, a distance in steps, that even the blind might feel their way, but a space of centuries, a loss total and immeasurable. And she could not get out of the cradle, which she felt rocking. She could not even struggle. With the utmost effort, she managed to form her friend’s name, but cried it so feebly that she knew it would never carry across the emptiness.

He meanwhile, as it turned out, was feeling much the same thing as she and was searching, terrified, for the light switch, which he could not find again. Finally his hand, groping blindly, hit the right spot and the room burst into light—the same room, with its paneling, its four-poster, its cradle in the fireplace, and her, clambering out of the cradle. They were both terror-stricken and refused to stay the night in that room.

You should not suppose that I am writing this to judge between my father and my mother. It would hardly be reasonable, now that they are both gone, to decide their quarrel. In my mind it remains a given, and goes on, an eternal argument.

My father named me Bernard, after Shaw, and Keith, for Sir Arthur Keith (my father’s name was Arthur). “Two old atheists,” my mother always said, certain he had picked the names to irritate her. (Her notion of atheist was a bit vague.) My father generally professed agnosticism, but in his last years—especially while drinking—insisted that he believed in God. “Otherwise,” he said, “how could I be a Mason?”

One of his favorite recollections (it must be remembered that he was half a century older than I) was the attempt of William Allen White, editor of the Emporia Gazette, to get into the local lodge. “They came to the question,” my father related, tapping my knee for emphasis, “which every applicant has to answer. They asked him, Do you believe in God? He said, I believe in William Allen White ” A dramatic pause, whether of outrage or admiration I could never decide. It was certainly portentous, our most celebrated citizen hanging in the balance. “And they turned him down!” My father had gone on up, into the Scottish Rite and the Shrine.

In the era of the Civil War, the Methodists, already old and formal, charged rental on their pews. The seceding branch, preaching largely to outcasts and the needy, decided to abolish this charge and so denominated themselves Free. It was a common practice among congregations of that time, especially near the frontier, to hire musicians for Sunday services—which meant, more often than not, bringing players from the local theater into the house of God. The Free Methodists, with all-or-nothing zeal, abolished instruments from their church, and in the early nineteen forties, when I attended and after much hesitation joined them, the singing was entirely congregational—no choir—and regulated by, at most, a pitch pipe. Sister Eliot or Sister Faulkner would lead (the one somewhat faster, the other somewhat slower, than expected tempo), not moving their hands, but simply by facing the congregation and singing out.

So when Sunday morning came around, or Sunday night, or Wednesday night, my mother would cease from her moanings, comb her hair, put on her best, and she and Elaine and I would hasten to South and Commercial for some a cappella praise, some middling preaching and, with luck, a breath of ecstasy. As long as she was there, among the saints, her life seemed clear and meaningful. Outside, in the world, she was a complex of miseries that I am still not sure I can quite sort out. “My heart,” she would say, fingers to her throat, but it stood for a whole existence.

Her greatest pride was the smallness of her hands and feet. If one of us bought her bedroom slippers for her birthday—demanding at the store their very most smallest size—they were sure to be too large and she was sure to be enraged that we should think her feet so gross. On less emotional occasions, “I have Cinderella feet,” she would say, and it was terribly plain that, not only the prince, but the entire fairy-tale realm, had passed her by, leaving the most workaday ashes.

Her first husband had been a deception. Her second she treated frankly as an enemy. It only gradually dawned on me, between battles, that I was disputed territory. Every time I went to church, it was a victory for her, and I came to regard my father as an alien power, sinister in behavior, but possessed of strange forces. His occupation itself was mysterious: as a railroader, he was fanatically punctual, continually checking his watch and angry if it got more than a few seconds from the official Santa Fe clock. But since he worked on freight trains, he was liable to appear at any hour of the night or day and just as arbitrarily to be called away. The unknown figure of the caller—just a voice on the telephone—made its way into my private mythology. Simply to answer the anonymous ring put one within the possibility of hearing, instead of an Hello that would connect with a remembered face, the disorienting but imperative “This is the caller.”

