Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones Read Free Book Online

liked being fooled (this was, after all, the first time I had ever fallen in love with anything). And realizing that, I understood something else: I wanted to fool other people in the same way. (I was affected with a similar feeling the first time I saw a magic show a year later, but there I realized immediately that no real magic was going on. The whole transaction between magician and audience was like that between a pitcher and batter: it was about skill and deception, and both parties were in on it together.) These tattered things, strung up and marched through a story whose ending was known to everyone in the audience before they took their seats, were capable of summoning not just a willing but a craven, abject suspension of disbelief. In the six or seven seconds that it took to rise out of sight, it really had been a magical beanstalk ascending to heaven. And that curtained proscenium—it didn’t matter that it was stained, faded, patched and repatched—was like a door I could walk through, and once I had crossed the threshold, I never wanted to leave.

  The Family Business  
    “Let us pray.” Every Sunday at 11:55 a.m., those words brought me out of my trance as surely as if Uncle Tom had said, “When I count to three, you will wake up and remember none of what just happened.” “Let us pray” was the unvarying tagline with which he ended his sermons. Now it was time to sing the last of the three hymns that punctuated every service. The hymns were my favorite part. But while we sang, I kept one eye on my uncle. When he took his pocket watch off the pulpit and clipped it back on its chain, I knew for sure church was over.
    Religion was the family business. That’s the way I thought of it growing up. Until I was eight, when Uncle Tom and Aunt Melita moved away from Winston-Salem, I spent so much time under their roof that I felt as much a part of their household as I did my own, maybe more so. They both stayed home all day, my aunt in the house, cooking and cleaning, my uncle in his study, a small pine-paneled room crowded with an enormous desk, three or four filing cabinets, a big red leather armchair overflowing with papers, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering two walls, theshelves packed with thick, uniform, leather-bound books connected to my uncle’s work (or so I supposed, since I never knew him to open one). The study was my favorite room. I liked to go there while my uncle worked and sit in the big chair and draw on scrap paper, of which he had an endless supply. On days when he wasn’t typing letters, he and I would switch places sometimes, and he would let me roll a sheet of paper into his old LC Smith typewriter and pretend to type. This was before I learned to read, but all the same, my first memory of writing is the pleasure I took in that sharp clack when the metal key slammed into the paper and left the imprint of a letter.

    During the school year, while my parents were at work, I spent every weekday with my aunt and uncle. I watched my aunt cook and helped her roll out dough for pie crust. I went with her to put water in the birdbath, and she taught me how to plant seeds for zinnias. I watched my uncle prepare his sermons. I rode alongwith him on his hospital visits, and his visits to the radio station to drop off announcements. After weddings and funerals, I watched him search his desk for the well-thumbed notebook in which he recorded every nuptial and burial he had ever conducted, noting the names and dates with the methodical precision of a bank teller tallying up the contents of his cash drawer. Sometimes I accompanied him when he called on his parishioners in their homes, where I remember sitting alone on a series of sofas in tiny living rooms while I waited for him to check on the sick or make his condolences to a widow. In the winter, it was always too hot in those closed-in little rooms that always smelled of last night’s dinner, burnt coffee and cigarettes and where the