September 1981, 3 a.m., Arlington, Texas
I am drunk and walking down the middle of Cooper Street. On my way to the leaf hut where I have been hiding out for a month, I stop beside a late-model BMW. Yuppie bastard, I mutter, then slam the toe of my Tony Lama roach killers into the street side taillight. The sound of shattering plexiglass echoes down the street. A warm glow, akin to orgasm, rises in my chest and dissipates through my limbs. I take out the taillights of the next car, and the next, and the next.
This stretch of FM 157 is lined with restaurants and bars. No latenight refrigerator raiders to flip on porch lights. No dogs to link together a neighborhood chain of barks. The owners of these unlucky cars are nowhere around, having fallen asleep in beds not their own. Before breakfast they will ride back in silence. When they see their wounded cars, they will curse in voices scalded from tonight’s booze and sex.
I glance down at taillight remains scattered like pieces of a broken stained-glass window. They are my declaration of contempt for all self-absorbed, beautiful people who know what they want out of life and are getting it. Each red shard is the initiation of a dialogue across space and time. In this moment, I am in control of—if nothing else—the transmission of a message that will change tomorrow’s water cooler conversations, and edit the stories told to husbands and wives and lovers about what happened tonight.
Countless cars later—I don’t know if it’s been ten minutes or an hour—I am standing on the overpass spanning I-20. The beams of oncoming headlights below me split into horizontal lines, like ones on the TV screen in the opening of the ‘60s show, Outer Limits. I try to recall the narrator’s exact words, but only a few phrases bubble to the surface of my brain’s murky swamp of beer.
“Louder,” I shout to the starless sky. Then, laughing: “If I wish to make it softer, I can tune it to a whisper.”
I control the horizontal, the vertical, speaks an internal voice.
“Yes, that’s the line,” I think.
Lifting up a challenge to the God I no longer claim is there, but Whom I have spent half a lifetime serving, I yell out: “There is nothing you can do to stop me!”
Silence. Proof that He does not exist—or worse, that He does and is ignoring me. Four years ago in seminary I could have answered the accusation with memorized quotations from St. Thomas Aquinas or Paul Tillich.
Now I am only sure of the cold as I work my way north. I spot the familiar deer path leading from a warehouse alley into the woods. Five minutes later I can make out the mound of leaves at the base of a forked tree. It looks like a massive furry creature without head or tail—an alien, yet familiar, species. I push midway between two scrub-oak ribs, and its prickly-skinned door gives way. I crawl inside the beast’s belly. I reseal the opening with clumps of damp leaves. They stick together like freshly picked scabs reapplied to an old wound, the new blood clotting and clinging to the creature’s skin. The outer world disappears.
Spring of 1958, 3rd Grade, Pinckneyville, Illinois
One Sunday afternoon my mother called me in early for supper and told me to sit down on the couch. She said she had something very important to talk to me about. I was worried that I had done something wrong, like the time I drew pictures with captions beneath them in my pocket spiral notebook. I had gotten the biggest lecture of my thenshort life about not wasting the paper my father worked hard to buy, and about how any art other than Christian art is of the devil. Afterwards, she ripped the pages out and flushed them down the toilet.
“We’re going to church tonight.”
“Why? I asked.
We attended every Sunday morning, but I had never been to an evening service.
“Tonight we’re observing The Lord’s Supper. Do you know what that is?”
Of course I knew. I’d heard about it in Sunday School, and read about it in the Bible for as long as I could remember. The bread and the wine symbolized the body and the blood of Christ. Except in The First Baptist Church of Pinckneyville the bread was really tiny, unsalted, square crackers, and the wine was Welch’s grape juice. I’d seen the deacons in a room off the choir room pouring it from the same bottle we had in our refrigerator. Only Catholics used real bread and wine. And they believed in magic. They thought that the baked dough and fermented grapes turned into Christ’s flesh and blood.
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied.
I checked my mother’s upper lip to gauge what might be coming next. If it was quivering, it meant something bad. I couldn’t see any movement. My stomach relaxed a bit.
“I wanted to have this little talk with you, so you would understand that you are not to take any of the bread or grape juice tonight.”
“Why not?”
“Because you have to be a member of the church in order to take The Lord’s Supper. And to be a church member, you have to be a Christian.”
“What?”
Something had to be wrong. I’d been attending church since I was five years old. Not a member of the church? I was holding back tears.
“That’s right, son. Only people who have become Christians by accepting Jesus into their hearts as their Savior can become members of our church. And only members of our church, The First Baptist Church of Pinckneyville, can take The Lord’s Supper with us. We practice Closed Communion . I think you should talk to Brother Swinbourn. He can explain it better than I can. I also think that it’s time for you to think about becoming a true Christian. He can tell you more about that, too.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Inside my head I saw the word, “No!” as if it were printed on the large billboard that loomed over the Y in the road outside of town, the left branch leading to St. Louis, the right to Mueller Hill Cemetery. The black letters had dried and cracked, having been exposed to the weather for a long time. I imagined tiny flakes breaking off the “N” and the “O” in my brain, travelling through blood vessels that led to my stomach, where they turned it into a dark, hollow cave. Not a member of the church? Not a Christian? Who was I? What was I? I must have been something horribly evil if I wasn’t worthy of drinking the grape juice and eating the crackers with my mother and aunts and uncles and cousins.
That night when the round plate of white crackers, and the silver tray of clinking, miniature glasses of grape juice were passed down our row, I leaned my head forward into my arms crossed on the back of the pew in front of me, scrunched my eyes closed, and arranged red letters inside my head: H-E-L-P! If there were a God, He would know that I needed it. I was eight years old and on my way to Hell because I wasn’t a real Christian.
