A Book of American Martyrs(25)
My friends (who had also quit school to work during the day) and I went drinking until we were sick to our stomachs. We pissed, and we vomited. We were happy only in the company of one another for we did not judge one another (as our families judged us) and yet, when we were not drinking we shrank from the sight of one another. Often we fought. We had no idea why, we hated each other like brothers who have had to share a room and a smelly bed for too long. In a filthy lavatory in a tavern on Overhill Road when I entered I saw one of them at a urinal, his face was flushed and coarse, there was a red pimple or pustule on his cheek that drew my eye, and a drunken rage came over me, and I seized him around the neck and tried to throw him down, I beat him with my fists and kicked him where he had fallen, I shoved him so that he struck his head on the urinal, and I did not help him up but hurriedly left the tavern; and had only the mildest worry that my friend might die of a skull fracture or a broken neck.
My knuckles were swollen and bleeding from the attack. Even my feet ached, where I had kicked the unresisting body. There were lacerations in my face, there was a shortness to my breath, the old wound between my ribs ached where Felice Sipper had sank the three-inch jackknife blade.
I did not see my friends for weeks. I had no news of my friend who’d been beaten and his skull cracked against the urinal but I did not think he had died or was hospitalized for there was nothing about this in the newspaper or on local TV. I made calls to Edna Mae Reiser who did not return them. But I persevered, and left messages with her mother and came to know Mrs. Reiser, through these conversations; and felt that Mrs. Reiser, who did not know Luther Dunphy, yet liked me. Then, at another time, I saw my friends again, as one of them had enlisted in the U.S. Army and would be leaving soon for boot camp, at this exciting time (for it was made to seem exciting on TV) when the Soviet army had invaded a remote Asian country called Afghanistan, in defiance of U.S. warnings, and there was a promise of a new war now between the United States and Soviet Russia; and the subject of the beating in the men’s lavatory came up, and my friends were embarrassed looking at me. Luther, you never found out who did that to you? Never saw his face? Fucker should be killed.
WHEN I WAS BAPTIZED for the second time, at age twenty-two, by the pastor of the St. Paul Missionary Church, Jesus rejoiced in my heart. Jesus did not need to say—I knew that you would come to me, Luther. All those years I was waiting, I knew.
Very quickly it had happened. Edna Mae had brought me with her to a new church, in Muskegee Falls, about which her friends had told her. At once stepping into this church (that was not fully finished and smelled of new lumber) I felt a turmoil in my soul as if I had come home, and would be recognized here.
The pastor was much younger than our pastor in the Sandusky church, who had never seemed to like me, and had always confused me with my brothers. This pastor greeted me with a smile and welcomed me as a friend. He was my height, and my approximate weight, but with wavy sand-colored hair, and pale gray eyes of unusual frankness and warmth. He might have been thirty-five years old. Warmly he asked me to call him “Dennis”—not “Reverend Dennis.” As soon as Reverend Dennis mentioned the work needing to be done on the church, insulation and shingle-laying, I told him that I would like to help him; and when he said, he was not sure that the church could afford a professional roofer, I told him I did not expect to be paid, it was for the sake of the church and for the sake of Jesus.
These words came from me without preparation. At once I felt my heart suffused with joy, and the look in Edna Mae’s face was one of astonishment and adoration.
When we were alone together Edna Mae wept with me, in sheer happiness. She said how she loved me, and had forgiven me the hurt I had done her, and would not give it another thought. By then, without either of us knowing, she was six weeks pregnant with our first son, Luke.
Soon then, within a few weeks, both Edna Mae and I were baptized in the St. Paul Missionary Church of Jesus. And soon after that, we were married.
THE CALLING
You must follow your heart, Luther. If you are absolutely certain that this is what you want.”
It was a curious mannerism of our pastor that, when he smiled, his face seemed to contract for just an instant, as if in pain; and when he laughed, his laughter was silent, and seemed to wrack his body with a kind of pain also.
Stiffly I said, “It is not what I want, Reverend Dennis, but what the Lord has called me to.”
“Has He! Well.”
I had hoped that Reverend Dennis would clasp my hand in a brotherly gesture as often he did, with Edna Mae and me, and other members of the congregation, in greeting us at the church door, and saying good-bye to us, at the end of services. But he did not seem so friendly now. The childish eagerness I had brought to him was like a warm patch of sunshine with no place to fall upon. It was not like our beloved pastor, to seem so awkward with a fellow Christian who had come to him with a joyous expectation.
I had been excited to reveal to Reverend Dennis the news of my hopes for a career in the church, which I had been discussing with Edna Mae for months, and about which we had prayed together for guidance; but Reverend Dennis did not greet this revelation as I had anticipated. Instead, after I spoke for some minutes, telling him of my plan to become a minister in the Missionary Church, like him, as I was inspired by his sermons and by his example, Reverend Dennis deflected the subject by asking me about my family, and my work, and where we were living in Muskegee Falls, in a voice that did not indicate enthusiasm but with only a common sort of friendly inquiry, as if he had hardly been listening to my words at all.