The Brothers K (11 page)

Everett and Peter are in an older class that hasn’t got a Corner, and the twins are in a kiddie class that’s actually just a bunch of brats fidgeting and crying. But Irwin is in my class, and I’ve tried to share the good news: I’ve told him how nice it is here in The Corner. But he refuses to take advantage of it due to this Memory Verse Streak he’s got going …

For 160-some Sabbaths in a row now Irwin has nailed his Memory Verse dead—and the way Brother Beal treats him, you’d think it was DiMaggio’s hitting streak. “Iron Man Irwin” he calls him. It’s kind of embarrassing. Still it’s a nice thing for Winnie, since he’s a bit of a dodo at real school. He feels he’s keeping the streak going for Jesus. He even told his study group how his memory didn’t work worth a hoot till he asked the Lord to come into his life and make some repairs on it. Of course Beal and the other Sabbath School teachers could eat that kind of crap for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but I think Irwin really meant it. He seems genuinely fond of Jesus. Peter does too, come to think of it, though he gives his Sabbath School teachers ulcers of the brain by being just as fond of Buddha and Krishna and Finn MacCool and Odin One-Eye and King Rama and I don’t remember who all, thanks to his ongoing adventures with heathen reading material. Everett on the other hand thinks of Jesus as just one more of these out-of-this-world Nice Guys who, as Leo Durocher predicted, finished dead last. It’s right there in the Bible, Everett says: “Christ admits it Himself.
‘I
am the Alpha and the Omega. The First—and the Last.’”

It’s strange the way everybody has their own pet notion about Jesus, and nobody’s pet notion seems to agree with anybody else’s. Grandawma, for instance, says He’s “just a defunct social reformer.” Then there’s Papa, who once said He’s God’s Son all right, and that He survived the crucifixion just fine, but that the two-thousand-year-old funeral service His cockeyed followers call Christianity probably made Him sorry He did. Meanwhile there’s Freddy, who’s six now, and who told me she saw Christ hiding under her bed one night, but that all He’d say to her was
“Pssst! Shhh! Pharisees!”
And Bet, who spent a whole day making a Christmas card for Uncle Marv and Aunt Mary Jane last year, then got so proud of the card that she refused to mail it to anybody but herself. “That’s the Christmas spirit!” Everett told her. Then we looked to see what she was so proud of, and it turned out to be this whole army of crayon angels, in these gold sort of football helmets, charging into Bethlehem while in the sky above them huge red and green letters copied from a Christmas carol book Bet couldn’t yet read proclaimed:

JOY TO THE WORDL!
THE SAVIOR RESIGNS!

Personally I’m not sure just who or what Christ is. I still pray to Him in a pinch, but I talk to myself in a pinch too—and I’m getting less and less sure there’s a difference. I used to wish somebody would just
tell
me what to think about Him. Then along came Elder Babcock, telling and telling, acting like Christ was running for President of the World, and he was His campaign manager, and whoever didn’t get out and vote for the Lord at the polls we call churches by casting the votes we call tithes and offerings into the ballot boxes we call offering plates was a wretched turd of a sinner voting for Satan by default. Mama tries to clear up all the confusion by saying that Christ is exactly what the Bible says He is. But what
does
the Bible say He is? On one page He’s a Word, on the next a bridegroom, then He’s a boy, then a scapegoat, then a thief in the night; read on and He’s the messiah, then oops, He’s a rabbi, and then a fraction—a third of a Trinity—then a fisherman, then a broken loaf of bread. I guess even God, when He’s human, has trouble deciding just what He is.

