Little Boy Blues (6 page)

“Let us pray.” Every Sunday at 11:55 a.m., those words brought me out of my trance as surely as if Uncle Tom had said, “When I count to three, you will wake up and remember none of what just happened.” “Let us pray” was the unvarying tagline with which he ended his sermons. Now it was time to sing the last of the three hymns that punctuated every service. The hymns were my favorite part. But while we sang, I kept one eye on my uncle. When he took his pocket watch off the pulpit and clipped it back on its chain, I knew for sure church was over.

Religion was the family business. That’s the way I thought of it growing up. Until I was eight, when Uncle Tom and Aunt Melita moved away from Winston-Salem, I spent so much time under their roof that I felt as much a part of their household as I did my own, maybe more so. They both stayed home all day, my aunt in the house, cooking and cleaning, my uncle in his study, a small pine-paneled room crowded with an enormous desk, three or four filing cabinets, a big red leather armchair overflowing with papers, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering two walls, the
shelves packed with thick, uniform, leather-bound books connected to my uncle’s work (or so I supposed, since I never knew him to open one). The study was my favorite room. I liked to go there while my uncle worked and sit in the big chair and draw on scrap paper, of which he had an endless supply. On days when he wasn’t typing letters, he and I would switch places sometimes, and he would let me roll a sheet of paper into his old LC Smith typewriter and pretend to type. This was before I learned to read, but all the same, my first memory of writing is the pleasure I took in that sharp clack when the metal key slammed into the paper and left the imprint of a letter.

During the school year, while my parents were at work, I spent every weekday with my aunt and uncle. I watched my aunt cook and helped her roll out dough for pie crust. I went with her to put water in the birdbath, and she taught me how to plant seeds for zinnias. I watched my uncle prepare his sermons. I rode along
with him on his hospital visits, and his visits to the radio station to drop off announcements. After weddings and funerals, I watched him search his desk for the well-thumbed notebook in which he recorded every nuptial and burial he had ever conducted, noting the names and dates with the methodical precision of a bank teller tallying up the contents of his cash drawer. Sometimes I accompanied him when he called on his parishioners in their homes, where I remember sitting alone on a series of sofas in tiny living rooms while I waited for him to check on the sick or make his condolences to a widow. In the winter, it was always too hot in those closed-in little rooms that always smelled of last night’s dinner, burnt coffee and cigarettes and where the people called my uncle Preacher Bryan. But no matter how hot it got, I kept my coat on. I felt like an alien in those homes, and I was ready to leave the minute we got there.

My introduction to the alphabet as a group of letters that could be rearranged into words came from watching my uncle open the glass front on the display case in the front yard of the church, take the white-painted metal letters off the board and replace them with letters that spelled out the name of next Sunday’s sermon. We did this at the end of every week. It was a routine, just part of the job, the same way my uncle’s nap after lunch on Sunday was part of the job: Sunday was the day he worked hardest: putting on his uniform, a black robe that fell almost to his ankles (and with a purple sash over his shoulders on special days, like communion Sundays and Easter service), going out and running the church service, delivering the sermon and then sending people back into the world with a handshake and a few words at the church door when the service had ended. That was his job, that was what he did, and by extension, it was what we all did.

Sunday was always the longest day of the week, because I knew ahead of time what was going to happen and the order in which it would unfold. Getting dressed took forever, because I had to get dressed
up:
coat, tie, hard-soled shoes, the works. When I was very small, my mother liked to dress me in caps that matched my jacket, and once she bought me a shirt with French cuffs and made me wear cuff links. After I got my church uniform on, the real torture began. My shirt collar chafed my neck. My shoes, always stiff because I wore them only once a week, hurt my feet. My wool coat itched where it rubbed my skin. That made church tick by even more slowly. I always sat with my aunt and my father, when he was around (same spot every Sunday: three-quarters of the way back, on the far left of the sanctuary). Mother was in the choir, and Uncle Tom was preaching. Sitting still for an hour was hard, especially the last twenty minutes, because that was when Uncle Tom would deliver his sermon. Everything that led up to that was tolerable, because there was a lot of standing up and sitting down: there were hymns, there was the choir’s anthem and sometimes a solo during the offertory, there were responsive readings, the Lord’s Prayer and the Doxology. Then came the sermon. This was long before preachers felt compelled to offer some entertainment for the children in the audience. When I was little, there were no such concessions. You were expected to sit there politely while the preacher talked, and if you “acted up,” you got a spanking when you got home. I was allowed to fill the time by drawing. I must have copied Warner Sallman’s head of Christ a thousand times. Mostly I drew Revolutionary War soldiers fighting the British. With half an ear, I kept track of where Uncle Tom was in his sermon. I have no idea if he was a compelling preacher or not (my mother complained that he read his
sermons). He certainly never threatened anyone with hellfire or in any way questioned the sincerity of his congregation—faith, in our family, was a given; doubt and ambiguity did not exist, which left me, years later, singularly unprepared to deal with these pitfalls as an adult. Best of all, he never ran long: he had people out the door and on the way to Sunday dinner at the stroke of noon every Sunday. He had no sense of irony or self-mockery about what he did for a living, but in an unguarded moment, he once told me that getting people out the door by noon was all most people wanted in a preacher.

