Fiery Rivers

by Daefyd Williams

  Devon panicked. “What’s he doin’ that for?” he thought.

  Once Adam had washed the brain, he put it back into Devon’s cranium and replaced the top of the skull from the container. Devon knew he would never be the same.

  He opened his eyes, his heart beating hard and fast. “Wow! What an incredible dream! What was that all about?” He was lying on the middle bunk of a trio of bunk beds in Parks Hall on the West Green of Ohio University, a college nestled among the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in southeastern Ohio. He was a freshman, and this was his second weekend away from home.

  He had gotten above his “raisin’” and defied his parents and applied for and been accepted into college. They had wanted him to get a good factory job like Adam, but his senior year in high school he had worked in a factory for four hours after school and five hours on Saturday, and he could not envision himself spending his life in the dirty, noisy tedium of a factory, where one is simply a small cog in a giant wheel. There had to be something more to life than that. At the end of his senior year, he had saved $2,200, enough money to pay for tuition, books, and room and board at the college for the whole year.

  On Friday of the weekend before, he had gotten carsick on the way to the university. Since his parents and he had never been to the college, they had taken Route 33 south from Columbus, a very winding road and not the shortest route. Adam had had to stop the car alongside the road while he got out and vomited into the weeds. Contributing to his anxiety was the fact that he had never been to the campus, and his parents would be leaving him on his own for the first time in his life. After they had taken his suitcase to his room and Devon had walked back downstairs to say good-bye to them, they had surprised him by hugging him. He had seen his parents hug men, women, and children in church his whole life, but they had never hugged him or any of his siblings.

  This was not the first time he had been away from his parents, however. After his junior year in high school, he had gone to New Hampshire to work for the summer as a gardener at a resort called The Waumbek in Jefferson. He had been invited to go by his friend, Tom Feynman, whose aunt and uncle managed the resort. They had worked diligently the first two weeks they were there, but spent the remaining weeks shirking work and hiding beneath the hotel on disused golf carts and talking.

  Devon had fallen in love with a tall, lissome brunette, Ann, while he was there. She was a college student, as were all the waiters, waitresses, and busboys at the resort. He had never had the courage to talk to her, but often ogled her when he saw her and her friends lounging around the mountain stream-fed pool in bikinis on their days off. She had been the cause of one of his most embarrassing moments during his high school years.

  He and Tom always sat at a table with the other groundskeepers at mealtimes in the employee cafeteria, making it necessary for them to walk past the table of chattering college students whenever they needed anything from the serving line. Devon would always glance furtively at Ann as he walked past them. One morning, as he walked past the table, all the students burst out in laughter as he looked at Ann. He instantly became aware that she had been cognizant of his looking at her and had told her friends to watch him as he walked by the table. He blushed and immediately experienced a resurgence of the sharp pain in his gut he had felt as an elementary school student when the other students would laugh at him and call him clumsy. He reached for the metal tongs at the serving line and placed two pieces of bacon on a plate, tears blurring his vision. He walked stoically back to his table, studiously avoiding looking at any of the college students as he passed.

  He did not hold a grudge against her. He would often fantasize about kissing her beautiful mouth and holding her in his arms at night. His fantasies never progressed further because he knew he would never even hold her hand or have the courage to talk to her.

  One day there was a light rain, and he and Tom did not have to pretend to work that day. He looked out his second-story bedroom window and saw her walking back to the resort along the road carrying a paper bag of something she had purchased from the convenience store a block north of their apartment. She had no umbrella and did not try to cover her head. She walked slowly and proudly in the rain, as though it were a sunny day. He loved her all the more for that; her complete lack of concern about getting wet somehow struck a primal chord in him.