T
he class has split into study groups now. This is the part that makes The Corner truly worth being in. In Sister Durrel’s group they’ve started reading about the furnace Shadrach and his brothers got thrown into, but at least they’ve got Sister Durrel to stare at. Over in Brother Beal’s group they’re listening to a story out of
Pathfinder Magazine
called “Why Bobby Degan Told Satan No,” and all there is to look at is Beal himself and a clump of dead milkweed growing in a concrete window well behind him. In Brother Benke’s group, just behind me, this weird religious kid named Stanley Stubenfelker is telling how he wrote a special prayer for his grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary that made his whole dang family cry, so can he please recite it to the group? Brother Benke says,
“Why, certainly, Stanley.” But on about word three of the prayer my best friend, Augie Mosk, starts crying his eyes out, and Irwin laughs so hard that Benke gets mad and sends Augie to the other Corner, where he’s resting now, like God and me. Way over in Sister Harg’s circle, which is all girls, they’re also trying to study the Fiery Furnace, but they’ve got the giggles. I thought they were giggling at Augie at first, but now I see that the problem is their stage props. They’ve got a big feltboard leaning on a chair, with a felt oven on it, and a felt Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego cooking in the oven. Jocie Best covered the brothers with red felt flames, and that was fine. Then Zulie Dawson added three big blond-haired Guardian Angels to protect them, and that worked too. But when Dollie Edgerton tried to stick the golden halos on the Angels the felt on the halo-backs was so worn out that they kept falling on the floor, and without halos the whole scene somehow lost its religious feeling and started looking like three Swedes and three beatniks in bathrobes committing suicide together in a sauna, so
tee hee hee hee hee!

I take the Bible Sister Durrel gave me, flip it open at random, and look to see what God’s Good Book has to say to me today. My first flip is typical: “And
Doeg the Edomite turned, and he fell upon the priests, and slew on that day fourscore and five persons
…
And Nob, the city of the priests, smote he with the edge of the sword, both men and women, children and sucklings, and oxen, and asses …”

Ugh. I try again: “
And they made an end of all the men that had taken strange wives by the first day of the first month …”

Okay. That’s enough words. Time for illustrations. I hunt down every color plate in my Bible one by one, bending each at the corner so I can find it again. Then I decide to conduct an award ceremony among them …

First category? How about Stupidest Picture?

Ah. Our first nominee is one of Jesus trying to drive a pack of money-lenders out of the temple with a whip about the size of a spaghetti noodle. And here’s another candidate: an idiotic-looking Peter staggering across the water, his mouth wide open, his arms splayed out like a toddler’s, while Christ just watches, grinning like a mean big brother, rowing backwards in the boat. But hey! The surprise winner, I see, has just got to be Noah’s Ark. It seems like the typical illustration at first—just a big wooden barge perched on a mountaintop, with the rainbow arching over it and a puddle-pocked landscape looking soggy but fairly inviting down below. But soon as I look more closely it hits me: when Noah and the animals get around to stepping out the Ark door, they’re all going to fall
about four thousand feet straight down this humongous cliff and land splat in a pile of big sharp rocks.

Next category: Sexiest Picture. But in Bibles, this one’s always tough. My first nominee is Salome, standing in front of King Herod flashing a nice pair of dancer’s legs—but the head of John the Baptist bleeding all over the TV tray in her hands cancels the legs out fast. Here’s one of a Delilah, happily hacking Samson’s hair off, with a face a little like Sophia Loren’s—but it’s Samson who’s got by far the showier legs and breasts in the picture. That leaves just one other illustration with any amount of skin showing: the old standby, Eve and Adam in The Garden. They’re stark naked, which you’d think would help, but their backs are to the camera, and Adam’s lumpy body makes it darned easy to believe that God made him just the other morning out of a big wad of clay. On close inspection there does seem to be a sexy area on Eve at first—a nice little place where her naked waist curves in, then out again, as it works its way downward. But right where the crack in her bottom should start the trusty bushes rush up and wreck the view. It’s not the bushes that totally luke the thing for me, though. It’s Eve’s hair. Not only is it egg-yolk yellow, it’s all teased and ratted up, as if Uncle Marv had just been working her over at the Butee Bar up in Spokane …

I’m not sure what the word
sexy
even means sometimes. I don’t even
care
what it means, normally. It’s the kind of thing you think about at church, though, because there’s nothing else to do. In the end I pretend I’m a girl just long enough to give the award to Samson.

Best Picture? Now this one’s easy. It’s one of David, all the way. Not the king, just the kid. All he’s doing is walking along by a stream, a stick in one hand, a sheep across his shoulders, the slingshot he’ll eventually nail Goliath with dangling from his belt. I suppose the big meadow he’s crossing could be the green pasture he gets made to lie down in before he heads on over to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, but the illustration doesn’t make you think of that. It doesn’t make you think of anything. That’s what I like about it. There’s nothing biblical going on—nobody getting burned or sacrificed or swallowed, no one getting driven out of or cast down from or dashed against anything. It’s just a normal piece of world for once: some nice running water, some strewn rocks, a wide empty grassland. The yellow flowers by the creek could be buttercups. The stream could be packed with trout. The only flaw is the sheep—but it isn’t the illustrator’s or David’s fault that the sheep bugs me. It’s Micah Barnes’s fault. Micah is the new assistant pastor’s kid. He’s the one who told me a year or so ago that some people fuck sheep.

