A Ticket to the Circus (4 page)

The preachers were the rock stars of the churches, and their sermons were
showtime.
Each preacher had his own style. Some spoke in a loud singsong cadence, pounded the pulpit, jumped on and off the stage, shook their fists, and perspired so profusely that the first row of
the audience would be sprinkled by sweat. Some preachers were quieter, speaking sincerely to the heart, while others were a combination. Just as your mind started to drift off, the quiet preacher would suddenly shout and wake you up. The goal was for the preachers to move their congregations emotionally, and to see how many people would come up to the altar and be saved and join the church.

Another way to do that, for some preachers, was to scare the flock into being saved by describing what would happen if someone committed a sin and died unforgiven and unsaved. If you had even
one
sin on your soul when you died, they preached, you would go to hell, and it seemed like nearly everything was a sin. Drinking alcohol, of course—that was one of the worst ones—or dancing or anything sexual outside holy matrimony. (There was an old joke: Why won’t Baptists make love standing up? Because someone might think they were dancing.) Going to movies was a sin. Gambling and playing cards, even if you weren’t doing it for money, was a sin (the
appearance
of gambling was enough). Going fishing on Sunday, or doing anything fun or worldly on Sunday instead of going to church, was a sin. Swearing was out, of course—even something called wooden swearing, which was saying “darn” in place of “damn,” or “heck” instead of “hell.” My father once spanked me for saying “pooey,” but it was probably the ugly way I said it, not the word itself that got me into trouble. I never heard Daddy swear even once, wooden or otherwise. When he was exasperated, sometimes he would say “Oh, me.” (I guess you can’t blaspheme yourself.) If my mother was feeling really angry, she would say “Oh, the devil,” which my father wasn’t happy about. (I never said the word “fuck” out loud until I met Norman. How’s that for irony? Something in him just brought it out in me, I guess. I still have trouble swearing, and for the most part don’t.)

Our church frowned on wearing shorts or spaghetti strap dresses or anything that showed too much skin. Although I was allowed to wear a bathing suit to the public pool, some of the church members wouldn’t let their daughters wear them. So on the hot summer Sundays when I went home with one of the girls from church after service, if we went swimming in the creek, we had to wear old dresses, which got tangled around our legs and made it hard to kick. I was never much of a swimmer. My mother’s fear of water, if not her other fears,
transferred down to me. When she was a kid, her older sister and two friends were wading in the Arkansas River on a sandbar when they fell into a sinkhole, and the two friends drowned. My aunt Modene nearly drowned, too, and later she developed TB and died when she was twenty-seven, probably from ingesting that nasty river water.

When I was about eight, we got a preacher named Brother Tommy whose favorite thing was to preach about hell. “Tonight we’re going to talk about… HELL,” he would intone, his eyes smoking with brimstone under shaggy white eyebrows. At that time there was no such thing as children’s church, and the kids were expected to sit quietly with the grown-ups for the whole service. For a little girl, it was terrifying. I would be as small as possible on the bench, cold and still, wishing I could get up and go out, while he preached for an hour and more about the devil with horns and cloven feet, the burning flesh and pools of liquid fire, on and on and on. He really got off on the details of what the devil was going to do to us. “No man knows when the world is going to end,” he’d say, “but, brothers, it’s coming, and it’s coming soon. It might be tomorrow… or it might be
tonight…
at the midnight hour. The clock will chime, the moon will turn to blood, and the sky will roll away to reveal the Lord Jesus, riding on clouds of glory, coming down to take His own with Him to heaven, and all the sinners will be left behind to BURN… forever and ever, with no hope of redemption, in HELL… where the fire is not quenched and the worm dieth not.” Brother Tommy dragged people up to the altar, too, telling the congregation he had seen them come out of a movie or a dance, and make them kneel down so the whole church could come up and pray for their souls. I think he used to patrol the streets after the dances and movies let out, looking for kids from his church.

