Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption

by Kris Saknussemm

  Berina taught him patience (“A watched clock never boils.”), introduced him to jazz (he’d heard a lot of blues, bluegrass and country music in his time on the road), and she gave him his love of gardening and things that grow. Together they planted bearded irises, trillium and lavender in her back yard—and he was entrusted with the task of watering all the indoor succulents. “A little green inside goes a long way,” she told him.

  For his part, he taught her one thing, which turned out to be a great source of happiness and fulfillment for her. Like many black Americans, for many reasons, Berina had never learned how to swim. And it had always bothered her. Casper had learned how to swim the hard way. Poppy had thrown him into the Pearl River. “We can’t have a Reverend doing baptisms, if he might drown!”

  Casper had discovered how to swim, just as he’d learned to survive—out of pure necessity. He wasn’t a great swimmer . . . “But I’m very bad drowner,” as he put it. So, they’d go out in attempted secrecy on Saturday mornings, driving in Berina’s forget-me-not blue Rambler to Shoals Creek, the moment it became warm enough to dip.

  “Don’t you be lookin’ at my fat thighs,” she’d say—wearing a bumblebee floral one-piece she’d bought with great embarrassment on Main Street. He’d laugh. She had the inner confidence to be laughed at, which was what he needed most of all. That was the thing he worried about most then—being laughed at.

  And while watching the barn swallows and the red-winged blackbirds, he taught her how to float . . . and she let him handle her body in a way that Rose would’ve never allowed. She got so she could paddle, then actually stroke. She came to love the water the way she loved her garden. In all the long days that he’d be gone, she’d come to escape to the local creeks whenever she could in summer. He’d helped her conquer a deep fear. Learning to float. Such a simple thing. But it meant a great deal to her. He was so pleased to see her pride in her growing confidence. He’d given something back, and that giving would return to him in more ways than he could ever say—when Poppy and Rose slipped out of his life and he was once more alone.

  “You release that boy into my custody as of this morning—this paper says so.”

  “Are you family?” the authorities asked.

  “I’m damn family enough and this paper proves it. It’s all I need in this world to convince the likes of you. You put one more hurdle in my way and I’ll take you with me when I go over it. I want to see him now, and we’re going to leave according to these papers.”

  The other meeting ground they had was music. Berina’s hands had become arthritic early, but she kept up the discipline of playing her polished upright grand piano that she’d brought with her from Chicago every day. She talked with pride about the famous musicians who’d passed through the family club and had given her lessons. She was good, Casper had to admit—but hearing her play always made him reflect on what a fine, subtle artist Rose was. She really had a gift, without seeming to expend any effort. It made him grieve to think of it, how good she was and yet how little she seemed to care. She preferred her Ouija board and Poppy’s penis—which puzzled him all the more because she was so puritanical about matters of the body generally. Just as with some applied effort, Poppy could’ve become a true stage magician, Rose could’ve become a concert pianist or a professional organist. Something more than Boone Burgers and his breakdown had gone wrong in their lives.

  One night in West Virginia, not far from where he was born, he asked Rose about her music and how she’d learned. She dodged the latter question entirely and to the former, replied with a faraway smile, “There’s always, somebody better.” Casper never repeated that to Berina, because it would’ve made her lose all respect for Rose.

  Together he and Berina would sing “Divine Love” and “Shall We Gather at the River.” He knew rivers and sang of them as if he did . . . the Tugaloo, the Ogeechee, the Sapelo and the Altamaha—the Rio Grande and the rivers of Eden. The first time they ever sang together she said, “Boy, you got some silk and rock salt in you. Where you learn to sing like that?”

  “I was Reverend America,” he answered. He’d learned to sing, literally for his supper, in JESUS LOVES YOU trailer towns amidst white trash and black cabins. As Poppy said, you couldn’t get the pot to bubble over with just hellfire and damnation—the winepress of the wrath of God—or even the succor of the Beatitudes. Their closing number was always Rose’s version of “The New Jerusalem,” her long fingers working out on the sticky keys to an early African-American written melody that stands with Bach. Casper would hear that in his sleep for years to come.

