How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

  It irked the families that we were still so dependent on First Baptist. Not enough for any of them to fork over the money needed to add on to the church, of course. For his part, my father was more than friendly with the preacher of First Baptist. In his late twenties and single, Brother Mims came over to the parsonage at least once a month to eat my mother’s cooking and talk God with my father. Brother Mims was a fiery little man who often yelled even when he was agreeing with you. Once, he brought over an inkblot the shape of Jesus’s face. He said he liked to show the image to children my age and had me hold the paper up to the light and stare at it uninterrupted for thirty seconds. Then he directed me to close my eyes, which I did, and there, burned onto the backs of my eyelids, was the glowing face of the Savior. It was startling. Brother Mims explained the power of Jesus was such that he could see inside us, that he knew our hearts and our souls better than we did. We could hide nothing from him, even the darkest corners of our minds. He said, “Confession. It’s the only way—for he already knows how filthy we are!” His voice rose so that it became almost funny, but I didn’t laugh because he was a guest in our home and my parents were watching. After he left, my mother and father argued about the demonstration. My mother believed it was wrong to use fear to scare children into salvation. “Unseemly,” she kept repeating. My father contended he didn’t care a lick about the method so long as a soul was spared eternal damnation.

  As my father and I canvassed the cemetery, I thought about that picture Brother Mims had burned into my brain and how the more I learned of God the more terrifying he seemed. Even after my mother showed me how the inkblot had been a trick. “A cheap one,” she said. Even after she made me hold other black-and-white pictures up to the light to prove how ridiculous it had been, how anything could mark our vision in that way. Still, I knew the works of God, how stern and immovable he was. The cemetery was a stark reminder of where we all were headed. No matter what, I was destined to face him, one on one, without the shield of my parents’ love to protect me.

  Late June and the cicadas had already burrowed out of the earth, leaving the ground squishy. As if we were walking on a sponge. At the back of the cemetery, right before the grass turned wild with honeysuckle and cattails, we came upon a fresh grave. A member of First Baptist who’d died while giving birth. A plaque had been planted at the foot of her grave that gave the woman’s name and age. It would remain there until the tombstone arrived a couple of weeks later.

  “Poor thing,” my father said. “She was fourteen.”

  Yards away, a man rode a lawnmower, his droopy straw hat obscuring his face. He’d already cut the grass where we stood, but he was headed back in our direction anyway. The wind caught his straw hat and blew back the brim, revealing the boyish face of Brother Mims. After he coasted up beside us, he killed the engine. “Lordy,” he said. “I guess my ox was in a ditch today!” He took off the hat to fan himself like an old woman would.

  “You picked a hot one, Mims.” My father was older than Brother Mims and better educated, but he didn’t make nearly as much as the young preacher. If this bothered him, he never said. He treated Brother Mims like a kid brother, someone to mentor. “A shame you had to put this one to rest.” He nodded to the grave.

  Brother Mims retrieved a thermos from the cup holder at his side. He squirted water on his face then opened his mouth and shot some inside. He looked like a teenager. He wore overalls and no shirt, and his pink shoulders bulged with damp muscle that I wanted to pat dry with my bare hands. I longed to touch the skin, feel the hardness in my hands. I knew it was wrong, that it was somehow connected to the “curiousness” my father had accused me of earlier that morning.

  “A mess,” Brother Mims was saying. “The whole business.” When he spoke, my urge to touch him lessened. His voice always shouting. Like he was speaking to us over the din of a noisy room. Maybe he’d find himself a wife, I thought, if he didn’t talk so much.

  “So I hear,” my father said.

  “Half the church didn’t want her put here if you can believe it.”

  “Oh, I can.”

  Even I knew of the scandal. The young girl had gotten herself pregnant by an older cousin. They had tried to run away to get married, but the family caught up with them in Arkansas—the girl was brought back home to have the baby while the cousin, a boy in his early twenties whom my father claimed was “soft in the head,” was sent away to distant relations in El Paso.