By the time we got home after service, I was so scared I couldn’t sleep. I would lie there and watch the clock hands, waiting for the midnight hour when the world would end. Only after the hands passed twelve could I relax and go to sleep, often to have dreams that I was standing in the middle of a beautiful meadow when the sky opened up and there was an angry God, telling me I had committed a sin and hadn’t asked for forgiveness, and I was going to hell. Then the ground would open up and I would start to fall into the fire below. I woke up
screaming for my daddy, who always came and held me until I could go back to sleep.

Those dreams went on for years. Finally, at one of the services, I was so overwrought that I went up when he made the altar call, and everyone came and prayed with me, asking that Jesus would save my soul. I’m not sure what it was I was asking forgiveness for at eight, probably for not liking Brother Tommy, but I prayed, “Forgive me of all my sins,” thinking that should cover it. Then, a few Sundays later, we all went to the creek and I was baptized, along with several other new Christians. I wore a dress, of course, pinched my nose, and tried not to panic as a preacher named Brother Henry held me and dipped me backward under the water, saying, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I baptize you, my sister.” I thought the nightmares would go away, but it didn’t really help.

In one way or another, either in living the Christian life or rebelling against it, religion has shaped me more than anything else. No matter how hard I try, I’ve never really gotten away from worrying about sin, although I’ve certainly left most of the harsh hell beliefs behind and have forged my own optimistic vision of God as a loving creator who would never send His children to burn forever for having a glass of wine or dancing or making love. Sex is something that God Himself created, and it was man who decided it was evil for a lot of twisted reasons. The story of Jesus is a beautiful one, if the words attributed to Him in the Bible are what He actually said, which, frankly, is unlikely given the propensity of reporters to get it all wrong and translators to screw it up, but even if the Bible didn’t record His exact words, I believe His message of love is truly what God is. I don’t think Jesus ever once threatened anybody with hell.

By the time I was eleven or twelve, we had a different preacher who didn’t preach hell or lurk around outside dances, so I relaxed a little bit. I had a friend named Cherry, a year older than me, who had great-smelling honey-colored hair, green eyes, and tan skin. (I named the heroine Cherry in my two novels, although my fictional Cherry was nowhere as cool as the real one was.) She was the granddaughter of the town banker and had a blue parakeet named Elvis who could wolf whistle and say his name. She always had the newest clothes and
enormous piles of presents under her tree at Christmas. One year, we got autograph books, and Cherry’s page to me read: “On top of old Smoky, all covered with blood, I saw my (UGH) friend Bar—her head stuck in the mud. There’s an axe in her stomach and a knife in her head. I jumped to the conclusion that Barbara was dead!”

That not being enough, she wrote one more: “Sitting by a stream, Barbara had a dream. She dreamed she was a fat old trout and some creep fished her out.”

I laughed because I wanted her to like me, but it wasn’t funny. Cherry had great legs from taking ballet lessons. I so envied her those legs and the pink satin toe shoes and net tutu, but it never occurred to me to ask to take ballet myself. At twelve, Cherry had breasts, wore white lipstick and white short shorts, and gave the best dance parties under her carport, while I was still playing with dolls. She didn’t want to invite me to her parties unless I danced, so she decided to teach me, along with a chubby boy named Kenny from across the street. We were her charity project. I felt uncomfortable about it, but I really wanted to go to those parties. Cherry played the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” while Kenny and I tried to do the steps she showed us, and somehow we got good enough to be invited. Later that year, she told me she wouldn’t continue to be my friend if I kept on playing with Barbie, and since she made me choose and I wouldn’t lie about it, I chose Barbie. She called me on Christmas morning to ask if I had gotten a second Barbie, which I had, and she was as good as her word and threw me over for an older girl named Bobbye Ann, another cool girl with boobs who already went out with boys. It was my first touch of heartbreak.

