Bean was born and raised up there, but Baby knew he wasn’t like the rest of them; he had a gift. He could play any musical instrument he tried—piano, accordion, saxophone, anything. He could hear a song once and play it note for note; he could sing the song with perfect pitch, without even using a pitch pipe. When he played or sang, he wasn’t just one of those trashy Boggses from the Ridge. He was magic.
The band director seized him as soon as he hit junior high, put him into a band uniform, and taught him to read music, which was as easy for Bean as football was for the rest of the boys. He played the clarinet, first chair, and could have gotten a music scholarship to DuVall, or anywhere else for that matter, but he didn’t care about school. He was going to be a rock star.
He practiced every song the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had ever written, and junior year, he and a couple of the guys in the marching band, John Cool McCool and Clint Murdoch, started a rock band.
It was while they were playing for the first time in public—at the Future Homemakers of America girls-ask-boys dance—that Baby noticed Bean. He was wearing tight leather pants and singing “The House of the Rising Sun.” His gravel-and-ice voice went right up her spine. She left the guy she was dancing with, walked up to the stage, and stared at Bean as if she had never seen him before. At the break, he came over and talked to her, and to her own amazement, she told him she thought he was really sexy. She let him take her home, and from that night on, they were a couple.
The band was just beginning to make some money when they all scattered after graduation. Bean was drafted into the army right out of school. When he got back from Vietnam in March of ’69, the first thing he tried to do was get the band back together again.
John Cool, big and shaggy, with a full beard and long hair, was happy for a diversion from his job selling used cars at Mountain Motors, but Clint had left for Texas Tech, so Baby’s brother Rocky bought a pair of leather pants and yellow aviator glasses and got his heart’s desire to play bass. Bean played lead guitar, and growled the vocals in a voice that made the girls scream.
The new band sounded even better than the old one, and before long they landed a regular gig out at Woody’s, a roadhouse and liquor store over by the interstate just across the county line. On Fridays after dark, the traffic from the dry town of Sweet Valley to Woody’s, in wet Marlon County, was bumper-to-bumper, everyone crossing the line to dance a little and stock up on beer and Boone’s Farm for the weekend, hoping they wouldn’t pass their preachers or their mothers on the road.
Baby hung out a lot with the band, dancing and having a few beers, but Cherry had never been to Woody’s. Ever since Bean had come back and started playing there, it was like Baby had a new part of her life that she couldn’t share with Cherry. Cherry was a member of the Holiness Church, which didn’t permit dancing, much less at a place where there was also drinking going on. As far as the church was concerned, Woody’s was the gateway to hell. One preacher or the other preached about it nearly every week. Members of the Holiness Church would jump off a cliff without a parachute before they would set foot in Woody’s. Baby felt the same way about the Holiness Church. It was foreign to her, and she would just as soon keep it that way.
8.Cherry
Last Sunday night our pastor, Brother Wilkins, announced we would have a revival at church, starting tonight. I hated—well, disliked; hateis too strong a word—revivals, because for the entire week I couldn’t do anything at night but go to church. It was enough to have to go three times a week.
Daddy was a deacon in the First Apostolic Holiness Church of God, and I think the first thing he and Mama did when I was born was take me straight to service from the hospital. They used to put a quilt down on the floor in between the pews and I’d sleep or nurse during the sermons, my mother delicately covering herself with a lace handkerchief. Getting religion with mother’s milk, so to speak.