  “Mary-Beth was young,” I said, and my father slapped me. Just barely. Hard enough to shut me up and prove something to Brother Mims, who’d looked startled when I spoke the girl’s name. Brother Mims probably assumed the slap was a reminder for me as a child—a child of a preacher, no less—to be seen and not heard, but I knew even then that my father’s slap was more significant. In part, it was a delayed response to our earlier conversation. Excess steam exploding through a relief valve of sudden violence.

  “People do all sorts of things,” my father said, “before they know how truly wrong they are.”

  —

  No amount of Bible study or prayer could rid my mother of her bawdy laugh. The laugh of Ethel Merman in There’s No Business Like Show Business, the laugh of Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame. A laugh that glowed, that said, Come in and take your shoes off. Her laugh must have been the first thing my father noticed about her, a serious man of God like he was. Must have both repelled him and drawn him in. They met in 1982, two years before I was born. My father was leading a prayer service at a run-down Piggly Wiggly in the lonesome town of Weir, not ten miles from the Neck. He had yet to find a church home and was traveling the state ministering in abandoned storefronts, living on the meager collections he received.

  Dr. Dillard—when he met my mother—still had all his hair. With a body more muscle than fat back then, he was an attractive man even if the pictures from that time show him in oversize cardigans and slacks. Clothes he would grow into as the years went by and my mother’s cooking took ahold of him. His eyes were the color of slate, and once they locked on to you, you were done for. You couldn’t look away. At the prayer service on the night my mother attended, he spoke in his usual quiet way. People probably leaned forward in their metal chairs to hear him, the stink of wet cardboard in the air. Baptists, as a rule, like their preachers to pronounce, to be bombastic, to be on fire with the Word—like Brother Mims. My father used other tactics; he wooed you to the Lord. His unlikely demeanor probably explained why it took him so long to find a church family. But I don’t mean to suggest he wasn’t effective. He’d get to speaking, his Texas drawl coming on strong, and you’d likely wonder what had taken you so long to accept the Good News. My mother was no exception, I’m sure.

  She recounted their first encounter to me like this: On that night, he told of the Samaritan woman who met Jesus at Jacob’s well. He often used the story for his sermons at Second Baptist. My father got a lot of mileage from the water metaphor. On his way back to Galilee, Jesus asked a woman if she would give him a drink of water from the well. The woman was taken aback. Jews didn’t speak to Samaritans—such was the custom of the day. The woman questioned Jesus about this, and Jesus told the woman that if she knew whom she was speaking to then she would ask a different question, a better one: She would ask him, the Son of Man, if she could drink the living water. “Dearly beloved,” my father likely said, standing on the cracked floor of the Piggly Wiggly. “Do you know that this selfsame water is offered to you tonight?” My father was a believer in baptisms. Not just the sprinkling on the forehead as performed by the liberal Methodists, but total immersions. “Dearly beloved,” he continued. “Don’t you know that this is a water to abate all your thirst?” At the benediction call, while the congregation sang “Open My Eyes That I May See,” Debra Rose, who’d been sitting in the back, as was her custom, stood. They had enchanted her, my father’s words. I never knew her to make a spectacle of herself in public, but this w
as different. A chance for salvation. Not only from her sins, but also from her past—a history on the Neck that she ran from at full tilt as she strode to the front where my father stood with open arms. When he hugged her, she laughed—that full-throated sound, reminding my father of all he’d ever known of heaven and hell. “Will you accept him into you?” he asked this husky woman, probably already a little in love with her, and she answered, “I will.”

  They embraced again, and this was when, she told me, she fell in love with him. A heavyset girl with a pretty face held by someone kind, someone steady. Her body shook with more laughter, both of my parents vibrated with her joy. As if a warm light had opened up between them. He pulled her away from his chest to get another look at this creature the Lord had sent his way. She was beautiful, yes, even if careworn around the eyes, and perhaps a little tacky with her plastic jewelry. He sensed sadness in her, too. A mystery. The words rolled out of his mouth, my mother told me, before he could stop himself. “Who are you?” he asked.

