by Rick Bragg
We pulled up to the solid, concrete-block building—but not too close up—and the car doors swung open to the unmistakable smell of grilling meat. It almost made a good Christian out of me, then and there.
It was a special Sunday, I later learned. It was Dinner on the Ground.
In Protestant churches throughout the South, Dinner on the Ground is nothing more than a big picnic held at dinnertime, which to us is the noon meal. But imagine a hundred church ladies, all schooled in the culinary genius of generations, unloading trunkloads of potato salad, homemade pickles, barbecued pork chops, beans (butter, green, pole, lima, pinto, baked, navy and snap), deviled eggs dusted with cayenne pepper, pones of cornbread cooked with cracklin’s, fried chicken, squash boo cane or a set of support hose. But such an act would have been suicide. The old were of value. The old men could look at a leaf a younger man brought to church in his shirt pocket and tell him what kind of worms were gnawing at his tomato plants, and how to kill them. They could peek under the hood of a car that was running rough and, with a Case pocketknife, adjust the idling, reset the points and adjust the gap on the plugs, all before the first strains of “I’ll Fly Away” drifted from the door.
The old women had an almost magical power. They were the shamans of their world, who could lift a crying baby from its own momma’s arms and, by pressing a wrinkled finger to its lips in just the right way, make it shush. They were the historians of the community, and kept a neat record of births and deaths in the blank pages of their Bibles, or just in their heads. They knew everything. They visited the sick, sat up with the dead and watched over their men, which they had grown accustomed to.
If any of them had had any money, young or old, they would have gone to one of the big churches over the mountain in Jacksonville or Anniston, where the people who owned the car lots and the banks and the insurance companies went, where men in suspenders and seersucker suits and women in heels—not too awfully high, for that would be scandalous—sat in churches with red stained glass, on pews softened by cushions. There were no cushions at Hollis Crossroads.
There was no choir, at least no robed choir. The entire congregation—every man, woman and child—was its choir, and if you didn’t sing, some old woman would whip her head around and give you a dirty look.
They were Baptists, not Church of Christ, so they strummed guitars and beat drums and tickled the piano. I remember one young man with a fine, strong bass voice who hit them low, low notes, like he was singing from the bottom of a well, and one old woman, her hair piled into an impressive beehive, who sang through her nose and gave out peppermints, and one old man who sang so loudly, so badly, that people used to gossip about whether someone should speak to him about it, but no one did. It was deemed un-Christian.
There was a whole, new, fascinating culture to this big whitewashed building. I went to Sunday school, not so much to study the Bible as to sit, covertly, by pretty girls. The teacher only asked us to memorize one verse every week. I used the same verse every Sunday.
“Jesus wept,” I would recite every week, short and sweet.
The teacher would glare.
The weeks rolled by. My momma would ask me, very eagerly, what I had learned, what the preacher said, who I had seen, what they wore. Every time, we begged her to come with us, but she always said no, she reckoned not, she would stay home. Maybe next Sunday.
Meanwhile, I heard a Sunday school teacher haltingly explain the Immaculate Conception. We drew names at Christmas and I got a Batman you catapulted into the air with a slingshot. I tried to learn a few hymns so ancient protectors-of-the-faith would stop looking mean at me. I thought, stupidly, that I belonged here.
But there was more to it than that. As so many Sundays flew by, there among those good people who treated me like a member of the family, the warm, decent people who found a pure joy inside the walls of that church, I learned that you can’t just come to have Dinner on the Ground. You can’t just come to listen to the guitar picker, or to sit with the girls or pretend to sing when you don’t know the words or the meaning behind the words. You can’t just see the show. You have to give something in trade.
The minister was a kind-looking older man who, instead of scaring his congregation, spoke of the loveliness, the wonder, the bliss of salvation, not only in heaven, which was its reward, but here on earth. He promised a peace and a happiness and something more, something that lit the darkness around you and frightened off the things that might do you harm. He was not an eloquent man, I remember, but he stood with his old Bible open in one hand, his voice warm and a little weak but clear and coaxing, and ushered those people into the outstretched arms of God.