1955-1959
Once a week, during my first four years in elementary school, my mother picked up the receiver from the cradle of the classic black telephone sitting on the small end table beside our living room’s only chair—overstuffed and covered with a white chenille bedspread to hide its frayed cloth. After “Hello,” and a pause, she spoke into the mouthpiece the words that I knew meant my father was on the other end of the line:
“Where is it from, operator?”
I knew the coded dialogue by heart, as if I had memorized the lines for three actors in a school play: my father’s, the long distance operator’s, and my mother’s.
Mother: “Hello?”
Operator: “Collect call for A.M. Lucas.”
(Code from Dad for “I’m checking in to make sure everything is okay.”)
Mother: “Where is it from operator?”
(Code for “Everything is okay.” If it were not, my mother would have accepted the call.)
Most operators wouldn’t tell where a call was from, so my mother feigned disbelief that A.M. Lucas would be receiving a collect call at this number, and asked the question with a tone of surprise in her voice. Hearing the question was my cue to get up from the floor beneath the open archway that only partially divided the living room from the area where a single bed served both my mother and me, and run to her side. Putting together a puzzle or working on my stamp collection, pasting the commemoratives that my Uncle Jack brought by every week into my Traveler Album with thin, pale-green hinges, was not as exciting as catching the sound of the voice of the man who I was told is my father. I seldom saw him, mostly only heard his gruff voice in conversation with my mother through the operator, because there was no money for long distance phone calls. There was not always money for food, even when my father was working. When there wasn’t, my mother borrowed ten dollars from Aunt Liza who worked at Luke’s Café, or from Aunt Hattie who started collecting Uncle Luther’s Social Security after he burned up in his truck with a load of penny postcards.
Operator: “Barstow, California.”
It could have been “Joplin, Missouri,” or “Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” or “Pueblo, Colorado,” or a hundred other places I dreamed of traveling to. Mom’s response usually was:
“Operator, there’s no one here to take that call.”
(Code for a question to my dad—“Is everything okay with you?”)
Now was the final chance for my mother and father to speak without going through the operator, with the possibility that I might be able to speak to my father myself—ask him when he was coming home, when we could go camping like he had promised for years, and when he was going to buy a house out west in New Mexico or Colorado so we could come live with him, and so I could learn to ride a pony. Usually my father’s response was:
“Just cancel the call, operator.”
(Code for “Everything is okay here.”)
If there had been some reason for my father to talk to my mother, he would have said:
“Tell that party that anyone there can accept this call.”
The operator would then repeat, as if my mother hadn’t heard him:
“Ma’am, my party placing the call says anyone can accept it.”
And then my mother would say:
“Alright, operator, I’ll accept the call.”
I can count on one hand the times my mother accepted a collect call from my father. Most of the time the news was bad—when my father rolled his truck nine times off a cliff and almost died, when my grandmother died and he came home for the funeral, the times my father lost his job. The one time the news was good was when he told my mother that he had bought a nine-year-old pickup truck and was on his way from Farmington, New Mexico to Pinckneyville, Illinois to pack up everything we owned, and move us out into the house he had just bought with his G.I. Bill. That call came the summer of 1959, between my fourth and fifth grade.
But most of the times after my mother hung up the phone, I didn’t think much about my dad, except for the numbers. Seventeen nights at home one year. A year and a half without seeing him after he hitchhiked to New Mexico to find work in the oil fields. Six weeks without a collect phone call from him to let my mother know where he was, if he was even alive. He freighted numbers older than mine. Some as heavy, some heavier. Nine years old, when he hopped a freight train to escape his father’s shovel handle. Five years riding the rails during the depression, making his way to New Orleans where he lived with three prostitutes. Going back home at age fourteen, spending one night. When his father came at him, my father beat him up and cleared out the next morning. Number of times he saw him after that? Zero. The same number of times I felt comfortable in his presence.
The smaller the number the more it weighed. One Purple Heart. One Silver Star. Six Bronze Stars—one for each major campaign he fought in WWII. But Dad’s fourth-grade education plus all his medals couldn’t buy a job in Pinckneyville after my mother pressured him to get out of the army. By the time I came along, my father had gone back on the road as a long-haul trucker. That’s when my mother lost any say in what my father did, where he went, or how long he stayed.
Until the summer of 1959, I had no real memory of my father being around, no memory of his face between visits—only a few pictures of him holding me with his tattooed, truck-driver arms—the faded green outline of my mother’s featureless face on his forearm, and the unreadable military I.D. number on his shoulder. His sergeant-square jaw was always set somewhere between a sarcastic grin and a bark aimed at the world.
What my memory did hold was all the stories my mother told about my father. One of the earliest was about him lighting a cigarette in our kitchen on one of his layovers. I was either four or five years old—not yet in grade school. Evidently he opened a drawer, took out a pack of matches, tore one off, and struck it with a popping sound against the sandpaper strip on the match cover. I looked up at him and said, “Them’s our matches, but you can use ’em.”
I don’t remember how old I was when I realized that Mom told and retold that story less as a cute anecdote about her son, and more as a two-fold put down of her husband. First, that he smoked cigarettes—an anathema to my mother, along with taking a drink of any alcoholic beverage, saying “damn” or “hell,” or taking even a single dance step across the floor—all were of the devil. Second, that he was a stranger to his only son because he wouldn’t take a local job pumping gas or working as a clerk in a store, so he could come home every night and fulfill his fatherly duties.
Once we moved to New Mexico, I anticipated his visits with both excitement and dread. He usually brought me some kind of present that was met with Mom’s disapproval—fire crackers from Texas, cactus candy from Arizona, a postcard or some kind of tchotchke from a trading post or gift shop on route 66 that had an off-color joke or image decaled on it. As soon as Dad was gone, my mother threw them away.