  More than anything else though, Berina gave him some new credence just in being. If she thought his behavior was ever strange (and sometimes it truly was), she gave no sign of being offended or afraid. Who wouldn’t be a little odd, growing up as he had? Berina Pinecoffin wasn’t one to judge anyone who met her standard of trying to better themselves. She called him Matty. Summer Shield did too.

  Summer was an impish dust brunette who lived two doors down from Berina’s boarding house. Her eyes were the aqua blue of Black Jack gum packs, but as a child she’d been blinded in one by a splash of hot grease from her mother’s frying pan, so one was cloudy, one was clear. The disability didn’t seem to affect her spirit, although it forced her to turn to speak to you. The first words she ever spoke to him were, “Why, you could hide behind a streetlight.” He liked her instantly. She had a lovely simple fragrance of muskmelon. The last thing he’d ever say to her in the flesh was, “I wish I could’ve healed you,” meaning her bad eye. She turned to him with the clear one and said, “You heal me every time we meet.”

  Her father ran one of the local hardware stores and was a devout Catholic, which meant that they came in for some prejudice. Persecution would’ve been too strong a word, but Casper had seen how it worked—the business suffered as a result and they only lived in the big house they did because her mother had inherited it.

  Her mother was some kind of invalid who remained confined to the home. Summer would later say she was afflicted with “Took-to-Her-Roomatism.” The presumed cause of the obscure nervous disorder was a hushed up attack by a door-to-door notions salesman, but Berina was of the view that the salesman was a fiction. “There’s a lot more to that family than meets the eye, pardon the expression.”

  Whatever the cause, the consequence was that Summer was forced to be eldest child, only daughter and virtual mother to the family, which made Casper appreciate all the more the time she took to spend with him.

  The four brothers were put to work in some way at the store. Summer, being a girl, found work doing chores for Berina, which is how Casper met her. She was two years older and half his size, and her devotion and the support she lent to his emerging masculinity balanced the nurture that Berina provided. Looking back, he saw he might well have slipped into the netherworld much sooner than he did without their care—and he might never have escaped.

  Summer loved cherry sno-cones, Mint Velvets and Wayne Newton—especially his song “Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” Casper, Matty, bought her a bouquet of long stem roses on her first birthday they shared together—April Fools, “My favorite day,” she’d say. Later, he’d always try to do the same if he had money. He’d at least send a postcard, one of the novelty ones she liked—like jackalopes or giant trout. Failing that, an old Reverend America one. He worried that if she didn’t hear from him, she’d think he was in jail or institutionalized—and there’d be some gut hurt truth in that.

  Come the end of school in June, when the two had finished their chores, they’d seek refuge near Turkey Creek, in the place the locals called Rum Jungle, because hoboes slept there. She’d slip a Shasta daisy from Berina’s garden behind one ear and pack them a picnic of cream soda, devilled eggs and boysenberry pie. They’d hold hands and stare at the sky. Come dusk, they’d fish for fireflies, listening to garter snakes slithering through rusted cans. Casper never once made a move to fondle her breasts or do anything that wasn�
��t chaste. He couldn’t bring himself to—not after Mexico. Even the coon dong he gave her was seen as innocent, because it came from Berina’s chest of charms.

  Summer had a wispy yet still hardy alto and loved to sing. Out of the blue she’d chirp a line of Billie Holiday, like “I’m goin’ to lock my heart and throw away the key.” Then she’d giggle. He loved singing “Skip to My Lou” with her, and he taught her to harmonize on Only Men songs like “In the Dark of the Road.”

  He greatly missed the music he’d made with Poppy and Rose—not just their official performances, but those times camped beside the Rivers of Babylon in the Chickasaw plum and weeping willow, with not a harp in the trees, but Poppy’s banjo, Rose singing like Eve at the beginning of the world.

