The Dirty Parts of the Bible (2 page)

Mama didn’t answer. Father repeated his question, louder and more forcefully. “Where did we go wrong?”

Still no answer. But I could almost hear the sound of gears clanking in Father’s head as he marshaled his arguments, preparing to strike.

“Ours is a Christian family,” he began, his voice booming as though he were in church. “We do things different from the rest of the world. And one of the ways we honor God is by keeping the Sabbath. That’s not just a suggestion—no, sir. It’s one of God’s great commandments.”

When Father paused to reload, Mama sighed. “Tobias is almost twenty years old,” she said. “It’s time for him to make his own decisions.”

“As long as the boy is under my roof he is under my discipline,” Father shot back. “A child is like an unruly tree—in order to grow up straight, he must be pruned. ‘Raise up a child in the way he should go, and he will not depart from it.’”

I knew I was in trouble whenever he started quoting Scripture.

“He’s not a child,” Mama said.

“Dishonoring the Sabbath is grave enough,” Father continued. “But that’s not my only concern. The boy has grown despondent—dull to the things of the Lord. He doesn’t study the Scriptures. Why, the only thing he reads on Sunday is the funny papers. He fritters away his time on—”

“Tobias is a good boy,” Mama said. “All he needs is a wife. When he starts a family of his own, he’ll see—”

“And where will he find a Christian wife, if not in church? You suppose he’ll find a suitable helpmate at the lake? ”

An iron skillet clanged against the sink. “You didn’t find
me
in church.”

“And look what happened,” Father said. “I was wrong.”

“Wrong about what?”

“Wrong to look for a wife at a place of amusement instead of in the Lord’s house. We’ve made do, Ada, and I’ve repented of my past. But—it wasn’t in God’s will for me to marry you.”

There was a long silence. Mama walked over to icebox and lifted out a chicken to thaw.

I suspect that Father regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth, but there was no going back now. And so he barreled forward, throwing out Bible verses like hand grenades.

“Who is the head of this home? ‘Wives, be ye subject to your husbands, for the husband is the head of the wife.’ You’ve flaunted my authority, coddled that boy, and let him do as he pleases. ‘A father that spareth the rod hateth his child.’ I will not sit idly by while my son goes to hell in—”

I heard a great thud and then a crash, followed by the sound of a frozen chicken wobbling over the floor. Father scrambled towards the door, pursued by shattering plates and cups. I froze to my bed, my heart pounding so hard I couldn’t breathe.

Outside, the Plymouth roared to life. Father tore out of the drive, tires spitting gravel, while Mama yelled after him: “Go to hell, you damn-blasted son of a bitch!

For having sworn only once before, Mama sure was good at it.

CHAPTER 2

F
ROM
downstairs, I heard Mama sweeping up the broken dishes. I thought about going down to see if she was all right, but I couldn’t bring myself to move.

I kept thinking over Father’s words. He was right—my life was aimless. But what was there for me in Remus? My friends had all split town, jumping trains bound for Detroit or wherever else work might be found.

Though he never said it outright, I got the feeling that Father wanted me to follow in his footsteps and go to seminary. Becoming a preacher was the last thing I wanted to do, and no cow had kicked me upside the head to convince me otherwise.

What did I want out of life? Only one thing, really. To make love to a beautiful girl before the Rapture. Which didn’t leave much time; according to Father, the End Times began the day they lifted Prohibition. Any minute now, Jesus was liable to come bursting out of the clouds on a white horse, sword in hand, ready to wreak some vengeance.

My worst fear was that I’d finally find a girl, we’d tie the knot, and
then
, on our wedding night—just when she was about to drop her dress—Jesus would come riding in on that infernal horse and whisk us up to heaven, where we’d be like angels and never get to have sex.

There was no need to worry about that anymore, thanks to Lars Lundgren. Now the only girls left in town were clunkers like Hulda Thrune.

As far as occupations went, my secret ambition was to be a newspaper cartoonist. Every week, I’d go down to Bob’s Barber Shop and salvage the old comic sections out of the wastebasket.
Mutt and Jeff
,
Krazy Kat
,
Bringing Up Father
,
The Katzenjammer Kids
,
Popeye
—I loved them all. I made up my own comics about the misadventures of a tall, skinny fellow named Augustus Beanpole. He was always bumping into things and getting his head knocked off. I couldn’t draw much more than stick figures, but that’s all I needed for Mr. Beanpole.

Father didn’t approve. He held that the Bible was the only thing worth reading. Made-up stories were just that—lies. And newspapers were worthless. “If you really want to know what’s happening in the world,” he’d say, “read the Book of Revelation.”

When I was a boy, Father would tuck me into bed and read to me every night. Other children got to hear a fairy tale or adventure story as they drifted off to sleep. I got Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

For all the Scripture I was subjected to, you’d think I would have known the whole Bible, frontwards and back. But, I came to find out, there were some parts of the Bible that Father never read.

