Confessions of a Childhood Churchgoer

1.

I was talking to Mama by extremely long distance where they have her grounded (no car) and immured at the tender age of eighty-five in an “assisted living” arrangement in Natchitoches, Louisiana. This was five hundred miles south of the Oklahoma farm town where she was born and reared, where her grandparents on both sides had homesteaded, and where she knew everyone and their cow and they knew her. Not to mention more cousins than Carter had little liver pills. Now she was confined in a one-room apartment where she knew no one but her daughter Gerry’s family, with no car to drive shopping, and, according to her complaints over the telephone, not even a way to get to church.

So there we were on the telephone, me half a world away, and we got onto the subject of church. I had been warned that she wasn’t a reliable reporter of her own situation, so to get her away from her frets and stews I took the safe course I’d learned with the agèd and anecdotal and asked her about the long ago. 

“Mama, do you remember the names of those preachers we had all those years when I was a kid and you were going to the Bible Missionary Church in Chandler?”

“Yes, kind of, I guess.”

“What were some of their names?”

“I’m not sure.”

“There was one family named Brown.”

“Yes, that right. Brother Brown.”

“Wilbur, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right. Brother Wilbur Brown. He’s dead now. He died, it’s been several years ago.”

“I remember them because they used to visit us--used to come out to the house pretty often when we lived on that school land three miles east of town.”

“Yes, Brother Brown loved to talk to your Daddy. He loved Archie.”

“And they had three kids. What were their names?”

“I don’t rightly recall.”

“There were two boys, one about my age—I think his name was Myron. Then a younger boy--Preston, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I believe that’s right.”

“And they had a girl about Gerry’s age. Do you remember her name?”

“No, I don’t think I do.”

“It was Aileen or Eileen, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“What were some of those other preachers’ names? I remember three families. None of them stayed long, so there’d be a new one about every three years. After the Browns there was a couple from Louisiana, or at least she came from Louisiana. She was small, dark-haired, had a Cajun accent and the smallest feet I’d ever seen on an adult. They had a son about my age. What were their names?”

“I don’t rightly recall.”

“The boy’s name was Steve, wasn’t it? I used to try to hang out with him because he didn’t have any friends. This was maybe my second year of high school. He was small, like his mother, and he had bad acne. Wasn’t his name Steve?” Actually, I remember him clearly—he showed me my first Playboy centerfold.

“Steve? Yes, it could be.”

“Then there was a third preacher. I suppose he was married but I don’t remember his wife, and I don’t think there were any kids. He was a short, bull-dog of a guy. Liked to do any kind of grunt work around the house or yard or to help build something so he could show off his muscles. Once he challenged me to see how many pushups I could do, saying he could twice as many as I could. Which he did. No surprise considering I was fourteen and hardly weighed a hundred pounds.”

“I know who you mean but I don’t remember his name.”

“Meeks. Wasn’t that his name?”

“Yes, I believe that’s right. Brother Meeks.”

“Mama, you went to church there at the Bible Missionary Church all those years three times a week and made all us kids go with you, and all these people used to visit us, have dinner with us, and you don’t remember their names?”

Her loss of memory wasn’t just her loss. It was mine too. The three three-year pastorates covered an impressionable decade of my own life, the year 1952 before we went to California plus the stretch between our move back to Oklahoma when I was ten and my departure for college at seventeen. This memory slippage on her part displeased me. I knew all about old people and their memory losses, the desiccated brain ghosts not getting the warm wash of blood they needed, but usually that problem showed up in recent memories, not in the distant past. In his early eighties Daddy couldn’t remember what he did last week but he could tell you the location of every road and section line in Lincoln County and name the inhabitants of every farmhouse in the Oak Grove community where he’d grown up. And he could do that for Lake County and the roads around Clear Lake in northern California, though in all we didn’t live there more than five years. Short-term memory falls victim to age before long-term, but what does the “long” in “long-term memory” mean? For lots of old people, I’ve heard it means about two years. I might have thought that for Daddy too, but now I’m more inclined to see his case as more geographical than temporal. For him the Great Divide was ante-Tulsa and post-Tulsa. 

