King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography

  To the bench.

  Then there was the curious matter of a mark God put on Cain, Adam and Eve’s kid, because he offed his brother. A mark that would last forever.

  “What kind of a mark?” I wanted to know. “Was it like a birthmark or a tattoo or something?”

  Mr. Robinson, my new Sunday school teacher, said it wasn’t a birthmark or a tattoo, but it was permanent.

  “Did they have mirrors in the olden days?” I asked.

  “No, of course they didn’t have mirrors,” he said. “Mirrors were not invented yet, and besides Adam and Eve were not vain.”

  “So who cares?”

  “What?”

  “Whether Cain had a mark on him. You said Adam and Eve knew who did it, so they wouldn’t need a mark to remind them, and that’s all the people there were, right? I mean Adam and Eve were first, then Cain and Abel, then no Abel. There weren’t any mirrors, so Cain wouldn’t have to look at the mark, and there were no other people to see it. So who cares if he had one?”

  Like Mautz before him, Robinson loved it when I asked a question he could put me in my too-smart-for-my-britches place answering. “The mark wasn’t simply on Cain,” he told me. “It was and is on all his descendants.”

  “You mean like his kids and grandkids and great-grand-kids and stuff ?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So how come we can’t see it today?”

  “We can.”

  “Does anyone in this room have it?”

  Robinson shook his head. “No, Chris, no one here has it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because the mark was dark skin. Negroes are the descendants of Cain.”

  I didn’t have my civil-rights sensibilities yet, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about God, one that had begun a short time earlier when I discovered He had smote a servant who touched the Ark of the Covenant to keep it from falling over and breaking. God had said not to touch it, but the guy was just trying to make sure it didn’t get ruined, and God just up and smote him. Now I find out He not only punished Cain for killing his brother but all of Cain’s descendants who weren’t even thought of yet when Cain committed his felony, and now Robinson was telling me that’s why they were slaves for a long time and still couldn’t swim in public swimming pools or pee where white people peed or get good jobs.

  “Does it really say that?” I asked. What Robinson didn’t know was that, though I pretty much had to treat God like everyone else did in church, falling down on my knees and stuff to keep from being smote, I had a different contract with Him when I prayed at night in my bedroom, and He was a much friendlier guy. I had already told God I could talk longer if He would let me pray in bed instead of on my knees on the cold hardwood floor, and because of that comfort I’d spend a little more time telling Him about my day and getting familiar. God was a much less scary dude in my bedroom.

  “Show me where it says that the mark was dark skin.” I was up on my Bible stories, and I didn’t remember anything like that.

  “It doesn’t actually say it,” Robinson told me, “but it’s known by religious scholars all over the world.”

  I said that wasn’t fair, and Robinson said it wasn’t my place to question God, and I said I wasn’t questioning God, but it still wasn’t fair.

  To the bench.

  I know it probably seemed as if I was always trying to prove my Sunday school teachers wrong, but what none of them understood was that I wanted them to be right. I wanted there to be some simple way life worked; a simple way God did His stuff. Though I certainly couldn’t articulate it, I wanted life in general to be congruous with the way my life worked, which happened sometimes when I prayed at night and never happened in Sunday school. At the same time my religious mentors were telling me what a loving God the Christian God was, they were scaring the hell out of me telling me what He’d do if I didn’t behave, things He’d already done to people back in biblical times.

  My final Red Brick blowout occurred when I was in junior high school, about a month before I bailed out for good and threw in with the Episcopalians because a certain second baseman who hadn’t moved off base to stroke my hair when I was flat on my back next to home plate with my tooth in the bat, bleeding to death, started playing the piano for them.

  It was time to fish or cut bait on getting baptized at the Red Brick Church. I’d been avoiding it for what seemed to me a very good reason. Get baptized and be cleansed of your sins. I wanted my money’s worth, and the more sins I could get cleansed with one dip, the better I’d feel. Years before, my brother had been tricked into believing he wouldn’t want to sin after being dunked, and came on a search-and-destroy mission early in the morning on the day of his baptism, intending to whack me around one more time before piety bound his hands. I spent more than three hours hiding in the rafters of the garage and in the fruit-and-preserves pantry in our basement listening for his footsteps. (That afternoon my mother and I accompanied him and the others to Arling Hot Springs for the baptism. Arling was a natural hot springs about seven miles out of town, situated between two large cattle ranches. The cows from both ranches grazed around the hot springs, and often in summertime you had to clear the cowpatties from the surface to get a good swim. When the Reverend Pardee had covered my brother’s face with the holy cloth and immersed him, the vacuum created in the water sucked a perfect face-sized patty right over the spot where his head disappeared beneath the surface, and for one quick moment before Pardee cleared it away, I thought I got a vision of the true face of my brother. That remains, to this day, the best baptism I’ve ever witnessed.)

