“No, he wasn’t!”
“Yes, he was. I told you I seen Daddy’s discharge papers an’ it said he was divorced.”
“No, he ain’t.”
“Yes, he is. I seen it, an’ I’ll show it to you when we git home.”
Del did not want to believe that his born-again parents had lied to them their entire lives by omitting to tell them the truth about their father being married. They had heard all their lives in every church they had ever attended that divorce was a sin. This was too farfetched to believe. Devon must be lying. Their parents surely would not lie to them.
When they got home, while their parents were busy with Gloryann and Denny downstairs, Devon and Del rushed upstairs. They quietly went into their parents’ bedroom. Devon opened a small drawer on the left side of the dresser and pulled out a piece of paper, Adam’s discharge from the Army. He unfolded it and pointed to a section in the upper left corner. Del read the heading, “Marital Status,” and then the typed capital “X” under the subheading “Divorced.” It was true. Adam had been divorced before he left the army. They quickly put the paper back, closed the drawer, and went into their room.
On Friday morning, Devon did not want to go to school. After Marie had awakened him and told him to go downstairs to breakfast, he had pulled the covers up to his chin, turned on his side, and gone back to sleep. She came to the bottom of the stairs from the kitchen and shouted up to him, “Devon, if you don’t git dressed an’ come down to breakfast right now, I’m gonna tell your father you ain’t mindin’ me, an’ you know what that means. Hurry up! You’re gonna be late.”
Devon opened his eyes and looked at the clock on the night stand between the twin beds. Seven thirty. “Oh, shoot, I’m gonna be late!” He threw the covers off, quickly took off his pajamas, pulled a red shirt and blue jeans from the closet and put them hastily on. He rushed downstairs where Marie had a bowl of Cheerios and two pieces of toast with butter and grape jelly waiting for him.
She half-smiled when she saw the red shirt. “Serves ‘im right for not mindin’ me,” she thought.
He was opening the southwest door to the school when the first bell rang. “Whew! Just made it!” He quickly sat down at his desk and put his lunch inside it.
“What happened to your shirt?” Michaelina asked. She was a plump, short Irish girl with red hair and freckles.
“Wha’da ya mean?” Devon asked.
“It’s torn there.” She pointed to his left side.
He raised his arm and looked. There was an eight-inch tear in the shirt from the armpit down the left side. The cold fist of fear plunged into his stomach, and he inhaled sharply. “She knew!” he thought. “She knew it was ripped an’ she sent me to school anyway, to teach me a lesson!” When the principal asked everyone over the intercom to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, he kept his left arm pressed against his side so no one would see the tear. When the pledge was over, he was thankful that no one except Michaelina had noticed it.
Mr. Wilson left his desk near the window and walked to the blackboard and stood directly in front of Devon. “Good mornin’, young scholars!” he proclaimed.
“Good morning, Mr. Wilson!” the class responded.
“Before we git started with our readin’, I just wanted to remind you that this afternoon we’re gonna be havin’ our class spellin’ bee, so you might wanta study the words I gave you on Monday at recess and lunch if you’re hopin’ to be the class winner and represent the class in the school spellin’ bee next week. Who knows? Maybe we have the school winner sittin’ right here. If you win the school spellin’ bee, you’ll be goin’ to the district spellin’ bee the second week of May. And if you win the district bee, you’ll be goin’ to the state bee in Columbus, for a chance to represent Ohio at the national bee in Washington, D.C. Grafton-Kennedy’s never had a student represent us in Washington. Maybe you’ll be the first.”
“Oh, no! The spellin’ bee’s today!? An’ Mommy let me come to school with a ripped shirt! I’m gonna stand up in front o’ everyone an’ be laughed at ‘cause o’ my shirt,” Devon thought. “Jus’ like I was in Franklin.” Instantly, the black silt flooded onto his heart and assumed its familiar position, obscuring the light and joy in his soul he had felt ever since he had been saved last Saturday. The struggle recommenced and the depression returned. It had been a short interregnum of five days from his torment. I do believe in the Holy Ghost. I do believe in the Holy Ghost. I do believe in the Holy Ghost. I do believe in the Holy Ghost. I do believe in the Holy Ghost.