Between the living room, which for some reason or other was my bedroom for a time, and the room where my parents slept, there were huge sliding doors. (This was a house on Neosho Street, the most nearly permanent of our homes—but there was inevitably, wherever we were, a sense of provisional arrangements, of waiting for better weather, a new government.) One night when my father was in, not likely to be called, I settled down on my convertible but could not enjoy my insomnia because of the argument from the other side of the door. An argument meant that my father’s voice continued on and on into the night, occasionally raised to a shout or broken by a murmur from my mother, who for the most part maintained a dead silence. All their nights together spread out like this into an agonizing deadlock. I don’t know what they argued about, or if indeed there was a subject. To escape from the oppressive sound, I set myself to wait for the unattainable moment of entering sleep. To be conscious for once at that magical transition seemed to me—I don’t know why—a knowledge I would need, that I could not well do without.

But just when I had dozed off, slipping past the threshold I wanted so much to examine, I was jolted awake by doors slid open, then slid shut again. And then, in the dark, my father lay down beside me, breathing heavily. I made no sign of life and gradually he subsided into, I thought, a sleep of his own. But apparently he was listening, there in the dark beside me, for before I quite had a chance to miss again my moment of going to sleep, he had thrown off the cover and the great doors rolled back with a crash and he was swearing loudly. After he left his bed, Elaine had slipped in beside my mother. Now she raced back to her own room as he switched the lights on. “This is what happens,” he was yelling, “as soon as I turn my back.” The giant doors cracked shut again, leaving me dazzled with the light that was now shut out. His shouts continued on the other side, Elaine’s voice sometimes chiming in from a distance. (Neither Charles nor Julian were there—Charles was in the war in the South Pacific.) I lay tense while the shouts got louder. I heard Sister Eliot’s name. Finally there were other sounds: movements, doors. Then a blow and my mother’s scream and Elaine howling.

I began to pray. I began, with an earnestness I have rarely recaptured in any action since then, to pray to God that he would strike my father dead. My prayer was answered, some dozen years later, after both my hatred and my faith had died long lingering deaths. The only immediate aftermath of that night was a peace-offering from my father, a new secondhand piano, at which my mother sat, eyes closed, playing what she could remember of something by Chopin, a syncopated waltz from 1920, brilliant variations on “Pass Me Not.”

II

Once or twice I rode with my father on his waycar at the end of a mile-long freight. From the cupola one could see along the tops of a hundred cars to the stack of a 2900. It seemed to me a tedious trip, much of the time spent on sidings, waiting for the dinkiest passenger trains to zip by. Night came and my father lit the kerosene lamp over his jolting desk where he went through the paperwork for the hundred carloads. The lamp gave a brilliant white light from its ash mantle, but I dropped off before we made it into Newton and was only half awake to clamber across the immense freight yard where, strangely, there were blinding lights all through the air, and yet the crisscrossed rails seemed endless and unlit.

On one such trip—when I was not along—the waycar, caught suddenly in the collected slack of a hundred couplings, cracked whip-like and threw my father on the floor, where he found he could not rise again. His back was broken.

“It was those months in the hospital,” he always said later, even much later, “while I was helpless in a cast, while I was out of the way. That’s when they really got control of your mother, those holy bitches.” He was in the Santa Fe’s hospital in Topeka, where I visited once a week. I am not sure, but possibly it was then I joined the church, a ceremony that my mother took as a triumph in the war against Satan and Arthur. At any rate the house was quieter. Then, finally, he came back, and gradually everything was as before, but a little worse, as things usually get worse.

My mother’s health was a constant problem. She had had some of the best doctors: she went to Dr. Curran in Kansas City for her tinted glasses. A goiter that had developed about the time I was born was cut out by no less than Dr. Hertzler, the famous “Horse-and-Buggy-Doctor” of Halstead. He became, understandably, one of her heroes. In his hands, she felt safe. “He’s so good,” she said, not alone I gather from her own experience but from a composite legend, “he could just cut that old goiter out and then” (her tiny hand in gesture of magic) “just tie it all up with one hand.”

