Old Glory (32 page)

Brother Gary pulled out the tremolo stop on his electronic organ, and we were launched into the service. The packed congregation sang:

Yelling along with the rest that I wanted that mountain, I did wonder whether I wasn’t being a trifle greedy. It was all very well to send curt eviction notices to Distress and Unbelief and Sin, as if one were a slum landlord, but I was not happy with this arrogant demand for the mountain. I knew exactly where it was, too. I had set eyes on it on another journey, and I didn’t think that its current tenants would take very kindly to my claims on it. The grapes of Eshcol grow along a brook below the city of Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied sector of the West Bank of the Jordan. Hebron had been a dim smudge, high above the line of Israeli command posts, where I’d watched soldiers with binoculars studying me and my Jordanian companion. Excellent as “I want that mountain” might have been as a marching song for the Palestine Liberation Organization, I didn’t feel that its words were quite suitable for the Community Baptist Church of Andalusia, Illinois.

Nor was I much reassured by the pastor’s sermon when it came. His theme was “Faith,” but his illustrations of what he meant by the word were resoundingly materialist. He asked me to take a payroll check from my boss. If I believed that he was going to deposit eighty dollars in my bank account, that was faith.

“Now, you take me and my family,” said the pastor. “We went on summer vacation. To the Azores. By TAP airlines. In a Boeing 747. Okay?”

It sounded fine to me. He looked as if such a holiday were well within his means.

“Why, just by simple faith, here you are—thousands of feet up in the air! That’s exercising Faith! You go to a doctor. You go to a drugstore. You go buy yourself a cold cure. That’s Faith!” The words “doctor” and “drugstore” apparently reminded him of a slogan that had proved its worth many times before. “In America now, we got prescription junkies!”

“Amen!”

“Amen!”

“We’re not talking to modernists, now! We’re not talking to infidels! We’re talking to the faithful!”

I was distracted by the interpreter for the deaf who stood by, miming his words like a TAP air hostess demonstrating how life vests should be worn. When my attention returned to the pastor, he was attacking the universities. “How many kids do you know—good, decent kids who’ve been raised in Faith? And they’ve gone to the State University of Iowa, and they’ve come home not believing in anything! Some of those kids, they don’t believe in
nothing
. They’ve been reading the wrong books. They’ve been listening to the wrong teachers. They’ve been led out of the way of Faith by modernists. By infidels! Well, Faith is fighting back! Why, only next month, David Gibbs is going to be turned loose against the state of Texas. Right?”

“Hallelujah!”

“
Hal
le
lu
jah!” repeated the pastor. “One bag of French-fries, now, why, it don’t even give a
smell
for everybody! But God changes circumstances. What am I trying to say? Am I getting through?”

To judge by the
hallelujahs
and
amens
that were coming in steadily now, punctuating almost every remark that he made, he was getting through very well. I found the drift of his logic unfathomable, but the basic grounds of his appeal were clear. He had raveled up prescription junkies, bags of French-fries, college professors, “modernists,” school boards into a single, ugly conglomerate, and he was inviting us to freely vent our prejudices in the name of the Lord. Whatever lay
beyond the immediate ken of Andalusia was in the territory of the infidel and the Saracen.
Amen
and
hallelujah
had been transformed from cries of praise to grunts of discontent. Moving steadily from one bugaboo to the next, the pastor roused us to a comfortable fury. When he got to the end of his address, he signaled to Brother Gary at the organ, and we stood up to sing:

I left during the second verse. Walking down First Street to the river, past the wooden chalets on stilts with a sleeping dog on every stoop, I could hear the high voices calling “
nice
for
me
” all the way to the harbor wall, where they were blotted out by the chinking of the crickets.

