A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel Read Free Book Online Page A

stuff it in a trash barrel. There was a flurry of activity around the Band Boosters Food Tent. I could see my sister through the crowd, laughing with Astor Main, the Fair Board president and local undertaker, as he placed the gorgeous, much-coveted Fair Queen tiara on her head. For just a moment I had a chilling vision of my father taking the entire Fair Board hostage with his hunting rifle, which quickly evolved into him demanding a recount, during which it was discovered that Melinda had actually won by a hundred and sixty-one votes.
    The truth was that just after the original crowning ceremonies, Carolyn admitted to one of her fellow contestants that she was three months pregnant, and was getting married in two weeks. Word spread like a field fire. With very little deliberation it was decided that Melinda, a girl of indisputable virginity, would hold the Fair Queen title.
    Thus my sister became Fair Queen by default, and the next year in the Fair Parade I was allowed to ride alongside her in the back of the Queen’s convertible, which bore the legend AN OLD-FASHIONED GIRL WITH AN OLD-FASHIONED SMILE
,
chosen just for Lindy by our clever mother. The handmade signs were taped to either door and surrounded by the ubiquitous flowers made of pipe cleaners and Kleenex. Melinda and I both wore high-necked Victorian dresses and Quaker bonnets and held parasols. Everything would have been perfect except that I refused to wear shoes, and so I had to sit very still and not swing my dirty, scabbed feet where they might be seen by the adoring crowd.

----
    BLOOD OF THE LAMB
    I t wasn’t enough for my mom to make me go to our Quaker church every Sunday; in addition, I had to listen to Batsell Barrett Baxter on television as we were getting ready to go.
    Batsell Barrett Baxter was either an early example of a telepreacher or else an early example of Claymation. He had no live audience and no flashy suits. He sat dead still in a chair and spoke into the camera without ever moving his head or altering his blood pressure. More a scholar than an evangelist, he told his television audience about the Good News of Jesus Christ with the same energy and enthusiasm that doctors generally reserve for discussion of really bad hemorrhoids. My mom loved him. Sometimes he even had “live” guests, other old and suited and clinically depressed men who had devoted their lives to God.
    BBB: So. Dr. Brown.
    DR. BROWN:
    BBB: Your book,
New Life in the Old Testament
, just came out. Here it is. That’s a nice cover. From Agape Press.
    DR. BROWN: Yes.
    BBB: Have you always been interested in the Old Testament?
    DR. BROWN: Yes.
    BBB: Why is that?
    DR. BROWN: Well. Interesting that you should ask that question. I have always felt that . . . [there follows a pause so terrifying and extended that two corn crops fail] . . . our
roots,
as it were, as the people of the
cross,
begin with the
Hebrew
peoples—their fledgling relationship with . . .
God
. . .
;
their inability to abide by His
commandments;
their exile into
Egypt
and eventual passage into the
Promised Land
. . . Jesus Christ is, as it were, the
fulfillment
of the promises made to the Hebrew peoples in God’s
first
covenant.
    BBB : God’s first
. . .
    DR. BROWN: That being the Old Testament, of course.
    BBB : Of course.
    My dad would have gotten up long before the rest of us, in order to do his mysterious middle-of-the-night stuff, which seemed to include standing in the yard with the dogs and looking up at the sky while drinking instant coffee so hot his upper lip was always a scalded red. Sometimes he went into his tool shed and moved things around, just a little. He whistled. By the time I got up, miserable and furious, it was still dark outside and his day was half done.
    He watched Batsell Barrett Baxter with his arms crossed, his face lit up with a deep and sardonic amusement.
    “Whoa. Amen,” he’d say after a particularly bland but coherent point. Or my personal favorite, which he