I was a reporter, even then. I believed what I could see and hear and sometimes what I could feel, but there is no doubt in my mind that something powerful, something fierce, rippled along that bare, gray concrete floor.
It happened at the end of every service, when the singing and the preaching was spent and the minister gave what was known as the call to the altar. The people in the congregation sang, softly, “Just as I Am,” as the old man in his sweat-stained polyester sport coat begged them to come forward, to kneel, to be Saved.
This was no confessional—that was for the Catholics—but a simple trade. One soul, for salvation, for peace, for across-the-board absolution. It began with a trembling of the lips, and then the tears would start to flow and before long the Lost would be coming, by ones, by twos, by threes. Some walked quietly to the preacher’s side, to kneel before the simple wooden cross on the simple wooden dais. Others came clawing out of their pew, frantic, enraptured, as if the bench had suddenly grown too hot to sit on, and maybe it had. In the congregation, the already Saved raised their hands to the ceiling, and heaven, waving them slowly from side to side as the old minister held the hands of the Now Found, welcoming them to Canaan.
He saved them one by one, the young ones and the old ones and even the ones who had been saved once or twice already, but had felt their faith weaken some, and needed it shorn up with another visit to the altar. He saved children—he said you were never too young—and caressed their necks as they knelt, weeping, not really understanding what they felt or why they felt it, as their mommas and daddies wept for them, from joy. He kept at it Sunday after Sunday, until he had enough of them to hold a decent baptismal. I saw one, only one. I think it was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
They did them only in warm weather, in a fishing lake not too far from the church. First someone threw in a rock to chase the cotton-mouths away, then the minister and his deacons walked into the dark green water, in their nicest clothes; nothing in this culture, our culture, was more important. The rest of the congregation lined the banks, singing of the River Jordan. I cannot recall the words, but even now I can hum those songs in my head.
Those about to have their sins washed clean waited, some weeping, some laughing. I remember that the women and the girls always wore white, some with flowers in their hair, and went barefoot into the murky water. I can still see the rapture in their faces as the preacher took them in his arms, then ever so gently leaned them back, back, until the waters closed over them and the thing was done. I remember how the mascara ran down their faces, and how completely, utterly alive they looked. I have never seen a look like that, as if something was racing through their very veins, stronger than heroin.
And I remember how odd it seemed, to see grown men, men who fed pipe shop furnaces, who heaved around 200-pound sticks of pulp-wood like firewood, lie like children in the preacher’s arms, and go so passively under the water as the congregation silently mouthed the words “Praise God” and “Thank you, Jesus.”
Then it was back to the church, back to The Word, back to that old man’s quiet faith and his unyielding crusade to save us all.
Every Sunday, I waited. I waited for the invasion, the infusion, the joy. I waited for the Holy Ghost to slip inside my heart and my mind and, as He had done to those all around me, lift me out
of the pew and up to that altar, Saving me. I waited for it like a boy waiting on a train.
But while I felt wonder and maybe a little fear, I never felt what I had seen, or maybe sensed, in the others. I was not refusing Him, rebuking Him. I wanted it, I wanted the strength of it, the joy of it, but mostly, I wanted the peace of it. The preacher promised it. He promised.
I just sat there. I could have pretended—I think some did pretend—but what good would that have done. I sat, as the Sundays drained away.
I never felt so alone before.
I don’t think I ever have, since.
I stopped going, after a while. I never went to church again, but I am not sorry I went then. I saw the power in it. I saw the need. Over the years, in every place I’ve gone where people lived surrounded by danger or misery or just pure evil, there was always one place of escape. Sometimes there was a cross nailed to the door, sometimes other symbols, but it was still sanctuary.
In every hopeless place I have ever been, there was that hope. And I always think the same thing, of how good it would be to feel what they feel, that peace in the midst of all that suffering. I guess it is envy, and maybe jealousy. How sad, to envy them heaven.
