Then the idea of prayer led on into planning my prayer circle climb and trying to see designs for my stick. I was already old enough to know when an idea was meant for me; and this plainly was, a beautiful place with a noble purpose. Chief had also mentioned prayer sticks as craft possibilities, another big attraction. I knew at once that I’d wait till the last day, far down in August. Not till then would I know how to thank the Spirit and what to ask next.
I even thought that my prayer stick might have a carved skull on the top—King Death. I’d stood three feet away, six months ago, and watched Father die. I was the only young man I knew who’d actually seen a human death, in a room with normal furniture, as real as a sneeze. So my thoughts were as bone-strewn as any slaughterhouse. But they wore me out in a few more minutes. In the frigid black I pulled my one blanket tighter around me and fell on sleep like a safety net.
The next morning was Sunday, so we put on our white shirts and trousers. Then after breakfast we climbed to yet another prominence. This one was a high field with tall oaks, which for some reason was called the Pasture. And there we took seats to hear the first of Chiefs sermons. Strictly speaking it was about the fourth sermon I’d heard from Chief. If he said “You’re looking well today,” it sounded sermonical, like an elegy on all your wasted days. And his favorite gesture was the classic pulpit chop, righthand axe on lefthand stump. His text was the parable of the Prodigal Son from the gospel of Luke, and he meant to prepare us to cherish even the most troublesome boy in our care. For all his up-and-at-em vigor, Chief always included the weak and needy boy. You couldn’t find a boy he’d spurn or despise.
I admired that in him, but the main thing I heard that Sunday morning was a confirmation of my resolve from the night before. At the end of the parable, when the bereaved father embraces his lost son, I fought back tears and swore to have a sizable life.
One of the last things my father said to me was “Anybody on Earth can be common, son.” In the idiom of his time, the word common was harsher by far than shit is now. Common meant absolutely natural, people who settled for being themselves, with their shirttails out. He’d been balked in his own hopes to practice law. I must not be balked, whatever my dream. Somehow he’d spared me the weight of substitute success. He never asked me to excel because he hadn’t. But the meaning hung there before me from the start. And oh, no starved white-trash hound was ever hungrier for rabbit than I was for greatness in the eyes of Heaven and Earth.
If you remember the bottomless, and topless, innocence of the 1950s, you’ll find it easier to believe me when I say that— alongside a healthy appetite for fun, sex, tennis, swimming and most kinds of music—I was a starved consumer of the highest art. My room at college was a tabernacle to the Greeks, Michelangelo, Vermeer, Picasso, Winslow Homer, Handel, Wagner, Keats, Hemingway and T. S. Eliot. From an Italian trip a teacher had brought me five or six of the uncanny Alinari reproductions of Michelangelo’s most ethereal drawings. So over my bed hung such high-water marks as “Archers Shooting at a Herm,” “The Fall of Phaeton,” a study of the Last Judgment and so on.
On a New York trip, for fifty dollars I’d purchased a fragment of a Greek girl. It was just a lopped-off torso but it glowed. My mellow RCA phonograph was backed by a respectable library of classical and jazz and blues albums. And the low bookcase held the cream of a library I’d accumulated since childhood. There were poems, novels, the lives of great artists and every Phaidon art book I could find. I’d have killed for copies of the prewar Phaidons I couldn’t find—Giorgione, Titian and El Greco.
I not only owned them, I used them all. And years before Father suffered and died, I combined their exalted visions of human potential with my own boyhood fantasies about Young Jesus, the one who astounded the scholars in the Temple. And I came up with high ambitions. Now with the memories of Father and his final challenge not to be common, the goal shone brighter. It spun ever faster and it seemed to draw near. I wanted to earn, I wanted truly to deserve, the permanent thanks of mankind. I wanted my good-sounding name to last. It was not impossible. A few dozen men had actually done it, a few strong women. Therefore I could.