The ruffled water of Andalusia Slough was quick with ragged slivers of sun and yellow aspen leaves. Sharp gusts of wind cut crinkling tracks across it, making the leaves tip upright, skate. and spin. There was hardly any current here. The slough was cut off from the main river by a straggle of sandbars, thickets, outcrops of forest and stagnant lagoons. For convenience’ sake, someone had named this interlocking congeries of land and water “Andalusia Island”; but in fact it was made up of several hundred islands—some a mile or more long, others only just big enough to accommodate a family of turtles piled up against one another’s shells like a handful of loose change.

The V of my wake went creaming away from the stern. I was full of the old juvenile pleasure at having escaped from church. Mine was the only boat on the slough; I had Sunday to myself and no certain destination in mind. Tows, waves and wing dams were all safely relegated to the main channel beyond the islands. At the mouth of a wooded creek, in the lee of the wind, I chucked my anchor out and settled down to smoke, drink coffee, meditate and fish. I tied on one of the homemade bass plugs Jim Curdue had given me back in Wabasha and flicked it out into a dark pool where the willows came low over the still water. At the Shetland farm where I had spent teen-age summer holidays with my Scottish great-uncle, there had been just one house rule which it was sacrilege to break: no fishing on Sundays. The best days for the running sea trout had always been Sundays, and I’d gloomed from behind the windowpane in my uncle’s gun room, looking down at the black loch at the bottom of the paddock, and watched the fish go free, leaping and splashing as they tried to shake the sea lice from their scales. Now, breaking the Sabbath without a wince of conscience, I drew the
line steadily in, waiting for a boil on the water and the throbbing plunge of an Andalusia bass.

I thought of the service from which I’d made my getaway. Its style and tone would have made complete sense a hundred years ago, when places like Andalusia were still young and raw. Then, the conditions of an infant, frontier community had demanded a new kind of religious practice. Its language would be colloquial and democratic: Brother Gary, Brother Zeke and Sister Liza would talk in church in much the same terms that they would use in the town meeting. Its theology would be made directly relevant to the everyday business of carving out a living from the land. Divine truth would be revealed through metaphors involving horses and plows and saws and axes; and frontier life itself, a muddy, difficult, improvised, hand-to-mouth affair, would be sanctified by its more than fleeting resemblance to the struggles of the Children of Israel in the wilderness as they headed for the Promised Land.
The mountain that my Lord has given me
was a bluff on the banks of the Mississippi; and if you worked hard enough you could grow the grapes of Eshcol there. Community Baptism was a religion of straight talking, practical know-how and self-reliance, in which making out as a farmer or carpenter was intimately connected with the doctrine of personal salvation.

Between then and now, though, something had gone terribly stale. The down-to-earth metaphors that once had been exact and fresh had turned to routine exercises in folksy cracker-barrel about paychecks, TAP Airlines and drugstore prescriptions. God had once been seen to smile on the reasonable ambitions of the settler.
I want that mountain! It belongs to me!
might have sounded like an admirable claim if it had come from the mouth of a young sodbuster in an open territory. Now it sounded merely petulant. I want that stereo system. I want that camper. I want that ranch-style bungalow. I want that government off my goddamn back. Saddest of all, the necessary pride in the new community, the sense of mutual solidarity in the face of a rough surrounding nature had been converted into crude small-town xenophobia. Phrases which had been coined to give meaning to a new and radical life were now voiced as expressions of irritable conservatism.

Yet if I was right about this, it did help to explain something important about the nature of the “born-again” Christian movement. It suggested that the powerful nostalgia which animated the born-againers was not simply a yearning for a lost theological innocence, but rather an ache to return to a specific period of American history. Once upon a time, ran the seductive story, there was an age when worldly ambition and spiritual virtue existed in harmony, when there was no gulf between
the language of religion and the language of day-to-day life, when the small local community was in the front line rather than in the rear guard, when to be a self-reliant householder with your own plot of ground was to be blessed as a righteous man by God Himself. And in the Western states at least, this golden age, this Eden was still tantalizingly near at hand. It was far enough away for the actual brutishness of the frontier to have been conveniently forgotten, but close enough to be dated with precision and still to exert the pull of a strong hereditary attachment. The era would have begun in the 1840s and it would have survived the Civil War by a good twenty years.

