by Sam Torode
I said, “I will go up to the palm tree;
I will take hold of the boughs thereof.”
Wherever I turned, there they were—swelling like ripe fruit, rising like towers, leaping like twin gazelles.
Thy breasts are like two young fawns,
twins of a gazelle, that frolic among the lilies.
I’d read some pretty racy stuff in Cowboy Love Tales, but no romance-writer that ever lived had anything on King Solomon.
I wrote down all the juiciest verses and stashed them in my secret lock-box—the rusty medicine chest I kept hidden in a hollow tree stump out back of our house. At that time, my other treasures consisted of a few half-smoked cigarettes and a dirty comic book called “Tillie the Typist After Hours.”
A year or so later, I added the crowning gem to my collection. Nosing around the rail yards one afternoon, I found it in an old boxcar, probably left there by a tramp. It was a photograph of a real, live, naked lady, stretched out on a fancy couch with one arm up behind her head. She must have been French, because she had more hair under her arm than I did.
That picture awakened new longings in me—longings I didn’t even know my body was ready for. And so, with visions of the French Lady in my head, I started rubbing myself between the legs and spilling my seed. I’d heard about this from other boys—jerking off, slapping the snake, choking the chicken, whacking the weasel. Now I knew what all the fuss was about.
I never dreamed of my true love, Emily Apple, when I did it. My intentions towards Emily were as pure as a saint’s. But the French Lady was my mistress.
Mama kept a stack of women’s medical books in her bottom dresser drawer, and sometimes I’d peek at them when my parents were out of the house. That’s how I learned words like ova, semen, and vulva—along with more disturbing words like vaginal discharge and menstruation. One of these books warned about boys like me:
Teach your boy that when he handles or excites the sexual organs, all parts of the body suffer. This is why it is called “self-abuse.” The sin is terrible, and is, in fact, worse than lying or stealing. For, although these are wicked and will ruin the soul, self-abuse will ruin both soul and body. This loathsome habit lays the foundation for consumption, paralysis, and heart disease. It makes many boys lose their minds; others, when grown, commit suicide.
That put the fear of God in me. I tried my best to kick the loathsome habit; one Sunday during the altar call, I even stumbled down the aisle and blubbered the Sinner’s Prayer. But admitting I was a sinner didn’t kill the desire. No matter how many times I asked Jesus into my heart, it wouldn’t take.
The summer I turned 16, I tried getting baptized. Father said that the Old Man was gone now, drowned in the baptismal waters, and I was a new and spotless creation. That worked for about a month. Then the Old Man crept back under my skin and wrapped his bony fingers around my heart.
Whenever I did manage to put off the habit for a couple weeks, the French Lady would enter my dreams and I’d spill my seed in bed. I hated wet dreams—they startled me awake and created a mess. I was terrified that Mama would notice the stains on my sheets.
I wondered—did Jesus ever spill his seed? Being fully a man, I figured, his body must have produced semen in the usual amount. And it had to escape one way or the other, or his balls would have exploded. So did Jesus have wet dreams? What were they about?
These questions vexed me considerably. The Bible didn’t give any answers, and I knew I couldn’t ask Father. That would have exposed me for the unrepentant sinner I was. If I were truly redeemed, I wouldn’t even think about such things.
+ + +
Lying in bed that Easter night, waiting to hear the Plymouth pull back into the drive, I realized that Father was right. I was headed for hell.
I remembered a word Father had used in one of his sermons: predestination. A small number of people—the elect—are predestined to heaven from the start. And everybody else is predestined to hell, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You know you’re among the elect if you love to pray and read the Bible above all else. But if you love girls more than God, it’s a sure bet you’ve got a one-way ticket south.
All these years I’d tried to hide my sins and blend in with God’s elect, but it was clear now that I was among the damned. Because of me, my parents were on the brink of divorce, if not murder.