  And maybe—who can say?—my mother gave him more of an answer than she ever gave me.

  —

  People often lost their way in the Neck,” my mother said.

  So many trees and hills. One pine looked like another, and not much sky could be seen from the ground, the trees packed as tightly as they were. The stars were useless for navigation. Only the stupid and the brave crossed into the Neck, and only the stupidest and the bravest went looking for the women. Some men traded wares with them, but as time passed, the women learned an ugly truth about their dealings with the men: They got more when they traded their bodies for valuables. For a rut, they got guns, bowie knives, good fabric. “They weren’t the best-looking sort,” my mother said. “And I am sure they stank to high heaven, having only the river or the lake to bathe in.” But that was all right with the men. In town they told of how the women’s rough bodies felt in their hands, how they looked you in the eye the whole time you did your business, holding a blade to your neck in case you made a move she didn’t agree with. The danger helped them gain notoriety, especially with those who liked a little spice with their lovemaking. A thrill, I guess, in never knowing if the woman who climbed on top of you would slice you open before you finished. Some of the men, it was known, wanted more than the women were willing to give. These men came back from the Neck wide-eyed and bleeding, missing an ear, or limping, or sporting a blade in their bellies. Occasionally, the law tried rooting the women out, but they always failed. The genius behind their business was mobility. They never stayed put in the same place longer than two nights, circling back to previous locations. The map of the Neck emblazoned on them like instinct. They hid their tracks so well some even claimed they weren’t really women at all, but spirits. “Or witches,” my mother said, frowning.

  “But they were women, flesh and bone, right?” I said to my mother, when I thought I understood everything. “They were whores. Like in the Bible.”

  My mother winced. “That’s an ugly word, nugget.”

  —

  The back porch of the parsonage had fallen in and was home to knuckle-size dirt daubers. The roof had been patched and repatched so many times neither my father nor my mother knew if there were any of the original shingles left. Most thunderstorms came and went without any fuss, but once or twice a year a heavy downpour would settle over us and leak through. Brown stains bled down the walls in the living room and the breezeway, obscuring the yellow wallpaper Agnes Musclewhite, the widow who’d lived there before us, had purchased from a store that must have specialized in religiously themed housewares: Little white crosses and black thorny crowns ran in alternating rows from the ceiling to the floor. The brown stains from the rain looked intentional almost. Nature’s opinion of Agnes Musclewhite’s questionable taste.

  Because they didn’t pay rent for the pleasure of living in the parsonage, my parents met these discomforts with humor. When the window unit in the kitchen broke down, or the hot-water heater sprang a leak, or the lights flickered off when a strong wind blew past, they would look at each other and, almost always, shout in unison, “Oh, Agnes!” They knew nothing about the woman, so they could blame her for the troubles with the house. It was easier, I guess, than blaming the deacons, who were always slow to repair what had been broken, or themselves for landing in the Delta at a poor church that kept us in such paltry and dismal conditions.

  A hundred steps separated Second Baptist from the parsonage. A hundred steps down a gravel road that snaked through cotton fields and under a crisscross of power lines, where turkey vultures gathered when animals lay dead in the ditch. Roadkill happened more frequently on Sundays when our dirt road saw most of its traffic as members of Second Baptist drove in from Hawshaw to worship. Inevitably, there’d be some possum or armadillo, too slow in crossing, popped open by a car wheel. Our closest neighbor was an old widower farmer named Mr. McBride, who chewed Red Man tobacco and still planted and picked a field or two all by himself. All his children lived up North and had nothing much to do with him anymore; he rented most of his property to dirt farmers who lived closer to town and didn’t own enough land of their own to turn a profit. He had bought up most of Agnes Musclewhite’s land when she died and vaguely resented us for living on the handful of acres the Musclewhite family had given for the parsonage and church. Mr. McBride wasn’t a churchgoer. Sunday afternoons, my father and I would stop off at his place on our way back from the cemetery. I’d wait in the pickup as my father, his Bible tucked under his arm, climbed the front steps of Mr. McBride’s house, a large two-story with a wraparound porch and a car-size satellite dish perched in the backyard. My father knocked and knocked on the screen door. And each time the silence that followed was excruciating to me because it was fake. I knew the old man was inside—so did my father. Mr. McBride, as silent as death, biding his time until we left.

