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At first we went sporadically, because Mother had a hard time sitting through the sermons. Reverend Pauling, a stooped, balding man, gave the Bible a close reading and seemed to focus on how the parishioners had failed, in their daily travails, to live up to the teachings of Jesus. The older women in the valley who had survived their various husbands—killed by logging accidents or by cancer after smoking Lucky Strikes and working in a cloud of backhoe dust for twenty years—were the mainstay of the church. They brought armloads of daffodils in the spring, tins of cookies in the winter months. If they did not love Reverend Pauling, he seemed to satisfy their sense of life's failed opportunities; they left the church chastened but sated, nodding their fleecy heads by the road.

Not long after we started going to church, Reverend Pauling retired and was replaced by Jerry Cliff, a bearded young man who drove into town in a battered pickup truck and turned the congregation on its ear. There is no doubt that Reverend Cliff took spiritual matters seriously; he just didn't mind the trimmings. He wore bell-bottom corduroys and Frye boots and opened his service with some rollicking acoustic guitar while the bewildered organist tried to follow along. Soon "Michael (Row the Boat Ashore)" crept into the Sunday repertoire, then "Blowin' in the Wind," and finally a tune that caused an exodus of the blue-rinse set from the congregation, called "Me Oh My, I Love That Methodist Pie," sung to the tune of another Dylan song.

My mother became a Sunday regular, going back for the daffodils, for the light sifting through stained glass onto familiar upturned faces, and for Jerry's sermons, because they seemed to pertain to the here and now. He talked about the gospel in concrete ways (sharing a few ears of ripe corn with a neighbor, say), and this dovetailed with the values hailed in Jim's copy of the
Whole Earth Catalog:
live simply so others may simply live, let's get back to the barter system—that sort of thing. If I know my mother, I imagine she must have liked the poetical lightness of one theme being sounded from different voices: Stewart Brand and this bearded preacher with the velvety voice.

Soon Jerry would become a frequent dinner guest—along with Alan Sarkissian and Grant, the logger—and after the table was cleared we would all retire to the living room, where Jim would stoke up the potbelly stove until the metal pinged and our cheeks flushed. I would lie with my head in Mother's lap while Jerry strummed and sang his secular repertoire—Jim Croce, Woody Guthrie—grittier tunes than the ones he played at the pulpit. I heard a note of sorrow in his voice when he sang, a whiff of loneliness in the empty pauses at the ends of songs.

 

Much as I loved Jerry, I found the sermons long and the pews hard, and soon migrated down the street toward the Evangelical church, where I joined an evening youth group. I even went so far as to take Jesus as my personal savior—helped in this by the preacher's wife, who treated the conversion of my soul as casually as a bank deposit—and spent most of my free time memorizing Scripture.

On the day when I asked my mother point-blank if she believed in God, she faltered for a moment. I registered this hesitation, because my mother always seemed to know precisely what she thought. Opinions spilled from her lips as easily as water from a tap—firm, strong, clear, the pressure of her thinking on the world. But that day in the kitchen she kept silent, and while she composed an answer, she wiped the counter with a sponge. Jim and a friend had made this counter out of two-by-four scraps, fastened them with hand-whittled pegs, and finished the patchwork of end grain to a high gloss. It was the kind of marriage of beauty and function that my mother most admired. Now she studied the expanse of rough rectangles as if they held some kind of answer.

"I think there are different Gods for different people," she said finally.

I tried to figure out what she meant by this—if she was hedging—and as I pondered I stared at a conical straw hat that hung over the refrigerator. Jim had brought it back from China; he said the people there wore them when harvesting rice. I used to wear the hat around the yard, playing peasant. The brim was so low it blocked out the horizon, leaving you with a view of the shady circle at your feet. Now, in the kitchen, trying to plumb my mother's silence, I stared at its perfect cone, and in the odd way that an object becomes tied to some scrap of feeling, that hat became linked to my notion of God—a thing that sheltered you and at the same time fettered your vision.

Suddenly I knew that my mother didn't believe in the God of my leather-clad Bible, but that she was searching for a gentle way to say this, a way that still left me room to choose.