  Once the White Angel Fire and Faith Mission was defunct, they stopped playing and singing cold—as if it had never mattered to them. Whenever he’d try to get Rose to play with him at home, she’d look at him with her séance eyes and say, “Not tonight.” He wondered if she was punishing him. She knew how much the singing meant to him.

  Summer always brought a pack of cards with her so they could play Crazy 8’s. “I’m just crazy about Crazy 8’s.” Some people around town thought she was a bit simple—but everyone seemed to believe on the basis of how she’d helped raise her brothers that “she’d make a good wife.” Casper often thought of that when he’d fall asleep back home, hearing her calling him Matty in his dreams.

  On occasion he noticed small violet bruises on her wrists and once up under her ear. He didn’t see how she could’ve gotten them from the work at Berina’s, but when he asked her about them, she’d laugh him off. “Don’t you worry about me, kiddo.”

  But he did worry—and those words of Berina’s about the deceptive nature of her family always stayed with him. She was hiding something—but whether it had to do with her father or the brothers, or her strange mother, she never let on.

  One time when they were lying in Rum Jungle, Summer started up from the sparrow grass with a sudden exclamation. She’d just gotten her period. She was so ashamed. Her pistachio green sundress was stained, her white cotton drawers soaked through. He held her. When she started to cry, he said in his Reverend America voice, “Let not your heart be troubled, for you are a child of God and his blessing is upon you.” He handed her some of the paper napkins she’d brought for their picnic and said, “We’ll rinse out those drawers in the creek. I’ve always been real good at laundry.” He gave her his shirt to wrap around her waist and walked her home in his T-shirt.

  The problem was he didn’t live with Berina and he only saw Summer for a few precious hours each week. His life still lay in the hands of Poppy and Rose, and upon the financial calamity of Boone Burgers, his guardians had become more pressured. Poppy had even started to drink, which was so unlike him.

  Casper was blamed for all their woes. They turned any recriminations they might’ve aimed at each other on him, and what had previously just seemed slippery became outright wrongdoing. They tried serious mail swindles. Losing all that money to Cab Hooly, it seemed like they had lost their minds, and the seeming neatness and insulation of their means of deception made them lose perspective on the risks they were running. In using the international mail, they’d steered into the territory of federal crime. When the final crisis came, it was like a trap springing shut.

  Casper was fifteen when his adoptive parents were arrested on multiple counts of fraud. For all the skirmishes with the law in the past, this time it looked like the charges would stick. At Poppy’s insistence, Rose got away, and for years Casper believed that any day he’d hear from her—that she’d slipped down to Costa Rica and would summon him to join her. That never happened, and he later found out through an old bail bondsman contact that she’d likely died in a hotel in Panama City from a barbiturate overdose about two years after she fled. If that woman wasn’t her, it was someone very much like her, and no other word ever came. Like Hooly, she just disappeared. Her organ—that they’d hauled so many miles—she left behind covered in dust. It was confiscated like all the rest of their things and sold at auction.

  12

  Don’t Hang Your Hat on the Wind

  West is south from Joplin, skirting the Arkansas line into Oklahoma. Casper and Little Red were just under two hundred miles from OK City on I-44. They could make that near sunrise, maybe rest a bit—then head down through Ft. Worth to Austin. All he had to do was keep it nice and easy—nothing to attract attention from the highway patrol. The car was a legitimate rental and when he checked the glove compartment, he found that the agreement had two more days to run. It would be another twenty-four hours at least after that before even bulletin was put out. Dev Neon had printed up a fake Nevada driver’s license for him—he thought that would hold up if they got pulled over. Little Red was another story.

  “I know the drill, Mister. I’m your niece, all right? Ain’t no one gonna believe daughter. Not the way you look. ‘Sides, I done this shit more times than you I bet.”

  Casper was pleased that this was true. He’d never had the belly for the young ones. He turned on the radio, hoping to get some news about the twisters. They were headed into the gauntlet. A CD came on instead. “Only the Lonely.” Poor Rick James, he thought. What would the brothers have said about him listening to Roy Orbison?

