Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

  On days like that, I tiptoe around her bedroom, and for dinner warm up some fish sticks or a potpie. Back, feet, sinuses, neck, migraines, vertigo, stomach, joints—the ailments always seem to flare up at a crucial time: when Marshall angers her, just before a holiday, when I go on a school trip. I have no way of knowing which pains are real and which are imagined, and no clue how to help an ailing woman who happens to be my mother.

  Mothers are supposed to make their children well when they’re hurt, not the other way around. I wonder, Is my mother unraveling, or is that just how women are? She should have had daughters. They’d know what to do.

  I volunteer for after-school activities to avoid spending too much time at home, yet even then I have to rely on Mother to pick me up. Sometimes I stand outside the school for thirty minutes or an hour, waiting. After darkness falls, I see only headlights driving by. Maybe she’s had an accident. Maybe she drove off the road on purpose, ending it all, as she sometimes threatens. Soon guilt floods in. How can I possibly think such thoughts?

  My brain spins. What will my life be like as an orphan? Will the state of Georgia assign me to a new, temporary mother? If she’s not here within the first fifteen cars, she’s not coming. I count to fifteen slowly, like a child playing hide-and-seek. When her car doesn’t appear, I set another goal. I walk to the end of the school driveway and back. Again. And again, counting the headlights that pass.

  She always shows up. I know better than to mention how long I’ve been waiting.

  Yet each month she writes letters to her supporters using spiritual, upbeat language. I find one lying around, and read:

  I’ve been doing some reminiscing lately over my life and the way the Lord has worked in it, and it just amazes me. When you serve the Lord life never is boring, and you don’t always know what is coming next, but as you look back you can see the direction of the Lord in each step. He has promised to lead and guide us “step by step” and He has faithfully done that.

  She quotes verses about triumphing in Christ, the joy of the Lord, and being content in whatsoever state you’re in. She reserves all the darkness, all the anger, for us, her sons.

  * * *

  —

  One summer day, I have to get away from the heat in the trailer. No one is talking there anyway.

  I walk a few blocks to a public swimming pool and change in the locker room, depositing my clothes in a rusty metal basket and pinning its number tag to my swimsuit. I slip into the chlorine-smelling water, duck under the surface, and force myself to open my eyes underwater. After I get used to the burning sensation, my vision clears.

  When I open my mouth, bubbles float to the surface. As I exhale, I sink slowly to the bottom of the pool, where I can watch the headless bodies of all the people kicking around me. I hear the odd, slushy sounds of shouts and laughter from above. I am alone in the midst of a crowd, watching. I let the feeling of calm, of safety, flow through me until the air runs out and I have to shoot to the surface.

  There is a terrible kind of cruelty, no matter how well intended, in demanding the denial of self when there is no selfhood to deny.

  —James Fowler, Stages of Faith

  CHAPTER 13

  ZEAL

  The summer I graduate from seventh grade, Mother accepts yet another job, teaching at a Christian camp in Kentucky. We throw some clothes in a suitcase and drive from Atlanta to a rustic site nestled in the hollows of Appalachia.

  For the next six weeks, Marshall and I live with several dozen other boys in a ramshackle cabin that smells of canvas and turpentine. The first afternoon, barefoot, I learn the hard way to avoid the splinters and nailheads poking up from the floorboards. At night, I turn over in my bunk bed and let out a yell—“Ow!”—waking the entire cabin. I have caught my nose on a nail protruding from the wall, ripping one nostril and causing a terrific nosebleed.

  The boys’ outhouse has six holes cut in a rough bench with no hinged seats—yet another splinter hazard. I take a deep gulp of outside air before entering, and try to hold my breath inside. If nature calls after dark, I sprint across the grass, hoping not to step on a snake or a scorpion, and then sit on a hole freshly webbed by a spider. A camper in my cabin has accidentally dropped a flashlight down the hole. Until the battery wears down, a pale yellow light shines through the chinks in the outhouse walls. No one volunteers to retrieve it.