I don’t buy all of it or even most of it, what those preachers said. I don’t think you have to do anything to get into heaven except do right. If you have ever pushed a wheelchair for somebody and nobody paid you, then you might get in. If you ever peeked inside an old person’s screen door and cracked open their loneliness with a simple “hello,” you might get in. My momma will. That, I know. Even with her hands pressed to the dusty top of a dully glowing electric box, she was closer to God than most people will ever get. I will take my peace from that.
I remember her, in that time, sitting in the living room, sewing up our ripped blue jeans, singing.
What a beautiful thought I am thinking
Concerning a great speckled bird
Remember that her name is recorded
On the pages of God’s Holy Word
10
If you got to kill somebody, better it ain’t family
For three good years, from the time I was ten until I turned thirteen, I lived in a beautiful oblivion, safe from the past, unaware of what waited for us when our childhoods ran out. In the summer, I would sit for endless hours in the middle of high clover, idly searching for one with four leaves, then pressing it between the pages of Tom Sawyer or The Hardy Boys. Even today I flip through those old books and search for one, but they have all either turned to dust or just disappeared, as if any luck they had in them was for the boy, not the man.
In winter I would settle into a spot where the pale, weak sunshine reached but the wind couldn’t find, and daydream myself away, far, far away. Sam and Mark used to think I was a little odd, and they would ask our momma what was wrong with me. “He’s travelin’,” she would say. “His daddy done it, too.”
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, Sam was thirteen, I was ten and Mark was seven, and when we stood side by side, with our matching cowlicks, huge ears and varying degrees of blond hair, we looked like steps in a staircase. Sam was exactly one foot taller than me, and Mark was exactly a foot shorter, with freckles. I know because our uncle John used to measure us every Saturday night with a fold-up ruler, or a tape measure, or by guessing, I disremember. We had the same one-dollar haircut by an absentminded barber who was prone to cut at an angle, so that the hair slanted down over one eye, like a patch. On any given day, we only had three eyes between us that actually saw anything. People used to see us in the grocery store, standing behind Momma, and grin.
“They growin’ like weeds, Margaret,” some old woman would say at the Piggly Wiggly, and Momma would politely say that, yes’m, and they eat like hogs.
But while we were so obviously similar, our characters, which had long since formed, were as different as people could be who had the same blood in their bodies. Sam was the solid one, the one most like Momma, the one who washed cars for a quarter, toted in wood for the heater and slopped the hog every morning before the school bus came through. Mark would become, even at such an early age, the wildly unpredictable one, the one most like our daddy, the one with mean and gentle streaks that seemed to blur and merge. Both of them were good with their hands, could build anything with a hammer and a saw, or fix anything with a wrench. But while Sam worked steadily at a thing until it was done, Mark was always dissatisfied, restless, as if something was nibbling at him, inside. Even when he was still a little child he had a rage in him.
I was not much like either of them. I couldn’t hammer a nail without bending it or severely damaging myself or someone standing near, and if you had depended on me to feed the fire or the hog we would have froze to death, huddled with our emaciated pig. I was a dreamer, and while I loved the woods and the creeks and the natural bounty of our world, I also loved to bury myself in books. After all the lights were shut out, I would cover up my head, click on a flashlight, and read as long as the batteries lasted from You Were There books about the Alamo, the Creek Indian Wars, the Battle of New Orleans. I solved mysteries with the Hardy Boys, and drifted down the Mississippi with Mark Twain. By the time I was in the eighth grade, I had read every book—except the ones for the little kids—in the tiny library at Roy Webb Junior High School. I am not bragging. I was just hungry. When I was out of books, I just found a quiet place to dream.
Sam and Mark built tree houses. I sailed them to China.
You wouldn’t have known any of this, of course, if you had driven up into our chert driveway when we were all involved in some major disagreement, which sometimes resulted in a trip to the emergency room. All it took was an angry word or some insult, however slight, and the subtle differences in our characters vanished and you would have thought we were children of Beelzebub, unbound. Momma had hoped that the passing of time would make us more passive, more peaceful, but all it did was make us stronger so we could hit harder. Like our inherent weakness for liquor, we had brawling in our DNA.