Being raised Holiness is kind of hard at times. It’s a real Don’t religion. They don’t believe in dancing or drinking or swearing or playing cards or wearing makeup or shorts or even sleeveless dresses, much less swimming suits, to mention a few things. When I was little, Daddy used to make me wear a dress when we went swimming in the creek, but I almost drowned once when it got wrapped around my legs, so Mama put a stop to that. To tell you the truth, Mama wasn’t all that keen on the Holiness philosophy. If she had stuck to all the rules like they preached, she wouldn’t have been able to use Dark Eyes on me or play cards with the aunts or wear makeup. She, of course, had to leave it off when she went to church, but Daddy didn’t seem to care (or maybe he just finally gave up) that when she went anyplace else, she put on the whole nine yards—lipstick, powder, rouge, and Maybelline mascara. That was the best part. The mascara came in a small red plastic box with a tiny drawer that slid out to reveal the weensiest little brush you’ve ever seen—like a toothbrush, with only one row of tiny bristles—and a brown cake of mascara. Mama would wet the brush with a drop of water and scrub it on the mascara cake, then, with dainty strokes, apply it to her lashes, her little finger bent, her eyebrows stretched upward. In a pinch, she would spit on the brush. It was kind of yucky, but she said your own body fluids are clean to yourself.
I used to love to watch her put it all on when I was little, but I don’t wear much makeup myself. False eyelashes sometimes. Eyeliner. Maybe a little pink or coral lipstick once in a while, but if I wear red, I look like a big red mouth wearing a skinny, white girl. Back a couple of years ago everyone was wearing white lipstick, and I tried that, but it was too scary, because it blended right in with my skin and made me look like I didn’t have any lips at all.
But makeup looks great on Ivanell. She has real style, the kind you have to be born with. She loves jewelry—big button earrings or gold hoops and bracelets that jangle. She’s big into nylon negligees, which she wears around the house with high-heeled marabou slippers. There is no one more glamorous than Mama. She should have been a movie star.
Frankly, if she wasn’t crazy for Daddy, I don’t think she would be all that much into the church at all. Ivanell loves fun, and the church is against anything that smacks of fun. They don’t like it if you go to a ball game or go fishing on Sunday. Most of them think it’s even a sin to have a TV.
When TV first got popular, there used to be long debates at church on whether or not it was a sin. They wouldn’t admit it out loud, but a lot of the congregation wanted a TV. They were just afraid of it. There were no Scriptures about TV in the Bible to guide them. It was an understood fact, though, that the movies were sin. A lot of movies had drinking and dancing and half-naked women in them. Christians didn’t go to movies. I learned that early.
When I was about nine, a girl in our church, Bernadine Taylor, sneaked out to the movies with her friends one night and had the bad luck to come out of the theater just as Brother Wilkins was passing by in his car. He got up in church the next Sunday and preached a whole message about it. He called her by name and made her kneel down at the altar and had the whole church come up to pray with her for forgiveness. She was crying and they all were crying and moaning and talking in tongues and begging for forgiveness for her soul. You would have thought she had been caught naked at the truck stop with a room full of sailors. I think she was thirteen at the time.
I even remember the movie. It was something with Robert Mitchum, who, Brother Wilkins said, was known to drink and maybe even use dope. Not that I particularly liked Robert Mitchum, but I did like Elvis quite a lot, and thought I might get to see one of his movies one day. But not if I would go to hell if I did. It upset me so much that I cried about it after church.
Mama told me to hush crying. She said that God would never send anybody to hell for having a good time, and all of them at church were a bunch of ignorant old fuddy-duddies who wouldn’t know a good time if it bit them on the butt. The next night, in spite of Daddy’s warnings, she took me to seeJailhouse Rock.We bought popcorn and Coke and both fell in love with Elvis.
When the movie was over, we stood in front of the theater for a really long time just hoping Brother Wilkins would drive by. Mama even smoked a cigarette, something she usually never did in public.
“Just let that old S.O.B. try to drag me up to the altar,” she said as we looked up and down the street.
He, as luck would have it, didn’t drive by that night. But after that we did buy a TV. Daddy rationalized it by saying, “Well, we are doing it in the privacy of our own home. It’s not like everyone is watching us.”
I’m sure he wouldn’t have bought it if Mama hadn’t thrown such a fit over the movie thing. I think he did it, in part, so she wouldn’t go back to the theater. Or maybe he would have bought one anyhow. She really wanted one. He pretty much did whatever she wanted. She had a hold over him greater even than the Holiness Church.
