“It's got a story on the back, Gatewood,” Mrs. Arnett said. “Get your grandmother to read it to you.”
“I'll read it my own self.”
“My, you must be a smart boy.” Mrs. Arnett smiled and patted my head, then shoved me out of the door.
I found Gran in the auditorium and sat down by her. Brother Haskell came in, and we had some songs and some prayers, then they took up another collection. This time, Gran gave me a nickel to drop into the plate. Then Mr. and Mrs. Tyler came in and sat down by me. They always came in after the collection. Mr. Tyler was big and round and wore a wide belt with curlicues on it and a big shiny buckle. The belt squeaked like a saddle when he breathed, and I watched the buckle move up and down while Brother Haskell talked. Gran nudged me. She pointed at Brother Haskell. He was red in the face, and he was yelling about a collie dog he used to have that got caught in a house fire, and how that dog yelped and hollered, and how his hair and flesh smelled while he was burning up, and how that was just what hell was going to be like for those who were going. And I started thinking about Nero, and how I'd feel if she got caught in a fire like that and I couldn't get her out.
Finally, he slowed down enough to tell us we were going to sing a song, and he came down and stood in front of the pulpit, and everybody sang.
“Al-most per-suad-ed,” now to be-lieve;
“Al-most per-suad-ed,” Christ to re-ceive;
Seems now some soul to say
,
“Go, Spir-it, go Thy way
,
Some more con-ven-ient day
On Thee I'll call.”
A couple of high school girls came down the aisle crying. Brother Haskell whispered in their ears, shook their hands, and waved them toward the front pew. Then he started shouting again, shaking his fist, his oily black curls dancing over his eyes.
“How do you know the sun's going to come up tomorrow?” he yelled above the music. “How do you know you won't depart this world tonight while you're asleep and go to your grave with your sins still strangling your soul? Do you want to burn like my collie dog forever and ever?”
Gran was crying. Tears were dripping off her chin. She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief.
“Al-most per-suad-ed,” harvest is past!
“Al-most per-suad-ed,” doom comes at last!
“Al-most” can-not a-vail;
“Al-most” is but to fail!
Sad, sad, that bit-ter wail
,
“Al-most,” but lost
.
That was the end of the song, but Brother Haskell wasn't through yet.
“All right, brothers and sisters,” he said. “All right! I know the Spirit is working in some of your hearts today. There's still time! There's still a chance to get through the gates of heaven before they slam shut! I want every head bowed! Every eye closed! If your husband, your son, your mother is lost, pray for God to send the light! If you're a sinking sinner, throw your life into the Everlasting Arms right now!”
We bowed our heads, and I gnawed on a corner of my Jesus picture.
“Almighty God, who canst read our evil hearts like an open book, we know the day is coming soon when we will stand before thy judgment bar⦔
Brother Haskell prayed a long time, but nobody else was saved, so he finally told everybody to come down and shake hands with the two high school girls. People started moving into the aisles, and Gran put her wet handkerchief into her purse.
“How did you like the service today, Gate?”
“Fine.”
“Well, you were a good boy. Now, go wait for me in the car while I go down and extend these girls the right hand of Christian fellowship.”
As we rode toward home, Gran waved at people getting out of their cars in front of their houses and hummed a song.
“Gran,” I said.
“Hmmm?”
“Can I stop going to church again when Daddy gets home?”
She looked at me kind of funny. “Don't you want to go to heaven?” she asked.
“Yeah, I guess. But do you have to go to church to do that?”
“Yessirreebobtail,” she said.
“I guess Daddy won't be going then, huh?”
“I don't want to stand in judgment of anybody, but I'll be mighty surprised if I see him there.”
Everybody was supposed to take a nap on Sunday afternoon at Gran's house, and everybody did except me. I never could sleep in the daytime, so I'd usually just lie on my bed and look at my books until everybody else went to sleep, then I'd go outside.
As I stepped out the door, Alice Childers was walking across the road from her house, which was next door to the Haskells'.