I might not have remembered that, except that some years later, when she went to Halstead for a checkup of some kind, I went with her and sat in the waiting room of the clinic and stared at the Mennonites in their bonnets and beards. And old Dr. Hertzler himself, who saw no patients anymore but wandered vaguely around the maze he had built, appeared with a fixed and benign smile. He had forgotten to put a shirt on, so his flannel underwear showed above baggy trousers. Stopping in front of me, he looked down from a great height and out of some pocket came the most enormous hand I had ever seen. He was a big man, but his hand was the hand of a giant, and in it was a yellow jawbreaker that he placed precisely in my palm. Then he wandered on to the next child. The nurses tolerated him.

My mother’s favorite hymn, which she looked at long enough to memorize, at the price of a terrible migraine, was “Where the Healing Waters Flow.” She played it over and over. More and more her notion of deity became that of a healing god, the waters of salvation cleansing, not only moral stain, but physical sickness and deformity. But healing was always still to come—meanwhile, she sat on the right side of the church, because her left eye was the stronger.

In one quarrel, when I was twelve, my father broke her glasses and she sued for divorce, getting an injunction that forced him to leave the premises. The final settlement by the court gave her the house and me, and he was to pay a small monthly allowance for my support.

About the same time, Elaine was graduating from high school and was getting rather serious about a ministerial student at the College of Emporia. He wanted to marry her, but she decided that, in spite of her feelings for him, she could not marry a Presbyterian.

This was, I am convinced, her own seriously considered decision, whatever counsels Mother may have offered. But it pointed to a great problem that had obviously to be faced. The local church was small. There were many marriageable females, but no suitable, unattached man. The College of Emporia, to the extent that it was not simply secular, was the institution of a cold, formal, worldly church, worse than the Methodist if not quite Episcopalian. Kansas State Teachers College, on the other side of town, was of no religion at all—they could well have atheists teaching there. There were two attempts to save the situation. The first was to explore other churches. (I should point out here that, though my father attributed everything to the influence of Free Methodist furies, the Free Methodists did not altogether approve of divorce and my mother was conscious of having fallen somewhat in their esteem.)

We visited the local Friends congregation, which I now think must have been rather degenerate—with a hired preacher—but my mother found it cold. From there we went straight to the Salvation Army, more to her taste, and once or twice I even played my violin in their street services. (I hope my father never found out.) But in spite of evangelical fervor, somewhat wasted on Emporia where there was only one bum and nothing stronger than 3.2 beer, except for those who could afford bootleg rates, their sense of doctrine was undeveloped, a bit Buddhist almost in its determination to rescue the perishing before specifying the works of grace. This irked my mother and, besides, though haphazard orchestration was at first a relief from the purely vocal strains we were used to, it hardly took conservatory training to be offended by the sound. Besides, there was hardly a male, over fourteen and under sixty-five, to be seen. We moved on to the Hardshell Baptists.

As I think back over all this it makes, alternately, too little and too much sense.

The Hardshell Baptists had a tiny church that had been a neighborhood grocery. The sign over the door, the only trace of recent paint, said “Fundamental Baptist Church” but my mother always referred to them as Hardshells. The preacher, who somehow made me think of a butcher, was a true ecstatic, carried off in turn by waves of joy and a pity for lost souls. While the latter was on him, during the altar call, he would sob uncontrollably as if his heart were broken. He radiated a sense of poverty. His church, a missionary effort, took all his time and energy and gave him only the most spiritual returns. I never saw more than six or eight attend any service and that was counting his wife and daughter. He wanted desperately for us to join his congregation and—even though there was no young man for Elaine—we might have done so, had he not insisted, with more sincerity than tact, on doctrines anathema to my mother. What annoyed her most was the claim that once saved, a person could never lose salvation, the doctrine of Eternal Security.

“Do you think,” he asked Mother, “that a sheep can become a goat?”

“Once saved, always saved?” she asked in return, daring him to affirm an outrage.

“When we are saved, we become God’s lambs,” he said, warming to his argument. “And His grace is sufficient to keep us from falling.”

“You mean you can go out and get drunk and be worldly and still be a Christian?” Her voice was getting higher as his gestures took on more and more pulpit manner. While his left hand moved horizontally, as if smoothing something, the right made a sort of chopping motion.