  At any rate, I was still sneaking into my mother’s purse on a daily basis to steal change for candy on the way to school, as well as snagging a couple of free candy bars each time I filled the candy machine at my dad’s service station, and baptism was the safety net I had in place to clear me of my sins. I was also cussing like a banned-book writer most of the time and having no luck at my attempts to quit. I wanted all that under control before my baptism, and I didn’t feel anywhere close. I already knew that the brain wasn’t as easily rinsed off as the body, because it wasn’t three hours after my brother’s baptism that he’d been stalking me like the pre-Freddy Krueger prototype he was.

  “That simply isn’t Christian thinking,” Reverend Hannaman said. Reverend Hannaman was the church’s new preacher. “You’re in junior high school now; most of your friends have already found Jesus. You simply don’t manipulate the Lord so you can commit the optimum number of sins. You think He doesn’t see what you’re doing?”

  “Even if He does,” I said, “He has to go by the rules He made.”

  Hannaman was a tall, dark man, and though he wasn’t imposing in the traditional sense, he had dark down. He looked even darker now. “Chris, this is not a game. This is life, and it is not to be blasphemed.”

  What I wish I’d known then, because I’d have said it, is this: “Oh, yes, it is, Mr. Hannaman. It’s very much a game—and a good one—and the people who don’t know the rules eat a lot of dark brown smelly stuff.”

  So, with the pressure on, I took the bull by the horns and ran for the Episcopalian church like the very devil was chasing me.

  Reverend Tate put me directly into confirmation classes. He thought my observation of Jonah’s protective gear was funny, and he assured me that dark skin was certainly not the mark of Cain. He was visibly angry at Mr. Robinson for saying so and warned me that people’s interpretation of the Bible could be downright dangerous. I brought up several other questions that had come up over the years, such as what kind of God would pile the bad news up on a guy like Job just to see if he’d crack, or trick a guy like Abraham into thinking he had to make a human sacrifice of his own son just to see if he’d do it.

  Reverend Tate stayed right with me. He said, “Chris, what was your all-time favorite children’s book?”

  I said Horton Hatches the Egg.

  He said, “What was it about?”


  I said it was about an elephant that took over hatching an egg for a lazy bird named Mayzie that didn’t have the patience to sit there until the egg hatched.

  “Was there a lesson?”

  I said the lesson came at the bottom of almost every page. He meant what he said and said what he meant—and was one hundred percent faithful.

  “And was Horton rewarded for his faithfulness?”

  He was. The animal that came out of the egg was a tiny elephant with wings.

  “Do you believe an elephant could hatch an egg?”

  Of course I didn’t.

  “But the value is still in the story, right?”

  I said, right.

  “The important thing about the Bible is the message,” Reverend Tate told me. “Some people believe every story is true; other people believe some and don’t believe others. There are those who believe the entire book is meant to get a message across, that asking whether this thing or that thing really happened is of no consequence. It’s just one of those things you’ll have to decide.”

  He went on to tell me that finding my spirituality was a lifelong task, that there was no number of stories I was required to believe, that there was a difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament, but even so, it was my job to discover what I really believed. I could be confirmed and baptized in his church for simply making the attempt to discover that about myself. And nobody expected me to be perfect after my baptism. Life was a learning process, and we learned by making mistakes. The baptism didn’t have to take place in a dung-filled hot springs, but rather right there in church, and I didn’t have to really get wet. That Paula Whitson would be playing the piano that day sealed the deal.

  Back in fifth grade, to kill time waiting for our parents to come set up our Christmas party, our teacher told us to write down all the words we could find from the letters in “Merry Christmas.” The first word I saw was Chris and the second was Christ, and I put them down in that order. She was walking up one aisle and down the other, making sure we were on task. She stopped at my desk, pointed to my first two words, and told me to reverse their order. When I balked, she told the class I thought I was more important than Christ. I was embarrassed and humiliated for being “too big for my britches,” and all in all it turned out to be a pretty shitty Christmas party. Forty-five years later I named a character in Whale Talk Chris just so I could retell that moment in fiction, because what I didn’t consider then, but wholly believe now, was that Jesus would have been more than happy to let me put my name ahead of His, particularly if it would have made me feel big enough to fill my britches.

  Anyone who reads my stories today knows I often throw a religious theme into the conflict; in a significant way in stories like Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes and Running Loose, and through smart-ass side comments by characters in most of the others, so it is not surprising that students around the country often ask if I’m a Christian. I’m not, and it isn’t because a few semiliterate mentors in my history were unable to explain Bible stories to me. Most of the reasons I won’t go into here, but I will say it started when I realized the God who allowed me to get into my bed to converse with Him rather than kneel on the cold hardwood floor was a lot closer to the God in whose image I was supposed to be created than the one the Red Brick Church tried to use to frighten me into good behavior. The scientist in me refuses to let me believe that biology was altered for a brief moment a little over two thousand years ago to make way for a virgin birth. I think Jesus would have laughed at that notion (it wasn’t His, by the way), so while I have no problem believing He was one wise and spiritually connected fellow and no problem capitalizing His pronoun, I don’t subscribe to many of the stories and thoughts that have sprung up around Him.

