forth not a single deviation from Free Methodist doctrine. Their services were identical. The only differences were, firstly, that the Wesleyans had church councils, but no bishops, and secondly, they had no prejudice against the use of musical instruments in their worship.
My father’s mother at her house on Cottonwood Street, Emporia.
Meanwhile my father, whom I saw more or less regularly—given his completely random schedule—had moved in with his mother and his brother Roscoe, who lived on Cottonwood Street. My memories of Emporia, not all pleasant, are lined with lovely elms arching and interlocking over streets of asphalt or brick. And when I try to think of the same town since the Dutch disease passed through (it has been over thirty years since I was last there, for my father’s funeral) it comes before me as a wasteland of stumps and rotten trunks. Already fallen or still standing, they are dead, and in the middle of summer the sun shines through them. The cicadas (which we called locusts) must now have difficulty finding a patch of bark to discard their shells on, the great trees themselves skeletons.
My grandmother was in her nineties, almost totally deaf. She sat through most of each day rocking, wrapped in smelly woolens, nodding peacefully. My father hated her. He swore she could hear perfectly, but simply would not listen. His greatest fear was that she would outlive us all, me included. Occasionally she would struggle up out of her chair, make her way to the kitchen and do some mischief. Deciding to make coffee, for instance, she once brewed a good quarter pound of my father’s Bond Street tobacco and if he had not come in while the reeking mixture was still percolating, she might have drunk it. Roscoe was her youngest child and had lived with her for sixty years.
One of my father’s continual humiliations was Roscoe’s presence at the depot. Freight crews assembled at the yard office, a mile out of town, but from time to time he would have some business or other at the passenger depot (which he always referred to as “the levee,” as though the tracks were a kind of Mississippi, floating streamliners between Chicago and California) and then he would invariably catch sight of Roscoe’s grizzly form. Roscoe, with his antique Stetson and weary suspenders, made the most drab surroundings look opulent by simple contrast. He was a soup line figure, stiff, unshaven, with sunken cheeks and deep-sunken eyes. He rolled his own and had always a mutilated cigarette between two fingers,that had turned brown in consequence, or between his teeth, which were also heavily stained. He had a job at the Depot Hotel, where his official title was, unless someone was putting me on, “dishwasher’s assistant”—his main task, making soap for the kitchen—and most of his working hours seemed to be spent across the street on the station platform. The baggageman and a couple of retired railroaders, now become whittlers, were his cronies, and they whiled away the afternoons telling adventures and arguing politics. It was not Roscoe’s appearance that embarrassed my father—though women tried to keep their children from staring at the little assembly—but his strongly expressed Republican opinions.
More and more, as he got older, my father’s defenses against the world were anger and eating, and often he indulged them concurrently. Eventually I hesitated, especially at meals, to introduce any subject whatever, the range of his irritation having increased along with the force of resentment. He listened to all the radio newscasts, and commentators, and read the Gazette from beginning to end. It all made him furious. “You son-of-a-bitch!” he would shout at Fulton Lewis, Jr., or just some neutral voice from the local station. Or reaching the editorial page of the paper, and seeing the signature “William L. White,” “Young Bill isn’t half the man his dad was. Runs off to New York and lets the paper go to hell.” And then, putting down the paper a moment to refill his pipe, “Of course, old White tried to get us all to vote for Cal Coolidge. The son-of-a-bitch.”
My mother’s favorite story was a simple anecdote. A woman—“and she wasn’t an old woman either”—took down a dipper from its hook. And I was transported from the world I knew, a world of hot and cold faucets, from Emporia to Leeton, where the well water tasted awful to me—or to Samaria. She took this dipper from the hook, without lighting the lamp. And in the shadows she scooped a drink from the water bucket and swallowed, along with the water, a black widow spider.
“No one knew this was going to happen,” my mother always said at the end of this tale. “Not even the angels knew. But the Holy Ghost knew.”
“Didn’t Jesus know?” I asked.
“She thought she had a long life yet to live. And she went to meet her Judge, prepared or not. You never know, from one minute to the next.”
Elaine, at Miltonvale, promptly attracted a young man, a prospective minister of the right faith, and at Christmas vacation brought him home. This was the first Christmas after the war. Charles was just out of the navy, Julian had just gone into the navy, but as it worked out, they were both home.
My mother’s heart was set on having a preacher in the family. She had given up on Charles. He was not only headstrong, but a constant reminder of the Charles who had deserted her—she always claimed the younger to be a spitting image of the elder. She decorated the walls with photographs of her son in uniform (and there was for some years a silver star in the front window, denoting a member of the family on overseas duty) but his presence was always a trial, from preschool age even, when from behind the post of a porch he hurled whatever swear words he knew down a steep terrace to startled passing strangers.
She had, by this time, just about given up on Julian, mainly because of his long-standing feud with the Emporia police, which had ended in the compromise of his recent enlistment in the navy. It was touch and go for a while, the police swearing they would have him in reform school. The balance shifted, however, with Julian’s theft of their arsenal, at which point they showed a willingness to bargain, and, instead of threatening, offered him a position on the force. And they were again angered by the language of his refusal.
My case was not yet decided, which is to say that my mother had not given up, but as yet I had received no call to preach. All that could safely be said so far was that it was still not too late. The call was, of course, absolutely essential since, besides standing to reason, it has an unequivocal text (Romans 10:15). Elaine envisioned for herself the sort of double ministry in which both the preacher (male) and his helpmeet qualify as able workers—in short, she felt called to be a preacher’s wife.
She and mother consulted together and prayed long hours to know whether this particular conjunction was the will of God. Her young man, she insisted—still insists, if his name comes up—was a fervent Christian and a genius. The latter quality immensely pleased her, though I think in mother’s view it suggested vain science and man’s philosophy. In this case, at least, intelligence created a snare. While Elaine sought the counsel of God and parent, Charles and Julian were checking out her guest. Their conclusion, which clicked almost audibly as their eyes met after some reply, did not concern itself with matters of faith or morals, but with problems of coherence and comprehension. They had decided, simultaneously and irrevocably, that Elaine’s suitor was mad.
So they began to treat him accordingly, taking his most commonplace remarks as full of strange meaning, echoing his words in slightly distorted senses. Having been a trifle nervous at meeting the family, he soon developed a case of jitters. But there was worse to come.
Charles had brought home guns, several Japanese rifles and a German pistol. He had set up a target in the basement and every once in a while went down and blasted away with the pistol—the only weapon he could find ammunition for. He and Julian now took the guest to the basement to show him around. “They’re shooting that old gun off,” my mother said, red-eyed from prayer. The shots in fact were ringing out, a nerve-racking sound. Then they stopped. And soon, with laborious shuffling steps, Julian and Charles ascended, the third man more or less hanging between them. He was stunned, but soon recovered, without visible
