Chinaberry Sidewalks (7 page)

Gone to Texas

J
.W. and Cauzette were married September 6, 1942, in Evansville, Indiana, where a marriage license could be obtained and the wedding performed in less than an hour. She was eighteen and in love; he was nineteen and in a hurry. After Sol T allowed five dollars for expenses and my father kicked in the few dollars he’d made splitting railroad ties, their justice-of-the-peace wedding came off without a hitch. “I got myself a dress and shoes and had a dollar and a quarter left over,” my mother once boasted of her trousseau. “Your daddy wore a suit he borrowed from one of the Starks boys that didn’t fit him, but I didn’t care. I thought he was the handsomest boy I’d ever seen.”

Iola and my mother’s brother-in-law, Westley Smith, made the trip to the altar with them. Westley, the only member of the extended family who owned an automobile, provided the transportation, and Iola graced the wedding party with her particular brand of perverse succor. Westley’s own marriage to my mother’s older sister was as short-lived as it was nasty. The notion that he was a man destined for higher rungs on the economic ladder, however, lingered long after their divorce, this to my least-favorite aunt’s chagrin. Given the family lore, I have no trouble imagining that he added a touch of class to my parents’ shoestring wedding. Iola was something else altogether.

“She made my life a livin’ hell,” my mother would say when recounting the early days of her marriage. “She hated me for takin’ her favorite boy. She told me right in front of your daddy’s face, I might get him for a while but she’d have him back before I knew it.”

It was under these conditions that she moved with her new husband into her in-laws’ dirt-floor farmhouse. “If it hadn’t been for Martin Crowell treatin’ me like I was something besides a farm animal, I’da never made it.”

My mother’s epileptic seizures further complicated her new life, and she lived in terror of what would happen if she were stricken in Iola’s presence. Yet on this matter she was given a reprieve, less than two weeks into their marriage, when my father fell sick with rheumatic fever.

“It was the first time I had my husband to myself,” she said. “Iola didn’t want nothin’ to do with him while he was sick. I never understood that. But I was glad she didn’t. He was so bad off. I took care of him day and night. His poor balls swelled up till we thought they was gonna bust open. They hurt him real bad. He run a temperature round the clock. When he started gettin’ a little better, we got him some crutches and started goin’ off by ourselves in the woods. It was some of the best times I ever had with your daddy. We talked and talked back then. He was so sick and handsome, and he was such a sweet boy once you got him away from Iola. I was so in love with him I coulda just died. I didn’t realize it till a long time later, but I didn’t have a single one of my spells while he was sick. I didn’t have time to. The next one I did have like to’ve killed me.”

After my father had recovered enough strength to go back to work on the farm, my mother’s greatest fear was made real: an attack with only Iola present to care for her. “ ‘Send for Momma’ is what I kept tellin’ her when I felt it comin’ on,” she explained, “but she just kept lookin’ at me like I was a knot on a log. She ran and fetched your daddy is what she did.” When they returned, my mother was lying semiconscious on the kitchen floor, the worst of the convulsions having passed. By her estimation, it was the closest he ever came to witnessing firsthand the hideousness of her affliction.

Two days later, Cauzette was back living with her mother and father, an arrangement that lasted into the summer of 1943. My father worked Monday through mid-Saturday on his father’s farm, then would ride a mule fifteen miles to spend Saturday night and all of Sunday with my mother. At three-thirty on Monday morning, he’d get up in order to be back at work by daybreak.

In August the couple went in search of a new life. First stop: a one-room log cabin near Paris, Tennessee. My father found work as a butcher’s apprentice, and by late fall they were living in a boardinghouse in Murray, Kentucky, where he was on the evening shift at the Tappan stove factory.

The previous fall and winter, my mother had experienced two failed pregnancies. “I couldn’t seem to carry a baby no more than fifteen minutes,” she told me. “And your daddy swore up and down I was losin’ ’em on purpose.” But she did finally manage to complete a full-term pregnancy, and Tex Edward was born on January 27, 1944. He died thirty-seven hours later.

Staring into some vacant yet familiar dreamscape, where the sharp pain of thirteen miscarriages is softened by visions of a heavenly playground for lost children, my mother, sifting through fractured images that documented her baby’s all too brief passage through this world, introduced me to my brother time and again. “Oh, he was beautiful, Rodney. He had a full head of curly black hair and the bluest eyes you ever seen. While I only got to hold him for a minute or two, I can still feel him to this day. They had me knocked out most of the time, but I could hear him cryin’ off in the next room. They said I almost died, too, and for a long time I wished I had. They never brought him back and nobody told me nothin’.”