I’m painfully aware how crazy that sounds. Even at the time, I suspected I was all but certifiable. Before I reached Juniper though, I’d confided to no one. Despite the ecstatic imagery of my plan, the practical means were within the reach of hope. I would paint, or make with whatever tools, pictures of the world that compelled belief. And belief not only in the reality of the world and its worthiness for contemplation and honor but a whole lot more. I wanted my pictures to inculcate, in secret of course, a trust in the hand that waits behind this brute noble Earth to lead us out and elsewhere.
I meant, in a word, to be a great artist and was far more certain than any of my overimpressed kin and friends of what a long distance lay between me and the goal. And still does, half a normal lifespan later. I mentioned calling myself agnostic. It didn’t rule out my firm conviction that nature is made. And it gives fairly unmistakable signs of being made by a single force that somehow includes everything. Everything we think of as beautiful and ugly, all good, all evil and a great deal more than we can imagine. I already had twenty-one years of evidence. I planned to get more, with my own two eyes. I mean, if you’ve never seen a watch or a clock in your life but discover a fine Swiss watch in working order on your walk today, will you just assume it’s a natural object—the product of eons of chemical accidents? If so, proceed to the nearest brain-scan machine. You are almost surely in terrible shape.
All of that swam only just below the surface as I sat with the other counselors, heard Chief out and sang “A Mighty Fortress” to Mike Dorfman’s pitch. On the amble downhill to lunch, two of the second-timers stage-whispered their boredom with the steadily rising piety level. We laughed them on into perfect imitations of Chief’s puppet walk, all lurching knees and elbows. We hadn’t noticed but he was just behind us. He saw the mocking and responded with a chuckle that relieved us at least but was more like the usual human response to gastric distress.
That released me. I’d been reared in a household founded on laughter. If a thing couldn’t be laughed at, it either hadn’t happened or was pitiful. I realized that nobody had laughed yet at Juniper—not in my hearing, certainly not in Chief’s, not a belly laugh deep enough to ventilate the mind. So I joined in the general relief and was still laughing ten minutes later when the soup came round.
Finally Kevin Hawser said “It’s just life, Bridge.” Then he sang “ ‘Don’t take it serious; it’s too mysterious.’ “
I didn’t know it was from an old song, but it sounded true enough to calm me down.
Then we changed into work clothes and spent the rest of Sunday, on into the night, getting the cabins and the other buildings ready for Monday’s fabled onslaught of boys.
The boys pretty well took care of themselves. Parents were the work. From what I gathered in their applications, six of my seven boys were first-timers here. That meant six chances for distraught mothers and pining boys. And since all my boys were in the middle age group, ten to twelve, I also anticipated the problems of that painful fulcrum between frank childhood and the musky outskirts of puberty. There’d be the scorn of older boys for younger and the opposite in romantic worship— moon-eyed crushes by the younger boys. By suppertime anyhow I had a full cabin, nobody was dead or in traction yet, and I’d suffered few mamas.
Chief had suggested strenuously that taking money from parents for favors was an unworthy idea. And one father tried it, in appropriate whispers. His son was a bedwetter, despite the application’s urging that such boys might feel uncomfortable. Would I conspire with the child to conceal any mishaps from the others? When I told him I’d survived the same heartache myself and would do my best, his eyes filled; and he pressed a wadded fifty into my palm. He was one of the bigger Carolina textile magnates—I’d known his name in the paper for years— and from the look of relief on his face, I saw that if I’d known of a c
ure for belated bedwetting, I could have named my fee. As it was, fifty dollars back then was serious money. But entirely against my will, I returned it.
One mother presented a handsome King James New Testament, bound in olive wood from the Holy Land, with the words of Jesus in red ink. She said she’d just feel better knowing that the cabin had a Bible but that in August I should take it home with me. When I thanked her she also whispered that she didn’t want her Teddy to hear the Bible read in any translation but the “Saint James.” There’d been hot grass-roots objections to the recent publication of the Revised Standard Version, which cast some shadow on the Virgin Mary’s virginity. I told her Teddy would be safe from such harm. And after that the other boys and parents seemed normal. There were several damp goodbyes—five weeks apart!—but by suppertime we were all campers banded together, and the forging of a temporary family was underway.
