Boy Erased (12 page)

“We just want you to feel comfortable,” he said, patting me on the back. “We might be more
relaxed
here than you're used to.”

I had heard my father preach against Pentecostal churches, against this “relaxed” attitude. “We don't do any of that hand flailing around here,” he would say. “God doesn't want to see us crawling up and down the aisles, acting like fools.”

One of the things that bothered me most about my father's
early sermons was his inclination to create a straw man, to set up an enemy and knock him down easily. Pentecostal churches were such enemies: speaking in tongues, convulsing on the floor, crying out for
Je
-sus and waving hands. To us Missionary Baptists, the only path to God was through a literal interpretation of the Bible, through baptism, through hard work, missionary work, dedication, and rededication. God's love never came as easy for the Baptists as it did for the Pentecostals, though it was a difficult path for both denominations. The only difference seemed to be that the Pentecostals relied a bit more on spiritual showmanship, while the Baptists relied more on righteous deeds and tended to be skeptical of any personal revelations that had not first been stated in the Bible.

We took a seat in the middle of the congregation. David tapped his sneaker on the concrete floor. One-two-three. “When people start crying really loudly,” he whispered, “don't get freaked out, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I looked behind me at the smiling faces of the congregants. I recognized many of my fellow classmates, ones who had mostly ignored me, secure in the iridescent Pentecostal bubble that seemed to envelop them. Now they were inviting me inside their smiles, asking me to join. I let my gaze drift to the steel struts above their heads. I followed a line of flaking rust along the ceiling that led to a series of dirt-caked crescent windows above the pulpit. The sunset behind them had begun to fade, and
THE POST
's pale fluorescents flickered to life.

“You're not doing anything wrong,” David said. “Being here.”

“I know,” I said.

“I don't think you do yet.”

I picked up the red hymnal beneath my seat and thumbed the pages. The songs were different from Baptist ones. They were newer, more inspirational, less than a hundred years old. They repeated “Sweet Jesus” and “Oh Jesus” in long, seemingly endless refrains that could go on for as long as people felt necessary or for as long as the Holy Spirit held sway over the room.

“You won't be needing that,” the youth pastor said, leaning in from the aisle. “We've got a new projection screen up by the band.” He motioned toward the stage, where a guitar player was adjusting his tuning pegs. As if on cue, the guitarist waved at me with his free hand. Everyone here seemed eager to make visitors feel comfortable, special; it reminded me of the way my father would walk up to a customer in his showroom and offer to give a tour of the dealership, the way he would bring a customer around to the wash bay, point in my direction, and say, “This boy can outwork any other man here. He'll make sure whatever car you buy from that lot is cleaner than when it first came off the rack.”

“Isn't this great?” David said.

The music began, a simple four-chord worship song, something about the blood of Jesus washing us clean. The congregation stood. One of the girls to my right turned to me, smiling.

“Sweet Jesus,” David sang. “Oh Jesus.”

He rocked back and forth on his heels, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them, as if he were starting a fire in midair. The other congregants' hands reached toward the ceiling, their fingers wriggling. The smiling girl beside me began to shake, her body convulsing.

I mumbled the words under my breath, hoping it looked like I was singing. I had never felt comfortable singing in front of people, even in my own church, though I fantasized that once I finally did, my voice would sound amazing. One day my mouth would burst open with a deep baritone the likes of which no one had ever heard. I waited for the inspiration to come.