My father always came home in the middle of the night. I knew because of the yelling that woke me up. My parents couldn’t be in the same room for five minutes without one of them exploding, setting off the other. Dad referred to my mother as “The War Department,” sometimes even in her presence.
“Can we go to a drive-in movie tonight, Dad?”
“You’ll have to check with The War Department, son.”
She spoke about him, and to him, as if he wasn’t as good as we were in some way. Everything he did seemed repulsive to her, from driving“that old stinking truck,” to reading “those trashy westerns” she found in his duffle bag when she washed his clothes. He would respond with something about “that ole stinking truck” paying the bills, and “those trashy westerns” keeping him from blowing his brains out on the road.
I never could figure out as a child why my parents got married, and I secretly wished they would get a divorce. Or, if not, that Dad would get fed up with Mom’s nit-picking, get in his truck one day and keep on driving, the same way he had left his father for good at the age of fourteen.
I was torn between hating my father like my mother did for shirking his domestic duties, and wanting him to be home, like she said she did. My mother successfully transferred her feelings of abandonment to me, so I easily dismissed him as a father figure, and felt less guilt for my mixed feelings of wanting a father, but not wanting him to come home because I was afraid of him. I dreaded the out of control yelling and throwing of things when he was in our house.
The number I remember most is the number of times I wanted to see him again every time he left—zero. I would open my pocket spiral notebook and write zeros between the blue lines. Such perfect, peaceful numbers. No sharp, jagged edges of feelings on their graceful, curved, event horizons. Round white holes I filled in with my no. 2 pencil. No one, not even I, knew what lay inside their dark centers.
War
The family story is that my father met my mother at Luke’s Café on the square in Pinckneyville the first week of December 1941. My mother and her sister, Liza, were waitresses, who happened to serve my father and an army buddy. The sisters went out with the soldiers. But on their first double date, my father was coupled with Liza. After the date, either the girls talked or the men talked, or both, and the pairing was switched, so that by the 7th, when Pearl Harbor was bombed, my father was interested in my mother. After three dates, they were married on January 7. My father left with the First Armored Division (Old Ironsides), on February 7 for Europe to fight in the war. Quick, neat, and tidy.
An examination of the record, however, does not corroborate all of those dates. The day Pearl Harbor was bombed, my father’s division was stationed at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, having already done maneuvers in Louisiana. They left for Ft. Dix, New Jersey in March of 1942, landing in Ireland in May/June. Knowing that he didn’t leave for the war on February 7 places some of the other facts in the story under doubt.
Even so, their marriage certificate is dated January 7, 1942, and I know that my parents escalated their relationship because of Pearl Harbor. Each of them told me separately that they would have never gotten married had it not been for the fact that they wanted to have sex before Dad left for the war. Southern Baptist religious taboo in rural Illinois against premarital sex was that strong. And even though neither one of them wanted to be married (my mother told me she figured Dad would never return and he told me that he didn’t think my mother would wait for him), they wanted to have sex more. Five and a half years later, when he returned from the war, they were strangers. And once again because of a religious taboo (this time against divorce), they remained married for the rest of their lives, making each other—and me when I came along in 1949—miserable.
Camping in Colorado, my father told me stories no nine-year-old should hear. Shot up in the desert of North Africa, with a gangrenous arm and no food or water for five days, my father wandered until Arabs found him. They tried to feed him but he couldn’t keep anything down. His digestive system had already shut down, along with several of his other organs. They were able to get him to a U.S. Army field hospital, where the doctor began preparing to amputate his arm to save his life. My father, delirious but true to his character, grabbed a nurse and held a knife to her throat, telling the doctor he would kill her if he touched his arm.
They put him in a straitjacket, gave him antibiotics, and he recovered—at least physically—enough to face a court martial in which he was found to be temporarily insane and was shipped back to the front lines. He didn’t tell too many people the story of the padded cell, how he made it through the rest of the war only because of the vodka he drank constantly—who knows where he got it.
The stories he told were mostly dark—how he and his men loaded a group of Germans into the back of a truck with a pitchfork after he shot them for not complying with the order to climb in. How he had been captured very early on in the war, along with a hundred or so other G.I.s. How he decided he wasn’t going to spend the war as a prisoner, so he orchestrated an escape. He was one of only four soldiers who made it out alive. They hid from the Germans, while trying to find their unit—which they never did. Instead they found Patton’s army. Dad stayed with them for a few days before running out on them in the middle of the night because, in his words, “Patton was crazy, and he was going to get me killed for sure.” He eventually made it back to his own division and fought the Germans at Anzio, Salerno, Naples, Kasserine Pass, and other major battles. Dad told me how he had been court martialed three times and won all three. One was after he shot his captain.
“He was a ninety-day wonder,” my dad said.
That was the slang term for college graduates with three months of training before they were made officers and sent into battle. My dad didn’t have much use for them before this particular captain. And after he panicked under fire, standing up and yelling, “Every man for himself, ”my father loathed them. My father shot him in the back like a common deserter as he ran away. He marshaled the troops, saving lives in the ensuing panic.
Of course, the shooting had to be investigated. At his general court martial, after he told his story, corroborated by witnesses, Staff Sergeant Lucas was stripped of his stripes and sent back into battle yards from where the shooting had taken place. It would, as it turned out, not be the only time he had to re-earn his rank.
One of the most memorable stories he told me took place when he was the sergeant over a POW camp. It wasn’t clear to me if his immediate superior was stationed at the camp or not. It was common, I suppose, for a non-com to be in charge of groups of men and operations when the commissioned officers had been killed in battle.
