Light While There Is Light. Keith Waldrop
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physical sickness and deformity. But healing was always still to come—meanwhile, she sat on the right side of the church, because her left eye was the stronger.
In one quarrel, when I was twelve, my father broke her glasses and she sued for divorce, getting an injunction that forced him to leave the premises. The final settlement by the court gave her the house and me, and he was to pay a small monthly allowance for my support.
About the same time, Elaine was graduating from high school and was getting rather serious about a ministerial student at the College of Emporia. He wanted to marry her, but she decided that, in spite of her feelings for him, she could not marry a Presbyterian.
This was, I am convinced, her own seriously considered decision, whatever counsels Mother may have offered. But it pointed to a great problem that had obviously to be faced. The local church was small. There were many marriageable females, but no suitable, unattached man. The College of Emporia, to the extent that it was not simply secular, was the institution of a cold, formal, worldly church, worse than the Methodist if not quite Episcopalian. Kansas State Teachers College, on the other side of town, was of no religion at all—they could well have atheists teaching there. There were two attempts to save the situation. The first was to explore other churches. (I should point out here that, though my father attributed everything to the influence of Free Methodist furies, the Free Methodists did not altogether approve of divorce and my mother was conscious of having fallen somewhat in their esteem.)
We visited the local Friends congregation, which I now think must have been rather degenerate—with a hired preacher—but my mother found it cold. From there we went straight to the Salvation Army, more to her taste, and once or twice I even played my violin in their street services. (I hope my father never found out.) But in spite of evangelical fervor, somewhat wasted on Emporia where there was only one bum and nothing stronger than 3.2 beer, except for those who could afford bootleg rates, their sense of doctrine was undeveloped, a bit Buddhist almost in its determination to rescue the perishing before specifying the works of grace. This irked my mother and, besides, though haphazard orchestration was at first a relief from the purely vocal strains we were used to, it hardly took conservatory training to be offended by the sound. Besides, there was hardly a male, over fourteen and under sixty-five, to be seen. We moved on to the Hardshell Baptists.
As I think back over all this it makes, alternately, too little and too much sense.
The Hardshell Baptists had a tiny church that had been a neighborhood grocery. The sign over the door, the only trace of recent paint, said “Fundamental Baptist Church” but my mother always referred to them as Hardshells. The preacher, who somehow made me think of a butcher, was a true ecstatic, carried off in turn by waves of joy and a pity for lost souls. While the latter was on him, during the altar call, he would sob uncontrollably as if his heart were broken. He radiated a sense of poverty. His church, a missionary effort, took all his time and energy and gave him only the most spiritual returns. I never saw more than six or eight attend any service and that was counting his wife and daughter. He wanted desperately for us to join his congregation and—even though there was no young man for Elaine—we might have done so, had he not insisted, with more sincerity than tact, on doctrines anathema to my mother. What annoyed her most was the claim that once saved, a person could never lose salvation, the doctrine of Eternal Security.
“Do you think,” he asked Mother, “that a sheep can become a goat?”
“Once saved, always saved?” she asked in return, daring him to affirm an outrage.
“When we are saved, we become God’s lambs,” he said, warming to his argument. “And His grace is sufficient to keep us from falling.”
“You mean you can go out and get drunk and be worldly and still be a Christian?” Her voice was getting higher as his gestures took on more and more pulpit manner. While his left hand moved horizontally, as if smoothing something, the right made a sort of chopping motion.
“If you’re really saved,” he said, “you won’t do that. You’ll live as a dove because the Lamb of God is in you. We’re born again, we are his children. Do you think His children can become the children of the Devil?”
“Well,” she said, shouting by now, “you can’t tell me just because a man has been saved once, he can go out and drink and swear and murder someone and smoke old cigarettes and still be a born-again child of God.” And as he raised his arms, doubtless to bring down his final and most crushing point—he was now red in the face and his forehead was beading with sweat—she bellowed, just before sweeping out the door, which she slammed behind her, “And what about the backsliding heifer? ”
Gradually, after the Four-square Gospel and a few more, we found ourselves back in the old church at South and Commercial, and with a different solution: Elaine would go away to a holiness college. The Free Methodists have several schools, but the nearest was in Illinois, whereas a related sect, the Wesleyans, though unrepresented in Emporia, maintained a junior college in Miltonvale, Kansas, and in the fall Elaine entered Miltonvale as a freshman. My mother’s inquiries into the faith of the Wesleyans brought forth not a single deviation from Free Methodist doctrine. Their services were identical. The only differences were, firstly, that the Wesleyans had church councils, but no bishops, and secondly, they had no prejudice against the use of musical instruments in their worship.
My father’s mother at her house on Cottonwood Street, Emporia.
Meanwhile my father, whom I saw more or less regularly—given his completely random schedule—had moved in with his mother and his brother Roscoe, who lived on Cottonwood Street. My memories of Emporia, not all pleasant, are lined with lovely elms arching and interlocking over streets of asphalt or brick. And when I try to think of the same town since the Dutch disease passed through (it has been over thirty years since I was last there, for my father’s funeral) it comes before me as a wasteland of stumps and rotten trunks. Already fallen or still standing, they are dead, and in the middle of summer the sun shines through them. The cicadas (which we called locusts) must now have difficulty finding a patch of bark to discard their shells on, the great trees themselves skeletons.
My grandmother was in her nineties, almost totally deaf. She sat through most of each day rocking, wrapped in smelly woolens, nodding peacefully. My father hated her. He swore she could hear perfectly, but simply would not listen. His greatest fear was that she would outlive us all, me included. Occasionally she would struggle up out of her chair, make her way to the kitchen and do some mischief. Deciding to make coffee, for instance, she once brewed a good quarter pound of my father’s Bond Street tobacco and if he had not come in while the reeking mixture was still percolating, she might have drunk it. Roscoe was her youngest child and had lived with her for sixty years.
One of my father’s continual humiliations was Roscoe’s presence at the depot. Freight crews assembled at the yard office, a mile out of town, but from time to time he would have some business or other at the passenger depot (which he always referred to as “the levee,” as though the tracks were a kind of Mississippi, floating streamliners between Chicago and California) and then he would invariably catch sight of Roscoe’s grizzly form. Roscoe, with his antique Stetson and weary suspenders, made the most drab surroundings look opulent by simple contrast. He was a soup line figure, stiff, unshaven, with sunken cheeks and deep-sunken eyes. He rolled his own and had always a mutilated cigarette between two fingers,that had turned brown in consequence, or between his teeth, which were also heavily stained. He had a job at the Depot Hotel, where his official title was, unless someone was putting me on, “dishwasher’s assistant”—his main task, making soap for the kitchen—and most of his working hours seemed to be spent across the street on the station platform. The baggageman and a couple of retired railroaders, now become whittlers, were his cronies, and they whiled away the afternoons telling adventures and arguing politics. It was not Roscoe’s appearance that embarrassed my father—though women tried to keep their children from staring at the little assembly—but his strongly expressed Republican opinions.
More and more, as he got older, my father’s defenses against the world were anger