Andalusia, for instance, had even gone on looking like a frontier settlement. Its plain carpentered houses, grouped in a rough square, three blocks by three, had kept their air of being temporary squatters on virgin land. There were cars on the streets, TV antennas on the rooftops, drooping telephone lines on poles; anomalous additions which did very little to disturb the essence of Andalusia, the bare conjunction of shack, forest, river and cultivated ground. If being born again and getting back to Jesus really meant losing a hundred years or so of history in a blink, Andalusia was a perfect setting for such a rebirth. Then, perhaps, the words of “I Want That Mountain” would lose the greed and smugness which I heard in them, and sound inspiring and heroic.

In Andalusia Slough, nothing moved except the leaves and jumping lights. Maybe the fish in these parts were Sabbatarians, under a vow of abstinence for the day. I quartered every inch of the pool with my plug and caught some green slime and a twig. Lallygagging on to the lock above Muscatine with my pipe drawing nicely, I drifted into a reverie of Sundays: the moist, cavelike smell of English stone churches; sleepy afternoons with the
Weekly Symphony
on the fretwork-fronted wireless; the steady
tirra-wirra
of a neighbor’s lawnmower; my father’s sermons, with their unacknowledged echoes of Lancelot Andrewes and Cardinal Newman; the smell of
his
pipe, crackling and bubbling with St. Bruno Rough Cut; and the rocky Sundays of the foreigner, afloat in countries where Sunday is the sharpest reminder that he’s not at home.

At Muscatine, I nosed along the waterfront looking for a berth. The town shelved gently down to the river, an intricate, substantial place of oxblood brickwork and terra-cotta streets. One could tell at first sight that Muscatine had class. Its tall shuttered warehouses (were they shuttered just for Sunday, or for life?) had scalloped pediments and fluted Corinthian drainpipes. Other buildings, lagged in ferns and ivy, had little, closetlike galleries of wood hanging out over the street and trailing ragged flights of wrought-iron steps. The broad market square,
open at one end to the river, looked as if it were still in business; and there, just across the wharf over the tracks, was a button factory. It wasn’t a gap-toothed ruin; it hadn’t been converted into a pizza parlor; its recently repainted sign said
J & K
PEARL BUTTON COMPANY
. All in all, Muscatine appeared to be a nineteenth-century river town that was in remarkably good working order.

It was, I felt, slightly too good to be true. The great, puce railroad hotel was alive and well, with a comfortable, creaky twelve-dollar room and a proprietor who asked me if I’d care to go along to someone’s housewarming party at the top end of town. Yes, said Mr. Anson, sure there was a button factory. In fact, there were two—no, three. Buttons were big in Muscatine. Pushing my luck, I asked whether the lumber business was still intact here too. Indeed it was; at least, there was a factory that made office furniture. Then there was the Grain Processing Corporation, which manufactured corn oil, starch and alcohol, and fed whole fleets of river barges with their cargoes. Clearly, Muscatine was in possession of some secret of survival which had escaped almost every other town of its size I had visited. I had assumed that slow dereliction and depopulation were the inevitable fate of such places, doomed now to squat and scrape a bare living in the long shadows of their ambitions of a century ago. There must, I thought, be something peculiarly boneheaded about Muscatine in its failure to grasp the basic principles that should have ensured its decline. To go on making buttons was to fly impertinently in the face of history. What did these dodos think they were doing?

Chuck Anson collected me from my room and drove me to the yard party on the bluff. For dodos, everyone seemed to be unseasonably cheerful. A large bearded dodo was singing comic songs to a guitar on the veranda; other dodos were sloshing quantities of gasoline over the barbecue briquettes. I felt that this was not, perhaps, quite the right moment for me to speak up and tell people that their town was a hopeless anachronism and should by rights be dead.