A new group of prisoners had been shipped in with a German officer who had two things my father detested: 1) an attitude of non-compliance that was stirring up all of the other prisoners; and 2) a German police dog the officer insisted remain with him. My father felt he was losing control (something he never allowed), and so he decided to demonstrate his authority. He lined all the prisoners up and ordered the officer to step forward. He announced that if the officer didn’t change his attitude, he would shoot him and bury him outside the fence in plain sight of his men. He figured that this would prompt him to demonstrate an even more rebellious attitude, which it did.
That night, asleep in their compound, the German prisoners were awakened to the sound of several shots. The next morning their officer was missing. When they looked outside the fence to their compound, they saw a freshly dug grave, with the officer’s hat on the end of his rifle, stuck at the head of the grave.
Someone reported the incident and in a day or two my father saw the dust of a general’s jeep making its way to his camp. He was relieved of his position and told that he would be court martialed for executing a German officer. My dad asked what proof he had for the crime. “Right out there, that grave where you buried him,” said the general. My father told the general that loose dirt was no proof; only a body was proof.
So the general ordered some men to go out and dig it up. What they found was quite a surprise. It wasn’t the German officer, but rather his police dog, shot and buried in the grave.
What my father had done was to sneak out the German officer in the middle of the night, transferring him to another POW camp away from his men, where he couldn’t do as much damage. The general, embarrassed at being shown up, got back into his jeep and ordered his driver to turn around and drive away, without saying a word to my father. My father said that the general never bothered him again, leaving him alone to run the POW camp his own way.
1956, Pinckneyville, Illinois
“Why are there no Negroes in my school?” I asked my mother.
There had been several in my kindergarten class in Ohio.
“They’re not allowed to spend the night in Pinckneyville,” she replied.
“Why not?”
“The last one found in town after sundown was tarred and feathered,
and ridden out of town on a rail.”
I wouldn’t hear the term “sundown town” for a decade or more, and I had no idea what the “rail” part meant. But I could sort of picture someone being dipped into the big bucket of smelly, hot tar that was parked in front of the McElvaine’s house across the street last summer when they had a new roof put on. Would people actually dunk someone in that steaming tar? And then what? Take turns throwing feathers on him? Chicken feathers? Where did they get them? From real chickens? From inside pillows? How could he breathe? Did he die?
Like Mary in the Bible, I thought, after the angel appeared to her to announce that she would have a son even though she wasn’t married, I pondered these things in my heart.
I was born a Southern Baptist. In the 1950s in Pinckneyville, Southern Baptist was the most popular name brand that religion was sold under. I say “religion,” rather than Christianity, because of course in Pinckneyville if you were religious, you were a Christian. America was a Christian nation, and there was nowhere more American than southern Illinois. Every morning in school we stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag and to the Christian flag, concluding with “and to the Savior, for whose kingdom it stands, one brotherhood, uniting all mankind in service and love.”
“Was it because God put a mark on them?” I asked my mother a few days later.
“On who, honey?”
“On Negroes. Brother Swinbourn said that God put a mark on Cain after he slew Abel, and that if anyone found him, he should kill him. Jamie says that the mark turned him black.”
“I don’t know.”
I wanted to ask whether Jews and other people who didn’t believe in Jesus, or people who didn’t believe in God at all, were allowed to spend the night in Pinckneyville, since our preacher said the Jews killed Jesus. And the Bible said that if you didn’t believe in God, you were an infidel—something that didn’t sound good. But I didn’t ask any of those questions. I figured I already knew the answers. Jews wouldn’t be allowed to spend the night in Pinckneyville any more than colored people—probably any color, but black for sure.
Years later, when I was thirteen or so, my mother gave me a pre-dating lecture (not that I was anywhere close to being ready to date, she emphasized). But she let me know in no uncertain terms that it was against God’s law for people of different races to marry. “All people are equal in the eyes of God,” she said. “But God never meant for people to marry someone other than their kind. The same thing goes for church. Negroes should worship with negroes. Whites with whites. And don’t think about marrying someone that isn’t a Baptist—preferably Southern Baptist. Certainly not someone who is not a Christian. The Bible says not to be “unequally yoked together.”
I wondered if God thought that my mother and father were yoked together at all.
Lesson
When I was eight years old, my father taught me how to kill a man with my bare hands and how to satisfy a woman sexually, all in the same conversation.
That night in bed I visualized would-be attackers writhing on the ground, gasping for breath from a single blow to the hollows of their necks that had collapsed their windpipes. I would be the hero for saving my mother or Faith Christenson, my classmate with the shiniest blond hair I’d ever seen. I couldn’t form a picture in my mind of doing to Faith what my father had told me “big girls” liked, but I got a tingling below my stomach that I’d never felt, thinking about how she would kiss me for saving her life.
I didn’t think it strange that my father told me how to take care of myself, and how to take care of women. When he was nine, he lived on his own and had learned these things the hard way. He told me it was time I learned them, and that it was his duty to teach me. I had no way of knowing that there might have been another reason, that he might have told me sooner than he had planned.
A few days after the lessons in self-defense and sex, I was playing in the front yard with neighborhood kids, and the screen door squeaked open. When I looked up, my father was standing beside me with his army-green, duffle bag over his shoulder. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but the short, one-sided conversation went something like this:
“Dad’s got to go find work, son, but I’ll be back for you and your mother.”
These words I do remember verbatim:
“You’re the man of the family now.”
And then he turned and walked down West South Street toward the highway that led to the rest of the world. I didn’t realize that he was hitchhiking west. I didn’t know that in a few days I would forget his ruddy, freckled face, his red hair, his massive arms, his graveled voice. I didn’t know that I wouldn’t miss him. I just went back to playing with my friends after he shook my hand, as if he were walking to Luke’s Café for a cup of coffee, or to the newsstand for a pack of Lucky Strikes, and would be home for supper. I didn’t know that I wouldn’t see him again for a year and a half.