“Come over and play,” she said.
“I can't. I'm taking a nap.”
“You ain't.”
“Well, I'm supposed to be. I'm not supposed to leave the yard anyway.”
“A little while won't hurt.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don't know. Let's go watch Mary Jean's toilet.”
The Haskells had a new house, which Brother Haskell built himself when he wasn't preaching. It had the only flush toilet in Darlington. It was white, and when you pushed a handle, water ran through it and gurgled, and all the shit disappeared.
“You think Brother Haskell will let us watch it?” I asked.
“I don't know. Maybe he's taking a nap, too.”
Mary Jean and Alice were both third-graders. I never played with Mary Jean because I didn't like her. She thought that because she was older than I was, she could boss me around all the time. But Alice never let on that she was older than me, and I liked her a lot. I would go to Mary Jean's when Alice was with me.
We knocked at the front door. No answer. We knocked again. No answer.
“Let's go around back,” Alice said.
No answer there, either. The car shed door was open, and the car was gone.
“Maybe they're eating with somebody,” I said. “Let's see what's in the car shed.”
It was shady and warm inside. There was a workbench with a bunch of tools in one corner and a big pile of straw in the other. I could smell the spot of oil on the ground. An old tire was hanging on the wall.
“Let's shut the door,” Alice said.
“What for?”
“Just to see what it's like.”
“It'll be dark.”
“Scared?”
“No.”
“Then shut the door.”
I swung the two big doors shut. There was a window over the workbench. I could see the sunlight through some nail holes in the shingles, too. Alice sat down in the straw. She looked like a fat teddy bear with bangs.
“See, I knew it wouldn't be dark,” she said.
“Well, what'll we do now?”
“Let's fuck.”
“What's that?”
“I'll show you.”
She yanked up her dress and pulled down her drawers. “Take your thing out and put it in there.” She pointed.
“Why?”
“That's how you do it.”
“I don't want to.”
“Oh, come on. It won't hurt you.”
“How do
you
know?”
“Because I saw my big brother do it to Billie Ann Caldwell in our well house, and it didn't hurt him none.”
“Yeah, but he's in the Air Corps!”
“Well, Billie Ann ain't in the Air Corps, and it didn't hurt her, either.”
“Well, it still seems like a dumb thing to do.”
“Oh yeah? Well, your own daddy does it.”
“How do you know?”
“All daddies do it. He does it to your mother. My big brother says he does it to Laverne Thomas, too.”
“How does
he
know that?”
“Laverne told him. My big brother does it to Laverne, too.”
“Well, I'm still not going to. I'm going to open the door.”
“Wait a minute!”
She yanked her drawers up just as the doors swung open. We walked outside.
“You won't tell, will you?” she said.
“No.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“Cross your heart and hope to die?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“Let's go swing. I'll let you be first.”
“Okay.”
We ran across the vacant lot between the Haskells' and the Childers', and I picked up the swing board and set into its notches the rope swing hanging from a limb of Alice's chinaberry tree. I sat down, and Alice gave me a shove, and I rose into the air. The wind whistled in my ears. Alice shoved again and again, and I rose higher and higher. I rose until I was almost level with the limb the rope was tied to. I pretended I was a pilot chasing a Jap plane. Alice was panting.
“Alice! Don't swing him so high! You want to break his neck?” Mrs. Childers was at the upstairs window. She was fat and ugly and hung down in front. She didn't have a dress on, and as I sailed back and forth across the window I could see her big old tits about to fall out of her slip. Alice stepped back and let me coast down, and Mrs. Childers disappeared.
“My turn now,” Alice said. “Pump me.” She sat down on the board, and I straddled her, standing up. There was barely room for my feet between her fat legs and the ropes. I grasped the ropes, bent my knees, pushed my body down. We moved. I kept pumping, and we went higher and higher, almost as high as I went with Alice pushing me.
“We better coast now,” Alice said. “Mama'll yell at us again.” Slowly we coasted to a stop. “Push me,” she said.