  To the other campers I must seem like a city slicker. These are tough, rangy kids with missing fingers, barbed-wire scars, and blank spaces where teeth should be. They quiz me about skyscrapers, television, expressways, and passenger trains. The only trains they know are the ones that carry coal strip-mined from the hills. “Do you know any Negroes?” one asks. “I ain’t never seen one.”

  The camp’s leaders must have served time in the military, because they run the place like basic training. At six o’clock in the morning—groan—a staticky loudspeaker clicks on and strains of the hymn “Whispering Hope” echo through the hills. Half an hour later we campers stand at attention in the cabin for a check of lice and bedbugs and an inspection of our bed-making skills. Next comes a half-hour quiet time devoted to Bible reading and prayer, followed by fifteen minutes of calisthenics. Finally, we march in formation to breakfast and a daily schedule of indoor handcrafts and outdoor games, sandwiched around Bible lessons and missionary stories—my mother’s contribution.

  On Friday night, after a roast-beef dinner, we gather around a fire to toast marshmallows on straightened coat hangers. The stars, undimmed by city lights, prick bright holes in the cobalt blue sky above. After leading a few hymns, the camp director reads from the Psalms, poems that speak of mountains and streams and animals. I think about the creatures that might be out there, watching us.

  One of the counselors asks, “Would anyone here like to share what God has done in their hearts this week?” We scuff our feet in the dirt. Kentucky kids, with no experience in public speaking, are slow to respond, and they keep it short.

  “I jes’ need to live for the Lord when I git back to my family. It’s easier here around y’all.”

  “Some things I know gotta change. I cuss too much, for one thing. I smoke like a chimney. And without God’s help I’ll end up just like my dad.”

  “I been hangin’ with the wrong crowd. I need to find me some new friends.”

  After each confession the camper who spoke tosses a stick into the fire, a sign of how he wants to blaze for Jesus.

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks in, I’m totally bored by the routine. Marshall and I hear the same Bible stories and play the same games, but with a new group of campers. The only breaks occur on weekends between camp sessions, when we drive through towns with names like Flat Rock and Dripping Springs and visit some of the campers’ houses. Most of them sit on concrete blocks, like our trailer, and have cardboard patches tacked to the outside walls.

  On these visits I learn to pump water from a well, working the handle up and down until, with a sound like a cough, a flow of clear, cold water spurts from the spout. I try my hand at milking a cow, but nothing comes out, no matter how hard I tug. The cow stamps her feet and my country coach says, “You’d best let go ’fore she kicks yore brains out.” He takes over, his hands moving smoothly from one teat to another, and streams of warm milk hit the bucket with a pinging sound. I breathe in the smells of warm milk and musty dried manure and the cow’s grassy breath.

  I gain new respect for people I had judged ignorant. I learn to reach under a hen and grab an egg so fast that the hen has no time to peck my arm. I watch a farm woman wring the neck of a chicken, swinging the plump body around like a lasso until suddenly she flicks her wrist and the bird’s neck snaps. She swings an axe, and I watch amazed as the headless chicken, spurting blood over its white feathers, runs around the yard flapping its wings, as if nothing has happened.

  Kentuck
y brings me close to nature. When a water moccasin swims toward two of us campers in a rowboat, a mere head visible with its flicking tongue and cloudy eyes, my companion calmly slaps an oar in the snake’s direction until it changes course. I lie in bed at night and listen to the thrumming of frogs as they hit different notes, like an orchestra tuning up. I fall asleep to the soft call of whip-poor-wills, and jerk awake at the cry of a bobcat, identical to a baby’s bawl.

  Then, one day’s adventure exposes something awful in myself. Hiking in the woods with a mischievous friend from the cabin, I see a box turtle dragging along in the dirt. It acts almost cartoonish, with tiny yellow-striped legs laboring to propel an oversized dome on its back. The head with its parrotlike beak bobs up and down as the reptile lumbers toward the bushes. I bend over to catch it, and just like that its head, legs, and tail retract. I poke here and there, trying to get a reaction, but the turtle knows better than to open up.

