Mississippi Sissy (29 page)

“That's a real German shep-uhd,” Reverend Graham finally said as the giant canine nudged my little brother all the way to the ground. Kim protected his Canon from the dog and continued to click away. The old man there in his lens—his famous profile proffered for yet another stranger—turned and peered up past the Smokies. He
smoothed his white hair back with one quick, tremored sweep of his flattened palm, then gathered Johnny Cash's old jean jacket more snugly about his infirm body. The shepherd continued its close watch as Kim saw a grin quickly flicker across Graham's face—a click captured it—with the same devilish glee that his wife had displayed earlier when he walked into the kitchen. “That dog there sniffing at you only
seems
tame,” he said. “He's really a trained kill-ah who could tear your throat out on command. We had to get guard dogs and increase security back in the sixties when things got bad up here. Death threats and all. Especially after Dr. King's assassination.”

The devilishness, though not the glee, just as quickly vanished from Reverend Graham's face and he once more silently peered up past those Smokies to a place he'd been peering at his whole life. The shepherd was finally satisfied the old man was safe. Ruth, satisfied also, remained at the window, now watching neither the life passing in front of her nor the life that had not, but beginning to see more clearly (the commissioning of that bust by Kim over by the hearth was perhaps her acceptance of this) the life that would never be. Her husband turned to her and smiled at how she still was able to surprise him. She smiled back. What passed between them—tearless, eternal—could not be sculpted.

________________

Dr. Graham. Dr. King. RFK. Maya Angelou. Arlene Francis. Toni Morrison. Eudora Welty. Katherine Anne Porter. All of them played significant roles in my growing up in Mississippi. But there was another person, Dr. Andrew F. Gallman, who was not as famous as they, not as accomplished, but who played an even more important role in my life. Once a Methodist minister in Mississippi, he had become the director of development for Asbury College when I met him. Asbury is a conservative “Christ-centered” school in Wilmore, Kentucky,
that states in its “mission purpose” that the school is guided “by the classical tradition of orthodox Christian thought. Central to this endeavor is a clear affirmation of the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as God's infallible and authoritative word.” Dr. Gallman's job at the college back then—this would have been during my seventh- and eighth-grade years—entailed his traveling to states throughout the South and raising the college's endowment by visiting churches (mostly Methodist) as well as rich business leaders with the same “Christ-centered” bent who might want to donate to the school's coffers.

Some in Mississippi insisted that Dr. Gallman was as good a stemwinder as Billy Graham, and he still preached from time to time when called upon. One of his sons, a brainy sort who was a linguist who had been called by God to interpret the Bible into languages as yet to be transcribed, had asked a first cousin of mine to marry him, and after their wedding they were headed off to the jungles of the Philippines and later Brazil to be linguistic missionaries, the two of them turning newfound yet ancient tongues into the numbered chapters and verses of Deuteronomy and Acts and Leviticus. My grandmother was thrilled not only because her eldest grandchild was getting married, but because she was entering into such a God-fearing and dedicatedly Christian family. Always a fervent Methodist, Mom had heard Dr. Gallman preach at several churches around the state before he took up his bureaucratic position at Asbury. The idea that her granddaughter was marrying his son “uplifts my soul,” she told me when making sure to pass on to me her deep respect for the man. Ever since she had witnessed my counter-grabbing conversion in our kitchen, or whatever it was that had happened there during that Billy Graham crusade, Mom had taken a keen interest in my spiritual well-being. She passed along her
Guidepost
magazines to me and pointed out verses in the Bible that meant the most
to her. “Jesus has got a plan up his sleeve for you, honey,” she said more than once. “I can sense it. Them solos you used to sing with Grace Speed when you was a boy soprano at Trinity was just the beginnin'. We get that stutter of yours cured—time we claimed a healin' for that anyway—I bet you could near ‘bout preach as good as Dr. Gallman. Shoot! Billy Graham hisself better watch out, I'm tellin' you. That's one thing this family could use, seein' as all the funerals that keep a'comin' our way—a readymade preacher. Somebody we could have on call, like Doc Townsend.”

