Howard chuckled. “You ought to come by the house now and then, Abe. Nadine would love to cook a meal for you. And she’s got a lot of single women friends who wouldn’t mind an old boot like you. Come on a Sunday, you can go to church with us, have roast beef for lunch, hang out.”
Abe looked at his friend. “I might just do that.” He paused a moment. “Can’t say I am much of a churchgoer, though.”
Howard looked at his beer, then at Kent. “Not proselytizing here, Abe, but didn’t you ever feel the need for prayer out there when the bullets were whistling past and calling your name?”
Kent smiled. “Every time. Prayer and pucker-factor go together better than peanut butter and jelly. You know what they say, John: There are no atheists in foxholes.”
“So you are a believer.”
Kent nodded. “Oh, yes. I believe in God. And I’ve got no arguments with Jesus being the Son and prophet. I don’t even have problems with Allah or Mohammed or Harry Rama, if it comes to that. Everybody has to be someplace. Not my job to tell ’em where.”
“I hear a ‘but’ there.”
Kent looked at his old friend, debating whether or not to tell him the story. It didn’t come up too often these days, but it wasn’t as if it was a big secret — he had told a few people along the way. And here they were, drinking good beer, shooting the bull. Why not?
He paused for another sip, then said, “Well. It goes back a long way. My maternal grandmother used to live down in Lafayette, Louisiana. Every other summer when my brother and I were kids — he was eight years older than I — my folks would ship us to Grandma’s for a few weeks to visit. After my brother turned into a teenager, he stopped going, but I still went. And he did wind up going to college down that way later.”
He sipped again, then pushed his glass a little ways away from him. “The summer I was ten, I stayed with Grandma. She lived on the bank of a bayou. I think it was the Vermilion River. Water came almost up to her back fence when it rained hard. She had a little dog, a Pomeranian named Dolly, and a parakeet named Pancho. I used to take my BB gun down to the banks of the muddy bayou and shoot at snakes and snapping turtles. For a while, my great-grandfather lived there. He was ninety-something, and he used to sit on the bank with me, fishing with a cane pole. We caught catfish, bream, even a gar, now and then. Had to throw them back. Grandma wouldn’t scale and cook them and she wouldn’t let me and Great-Grampa in her kitchen to try.”
Kent grinned, remembering those days. Great-Grampa Johnson smoked a pack of unfiltered Camels a day, and took nips from a bottle of Old Crow he kept hidden under the bathroom sink. He was a small man, compact, and had served in France in the Great War.
The cigarettes and liquor never did kill him — he died from pneumonia he picked up in the hospital after he fell and broke his hip, at age ninety-three.
Kent pulled his memories back to the present. “Grandma was a bridge player and a churchgoer. Grampa worked on the oil rigs out in the Gulf, he was an engineer, and mostly gone. They were Methodists, which is about as benign a Christian group as ever there was. The main difference between them and the Baptists, my grandfather used to say, was that the Methodists sprinkled, but the Baptists had to dunk, since their congregations needed more water to keep cool during the hellfire and brimstone preaching.”
Howard smiled.
“I went to Sunday school at home, and when I visited Grandma Ruth, I also stayed for the church service with her.”
Kent paused again, spinning his glass slowly on the table. “This was back in the early sixties, around ’61 or ’62. The civil rights movement was going on, and it was… turbulent… down South.”
Howard nodded. “My folks told me the stories of uncles who went down to Mississippi and Alabama to march. Terrible times.”
Kent said, “I was a kid, I didn’t have much of a clue about what all that meant. The schools were segregated, the bus stations had separate waiting areas for whites and ‘coloreds.’ I remember seeing bathrooms at a gas station on one of my visits once that had three doors on the side: Men, Women, and Colored. The churches were also segregated. Grandma’s church, Magnolia Methodist, was only a few blocks away from her house, in an upscale, all-white neighborhood. Grandma was well off — she drove a powder-blue Cadillac and had a mink stole.” Kent frowned and took another sip. “There had been some talk about demonstrations. Supposedly, some of the local black folks — called either ‘coloreds’ or ‘nigrahs,’ if you were polite. If you weren’t polite…”
Howard’s jaw muscles flexed. “I believe I know the impolite term.”
Kent nodded. “So, apparently, the story was, these agitators were planning on integrating some of the local churches on an upcoming Sunday. Nobody seemed to know exactly when, only that it would be soon.” He shrugged and went on. “I was probably a typical kid when it came to religion. I believed what my folks told me, I earned my own Bible by reading and memorizing chapter and verse. I wasn’t devout, but I liked the stories, and I felt comfortable knowing that the blue-eyed-blond-haired Jesus was up there watching over me.”
Howard shook his head but didn’t interrupt.
“So on this particular Sunday, the minister stood in front of the congregation and said, ‘You all have heard about the possibility that we might have a visit from our Negro brothers and sisters in the next week or two. I think it would be appropriate for us to discuss how we might deal with such a situation.’ ”
Abe paused again, his eyes staring over Howard’s shoulder, but he wasn’t seeing the sparse pub crowd. He was seeing that day long ago. “Now I was just a kid, John, but I knew what Christ’s message had been. Love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, and all that, and I expected that the congregation would hold to those principles. That they would, even if they were a little uncomfortable, welcome anybody who came in — even if they had to sit in the back — to worship in God’s house. I was young and unlearned in the ways of the world.”
“Let me guess,” Howard said. “It didn’t go down like that?”
“Fifty-odd years ago, and I still remember it vividly.”
Abe drew in a deep, ragged breath. “It went on like this for what seemed like a long time. Violent action was the predominant voice. If the coloreds came, they’d, by God, be sorry. Even at that age, I knew that this was where the minister was supposed to step up and deliver the lesson. What Christ would do in these circumstances. How a Christian should behave. He was supposed to be the sheriff with only a double-barreled shotgun standing against a lynch mob, do or die. But he didn’t. He just stood there, pale, listening, and let the congregation work itself up.”
Kent paused again, then gave a little half smile. “As it turned out, our little church wasn’t on the list. Nobody ever showed up, so it was all moot. But that’s when I stopped going to church. When my grandmother and my parents tried to make me, I refused. I was punished for it — they grounded me, my father took his belt to me, but I wouldn’t go. I didn’t know jack about integration, but I knew what was right, and this wasn’t. I didn’t want to belong to that group.”
Howard shook his head sadly. “That’s a terrible thing for a child to see and hear. But you know, there’s a difference between the message and the messenger. Sometimes the man carrying the Word misinterprets it. That doesn’t mean the Word itself is wrong.”
Kent nodded, frowning. “I know that, John. But look around. There are a lot of bad messengers. More people have been killed in holy wars, in God’s name, than for ambition or territory. Christianity against Islam; Islam against Hindu; even Catholics against Protestants. Yes, Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple, but he didn’t start a war with the Romans. He never killed anybody.”
He paused and sipped at his beer again. “It’s just that I don’t need somebody explaining things to me that I can read for myself, and I sure don’t need somebody getting it wrong. I think the churches have screwed up what was a fairly simple message. ‘Churchianity’ is a different thing, it has a life of its own. God isn’t about buildings and Sunday-go-to-meeting Christians.”