  His most embarrassing moment occurred in his senior year. The family had moved to Enon, Ohio, from Dayton after he had completed his freshman year at Northridge High School. He did not know why he did it, but he tried out for the basketball team in the fall of his sophomore year at Greenon High School and made the team, not because he had any innate ability, but because of his height. He was now six feet, five inches tall, but still as clumsy and slow as he had been in elementary school. Mr. Dobson, the coach, had chosen him to be on the team because of the psychological advantage he thought Devon brought against the other team during warm-ups before games. There was another boy on the team, Steve Hessian, who was Devon’s height, but who did not have Devon’s clumsiness. Steve was a great player; he once set the school record for the most points scored in a game—forty-three against Tecumseh in his sophomore year. Mr. Dobson believed that any team who saw that Greenon had two players who were six-five would blanch. And he was right, until the opening tipoff, when Steve would start the game and Devon would take his customary place on the bench on the sidelines.

  There were two minutes and thirty seconds remaining in a game against Shawnee High School, and Greenon was losing, 82 to 67, as usual. Mr. Dobson was as incompetent at coaching as his assistant, Mr. Mills, was adept. Mr. Mills regularly led his reserve team to winning seasons. This season its record was eighteen wins and three losses; Mr. Dobson’s season was a mirror opposite, three wins and eighteen losses. Devon could never fathom why the administration simply did not reverse their roles and put Mr. Mills in charge of the varsity team. Since Devon was young, he was not aware of the politics involved in bureaucracies. Later on, he would learn firsthand of the inanities and downright boneheadedness of bureaucracies when he became a teacher himself. The only time Mr. Dobson ever put Devon into a game was when there were a few minutes remaining in a game that they were losing, like tonight.

  “Hensley, check in for Hessian,” Mr. Dobson barked, looking directly at Devon.

  The icy fist of fear immediately clutched Devon’s stomach. He hated to be put into a game. All eyes in the gymnasium would be looking at him, and he ran the risk of being laughed at, not just by students, but by adults also. Mr. Dobson called for a timeout, and Devon replaced Steve. A player on Shawnee’s team caught the ball and Devon fouled him when he took a jump shot. After he made both his foul shots, Greenon took possession of the ball. As Steve Fury, one of the guards, dribbled downcourt, he suddenly passed the ball to Devon, who was terrified. He stopped and held it, as he did not trust himself to dribble the ball downcourt. He had never been good at dribbling.

  “Gimme the ball!” someone shouted. Relieved to be rid of it, he passed it to the boy, only to realize with horror that the boy who had shouted was a Shawnee player. He had given the ball to the opposing team.

  “Idiot! Get the bum outa there! Go back to benchwarming!” burrowed into his brain from the stands. He went beet red in embarrassment. Mr. Dobson called for a timeout and immediately took him out of the game. Devon was humiliated and walked dejectedly with his head down back to the bench on the sidelines.

  “Smooth move, Hensley,” Tom said sarcastically to him as he sat down. “Ya been practicin’ that?”

  Devon just stared at the floor and said nothing.

  His compulsive flicking of his right wrist abated and then died away on its own after his freshman year of high school.

  In his sophomore year, he decided to go to hell rather than incessantly repeat, “I do believe in the Holy Ghost. I do believe in the Holy Ghost,” in his head from the moment he opened his eyes in the morning until he fell asleep at night, which he had done for
six years. He determined that he would rather go to hell and burn in the searing flames than to torment himself while he was alive. Once he made the decision, every time he began the mantra or felt the fear of eternal damnation grip his intestines, he would blank his mind and not allow those thoughts or feelings to gain ascendancy. It was a gargantuan struggle for the first year, but he emerged the victor.

  The clenching of his abdominal muscles, however, especially on his right side, proved to be indomitable. He sought out a psychologist in his sophomore year at Ohio University for help. In Devon’s first meeting with him, the doctor asked his permission to tape record their interaction. Devon, already very anxious about seeing a psychologist for help, agreed, but thought being considered a specimen strange. The doctor had asked Devon why he was feeling anxious, and he had answered that he was concerned that his younger brothers and sisters were being raised in the same environment in which he had been tormented and wanted them not to experience what he had gone through. The doctor taught him Deep Muscle Relaxation, a procedure to affect relaxation in all the muscles of the body by tensing and then relaxing all muscle groups. Devon tried it, but was still clenching his abdominal muscles after two months. Frustrated, he returned to the psychologist, hoping to be provided with a more effective method to stop the clenching. On his second visit, the doctor simply asked him to continue to do Deep Muscle Relaxation and to see him the next month. Disgusted with this advice, he never saw the doctor again.