With the wonder of the TV, it seems like things eased up a little, and by the time I started dating Ricky Don, they didn’t say much when I went out to the movies with him. We even went to a dance once in a while. I just didn’t make a point of telling Daddy, and he didn’t ask: “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”
And that’s more or less the way it has been ever since, about everything. I still go to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night, and I sing in the choir. But hell has receded a little for me.
—
The first night of the revival was to be the annual foot washing and Lord’s Supper to kick off the week of services. I really dreaded the foot washing. I may have mentioned that my feet are large. I wear size 11, but there is just no place that carries that size, so usually I have to buy a 10, and my feet hurt all the time.
I asked Doc McGuire once if there was an operation to take out some bones in my feet to make them a normal size, and he gave me such a lecture that you would have thought I had asked him to make my boobs bigger. Which, to tell the truth, I would have done if it was possible. But after that tongue-lashing about the feet, I wouldn’t dare mention boobs to him. I guess I’ll just have to live with big feet and a flat chest. Or find a more sympathetic doctor. I probably couldn’t afford it anyhow.
But the foot washing, I could do without.
The way it works is, they line up two benches facing each other on both sides of the church, four benches in all. The men are on one side, the women on the other. We all sit across from each other, and then, taking turns, each woman gets down on her knees and washes the feet of the woman opposite her. I don’t mean really scrub them with soap—we just symbolically splash a little water over them and pat them dry with a towel to show humility, like Jesus did at the Last Supper.
I was doubly embarrassed when it came my turn, because Brother Wilkins’s wife, Sister Wilkins, plopped herself down right in front of me to be my partner. She was as small as Brother Wilkins was large; skinny, with sharp elbows and a big pink mole on her upper lip that quivered when she talked, bless her heart, so that try as you would, you couldn’t take your eyes off it. I suppose the Holiness Church won’t let her get it removed. I couldn’t imagine kissing her. I was trying to picture Brother and Sister Wilkins kissing when she got down on her knees and I had to put my foot in the basin to get washed. It was so big—my foot, not the basin—that my toes stretched up the side of the bowl. All the water almost sloshed out. I’m sure she picked me because, being the preacher’s wife, she wanted to get all the humility she could. More foot for the money, so to speak. She cupped her hands and dipped a handful or two of water over my feet, then dried them with the towel, and I did the same for her poor little skinny size 5’s.
Then they passed around the blood and body of Christ—trays of unleavened bread and tiny glasses of grape juice. We each took a piece of bread and chewed it slowly and reverently, and then a sip of juice from a sip-size glass, putting it back into its stainless-steel holder as the deacons passed by. We couldn’t understand how the Catholics could all drink out of the same cup, with the germs and all. And it was rumored that they used real wine. The Holiness Church believes that no one in the Bible actually drank wine and that at the wedding in Cana, Jesus changed the water into grape juice. Nothing will change their minds.
After the bread and grape juice were served and the benches were put back in order, we sang “I’ll Fly Away,” and Brother Dane Harkness got up to start preaching the revival.
I liked Brother Dane—a lot more than sour old fat Brother Wilkins, with his puckered-up face, chipped front tooth, and unfortunate perspiration problem. Too bad Brother Dane was an evangelist and didn’t want to take a church full-time as the preacher. I would swap Brother Wilkins for him in a minute.
Brother Dane used to be a hell-raiser in high school. He was in the same class with Mama, and she told me he was the best-looking boy in the class but that it was scary going out with him—which I think she did, although she would never admit it to me—because he drank moonshine whiskey and raced his old car around those winding mountain hairpin curves at ninety miles an hour and did every other wild thing he could think of in this little town. Until he found Jesus and reformed and became a preacher, that is.
Nobody ever fell asleep during his sermons. He loved to preach about how bad he was in the old days. It was meant to make us see how horrible sin was, but it sounded like he’d had a really great time:
“Brethren, I know sin in an intimate way! The Devil was my closest companion when I was a young and foolish boy. Me and the Devil were just-like-this.” (He held up his crossed fingers.) “Inseparable. We drank together in honky-tonks, got into fistfights, played cards, drag-raced, and chased loose women. We got unspeakable diseases together, got shot at, cut with knives, and once the Devil went with me to the hospital at three in the morning to get an ear sewed back on that had got half bit off in a fight.” (He stopped and pointed out the scar.)