“If you’re really saved,” he said, “you won’t do that. You’ll live as a dove because the Lamb of God is in you. We’re born again, we are his children. Do you think His children can become the children of the Devil?”

“Well,” she said, shouting by now, “you can’t tell me just because a man has been saved once, he can go out and drink and swear and murder someone and smoke old cigarettes and still be a born-again child of God.” And as he raised his arms, doubtless to bring down his final and most crushing point—he was now red in the face and his forehead was beading with sweat—she bellowed, just before sweeping out the door, which she slammed behind her, “And what about the backsliding heifer? ”

Gradually, after the Four-square Gospel and a few more, we found ourselves back in the old church at South and Commercial, and with a different solution: Elaine would go away to a holiness college. The Free Methodists have several schools, but the nearest was in Illinois, whereas a related sect, the Wesleyans, though unrepresented in Emporia, maintained a junior college in Miltonvale, Kansas, and in the fall Elaine entered Miltonvale as a freshman. My mother’s inquiries into the faith of the Wesleyans brought forth not a single deviation from Free Methodist doctrine. Their services were identical. The only differences were, firstly, that the Wesleyans had church councils, but no bishops, and secondly, they had no prejudice against the use of musical instruments in their worship.

My father’s mother at her house on Cottonwood Street, Emporia.

Meanwhile my father, whom I saw more or less regularly—given his completely random schedule—had moved in with his mother and his brother Roscoe, who lived on Cottonwood Street. My memories of Emporia, not all pleasant, are lined with lovely elms arching and interlocking over streets of asphalt or brick. And when I try to think of the same town since the Dutch disease passed through (it has been over thirty years since I was last there, for my father’s funeral) it comes before me as a wasteland of stumps and rotten trunks. Already fallen or still standing, they are dead, and in the middle of summer the sun shines through them. The cicadas (which we called locusts) must now have difficulty finding a patch of bark to discard their shells on, the great trees themselves skeletons.

My grandmother was in her nineties, almost totally deaf. She sat through most of each day rocking, wrapped in smelly woolens, nodding peacefully. My father hated her. He swore she could hear perfectly, but simply would not listen. His greatest fear was that she would outlive us all, me included. Occasionally she would struggle up out of her chair, make her way to the kitchen and do some mischief. Deciding to make coffee, for instance, she once brewed a good quarter pound of my father’s Bond Street tobacco and if he had not come in while the reeking mixture was still percolating, she might have drunk it. Roscoe was her youngest child and had lived with her for sixty years.

One of my father’s continual humiliations was Roscoe’s presence at the depot. Freight crews assembled at the yard office, a mile out of town, but from time to time he would have some business or other at the passenger depot (which he always referred to as “the levee,” as though the tracks were a kind of Mississippi, floating streamliners between Chicago and California) and then he would invariably catch sight of Roscoe’s grizzly form. Roscoe, with his antique Stetson and weary suspenders, made the most drab surroundings look opulent by simple contrast. He was a soup line figure, stiff, unshaven, with sunken cheeks and deep-sunken eyes. He rolled his own and had always a mutilated cigarette between two fingers,that had turned brown in consequence, or between his teeth, which were also heavily stained. He had a job at the Depot Hotel, where his official title was, unless someone was putting me on, “dishwasher’s assistant”—his main task, making soap for the kitchen—and most of his working hours seemed to be spent across the street on the station platform. The baggageman and a couple of retired railroaders, now become whittlers, were his cronies, and they whiled away the afternoons telling adventures and arguing politics. It was not Roscoe’s appearance that embarrassed my father—though women tried to keep their children from staring at the little assembly—but his strongly expressed Republican opinions.

More and more, as he got older, my father’s defenses against the world were anger and eating, and often he indulged them concurrently. Eventually I hesitated, especially at meals, to introduce any subject whatever, the range of his irritation having increased along with the force of resentment. He listened to all the radio newscasts, and commentators, and read the Gazette from beginning to end. It all made him furious. “You son-of-a-bitch!” he would shout at Fulton Lewis, Jr., or just some neutral voice from the local station. Or reaching the editorial page of the paper, and seeing the signature “William L. White,” “Young Bill isn’t half the man his dad was. Runs off to New York and lets the paper go to hell.” And then, putting down the paper a moment to refill his pipe, “Of course, old White tried to get us all to vote for Cal Coolidge. The son-of-a-bitch.”