My parents dutifully accepted no explanation as the official cause of their baby’s death. Years later, my mother admitted that at the time she’d never even heard of any such thing as a valid death certificate. So Tex Edward was buried in the Shady Grove Cemetery, and for fifty-three years the grave site was marked with a single red brick.

As a boy, I accepted the vagueness surrounding my brother’s death much as we recognize poetic license as an accepted contrivance in the shaping of family myth, and I suspended my disbelief. It was as if I were heir to some genetic predisposition toward unworthiness. Permission to ask about the medical particulars might have been granted to other people, but for a long time, like my parents, I assumed I wasn’t good enough to know.

The birth of my daughters shattered this delusion, and at my instigation my parents found themselves in a series of heated confrontations on the subject of Tex Edward’s death. Having begun to view the fog hovering over his nearly unmarked grave as a personal affront, I insisted on knowing what actually killed him. But my mother had no idea what had happened, or why, and showed no interest in wanting to. My father simply refused to acknowledge my questions.

Forty years after my brother’s death, frustration finally got the better of me.

“Goddamnit, don’t you want to know what the fuck happened? Don’t you think you deserve an explanation for the loss of your child? I sure as hell do.”

My mother fixed me evenly with her gaze and voice. “Rodney J. Crowell,” she said—apparently forgetting my profanity-laced vow to let her die before I’d nurse her through one more spell—“you’ve never talked to me like that in your life, and I’m not about to let you start now. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am, I hear you. I’m sorry,” I said, surprised by my own vitriol. “I meant no disrespect, but—”

“Yes, son, I do want to know,” my father volunteered unexpectedly, his tone a sure sign that these words came at no small price. “They ain’t been many days gone by that I didn’t wish to God I knew why. He was my boy, just like you … and I lost him. At the time my heart couldn’t bear knowing why, and neither could your momma’s. I went ahead and buried him but didn’t want to know why. You go on and find out for yourself, if that’s what you need to do. I’ll be knowing it soon enough.”

Not long after losing their son, my parents moved into a one-room apartment over a shoe-repair shop in Clarksville, Tennessee. My father found a job at Fort Campbell, but civilian work on a military base was a humiliating experience. A prideful young man, he felt compelled to explain to the soldiers he met that rheumatic fever had rendered him medically ineligible for military service. “I didn’t want folks thinkin’ I was afraid to be over there fightin’ ” is how he described his wartime shame. That job lasted five months.

Next came a six-month stint on a Detroit auto-assembly line. Throughout their time in Clarksville and Detroit, my mother endured a particularly agonizing period of epilepsy, and my father perfected his knack for being elsewhere when her seizures struck. “I had most of my convulsions alone,” she said, “or with people I didn’t even know.”

Just before Christmas in 1944, my parents took a Greyhound bus back to Murray, Kentucky. With her marriage in a nearly hopeless state of disrepair, moving her few belongings into a boardinghouse similar to the one where she’d carried her lost child was devastating. Living more or less alone with the sorrow of the past two years and with no place to go but down, she hit bottom,
hard
.

“My nerves just went out on me,” she explained decades later. “I didn’t really wanta die, but I figured your daddy mighta been relieved if I did.”

While my parents were living in Clarksville, my mother’s father had quit sharecropping for good and moved with my grandmother to Houston. There he found the job market as much to his liking as the duplex apartment they rented on Avenue P was to his wife’s.

When word reached them that my mother was languishing in William Mason Memorial Hospital’s psychiatric ward, showing little interest in recovering from an intentional phenobarbital overdose, my grandfather took the next train to Memphis, where he caught the bus to Murray. A day later, father and daughter boarded a train in Memphis that would finally deliver her from this hell on earth she swore she’d never go back to as long as she lived.

In the summer of 1945, my father hitchhiked to Houston and showed up at Sol T and Katie’s door with his suitcase and a Gibson guitar. Reconciliations were “nearly” instantaneous. When I say nearly, I mean this: Thirty-four months after the wedding, the father of the bride laid down the law about how he expected the groom to treat his daughter. Their showdown consisted of splitting a six-pack of beer and arguing about who made the better automobile, Packard or Plymouth. Neither of them owned a car.