“There was nothing he wouldn’t egg me on to do,” he continued. “Nothing. If I hesitated, he dared me. ‘Are you yellow?’ he’d say. ‘Are you chicken?’ And I’d say, ‘Chicken? I’ll show youwho’s chicken!’ And then I’d go on and do whatever it was he wanted me to do. Oh, he was a fine companion. So fine that one morning after fighting and drinking moonshine whiskey the whole night long, I woke up in the hog pen with the sun in my eyes and the hogs rooting me around and never knew when or how I got there.
“Brethren, in that hog pen, in that nasty, slimy, stinking muck, I hit bottom. I was as low as any man can go. I was sick at my stomach, covered in my own puke. My head felt like somebody had taken a chopping ax to it, and I could hear my old pal the Devil laughing at me. Brethren—it made me mad.
“If Saint Paul wrestled with an angel, I wrestled with the Devil that morning there in that hog pen. I lit into him like a man possessed—which I was—and he dodged me like one of those greased pigs. The Devil is a dirty fighter, brethren. A tricky fighter. When you fight the Devil, it’s Katie, bar the door!
“I called him every name in the book. I ran out of names to call him, and made up a few. I dared him to show his face. Then I would feel him sneak up behind me. I’d wheel around and dive at him, but he wouldn’t be there, and I’d just dive into the hogs. The madder I got and the more I rolled and thrashed around with those hogs, the louder he laughed.
“We wrestled until the sun burned down hot at high noon. We wrestled until the sweat ran and the twilight came, and I was wore plumb out. The Devil was still laughing. He was not even winded.
“I gave up then. I gave up and lay right down and waited to die. The Devil had won. The end was coming and I knew I was going to die and get eaten by those hogs. I would become what I deserved to be—hog manure.”
Brother Dane was preaching so loud that the windows rattled. He was jumping up on the altar and down off the altar, swinging at an imaginary Devil. His dark hair hung down in his eyes, the color of blue gas flames, and I could see why girls had been scared of him. But he had that congregation in the palm of his hand.
Then he stopped. He stood looking at us wit
hout saying a word. There was not one baby crying or one kid squirming. Nobody even breathed. Then he continued on in a quiet, gentle voice:
“But, brethren, something miraculous happened. Just as soon as I stopped fighting, just as soon as I gave up, I heard a still, small voice speak to me. I heard it just as sure as you are sitting there and listening to my voice speak to you here tonight.
“It said that it loved me. It said that it had loved me since long before I was born, and loved me so much that it had died for my sins. It said I didn’t have to be in this wretched shape anymore. I didn’t have to play the Devil’s game and wonder if each day would be my last.”
He took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead.
“All I would have to do is ask Jesus to come into my heart. For that was who was speaking to me, brethren. Jesus. In Luke, Chapter eleven, Verse nine, He said, ‘Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.’ I asked Him that day to come into my heart. He knocked, and I answered.
“He’s knocking at your door, brethren. All you have to do is let Him in. Say, ‘Jesus, I have sinned, but I’m tired of sinning. I’m tired of carrying this burden all by myself. I need a little help. I want you to come into my heart, and into my life.’ Ask Him now. Invite Him to come in now. And He’ll take over from there.
“I asked Him right there in the hog pen. I opened the door. And when Jesus came in, the Devil fled. There’s not room in your heart for the both of them, brethren. You don’t have to be in a hog pen to accept Jesus. You can do it right here at this altar. It changed my life, and it can change yours. Close your eyes and bow your heads. Come to the altar now. Nobody will be watching you. Come now. Come while we sing.”
The choir began singing “Just as I Am,” and Brother Dane went up and down the aisles, laying hands on the bowed heads in kind of a blessing. The air was snapping with a crazy energy. I must admit, my own heart was racing. If I hadn’t already accepted Jesus as my personal Savior when I was eight years old, I would have gone up and let Brother Dane lay hands on me.
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