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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was Clayton Bostwick who got of us thrown out of my last testimony meeting. Clay lived in awe of his father as I had been of my father, but his respect arose from fear. Outwardly, aproned behind the rich rubbed wood of his good’s counter, Ephriam Bostwick was the essence of meekness, as are most merchants. He was the Walter Mitty of the Immigration Valley, a respected, suspender-stropping purveyor of goods wet and dry. We knew, however, that Ephriam Bostwick was a tyrannical little green grocer who would whip Clayton at the slightest provocation. It was mild-mannered Clayton whose voice had not yet broken from a high alto who caused the incident that cast a pall on our plans for the day, and for many to come. And it was Clayton who got every last one of us whipped with a leather razor strop, a leather belt, or a braided horsewhip. Excepting one who, absent a father, had to suffer the humiliation in different ways.
Viola had finally found the right crystals and stood, the African violet wilting in the warm air, her flat hat squarely on her gray head, her toothless gums beginning to gather moisture for the delivery. A snake-like tongue flicked across her thin lips.
One could almost sense an embarrassment among the ward members as we sat and waited. A collective catatonia descended like a suffocating, dark-winged succubus. Some members of the ward hadn’t missed a testimony meeting in sixty years, and it was only upon the rarest of occasions that Viola would not rise with the prompting. A few of them had even figured out some of her lexicon, which is to say that they recognized one utterance repeated over the years, something like “MelshickuksharMax” which must have been a powerfully holy word.
One could sense a collective withdrawing of the men and women into a somber privacy. It was a good time to think of crops and gardens and children and chores and sick cows and how nice it would be to get home to the roast beef or fried chicken dinner and the cool lemonade laced with sprigs of wild mint. There were very few small children present, but those few who were forced to attend merely squirmed in mystified torment, while the adolescents tried their best to keep from being discovered leering, lobbing spitballs, or stealing glances at the pretty girls.
If a general, silent, impatient withdrawal was a common reaction for the majority of the ward’s faithful to Viola’s testimony, to us it was as if we were getting a glimpse of Hell itself, right there on a beautiful June afternoon.
I drifted off, back to the winter, to the day of the frozen funeral. Even thinking about my father was preferable to listening to Viola Sleight, no matter how painful, no matter that the memories rose in me an inchoate matrix of anger and sorrow.
I could hear Viola clearing her throat, and felt Willy slump next to me, his head nodding. He would screw up the swimming trip for sure if he went to sleep and his father would deny use of the old pickup to take us to Moroni Lake or to a trout-laughing stream. I ribbed Willy just as sharply as Biff had ribbed me, my elbow a bony sharpness. Willy’s head snapped up, and I glared at him.
Clay Bostwick, as always, was engrossed in memorizing hymns from the hymnal, his head nodding in the clock-like meter of the verse. He always had the faint aroma of raw, red meat about him, as if he slept in his father’s meat locker at Bostwick’s Western Family Groceries. At times, I felt sorry for him. And he was worked like a bondservant. Of the five of us, he seemed the most vulnerable to taking comfort from the scriptures. He longed to belong to the gang. It was only by the merest fluke he was with us the day it happened.
I was remembering my father’s strong forearms as he planed a rough plank of pine, the fragrant shavings curled like blond ringlets and caught in the dark hair on the back of his hands. Widowhood had placed my mother in an ecstasy of grief. We buried my father on a blustery day. The frosty lane had thawed and it turned muddy, slashed crazily by tire tracks. I was told that the grave had to be opened with dynamite to break the frost.
I looked around the church, seeing the same cluster of ruddy-faced ranchers and whey-faced merchants trying to tune Viola out. I saw the same collection of starch filled women, dressed in black, whose broad shoulders seemed to hold up the threatening sky, who were letting restrained tears fall into white handkerchiefs while the men bent to the shovels and turned the frozen earth, planting another kind of seed. I saw Biff look warningly at me with that slide of blue eyes and composed myself.
Viola had it now! She rose, and in a clearly enunciated, precise King James English, she said, “I want to bear my testimony.” And then she began to babble in the tongues, an interminable, monotonous, incomprehensible reel of glottal and wet-running syllables that no human ear in the place could understand. Her ‘testimony’ lasted anywhere from ten minutes to two hours depending upon the strength of the signal.
Viola was perfectly receptive that morning, her antenna having balanced the standing wave ratio to optimum sensitivity. She would go on for more than an hour. It was about half way through her utterance when Clayton Bostwick, awakening from innocence and torpor, realized he was in trouble. It was one of man’s oldest predicaments, a source of humor common to every congregation since the worship of Baal. Clayton, despite his best efforts to control himself, his face utterly red with effort, broke wind like a cracking, zipping bolt of lightning that echoed around the walls of the church like an erratic, but powerful thunder.
The staccato report did not disturb Viola’s reeling glossolalia in the least, as she was in some other place, speaking as the Lord’s mouthpiece, but for the members of the bishopric and the entire congregation it was the final straw.
In seconds, Clayton was in tears trying to hold back what one had to assume was embarrassment, but which was actually laughter. Then I could no longer suppress my giggle. Cool Biff Doyle began to guffaw, and then Brother Armitage, the Sergeant of Arms, keeper of order, and instrument of the Lord’s discipline, looking like one of the Sons of Dan, marched up the aisle, pointed his finger singly at each one us, and directed us toward the rear door.
Unfortunately, just as Willy Smith hit the door he could no longer contain hysterical laughter, and caught the heavy leather dress shoe of the Sergeant of Arms on his backside. The force of it across the dandelion-strewn lawn propelled Willy almost to the sidewalk, a flight of about twenty feet. There would be hell to pay for sure.
Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Taylor, Mr. and Mrs. LeGrande Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Doyle, and Mrs. Jonathon Lattimore immediately rose from different places in the congregation and left by the front door, their ears flaming red with humiliation.
It was the beginning of a season of our terror.
“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted
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