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

lasted most of the afternoon. When I was small, I sometimes napped with him, although I slept very little, because he snored. So I lay there, watching his belly rise and fall, watching the curtains lift in the sluggish air, pulling the tangled covers up, then pushing them down. My aunt and uncle’s mattress was so old that it had conformed to the shapes of their bodies, which left me imagining that I had fallen into the trough of a wave that would never swell, never crest. If I got up, my aunt forbade me to make noise. This was the only time she was ever strict with me (unlike my mother, my aunt never coached me in how to behave; the only pieces of advice she ever gave me—always read with a good light, and mind your posture, and you’ll be glad you did when you get older—were practical and down to earth, and even now, when I find myself backsliding, I hear her voice correcting me). I was forbidden to do much of anything on Sunday,because, Aunt Melita explained, it was the Lord’s day and a day of rest. God didn’t want us to do anything that day but appreciate his creation. There were strict rules about all this in the Bible. If your ox fell in a ditch, you could haul him out. If you fell into the ditch, you had to stay there. I spent most of my Sundays feeling as though I had fallen into a ditch, and wishing I had an ox.
    I liked two things about church. I liked the sanctuary, with all that space rising up to the roof and the stained-glass windows that showered the parishioners with little flecks of colored light. And I loved the music, especially the hymns, and of those I favored the ones with brisk tempos: “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” “For the Beauty of the Earth,” “This Is My Father’s World.” When we sang, with the women around us doing their best to find the melody and the men just rumbling along somewhere in the bass register, I came as close as I would ever come to that feeling you were supposed to have of Christ entering your body and taking possession of your soul. It was, to use a church word, an exalted feeling. It is my oldest and closest connection to the spiritual realm.
    Throughout my childhood, I tried hard to be obedient, to walk in the path of Jesus and to obey the commandments. I said my prayers every night before bed. I loved my red leather Bible with my name stamped in gold letters on the cover, even if I never looked inside much, except to stare at the handful of black-and-white photographs of the Holy Land—sere, rocky landscapes that made me wonder how it had gotten so run-down looking. But I was never a perfect little scholar in the temple, like Jesus. I had my lapses. It grieved me, I think, even more than it worried myaunt and uncle, that I could never memorize even the kindergarten version of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
Who made you? God. What else did God make? God made all things
. After that, I stumbled. My uncle subscribed to a magazine called
The Christian Observer
, and every issue carried letters from children writing in to Dear Mr. Converse, announcing that they had memorized their Catechism. Sometimes my uncle would read those letters aloud, as an incentive to get me through the chore, but they just made me feel worse. There were kids out there who could do what I couldn’t, and they weren’t even preachers’ kids. Religion wasn’t their family business. I made sure to compensate for that failure at Sunday school. When we sat in a circle and were asked in turn for sentence prayers, I always had one ready. Whenever a teacher wanted to know who Zacheus was or the story behind Naboth’s vineyard, my hand was the first one up. I knew about the Woman at the Well, Benjamin’s cup, the Seven Foolish Virgins and the miracle at Cana (though this was not a story often told, for while it records Jesus’ first miracle, it also involves wine—my aunt got around this awkward fact by explaining to me that wine in the Bible wasn’t what we knew as wine, but