  In the years to come, he did see a phalanx of psychiatrists, group therapists, acupuncturists, and hypnotists, all to no avail. The Roman soldier painfully plunged his bloody spear into Devon’s right side over and over again until the end of his days.

  His freshman year at Ohio University had been the most painful in his life. His dorm room was intended for two people, but because of students seeking deferments to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam, a triple bunk bed sat against the wall. His two roommates were from Cleveland and New York City, places Devon had never been. They instantly noticed that he talked as though he were from Kentucky, which he could not do otherwise because his parents were from Kentucky. They immediately began calling him “farmer” and avoided being seen with him or talking to him. They would not even eat with him in the cafeteria, so he spent the whole academic year eating by himself. He would go to the cafeteria fifteen minutes before it closed to ensure that the fewest people would notice him eating alone. He connected with no one the entire year. After several months of attending classes, he noticed that his professors added “ing” to the ends of verbs instead of “in’”. He consciously began to emulate them.

  His sophomore and junior years were only slightly less miserable. The obsessive-compulsive disorder that had begun with the Holy Ghost mantra had extended now to all areas of his life. He now regularly consumed three hours of every day of his life brushing his teeth, shaving, and showering, behavior which did not go unnoticed by men in the dorm. They began to call him “bathroom man,” the pain of which made him cringe internally. To avoid interaction of this sort, he would come to his dorm room after eating dinner in the cafeteria and go to bed and sleep until midnight. Then he would get up and go to the study rooms downstairs and study until five a.m. Even this, however, did not stop the taunts. When his dorm mates saw him studying, they would shout, “Hey, bathroom man!” through the screened windows as they walked past.

  The hazing ended his senior year when he persuaded Del to transfer from Wright State University, where he was enrolled, to Ohio University. They were roommates and lived off campus in the Carriage Hill apartments. He finally spent a year free of taunting.

  A month after he graduated from Ohio University, he moved to Miami, Florida, to get as far away from his parents and their religion as possible. He received an advanced degree in Florida and, three months after that, moved to Los Angeles to get involved somehow in the movie industry. He became an actor and acted in two bad horror films and was never hired as an actor again. He acquired a teaching credential and became a teacher at a middle school. He continued to approach and run away from women the rest of his life and never married.

  It was a warm May afternoon. Puffy white clouds were scudding eastward in the hazy blue sky. Jackie and Gina were playing with Feisty under the clothesline in the backyard. Gloryannn, Denny, and Devon were sitting in the shade of the house watching Adam pull weeds from the rows of beans in the vegetable garden he had planted east of the clothesline. Suddenly, he keeled over onto his back in the dirt and wanly beckoned the kids to him with his right hand. Devon was there first, the younger children close behind.

  “What happen’?” Devon asked.

  “I . . . I got a . . . a pain in my chest,” he managed to whisper. His face had drained of all color and beads of sweat were on his forehead.

  “Gloryann! Go git Mommy!” Devon commanded. She ran toward the house.

  “Denny, let’s git him into the house!” Devon pulled him to his feet, and Denny and he walked beside him, their arms around his waist. By the time they got him to the kitchen door, Marie was holding the door for them.

  “What happen’, honey?” she asked anxiously.

  “I . . . I doeknow. I just felt this pain in my chest an’ then my legs woulden hold me.”

  “Come on in an’ set down. You oughta let the kids pull them weeds.”

  Denny and Devon eased him onto a kitchen chair. He slumped down so he could rest his head against the back of the chair. “Jus’ lemme rest a minute. I’ll be alright.” He continued to sweat.