  As a child abuse and neglect therapist I do battle daily with Christians enamored of the Old Testament phrase “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” No matter how far I stretch my imagination, it does not stretch far enough to include the image of a cool dude like Jesus taking a rod to a kid. I believe there was a big bang and that because of that we are all connected into infinity, and I know very little having to do with human beings that doesn’t also have to do with connection. We want to be noticed, we want to be good enough, we want friends, and we want to be loved. We want our place to stand. I believe that spiritual men and women throughout history felt and feel these things at some core level, and the statement that we are created in the image of God is a Duh! because we are products of the universal flow of energy emanating from that bang. And that’s a lot of bang for our buck. I say all that because when I answer no to the question “Are you a Christian?” there is always a certain sense of discomfort in the room, because it’s nearly always a Christian who asks.

  I look back to those nights in my bed, praying/talking with an intimate God who understood what I meant even when I couldn’t articulate it; a God interested in my life and willing to let me have my dreams, willing to let me fail, patient enough to give me as many tries as it took to find a graceful way through all the scary stuff, a God eager and willing to forgive me when I couldn’t find that grace.

  Recently in an interview I was asked if I thought life is fair. Because the lives of many of my characters are so hard, the interviewer expected me to say that life is certainly and obviously not fair. But life is exactly fair. It has order and randomness and it moves through the universe without prejudice or passion. People aren’t always fair, and it seems the less we know the more unfair we are, but I think that a big part of the business of religion should be to understand that nothing is fairer than life and that mysterious ways are mostly mysterious because of our ignorance.

  A Different Kind of Love Story

  9

  I MENTIONED BEFORE THAT PERTY GIRLS were my downfall, and at the onset of puberty, which didn’t diminish that truth one bit, I focused in on Paula Whitson (good bat, great field) like a kid setting fire to an ant with a magnifying glass. I began finding things on the floor; pencils or pens, notebooks, money, and handing them to her saying I thought she had dropped them. She would let me know the article wasn’t hers, smile politely, and say thanks anyway, probably wondering if she should run down to the county courthouse at lunchtime to swear out the early sixties version of a restraining order. On summer evenings her parents would take an after-dinner drive south toward Clear Creek Station and Smith’s Ferry. To get to those exotic resort spots you had to pass the Crutchers’ well-manicured lawn on your way out of town, and on each and every one of those evenings, between six-thirty and eight, on the off chance that Paula might be with them, I could be found on my front lawn, very close to Main Street, pretending to do push-ups and sit-ups in preparation for the upcoming football season, raking the lawn, brushing our dog, or performing some other activity you couldn’t normally get me to do without a branding iron.

  If for some reason her parents decided not to take that trip, I was held a prisoner of anticipation in my front yard until the sun settled atop West Mountain, growing goose bumps the size I wished for my biceps. The number of times a day a phantom crisis required me to rush past her house on some mission of mercy—on my feet in the early days and, after my fourteenth birthday, in my dad’s ’41 gray Chevy pickup—would make a lie of the laws of probability even if she had lived next door to an ER. That behavior today might well fall under stalker laws. Paula Whitson had plenty of chances to see me in action, but she must not have possessed the foresight to predict that my late-night talks with my mother about her continuing battle with alcohol had turned me into the go-to guy for dumping your troubles, because whatever there might have been about Paula Whitson that needed fixed, she wasn’t bringing it to this Mr. Goodwrench.

  About two months before the high-school White Christmas Ball during my sophomore year, my brother finally got tired of listening to me declaring my intentions and undying love for Paula, always followed by no action. A lot of guys wanted to take her out, he said while he held me on the couch in a headlo
ck (and my sister ran around in circles yelling, “Lever has a girlfriend, Lever has a girlfriend”), but none of them would even be thinking about the White Christmas Ball yet. (Strategywise it was the romantic equivalent of fast breaking when your team is twenty points ahead with less than two minutes to go.) Why didn’t I go in there and call her and get a date and then shut the hell up?

  “I can’t,” I said. “What if she answered?”

  “You would ask her to the dance,” he said.

  The very thought tangled my wiring.

  “Go in there and call her,” he said, “or I’m going to call her for you.”

  “Yeah, right. What would you say?”

  “I’d say, ‘Paula, this is John Crutcher. If you’ll go to the White Christmas Ball with my brother, I’ll put your first child through college.”

  “Funny. You’re not going to call her.”

  He walked toward the phone.

  My brother was not someone you wanted to dare. “Wait!” I said. “Okay, I’ll do it. Just give me a minute.”

  He looked at his watch and started counting seconds.

  The telephone was mounted on the wall just around the corner from the door leading to the basement. I stared at it. It looked unusable.

  “You or me,” my brother said. “Before we go to bed tonight, this is going to be done.”