As always, my father didn’t take long to find a job. With what he earned delivering ice, the newly reunited couple set up housekeeping in the vacant duplex adjacent to my grandparents’—the beginning of a five-year period when my mother had the only man she would ever love and the one person willing and able to nurse her through the growing stream of epileptic episodes literally under the same roof.

And between her seventh and eighth miscarriages, my mother managed another full-term pregnancy. I was born in August of 1950. Two months later, my parents moved half a block east on Avenue P into the little shotgun shack where my version of this story began on New Year’s Eve of 1955.

P
ART
T
WO

Altar Falters and Prayer Witches

I
t is a Sunday morning in the summer of 1955, and my mother’s literally dragging me to the Emmanuel Temple Pentecostal church services. She’s singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and I’m spewing bile about my feet, still hurting from last week’s trek. Hating these holy-rolling, speaking-in-unknown-tongues free-for-alls she loves so well, I do my best to make the trip more miserable than it already is. It’s a testament to her faith in an angry and kind and vengeful and loving God that she sees this two-mile slog with her son kicking and screaming as a small price to pay for salvation. Shouting, crying, dancing in the aisles, writhing on the floor, and bowing at the feet of charismatic evangelists, anything short of snake handling—it’s all a tonic for her troubled soul. We’re almost always on foot and it might be raining, but if the Emmanuel Temple’s doors are open, she’ll be there, and so will I. I’m learning to take it in stride.

In contrast to the knockoff Craftsman and raised-clapboard houses lining Wayside Drive, the Emmanuel Temple stands as the East End’s most exotic architectural structure. A grand, green-carpeted stairway leads from the sidewalk to its second-floor portico entrance. Behind its four arched double doorways and mock–Italian Renaissance façade, the temple boasts alternating pastors, Brother Modest and Brother Pemberton, locked in a high-stakes game of spiritual one-upmanship. Each lays down an Old Testament gauntlet no God-fearing member of the congregation will dare trespass for fear of turning into a pillar of salt.

My mother’s criteria for a church worthy of regular attendance are fairly basic. The congregants and preachers must refer to themselves as “Brother” or “Sister,” followed by their surname, identifying one another as members of the same spiritual family. The church must be within forty blocks of our house, that is, within walking distance. And, most important, the preacher must be inspirational. My mother has this to say about the only subject outside of raising me in which she’s at all decisive: “A preacher who ain’t on fire for the Lord ain’t no ’count.”

Brother Modest has Dean Martin’s smoothness and a wavy head of hair, as black and shiny as his shoes. He likes his shirts starched stiff and his neckties knotted tight. His suits, though off the rack, have a tailored quality that complements his buttery voice and sanctified diction. He seduces his flock of sinners with nuance and innuendo, his style equal parts politician, lounge singer, and used-car salesman. One by one, these poor souls empty their already virtually empty pockets into the offering plate before heading down front to press their noses against his gleaming footwear.

Accepting nothing short of total obedience, Brother Modest makes it known that he alone can dispense forgiveness on behalf of the Supreme Being. My mother and I march down front and fall to our knees, she with her eyes closed, enraptured, mumbling prayers punctuated by “Thank you, Jesus,” and me fidgeting to keep my eyes from popping open and giving me away as the heathen I prefer to be.

Interpreting unknown tongues and deciphering the messages hidden within is Brother Modest’s special talent. I don’t understand his references to Armageddon and Judgment Day looming like a Nazi border crossing around the next bend in the road, but sometimes I do enjoy the ensemble performances.

As if on cue, Sister Worthan or Kunkle or Crowell breaks out in spasms of heavenly nonsense, bringing Brother Modest vaulting from behind the pulpit. With one hand waving high in the air—a kind of spiritual lightning rod—he hovers over God’s chosen vessel and divines for his congregation the encoded reprimand concealed in such commentary as “Yea toma con kewly con rishney shalla lama cundullo shondalay.”

My mother has a schoolgirl crush on Brother Modest, whose unattainable charm and lofty posturing are irresistible to a farm girl with low self-esteem. I myself prefer Brother Pemberton’s rockabilly version of hellfire and damnation to his superior and slick approach.