+ + +

One Sunday during church, when I was about twelve years old, I was sitting next to Eddie Quackenbush. In the middle of the sermon, Eddie poked me in the ribs and whispered, “Did you know that the Bible talks about Mrs. Pike?” (Mrs. Pike was our Sunday school teacher.) I tried to ignore him, but Eddie shoved his Bible under my nose and pointed to these words:

We have a sister,

and she hath no breasts.

My eyes about popped out of their sockets. I grabbed Eddie’s Bible to see what book those words were in.
Song of Solomon
. Huh—twelve years of sermons and nightly Bible readings, and I’d never heard of
that
book.

Suddenly, I took an intense interest in Scripture study. That night, after Father finished with the usual selection from Ezra or Ezekiel and snuffed out the lamp, I lit a candle and opened my Bible to the Song of Solomon. I started at the first page, to see if this little book had any other interesting verses. God rewarded my curiosity.

A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me;

he shall lie all night between my breasts.

For me, there was no greater revelation than finding breasts in the Bible. I’d have sooner expected to find beer at a Baptist picnic. And yet, the Song of Solomon was practically bursting with breasts!

Thy stature is like to a palm tree,

and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.

I said, “I will go up to the palm tree;

I will take hold of the boughs thereof.”

Wherever I turned, there they were—swelling like ripe fruit, rising like towers, leaping like twin gazelles.

Thy breasts are like two young fawns,

twins of a gazelle, that frolic among the lilies.

I’d read some pretty racy stuff in
Cowboy Love Tales
, but no romance-writer that ever lived had anything on King Solomon.

I wrote down all the juiciest verses and stashed them in my secret lock-box—the rusty medicine chest I kept hidden in a hollow tree stump out back of our house. At that time, my other treasures consisted of a few half-smoked cigarettes and a dirty comic book called “Tillie the Typist After Hours.”

A year or so later, I added the crowning gem to my collection. Nosing around the rail yards one afternoon, I found it in an old boxcar, probably left there by a tramp. It was a photograph of a real, live, naked lady, stretched out on a fancy rug with her arm up behind her head. She must have been French, because she had more hair under her arm than I did.

That picture awakened new longings in me—longings I didn’t even know my body was ready for. And so, with visions of the French Lady in my head, I started rubbing myself between the legs and spilling my seed. I’d heard about this from other boys—jerking off, slapping the snake, choking the chicken, whacking the weasel. Now I knew what all the fuss was about.

I never dreamed of my true love, Emily Apple, when I did it. My intentions towards Emily were as pure as a saint’s. But the French Lady was my mistress.

Mama kept a stack of women’s medical books in her bottom dresser drawer, and sometimes I’d peek at them when my parents were out of the house. That’s how I learned words like
ova
,
semen
, and
vulva
—along with more disturbing words like
vaginal discharge
and
menstruation
. One of these books warned about boys like me:

Teach your boy that when he handles or excites the sexual organs, all parts of the body suffer. This is why it is called “self-abuse.” The sin is terrible, and is, in fact, worse than lying or stealing. For, although these are wicked and will ruin the soul, self-abuse will ruin both soul and body. This loathsome habit lays the foundation for consumption, paralysis, and heart disease. It makes many boys lose their minds; others, when grown, commit suicide.

That put the fear of God in me. I tried my best to kick the loathsome habit; one Sunday during the altar call, I even stumbled down the aisle and blubbered the Sinner’s Prayer. But admitting I was a sinner didn’t kill the desire. No matter how many times I asked Jesus into my heart, it wouldn’t take.

The summer I turned 16, I tried getting baptized. Father said that the Old Man was gone now, drowned in the baptismal waters, and I was a new and spotless creation. That worked for about a month. Then the Old Man crept back under my skin and wrapped his bony fingers around my heart.

Whenever I did manage to put off the habit for a couple weeks, the French Lady would enter my dreams and I’d spill my seed in bed. I hated wet dreams—they startled me awake and created a mess. I was terrified that Mama would notice the stains on my sheets.

I wondered—did Jesus ever spill his seed? Being fully a man, I figured, his body must have produced semen in the usual amount. And it had to escape one way or the other, or his balls would have exploded. So did Jesus have wet dreams? What were they about?

These questions vexed me considerably. The Bible didn’t give any answers, and I knew I couldn’t ask Father. That would have exposed me for the unrepentant sinner I was. If I were truly redeemed, I wouldn’t even think about such things.

+ + +

Lying in bed that Easter night, waiting to hear the Plymouth pull back into the drive, I realized that Father was right. I
was
headed for hell.

I remembered a word Father had used in one of his sermons:
predestination
. A small number of people—the elect—are predestined to heaven from the start. And everybody else is predestined to hell, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You know you’re among the elect if you love to pray and read the Bible above all else. But if you love girls more than God, it’s a sure bet you’ve got a one-way ticket south.

All these years I’d tried to hide my sins and blend in with God’s elect, but it was clear now that I was among the damned. Because of me, my parents were on the brink of divorce, if not murder.