After church, we all went out to eat, which meant standing in line at the K&W cafeteria or waiting at the Town Steak House to get a table, then waiting for the food to come, then more waiting for everyone else to finish eating. And then time seemed to stop completely, especially if I found myself back at Tom and Melita’s. Uncle Tom’s nap lasted most of the afternoon. When I was small, I sometimes napped with him, although I slept very little, because he snored. So I lay there, watching his belly rise and fall, watching the curtains lift in the sluggish air, pulling the tangled covers up, then pushing them down. My aunt and uncle’s mattress was so old that it had conformed to the shapes of their bodies, which left me imagining that I had fallen into the trough of a wave that would never swell, never crest. If I got up, my aunt forbade me to make noise. This was the only time she was ever strict with me (unlike my mother, my aunt never coached me in how to behave; the only pieces of advice she ever gave me—always read with a good light, and mind your posture, and you’ll be glad you did when you get older—were practical and down to earth, and even now, when I find myself backsliding, I hear her voice correcting me). I was forbidden to do much of anything on Sunday,
because, Aunt Melita explained, it was the Lord’s day and a day of rest. God didn’t want us to do anything that day but appreciate his creation. There were strict rules about all this in the Bible. If your ox fell in a ditch, you could haul him out. If you fell into the ditch, you had to stay there. I spent most of my Sundays feeling as though I had fallen into a ditch, and wishing I had an ox.

I liked two things about church. I liked the sanctuary, with all that space rising up to the roof and the stained-glass windows that showered the parishioners with little flecks of colored light. And I loved the music, especially the hymns, and of those I favored the ones with brisk tempos: “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” “For the Beauty of the Earth,” “This Is My Father’s World.” When we sang, with the women around us doing their best to find the melody and the men just rumbling along somewhere in the bass register, I came as close as I would ever come to that feeling you were supposed to have of Christ entering your body and taking possession of your soul. It was, to use a church word, an exalted feeling. It is my oldest and closest connection to the spiritual realm.

Throughout my childhood, I tried hard to be obedient, to walk in the path of Jesus and to obey the commandments. I said my prayers every night before bed. I loved my red leather Bible with my name stamped in gold letters on the cover, even if I never looked inside much, except to stare at the handful of black-and-white photographs of the Holy Land—sere, rocky landscapes that made me wonder how it had gotten so run-down looking. But I was never a perfect little scholar in the temple, like Jesus. I had my lapses. It grieved me, I think, even more than it worried my
aunt and uncle, that I could never memorize even the kindergarten version of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
Who made you? God. What else did God make? God made all things
. After that, I stumbled. My uncle subscribed to a magazine called
The Christian Observer
, and every issue carried letters from children writing in to Dear Mr. Converse, announcing that they had memorized their Catechism. Sometimes my uncle would read those letters aloud, as an incentive to get me through the chore, but they just made me feel worse. There were kids out there who could do what I couldn’t, and they weren’t even preachers’ kids. Religion wasn’t their family business. I made sure to compensate for that failure at Sunday school. When we sat in a circle and were asked in turn for sentence prayers, I always had one ready. Whenever a teacher wanted to know who Zacheus was or the story behind Naboth’s vineyard, my hand was the first one up. I knew about the Woman at the Well, Benjamin’s cup, the Seven Foolish Virgins and the miracle at Cana (though this was not a story often told, for while it records Jesus’ first miracle, it also involves wine—my aunt got around this awkward fact by explaining to me that wine in the Bible wasn’t what we knew as wine, but more like grape juice, in the same way that Methuselah wasn’t 969 years old in our years).