To the Letter
My mother carried her trauma differently than my father. Hers was hidden behind a Mona Lisa smile that presented the same impenetrable flat surface to all observers, never truly engaging anyone, not even herself. Her pain rarely escaped through her lips. Instead, it settled into every muscle and joint, prohibiting her body from enjoying any movement. Likewise, the air she inhaled was never sweet. I always felt she was the happiest, celebrating her despair from behind a cold washcloth laid across her eyes, lying in a dark room alone, moaning softly to prove that the shot of pain killer her doctor had given her was no match for her migraine.
My father’s roiling turmoil was never completely out of sight. The seething lava pooled inside the rims of his eye sockets cast a permanent red glow on his forehead and cheeks, accentuating deep lines that threatened to collapse into a life-threatening caldera at any moment. The volcano that was my father would remain dormant for days. When my mother started climbing on him, he would erupt without warning, and everyone within range (mainly me, his only child) became a target for the explosion of steam and magma hotter than the inside of the sun. And then it was over.
Both of my parents told me more about themselves than any nineyear old should know. My mother carried the heavy load in her body of seeing her father physically abuse my grandmother. Decades later, my therapist would explain to me that my mother tried to fix her relationship to the archetypal masculine that was shattered by her father’s abuse by fixing Dad— meaning taking out all of her anger against her father on my father, mostly passively by finding fault with everything he did, but occasionally actively during arguments after he exploded. Then my father would leave, and the only person my mother had to fix was me.
My mother constructed a box with a maze inside it that I had to run each waking moment. Like a child playing a video game, she lost herself in me. Although I never doubted her motivation to provide the needed structure in my life that she lacked as a child, from my vantage point, she had changed the “u” to an “i” and the result was stricture. Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. during the school year she only loaned me to my teachers. But with the ringing of the final bell, I was scooped up and placed back into the Gladys Lucille Lucas regimented control box.
Mother only tolerated people if they ran the maze, meaning that they believed and behaved the way she did, the way she had been taught all her life by the Southern Baptist Church. Deviate in the slightest from her way, like Mormons believing that drinking coffee was a sin, and she’d ignore you. A lot, like Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing to salute the flag or pledge allegiance to it, and she’d run you off the porch with her broom.
Each person had to avoid both sins of commission and omission in order to remain in good standing. Except for me. I couldn’t do anything bad enough to get thrown out. But I could be relegated to one of the box’s corners if I didn’t run the maze exactly right. My mother applied the letter of the law equally to everyone. The punishment meted out was just different with me. Everyone else would be ignored, cut off. I would have to endure my mother’s helicopter presence. And her interrogations.
Every evening after school, the first turn in the maze involved reporting everything that happened at school that day, including what I had observed about my cousins. Then my mother checked my lunch box, and I reported on how everything tasted. If any items were uneaten, I had to explain why, and sit down right then at the kitchen table and eat them. Waste was not something my mother tolerated.
After doing homework, I had to let her check it over. If it passed inspection, I could go outside and play for a few minutes before supper. If she found anything amiss, I had to make it perfect right then.
After supper, I was never allowed to go outside on a school night, but I could read or play with one toy at a time—a different toy each evening—before putting it away in the closet. Then we did the Bible reading for the day, discussed it, and I said my prayers before going to bed. We had no TV until I was nine. No, that’s not right.
We had a large Muntz TV in a beautiful wood cabinet with doors that opened up to reveal the blank, gray-green screen that never lit up, because we could not afford to replace the broken picture tube. I would sit on the floor before this electronic god, open the heavy doors to its inner sanctum, and worship. Like the God I was taught to pray to, this one didn’t answer either.
But I loved pretending. I loved the mushy glub-glub sound the channel changer made, and the way the on/off knob had so much play in it that I had to guess when I would feel the click that would have powered up the tubes, had it been working. Instead, that knob switched on my imaginary programs—World War II battles in which I sacrificed my life for my men and was shipped home in a wooden box covered with the U.S. flag, my fourth grade classmates standing at attention during the funeral, while a general tossed a Purple Heart and the Congressional Medal of Honor into my casket. Or I would pretend being in a wagon train to New Mexico, where my mother and father and I homesteaded, raising all the food we needed. I would catch wild horses and break them to the saddle, but keep their lively spirits to the amazement of all the townspeople.
Sundays were different. After Sunday School, Worship Service, and lunch, I was allowed to go outside and play (usually by myself), until it started getting dark or too cool for my health. I caught honeybees in Welch’s grape jelly jars, punched holes in the top with a screwdriver so they could get air. I would catch a frog, place it in a jar with a cotton ball soaked with ether from a can Dad would use to start his diesel truck in cold weather. Throwing the jar as high as I could with a spin, I would let it land in the soft grass over and over, until the frog lay limp. I would then dissect it, and identify every organ, before burying it all in the narrow space between the backside of the garage and the fenced-in cornfield back of our house.
I loved Sundays. It felt like I got to come out of the box for a few hours and take deep breaths of fresh air, move around and stretch my muscles the way those frogs in the jars couldn’t. The way I couldn’t when Monday morning came, and my brain went numb, and my legs were stuck in molasses as I tried to get out of my dreams and out of my bed. Before I had to climb back into the maze.
Wall of Fire
A few days after not taking the Lord’s Supper I heard my mother talking on the telephone to my Aunt Liza:
“Terry’s reached the age of accountability and he’s under conviction. Please pray for his soul.”
Later that day, Jamie, who had walked the aisle for Jesus the previous winter and had been baptized (he got to drink the grape juice and eat the crackers), babysat me while my mother walked down to the store.
“What was it like?” I asked.