And so I resigned myself to hell. It wasn’t a great disappointment, though. Heaven, Father said, was one long church service where the saints sang through the Baptist Hymnal again and again, into infinity. Eternal torment by Satan and his minions sounded rosy by comparison—especially if the French Lady was there with me.
CHAPTER 3
THE next morning, I awoke to the sound of a car crunching up the drive. I rolled out of bed and stumbled over to the window. There was a large black auto in the driveway, but it wasn’t Father’s—it was a patrol car.
When I got downstairs, Officer Radney was already in the kitchen. There was no mistaking him; everyone in town knew Radney Larse, Remus’s one and only lawman.
“This is the hardest part of my job, ma’am” he said, scanning the kitchen to avoid looking at Mama. “Yes siree.”
Mama’s face was flushed and her hands were trembling. “Malachi. Is—is he—?”
Officer Radney fixed his gaze on a basket of biscuits left over from the night before. “Do you mind?”
Mama was confused. “No, I—”
“Much obliged.” He sauntered over and bit off a cheekful of biscuit. “Now. You were asking …”
“Malachi—”
“Ah, yes. The Reverend.” Radney coughed, spraying crumbs through the air. “Well, he’s seen better days, but he’s still in one piece. Can’t say the same for that Ford.”
“It’s a Plymouth,” I said. “Brand new.”
“Ain’t no more.” Officer Radney bowed his head for a moment. “I’ll take you to the church—that’s where it happened.”
As Mama and I started towards the door, Radney pocketed two more biscuits.
+ + +
It was a cold, gray morning. Sure enough, I thought, yesterday’s balmy weather was only a fluke. Mama and I slid onto the hard leather seat in back of the patrol car.
“Lord have mercy,” Mama said, over and over. Her prayers floated up in white clouds of warm breath and flattened into a layer of fog on the cold window.
Father had never much liked Officer Radney. During Prohibition, Radney turned a blind eye to the stills and speakeasies, giving Remus a reputation as “Michigan’s Whiskey Woods.” Father often had condemned Radney from the pulpit; this must have been sweet revenge.
It didn’t take long to reach the church. “There she is,” Radney said, turning up the drive. “What’s left of her.”
A pair of tire tracks spun off the drive and ate through the grass, leading to a gaping hole in the side of the church. The Plymouth’s tail protruded forth. Loose parts were scattered over the ground—hubcaps, headlights, a door, the steering wheel. That car was the one luxury Father allowed himself; he justified it on account of a preacher needing a nice car to lead funeral processions.
“The Reverend got thrown from the vehicle before impact,” Radney said. “I found him lyin’ over there, passed out. Lucky thing there ain’t parts of him spread all over, too.” Radney laughed but Mama didn’t.
He hopped out and opened the door. “Follow me—he’s inside the church.”
It was raining harder now. We stepped over shards of metal, glass, and wood, making our way to the church. At the door, Radney turned to face Mama. “I hate to be the one to tell you, ma’am,” he said, “but the Reverend was inebriated.”
Mama shot him a glare. “What?”
“Drunk.”
“Not Malachi. Impossible—”
“As a skunk,” Radney said. “Go on in and smell for yourself.”
+ + +
Father was hunched over in the back pew—the same seat where I sat most Sundays, doodli
ng in my notebook and dodging the sermon. Mama tried to rouse him, but Father hid his face in his hands. I didn’t see any blood, but on top of his head was a big purple goose-egg from the frozen chicken.
Radney sauntered up behind Mama and lit a cigarette. “One thing I forgot to tell you,” he said. “There’s something funny with his eyes. When I found him, there was white stuff splattered all over his face. I wiped it off, but he still couldn’t see anything. Had to lead him in here like a blind man.”
Mama fanned away the smoke. “What kind of white stuff?”
“At first I thought was paint—till I smelt it. It’s the damndest thing but, while he was lying there, a bird must’ve flew over and, you know, shit on his face. Pardon the language.” Radney cast a glance around the sanctuary. “Don’t know what kind of bird could’ve dropped a load that size. Must’ve been a big mother.”