The only culture I knew growing up was church culture. Everyone I knew went to services on Sunday, but there was also choir practice and Wednesday-night prayer meeting and youth group. The church also served as an informal social club, a place to meet your friends, a place to stand around in the parking lot and catch up after services were done. Teenagers did this, of course, but so did grown men, the women not so much. The women had what they called circle meetings, where they met in
each other’s homes every month for Bible study and refreshments—the Southern Protestant equivalent of book group. Then there were funerals and weddings, with the receptions held in the church activities room (always dry: I never attended a wedding where alcohol was served until I was an adult). Some churches sponsored softball leagues, and there were blanket drives and church suppers, and once a year there was revival week, where preachers famed for their stem-winding oratory were imported to preach every night, although back then no one but holy rollers talked about being born again. But while the South of my childhood was every bit as religious as the South is today, churches then were less aggressive about competing for your time. They were more willing to share you with the Elks or the bridge club. And they never stuck their noses into politics. Perhaps they didn’t compete because there was so little to compete with. Life then was no less complicated than it is today, but it was a lot emptier. There was less to do and more time to do it in. Some people went to church just to get out of the house.

My uncle’s church in Winston-Salem was in an old neighborhood thick with churches. The Methodists and the Baptists had staked their claims only a block away. I always wanted to sneak into the Baptist church to see their baptismal pool, after I learned that Baptists believed in total immersion, but I was never given the chance, ecumenism being preached in our family but not practiced with much diligence. My aunt and uncle never criticized other sects or denominations, but I was gently led to understand that our way, the Presbyterian way, was simply better, more efficient. I’m sure the same discussions went on in the respective homes of Ford and Dodge dealers. With Catholics and Jews, they just seemed exasperated. How could anyone be so silly as to think
you couldn’t pray directly to God? How could anyone ever doubt for a second that Jesus was the Messiah? But even here, it was like listening to someone extol the benefits of an automatic transmission over three on the tree. The closest I ever heard my uncle come to expressing even the mildest prejudice toward another religion was his fondness for the rhyme “How odd of God to choose the Jews.”

The one virulent prejudice my family harbored was toward what they considered the lower rungs of religion: the Pentecostals, snake handlers and faith healers like Oral Roberts, who was then the only preacher you ever saw on television, slapping people on the forehead and commanding them to be healed. Billy Graham was the one evangelist they respected (we went to hear him preach once, and I thought about following several people up to the front to profess my faith in Jesus but chickened out at the last minute, convinced that my meekness, like Peter’s, would earn me eternal disapproval from the Lord). That anyone, even someone who had never been to college or seminary, could just up and start preaching the Gospel was anathema in our family. Stump preachers were quacks just as surely as chiropractors. When we went out to eat, we said grace before the meal, but there was nothing ostentatious about that. We were just showing the flag. Still, religion was to me as water is to a fish: what I lived in, with no thought of an alternative. It was not only not a question of doubt, it was not even a question of faith. Jesus and all the stories I knew from the Bible were as real to me as my arms and legs. Santa and the Easter Bunny were things to believe in. Jesus just was.
Uncle Tom was big and fleshy with a jowly double chin and a paunch. Except for a rather sharp nose that I always thought looked like it was sculpted out of wax, he had no lines to his body. He was all curves, like a man made of pillows. He did like to eat. If he had a vice, that was it. It was certainly the only thing I ever saw him do for fun. Mother called him fat behind his back, but he wasn’t fat, except around the belly. The word for such men then was
portly
. And a steady diet of my aunt’s cooking would have put pounds on anyone. She stuck to the Southern menu—ham, chicken, beef roasts, casseroles. There was nothing fancy about her recipes, but she had that knack that one in a hundred cooks possesses—the ability to make heavy food seem light. The best part of eating at my aunt’s table, though, was the mood. They never ate in the dining room unless there was a lot of company or it was Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter. Instead, we would crowd around the little table in a corner of the kitchen, where the smell of oyster stew and fried chicken and chocolate pound cake banished all unhappiness, as surely as the brightly lit yellow walls kept the night outside at bay. I had never felt safer than when sitting at that table, watching my aunt crumble a hard-boiled egg yolk over steamed spinach or patiently stirring custard on the stove.