“What?”
“Getting saved.”
“I saw a wall of fire. And Jesus—He was standing on the other side of the flames—called to me: Jamie, come on over to my side. Over and over, He said that. And so I walked right into the fire. I felt a hand grab hold of me, and the next thing I knew I was on the other side with Jesus.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Now I’m going to Heaven and will never have to face the fires of Hell again.”
“I don’t want to face those fires.”
“Then He’ll call you, too. You just have to listen for Him and then do what He says. He talks to me all the time, now.”
“For real? You actually hear Him talking with your ears? Not just inside your head?”
“Sure—all real Christians do.”
The Lie
The morning after my conversation with Jamie, I got up at 6 a.m. and climbed into the big overstuffed chair beside the bed my mother and I slept in. The bed barely fit into a recessed space off the living area allocated for sleeping. The chair was fully in the living area.
I closed my eyes and waited to hear Jesus’s voice calling me. Nope. I wasn’t doing it right. I scrunched my eyes really tight and clenched my teeth as hard as I could—I would focus with my entire being, so He would know I was ready to hear his voice. Nothing. Maybe it didn’t work sitting in a chair. I dropped down to the floor and pressed my face into the dusty rug. Feeling the course fibers on my nose almost made me sneeze.
“Help me,” I whispered again.
Still nothing.
Every morning before my mother woke up, I repeated this procedure with variations. But I never heard Jesus calling my name the way He had called Jamie’s, or the way he had called out Samuel’s name in the middle of the night as I learned in Sunday School.
A few days later, my mother’s friend, Helen, came over to our house for coffee. My mother drank a couple of pots a day, as did my father when he was home. I had been introduced to coffee, blowing on the steaming brew in the chrome cup of my father’s Stanley thermos and slurping a sip to test the temperature, before handing it to him.
I went into “the bedroom” to play, but I could still hear every word that Helen and my mother were saying. They must have forgotten I was on the floor on the other side of the bed, out of sight.
“Terry’s not yet a Christian,” my mother told Helen.
I had taken about as much as I could about not being a Christian, so I stood up and walked to the entryway between the living room and bedroom.
“Yes, I am,” I said.
“What?” said my mother.
“I’m a real Christian. I heard Jesus calling me and I invited him into my heart.”
“When, honey?” my mother said in surprise.
A couple of weeks ago at 6:00 a.m. sitting right there in that chair.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” my mother said.
I don’t remember exactly what I said. But I remembered what Evangelist Angel Martinez said in our winter revival meeting: “Salvation doesn’t come from the church, it’s between every individual person and God.” I regurgitated his line the best I could. Evidently it worked, because my mother came over and gave me a big hug.
“I’ll schedule an appointment with Brother Swinbourn, so you can tell him the good news,” she said. “You can make your public profession of faith next Sunday.”
After walking down the aisle for Jesus the following Sunday, standing at the front of the auditorium, the entire congregation walked by and gave me “the right hand of Christian fellowship.” When Jamie got to me, he stopped and whispered in my ear.
“You heard Him, didn’t you?”
My silence sealed my guilt. I would grapple with my lie for the next twenty years. Every Sunday morning and every Sunday night, during the invitation service, I wanted to run down the aisle, stop the music, and confess to the congregation that I hadn’t heard the voice of Jesus calling me when I was eight years old. That I hadn’t really accepted Him into my heart. That I wasn’t a real Christian.
I didn’t know what it was in me that caused me to lie. I could have just told my mother that I wasn’t ready yet to be a Christian, that I didn’t hear Jesus calling me. Plenty of church kids weren’t saved until they were teenagers. Then, sitting in a revival meeting, where Angel or Homer Martinez preached on God’s plan of salvation from the book of Romans, and told stories of teenagers who didn’t know Jesus as Savior being killed in car crashes, they would feel the Holy Ghost urging them to go forward and fall on their knees and beg God to save them. But somehow, I had gotten the idea that there was a lot more riding on my being saved at an early age than just my own escape from Hell, as important as that was.
I sensed a cloud of unseen witnesses surrounding me, like the one the Bible talks about—generations of my ancestors who had been failures at life, waiting to see if I would be the next in a long line of failures, or if I would give the futility of their lives some meaning by accomplishing something extraordinary for God, like Albert Schweitzer who spent his life as a medical missionary to Africa. I figured I needed to balance out all the bad things my family had done.
I guessed that a greater good would be served by fulfilling the expectations of my parents and my ancestors, than by admitting that I didn’t hear anything or feel anything when I prayed to God. Actually, I did feel something—shame. A shame that weakened me so much that, more than my own integrity, I wanted the praise of my mother, and for her to be proud of me, so we could measure up to her sisters and their children, all of whom had already secured a place in God’s Kingdom.
Years later, back from Vietnam, sitting in Luke’s Café one night, Jamie would hear a voice in the deep fryer telling him kill to his waitress. Although he would be unable to catch her, he would run naked across the tabletops with a butcher knife, and spend the rest of his life in the state hospital in Anna, Illinois.
M.I.A.
About a year after my father left, my mother called me into the living room and said she had something to tell me.
“I haven’t heard from your father in a month, and I’m going to have to call the police, because no one knows where he is. No collect calls. No money. Nothing.”
Her voice broke when she said “Nothing.”
I had secretly fantasized that my father would never come home, and now my wish was coming true. My stomach hurt and I felt a warm glow in my chest at the same time. I knew that Jesus wouldn’t approve of my being happy about the prospect of my father never coming back, but it really didn’t matter because I was going to double Hell anyway for lying about being saved.