That afternoon, when he stood in front of the class to spell a word in the spelling bee, he held his left arm stiffly and tightly against his body so that no one would notice the tear in his shirt. It seemed to work, for no one laughed at him. And he won the spelling bee. He would be the class representative in the school spelling bee next Friday.
At supper, Devon asked his mother, “Didjou know my shirt was torn this mornin’ when I went to school?”
“Course I knew. I thought I’d teach you a lesson ‘bout doin’ what I tell ya to do the first time I tell ya, and not be so stubborn. You’re the stubbornest boy I ever saw.”
“But I had to stand up in front o’ everyone an’ try to hide the tear when I was spellin’ a word!” he protested, his voice rising.
“Don’tchou sass me boy! Serves you right. I had to yell at you three times to git you outa bed!”
Devon stuck his fork into his mashed potatoes, his bottom lip quivering and his eyes filling with tears. “She ain’t fair!” he thought. “She ain’t fair!” I do believe in the Holy Ghost. I do believe in the Holy Ghost.
That evening, he and Del went out onto the back porch and into the backyard and called Feisty’s name, as they had done every night since Marie had informed them that he was missing. He did not come.
When they came back into the kitchen, Marie and Adam asked them to sit at the dining room table. The boys looked at each other wonderingly.
“We just wanted to let you boys know that we’re gonna have another addition to our family,” Marie announced, beaming.
“You’re pregnant?” Del asked.
“That’s right,” Adam said. “We’re expectin’ it to come in October.”
Devon sat dumbfounded. “She musta got pregnant the night I heard ‘em fuckin’!” he thought.
“Neat!” Del exclaimed.
Devon went to bed depressed. “Another baby in the family! Four idden enough?” I do believe in the Holy Ghost.
The morning of the school spelling bee, he made sure that neither his shirt nor his pants had any tears in them. And he got up early. He was afraid of standing in front of the entire school in the cafeteria, but once he walked up to the microphone and spelled the first word correctly, he was no longer nervous. Whenever a word was presented to him, he could visualize it in his mind. All he had to do then was to read the letters. He won the bee by correctly spelling the word “professor.”
Mrs. Baggett, the principal, came to the stage to present him with a gold medal. She told him that he would be receiving his certificate next week. He reveled in the applause when he accepted the medal, but better than that was the standing ovation from all of his classmates and Mr. Wilson when he returned to the classroom. He smiled shyly and took his seat. Everyone sat down when he did.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the spellin’ champion of Grafton-Kennedy Elementary School, Devon Hensley,” announced Mr. Wilson with a flourish of his arm. He made a movement with his hand to indicate that everyone should stand again, and the class applauded once more. It was the proudest day of Devon’s life.
When he got home, Marie was ironing in the living room.
“I won the school spellin’ bee today,” he announced.
“Didjou?” she answered in a flat, uninterested tone. “That’s nice.”
He went upstairs dejectedly, lay down on his bed, and began to read Hunting for Hidden Gold, a Hardy Boys’ mystery.
When he re
ceived his spelling certificate on Monday, a name had been erased and his name written on top of it, as though whomever had written out the certificate had subconsciously wanted someone else to win. But the certificate, and the gold medal, were all his.
He had been given a booklet published by the National Spelling Bee to study in the weeks prior to the district contest, but he had only briefly looked at it. It was column after column and page after page of increasingly more difficult words. He was not interested.
The evening of the district contest, the whole family went to Horace Mann Elementary School. Mr. Wilson came up to them and shook his parents’ hands and congratulated them. “Didjou help him study?” he asked Marie.
“No, not much. We usually let him study on his own,” she replied. She had not even looked at the spelling booklet.
He looked at Devon. “Well, Devon, you better git to the stage an’ git your number. Good luck!”
“Thanks,” Devon mumbled. He walked toward the stage, where twenty-nine students were already seated. I do believe in the Holy Ghost. I do believe in the Holy Ghost. I do believe in the Holy Ghost.