"I'm wondering," she said, wringing out the sponge and turning toward me. "What do you believe?"

I don't remember my answer, but I remember some of what God meant to me for those brief months of my conversion. He was more than anything a tentacle extending from myself. God was a distant colony of my spirit, a cumbersome and soothing arrangement of my thoughts. I worked to make him real. That's what prayer was.

God was also a taking up of the pronoun
he
within my self-regard.
He
was
good.
This I intoned before each meal, as I had been taught, and just the naming of his goodness called up an attending wave of awe, for I was very clearly
not good
—full of laziness and vanity and rage. As Jim had pointed out, I took stock of myself in every mirror and sunlit windowpane (never mind that I didn't much like what I saw). And there was the matter of my occasional spankings and my plan to brain Mother with the skillet. I talked too much, and bossed kids when they would rather be left alone. Every winter I lost my coat before the first frost.

I knew little of goodness because my best behavior came about in a state of self-forgetfulness. One day I walked home from school and found Mother stacking wood against the west end of the house. Drawn nearer by the sunlit wall, the shining tarp, the satisfying clunk of the logs, I dropped my bag and started in beside her, adjusting the wedges here and there so the pile would hold firm. Then, suddenly, her hand was brushing my hair: "Well, you're sure nice to have around."

I stared at her then—pulled out of myself, blinking and confused as to what had earned the remark. It seemed I was good only when I didn't try to be.

***

Prayer seemed to offer a clearer road to virtue. At night I lay back in my bed—bears and dolls arranged around me so I couldn't stir—and thought of Jesus, his liquid eyes and un-lined brow. Inspired by his visage, I sent a beam of earnest feeling toward the people I loved. My mother, reading in the next room, who played Scrabble with me when I asked—I had been neglecting her, spending too much time playing kickball and reading Scripture; I resolved to give her more attention. Cathy, the girl who had brought me to Bible-study class—suddenly I felt I could see her clearly: her awkward sweetness, the way she curled a hand over her braces when she laughed. I went on like that, through lists of friends and relations, feeling half swollen with love. Then I closed my eyes and laid my palms down on the comforter like a child in a picture book, waiting for sleep.

There was, however, a small kink in this plan, an itch beneath my piety. Before I found Jesus, I had rocked myself to sleep by a means as old as Methuselah, and without the Bible ever saying anything nearly to the point, I knew that God had a problem with self-satisfaction.

I didn't sleep well in those days. I would pray and arrange the animals around me like disciples, call on God for help, and settle back into my Corpse pose. If I were going to accept Jesus as my personal savior, I knew I would have to give up the sins of the flesh.

On one of those nights I lay in bed staring, as I often did, at the whorls and knots in the wood above me, waiting for my mother to kiss me good night. She was in the kitchen making a batch of lasagna, filling up enough tinfoil pans to feed us for a week. She'd been at it so long, all the windows in the house were laced with steam. I could hear her singing over the boiling noodles. Finally she came in and lay down beside me. "Your hands smell good," I said, holding them to my cheek to breathe in the garlic and basil.

She leaned her head next to mine. "So do yours."

I tucked my hands deep into the covers, stricken with shame.

"It's all right," my mother said, looking me in the eye with a steady expression. "It's a good thing."

***

My father never talked about God; he talked about power and about material conditions. Some people had their eye on the everlasting. He had his eye on justice, the reckoning of the here and now.

I asked him once what capitalism was, and he broke it down to basics. The companies make products as cheaply as they can and sell them for as much as the market will bear. They buy their raw materials from faraway countries where the people are poor and will sell them for a song, and they pay the workers the lowest wages they can get away with. What's left is called the profit margin, and they keep that for themselves.

There it was, the brutish truth of how one man makes his living off another. At one time, I might have asked the question of innocents: "Why can't the rich people share some of what they have so everyone can eat?" But I didn't ask those questions anymore. I knew the world was full of cruelty, and that in the lottery of birth I had come up with an exceedingly lucky card. I was already on to other questions. Couldn't the poor people be helped in some anesthetic way? Some way that didn't threaten my comfort?