We quit going to church. My mother told me she was tired of people asking, “How’s Mike?” or “When’s Mike coming home?” She hadn’t told anyone about him missing except for her sisters—my Aunt Hattie, Aunt Liz, and Aunt Vera—and her two brothers, Uncle Al and Uncle Jack. Uncle Jack came around more often, and when he did, he and my mother would go into the other room and speak in whispers. I knew something was really wrong, but I didn’t feel like it was, because nothing had changed for me. Except for the way my mother was acting—something I learned my mother’s family (the West family), called “the West way.”
Aunt Hattie held to “the West way” more than the others. My mother had told me how her husband Luther had burned up in a truck hauling penny postcards. He swerved off the highway to save a family whose car was stalled around a blind curve. His truck went over an embankment, exploded, and he burned to death along with all those postcards.
The night of the accident, Aunt Hattie called her sisters—Liza, the youngest, Vera, the oldest, and my mom, Gladys, the closest to her in every way. I’d heard the story so many times from both of them, I knew some of what Aunt Hattie said to my mom, by heart.
“Gad?” (What all her siblings called her).
“Yes?”
“Luther’s died, but don’t tell anyone.”
“What? How?”
“Burned up in a truck full of penny postcards.”
And then before Aunt Hattie hung up, she repeated:
“Don’t tell anyone.”
One day when I came home from school my mother was crying again, and I figured my father had been found dead. But, no, the New Mexico State Police had found him alive, out of work, living with a friend—Noel Ride—in a small trailer in a remote area of the northwestern New Mexico oil fields. My mother told me that as soon as he got another job, and saved up enough money, my father was moving us out to New Mexico to live with him. My father did get another job, and saved enough money to buy a nine-year old pick-up truck. He used his G.I. Bill to buy a three-bedroom, two-bath house (what would we ever do with two bathrooms?), and drove back in the summer of 1959 to move us out west. My mother never again mentioned anything about my father’s disappearance. My stomach aches and migraine headaches got worse the closer the time came. But so did the warm glow in my chest, thinking about moving to the land of John Wayne and Geronimo, thinking about those horses still running wild in New Mexico that my dad had told me we would see.
And remembering that he told me I might get one of my own.
December 25, 1958, Pinckneyville, Illinois
My best Christmas would be a tie between the first one in New Mexico, when my father gave me a genuine Stetson cowboy hat, Justin Wellington boots (I pretended they were cowboy boots), an embroidered cowboy shirt, vest, jeans, and a Colt Cap Gun Revolver with leather belt and holster. It was between that Christmas and the last one we spent in Illinois when I got my Western Flyer bicycle. Since my dad was present when I got the cowboy outfit, that Christmas gets extra points. I’m told I would give him a hug after opening each package. But my dad was not yet part of my everyday life in 1958, and the desire to expand my territory, exploring distant vistas on a sleek two-wheeler that was all mine, had filled my fantasies for so long that I have to give my Western Flyer Christmas the nudge.
Even though I remember the details of each article of cowboy clothing that I wore playing in the painted hills of New Mexico—the precise fold of the felt hat, how my index finger perfectly fit the middle groove, and my middle finger and thumb gripped the ridges formed by it when I took it off to wipe my brow, wet from the moisture that accumulated beneath its brown sweat band, the way those boots rubbed my legs raw on long walks down arroyos with sand that pulled against the stride of my sixty-pound frame, as if I were making my way on a planet with double the gravity of earth—nothing in my eight years of living compared with the freedom of coasting down Randolph Street, blocks away from our little duplex, pretending I would never go home. I would glance in the window of Edward’s Grocery store, seeing my reflection, hair blowing in the wind, knowing that, for the moment, I had harnessed the wild force of gravity. And that only I determined where I peddled, coasted, turned, and stopped.
My bike had been “under” our Christmas tree—which in reality was really beside it—for a several days. My mother, I later learned, paid the owner of the Western Flyer store an extra $2 to assemble it. Of course, there was no way to wrap it, so my mom just put a bow on it, as well as an invisible no-enter zone, to keep it off limits until the big day. On Christmas Eve, I couldn’t keep my hands off it any longer, so my mother, in a rare instance of exception-making, allowed me to take it outside and ride it on the sidewalk in the dark, down to the corner and back—one time. Then I had to return it to its place beside the tree, and wait until Christmas morning to possess it fully. Of course, I never went to sleep, and at 6:00 a.m., unable to contain myself any longer, I woke up my mother, and before breakfast she let me take my real first solo ride.
The frame was red, with a built-in headlight on the front fender and a red reflector on the rear. It had a chrome bookrack over the rear fender as well, streamers coming out of the red rubber grips on the chrome handle bars, and red reflectors on the silver metal pedals. Whitewall tires were the only other accessory, and they set off the silver spokes and pinstriped chain guard in typical 50s style. I was the envy of my friends, neighbors, and cousins. Never did any parent score more brownie points from spending $29.99 than did my mother when she bought what was the most beautiful bike I had ever seen. Beauty, I learned, however, can bring out not only the best in people but also the worst.
Since first grade, Eddie Heavener, although not the brightest boy, had maintained more status than I because he owned a bike. By fourth grade, even though his bike still was in operating condition, it was old, paint-chipped, and rusted through in several spots on the fenders. But since not every boy in our neighborhood had the luxury of a working bicycle, Eddie maintained a modest level above me in the pecking order. Christmas afternoon, I met up with Eddie in the schoolyard, where the in crowd jumped curbs. We rode around the streets for a while, side-byside. Presently, we turned into my yard for water and a snack.
My mother asked Eddie what he got for Christmas. His answer surprised me. “A new bike.”
“Really?” my mother replied.
I hadn’t heard this either, so I was suspicious. My mother pursued the conversation.
“Why aren’t you riding it?”
“I’m saving it so it won’t get scratched. That way I can have it nice and shiny when I get older.”