Cut from the Jerry Lee Lewis mold, Brother Pemberton gives the impression that he might burst into flames at any moment. With his greasy pompadour spilling down over his eyes, his necktie flying, his shirt hanging halfway out of his pants, his face turned to the heavens like a satellite dish awaiting God’s direct signals, which once received will be spat at the congregation like bullets from a Gatling gun, Brother Pemberton in full flight is a sight to behold.

Attacking the congregants with direct accusation is his strong suit, and it’s his willingness to include himself in what he calls “this worthless heap of flesh with the nerve to call itself Christian” that makes his full-frontal assaults so effective. “We might be the sorriest bunch of sinners ever to walk through church-house doors,” he’d say (his favorite assessment of his Sunday morning assemblage), “but the thing that sets us apart from them watered-down institutions over yonder in River Oaks and Sharpstown is we got us a direct feed to the salvation hotline.”

Early in his sermons, Brother Pemberton implies he isn’t sure if he has enough pull with the Man Upstairs to keep us all from roasting in hell. This prepares the stage for his all-important battle for our salvation, a struggle from which, God willing, he will emerge scarred but victorious. He begins his petition on our behalf with a crack in his voice that matches the world-weariness in his soul. “Lord God sitting right now on Your heavenly throne, I come before You with a heart so burdened I can hardly bring myself to speak Thy holy name.” When it comes to making a voice sound like teardrops, there’s no one in Brother Pemberton’s league. “Lord God, You see us down here like lost sheep following in the footsteps of the one who would lead us straight through the gates of hell into everlasting servitude: Satan! Yes, Lord, Satan, the Prince of Darkness. I say unto You this very day, the Devil is a liar and will not steal this flock as long as I have air to breathe and life in my body.”

To italicize the dire circumstances we have allowed to befall us, and to bolster Brother Pemberton’s resolve to continue negotiations on our behalf, Sister Kunkle and my mother float the occasional “Forgive us, Lord” and “Help us, Jesus” from behind paper fans bearing a portrait of the long-suffering, blue-eyed Galilean who died all those years ago so that we could get away with what we now stand accused of.

“It was Thine own Son who gave us Your word, Lord God, that, if we but knock, the door will open, and if we but seek, we shall find.” At this point in his performance Brother Pemberton tends to rely on stock biblical rhetoric, but I don’t mind. He’s a strong closer and needs the filler to prolong the precariousness of our situation and set up his big finish. “In Ezekiel, chapter thirty-seven, verse twenty-three, You said: ‘Neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions: but I will save them out of all their dwellingplaces, wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them: so shall they be my people, and I will be their God.’ ”

He pauses, and the congregation nods in recognition that two important questions have just been answered: Yes, he knows his scriptures; and no, it’s not just some chump off the street who’s conducting these high-level talks with the Creator of the Universe.

“You see before You this morning a little church full of lost sheep, Lord God. We are knocking on the door of Your forgiveness, seeking the answer to this question: Are we too late in asking that in Your name we be spared from becoming the instruments of Satan’s ill will?” This part confuses the hell out of me, since it was my understanding that we’d already been signed up and were playing first string on the Devil’s team. “It is by Thy grace alone that we will be allowed back into the garden of everlasting light, nevermore to wander in darkness.” “Amen’s” pop up here and there, sure signs of solidarity in the pews, every last sinner supporting the preacher’s proposal for our rehabilitation.

When he feels the flock is his to do with what he will, Brother Pemberton rewards our sheepishness with one of his world-class altar falters. Depending on the severity of our transgressions, there are two basic variations. Leaning against the podium while fluttering his eyelids is the go-to falter for mid- to upper-level transgressions, and asthmatic gasps from as far away as the back row—and it’s a known fact that my mother would rather take rabies shots than be caught sitting there—confirm its effects on the congregation. But whenever truly
rampant
iniquity looms, he slumps against the organ with his eyes rolled back in their sockets and tears at his shirt collar and necktie in nearly suffocating panic, and this never fails to bring a stunned silence to the Emmanuel Temple.

Much of Brother Pemberton’s success in the salvation business is based on the principle that when a church full of reprobates is reeling from the effects of a shared hallucination, there will be silence in the pews. And when there’s silence in the pews, there are sheep to be led. His illusionist’s skill is so finely honed that with a simple shudder or twitch he can convince an entire congregation that it has just witnessed his soul take wing and fly from the shell of his weary body. Milling around in the lobby after church, I’ve heard grown men and women claim to have seen gold, white, and silvery-blue light streaming out of the top of Brother Pemberton’s head. One woman saw seven angels arrive to assist in his untimely departure. Another swore the hand of God reached down through the ceiling to take him on home.