“No. It's my turn. You push me.”
“No. I pushed you longer than you pumped me.”
“No, you didn't.”
“Yes, I did.”
“No, you didn't!”
“Yes, I did!”
“Didn't, didn't, didn't!”
“Did, did, did!”
“Didn't, didn't, didn't!”
Alice jumped out of the swing and socked me on the ear. I let out a yell and grabbed the swing board and ran for Gran's house. Alice took off after me. I was getting scared, and yelling, and tears were coming into my eyes, and I could barely see. I could hear Alice panting behind me. She grabbed for me and caught my suspenders. The clamps popped off the front of my pants. She pulled on the suspenders. By now, we were across the street. Gran was standing on the porch. Alice let go and ran for home. The suspenders popped me hard in the back. I yelled again, grabbed my pants, and ran up the sidewalk and up the steps. I looked back. Alice wasn't in sight. Gran hugged me to her and wiped my nose with her skirt.
“Come on inside, Gate,” she said. “I'll read you the funnies. We'll see if Dick Tracy's caught The Brow yet.”
I dropped the swing board behind the honeysuckle bush.
I've often wondered why, of all the experiences I must have had during my father's absence, that Sunday has remained so vivid in my mind. Years later, when the storms of puberty wracked my mind and loins, Technicolor dreams of that fat little girl in the straw, panties at her feet, skirt turned inside out over her breastless torso, haunted me. Never mind that Gatewood Lafayette Turnbolt at seven couldn't have satisfied Alice Childers even had he been willing. I could at least have paid closer attention, been curious, explored with eye and finger and gotten a preview of the joys and tribulations that lay ahead. Even now that my virginity is long since gone, Alice Childers still intrigues me. Who finally accepted her invitation? How long after she extended it to me? Did she remain fat, or did she grow into beauty? Is she now a housewife? A waitress? A professor? A whore? Whatever she is, she is lost to me. Just one vivid memory of a hazy but crucial time.
But there are flashes of others. Virgil Stoner, the druggist's son, came home with a chestload of medals and only one leg. He jerked down the Nazi flag that he had sent his father and that Mr. Stoner had displayed so proudly behind the soda fountain. Virgil sat at one of the little round marble ice cream tables for two or three days, his crutch lying beside him on the floor, saying hello to his friends and neighbors from before the war. Then he went home and shot himself with a German pistol. I was an anti-aircraft gunner during recess at school. I sat astride a long piece of pipe like a stick horse and blasted away at the sky. Golden Patricia Cabell was always near me. I jerked my head back and crumpled to the ground as some invisible German or Jap pilot (the entire Axis was our foe on the school ground) got in his licks. Patricia lifted me gently, I hung my arm around her neck, and she and I struggled together back to our fort. She was a good nurse. The wound wasn't fatal. Joe George Calhoun was waylaid by a bunch of “big boys” in the school privy. They removed his overalls and shorts and tossed them up on the roof. “Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” crossed my grandmother's lips at least once a day. The radio spoke daily of the Allies and the Axis, Roosevelt and Churchill, the White House.
And my father came home once, after his basic training, I suppose. He wasn't in uniform, but he brought me and Belinda (now five) and Rick (almost three) each an overseas cap and patted us all on the head and sat and talked to us for a while as if we were somebody else's children. Then Mother came out of her room with a little suitcase, and she and my father got into the car and drove away. Gran came out of the kitchen, where she had stayed during the time my father had been in the house. “Come on, kids, I'll read you a story,” she said. My father and Mother were gone all the next day. I heard them come in during the night, but when I got up the next morning, my father was gone.
“Virgie and Joe George are going to stay with you a few days, so you all behave yourselves and do what she says.”
“Where are you going?” Belinda asked.
“To the Comanche hospital to get our new baby,” Mother replied, “and Gran's got to take me.”
“Couldn't you take yourself?”
“Well, yes, but Gran's going to help me pick out the baby we want.”