“I see,” said my mother.
Eddie was in deep now and couldn’t find his way out.
“What color is it?”
“Purple,” replied Eddie, “Purple, with sparkles in the paint, and diamond
chips in the fenders.”
“Wow, I’d sure like to see that bike,” my mom said.
“Oh, I can’t bring it outside, I don’t want it to get messed up.”
On and on the conversation went, Eddie digging the hole deeper by the second. I was embarrassed for him, and ashamed of my mother because she was pushing him so hard.
“Let’s go for another ride,” I said.
After we got around the corner, Eddie burst out crying and admitted that he had made up the story about the bicycle. I learned a lesson that day about envy and pride. I also learned that my mother had a streak of something dark inside her. Something I did not understand. Later when my mother told the story to Jamie, I laughed with her. That’s when I knew that something dark lived inside me as well.
My bicycle riding territory had boundaries. Water Street to the north, and South Main Street to the east. The railroad tracks ran diagonally through town from the southeast to the northwest. They were my territory’s southern and western borders. My mother made it clear that if I went outside the boundaries, something bad would happen.
“Don’t forget not to go outside the boundaries.”
How could I forget? Every time I left, no matter how many times a day, every time I got back, even for just a drink of water, I was quizzed about where I had gone and whether or not I had gone “outside the boundaries.” I never did.
I would ride up to them, stopping at the railroad crossing and rolling my front tire up to the first railing, just shy of touching it, to see how it felt. How those green lawns on the other side pulled at me.
I would ride my bike down West South Street to South Main (the highway that went out of town, south to Carbondale, and all the way to Kentucky, if you took it far enough). I would stop at the stop sign on the corner where Rick Thurman lived in the big house on my left, look up the street toward the town square and down to where the road disappeared into cornfields and adventures I could only imagine.
Then I would do a U-turn and go back up past our house to the other end of my territory, where the railroad tracks cut through Jamie’s yard, and ride as far as I could up the embankment to the tracks, and sit and watch the coal cars go by that Jamie regularly ran alongside, grabbing a ladder, and scrambling to the top of an open hopper to get rocks for his collection, before jumping down just in time to land in his yard, before the car disappeared around the bend.
Like a cat, I patrolled my territory. Several times a day, I made sure the boundaries were still there. I fantasizing about crossing them. For weeks I went through this ritual of hearing my mother’s voice—“where did you ride?”—thinking about crossing the line, but not doing it. Until I did.
One day while riding on a street that paralleled West South Street on the southern side of my territory, I came to South Main Street and stopped, like I always did, preparing to do a U-turn. I looked to the left. No cars approaching. To the right—none there either. I looked across the street at houses and yards and trees I had never ridden past. The next thing I knew, I was through the intersection, peddling fast. It was the first time I remember consciously breaking through a limit that either one of my parents had set.
It was exhilarating. The houses were huge. The trees taller than any I had ever seen. The grass, the flowers, more lush than paradise. I was coasting down the largest hill I had ever been on—I seem to remember even taking my hands off the handlebars—when I looked to the right and saw my Uncle Jack standing in the front yard of a house. “What was he doing here”? I thought. He waved. I turned my head away and immediately turned left at the next intersection, continuing down the hill. I was so much in a panic that I didn’t bother stopping at the stop sign. I saw a car approaching from my left, but I was traveling so fast I couldn’t stop. I ran into the front right fender of the car, flipped over the handlebars, across the hood of the car, and onto the pavement. The man and woman in the car immediately jumped out. I picked myself up and went around to retrieve my bike.
“Are you all right?” they asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, not looking at them, so they couldn’t identify me later.
“We should take you to a doctor!”
“No, I’m fine,” I insisted, as I pedaled away, conscious that I had left their fender scraped and dented, but thinking only of how I could get out of this mess.
I was around the corner before they could get back into their car. After a block or so, I pulled over into some trees to hide. It was then that I noticed that my handlebars had been knocked sideways. I straightened them—thank goodness they weren’t permanently damaged. I checked the rest of my bike, and found that there appeared to be no additional damage. It took a while for me to ride home. I was gathering myself, thinking about all of the possible consequences to my crossing the boundary.
When I pulled into our driveway, Uncle Jack’s old painting van was in front of our house. Somewhere inside me I knew I was doomed. But I was not ready to give up. I walked in all cheerful, acting as if nothing untoward had happened.
Uncle Jack and my mother were sitting on the couch. At first they didn’t speak, taking their measure of me. Then my mother began:
“Where have you been?”
“Oh, just out riding,” I said.
And then the dreaded question:
“Did you stay within the boundaries?”
“Of course,” I said.
“That’s strange,” said my mother. “Because your Uncle Jack says he saw a boy riding past his house that looked a lot like you, on a bike that looked a lot like yours.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“He says that he waved at you and you turned away.”
“Nope, must have been someone else.”
Then Uncle Jack started in on me. My mother jumped in and they took turns grilling me. I was standing in the center of what now felt like a courtroom. I was in front of the prosecuting attorney and the judge, with no one to defend me. But no matter how many times they cross-examined me, I held to my story. And then they stopped, and just stared at me again.
That did it. I could deal with their accusations. They were something I could push against. But I couldn’t deal with this—this cold silence. A silence where, instead of God’s wrath pointing its fiery finger in my face, and naming aloud my sin the way it had with Moses in The Ten Commandments—there was only a blank space that offered neither resistance, nor help. My upper lip started quivering. I began sniffling. Then I let out a wail that exploded through the house and burst through every open window.
“I lied!”
I ran into my mother’s arms. After a good lecture, all was forgiven.
But I was grounded. The next time I got to ride my bike, I stayed within the boundaries. And I never crossed them on my bicycle ever again.