My mother’s favorite story was a simple anecdote. A woman—“and she wasn’t an old woman either”—took down a dipper from its hook. And I was transported from the world I knew, a world of hot and cold faucets, from Emporia to Leeton, where the well water tasted awful to me—or to Samaria. She took this dipper from the hook, without lighting the lamp. And in the shadows she scooped a drink from the water bucket and swallowed, along with the water, a black widow spider.

“No one knew this was going to happen,” my mother always said at the end of this tale. “Not even the angels knew. But the Holy Ghost knew.”

“Didn’t Jesus know?” I asked.

“She thought she had a long life yet to live. And she went to meet her Judge, prepared or not. You never know, from one minute to the next.”

Elaine, at Miltonvale, promptly attracted a young man, a prospective minister of the right faith, and at Christmas vacation brought him home. This was the first Christmas after the war. Charles was just out of the navy, Julian had just gone into the navy, but as it worked out, they were both home.

My mother’s heart was set on having a preacher in the family. She had given up on Charles. He was not only headstrong, but a constant reminder of the Charles who had deserted her—she always claimed the younger to be a spitting image of the elder. She decorated the walls with photographs of her son in uniform (and there was for some years a silver star in the front window, denoting a member of the family on overseas duty) but his presence was always a trial, from preschool age even, when from behind the post of a porch he hurled whatever swear words he knew down a steep terrace to startled passing strangers.

She had, by this time, just about given up on Julian, mainly because of his long-standing feud with the Emporia police, which had ended in the compromise of his recent enlistment in the navy. It was touch and go for a while, the police swearing they would have him in reform school. The balance shifted, however, with Julian’s theft of their arsenal, at which point they showed a willingness to bargain, and, instead of threatening, offered him a position on the force. And they were again angered by the language of his refusal.

My case was not yet decided, which is to say that my mother had not given up, but as yet I had received no call to preach. All that could safely be said so far was that it was still not too late. The call was, of course, absolutely essential since, besides standing to reason, it has an unequivocal text (Romans 10:15). Elaine envisioned for herself the sort of double ministry in which both the preacher (male) and his helpmeet qualify as able workers—in short, she felt called to be a preacher’s wife.

She and mother consulted together and prayed long hours to know whether this particular conjunction was the will of God. Her young man, she insisted—still insists, if his name comes up—was a fervent Christian and a genius. The latter quality immensely pleased her, though I think in mother’s view it suggested vain science and man’s philosophy. In this case, at least, intelligence created a snare. While Elaine sought the counsel of God and parent, Charles and Julian were checking out her guest. Their conclusion, which clicked almost audibly as their eyes met after some reply, did not concern itself with matters of faith or morals, but with problems of coherence and comprehension. They had decided, simultaneously and irrevocably, that Elaine’s suitor was mad.

So they began to treat him accordingly, taking his most commonplace remarks as full of strange meaning, echoing his words in slightly distorted senses. Having been a trifle nervous at meeting the family, he soon developed a case of jitters. But there was worse to come.

Charles had brought home guns, several Japanese rifles and a German pistol. He had set up a target in the basement and every once in a while went down and blasted away with the pistol—the only weapon he could find ammunition for. He and Julian now took the guest to the basement to show him around. “They’re shooting that old gun off,” my mother said, red-eyed from prayer. The shots in fact were ringing out, a nerve-racking sound. Then they stopped. And soon, with laborious shuffling steps, Julian and Charles ascended, the third man more or less hanging between them. He was stunned, but soon recovered, without visible wound. Julian claimed he had

simply suddenly collapsed. He maintained, however, that Julian had hit him over the head. In any case, a few hours after what seemed full recovery, he became feverish and, by degrees, delirious. Dr. Hovorka examined him and pronounced with what seemed utter irrelevance—we would not have been surprised at hearing a diagnosis of epilepsy, plague, Huntington’s—that the patient was suffering from a strep throat. He should be kept in bed.

