So, after I got kicked out of the Full Gospel Apostolic Tabernacle Seminary for Preaching, Healing, and Sanctification, I figured I might as well go home to the Ozarks. If you recall, the precipitating event of my downfall was the Halloween exorcism at Professor Teeter’s house with his forty-something wife. I tried to defend myself to the Dean as a poor, hapless youth who had been seduced by a voracious virago, which was, in fact, the truth, but he wasn’t buying it. In a voice quaking with indignation, he quoted Second Timothy, “Young men, flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace!”
I said, “That’s easy for you to say because you’re old and blind and couldn’t pursue anything more exciting than righteousness if you wanted to.”
He pointed his quaking finger at me and fairly shouted, “Anathema! Anathema! In the last days will come mockers and scoffers! Now you listen to me, young man: Bob Teeters is a friend of mine and a good man, and you, you dishonored him in his own home with his own wife!”
I said, “Well, sir, it’s like this: she offered her honor; I honored her offer; and the rest of the night I was on her and off her. Heh.”
He said, “Do you think this is funny?”
I did, he didn’t, and I was out on my ass.
The next day, I had my backpack strapped on, my guitar case in my left hand, and my right thumb in the air. It’s a long way from Waxahachie, Texas, to the Ozarks, and I didn’t arrive in Eureka Springs until the seventh of November. A girl from Tulsa picked me up; she was a music major at the University of Arkansas, and she had a cassette tape player and a console full of tapes. On a couple of them she had written “Partying and grubbing tunes,” but to my disappointment, we didn’t listen to them. She put in Vivaldi instead. I had never heard of Vivaldi, but he made autumn sound like it won the war. The day was misty and the leaves sagged and dripped, but when the music started, we found ourselves driving through a canyon of gold that would damn near break your heart. By the time we reached Eureka, I was as weak as if we had made love at every scenic overlook for the last hundred miles. Too much beauty will deplete a man, particularly a young man. My withers were wrung; my sap was zapped. The girl dropped me off at the Basin Park where I had listened to John Thomas and the Reivers in what seemed like a lifetime ago but was really only a year.*
I bade the girl farewell and walked across Spring Street to eat in the same Italian restaurant, where the same old man was playing the banjo. This time he sang “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and I felt so sad about little Jackie Paper that I could barely finish my lasagna.* After I paid the bill, I went outside to smoke a cigarette, and I could smell the trees and dank limestone ledges and the black soil between the outcroppings. The bluff behind the park was a canvas of oranges and yellows with an intermittent smudge of cedars. The old man began singing “Five Hundred Miles,” and I wished I were a poet.
II. Lily
I finally made it back to Missouri and moved into a room over the general store in the little town of Rocky Comfort, which is just down the road from my home in Stella. I lived there instead of staying with Ma and Pap because when a fellow gets baptized in the Holy Ghost and initiated into the pleasures of the flesh on the same trip, he needs to be on his own to work out his contradictions.* Much more important for my memoirs, however, is that I got married for the first time, a relationship much rockier than it was comfortable.
I met Lily when I thought I might make a little money preaching a revival. We were both young and full of the Spirit, so of course we fooled around in the brush arbor after everyone else had gone home. Good fun was followed by guilt and recrimination, whereupon an irrational impulse seized Lily “to make things right before the Lord.” I asked her if that was really necessary, and her glare persuaded me that it was. So, the next day we surprised our kinfolk by going to the judge down in Cassville. He asked us, “Are you sure about this?” Lily looked at me and said to the judge, “Just get it over with.”
After that perfunctory ceremony, I moved out of my apartment, and we rented a small farm with about ten acres and a snug house. Snug as a slug in a jug—a jug of salt, that is. The house didn’t have but one bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen, a sitting room, and an attic. In the beginning, Lily and I enjoyed the bedroom part of the house but not so much the other rooms. Seems like after we kicked off the covers, our dispositions quickly deteriorated from lovey-dovey to grudging forbearance all the way down to a simmering fury.
For example, Lily would ask me, “If the Lord loves us so much, how come we’re so damn poor?” a question I had often pondered myself. But then she would propose an answer, “Because you’re lazy—that’s why! The love of Jesus can’t do nothing with lazy!”
“A man seldom grows rich toiling in the vineyards of the Lord. You knew that going in!”
“That’s another thing I don’t understand: Just because you’re working in the Lord’s fields doesn’t mean you can’t work your own. There’s ten tillable acres right out the back door.”
“We just moved in a week ago! I’m trying to get the lay of the land.”
“Oh, you’re always trying to get the lay of the land! That’s sure enough what I gave you, isn’t that right? Isn’t that right?”
She had at that.
She continued, “So now for the satisfaction of your little pennywhistle—”
“Hey, wait a minute, it’s not so little.”
“As I was saying before you so rudely interrupted me—for the satisfaction of your itty-bitty pennywhistle, I’m condemned forever to wash clothes from the secondhand store and cook food I have to spoon out of a number ten can and pay the electric bill with money you pilfer from love offerings. How much must Jehovah God Almighty hate fornication that He would punish me with the likes of you? I always thought Hell was some kind of healthy fiction to keep folks from misbehaving, but having you as a husband has me persuaded that Hell is as real as drought and dry heaves. You’re the worst excuse for a—”
Oh, that girl knew how to nag, like she had earned a degree in nagging, with honors, summa cum loud, an MFA in nagging.