I was too shocked to feel anything, but Mama started to cry.
Radney tried to put his hand on her shoulder, but she jerked away. After an awkward silence, he dropped his cigarette on the church floor and ground it out. “Got to get back to the station and file a report.”
+ + +
File a report, my ass. Radney drove straight to Bob’s Barber Shop to gloat. By noon, the whole town was abuzz over Father’s disgrace.
The church elders held an emergency meeting that night and declared Father unfit for ministry. They gave us two months to vacate the parsonage and find a new home. Brother Lester Crouch was appointed interim pastor.
Brother Lester and his wife had thirteen children whose names were all from the Bible and started with “J”—John, Josiah, Jerusha, Jehosephat, and so on. (I always wondered when they’d get stuck with Jezebel.) Lester was the obvious choice for pastor, I guess, since he’d sired half the congregation.
The next day, the Remus Register carried a front-page exposé. A fallen preacher was big news for a paper usually devoted to livestock trades, obituaries, and reports of unusually-shaped vegetables.
According to the Register, Father had driven to the Beaver Lodge, a tavern north of town. “He came in and sat alone in a corner,” the tavern keeper said.
Nobody knew who he was. After about an hour, I told him to order up or get out. We don’t stand for vagrants loitering around. Then he asked for apple juice. Now, nobody asks for apple juice this time of year unless they mean the hard stuff, so I brought him a mug of hard cider. He sure liked it, because he ordered up another mug, and then another. After eight or ten mugs, his spirits lightened considerably. Then he told us he was a preacher, so the boys asked him to lead in a hymn. He obliged with “Brighten the Corner Where You Are,” and everybody joined him on the chorus:
Brighten the corner where you are!
Someone far from harbor
you may lead across the bar,
So brighten the corner where you are!
Reverend Henry really raised the roof on that part about “the bar.” After that, he stood up on the pool table and preached a sermon about how Jesus turned water into liquor. By the end, he was whooping and hollering. It was a regular revival. A little while later, he slipped out the door. Drove off without even paying. I should have known better than to trust a preacher.
Mama and I could scarcely believe it. Father was such a strict teetotaler that he never even touched grapes; “wine in the cluster,” he called them. But, as with Adam and Eve, apples were his undoing.
CHAPTER 4
FOR a full week, Father didn’t say a single word. He stayed in his study, taking only bread and water. Mama tried reading the Bible aloud to him, but he waved her away.
On the eighth day, I was sitting in the kitchen when Mama came to fetch me. “Your father wants to talk with you.”
“What about?” I wondered if he blamed me for what happened. Maybe he’d been stewing all this time, getting ready to bawl me out.
“How should I know? All he said was ‘Bring me Tobias.’”
“That’s it?”
“He won’t even talk to me. If he wasn’t so pathetic, I’d give him another thrashing.”
Usually when Father called me into his study, I’d stare out the window to evade his probing gaze. I was afraid that if I looked into his eyes, he’d see right through to my soul; he’d pry open my heart like my secret box and spread the contents out on his desk for examination.
But there was nothing to hide from this time. Father slouched in his chair with a black bandana tied over his eyes. For a long while, neither of us said anything. I was surprised at how old he looked; I hadn’t noticed him going gray, but now his hair was more white than brown. And set against that black cloth, his skin was ghastly pale. He looked like a dead man alive.
Father must have sensed my sadness. “Tobias,” he said. “Don’t pity me. I am the Lord’s clay pot, but I made myself a vessel of dishonor. He’s returning me to the potter’s grounds, grinding me back into the clay so that I can be made anew. This is my punishment, and the Lord is just.”
“You’ll preach again.” I said. “There’s lots of blind evangelists.”
“But not drunk evangelists.” Father tightened his grip on the chair’s arms. “I will not ask for mercy. I don’t deserve it. All I can hope for is that my life will serve as a warning to others.”