Like our father, his father, his brothers, we fought with our fists, with rocks, with mud clods, sticks, baseball bats and, once, a hambone. Sam shot me once in the hand with a bow and arrow—I was protecting my eyes—and Mark stabbed me in the forehead with a pine splinter. I bled a quart. We shot each other with slingshots and BB guns (once I shot my cousin Connie by mistake). A snowball fight in those rare hard winters could kill. We packed the snow around chert rocks, to give us heft and distance. We knocked each other out of trees. We held each other under the water until the last, lonely bubble had trickled to the top. We choked each other, to see if you really did turn blue. Once, Mark hit me in the knuckle with a rock he threw from fifty yards. We walked it off, just to see.
We only quit when we made our momma cry. We worried her to death, and made her chase us through the hills and fields with a hickory in her hand and the wrath of God in her eyes. But if she ever broke down and cried, it shamed us, and we behaved for a while, or until she went inside. Once, I recall, she called us into the living room to ask us for help.
She didn’t have many sit-down talks with us, so when she did, it was serious. She had one with me, in tears, the day I took the scissors and cut the legs out of a new pair of jeans so they would fit me, jeans she had bought for Sam by ironing clothes. She whipped me a little, halfheartedly and not very effectively, the only time she ever did, and explained that there was no money left to undo what I had done.
This time, she explained that she was doing all she could to feed us and clothe us so that we could live decent, and she actually apologized for not being able to spend as much time with us as she would like. But she said we were worrying her to death, and she extracted three promises from us, before we went out to play.
One: Don’t kill yourself.
Two: Don’t kill each other.
Three: Try hard not to kill nobody else, but if you have to, better if it ain’t fam’ly.
She might as well have been talking to a t
elephone pole. We built gocarts and minibikes and motorcycles out of junk—well, actually, Sam made them, but I was always the test pilot—and wrecked them all in spectacular fashion. I burned myself so bad in one wreck, from the hot muffler, that I lay under the cold spray of water from the outdoor hydrant (Yankees would call it a faucet) because it was the only thing that stopped me from screaming.
Once, Sam came into possession of an old moped, a boring, half-bicycle, half-motorcycle conveyance that looked better fit for some Parisian sissy or an old woman. But we stripped it down to—near as I could tell—a seat with a motor under it, attached it to two wheels, and then he gave me a push-start. It would run sixty miles an hour on a straightaway. I jumped ditches with it. I should have worn a helmet, but that would have slowed me down. My momma thought I was crazy, and would run, screaming at me, until she disappeared in a cloud of red dust and the grrrrrroooooowwwwwwwwwlllllllllll of that sawed-off, two-inch muffler. On every slope, on every hump, I was airborne, and I thought, as I cheated gravity, that I was Captain Zoom. It had no fenders, either, so it covered me in a red film of dirt from my ankles to my eyebrows. I tasted grit and did not give a damn.
I rode the same road, from my house to Germania Springs, over and over and over again. Back then, Germania Springs was a beautiful, crystal-clear stream full of crawfish and watercress and lined with oaks. People used to picnic on the ground—sometimes the younger ones would sneak in a little smooching—and enjoy the peace and quiet of it. At least, they would have, if a red-dirt-encrusted demon boy had not been slinging sand and dust into the air and chasing the serenity from the trees with the noise of his, well, they were not real sure what it was. I guess I was a distraction to them. Anyway, somebody called the law.
I was about a mile from home when I saw the sheriff’s cruiser turn on its flashing blue lights, and I headed straight for Momma. I was almost home when I realized that bringing the law into her house might make her cry. I decided, as the dust flew and the siren wailed, that I had to escape justice on my own. I went rocketing down the dirt road and right on past the house, under the clothesline, around the barn, past the apple tree and straight into the cotton field, slewing around in that soft dirt, the green bolls of cotton beating my hands bloody, but I was free. I looked back over my shoulder and saw one of the deputies out of his car, bent over, laughing. I was eleven going on twelve. I reckon, if caught, I wouldn’t have done much time.