  We find another turtle, and then another. We have stumbled upon a nest. Within a few minutes we catch seventeen of the box turtles. We line them up in a row, all hiding inside their shells, unmoving.

  For some reason, my companion drops a large boulder on the end turtle and with a loud crack the shell breaks and red blood and shiny moist insides gush out. Hesitantly, I pick up the boulder and do the same to another turtle.

  Something possesses us. Without saying a word to each other, we proceed to drop heavy rocks on all seventeen turtles, one by one, laughing as their shells split open. Perhaps scared by the noise, not one tries to escape. They die mute.

  We walk back to the cabin in silence. All that summer I live with a private stench of shame. Such wanton cruelty in anyone else would appall me. Now, I am the guilty one. The scene clings to me like a second skin, damning proof of a self I have not known. I speak of it to no one, but inside me a dark hole yawns open, as if something has burst.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of that summer, Mother makes the decision to move our trailer to the grounds of Faith Baptist Church on the eastern edge of Atlanta. She explains that she can no longer afford the monthly trailer-park rent, so she has agreed to head up the church’s Christian-education program in exchange for a free parking space for our trailer. “We’ll never get away from church,” I complain. “We’ll practically live in one!”

  We go from the 1,000-member Colonial Hills, too conservative for the Southern Baptists, to the 120-member Faith Baptist, too conservative for any denomination. The sign out front spells out the church’s identity in a many-pointed star: “Independent, Fundamental, Bible-believing, New Testament, Blood-bought, Born-again, Dispensational, Premillennial, Pretribulational.” The church’s motto? “Contending for the Faith!”

  Faith Baptist occupies twenty acres, the site of a former pony farm. A truck hauls our mobile home to a spot that some of the churchmen have rigged up with electricity, water, and sewer. In the process, the movers poke two holes beneath the trailer’s kitchen window, which workmen cover with strips of shiny metal. The front of our aluminum home now looks like a grinning face with two front teeth missing.

  The congregation meets in a small brick building, its inside walls bare of any decoration. Our pastor, Brother Howard Pyle, comes from a proud family of fundamentalists, all graduates of Tennessee Temple University. He has flaming red hair, a surplus of zeal, and an eagerness to follow in the footsteps of his four preacher brothers. The Pyles and their three daughters live in a large house on the church property, directly across from our trailer.

  Church life centers on the preacher, and Brother Pyle uses that fact to full advantage. Shaking his right index finger at us, he preaches fiery sermons in a strained rapt voice. Over the next four years, I attend hundreds of services—Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night prayer meeting—and hear hundreds of sermons, most of them describing what we should guard against: sin, Hell, the devil, temptation, the wiles of the evil one. Most services end with an altar call for salvation, even though the congregation rarely includes a visitor and all of us regulars have already gone forward at least once. No one seems to mind. With such high stakes, you can’t be too careful.

  Our new community seems more akin to the folks in Kentucky than to the middle-class crowd at Colonial Hills. A one-eyed hairdresser who can’t shake the nicotine habit. A plumber with an abundant sprout of nasal hair. A garbage-truck driver. A middle-aged mother who often requests prayer for her alcoholic husband. I wonder, What brings these people back week after week to hear about wickedness and failure?

  Music helps lighten the tone. We have an energetic song leader who waves his arm in ⁴⁄₄ time, like the pope blessing a crowd. Accompanying him at the piano, Marshall soon dazzles our humble congregation. He breaks into runs and trills that make that tired old instrument sound as if Jerry Lee Lewis himself has stopped by.

  One Sunday in the middle of the service, the church door flies open and someone yells, “Fire!” We all run outside, and find orange flames licking the roof off the pony barn, which we use for Sunday School. Fire trucks roar up with sirens blaring, the deacons scurry about moving lumber and attaching hoses, and all of us church members look on as the flames climb the air and heat bakes our faces. Then we file back into the sanctuary, smoky with the scent of charred timbers, and listen to Brother Pyle deliver an impromptu sermon on the fires of Hell, which he describes as seven times hotter than what we have just witnessed.