The dancing was my first little foray into sin, but it was so much fun I didn’t worry too much about it. It somehow didn’t feel like a sin. And I didn’t tell my parents. I loved them both so much, but I learned early on that I couldn’t tell them what I was feeling, what I wanted or needed or feared. Once, when I was having one of my nightmares, my mother wanted to call the preacher over to pray with me. She had no idea he was the reason for the nightmare. I always wanted to be the perfect daughter, the perfect Christian, and so I learned to pretend to them that I was. I wish I could have confided in them and asked their advice sometimes, but I knew they would just say “Don’t do that, it’s a sin”
and be disappointed in me. My father was the most perfect man I knew. He was always helping someone else, driving old ladies to the doctor, taking fatherless little boys swimming or fishing, always doing things for everyone.

But as much as my father believed in Jesus, as good as he had lived his life, religion was not a comfort to him as he was dying years later when he was seventy-eight. He lay there in the hospital for months, worrying, combing his memory, trying to remember something he had done wrong, something that he had done and hadn’t been forgiven for, something he should have done and didn’t do. Something that would send him to hell. He even said to me, “I’m so sorry I spanked you when you were a little girl.” I couldn’t hold back the tears. “Oh, Daddy,” I said, “I don’t even remember that. And I probably deserved it anyhow.” But he wouldn’t be comforted. I told him, “You’ve loved Jesus all your life, and He’s not going to let you go to hell.” I sincerely believed that. If anybody is in heaven, my father is, but I knew then that I wasn’t the only one who had been affected by those hell sermons, and I wish to God it had been different.

W
hen I was twelve, my mother turned our carport into a beauty shop. A few years before that, when I could stay on my own in the afternoons after school, she had decided to go back to work. After my father’s accident, we needed the income, so she tried a string of different jobs. One was picking cotton, which she at least was familiar with. Every morning before I went to school, a rattletrap pickup truck would stop outside our house. My mother—wearing faded jeans, some kind of old shirt, and one of those sunbonnets made from printed cotton that puffed out on top like a muffin—would climb up into the open back with a load of people dressed just like she was and head for some cotton patch. She worked all day in the hot sun and came back long after I got home from
school. That didn’t last too long. I was happy when she quit. I was embarrassed for anybody to see her dressed like that, riding in the back of a truck.

Then she got an even worse job on the pinning line at the chicken plant, but it paid more. She and several other women stood for eight hours a shift on a wet concrete floor and pulled feathers out of chickens after they had been tied, flopping and screeching, by the feet, had been hung on a moving wire, and had had their heads dipped into a pool of electrified water, which shocked them to death. Her arms ached so much from holding them up in the same position and pulling out feathers that she could hardly move at night, and she was always slightly green and sick with a runny nose from the cold plant, even though she wore sweaters under her coverall and two pairs of socks inside her rubber boots. I went with her to pick up her last check, and I nearly threw up from the smell, just in the office. I had the courage only once to peek inside the actual plant to look at the chickens drifting around the room on their conveyer wire, getting plucked here, split open there, and their innards pulled out at the next station, and then I had to get out into the fresh air.

When no other job could be found, we were driving down the street in Russellville and saw that someone was putting in a new beauty school. It was a six-month course, and my father said he would turn the carport into a beauty shop for her if she wanted. She was so happy at the school with all the other women, a lot of them her age, learning how to cut hair and do perms and color and perform the newest rage, back-combing, also known as teasing or ratting, to make all the hair fluff out into a bubble. They used real people for the students to practice on, and since beauty school treatments were, of course, cheaper than regular beauty shops, it gave women who normally couldn’t afford it the luxury of having their hair and nails done. The local nursing home would bring all the old ladies in by the busload once a week, and when they left, they waved cheerfully from the bus, their bouffant hair in assorted pastel hues filling the windows like cotton candy. I used to go and hang out with Mother on Saturday, and at lunchtime we’d go across the street to the drugstore and get a pimento cheese sandwich and a Coke at the soda fountain. All day, I would watch and absorb the lessons. I practiced on my friends, and am still a pretty good haircutter, if I do say so myself. (Norman never again went to a barber after we got together, and he delighted in telling people I cut his hair. “Just think of all the money we’ve saved over the years!” he’d say.)