table with rubbing alcohol. If he wasn’t armed with Lysol, attempting to single-handedly rid the world of germs, Robert was gargling with Listerine or gripping a container of Dristan or pushing a long iodine-saturated Q-tip up his nose, pulling it out, then looking at whatever it had caught, a scene by which I was for some reason transfixed. Never married and living with Grandma, Robert had loved to draw as a child but was teased for it. Only sissies did art. Or girls. He gave it up and worked at the power plant.
Robert wasn’t quite certain what to do with the tribe of boisterous children who clamored to gather eggs, feed the chickens, pump the well water into the tin coffee can on the wooden fence, and investigate the log cabin, with its patches of faded, floral wallpaper from the Depression. During the hot summer months, my father, his parents, and his siblings had slept on the porch. “We’d fall asleep to the music of the crickets and cicadas,” he once said, his voice nostalgic. The log home was a reminder of the two different eras that my father witnessed. He was born into a horse-and-buggy world in which peddlers came around to sell knives, thread, and pots and pans, gypsies were accused of stealing children, and neighbors made moonshine during Prohibition. He went on to witness atomic bombs and space shuttles and the possibility of obtaining any commodity in the world simply by punching keys on a computer. He liked to recall the past—the father he lost too young and the world he grew up in that had changed so very much.
My father once told me about a little wren that had made its home in a wooden shoe worn by one of his ancestors. His grandmother had sternly admonished him to leave the wren alone, but not because she felt an emotional attachment to it. Rather, wrens killed the bugs on the crops. My father, however, did feel emotionally attached to the birds. And to the old log cabin. To all of his old cars. And most of all, to the way things once were, and the way they still should be. He didn’t view it as inconsistent that he’d broken with his past and his traditions when he took on a new faith. He believed he’d found the truth, an objective truth, and everyone else should likewise believe it.
On Sunday mornings, Grandma returned home from her Evangelical Lutheran church often still singing “Come, Holy Spirit, God and Lord”—or the German version of it: “Komm, Heiliger Geist, Herre Gott”—in her clear, beautiful soprano voice while she was working in the kitchen or the garden. She sang with such joy and sincerity, the notes floating in the quiet of the farm, that I couldn’t imagine that God didn’t hear her just because she was Lutheran. But should such a perplexing thought cross my mind, I quickly chased it away. I didn’t want to be one of those people in the church who had doubts.
One day when Grandma was bending over the hoe in the garden, humming and singing German words I didn’t understand, her long dress rode up in the back. I saw that Grandma’s legs were a map of her life’s journey. Above the knees, her legs were sophisticated, big city, white and pale where the sun didn’t hit them, remnants of her life in Hamburg where she’d never planted so much as a flower. Everything she’d left behind. Below her knees, her skin was brown and leathery from constant exposure to her new life on the farm, plowing, baling hay, and sowing beans. Grandma, in many respects, was a transplant who didn’t quite take to the new soil she’d been stuck in.
Invariably, Grandma had a pork roast on Sunday that she wanted to feed us and which we stalwartly, with great principle and moral fiber, refused. My father would say, “Now, Mom, you know we don’t eat that stuff.”
“You used to. I don’t understand you, James. Vat’s the matter vith some pork?”
Within minutes, the two of them would be in the midst of a fierce argument, breaking into heated German, and ending with my father throwing up his hands and yelling, “I don’t know what the HECK is the matter with you, Mom! You think up is down and down is up. I’m so mad, I could bite the head off a tenpenny nail!” and he would stomp out the door. My father was a yeller and screamer.
Grandma offered us long diatribes on what a good man Martin Luther had been and what a bad man that Armstrong was. About Luther, she said, “Zat poor man, he valked on his knees up ze steps of ze Vatican!” Grandma didn’t understand how her son had given up Martin Luther for “Zat nasty man! I don’t know vhy you give your money, vhich you vork very hard for, to zat nasty man.” This short, white-haired, rotund dervish would sometimes confront her tall, broad, strong son as if he were a small child. “Ja, he iss nasty, I tell you!” and Grandma would stomp her foot (my father and grandma were both enthusiastic stompers) and let loose a barrage of German, enraged that my parents gave so much of their money to the church. I snuck out the door when they fought. The last thing I wanted was confrontation.
I hated to agree with Grandma, but even though I knew that we had to suffer the sacrifice of the material for the spiritual before Jesus returned and saved us, it would have been nice to have had new shoes instead of hand-me-downs. Or to have curtains cover the living room windows so that people couldn’t see straight in when they drove past. I wanted Baggies for our lunch sandwiches instead of reused brown paper bags. I wanted new clothes, not skirts and shirts that had been handed down from twenty years ago and had to be safety-pinned to fit. And yes, it would have been wonderful to have a car without rust running down the fender, seats with foam rubber emerging from big gashes, and a loud, clanging muffler.
I was acutely aware that belonging to the church placed me firmly on the periphery of the community. Having so many siblings, living out on a country road, using food stamps, and not having money for new clothes just added to the whole weird package. Once, when my younger sister Liz and I were driving with our father, I half-ducked my head so no one would see it was me. Liz kept her head up and laughed at me. She refused to be intimidated by anyone who dared judge her for driving through town in a pink Caddy that died at stop signs and groaned going up hills. The sacrifices of the material for the spiritual were just part of the necessary trials and tribulations.
My father had had to quit school after eighth grade to help his dad on the farm, and without a high school diploma, he could only find jobs that necessitated physical, not mental, ability. He worked in construction to support his ever-growing family, leaving early in the morning, dressed in gray or navy-blue work pants and shirt and heavy boots. My mother packed him beef bologna sandwiches on whole-wheat bread for lunch, and he returned by five or six, hungry and weary. He belonged to the laborers’ union and was sent out to build a reservoir in the county, work at a power plant, lay concrete on I-64, and do various other jobs requiring his formidable strength and endurance.
However, he was also an avid reader and picked up books at antiquarian book fairs, including Plutarch’s Lives and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. One of his favorite books, which he attempted to get all of us to read, was The Two Babylons: Or, The Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife. He was fond of quoting this book, published in the mid-1800s by a Protestant minister named Alexander Hislop, which claimed that the Catholic Church was a continuation of the pagan religion of Babylon and was nothing less than the Whore of Babylon referred to in the book of Revelation.
I read parts of the book several times, and given the extensive footnotes, it seemed to be a reliable and even scholarly work. Yet, I could never read much of it without putting it down. Not only was the language dense and bombastic, essentially an attack against the Catholic Church as “a synagogue of Satan,” but I was disturbed by something else in the pages, something that I couldn’t articulate even to myself. The book put forth many of the same arguments as our church—that the Catholic Church was the Antichrist, which had to be vanquished before Jesus could return—but it was overly self-righteous and lacking respect for another faith, even if I was taught that that faith was wrong.
Several times, in a fine fury, Grandma shouted that the Worldwide Church of God was a cult. This really incensed my father, and he would decide we couldn’t go to the farm anymore if Grandma was going to be so contrary and foolish and perhaps even influenced by Satan. Herbert Armstrong preached that anyone who disagreed with church doctrine likely had the devil working on him or her.
Poor
