Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption

by Kris Saknussemm

  “I have a propensity for veering into the realm of aphorism and saw,” replied the ancient, which reminded Casper of both Poppy and Joe.

  “Like how do you mean?”

  “There are only two things in the world that smell like fish, and one of them’s fish . . . when you put the ball in the air only three things can happen and two of them are bad. That, and I remain incredibly horny—do you know old Ben stayed porking right up to the end? I also occasionally go kite flying.”

  “Kite flying?” Casper queried.

  “A cerebral sojourn,” the old man explained. “An adventure of the imagination. You would too if you’d been stuck in that place.”

  “I can understand that,” Casper said. “What’s that around your neck?”

  “This, my young friend—if I may be so bold—is what passed for our entertainment in that foul establishment—did you see my establishment? Donated malfunctioning headsets from the Museum of American Natural History. A self-guided tour through the ages.”

  Casper slipped on the headset and heard a synthetically bland, cheerful voice . . . “Welcome to the Hall of Early Mammals.”

  “Can you believe it?” the old timer sniggered, and threw the device out the window. “Some folks got the Japanese version. No cable, no records, hardly any books—and they wouldn’t let me have a guitar, so all I had was this,” and he pulled from the chest pocket of his shirt a tarnished Marine Band harmonica in the key of G.

  “Do you know what they’d do to keep us entertained in winter? They’d wheel us down, even those of us who can walk just fine, and they’d let us fish in the municipal pool. They’d put blankets over us, and there we’d sit. A bunch of old men with fishing poles, nothing to catch. Some wiseass therapist thought that would be fulfilling. Give the old bastards something to think they’re doing! But I’ll be damned if a turtle didn’t get in that pool one day and Bill Heffernen, bless his fool heart—he got up out of his wheelchair and dove in after it. Don’t know if he was trying to catch it, or just felt kinship.”

  “What happened to him?” Casper asked.

  “Oh, he drowned. But it was a good way to go out. We all threw our poles in. I hope the turtle got away. Bill’s turtle. He got his sign.

  “And now, how are we going to free the working class? Have you read Marx? Are you members of a union? All this fear of socialism! What we need is communism! Equality! Dignity for the common man! I don’t suppose you have a club sandwich? Why did you knock me down? Did I tell you I was 151 years old? I’m a folk singing agitator. I’m a legend. My name is Hoptree Bark. I’m bitter and ill-scented, but I have many medicinal purposes. Hehe.”

  “Do you know where you are now?” Casper asked.

  “I’m in a car,” the old man replied.

  Casper glanced at Angelike.

  “You’re drivin’ and savin’. He can’t go back where he come from.”

  Casper put the Buick in gear and headed through the remnants of Ardmore.

  “If you want something done, give it to a busy person,” the old man chirped. “If you want something done right, do it yourself. My name is Hoptree Bark. I’m 151 years old.” Then he launched into the old folk song “Sourwood Mountain.”

  13

  In the Time of My Dying

  Poppy managed to wiggle on the federal charges, but was convicted on other felony counts and sent to State Prison, where he developed severe depression and was fatally stabbed by a fellow inmate over a domino game within a year of his incarceration.

  The last words he said to Casper were, “Remember what I told you about your teeth and your shoes. Don’t worry about me—I had this coming. Just don’t you become a wood duck. When you’re clear, you’re the best there is. I thought I was good. You’re in your own class Only Man.”

  Overnight, the bottom of Casper’s world fell out, and there was nothing Berina could do to save him then—although she tried every avenue. When the full scope of Poppy and Rose’s frauds was learned, no one in authority was keen to offer much sympathy, and the system came down hard on Mathias True.

  Underage and without legal family, he was put into the care of a youth authority. His albino complexion and peculiar demeanor made him the butt of jokes and bullying. When he fought back, he went overboard. His anger and resentment at losing his parents—the deeper disorientation of never having known his real family—and the growing awareness of how his youth had been martyred on the altar of deception—all served to make him intractable.