  “Mom, I think you better call an ambulance. This doesn’t look good,” Devon said.

  “I think you’re right.” She went into the living room and called an ambulance.

  It was a heart attack, and he was hospitalized for a week. Springfield Hospital staff recommended that he go to Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton for a balloon angioplasty, but he was afraid that he would die if he went through the procedure and refused to have it done. He would spend the rest of his life swallowing nitroglycerine tablets for angina.

  Because of the heart attack, however, he was able to retire from Frigidaire, where he had worked for twenty-five years. This pleased him; he had often suggested to Marie that he quit the factory and take up a new occupation, like driving a taxi. She had never allowed him to quit, saying that driving a cab would be a “tejus” way to make a living, better to stay somewhere which guaranteed a steady income. And so he had endured until the heart attack felled him. A contributing factor to his attack was probably his reassignment after twenty-four and a half years as a forklift operator on the day shift to the assembly line on the graveyard shift, quickly installing the three shelves inside refrigerators as they trundled past him on the line. He could not sleep as well during the day as he did at night and hated going to work at ten p.m. so that he could be there early before the bell rang at eleven to start the new shift. The factory was dirty, loud, and dim, and he was grateful to retire on a medical disability at fifty-five.

  With the help of Dwayne, Rufus, and members of the church, he built a concrete-block church with a brick facade on Rebert Pike in Enon, Ohio, and moved from the little pink church in 1966 in preparation for the five hundred parishioners God had told him would be coming to the church in the prophecy that Marie had given in tongues while she was in the Spirit and Dwayne had translated. The prophecy had also stated that his preaching would be broadcast on two radio stations. He had no idea how that would come about, but trusted that the Lord would present a way. He called the church Whole Bible Pentecostal Church.

  The five hundred parishioners never materialized. No radio station ever broadcast his preaching. Sunday morning attendance never rose above forty, hardly more than had attended the little pink church. After preaching for fifteen years in the new church with minimal results, he retired, disillusioned and heartbroken, and moved back to Franklin. He and Marie moved into a brick house on Arthur Avenue just west of the Great Miami River. They began attending Brother Lag
gert’s Pentecostal church and became Sunday school teachers, but would never again assume the mantle of a church of their own.

  One hot, muggy evening in August, they had just retired for the evening when Adam blurted out, “I wish I’d never whupped my young’uns.”

  Marie was taken aback. “Why, honey, we raised our young’uns the way we were raised growin’ up. We didden know any other way.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, I know, but that dudden make it right. I wish I could tell ‘em all that I’m sorry. I shouldn’ta whupped ‘em.”

  “Well, Devon an’ Del got the most, ‘specially Devon. Ya hardly touched the young’uns.”

  “That’s true. Devon shore was stubborn, wudden he?”

  “Yeah, he was, but he’s workin’ on his master’s now and has a good woman in Lee, so I guess ya got his mind right.”

  Adam chuckled. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

  Marie put her arm around him and kissed him. “Don’tchou fret no more about whuppin’ those young’uns. They turned out good.”

  “Yeah, I guess they did.” He was somewhat comforted and drifted off to sleep.

  On September eleventh of that year, 1992, he had a massive heart attack during the night and was rushed to Miami Valley Hospital by ambulance. In the emergency room, his heart arrested for fifteen minutes, but he was resuscitated. The doctors were compelled to perform an emergency angioplasty, after which he was placed in intensive care.

  When Devon and Del walked into his hospital room, Devon took Adam’s hand and said, “Dad, it’s us. Devon and Del.” Adam lightly squeezed Devon’s hand to show them that he knew they were there, but he could not open his eyes or talk. “We’ve come to be with you.”

  The next day, the surgeon who had done the angioplasty told the family that Adam’s blood pressure continued to drop and that they suspected that he had internal bleeding. They wanted the family’s permission to operate. Marie gave it, since the doctor had said that he would die if the bleeding was not stopped.