We kept him in bed. In a few days he had recovered and gone home. And just before Elaine’s vacation was up, she got a letter from him. Charles and Julian had both done their best to convince my mother that he was insane and Elaine’s protests that he was an intellectual served merely to reinforce this idea. But even Elaine’s sentiments were confused by the arrival of the letter. It started with compliments and went on to anecdotes and small talk, but one passage stood out and she went back to it again and again.

. . . I felt you had somewhat cooled towards me. I don’t mean at your home, where I was very sick, as you know, sicker perhaps than you know, but before, at Miltonvale where I will soon, I trust, see you soon again. I am afraid that they

(Here he had apparently started to write some name, possibly Elaine’s college roommate, but crossed it out and put “they.”)

have told you evil stories about me.

Understand, I don’t mean to accuse anyone of willful lying. But they may be mistaken. It’s hard to say what I mean, but they may have reported with the best of intentions a falsehood. Oh if you knew what it costs me to write this. Because, you see, I don’t know if it is false or not. I have asked my Redeemer for forgiveness, even if I did not actually sin.

What I am trying to say is that if it is a story about a woman they may have seen me with very late at night, long after hours, a few months ago, I would like to tell you the whole story. I did not know what kind of woman she was. Oh it is too painful, I cannot tell you how I came to be in her room that night. What I want you to know is that when I realized the sort she was, what she wanted of me, I started to leave.

Then everything blacked out. Later I had no memory of what came after that moment. The next thing I knew was that we were walking along the street and she had hold of my arm. I pulled my arm loose and ran. It may be that they saw me walking with her arm. But what would they have been doing out at that hour.

That makes no difference. I only wish I knew what happened while I was out. In any case, it is under the blood. Believe me. . . .

And on. And then to other things.

Elaine went back to Miltonvale, and might well have married him. But Mother had now decided he was possessed. The letter (she always liked things to be documented—the letter went into her trunk) was a perfect admission of guilt. The demon had possessed his body while he was with some sinful creature. That was why he had no memory of the events. And if the devil had him once, what was to prevent its happening again? She decided that Elaine should be far away from him, at some other college. This was the sign that pointed us to Sharon.

III

One whole dinner party, once, I had to be polite and listen to a philosopher, whose name I can’t recall, expand on the notion of divine omnipotence. No doubt Rosmarie was suffering more than I, since her Catholic background remains with her in the form of a distaste for religious conversation. (My mother, almost at the end of her life, was heard lamenting by telephone to her last pastor, “I had three sons—two of them married witches, and one married a Catholic.” Her firmest conviction was that once a Catholic, always a Catholic.)

The miracles of the Bible are violations of the so-called laws of nature, but these laws are based on observation, are merely empirical, and deity is above them. When Jesus, after the resurrection, comes into the room without opening the door, it is a miracle—in the sense that one cannot ordinarily do it. To raise the dead is miraculous and, likewise, to make the sun stand still. We cannot do these things, but God can, just as he performed the greatest miracle of all: the creation. He is omnipotent, which is to say, he can do anything. No—he can do anything that can be done.

Me, Charles (holding me), Julian, Elaine

(Emporia)

For beyond these mere physical impossibilities—saying to this mountain, Be removed—there are the true impossibilities of logic. Even God cannot annul the law of identity, which says that whatever is, is. He can, of course, destroy what is, but cannot make it at the same time be and not be. He can create seven times seventy worlds, but cannot keep seven from being a prime number. Two plus two equals four in all possible worlds, created or uncreated.

Well, I had heard all this before, and while he was talking, and on the way home, I was faintly amused by anyone taking such things so seriously. But later that night I was unreasonably angry, to think that people professing belief in God should turn and subject him to Copi or Quine. If I were to invent a god, I would make sure he didn’t get stuck with the primeness of seven or have reason to feel threatened by Godel’s proof. He might produce a square circle, if he felt so inclined. And, yes, he could, at one and the same moment, exist and not exist.

Elaine, me, Charles, and Julian on a visit to Leeton.