•   •   •

I
COME
BY
this desire for inspiration naturally, perhaps genetically. I'd heard stories all my life of my maternal great-aunt Ellen, about her crazy search for inspiration, my parents' tone whenever they spoke of her one of awe rather than concern. Nobody knew what had driven this beautiful woman to insanity, but the fact was that she lived alone for most of her adult life in her deceased mother's two-story plantation house, waiting for divine inspiration to reveal itself from inside the crumbling walls. Like many mystics and highly devout religious persons before her, Aunt Ellen believed that God had a special purpose for her. Yet rather than searching the sky for answers, she searched the limited world around her. To keep other people from discovering this mystery before she did, she nailed all of her bed sheets over her windows. She wore decades-old
newspapers on her feet in lieu of slippers and covered her face in bright orange mercurochrome, moving from one room of her house to the next, in search of something she couldn't name. She would inhabit one room long enough to soil it, leave it no longer habitable, with food-encrusted plates, warped and moldy microwavable trays, open jars of pickled okra—whatever her concerned neighbors would send her—scattered all over her shag carpet. She seemed to believe she would never run out of rooms to soil, or at least that she would find the answer to her life's mystery before she reached the final room.

It was no wonder, then, that at the age of sixteen my mother hadn't been to Aunt Ellen's house in years, that her mother forbade her from seeing the woman who resembled a ghost more than an aunt. On the night of my parents' fourth or fifth date, my father drove along the highway that led to Aunt Ellen's, my mother with her head on his shoulder. My mother began to feel something like panic rise from the bottom of her stomach.
Surely
, she thought,
he couldn't be driving all the way out to Aunt Ellen's.

“There's this haunted house you've got to see,” my father said.

“I don't know,” my mother said, serious now. “I don't think this is a good idea.”

The cotton fields stretched out left and right from the road, their rows flicking by in the half dark, the sky settling down like the ceramic lid of one of my grandmother's quart-sized
pots. The minute my father would marry my mother, in less than a year, he would inherit all of this, though he didn't realize it then. My grandfather would step back from the family business and hand the reins of the Caudill Brothers Gin over to my father. A soft bed of cotton would buoy him up from a childhood spent working as a mechanic for my alcoholic and abusive paternal grandfather to a life of good work, of progress matched by his skilled hands. Finally, after nineteen years of living as a nobody, he would be recognized as a person of importance. He would hold on to this feeling throughout the course of his three disparate careers—twenty-five years' hard work as the manager of the family cotton gin before it gave way to a corporate competitor; six years as one of the most popular Ford dealers in the tristate area; and finally, this latest calling of his to be a preacher and a soon-to-be pastor. He would refuse to let this feeling go, even when God bucked him off a direct path to the pastorate by sending him a gay son. Even then he would hold on to this sense of importance.

“It'll be fun,” my father said, hugging my mother closer. “I'll protect you.”

“No,” she said. “I have to go home. Right. Now.”

It was then that the white sheet visited them, drifted lazily over the windows of the Mustang and settled as an opaque, wrinkleless fog. It covered them in white light, the glare of the Mustang's headlights reversing its course, turning back to blind them.

“Like drifting into a cloud,” my mother would later say. “Scary but not scary at the same time.”

My father tried to keep his hands steady, pulling his arm from behind my mother's shoulder and gripping the wheel with both hands, but he could no longer remember where the next curve came. Only after the blinding sheet had passed did they begin to grow frightened.

My father overcorrected by slamming on the brakes.

“What was that?” my mother asked. Somehow the sheet had disappeared.

They stumbled out of the car. Nothing white for miles around. Only the steady chirping of crickets and the occasional flare of a firefly. Only my mother cracking her heels in the muddy ditch as she searched for the source of their vision.

“What
was
that?”

They never made it to Aunt Ellen's that night. My mother wouldn't tell my father the truth about her crazy aunt until several years into their marriage. By that time, the white sheet had taken on a new, sinister meaning. Lying in a bed in the Memphis Baptist Memorial Hospital as the doctor told her that she had somehow lost the baby that had been growing inside her, all she could think to do was grip the bed sheets in her fist, ball them up, stop the bed from slipping out from under her. She would remember the white sheet and see it as an evil omen, some sign of horrible things to come.

Years later, when she decided she would give birth to me despite the doctor's warnings about her weak heart, despite the
very high chance that she might die, and after I'd been born and the doctor had cleaned me off and allowed her to hold me, she would see the white as a sign that everything would soon be washed clean, that we would all be given a second chance. She would learn to take the top bunk in my bedroom and pull the sheets in close and listen to her living son's steady breathing coming from below.