To my genuine pleasure it went smoothly, right along. As we lay in the dark that first night, telling our names and backgrounds aloud, a boy said straightforwardly that his mother had died last November and that he wasn’t “as strong as I want to be yet.” He said it out slowly, taking each word like a stepping-stone through rapid water. So I could tell that he knew his audience and still had the nerve to say it. I’m proud to record that no one snickered or ever used it against him, and he ended as one of the popular boys.
One boy from High Point was clearly in the early stages of hormonal tumult and said so, something like “I’m turning into a grownup faster than I planned to, but so far it’s right much fun to watch.”
The bedwetter went straight to the brink of confession. “My father says I’ve got some habits that camp will help, which is why I came. I hope y’all will help me.” That plea, in its abject dignity, was as brave as it was reckless. And again I’m glad to say that it got him a smooth five weeks with the others.
The rest had nothing peculiar to add.
So I finished off by telling them about my father’s death early last winter and of my hope to lay that behind me during ten weeks of mountain air, sunlight, fun with them and a lot of good work. It wasn’t quite out of my mouth before I thought that was too scary for them, this first night anyhow. And for half a minute, they all were so quiet I thought they’d gone to sleep or were sobbing or chewing their pillows.
But then the boy who’d lost his mother said “Why do you want your daddy behind you? I want Mother back in front of me.”
I told him gently that was probably because he was eleven and I was twenty-one, the kind of damned-fool thing you say at twenty-one.
He said “I won’t be twenty-one then. I liked to watch her. Her hair was the best-smelling stuff I know.”
Before I could muster a second wise answer, a voluminous fart tore the cold like a lit powder trail—the loudest I’d heard. A faceless voice said “How’s that for good smelling?” Then monkey-house laughter, boys hopping out of bunks accusing one another and fanning their outraged delighted noses. The boy with the dead mother led the glee.
I silently reminded my upstaged self that body wind in its two main forms, belches and farts, is half the foundation of boyish humor. I rightly suspected I’d hardly begun to experience their virtuosity in ways to smuggle farts like anarchist bombs into the highest and most sacred scenes of camp life. In fact the rest of the summer was, from one angle anyhow, a crash training course in ballistic wind tactics. Their supreme goal turned out to be a feat called the “S.B.D.,” a silent but deadly fart—the anonymous invisible outrage that left a room gasping. If no one guessed the culprit within thirty seconds, he got to cry “S.B.D.!” in triumph and could hit us all, one good hard punch.
Finally that first night I corralled them back down, called for the customary Lord’s Prayer and tumbled on sleep as easily as they.
An orderly report on that first five weeks would raise a number of laughs and more than one lump in the throat, but the jokes and poignancy of Camp Juniper in June and early July 1954 were thoroughly typical of the American camp life that has since been the subject of numerous comic songs, movies and TV series. Only one of the boys, the son of the camp’s dietitian and a four-year veteran of Juniper, posed an early problem— mainly verbal defiance and an effort to demoralize the cabin with jokes about every adult in sight. When I discovered that his parents were recently divorced, which was a rarity then in the South, I stumbled on a benign paternal tack. I told him that, as a new counselor, I needed his advice. From that moment on I’d confide my puzzlement at this or that. He’d set me straight as an old Dutch uncle and from then on was a mainly stalwart help.
The bedwetter never confided an accident. The orphan had a few desolate moments—one morning, when he and I were alone in the cabin, out of the absolute blue he told me he didn’t believe in Heaven—but he never shed a tear that I got to see. And the others pitched in with mostly unfailing good humor. There were normal frictions, bruised feelings and one or two black eyes. But to my knowledge there was none of the meanness normal in childhood. The best I can say about them is that they occasionally made me regret being an only child and missing such robust company.
