freight. From the cupola one could see along the tops of a hundred cars to the stack of a 2900. It seemed to me a tedious trip, much of the time spent on sidings, waiting for the dinkiest passenger trains to zip by. Night came and my father lit the kerosene lamp over his jolting desk where he went through the paperwork for the hundred carloads. The lamp gave a brilliant white light from its ash mantle, but I dropped off before we made it into Newton and was only half awake to clamber across the immense freight yard where, strangely, there were blinding lights all through the air, and yet the crisscrossed rails seemed endless and unlit.
On one such trip—when I was not along—the waycar, caught suddenly in the collected slack of a hundred couplings, cracked whip-like and threw my father on the floor, where he found he could not rise again. His back was broken.
“It was those months in the hospital,” he always said later, even much later, “while I was helpless in a cast, while I was out of the way. That’s when they really got control of your mother, those holy bitches.” He was in the Santa Fe’s hospital in Topeka, where I visited once a week. I am not sure, but possibly it was then I joined the church, a ceremony that my mother took as a triumph in the war against Satan and Arthur. At any rate the house was quieter. Then, finally, he came back, and gradually everything was as before, but a little worse, as things usually get worse.
My mother’s health was a constant problem. She had had some of the best doctors: she went to Dr. Curran in Kansas City for her tinted glasses. A goiter that had developed about the time I was born was cut out by no less than Dr. Hertzler, the famous “Horse-and-Buggy-Doctor” of Halstead. He became, understandably, one of her heroes. In his hands, she felt safe. “He’s so good,” she said, not alone I gather from her own experience but from a composite legend, “he could just cut that old goiter out and then” (her tiny hand in gesture of magic) “just tie it all up with one hand.”
I might not have remembered that, except that some years later, when she went to Halstead for a checkup of some kind, I went with her and sat in the waiting room of the clinic and stared at the Mennonites in their bonnets and beards. And old Dr. Hertzler himself, who saw no patients anymore but wandered vaguely around the maze he had built, appeared with a fixed and benign smile. He had forgotten to put a shirt on, so his flannel underwear showed above baggy trousers. Stopping in front of me, he looked down from a great height and out of some pocket came the most enormous hand I had ever seen. He was a big man, but his hand was the hand of a giant, and in it was a yellow jawbreaker that he placed precisely in my palm. Then he wandered on to the next child. The nurses tolerated him.
My mother’s favorite hymn, which she looked at long enough to memorize, at the price of a terrible migraine, was “Where the Healing Waters Flow.” She played it over and over. More and more her notion of deity became that of a healing god, the waters of salvation cleansing, not only moral stain, but physical sickness and deformity. But healing was always still to come—meanwhile, she sat on the right side of the church, because her left eye was the stronger.
In one quarrel, when I was twelve, my father broke her glasses and she sued for divorce, getting an injunction that forced him to leave the premises. The final settlement by the court gave her the house and me, and he was to pay a small monthly allowance for my support.
About the same time, Elaine was graduating from high school and was getting rather serious about a ministerial student at the College of Emporia. He wanted to marry her, but she decided that, in spite of her feelings for him, she could not marry a Presbyterian.
This was, I am convinced, her own seriously considered decision, whatever counsels Mother may have offered. But it pointed to a great problem that had obviously to be faced. The local church was small. There were many marriageable females, but no suitable, unattached man. The College of Emporia, to the extent that it was not simply secular, was the institution of a cold, formal, worldly church, worse than the Methodist if not quite Episcopalian. Kansas State Teachers College, on the other side of town, was of no religion at all—they could well have atheists teaching there. There were two attempts to save the situation. The first was to explore other churches. (I should point out here that, though my father attributed everything to the influence of Free Methodist furies, the Free Methodists did not altogether approve of divorce and my mother was conscious of having fallen somewhat in their esteem.)
We visited the local Friends congregation, which I now think must have been rather degenerate—with a hired preacher—but my mother found it cold. From there we went straight to the Salvation Army, more to her taste, and once or twice I even played my violin in their street services. (I hope my father never found out.) But in spite of evangelical fervor, somewhat wasted on Emporia where there was only one bum and nothing stronger than 3.2 beer, except for those who could afford bootleg rates, their sense of doctrine was undeveloped, a bit Buddhist almost in its determination to rescue the perishing before specifying the works of grace. This irked my mother and, besides, though haphazard orchestration was at first a relief from the purely vocal strains we were used to, it hardly took conservatory training to be offended by the sound. Besides, there was hardly a male, over fourteen and under sixty-five, to be seen. We moved on to the Hardshell Baptists.
As I think back over all this it makes, alternately, too little and too much sense.
The Hardshell Baptists had a tiny church that had been a neighborhood grocery. The sign over the door, the only trace of recent paint, said “Fundamental Baptist Church” but my mother always referred to them as Hardshells. The preacher, who somehow made me think of a butcher, was a true ecstatic, carried off in turn by waves of joy and a pity for lost souls. While the latter was on him, during the altar call, he would sob uncontrollably as if his heart were broken. He radiated a sense of poverty. His church, a missionary effort, took all his time and energy and gave him only the most spiritual returns. I never saw more than six or eight attend any service and that was counting his wife and daughter. He wanted desperately for us to join his congregation and—even though there was no young man for Elaine—we might have done so, had he not insisted, with more sincerity than tact, on doctrines anathema to my mother. What annoyed her most was the claim that once saved, a person could never lose salvation, the doctrine of Eternal Security.
“Do you think,” he asked Mother, “that a sheep can become a goat?”
“Once saved, always saved?” she asked in return, daring him to affirm an outrage.
“When we are saved, we become God’s lambs,” he said, warming to his argument. “And His grace is sufficient to keep us from falling.”
“You mean you can go out and get drunk and be worldly and still be a Christian?” Her voice was getting higher as his gestures took on more and more pulpit manner. While his left hand moved horizontally, as if smoothing something, the right made a sort of chopping motion.
“If you’re really saved,” he said, “you won’t do that. You’ll live as a dove because the Lamb of God is in you. We’re born again, we are his children. Do you think His children can become the children of the Devil?”
“Well,” she said, shouting by now, “you can’t tell me just because a man has been saved once, he can go out and drink and swear and murder someone and smoke old cigarettes and still be a born-again child of God.” And as he raised his arms, doubtless to bring down his final and most crushing point—he was now red in the face and his forehead was beading with sweat—she bellowed, just before sweeping out the door, which she slammed behind her, “And what about the backsliding heifer? ”
Gradually, after the Four-square Gospel and a few more, we found ourselves back in the old church at South and Commercial, and with a different solution: Elaine would go away to a holiness college. The Free Methodists have several schools, but the nearest was in Illinois, whereas a related sect, the Wesleyans, though unrepresented in Emporia, maintained a junior college in Miltonvale, Kansas, and