Elaine, Charles, me, and Julian (Emporia)

Sharon College, sitting on a hill in South Carolina, at a point where the Blue Ridge has petered out, was founded by Wesleyans shortly before the First World War. It is recorded (by the Reverend Eber Teter, a founding father whose health failed before he could accept the office of treasurer) that when the first spadeful of clay was turned, those present fell on their knees with one accord, sang repeatedly “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow” and prayed many a fervent prayer. “How we felt our hearts,” his account says, “burn within us.” When my mother and Elaine and I got to Sharon, walking the last half-mile through the dusk, the fragrance of apples gradually replacing the soot in our lungs, Wednesday night prayer meeting was on in the chapel and they were singing “Jesus Paid It All.”

Sharon was a junior college, but boasted a four-year program in theology—leading to the degree Th.B.—and it had a high school as well. We moved into three rooms of a building called Teter Hall, which had been the original men’s dormitory but, converted now, housed married students and us. And the English teacher Miss Yodle who, to mutual regret, lived just below us. On each floor, at the end of the hallway, a john had been installed, though to shower one had to trudge to the basement. Miss Yodle would not use these inside facilities, I suppose because the rest of us did, and so she had a private outhouse—not the only one around but the only one still in use, which every Halloween of course got tipped over, leaving a two-hole stool on exhibit.

Julian was then stationed on the West Coast, having joined the navy on V-J Day. When his discharge was due, as I found out later, Charles had driven (from where, I have no idea) to California to get him (to take him where, Charles probably had no clear idea either). Julian, it turned out, was in the brig. He had bashed the mess cook with a serving spoon after the cook refused him seconds. I remember how once, when Julian was growing up, he ran to Mother crying and tried to get her to hide him.

“They’re going to put me in jail,” he kept screaming.

“What have you done?”

“I pulled Swint’s nose,” he said and Mother, relieved, tried to console him.

“You shouldn’t have done it, but they aren’t going to put you in jail for pulling someone’s nose.” He looked doubtful, and it came out that he had pulled his friend, by the nose, from Fifth and Neosho to Twelfth and Main, close to a mile.

The town Sharon is three miles from the college. Its Main (and only paved) Street is the highway; on one side of it the railroad runs parallel and on the other there is a rampart of buildings about the length of a city block—Sharon’s business district. The buildings towards Greenville are old, the end one a large frame structure housing a general store; those the other direction are newer—there is a movie house and, where the highway begins to curve, the quicker to reach Atlanta, a pink service station. (I say “is” because, although everything has doubtless changed since I left there, Sharon seemed to me at the time to present an aspect of eternity: it was so ugly.)

Charles, in front of the house at 614 Neosho Street.

There is one break in the rampart, one vacant lot between two edifices, where we held street services. J.W. would back his car over the sidewalk onto the packed clay. He had a loudspeaker on top of his car and after we had sung a few hymns he would preach into an elegant little microphone perched on a pole of aluminum. People just walking along Main Street would suddenly, when they were past Harvey’s package store, find themselves confronted by an invitation of enormous volume. And coated with static, since J.W. yelled directly into the little cup and sometimes shook the rod in his enthusiasm.

J.W. was himself enormous, balloon-like, and when he was in the spirit it often seemed to me that he might bounce too high and be carried away. He was from somewhere in the hills—the lower Blue Ridge—and he had ministered to hill people for fifteen years before coming to Sharon to study homiletics. His reputation had, in fact, ranged from village to village over a surprising territory, mainly because of an exorcism he had performed in the late thirties. An old farmer, who produced principally moonshine, was dying in his shack and J.W., after climbing a mountain to see him, was greeted by a crone carrying a shotgun and told that the case was absolutely hopeless. The man, eighty-odd years old, had been hexed. A lady on a neighboring slope—the shotgun-carrier suggested a broken engagement, but it could hardly have been recent—was by some means or other causing his chest to constrict, a little more each day, and the end was near. J.W. went in, despite the smell, and found the man lying on a pallet, eyes bulging out of a dry skull, his arms locked around his chest as if he were holding himself to the bed. J.W. prayed, read the Twenty-third Psalm, prayed some more, put his hand on the old head, and prayed some more. The man seemed already in another world. J.W. leapt to his feet, took a charred stick from the stove and on the rough wall of the shack scratched a stick figure of more than human size.