So, that was a black cloud on the horizon of our domestic tranquility. Another cloud—more like a tornado, really—was my aforementioned lack of self-control when it came to women. I blame it all on the ministerial profession.
III. Whoops, I Did It Again
It is a truth observable that every congregation, no matter how rural, has at least one pretty girl, and I was never able to resist a pretty girl who paid me any mind whatsoever. This time the pretty girl was named Rose, and Rose arose during the altar call and got slain in the Spirit and rose again with the gift of tongues, whereupon she looked up at me with dewy eyes and asked could she talk to me? She said, “I sure would like some spiritual counseling.” Of course, I said, “Yes,” and gave her my card:
The Reverend Otis Bulfinch
Biblical Expositor and Eschatologist
Rt. 2
Rocky Comfort, Missouri 64861
417-521-3240*
Later that evening in the backseat of my car, Rose and I engaged in spiritual activities that did, in fact, involve tongues and the laying on of hands and other signs of the times. Turns out that Rosie was home on Thanksgiving break from a college down South where, apparently, the girls learned to reconcile Holy Scripture with the Kama Sutra. How Rose ended up in a brush arbor outside Wheaton, Missouri, was a question I didn’t pursue: I simply took it as a sign of God’s favor.
Then came the day after Thanksgiving—a bright autumnal morning with a frisky chill in the air—when Lily (still my wife) said to me, “I’m going to Joplin to go shopping. Daddy sent me a check for fifty dollars on condition you don’t get any of it, and I intend to spend every dime! Bye.” The screen door slammed, and the pick-up started; then wheels crunching in gravel, tires rubbery on asphalt, and the distant shifting of gears. A holy silence ensued. I could hear my heart thumping in the empty house. After I finished my coffee and looked both ways down the road, I called Rosie, and in fifteen minutes she was there.
We sat on the sofa talking about the budding of the fig tree and the four horsemen of the apocalypse and the moon turning blood red, all the time scooching closer to one another, until finally neither of us could bear it any longer, and—
You get the picture.
We were in the midst of immense pleasure when I again heard the crunching of gravel in the driveway.
“Damn!” I said. “Where’d you park your car?”
“At the DX station like you told me.”
“Okay, good. Grab your clothes and follow me. Hurry!” Not quite like the biblical injunction to take up one’s cross, but if we couldn’t figure this out, I’d be nailed for sure. I pulled on my pants and threw on my shirt.
Footsteps in the gravel.
In the kitchen was the pulldown stairs for the attic. I tugged on the rope and unfolded the stairs, whereupon Rose clambered up into the attic, still clutching her clothes to her chest. I admired the view briefly before pushing the stairs into the ceiling. Then the front door opened and—
“I forgot the damn check! By now you’ve probably forged your own name and cashed it down at the station, knowing you.”
“Aw, honey, I wouldn’t do that to you,” I said, walking out of the kitchen and wiping my hands on a dishtowel. “That’s your money.”
“Shove it,” she replied. Then she looked at me. “Were you doing the dishes? That’d be a first.”
“I’ve made a resolution to help out more around here. I’m a new creation, thanks to your, uh, encouragement.” Lily pursed her lips and went into the bedroom. When she came out, she was sticking the check into her purse.
“Why’s the bed all shambled up?”
“Well, you know how lazy I’ve been. I confess that I went back to bed, but then I got to thinking about how much work there is to do around here, so I flung down the covers and vowed to make a new beginning.”
“Huh.” She sniffed. “Is that perfume?”
“That, my dear, is the sweet fragrance of air freshener. I thought I would tidy up the house before going to the fields.”
Lily looked at me through narrow eyes. “You’re lying,” she said.
Just then, we heard a bump.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Uh, must be squirrels in the attic. I’ll look into it. Now you go on shopping.”
More bumping. “That’s a damn big squirrel sounds like to me.” Lily went into the kitchen, with me following and my heart thumping more than ever. That’s when we heard the first scream.
“I should’ve known,” Lily said. She grabbed the rope to the stairs when we heard another scream. Lily pulled the stairs down with a jerk, and out fell a black snake with a mouse in its mouth, ka-thump, on the kitchen floor. Lily screamed. Then a dress came tumbling and flipping down the stairs. Another scream from above and Lily fuming below. She looked up at Rose, who was stark naked and terrified, and then at me.
I lifted my hands in rapture. “An angel!” I proclaimed. “In our attic! Praise the Lord!”
Lily fixed me with a look of hardened hate and said, “You may think you’re fooling everybody else, but you sure as hell aren’t fooling me! Next time I’ll suffer the wrath of God before I marry another two-timing, lazy shit bucket like you.” A minute later there was the crunching of wheels in gravel, and she was gone for good.
Then, a remarkable occurrence followed: Having regained her composure, Rose climbed down the stairs, turned to place her hands on my shoulders, and looked at me with her innocent blue eyes. “Now where were we?” she asked.
She was a different kind of gal, all right.
Where were we, indeed?