  “Think about that fire,” he says, “causing pain far beyond the worst burn you’ve ever had. That’s a pale picture of what Hell will be like—seven times hotter, forever and ever with no second chance.” I try to wrap my eleven-year-old mind around eternity, and fail.

  Hell, though, I can easily imagine. I live every day in fear that God will send me there. The prospect leaves an acid taste in my mouth and a tense feeling in my stomach. Whenever I start feeling safe, the scene with the turtles comes back.

  * * *

  —

  Every fall, Faith Baptist erects a circus tent on the grass field beside the pony barn and holds a week of special “revival” meetings. Since we live on the church grounds, Mother expects us to attend services every night of the week. Our first year, a preacher named Jack Hyles drives down from Indiana to preach on “Thirty-Nine Steps to Effective Soul-Winning.” Another year, the firebrand Bob Jones Jr. leads the revival, stirring things up when he denounces Billy Graham as a compromiser.

  A Texan named Lester Roloff draws the most enthusiastic crowds to the big white tent. Roloff owns his own plane, which he flies to speaking engagements. Like a cowboy, he wears boots and a bolo tie, and he speaks in a bass voice with a Texas drawl. Roloff got his reputation by ranting on the radio against homosexuality, communism, television, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, gluttony, and psychology. He did so in such strident terms that he had to leave the Southern Baptist denomination and become an Independent Baptist, just like us. Now he runs group homes for troubled teenagers, where, in his words, “parent-hating, Satan-worshipping, dope-taking immoral boys and girls” are turned into “faithful servants of the Lord.”

  You never know what you’ll get when Lester Roloff starts preaching. A health fanatic, he claims most problems can be cured by faith, fasting, and food. He scorns most pills, except “the gos-pill,” he says, and urges us to follow the diet found in Leviticus, along with a few of his own additions. “Even rats and roaches won’t eat that worthless white bread,” he claims. “You don’t believe me? Leave a piece out for them. They know it’s full of chemicals and poison, and they won’t touch it.” In a major sacrifice for a family raised on Wonder Bread, Mother follows his advice and converts us to the brown wheat variety. Soon we’re also eating grapefruit for breakfast, but I draw the line at Roloff’s favorite snack, carrot juice.

  One thing about a Roloff revival service: nobody falls asleep. In the middle of a sermon, he’ll suddenly come up with an unrelated
pronouncement—such as “Dancing feet don’t hang on praying knees!”—and begin a blast against lukewarm Christians who dance. “Do I hear an amen? Amen!” Then he bursts into song in an off-key voice like Johnny Cash’s: “Wearin’ out my shoes / Tellin’ God’s Good News / Ringing doorbells for my Lord / Ringing, ringing, ringing doorbells / For my Lord!”

  Within a few years, however, Lester Roloff gets in trouble with the state of Texas over his group homes. He has often bragged about the strict rules: no television, doors locked from the outside, radios tuned to his station only, mandatory daily church attendance. At a court trial, sixteen girls testify that they have been whipped with leather straps, handcuffed to drainpipes, and put in isolation cells as penalties for failing to memorize a Bible passage or make a bed.

  “We are under attack,” Roloff says in his defense. “The Communists, Masons, atheists, humanists, evolutionists, and other godless sickos want to destroy the family. Parents beware, the government wants your child!”

  As authorities haul him off to jail, he shouts defiantly, “Better a pink bottom than a black soul!”

  * * *

  —

  I spend my summers at a Bible camp and the rest of the year living on the grounds of a hard-line church. I inhale religion. Yet as I prepare to enter high school, I feel more anxious than holy.

  I have yielded to the pressures of altar calls. I have felt the shiver of pious pleasure on hearing a revival speaker say, “Yes, Jesus, thank you, Jesus,” as I make my way forward to get born again again or to rededicate my life to the Lord. I know how to give my testimony in a soft, sincere tone and can pray in a way to beckon amens, and sometimes tears, from those around me.