“Where does it hurt?” he shouted to the sick man, who in spite of himself had moved until he could see the drawing. “Where does it hurt?” J.W. shouted again and getting no reply shouted on, “Here! Here’s where the devil is!” and scratched an X in the middle of his stick figure’s chest. “The devil is there! He’s there!” he shouted, pointing at the X. Then he grabbed the shotgun from the crone, and shouting “In the blessed name of Jesus” pulled the trigger and blasted the X, the devil, and a good portion of the wall. In an instant the man was on his feet, hopping mad and cursing, chasing J.W. halfway across the mountain while the crone, on her knees, screamed hallelujahs.

I played the violin. I started in junior high and as in many of my more complicated projects, began with promise, a promise never fulfilled. But musicians were scarce at Sharon, so for street services a fragile girl named Stella played the accordion, and I fiddled away—practically inaudible under Stella’s vast and unarticulated sound. Often Evangeline stood next to me and held the hymnbook so that the pages would not flip in the wind. I tried hard to figure out Evangeline. Glancing at her (sideways, missing a few notes of “Work For the Night is Coming”) I could sometimes suppose that she was different merely because she believed more fervently or lived more righteously or prayed more than all the others—which she may have done.

“My text,” J.W. roared on one such occasion, “is from Revelations.” It usually was. And he proceeded to read, in its entirety, what the Spirit said to the church of the Laodiceans: “These things saith the Amen. . . .” A train was pulling in across the street, stealing J.W.’s thunder and sending a shower of soot down on all of us. There were few listeners anyway, but some left amid the roar. A teenage girl began to laugh and shout into her boyfriend’s ear—he tried then to pull her away from the meeting, but she stayed and so did he. An old woman sitting on a package wrapped in brown paper slipped a little more snuff into her already bulging lip. “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot.” The train had stopped and was snorting. “I would thou wert cold or hot.” The black cloud that belched out now blotted the daylight and we could hear nothing but the engine puffing and grinding. Engineers do not like to stop at Sharon, going east; the rails are upgrade then all the way to Easley. The electric voice came through again as the last car rumbled past and the sky slowly reappeared. “Behold I stand at the door and knock. . . .” I could look at the scripture as it was read, because Evangeline had her blue leather Bible open, but I was gazing at my brothers, whom I had not seen for two years but who were now, suitcases and all, crossing the highway from the depot, followed by two of the toughest-looking characters I had ever seen.

“And I tell you,” J.W. was roaring, “when Jesus comes back to this earth with power and glory and sits down to judge the quick and the dead, is he going to find you with your lamps trimmed and waiting? Is he going to find you ready at the Rapture or will he say depart from me ye wicked into everlasting damnation I never knew ye?” Stella started playing for the invitation. Evangeline opened the book to “Just As I Am” and I scratched out the melody underneath the heavy chords. Most of the sidewalk congregation moved away quickly, but those who did not were soon cornered and exhorted to give their hearts to Jesus. A tall black man with white hair and expensive clothes nodded yes he was already the Lord’s and touched the hem of his jacket to make sure it still covered his hip pocket. The woman on the package was weeping and with a crooked index finger scooped a mass of snuff out of her jaw and slapped it on the sidewalk. When it was all over and the microphone and the accordion and my violin were packed away in J.W.’s car, neither Charles nor Julian was to be seen, so I rode back to the campus with the others.

My mother’s first experience of divine healing was directly after separation from my father. It was rather an informal experience, without a service and without the shock of sudden recovery that is commonly reported. “I told the Lord,” she said, “that I was going to do his will—and he would just have to give me the strength for it.”

The most obvious improvement was in her eyes. She now found it possible to read the Bible, in moderation, and to look at a certain amount of music. So she started again, after a lapse of twenty-odd years, teaching piano. At first she took on neighbor children, a few from the church, some friends of mine, and little by little built up a large class. The house was always ringing with some botched melody, which she would correct mercilessly, though often still she listened with her eyes closed. When we moved to South Carolina, what she regretted most leaving behind was her horde of keyboard thumpers who, twice a year, slicked up enough to be presented in public recital. Her students loved her, and some of them even learned to play.