  Yet he actually started longing for the Reverend America days. He missed people fainting when he touched them—the magnetic electric power he had. He missed the calico and denim awe when he’d thrust out his hands and plead, “I pray to the divine majesty and mercy of the Lord of Hosts to help me save these wayward souls here tonight.” He missed the pulled pork, deep fried okra and apple butter. But most of all, he missed singing together with Poppy and Rose as only they could. He managed to slip the sacred Only Men songbook to Berina before he was taken away.

  He took to resisting all regimentation and looked down on his peers. Worse—the hallucinations returned. He was bounced around and eventually relocated to a facility in faraway Michigan, where he knew no one and felt utterly isolated. He ended up breaking another boy’s nose and had to face Mr. Krepp, the administrator.

  Julius Krepp liked boys—that’s why he worked with them. He especially liked unusual looking, sensitive boys who weren’t cut out for a life of strip searches and total lockdowns. He always put it politely, even though he could crush them as he liked. All he asked for was submission. Respect. Surrender. Then he’d sign the good paper.

  He was a squat, receding hair-lined man in his early 50’s, with shining rimmed eyeglasses and the habit of blinking too much. Always a little too well groomed for such a job, he had immaculately manicured fingernails and smooth, almost waxen skin. Beware men with unusually soft hands.

  Mathias True expressed the deepest contempt he could—with his teeth. And so, Krepp, when he got out of the hospital, took his revenge. He will surely violently turn and toss thee like a ball into a large country: there thou shalt die.

  Like a prince of eunuchs, he sent the boy into the lion’s den of a serious correctional facility with older men. Just as he intended, the failed minister wasn’t there for forty-eight hours before he was treated to a Michigan Bank Roll.

  A “Michigan Bank Roll” is old gambling slang for a roll of what could be $1 bills or even blank paper wrapped inside a $100 note to create the illusion of a wad of money. But that’s not what the term means in places like where Mathias was sent. It happened in the kitchen, where his head was forced down into a pile of slippery potato peels.

  Voices and shadows . . . snouts and ears of limestone cave bats . . . tarantulas all over his body . . . teasing him . . . tickling him . . . until their claws came out and bit in deep . . . their eyes incandescent . . . fur and scales like phosphorous . . . tongues wet and long with the lust for violence . . .

  “You’re gonna bleed like a bitch!”

  “Hold that skinny motherfucker down. I’m first in.”

  Shared like meat.

  The idea isn’t just to desecrate the victim’s dignity on a one-time basis—it’s to eliminate the possibility of dignity. Ten is the magic number, but five will do. One grabs the hair or neck. A blade of some kind isn’t only held to the victim’s throat, some blood is drawn, so that there’s no question what will happen should a Mr. Krepp instinct take hold. A third stands by to defend against arms moving, legs kicking. The closest equivalent to a broken bottle that can be found in custody is always visible, as a reminder of what could be applied if needed.

  “Right up your fuckin’ ass, you punk ghost faggot!”

  With these parameters in place, the object is to deploy the group in continuously sodomizing the sissy, while forcing him to simultaneously choke on another cock.

  “Spit on him! Spit on him!”

  Discipline and order must be maintain
ed to enact the full emotional and physical mutilation. The goal is to have one attacker pumping hard while the victim is forced to gag on another member. Then, when the fucker is about to climax, he trades places, jerks the victim’s head back, inserts his penis into the mouth and ejaculates deep down the unfortunate’s throat—with a nice aftertaste of rectal mucus, some blood and possibly shit.

  “Suck your ass you freak!”

  Casper came close to requiring a colostomy bag and was in the infirmary for two weeks, hallucinating great horned creatures.

  The ordeal did have one beneficent side effect though—it brought to the fore his incipient madness. He discovered deep things in darkness. He’d lost whatever faith in God he’d ever had, but he’d found his own religion. Survival. He was free to be insane and that insanity protected him.

