Preacher's Boy

"Nobody asked me about that."

"Oh, Robbie—" I could tell he wanted to say more, but he was too exasperated and hurt to keep at it. "When you're ready to talk in a sensible fashion, I'll be in my study."

I showed him. I never went downstairs until the next morning.

2. Preparing for the End of the Age

NONE OF THE CHURCH PEOPLE EVER SPOKE OF MY behavior that night. They would see me coming and shake their heads, but they'd done that for years. It was Pa's reputation that got further damaged, not mine. A preacher who couldn't prevent his own son from disrupting divine services was lacking proper authority even in his own household, they said. They all felt it would have helped if Pa had had the moral fortitude to lay a rod across my rear once a day and twice on Saturdays.

But I wasn't the only problem, they said. The sermons themselves lacked passion. They asked each other when was the last time the word Hell had been thundered from the pulpit? Calling war "Hell" didn't seem to count. It occurred to them that they hadn't heard more than a thimbleful of fiery damnation since the Reverend J. K. Pelham left town twelve years previously to take a larger charge in western Connecticut. No wonder the town was about to disappear down the broad path of turpitude and outright wickedness. All that drinking and obscene thinking and flying you-know-whats from the town hall flagpole—no one was warning the citizenry about the wrath to come.

Folks began to wax near nostalgic about those good old days. Why, Reverend Pelham's sermons would make tears come to the ladies' eyes and the sweat break out on the foreheads of grown men. Oh, that those mighty days should return. So the deacons determined to write to Reverend Pelham and invite him home to Leonardstown to preach on what they were calling "Revival Sunday." They figured a good dose of the old reverend would turn the town on its ear, if not lead it to righteousness.

Pa, I don't need to say, was not overly pleased with the idea. I overheard him complaining to Ma that he'd spent the better part of twelve years mopping up damage from the Reverend Pelham's sermons. Because, you see, it wasn't the wicked people who got changed by them. It wasn't even the pious and prim who were well set in their ways and not about to change, for all their tears and sweat. It was the meek and easily frightened—they who had a fragile hold on the everlasting mercy.

I felt terrible. I knew good and well it was the business of Mabel Cramm's bloomers that had set the congregation to thinking that the town was headed on the road to perdition. And me and Willie had done that just to get even with the Weston boys. It was like blowing a soap bubble to the size of a hot-air balloon. Even though God and I were on shaky terms in those days, I prayed He would see how the situation had got all out of proportion and stick a pin in it. Well, anyhow, that He would somehow manage to keep Reverend Pelham home in western Connecticut.

My prayer was not answered. Reverend Pelham wrote back the very day he got the letter. He said the Lord had told him to tear himself away from the sinners in Connecticut and hightail it to Leonardstown, where, apparently, the Devil had had a picnic since the

reverend's departure twelve years before.

So it was that at eleven A.M. on the last Sunday morning in June the Reverend J. K. Pelham mounted the pulpit, standing where by all rights my pa should have been, breathing fire and brimstone on the just and unjust alike.

I wasn't too worried when he spoke out against drinking strong spirits and indulging in tobacco. I've never had anything more than a little hard cider myself, and the only thing I smoke regularly is corn silks and the occasional rabbit tobacco. In fact, I was wondering how Mr. Weston was taking that part of the sermon, since everyone knows he not only sells tobacco but is known to smoke and chew it himself. As for the strong drink, there were a number of menfolk out there that had regular bouts of indigestion for which alcoholic spirits had proved to be the only known cure. Or so they maintained.

I began to get a bit squirmy when he started in to preach about impure thoughts and language. How can you blame a fellow for what he thinks? It's not as if I go looking for ideas that aren't proper. Sometimes thoughts just pop into my head like weeds in the vegetable patch. The same goes for language. How can you blame a fellow for letting slip the occasional cuss word? I don't cuss around ladies or church members—only do it around Willie or other fellows. After I've had a run-in with the Weston boys, it takes a few purple phrases to settle me down.

Reverend Pelham did not stop with condemning folks for unrighteous behavior or even wicked thoughts and words. He went on to say that people who behave themselves might be in worse danger than the murderers, thieves, adulterers, and the like, because being good never got a soul past the Pearly Gates. No, no. We mustn't be misled. Behaving yourself didn't cut any ice with God if you didn't believe everything just exactly proper. When the Day of Judgment came, all us doubters and unbelievers and followers after false doctrine would come to the same end as all the outrageous sinners. We would all go swooping down the coal chute to the fiery furnace. No, those weren't his exact words, but that's what he meant.