We all slept in the same open space, and we dressed and undressed in full view of one another. We ate our meals at the same table, washed in the same bathhouse. And once a week we went on a cabin supper together. That consisted of maybe a three-mile hike, followed by a campfire-cooked meal, ghost stories, songs and a night on the ground. So my claim of close knowledge is probably safe. The only substantial time they spent out of my sight was during the morning and afternoon classes. Then they were off taking archery, art, diving, horseback riding, magic, Indian lore, pottery, swimming and woodcraft. And there they were watched by other counselors. As summers go then—and boys—it was an unblemished start.
I taught drawing and watercolor painting five mornings a week. And I single-handedly wrote, typed, mimeographed and stapled The Thunderbird in the afternoons. The paper was easy and boring but of evident importance to Chief. He’d told me in Winston how, once a year, he sent a complete set of papers to the Asheville Library, where they were carefully preserved “for after times.” And I realized that, such as it was, Chief saw The Thunderbird as history. Somewhere a hundred years from now, we’d all be dead—and all these boys and their grandchildren—but a set of mimeographed weekly papers would be the surviving record of his work and his life’s devotion. Not to mention its revelations that Bill Grimsley had won the intermediate horseshoe tournament, David Holt had plaited a yard-long key chain or that Mrs. Chief was safely back from a visit to her bedridden sister in Aurelian Springs.
Still Chief paid frequent visits to my office in the lodge. He said he only meant to encourage me, and he’d often deliver the latest of his brief but clarion editorials. But I understood he was also checking the health of the trust he’d placed in me. Was I thinning out, in mind or soul, towards the kind of break that often delays after a personal crisis but strikes unexpected one calm afternoon? Was my dead father riding me still? I’ll grant that Chief managed his checks with a pawky grace. He’d always ask for news of my mother, or he’d say he noticed how proud the boys in my art class looked. Proud was very high praise from Chief, but beneath it I also heard his fear. And I tried to let him see I was safe.
My other main work was the art class. At the first interview Chief had spoken of my offering a “serious” class. I decided it was better not to probe the meaning of that—unless he volunteered advice, which he never did. So when I planned the activities, I leaned heavily on the traditional methods that I’d learned privately from an excellent woman in Winston and was repeating now in college. Plus a few innovations from my reading in the lives of painters, in Michelangelo’s letters, Delacroix’s diary and the notebooks of Gauguin and Leonardo.
Hard as I tried though, my Juniper classes were steadily but not surprisingly disappointing. Public schools then had no funds at all for teaching art. After an early run at fingerpainting with garish mud, and at drawing with br
oken and peeled crayons, we were bustled on to the meat of life. That was math, grammar and writing the business letter. So none of the campers had really studied art before meeting me. And to be honest, in the first session I felt lucky not to have a gifted pupil. I thought he would have drained my energy and stood between me and my own work. I hadn’t yet experienced the teacher’s best reward. If you’re lucky, that comes on the unpredictable day when the years of classroom rock-crushing suddenly begin to feed into your own work. You find that you understand human life, and you still want to paint it.
Meanwhile twice a week I set up still lifes or led the boys to interesting views, plants or rock formations in the middle distance, and turned them loose. I never left though till I’d given some version of the only useful advice I’d heard in my own training—Look, really look. The boundary lines of the natural world are tracing a lot more complicated route than you think at first. Watch the line of your leg, the trunk of that tree, the split in your face through which you feed. Or to put it quicker, Things don’t often look the way you think they do. Pay them the simple honor of watching their lines and shadows till they tell you their secrets. Those are the codes of life and of life’s own draftsman.
Was that any quicker? Maybe I can no longer recover the naive advice I gave that summer. A dredge of my memory finds what I’ve written above. And since it has a dim but true ring still, then I could be recalling correctly. It’s the implied and beatific “wisdom” that convinces me. Who but a very young and privileged white American, unaccustomed to hearing a discouraging word, would claim that much in public and for pay?
The Tongues of Angels Page 3