  At first, the word that went around the cells and the mess hall was that the ritual rape had gone too far—they’d broken him. Yet he didn’t seem broken in the way they’d intended. He remained undefiled—and yet defiant. Not many can quote verbatim all the Four Gospels. Fewer still from the Books of Prophecy. And he could beat the Hell and Heavenly light out of Revelation. Come gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men.

  His fiery furnace visions, powered by the strength of his oratory made even the bluntest and roughest men decline further molestation. “Ye worship ye know not what!” he’d scream in the cold, cold showers. (Imagine the atrocity of being young, naked and so white, with leering, drooling men beating off and blowing jets of snot out their noses at your feet.) He summoned forth the Angel of Death from the scrub hollows and the possumshaw holly of the past. He roared of the Beast and the Vials of Wrath. And he sang. He sang for his life. It would be the last place he’d sing for many years.

  Several of even the most predatory inmates were outright scared of him, and while his mind flamed with hate, he wasn’t so addled as not to realize the leverage his apparent lunacy gave him. With his natural sense of training and long history of manipulation, the spirit white punk became a figure of respect, verging on awe. It was in that place that he was rechristened as Casper. Saint Psycho. The Creature Preacher. He lived morning by morning. Night times reminded him of the poultry pavilion, and the tears would well up—until he began shrieking with laughter and ranting of the fire. His words never stopped him from thinking of Poppy though. He’d learned the old survivor hadn’t survived his ordeal via the prison grapevine and it opened up all the old wounds. Memories of the card tricks and the vittles in the pines. They’d never been a father-son team cheating at a soapbox derby—and they’d have been so good at that. They were good cheaters.

  The case of Rose was even more poignant because he kept expecting her to rescue him. For the second time he’d been abandoned by a mother, and the thought of that cut deeper than the Michigan Bank Roll. Still, he endured the two blurred years it took Berina to go through proper channels to have him returned to Missouri and put in the care of a State psychiatric facility. As she’d done in the wreckage of Revered America, she saved him the best way she could. And she’d continue to do so.

  But in the moment, the mental institution hardly seemed like an improvement. There weren’t the gang fights and the race driven drug and cigarette wars to contend with—but there was no less noise, with men and women crying or laughing all night . . . contorted rubber faces peering out . . . hands attached . . . people like Mrs. Toffler, saying the most obscene things with the politest expressions on their faces. And although the guards were called orderlies, they were every bit as brutal and cunning. One in particular, a burly impotent Irishman would regularly rape and beat both female and male patients with his baton, always running it along the whitewashed cinderblock walls to announce his impending arrival.

  But being closer to Joplin meant Berina at least could visit, and she was quick to see the infernal nature of the place. She called on all the hoodoo she knew to get Casper released and into local outpatient care. The authorities attributed his “improvement” to the carpet-bombing of medication he received. The drugs eliminated any libido and caused near constant diarrhea, but he appeared a star example in their eyes.

  Although Berina couldn’t erase the memories, she managed to get this early part of his criminal record expunged, as he’d been underage when taken into custody and had never been formally charged. This didn’t prevent him from getting into trouble again though. He was later arrested for burglary, for which he served an absurdly harsh two-year sentence. “Boy, you do that again and I will whup you upside your head so hard you’ll never know Saturday from Sunday.”

  She still stood by him, but the days behind bars further hardened his heart. He’d learned, however, some lessons from his earlier confinement. How to drink pruno. How to keep a loose head. How not to get cornered.

  The combination of imprisonment, insanity and his Reverend America phase would have several lasting impacts. It froze him in time, like Poppy and Rose—sealing him in a bubble of Joe Louis, wingtips, Lana Turner sweaters and Milton Berle. To him, rock’n’roll would forever remain Elvis and Buddy Holly—he missed the Beatles completely.