When Mom heard that Dr. Gallman himself was going to officiate at her granddaughter's wedding she was beside herself with joy that she would get to know the man in a more personal way. Then, when word came that he had accepted an invitation to preach, in the days before the wedding, at a revival meeting at her old Methodist church out in Harperville, across from the family cemetery, all the physical aftershocks of her recent stroke seemed to lift. She was newly energized and made sure we were there for his inaugural sermon, making a pit stop at my parents' graves and saying our first prayer of the evening before settling into a pew. I was nervous about attending the revival. With Mom's build-up of the man, I began to believe that Dr. Gallman, once he met me, would see right through me. Though I had been living as godly a life as I could after Billy Graham's Madison Square Garden altar call, I still wasn't sure about the whole born-again experience those around me presumed I had had. But instead of focusing on that, or perhaps because of such doubts, I busied myself with helping start a Christian youth coffee house in the rambling old antebellum mansion that had sat vacant for years next to Trinity Methodist Church's sanctuary. Some had suggested that the almost dilapidated dwelling was haunted but I had long ago gotten over my fear of such places. I had come to accept, after all that had happened to me, including a bit of prompting from Matty May I could never
quite shake, that “haunted” was, in fact, the best way to describe my life. “Lawd be, child. Why you carry on like you done at that carnival?” Matty had asked me after Mom told her what had happened that night. “Witches ain't supposed to carry on like that around folkses. Folkses is supposed to carry on like that around witches. When you comes right down to it—Matty be right about dis—yo' mama'n'-daddy is haints. A boy with haints for his mama'n'daddy ain't got no right to such foolishness. Haints is what loves ya. You shouldn't—ahwoe!—boo-hoo at nothin' that says boo at ya, child. Might be Miz Nan and that fine husband a'hern just a'sayin' hello.”

Haints or not, I was excited about fixing up the old mansion and even came up with a name for the place: House of the Rising Son. We hosted visiting youth choirs there and served refreshments and had group discussions about what sorts of things kids my age might be unduly influenced by during those days—Vietnam protesters,
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice,
tabs of LSD, Boone's Farm wine. One Saturday night a duo called the Two Lynns arrived from Jackson and entertained us, one of them, the Liza Minnelli look-alike, catching my eye and engaging me in whispered conversation in one of the house's corners. We joked about our matching shag haircuts and confided to each other that we really wanted to go into show business, a different kind of missionary field but one that held us in its thrall. I loved hanging out there and singing Christian folk songs. My favorite was “Pass It On.” Its first lyric, “It only takes a spark to get a fire going,” was appropriate, for the House of the Rising Son lasted only a matter of months before it burned to the ground. “Faulty wiring is as good a guess as any, is what the fire chief said,” my grandfather told me when he broke the news to me. “The good Lord's too busy these days with all that's going on in the world to stoop to electrical work, I guess.” He drove me up to the remains of the place the next morning, parking our old blue square-fendered Plymouth Fury III beneath the oak that towered over the front lawn. The smoldering sight broke my
healing heart. When we got out of the car, Pop put his hand on my shoulder like he had done when I stood at my mother's open casket. It did seem like something had died. And, like at that casket, I felt the stirrings of the Witch Boy well up inside me, for I did not feel sorrow but anger at what I was seeing. I did not want to pray. I wanted to incant, to retrieve those black-magic sounds I had placed beneath my mother's pillow in her coffin now buried out there in Harperville, and sling them into the smoke that still stubbornly billowed in isolated pockets of scorched lumber. A bluejay, a scavenger's sense of tragedy no doubt guiding its wings, alighted on the hood of our Plymouth. I wondered if it were a sign and decided it was just a bird.

Dr. Gallman had a rather avian look himself that first night of the revival at Harperville Methodist where he sat perched in the high-backed chair behind the pulpit waiting to start his sermon. I tried not to stare at him but every time he turned his head in front of the choir loft my heart jumped a bit, like some frightened field mouse, at his hawklike profile. Though not as handsome as Billy Graham, Dr. Gallman still possessed the magnetism that all great preachers possess. They hold you, such preachers, in their physical sway even as they appeal to your spiritual hunger. I watched him—gray-haired, a little over sixty years old, I estimated, that beaklike nose of his seeming to be sniffing the very air in the church now for lost souls—as he surveyed this little country congregation to whom he was about to preach. I did not so much sense condescension as I did some profound recognition on his part. At that very moment, his eyes came to rest on me and did not move on to anybody else. Just as I had thought. He was seeing right into me, spotting the vestiges of my witchery. Yet he did not seem bothered by what he was seeing. A grin—a bit more devilish than the one that years later would flicker across Billy Graham's face when that German shepherd found Kim's shoulder—parted almost imperceptibly the somber set of his lips. Had he just nodded my way? I blushed at the thought of his acknowledgment.