  We didn’t visit Mr. McBride on the day I danced in the choir. Passing the old man’s house, I asked my father if he thought our neighbor was going to hell. “Tough to say,” my father said. “He might get lucky in the end. Come to his senses.” In addition to total immersions, my father believed that once saved, always saved. No matter what you did, your acceptance into heaven was nonnegotiable once you asked Jesus into your heart. He had little patience for other denominations that believed otherwise. Like the Methodists, who kept to this notion of conditional salvation, where you could sin badly enough that your soul slipped out of fellowship with the Holy Spirit and you were in danger of damnation. “My God,” my father said, and said often, “only had to die once for my sins.” He especially hated Presbyterian salvation. They believed in predestination. And if he ever began to give his thoughts on the matter of predestination, his voice would rise to the volume of Brother Mims’s. “I do not, do not, do not,” he’d shout, if pushed, “believe in a God who punishes people before they are even born! It’s not just cruel, it’s undemocratic.”

  When we got home, my mother sat rocking on the front-porch swing, sipping on a pink can of Tab. After we parked, she hollered that supper was almost ready, and my father hollered back for the menu. “Well, let me see,” my mother said, rising to her feet as we joined her under the shade of the porch. “I did up the rest of the squash and fried some cornbread and—” When she glanced at my face, she swallowed the rest of her sentence and put the cool soda can up to my cheek. “Get a bug bite, nugget?” I was fair skinned like her, my flesh always burning and peeling in the sun but never turning brown. Even the tiniest of licks, like the one my father had given me in the cemetery, would show up and linger for days. My father walked inside the house without comment. She removed the can from my face and took another swig, thinking, her own face flattening from a look of confusion to something else I couldn’t read. We left her question unanswered and followed my father through the breezeway, then turned right to pass through the living room into the kitchen, where he was already seated at the card table, ready for her
cooking.

  No one in the Delta, least of all the residents of Hawshaw, knew of or cared about who my mother may or may not have been before joining them. Whatever happened in parts of the world beyond the Yazoo River was of little concern. If you were white and married to a man of semiprominence like my father, then you were welcomed. However, her reputation as a preacher’s wife grew considerably more beloved when she established herself as a cook. My mother had Bell’s Best memorized and never met a casserole she didn’t like or try to reverse engineer if the person who’d cooked it had not been forthcoming with the recipe. Her work with the Crock-Pot—the stews and the briskets and the roast beefs—became the stuff of legend. It was her desserts, though, that cemented her in the hearts and minds of the Woods and the Dickersons and the Musclewhites. Pound cakes made with Crisco instead of butter. Spongy peach cobblers with caramel sauce. A three-layer red velvet cake slathered with icing so white the cake seemed to be lit from within. Her most favored dish—the one the three families requested most for fifth-Sunday meals—was the cream-cheese crescent squares, known affectionately as Sugar Dump, for obvious reasons. The few times she bought expensive name brands were when she fixed this dish. A layer of Pillsbury crescent rolls popped from the tube and rolled out onto a casserole dish. Then a layer of Philadelphia cream cheese mixed with a cup of sugar, followed by another layer of crescent rolls. She baked it at 350 for thirty minutes, and while it cooled, she drizzled the top with a thin glaze of powdered sugar and milk. A simple recipe with store-bought ingredients, but people loved it. I suspect my mother took great pleasure in feeding her husband’s congregation. Perhaps a kind of communion: The more they ate her food, the less she felt like that old Debra Rose, the bona fide wild woman I wanted to meet, and more like the woman she had willed herself to be: Dr. Dillard’s wife.