Of course I called him a filthy liar. But he just laughed, popped open his Bible, and actually
proved
what he’d said! Somewhere in Leviticus, it was. There were no actual scenes describing guys and sheep humping away, but there were detailed instructions on how you had to kill them if they did. The whole idea about made me puke. I mean, why would Moses even
mention
such a thing? I would certainly never have thought of it on my own! He even went on to list several other types of animals you had to kill guys for screwing.

I feel sorry for Micah Barnes, though. He’s the kind of mixed-up little church rat you meet pretty often in Adventist basements (which is where they always seem to stick the kids). His dad’s an up-and-coming preacher, so Micah spends his whole life stuck in church camps, church schools, church basements. And since all he hears there is how good and holy the Church is and how cruel and filthy the Outside World is, and since he hates his good and holy basement life, he assumes he’d rather be in the Outside World, and so tries to prove how much he knows about it—by acting cruel and talking filthy.

The first time we met, Micah walked up to me, pointed like I was something in a cage, and screamed, “God
damn
, kid! You got ears just like a monkey!
Hahahaha! Monkey Ears!”

Next to the mud pies Everett slings around, this little dirt clod didn’t even wing me. I just gave Micah the cold hard stare and turned to walk away. But then this girl, Vera Klinger, had to stick her oar in. And to complicate matters, Vera has a harelip. You can’t really see the thing, but you sure can hear it. “Nat’s nod nice!” she snapped at Micah. “Nyou soodn’t snay sengs nike nat!”

Micah was stunned for a second. Then he went apeshit: “HAHAHAHA!” he shrieked.
“Nough snitty, nittle nirl! Nup nyours! Nup nyours!”
So, right there in the basement of God’s House, I had to punch the new assistant pastor’s kid smack in the mouth.

It wasn’t much of a punch. I figured that with a lip like hers Vera must be used to insults, and I could see already that the new kid had strange problems, so I took the kind of contact swing a batter does when the hit-and-run is on. But Micah went down like my fist was a shot put, curled up like a salted slug, screamed like a baby with a diaper pin sticking in it—and then had the gall to tell me later that he was “turning the other cheek,” like Jesus says to do! Of course Brother Beal ran over and tried to find out what had happened, but Vera started nuttering and nurring at him so frantically that he gave up, sent Micah to the bathroom, then ordered me for the first time in my life to go sit in The Corner with the
Memory Verse dunces. I was mad for a while. But I ended up enjoying The Corner so much I haven’t learned a Memory Verse since.

Everett Seniors’s new Cougar coaching job was during the Great Depression, and to prove it Hugh reports actual Washington State Varsity Ballplayers practicing ball in corked logging boots and some guys barefoot even, just to show you how unable they were to afford cleats. Imagine if you will some corked logging booted guy’s logging boot landing on some barefooted guy’s bare foot. YOUCH! to say the least. Imagine also how some prospects had no gloves and injured their hands quite seriously trying to catch the stupid ball at times. These were the hazards of The Grand Old Game in those days, so that we can thank our lucky stars to live now instead!

It soon became visible at quite a young age that Hugh Chance was already a better ballplayer than most of Everett Seniors’s actual college players, especially his left arm. This became most visible of all when he was twelve and started pitching BP as batting practice was known as, at which he enjoyed striking out Cougar sluggers one after the next with his fastball until his dad had to start yelling at him. “EASE OFF!” he had to start yelling. “I WANT MY TEAM TO PRACTICE HITTING, NOT STRIKING OUT!” he also yelled. So Hugh eased off, though secretly the whole thing gave him one heck of a kick in the pants.

To jump backwards in time for a more sad instants of his fine arm, Hugh killed a meadowlark right out of the air with an apple at a distance of approximately third base to first when he was ten years of age, causing his father to say it was nothing to brag about and disgusting Marion into sending him to bed without supper. Be
darn careful what you aim
at
even when certain you won’t
hit it! is the lesson Hugh claims it taught him.