back of the bus, and by the time we reached Carbon we were singing all four verses of “Amazing Grace” with guitar accompaniment. I sang, too, but softly, not wishing to be a righteous nuisance to the half of the bus which didn’t share our destination in this world and the next. From across the aisle I watched a beautiful sophomore named Monica close her eyes and raise her open palms to heaven (though only to shoulder height, so as not to draw attention to herself), while a track of tears glistened on her cheek like a scar from a duel with the Devil. That first night, as I turned back to the window and the cold dank of the world, the wheat fields seemed as strange to me as lunar seas.
“Uncle Corey used to have this expression at the dinner table — I ever tell you boys about ?I’ Corey? — Anyhow, he used to say, ‘Not as good as skinned cat’.”
“Jeepers, Jerry,” Montana whooped. “We’re eating.”(Kansas, Montana, Tennessee …. In four years not once did I meet a student nicknamed Yukon or Manitoba or Prince Edward Island, though I did meet a guy from Fredericton who called himself “Dallas.”)
“No matter what he was served, whenever we’d ask how it was, that’s what he’d say.”
“Did he ever eat here? Anybody know what this is?”
“So anyway, we all got a little tired of hearing this —”
“Why didn’t you just stop asking him?”
“So just before Corey’s next visit Dad went and caught this stray cat.”
“No way!”
“Mom wasn’t sure what to do with it, but figured the meat’d look like chicken anyway. So when dinner came around there we were, right, all with barbecue chicken in front of us except Uncle Corey. We could hardly keep a straight face, watching him shovel it down. Good it was a big ‘o1 tab; he couldn’t get enough. When he was sopping up the plate with the corn bread Dad asked him how it was. ‘Great’, he says. ‘Not as good as skinned cat, of course.’ Well, we all start hooting, and the look on Corey’s face … man, I wish I had a camera. And then of course he pukes right there.”
This was my first supper in the O.B.I. dining room, and the last meal I intended to share with my roommate Jerry Cheeseman. The day before I arrived on campus, he had tacked a huge ?l’ Glory Stars and Stripes to the wall at the foot of the top bunk, and taken the bottom bunk for himself. “Don’t mind the flag, bro’,” he’d told me before introducing himself. “They call it North America, right?” Jerry was an unabashed John Bircher who could not wrap his head around the idea of Canada. He loved Canada — what he’d seen of southern Alberta looked just like home — but our untimely Thanksgiving, three down football and universal health care seemed either whimsically foreign or perilously un-American. Gingerly, I let Jerry know how I felt about the stars and bars being the first thing I’d see between my legs by the dawn’s early light. He suggested we switch beds. I agreed, not expecting him to continue his habit of kneeling next to the lower bunk for prayer. After his evening’s devotions my sheets were often damp with his salty cries unto the Lord.
Jerry had a poster of Rembrandt’s Christ on the road to Emmaus taped to the cupboard above his desk. A faithful reproduction, but for the Lord’s crew cut. (“Nothing in the Bible proves Jesus had long hair. I’m not saying he had a crew cut. We just don’t know. When he comes back I bet he will. Not that I’ll actually place a wager. The Devil’s a gambler, Daddy says.”) All this and his “skinned cat” yarn confirmed him as a crypto-hillbilly cocksucker (though not in so many words: I’d been saved, thank God, from such a vocabulary). He was someone who could be trusted with neither big ideas nor small, furry things.
“So roomie,” Jerry drawled, hitting the lights the night of our first floor meeting, “What do you make of Delbert Moon?”
“Which one was he?” In the long shadows of the lower bunk I pulled the sheets and blanket to my chin, brushing my penis back upon my belly.
“The late guy, who asked about that stuff with your pastor.”
“Oh yeah.” Careful so as to not inflame my loins, I flipped my cock down against my right thigh before folding my hands behind my head. An elbow was moistened by a stain of Cheeseman’s tears and I rolled to my side in disgust. “What about him?”
“He’s a funny guy.” Jerry paused for my, “Funny how?” but I said nothing. He waited so long that I was nearly asleep by the time he added, “A real funny guy.”
“Funny how?” I finally mumbled, but Jerry didn’t answer. He was snoring a minute later.
My roommate aside (who was, I’m sure, my father’s nightmare of what I would become), I was thrilled to be at Bible College. I threw myself into my studies and obedience training. I wanted to melt into the mould of God’s plan for my life, which he’d known (and God was a he; the heist He) since before the foundations of the world. I was delighted to be suddenly subject to the rules of sober men (and they were men; and by God they were sober) whose selfless, sole concern was that I and my classmates grow into the disciplined officer core of the Church Triumphant’s shock troops. My hair is too long, and has to be off the collar and behind my ears? Off it comes. I’m to be woken daily at six for a 30 minute spell of private prayer, and I’m to be asleep by 10:30 (11 on weekends) after another half hour of compulsory devotions? Hey, I’m awake — I’m asleep. No folk music, not even Burl Ives, let alone rock and roll? I’ll take my Heavenly Father over Big Daddy 10 times out of 10. (And even now Bob Dylan — that Bob Dylan — was singing about Jesus and the End Times and being born again. How much am I, I thought, on the right side of history?) I’m permitted to speak with female students on the O.B.I. grounds, but only so long as we’re walking, and walking in opposite directions? I don’t have a problem with that; I can do without. I can do without everything but the Truth, I wrote in the flyleaf of my Bible my first night on campus, and without everyone but Jesus.
Overcomer Bible Institute had been a baby of the Great Depression; conceived, delivered and breastfed by the Reverend Charles Kaye Barstowe of the popular Glory Hour radio program. As a young Baptist minister in rural Alberta, Barstowe believed he had heard the call of God to evangelize China, and was to sail with his wife and child for Shanghai when, as described in his book, At Home with God,“God stopped me with a cow”:
We’d brought in nearly all the Derby’s crop of barley, such as it was, when a great ruckus drew us to the barn. “Father! Edwin! Pastor! Come quick! It’s Libby!” Derby’s youngest lad, Pelton, cried at the top of his nine-year-old lungs. When we arrived upon the scene Pelton’s eyes were wide as saucers, and he was jumping up and down as he shouted, “Libby talked! Libby talked!”
“What do you mean, boy?” The elder Derby, as flummoxed as I, asked with the patience of Job.
“I was cleaning out her stall, just like you asked, and she lifted her big face towards me and said ‘Proverbs 16:9.’”
“What do you mean?” the good farmer repeated. “Our cow’s quoting scripture?”
“She didn’t quote it,” Pelton explained. “She just gave the reference.”
“‘A man’s heart deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps,” I recited.
“Cows can’t talk, you crazy pug!” said Edwin, tearing a strip from his little brother.
I said nothing while the family argued their heifer’s