If all this was not enough to scare the dead, the reverend took to hinting that we were not only panting to the end of the century, we were sneaking up on the End of the Age. Oh, yes, we might be sitting here fat and content, as it were, but we ought to be trimming our lamps like the wise virgins in the Bible. Although he admitted that the Bible itself says, "No man knoweth the day or the hour," and he wasn't going to be presumptuous and name a particular day or hour. But when eighteen ninety-nine rolled over into nineteen aught aught, we'd be fools if we hadn't prepared ourselves for that Dread Day.

"There are those," he went on, and I swear he was looking straight at me when he did, "there are those sitting here in our very midst who will never sit at table in the Kingdom of Heaven. You know who you are!" He was staring daggers at me. "You know who you are." This second time he said it in a real sad way. "I beg you, my brother, turn from your evil thoughts. Turn again and be saved before the night cometh when no man can repent! Repent and join me on that glorious day in the Eternal Kingdom of the Righteous!"

Sitting there in the Leonardstown Congregational church, I just gave up trying to be a Christian. The whole business was too much of a burden for a fellow like me—high-tempered as I was and hating to be tamed down. Let's face it, I ain't got the knack for holiness. Besides, I didn't have the slightest little desire to join the likes of Reverend Pelham at the dinner table for fourteen minutes, much less at the banquet table of Heaven eternally. Eternity is a mighty long time to be stuck with people who judge every word you say and think and condemn most of what you do. It struck me as pretty miserable company. And if Reverend Pelham was the kind of company God preferred to keep, well, I just hoped they'd be happy together.

As for me, I would leave the fold and become either a heathen, a Unitarian, or a Democrat, whichever was most fun. Because if the reverend was by any chance in on God's secrets, the Dread Day (providing it was January first, nineteen aught aught) was only six months away. I aimed to pack a lot of living into that time, and Reverend Pelham had made it clear you couldn't do that and remain a faithful Congregationalist.

Reverand Pelham was, of course, eating at our house. The deacons thought it would be insulting, not to mention expensive, to put their beloved former pastor up in the Leonardstown Hotel.

Well, I got through Sunday dinner (during which the reverend pretty much repeated his earlier sermon, looking across the table to me as though he suspected I'd missed a word a two). As soon as I was excused from the table, I went off to find Willie. I'm not allowed to fish on Sundays, so we were lying on the side of the hill, staring at the clouds, chewing our wood-sorrel twigs, which taste, if you don't know it, almost like lemonade. I watched the sky for a while, listening to the song of a hermit thrush. When the bird hushed, I told Willie in a solemn voice that, as of that very morning, I was a convert to disbelief, and that since life threatened to be short, I was determined, as they say, to make hay while the sun still shone.

"But Robbie," Willie said, "if you don't believe in God, how come you believe He's going to make the world end come January?"

I struggled for a logical answer. Willie's one fault is that he takes everything strictly literal. Not much imagination in him, for all his good qualities. "Wal, Willie," I started, moving my sorrel stick to the other side of my mouth, "it's like this. No man knows the day or hour, but you'd be a fool not to take precautions. Wouldn't I be mad if suddenly the end came and I hadn't made the most of my remaining days? Why, Willie, I tell you, I'd just be furious."

"You think deep, Robbie," he said, his voice fair dripping with respect.

"Thank you," I said modestly. "I reckon I do."

From far off down the valley echoed the whistle of the afternoon train coming up from the south. "I tell you one thing, Willie. If it all goes bust, I'm sure going to miss the trains."

"Don't God have any trains?"

"Think about it, Willie. If there is a Heaven, about which I am currently in grave doubt, everyone would have wings. You'd probably despise trains if you could fly. And then there'd be the problem of firing up the locomotive. If it's like the reverend says, the fire is all someplace else."

"Wal," he said, and quite cheerfully, too, "then you'd be more than likely to see a lot more trains than most, seeing how—"

"Just in case," I said, a bit hurriedly, "let's go down to the depot and see the train come in before we have to go home to supper."