After ten rounds, there were only nine students left, and Devon was one of them. He had been spelling words he had never heard in his life. He walked up to the microphone, and the judge said, “panacea.” Devon repeated the word, “panacea,” and then spelled it “p-a-n-a-s-e-a.” He thought he had spelled it correctly, and then the judge reached over to ding the little metal bell that sat on the judges’ table. He said, “The correct spelling is p-a-n-a-c-e-a.” Devon sat down, disappointed. He had not won the district contest. It was won by a tall seventh grade girl from Dennis Middle School. Devon was ninth in the district.
In the car on the way home, Marie said from the front seat, “If you’da studied, Dev, you coulda won. You didden study, didjou?”
“No, not really,” he replied slowly.
“Well, let that be a lesson to ya. If you want somethin’, ya gotta work for it, just like Daddy workin’ at Frigidaire. You think we’d have a roof over our heads an’ food on the table if he didden work for ‘em?”
“No,” Devon agreed. He turned his head toward the window and looked out disconsolately at the traffic flowing south on Interstate 75 and listened to the voice in his head. I do believe in the Holy Ghost. I do believe in the Holy Ghost. I do believe in the Holy Ghost. I do believe in the Holy Ghost.
In the third week of May, Mr. Wilson had a talent contest in the classroom. First to perform was Michaelina, the chubby, freckled Irish girl with pigtails and auburn hair who sat across the aisle from Devon. She sang “Danny Boy” a cappella in a sweet voice everyone in class was surprised at, for no one had ever heard her sing. Everyone applauded vigorously when she finished. She blushed, smiled shyly, and sat back down at her desk.
Next to perform was Gwen, whose parents were from Hawaii. She was tall, had black hair, and was wearing a sarong. David put on a 45 rpm record on the record player at the back of the class, and Gwen began a hula dance. She moved her hips and arms slowly and sensuously in time with the music, and then turned and swayed her buttocks gently back and forth, back and forth.
Mr. Wilson was standing at the back of the room. His eyes narrowed as he watched the gentle, flowing movements of Gwen’s long, slender arms and hands and swaying buttocks. “Oh man, oh man, oh man!” he thought. “What I wouldn’t give to be alone with that.”
When the song finished, she raised her left arm in farewell and walked all the way back to her seat with her arm aloft and waving her hand to the students, to loud applause.
The three remaining acts were students lip-synching to records— “Johnny Angel,” by Shelley Fabares, “Duke of Earl,” by Gene Chandler, and “Baby, It’s You,” by The Shirelles. Each act got polite applause, but the loudest applause had been for Michaelina for “Danny Boy,” and Gwen for her hula dance.
The last week in May, Mr. Wilson invited Sandy, Gwen, David, and Devon, his favorite students, to have supper with him as a final treat before moving on to the seventh grade in September. He called each student’s parents and got permission to take them to Frisch’s Big Boy for supper on Friday at six.
Devon was Mr. Wilson’s last pickup. He slid onto the front seat beside Mr. Wilson. “Hi, Mr. Wilson,” he said as he closed the front door.
Mr. Wilson looked over at him, smiled, and said, “Hi, Dev, spellin’ champ o’ the world.”
Devon smiled, half-turned in his seat, and said “Hi” to David, Gwen, and Sandy in the back. Everyone returned his greeting. Sandy, sitting behind Mr. Wilson, smiled shyly at him and Devon felt his heart leap skyward with pleasure.
As they ate their cheeseburgers, French fries, and milk shakes, Mr. Wilson told them that this had been his best year in a long time. “I’ve never had a spellin’ champ o’ the school in my class before,” he said as he looked at Devon proudly, “or a hula dancer,” he added as he looked at Gwen. She blushed and looked down at her plate. “Y’all have made it a very special year for me. Ya know,” he said, as he looked down at his watch, “we prob’ly got time to stop at Tait Park before I take ya back home. Wouldjou like that?”
“Yeah,” Devon and David said simultaneously. The girls shook their heads yes.