  They merged onto 44 (what Missourians call “farty fahr”). He punched out the disc and the weather report confirmed what he feared. Little Red . . . Angelike seemed unperturbed. Maybe it was all catching up to her.

  “I’m . . . sorry for what happened,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

  “I was there, I saw it,” she answered. “He’d have beaten me up and you know it. He’d been wailin’ on me a lot ‘cause I stopped workin’ with the bump. I only found out a bit ago. He had one other fat black chick named Shantrelle that he was hustlin’ but he wasn’t any kine of real pimp. Used to be night manager at KFC. Got fired for drinkin’. I wuddn’t be with you if I thought you was the killin’ kine. I’m stupid, but no fool.”

  Casper turned those words over. Then went to turn off the radio.

  “Leave it on if you like,” she said. “You mine if I play with myself? It relaxes me. I mean we’re friens right? Havin’ just dumped a body and all.”

  Casper changed the station and a song came on that he liked. Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery . . . make a poster of an old rodeo . . . just give me one thing that I can hold onto . . . ’cause belief in this livin’ is just a hard way to go.

  Angelike gave out a dry cry when the song finished. He kept his eyes on the white lines of the road. It was a better cry than her tears. Several miles passed in silence—and then she said, “So, frien—uncle . . . am I gonna keep callin’ you Mister, or do you have a name? I’d believe you if you said you didn’t. And you did scare me some back at the depot.”

  He cracked a thin smile. “You can call me Casper.”

  “Like the Frien-ly Ghost?”

  “Not the Holy Ghost.”

  “Word. You always been so white? I guess that’s a dumb question. I mean—I don’t know. That wuddn’t what scared me.”

  “What was it?” he asked.

  “You just don’t look . . . like you come . . . from anywhere.”

  Out of the mouths of babes, Casper thought. That summed up a lifetime of stares and averted glances.

  “You traveled a lot?”

  “Walla Walla, Washington . . . Hutchison, Kansas . . . Modesto, Saginaw, Decatur, Durango, Sugarland, Texas. I’ve been in every state in America except Alaska, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Delaware—and Maine,” he replied. “I’m not sure Delaware actually exists—I think it’s one of those urban legends. I’ve been across Canada, down in Mexico—and once on a vacation to Puerto Rico. Only vacation like normal people I’ve ever had.” He thought of Sharee.

  “Where you learn to deal like you handled Rickie? He didn’t even see that comin’—and you’re no pup. Soldier?”

/>   “I’ve been in jail—and worse places—and I’ve worked with a lot of tough folks.”

  “So, what brought you to Joplin—other than the ole Hound Dog?”

  “I used to live there,” Casper answered. “I came back thinking I’d find some answers.”

  “‘Stead you found me.”

  “You were the one who found me,” he replied.

  “Laugh out loud. All right, so, you save my ass—you’re drivin’ me to Austin in a stolen car, takin’ all these chances, when you already been in trouble . . . how come you don’t want me? Is it the bump? You think I’m dirty? I got condoms. I got a pill left if you got trouble gettin’ hard. No dude ever knocked me back ‘cause I’s too young. Rickie, he made money off me—when he wasn’t on top of me his own damn self.”

  “Like you said,” Casper murmured, “I’m not like others. I don’t think that’s what you need now. What you need is a ride to Austin—and I’ll take you there.”

  “I’ll take you there,” she sang. “You know that old soul song?” Casper had once sung with Roebuck “Poppa” Staples and his daughters in Lexington.

  “I love old soul. I used to love to dance! I’d dance and sing my ass off when I was young.”

  Casper half-smiled, half-grimaced. When I was young. There was a little girl in her that hadn’t been killed off. He wondered whether the Charleston boy was still alive in him—the miracle child who became good ol’ Reverend America.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I’m running low on money too. I’m hoping maybe your aunt can help me out,” he said.

  “Good try, Mister—Casper. I think you’re just a helpin’ kine of fool. But if pity works for you, it works for me.”