Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

people called my uncle Preacher Bryan. But no matter how hot it got, I kept my coat on. I felt like an alien in those homes, and I was ready to leave the minute we got there.
    My introduction to the alphabet as a group of letters that could be rearranged into words came from watching my uncle open the glass front on the display case in the front yard of the church, take the white-painted metal letters off the board and replace them with letters that spelled out the name of next Sunday’s sermon. We did this at the end of every week. It was a routine, just part of the job, the same way my uncle’s nap after lunch on Sunday was part of the job: Sunday was the day he worked hardest: putting on his uniform, a black robe that fell almost to his ankles (and with a purple sash over his shoulders on special days, like communion Sundays and Easter service), going out and running the church service, delivering the sermon and then sending people back into the world with a handshake and a few words at the church door when the service had ended. That was his job, that was what he did, and by extension, it was what we all did.
    Sunday was always the longest day of the week, because I knew ahead of time what was going to happen and the order in which it would unfold. Getting dressed took forever, because I had to get dressed
up:
coat, tie, hard-soled shoes, the works. When I was very small, my mother liked to dress me in caps that matched my jacket, and once she bought me a shirt with French cuffs and made me wear cuff links. After I got my church uniform on, the real torture began. My shirt collar chafed my neck. My shoes, always stiff because I wore them only once a week, hurt my feet. My wool coat itched where it rubbed my skin. That made church tick by even more slowly. I always sat with my aunt and my father, when he was around (same spot every Sunday: three-quarters of the way back, on the far left of the sanctuary). Mother was in the choir, and Uncle Tom was preaching. Sitting still for an hour was hard, especially the last twenty minutes, because that was when Uncle Tom would deliver his sermon. Everything that led up to that was tolerable, because there was a lot of standing up and sitting down: there were hymns, there was the choir’s anthem and sometimes a solo during the offertory, there were responsive readings, the Lord’s Prayer and the Doxology. Then came the sermon. This was long before preachers felt compelled to offer some entertainment for the children in the audience. When I was little, there were no such concessions. You were expected to sit there politely while the preacher talked, and if you “acted up,” you got a spanking when you got home. I was allowed to fill the time by drawing. I must have copied Warner Sallman’s head of Christ a thousand times. Mostly I drew Revolutionary War soldiers fighting the British. With half an ear, I kept track of where Uncle Tom was in his sermon. I have no idea if he was a compelling preacher or not (my mother complained that he read hissermons). He certainly never threatened anyone with hellfire or in any way questioned the sincerity of his congregation—faith, in our family, was a given; doubt and ambiguity did not exist, which left me, years later, singularly unprepared to deal with these pitfalls as an adult. Best of all, he never ran long: he had people out the door and on the way to Sunday dinner at the stroke of noon every Sunday. He had no sense of irony or self-mockery about what he did for a living, but in an unguarded moment, he once told me that getting people out the door by noon was all most people wanted in a preacher.
    After church, we all went out to eat, which meant standing in line at the K&W cafeteria or waiting at the Town Steak House to get a table, then waiting for the food to come, then more waiting for everyone else to finish eating. And then time seemed to stop completely, especially if I found myself back at Tom and Melita’s. Uncle Tom’s nap