The park was a mile east of South Dixie Highway on the way home. It was a small park, surrounded on three sides by tall pine trees. It had a jungle gym in the back close to the trees, and swings in front near the parking lot. After Mr. Wilson turned off the car, Devon and David jumped from the car and raced each other to the jungle gym. Mr. Wilson announced to the girls, “I’ll push you girls on the swings.”
He pushed against their soft, warm backs in the beginning, but as he pushed them ever higher, his hands dropped to their slender waists and the warm tops of their hips. They squealed in delight as he pushed them ever higher. “They’re both gittin’ a nice pair o’ titties on ‘em, but I think Gwen’s are bigger,” he thought. “I’d eat a mile o’ her shit just to lick her pussy.” He imagined the girls kneeling naked on a bed with their heads down and he taking them alternately from behind, his hands would be about where they were now, around their waists, pulling their asses against him. He could feel himself getting hard. “Man, I could really have some fun if these boys weren’t here.” He pushed them ever higher, hoping to see a flash of thigh as their dresses fluttered on the upswing. He glanced down at his watch. “Shit. Eight. I gotta take these kids home.” “Alright, guys,” he yelled back to the boys, “time to go!” He sat down on the stone wall behind the swings to let his erection subside as the girls’ swings slowly stopped swaying and came to a stop.
“Thanks, Mr. Wilson,” Sandy said.
“Yeah, thanks. That was fun,” Gwen added.
“It was my pleasure,” Mr. Wilson replied. “If you only knew!” he mused.
After he had dropped them off at their homes and picked up Tommy from his sister’s house, he went into his bedroom while Tommy watched TV and ate Cheetos and pulled down his collection of teen pornography from the top shelf in his closet and the jar of Albolene moisturizing cleanser next to them to finish what he had begun at the park in his imagination.
The place of baptism was the Mad River, just east of the pay-to-fish yellowish pond along Route 4, a curiosity in Ohio, since the rivers and lakes were plentiful with fish. However, there always seemed to be trucks and cars parked in the gravel lot, driven by those fishermen who did not have the patience for fishing and thought catching a fish almost immediately as one sat down on the bank a more rewarding experience than the hours of tedium one experiences sitting on a riverbank. They were urban fishermen.
Members of the church had come to watch the newly born-again be baptized after the Sunday morning service. It was the first Sunday in June, a typical muggy, hazy Ohio afternoon. Adam, carrying his Bible, and Uncle Dwayne, after taking off their shoes and socks and rolling up their pants above their knees, waded into the muddy river and turned to face the congregation standing on the bank. The
y had taken off their jackets but were still wearing their ties.
“Brothers an’ sisters,” Adam began, “we come here today to baptize our fellow Christians as John baptized our savior, Jesus Christ, in the Jordan River.” He opened the Bible to a red satin bookmark and read Matthew, chapter three, verses thirteen through seventeen:
Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John,
to be baptized of him. But John forbad him sayin’, I
have need to be baptized of thee, an’ comest thou to
me? An’ Jesus answerin’ said unto him, Suffer it to be
so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all
righteousness. Then he suffered him. (Which means he
baptized him.) An’ Jesus, when he was baptized, went
up straightway out o’ the water: an’ lo, the heavens
were opened unto him, an’ he saw the Spirit o’ God
descendin’ like a dove, an’ lightin’ upon ‘im. And lo a
voice from heaven, sayin’, This is my beloved son, in
whom I am well pleased.
“So, those of you who are new to the fold, bein’ a Christian means bein’ Christ-like, an’ followin’ in his footsteps an’ doin’ what he done an’ treatin’ others like he woulda treated ‘em. An’ so today, with baptizin’, we are followin’ in his footsteps an’ doin’ like he done. So, Sister Alice, why don’tchou come into the water now an’ be the first today to be Christ-like?” He walked up the bank, handed his Bible to Marie, and offered his hand to Sister Alice.
Sister Alice, wearing the same blue dress with yellow flowers in which she had first received Jesus Christ as her personal savior the same night Devon had been saved, bent down and gathered her dress tightly at the knees with one hand so that it would not rise up her legs and waddled into the water, turned around and stood facing the congregation between Adam and Dwayne.
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