the road to the forest. That damn gravel and stirred-up dust was horrifying to me. I did as best I could to keep my boots and long pants on, striding across the farm fields that Doctor Guillot’s daddy kept planted in cotton. When they invented something like a bean, a soy bean, in Viet Nam, we were happier. We could run across one of those fields and not get scratched up like the cotton did to us. There were the groves of old pecan trees in a grid pattern, many of them broken and deformed but all producing big pecans.
There were some people who picked the pecans from Dr. Guillot’s daddy’s land. They were usually the older black men and women who probably, I learned from Matty, were picking on “shores” whatever that was. It was a quota system of some kind, but “shore” seemed to be about water. Anyway, we could stop running through the cotton or soy, fall on the cool grass and rest every hundred yards or so when a swatch of pecan trees crossed the land. Otherwise, if there were no pecan trees growing, the land was in full sun, with crops growing.
I loved pecans. I remember the tasty pecans, so good. Of course, one withered, greenish rotten pecan could make you wish you never ate any. Spitting and spitting, we got those out of our mouths, drank some of our canteen water and ran across the next hundred yards of crops. We crossed alternating strips of pecan groves and crop fields, about two miles. In the summer, real summer, that was two miles like the Sahara desert.
Kids didn’t understand the magic of the forest and the wonder of the bayou. There were new canals with giant turtles, green and brown snakes and fish, even wild cows. It was not just bugs, birds and bees. No. The forest was a veritable treasure house of gifts to an imaginative boy’s mind.
However, Matty didn’t like sweating too much even though his upper lip was always wet. He liked to be in the house in front of a fan. When his absent father sent him a Wollensak reel to reel tape recorder, he never came outdoors for about two years.
The tough kids wanted to hang out where the C.Y.O. provided pool tables, card games, basketball, and other civilized and boring crap. They smoked cigarettes, but I couldn’t smoke at the C.Y.O., because my older brother would kill me if he caught me smoking. I did smoke but only after I found a carton of Kent Cigarettes in the park one day. I kept eight packs for myself and gave two packs to Johnny Plazens for two Army Surplus Walkie Talkie Telephones, without any wires, but the generators in them shocked anyone or anything pretty good. We shocked some fish in the lake one day, from the boat side, and a big bass about four pounds jumped into the boat from the other side when he tried to race up the shore.
Getting away from an electrical shock was something I understood. One day I pelted the lead off of the tops of some .22 bullets with a hammer to get the gun powder out. I hit each tiny piece of gun powder with the hammer to make a loud cracking sound. I accidentally hit too deep on the bullet brass casing and it fired. The lead went to my right, the brass to my left and the noise filled my head and heart with fear. Never again did I hit a bullet with a hammer. I had to get the gunpowder burns off of the concrete; to do that I used a hose. Then I really got into washing the house and accidentally or stupidly put the water stream into the electrical socket on the back porch. I felt my bare feet attach to the ground, as current surged through me from my arms, down into my body to my feet. All I could do was remember that when daddy was changing the circuit breakers, he had my older brother stand there with a bat. He told him that if he began to get electrocuted, to hit his arms hard enough to make his hands break off the circuit box. I thought of that while I was being shocked. It was getting horridly intense. I remembered that about breaking contact with force, and somehow reached deep inside myself and forcefully jerked my arms to the side like I was hit by a bat. The water broke its connection to the current and I was free.
The rectory was a great alternative to the hot summer world. It was great to go inside an air-conditioned place, eat candy and listen to records with my new priest friend and “personal confessor.” I found out that confession could happen outside the confessional, on a couch, and later, I was to find out I could confess in a Chevrolet on the way to New Orleans. Guilt was gone from my life at least fifty percent of the time now, instead of all the Catholic hours of my life. Personal confessors are a lot like gun slingers and marshals in the old west and they can shoot down some bad stuff. They have reputations that cause nobody to mess with them, not at all. It’s “Yes, Father,” and “No, Father” and “Thank you so much, Father!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
TO BECOME A FATHER
I thought being a “Father” like this was the best thing in the world. After all, Father even fixed my maniacal habit of “self-abuse” five times a day. I was reformed, and to me, that spoke volumes about what being a priest could do. Maybe he could help the unhappy kids who lived in homes where the parents yelled at each other. My dad asked me who I wanted to live with when they got two houses to live in and was downcast when I said, “Mother.”
I remember thinking, crying as I listened to my mother and father accuse each other of things in Cajun French, how terrible it was to bring a child into this world. They never allowed me to learn French at home because it was the only privacy from children they had. They claimed it might make a boy stutter to learn two languages, and I could study “good French” later in college. Yet their French didn’t hide their misery from me, their dreadful anger. I made a resolution: “I will never be part of bringing children into this hell of a world!”
I made this conscious resolution long before I seriously confronted the issue of voluntary celibacy. I just knew I did not want to bring kids into hell. My life at home was hell, and my brother’s problems were worse, because, like a dumb-ass he began to drink as much liquor as he could. He flew into rages, slugging me and other things. He hit my father again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ALGIERS
Algiers, Louisiana, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans’s famous French Quarter, a ferry or a bridge ride away from the Crescent City, was home to Father Terry’s family. It was to New Orleans that we drove in the black Chevy from Assisi in Conway, all the way to New Orleans.
Oddly enough, we went through Mississippi part of the way even though Louisiana is directly connected to Arkansas. We took the “scenic route” Father Terry said. He said there were advantages to some of the rural roads in Mississippi, more interesting sites; so, this long detour gave us a luxurious amount of time to chat and be together. It was clear to me Father Terry liked me, and I liked him, very much. I began to talk a lot to him about everything I could think of. I seemed to be waking up from something like a long dream state. He knew something about everything, too. No other adult talked to me like this. He was my friend, for sure, and now I was going to visit with his mother in their home. I was eager to see their family grocery store and “camel back house” where he’d grown up.
I thought Father Terry’s rectory was spooky but not as spooky as his bedroom and home in Algiers turned out to be. It was really “old world,” and I learned what a “camel back house” was only after imagining a house with camel humps on the roof. What it meant was that it had a hump on the back, one story on the front of the house at the street and two story mid-house onward to the rear of the house. Property taxes in the parish in that part of Louisiana were calculated on how many square feet of frontage your house had on the city street. A two story frontage meant twice the property tax so people built shorter fronts, one story, and paid taxes on one story homes, but lived in two story houses back from the street curb. It wasn’t really a hump in the middle of the house, but the back of the house was the humped-up part.
Being a guest in Father Terry’s family home and store was fun. I loved it. However, I was a little confused. I had been visiting Father Terry in his chambers as a solitary, one on one, private, very secret confessional and counseling relationship. Then I learned, on the way to his parent’s home in Algiers, that I could confess my sins to him in ordinary conversational talking.