  But the heavy medication he was exposed to did bring an end to the hallucinations. He was let out, and the go to the ant work ethic Berina had instilled in him stood him in good stead, even when the jobs were dull. He worked and wandered, traveling the country as he’d done with Poppy and Rose. He learned how to drive a bulldozer in a pine plantation one summer, cleaned acid vats, and decked chain on an Ohio River tugboat. His goal was to one day rejoin Summer, who’d stayed on in Joplin and become a nurse. But the jobs and the cities swept around him like the dandelion down she used to blow. He lost his way again. He’d been in one of the cleaner, more expensive institutions that Berina paid for when the news of Summer’s death reached him. She’d been hit crossing the street. On her blind side. By an ambulance, ironically. She’d never gotten married and was still living at home. She’d been saving herself he’d heard—for something. The loss brought back the darkness—yet still he endured. Berina managed his release. He’d learned the favorite show idea.

  Once more out of the grave and into the fire. Without a high school diploma, he had to take what work he could—often despairing, pointless jobs . . . slaughterhouse, rest home, factories, changing tires. The places he’d lived were just as heartless. Squares of loneliness with steam heat dripping off the walls, a spring jutting out of a stained mattress . . . smears of sputum dried under matchbook-shimmed tables . . . damp, stinking pillows. He never sang in those days.

  It’s not easy when you have both a criminal record and a history of mental health problems. Never to be called the courteous “Sir.” Forever grateful for a clean toilet. He was often forced to forge signatures and invent names—just as his former guardians had done. He knew how to come by fake ID and how to make up stories. He was only one coherent person to Berina.

  Then she called on some old family connections and got him a job working for Amtrack on the Empire Builder. He started washing dishes, the sole white man in the kitchen. All those rolling miles—from Union Station in Chicago to Milwaukee, St. Paul . . . then the haunted towns of North Dakota . . . to Whitefish . . . through the mountain darkness of Idaho, at last to the coast and the ferries of Puget Sound.

  He kept his nose clean and became a chef’s assistant, working for Big Black Monroe back east on the Montrealer line, slinging the hash alongside a tiny, wiry black guy called Jerky. Monroe had a Jewish wife and six children in Montreal. Jerky lived above a barbershop in East Harlem when he wasn’t on the train. Not being able to afford living at either end of the line, Casper took a creaking floored hotel room in White River Junction, Vermont. He liked the icicle sharp steeples of the New England churches. It was there he met Betsy.

  Poor Betsy was a May Day in bed, but had pubic hair that was as rough as a Brillo pad, which she tried heroically to soften wi
th lanolin, and Casper joked that with a little rosemary and garlic, she’d have been the perfect lamb roast. He called her “Lambkin” and he started singing again. In his Medicine Bag was a Polaroid some stranger had taken of them sharing a submarine sandwich out in front of a Mohawk gas station.

  But love will make you do funny things—and not having much experience that way, Casper gave up his good job for the hope of a life with her. They went back to her small Wisconsin hometown and served as caretakers of a summer camp. Then he got into a fight in town one night. He couldn’t remember how it started—only how it ended. He had to cross over into Canada. For man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. For years he lived illegally, being paid in cash. He worked on a Cree Indian Reservation. He studied wheat fields. But still he snuck back to see Berina.

  The final time he returned to Joplin, he stayed to look after her as she’d done with him. Leukemia. She’d fallen on hard economic times too—the only way a sensible, hardworking woman like her could’ve found that fate. Love. For the first time since her young filly days, stout and now speckled with age, she’d given her heart to a man. A traveler who’d been staying at her boarding house for years. One of the few loyals who’d stuck with her despite deals at the local motels she couldn’t match. A white man named Exeter Crowe.

  Casper was too late coming back to find out the details of how he’d worked his wiles. Like Cab Hooly, he just absconded one day—and with him went most of the money Berina had worked so hard to save. Casper made her peppermint tea and read to her from the Reader’s Digest. It nearly tore his heart open to hear her, near death, weeping in shame about not having more money to leave him. He never forgot those last moments in the hospital. No longer the lovely smells of jasmine, honeysuckle, crumbed cutlets and fresh bread that had been her life. Just disinfectant and rubber gloves—Salisbury steak and cranberry slop.

  “I wish to God I were a real healer,” he said.