Despite having seen Brother Pemberton’s altar falters performed perhaps twenty-five times, I still have no idea how a packed audience can go fifteen minutes without drawing a breath. Although I prefer the subtlety of his subliminal sketches to his broad, stage-two brushstrokes, my appreciation of the showmanship involved in shocking sinners senseless is complete. Creating a life-and-death situation out of something as mundane as lying about your age isn’t easily done; it takes energy, dedication, vision, and will. If an evangelistic hall of fame exists, James Pemberton should be voted in on the inspired audacity of this act alone. I’m a total fan.

Then, before the altar falter can claim its victim, Sister Conn races from the front row, her arms outstretched, as if to snatch the preacher from the clutches of the angel of death. But with the same shrug of the shoulder he used the week before last, she’s sent skulking back to the pews, a wilted symbol of collective shame. (Why she volunteers for this humiliation always puzzles me.)

Whether he’s turning his back to us or on us is open to interpretation. We know our boneheaded refusal to walk the straight and narrow has brought calamity on our fearless leader, and being left to stew in the juices of our own demise suggests that on this occasion Brother Pemberton might
not
hurl a Hail Mary that saves our bacon just as time runs out. We also know that when you’re facing an eternity of roasting like a marshmallow in the bonfires of hell, it’s not a good idea to infuriate your lead defense counsel; so it doesn’t bode well that this Sunday’s written prayer requests focus on gambling debts, washing-machine repair, new cars, and tawdry love triangles. What we don’t know is how long he’ll be lost in limbo or even if, in fact, he’ll ever make it back to finish arguing our case in the Lord God’s high court.

Besides meditating on the relative state of our disrepair, the other activity sanctioned by Brother Pemberton during “the silence” is the flurry of paper Jesus fans. This is a good idea. Redistributing the heat of a summer Sunday morning gives us a preview of what hell will be like if he’s unsuccessful in getting the charges against us dropped. Aside from a “Thank you, Jesus” or two, the pews remain as quiet as a morgue.

But considering the current state of our affairs, thanking Jesus just now strikes me as presumptuous. As to whether or not we’re all going to hell, it’s my understanding the votes aren’t all in, so the possibility of being forgiven for our sins in advance is cause for serious head-scratching. Comforting though it might seem, if indeed we’ve already been forgiven, why put us through the wringer every Sunday morning?

Though it appears that Brother Pemberton might already have crossed over to the Promised Land, he still has his finger on the pulse of his congregation and knows exactly when the last holdouts are ready to accept a Pentecostal plea bargain. In the stillness of this deathwatch, ninety-one panic attacks rage in silence, and unauthorized prayers rise toward the heavens like helium balloons:
Please, God, don’t let this soldier of salvation fall on the rusty sword of our sins. I promise I won’t cuss, lie, cheat, steal, drink beer or whiskey, smoke cigarettes, take Thy name in vain, drive fast, covet my neighbor’s wife, bear false witness, you name it, I’ll never do it again.… Please, just let Brother Pemberton live
. Quarters destined for the offering plate become dollar bills. Old men and children who have come to the service with no intention of kneeling at the altar and accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior are now honor-bound to bow at the foot of the Old Rugged Cross. Men my father’s age, whose wives have dragged them as many blocks as my mother has hauled me, now droop in red-handed resignation. Come Wednesday night, sporting dress shirts and clean shaves, they’ll be parked near the front row, three hours away from firing up their next Lucky Strike.

Something stirs the eerie calm, identifying itself quietly, distantly, like the rustling of leaves or some faraway freight train at three a.m. The flutter of Brother Pemberton’s eyelids sends ripples across the room. Signs of life emerge from the pulpit, slowly at first, then gaining in strength, speed, and resolve. The faithless gasp and reverse their field now that hope glimmers guardedly in the Emmanuel Temple. Sighs of relief reach the back row. Like Noah’s dove, our faithful petitioner has returned alive, olive branch in hand, to confirm there is air to be breathed, light to be seen, souls to be saved, a Devil to rebuke, and woods to be gotten out of. Damn the doomsday doldrums, change is in the air. The Grim Reaper beats an empty-handed retreat, and Brother Pemberton lives to carry on the fight.