A hymn was announced and we all stood to sing it before he took his place behind the pulpit. Once there, he asked us all to bow our heads in prayer. I always kept my head bowed in church back then until I heard the requisite amen, but this one time I opened my eyes early, thinking I could steal a glance at him. When I looked up he was still staring right at me as the rote words of his prayer were rounding their preacher-like bend to his pronouncement of “in God's name we pray; amen.” Heads lifted and he, in turn, lifted a huge notebook into the air over his head and slammed it to the floor. I jumped at the sound of the thing hitting the platform where he stood, a sharp purposeful report like that of the starting gun brandished by my junior high track coach. Dr. Gallman's voice, full-throated, thrilling in its sonorous reaches, took off at full sprint toward its own finish line. “I was prepared to preach a whole other sermon,” he said. “Had it written out right there in that book,” he thundered, pointing to the leather-bound holder, its pages having come undone from the ringed binder and now spread in disarray all over the floor around him. “But the Holy Ghost is moving me tonight to talk about a whole other subject. I hope you'll bear with me and humor an old preacher glad to be home in Mississippi, back where he belongs. Being here at this little country church has brought back memories of my own orphaned childhood, when I was raised by a grandmama who would bring me to a church just like this one, where I first accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” Sweat was already appearing on his forehead. The energy he was emitting that night, as he improvised his way through his sermon, was that of a much younger man. I sat there mesmerized by how similar our stories were, how he had once felt as lost as I was feeling, how he had gone through the motions of “being the good boy that everyone expected me to be but knew deep down that all that goodness was just something I could keep pouring into that empty bottomless hole in my soul,” which was a pretty good description, as far as I could tell, for my “Jesus-freakiness.” It was as if the sermon
were being tailored especially for me. By the end of it, when he made the invitation to “come and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, let Him fill up that empty hole in your soul with grace, not goodness,” I was the first one up and moving down the aisle. My heart had not pounded so since that day I made my way to Miss Ishee's office to hear the news I knew awaited me of my mother's death. I knelt at the altar that night and wept with relief. This, I was certain now, was what being born again felt like. Dr. Gallman kicked those pages on the floor out of his way and crouched before me on the other side of the altar. He held me in his arms, held me like he knew he was going to hold me since that first moment he saw me sitting on that pew. He had targeted my soul that night. No doubt about it. He whispered over and over in my ear as I continued to weep, “Let it out, son, let Jesus love you, let it out, Jesus loves you, let Him love you, let it out, let Him in, let it out, let Him in.” He rocked me to and fro. I was saved. I had never been surer of anything in my life.

In the months that followed, Dr. Gallman and I carried on a stilted though heartfelt correspondence. He would write me from bucolic retreats he referred to as “Christian ashrams” on his many postcards from the Smoky Mountains. He told me such retreats were filled with young boys like me who lived in tents for a few days and became one with nature as well as with God. As the correspondence continued, he wrote in even more detail in sealed letters about how alike we two were, based on our life stories, how he understood me in ways that most adults could not, how he knew in the deepest part of his own soul what I was going through because he had once gone through it also, how we could always trust one another, no matter what, how I was not to show those letters to another person, not even my grandmother. “The postcards are for both you and her, but the letters are just between you and me. And God,” he wrote. He sent me Bible verses to study. He loved the book of Proverbs. Two of his favorite verses were from the eighteenth chapter. “Death and life are in the
power of the tongue” was one. The other: “A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself.” After he wrote the latter one to me, he signed the letter: Your foolish, Dr. Gallman (Andy). I studied the letters every night, reading them over and over, then turned to the Bible and read his recommended sections. In so doing, I felt closer to God. And him.