"When the people build a movement, when they really threaten the power structure, capital throws out a few crumbs," my father said, warming to his subject. "They're like, 'Holy shit! These people are in the streets. We've got to do something.' That's how we got Social Security, the WPA, welfare—just enough to make sure people don't completely drop out the bottom."

"Okay," I said. "So capitalism isn't fair. But I don't see anything that looks better." I looked at him carefully, then looked down, nervous to tell the truth. "I wouldn't want to trade with some girl in Russia."

I was prepared for a lecture:
The people in Russia have more equality.
But my father nodded. "I know," he said. "I don't have the answers either. I'm still looking."

His candor caught me off guard. We sat for a few moments in that hollow, where the way wasn't clear. Things weren't good the way they were, but change might bring something worse. "I'm scared of a revolution," I said.

My father took my hand. His hands amazed me. No matter how much I grew, they were always bigger than mine, and they never seemed to sweat. "I know," he said. "I get scared, too."

 

Over the longer visit that first summer, I got a better feel for my dad's and Leslie's daily lives. My dad worked at the hospital, and Leslie had a job at the shipyards in Alameda, but the bulk of their free time was spent doing political work. Gradually, I understood that they were labor organizers, a term that struck me as odd. Labor, in my mind, was simple work—picking walnuts out of the lawn or hauling manure. It didn't require planning so much as stamina. Organization was another thing altogether. It was lack of organization that made me forget my homework or lose my train of thought. The work of the mind was slippery, elusive, and somehow, in the end, more of a strain. Now these two ideas collided and coupled. How did you organize labor?

"We are trying to work for better conditions," my father explained. "More pay, safer factories." Mainly, as far as I could see, they went to work like everybody else. Sometimes, my father went to the plant early to pass out leaflets before his shift. But it was at night, at home, that they did most of their organizing work. My father sat in the dining room typing articles. And there were meetings, endless meetings. Comrades came over and sat around on the floor, writing on legal pads and discussing strategy. I was free to come and go as I pleased, but I found the gatherings dull, full of talk I couldn't understand.

I remember a girl I played with around that time who had communist coloring books: the fat factory bosses wore three-piece suits with watch chains; the workers were lean and muscled and clad in overalls. While our fathers had a meeting, we sat on the floor with her perfectly sharpened Crayolas and she told me what to do. The Capitalist Running Dogs were to be filled in with heavy black strokes. I was allowed to use only red and blue crayons for the "proletariat."

 

Since Leslie and my father were working full-time, I went to day camp at the YMCA about ten blocks from our house. When they had escorted me a few times and were sure I knew the route, I made the daily trip to and fro by myself. A bit nervous to be trusted with my own stewardship, I walked up University Avenue, hailing people on street corners with a bluff "Howdy," which seemed to work well for Jim, and giving out change to every panhandler I passed.

The day camp had been Leslie's idea. Months before I arrived for my first summer, she began pressing my father to find a place for me to pass my days. This was to be their lifelong division of labor. Leslie would plan our lives on the grand scale, always looking ahead. She made a calendar of the year on a yard of tagboard and posted it in the kitchen. Rallies and political deadlines would be marked in one color. My comings and goings would be mapped in another. She often looked out for me in behind-the-scenes, practical ways I took for granted.

My father often got lost in the swamp of their hectic life, but he always kept a handle on the daily things: keeping food in the fridge, packing lunches, making sure I had money for the bus or snacks—the kind of things that got Leslie down. They made good partners; their strengths and weaknesses slotted together like tongue and groove.

The two of them picked the YMCA because it was cheap and close by, and because the kids came from all over town—a mix of races and incomes. It was important to them that as a family we walked the walk. My days there were pleasant enough. We swam in the ancient tiled pool or hung around in the rec room playing Ping-Pong. If the goal was for me to make black friends, it didn't quite work. I got slapped across the face early on by a girl whose cornrows hung to the middle of her back. There wasn't much to the encounter. One minute I was looking at her, then the next minute my cheek was stinging. "Don't ever let me catch you looking my way again," she said, her voice nearly clinical. I got the feeling it was mainly a formality, a way to make clear who was boss.