Though Aunt Ellen never discovered the mystery behind her walls, my parents certainly brushed against mystery that night. The mystery would haunt them, as it would later come to haunt me; this idea that at any moment some divine force—whether you were looking for it like Aunt Ellen was or driving away from it like my father did—could eventually overtake you. Sometimes this could be a good thing, but often it could be a terrifying visitation.

“Don't ask God to give you a sign,” my father would sometimes tell congregants during his revivals, rubbing the side of a face that had nearly been burned to nothing. “You might not like what you get.”

•   •   •

I
WAS
WAITING
for a sign from God as David tapped his feet beside me in the church. I tapped back. One-two-three. We let our feet dance around each other.

The youth pastor positioned himself behind the pulpit. “As Christians,” he said, “we must put on the armor of God.”

His words came at the end of a euphoric song worship. A
few of the congregants' final notes carried over into his sermon, spiraling through the reading of scripture—“Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil”—and the girl beside me moaned and spoke in tongues, her hands pressed up against something invisible in the air before her, her voice filled with unfamiliar syllables, an ululation.

The youth pastor paused for a moment, his eyes flashing over each member of the congregation. “Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness.”

Arming oneself, for the Pentecostals, seemed as simple as raising your hands in the air to receive the fruits of God's armory. The Holy Spirit would then fasten on you the breastplate of righteousness, place the shield of truth in your fist like some medieval page. Sitting beside me, David seemed as if he might already be wearing his invisible armor. He mumbled the syllables of a secret language to himself, one that his enemies would never be able to interpret.
No need for evolution
, this language seemed to say,
our God will keep you safe from your enemies, help you sleep at night
.

On this issue the Baptists and the Pentecostals agreed. Christians had to arm themselves against Satan's offensive against our country. I had recently heard Baptist pastors like Jerry Falwell condemning in militaristic terms our country's
effeminacy, blaming terrorism against America on homosexuality, on the permissiveness of our culture. Brother Nielson and his nuke-'em-all philosophy had proclaimed more or less the same. Foreigners would have no WMDs, the logic went, if we hadn't gone so
soft
. I had heard it in our own church, when a bald, red-faced man burst into my Sunday school class carrying a church petition that asked us to stand against the LGBT pride parade taking place just hours from our town. “Sign it,” the man had said, “or else how can you call yourself a soldier in the Christian army?” The paper passed from person to person until it came to me, until I felt everyone staring at me while I held the pen before the paper, afraid to sign, as though I would be drafted into some real-life army the minute I added my name—until I finally formed the letters of my name, hating its ability to fit so clearly and easily within the petition's dotted lines.

But now the youth pastor was telling me that I could be strong just by accepting God's gifts. I could enter into David's secret language, feel the weight of those syllables rolling off my own tongue, our separate bodies unified through the one body of Christ. In one blinding flash, the promise of such intimacy became everything for me. I might find my real inspiration there.

•   •   •

D
URING
THE
second year of their marriage, when my mother and father still shared a bedroom, a singular encounter tested their faith in God's divine protection. My mother was sleeping
beside my father—the television off, the room dark, the house quiet—when one of the cotton gin employees crept into the bedroom, knife in hand, and crawled onto the cool sheets. Like the man who turned the key and burned my father's face and hands, this man's motivations would never be clear to any of us. He moved close to my mother and grasped one of her legs, ran his hands up her thighs, and with his knife-wielding hand held the blade to her neck, kept her hostage, stopped her from crying out. The man had assumed my father was gone. My father's pickup truck wasn't parked out front, but this was only because he had, for reasons he could never explain, decided to park around the back of the house. The employee had not been thorough, his desire too strong to allow a slow approach. As the man slid up the bed toward my mother, my father was retrieving his shotgun from under the bed, preparing to shoot him.