Good little boys do what they are told and believe what their elders tell them. I generally did what I was told as a kid but from an early age I veered toward the skeptical side of life. Too many stories.
Take religion. Our family was not a particularly religious, so it’s not like my budding incredulity was a form of rebellion against an overly spiritual upbringing. We did attempt to go to church occasionally, but this was more to keep up appearances than to satisfy deep-seated religious needs. Church was always a big production. Like most country boys, my brother and I felt awkward and self-conscious when dressed up, so it was always a struggle to get us properly washed and attired. My father, on the other hand, seemed to relish exchanging his working duds for a starched shirt and a pressed suit from time to time; he relished the contrast and it gave him an opportunity to hobnob. For mother, however, church was a serious undertaking but not for otherworldly reasons. Church was first and foremost a social event. Her ingrained sense of propriety demanded that she be properly clothed, bejeweled, and groomed for the coming public exposure; above all, a stylish hair-do was called for, requiring elaborate preparation, which, if in anyway interrupted, would upset our already strained timetable.
And so it was one particular Sunday. My brother and I had begrudgingly taken our places in the back seat of our ’54 Chevy Impala while Papa sat impatiently at the steering wheel waiting for Mama to put the final touches on her bouffant. We were running late, as usual. Finally, the back door opened, and out she came, obviously in a tizzy. Then as now, an ancient, patriarchal live oak tree overarched our whole back yard and one of its many spreading limbs dipped down to parallel the ground at a respectable height before turning up and issuing into a mass of leaves and branches over the back porch. This was the favorite perch of Jacob, our pet crow. Just as mother passed under him, with precise timing, Jacob released a slimy bomb that plopped with uncanny precision in the center of mother’s exquisite creation, which had culminated, fashionably, in an enormous bun on the very top of her head.
Mother reacted with horror and indignation, letting out a stream of very un-Sunday-like expletives directed at Jacob, who commenced to fly around the house squawking “bwekfas, bwekfas,” the only sounds he knew that any way resembled a recognizable human word. My father could only hold his sides in laughter, which made my mother even madder, but my brother and I were overjoyed, for we instantly realized that Jacob’s ungraciousness had spared us the torture of sitting through another interminably long and boring church service.
Jacob’s one word vocabulary had come about like this. My brother collected bird nests avidly and had assembled quite an impressive display in our train house (later) of which he was very proud. But his collection lacked a crow’s nest. One day he spotted one in a low post oak tree and shimmed straightaway up the tree to appropriate the missing prize. The parent crows were out foraging somewhere, which made the task easier, for they would have defended the nest vigorously. The nest had one baby crow in it. You can guess the rest. He brought the nest home along with the baby crow. We fed him successfully first with a milk dropper and then with bred crumbs until he got old enough to fly at which point he was banned from indoors.
Now the morning routine at our house called for papa to get up very early, around five o’clock, and fix breakfast, which was usually no more than buttered toast and occasionally scrambled eggs that were eaten on the toast. Once properly browned, he would yell at the top of his voice, “breakfast,” at which time everyone arose to greet the day. At one point Papa had split Jacob’s tongue because, so he maintained, that would make him better able to talk. Be that as it may, Jacob, upon hearing Papa yell, or any other excitement for that matter, would commence circling the house squawking, “bwekfas, bwekfas,” which constituted his one word vocabulary.
Jacob, unfortunately, only came to our rescue on this one occasion. Our preacher at the time was tall and gaunt with sharp, bird-like features: to youthful eyes almost demonic in appearance. His head was very bald and glistened in the light of overhead chandeliers. His most noticeable feature was a big bump, almost like a tit, smack dab on top of his shining pate. He was a true old-time ‘fire and brimstone’ type. Upon reaching the crescendo of his sermon, when he assured the assembled that they would all most assuredly roast in hell for eternity if they didn’t repent and change their wicked ways, he would lean out over the pulpit and gesture frantically with his long, bony fingers. His face would turn a ghastly red, beads of sweat would gather on his forehead, while the changed angle of presentation would create the impression that the bump on his head had undergone an erection. As he ranted and gesticulated, the ladies of the church would fan ever more furiously, as if to keep pace with the rising drama of the spectacle.
My parents didn’t seem particularly moved by the preacher’s theatrics and the reader can understand that this whole exhibition did little to further a proper appreciation for religion on my young and impressionable mind. Once the service was over, life quickly returned to familiar paths. Papa continued to swear like a sailor and mama reflected on how to readjust her wardrobe (and hair-do) for the next social outing. For my part, I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about hell and redemption. Once out the door, I took a breath of fresh air to get the smell of sweaty humans out of my nostrils (pre-air-conditioning) and looked forward to shedding the unwanted duds and feasting on the promised post-church meal of fried chicken and dumplings with homemade biscuits, which was tradition in the family and the one real compensation for all this falderal. I couldn’t understand why we didn’t just skip the church part and go straight to the chicken.But I guess I took more from this whole affair than I realized. Did you ever notice how closely a baby calf watches her mama? When a cow jerks her head up high, she is signaling the possibility of danger. Her calf will notice this instinctually and forever be wary of whatever the mama was looking at. But the reverse is also true: if the mama cow continues to graze indifferently while (say) a human walks by, the calf will assume from that point on that humans are tolerable. Human calves are no different: if my parents weren’t concerned with hell and redemption, why should I bother? They hadn’t jerked their heads up at the good preacher’s words, or otherwise indicated through their deportment that they took his antics and words too very seriously, so I learned to take this sort of thing with a grain of salt.”
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