“How can I help?”
“You can’t help me. But your mother—” Father choked up. “Because of my sin, she will suffer. If I die penniless and starved, so be it. But I can’t bear the thought of Ada—”
“I’ll do anything,” I said. “I’ll get a job.”
He shook his head. “There’s no work in Remus.”
“I’ll go to Grand Rapids—or Detroit. Work in a factory.”
“The car is gone. In seven weeks, we’ll lose this house. I’ve been turning it over in my mind, and there’s only one hope.”
“What’s that?”
Father put his hands together and touched his fingers to his lips as though he were praying. He seemed unsure of his idea—maybe he was afraid to say it because it was the only one he had.
“I need you to fetch a book,” he said. “It’s on the top shelf, behind my set of Jonathan Edwards.”
I remembered Father quoting Jonathan Edwards once in a sermon: he said that the road to hell is paved with the skulls of unsaved babies. I hoped Father didn’t want me to read something like that at a time like this.
“Pull down a couple volumes,” he said, “and reach back behind. There should be a small book with a green cover.”
“I think I can feel it … ”
When I brought the book out into the light, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a Western novel—Comrades of the Saddle.
So my father had secrets of his own.
I peeled open the cover and read the inscription: “To Malachi Henry, the Texas Troubador; with love, Ada Jackson, Christmas 1914.”
“In the middle of that book,” Father said, “you’ll find a piece of paper.”
I found the sheet, unfolded it, and spread it out on Father’s desk. It was a broadside advertisement:
CHRISTMAS EVE DANCE
Town Hall, Glen Rose
Dec. 24, 1914
Music provided by
The Golden Melody Makers
Admission 50 cents
“You were in a music group?” I asked.
“My brothers and me, yes. Our sisters sang with us sometimes, but mostly it was Wilburn, JP, and me. The three of us used to set on the front porch every night after chores were done. Will played banjo and JP played the fiddle. My fingers couldn’t move fast enough to pick a banjo or mandolin. All I could ever do was strum the guitar and sing.”
“What sort of songs?”
“Oh, ‘Yellow Rose of Texas,’ ‘Speckled Top Shoes,’ ‘Jack of Diamonds’—all the old ones.”
Father leaned back in his chair, and his lips eased into the faint glimmer of a smile. “We were only playing for fun, but folks told us we should start up a band. So one day we up and did
. Called ourselves the Golden Melody Makers. We played dance halls, roadhouses, fairs—all the way from Glen Rose to Fort Worth. We couldn’t believe that folks would pay to hear us, but they did. Before long, I had a big pile of money stashed under my mattress. Will and JP blew theirs, but I saved mine. I didn’t tell anybody about the money—not even Ada.”
Father wasn’t using his preacher’s voice anymore. He was talking to me like a confidant, a friend.
“Why did you give it up?” I asked.
“Daddy got to where he couldn’t work the farm anymore, and Will had to take over. I married your mama and went off to seminary. It was time to give up childish things.
“For a time, I thought I could keep playing on the side. But at seminary, I learned that God is glorified by spiritual hymns. Worldly music glorifies Satan. One of my teachers told me that I had to choose between my guitar and Jesus. He said, ‘Would Jesus ever sing about women, or gambling, or drinking?’ Those words convicted me, and I smashed my old guitar. I vowed to sing nothing but hymns for the rest of my life.
“But I didn’t know what to do with all that money. I didn’t know any better when I earned it, but it was surely tainted now. I decided to burn it, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through with it. What if, someday, God wanted to give it away to help others? So I stuffed it all into a leather pouch and dropped it into an old, dry well on my family’s farm. Then I threw in some dirt on top and boarded over the hole so no one would see it.”
Father stopped and leaned in towards me. “Now take that piece of paper,” he said, “and turn it over.”
On the back of the advertisement, there were faint pencil markings.
“It’s a map,” Father said. “I drew it to mark where that well was, so I’d never forget.”