What year did they move from Chandler, pop. 2000, to the Oil Capital of the World, as it used to be known back when the word “Arab” was only used in jokes (“Ahab the Arab,” etc.)?  Where they moved, in fact, wasn’t Tulsa but Glenpool, Tulsa’s first big oil field and now one of its desolate suburbs. It would have been 1997 or 1998, about the time Daddy was turning eighty. Why did they make that move, which from my perspective was disastrous? I know their reasons, and I may talk about them, but before I do that I want to mention another phone call I made.

After I talked. to Mama and found that for her the procession of parsons through the Chandler B.M.C. was largely blank, I called my brother. A recently retired C.P.A. who’s got himself a manorial acre of blackjack and postoak outside of Jenks, about twelve miles north of Glenpool, my brother was five years older than I and became, after some struggle and doubts that I know little about, the good son. Though in highschool he aspired to be a juvenile delinquent, when he was nineteen and in boot-camp he found Jesus and got the church habit--as pious as Mama, at least until recently when he’s gone back to the BMC’s more liberal parent church, the Nazarenes, which allows him to wear short-sleeved shirts and Bermuda shorts in the summer time. 

2.

Knowing all generalizations are futile, I am nonetheless tempted to offer one comparing the effects on memory of other-worldliness and this-worldliness. In my family the examples of piety in old people descending to the darkness of amnesia or Alzheimer’s include everyone who lived long enough. The exceptions are Daddy, his dad, and–though I hesitate to say so—myself. (Early days to speak of myself. I’ve been famously forgetful since I was fourteen—“too many books,” Mama said.) That may well be the much maligned Y-chromosome (aka Adam’s curse) doing its work. No male bearing the name Pounds was ever pious—with the exception of my brother, who for reasons best known to himself doubts his “manhood” and makes up for it by riding big Honda bikes to conferences of similarly afflicted male Christians. The Band of Brothers syndrome, I call it. 

We’d have to have some definitions to clarify this. Piety isn’t even the right term unless it’s qualified. I don’t mean the quietist piety of the saints of yore but a post-Cane-Ridge Jesus addiction--proselytizing, evangelical piety intent on converting the unrighteous. That definition wouldn’t fit Uncle Ted, Mama’s brother-in-law, who wasn’t at all pious but who was the first of their generation to go into the amnesiac night. What he was, was an authoritarian. As a boy strictly from dirt-floor poverty, he seems to have found himself in Big Two and thereafter was a domestic mandarin. He wore hand-made boots when he didn’t have a pot to piss in, made his boys shine the boots and call him Sir, and never let his wife have a driver’s license. Piety in its Cane Ridge version is also authoritarian, yielding all authority to the Great Hunks in Heaven. Ours not to question why, we’ll understand it better bye-and-bye. So maybe rather than piety I’m talking about the authoritarian mind, people who believe they’re right and others wrong. A novelist friend of mine named Burroughs used to call it “the right virus”—an affliction that makes a person want to be right all the time.

Unlike the saint, the sinner accepts imperfection, a much less strenuous road. Daddy smoked, and his dad before him, and his before him and so on back to Original Pa, the first Pound (no –s in those days) to arrive in Virginia in the 1600s. The men smoked and drank, and the women went to church—a time honored pattern in North America. Was smoking a sin? King James had railed against it in 1604 in his Counterblaste to Tobacco when the Sot Weed first made its way from Virginia to England--but probably only because he didn’t smoke himself—and others have done so since. In the creedal formulations set forth in the Manual of the Bible Missionary Church, smoking became officially, theologically and dogmatically sin—which, it might well be thought, may just have been the smoker’s salvation. 

The Japanese have a lovely saying about this and it’s regrettable that it doesn’t translate into English. It requires two nouns for “heart”—one for the blood pump, another for the seat of affections—and English has only one. The adage says, “smoking is bad for the shinzo (the blood pump) but good for the kokoro (seat of affections).” Bad for your coronary condition but good for your heart.

Grandpa Pounds smoked all his life. When I knew him and he was living in town, he rolled his own Prince Albert smokes and when he ran out sometimes he’d buy a pack of Chesterfields till he could get some more makings. He had a cigarette roller that fascinated me, boy that I was. Supplied by the P.A. company, it was fire-engine red, and when properly primed with tobacco and paper and its handle pulled through a ninety-degree arc it produced a tight cigarette Grandpa said you couldn’t tell from tailor-made. It was a single-shot apparatus that had to be loaded with paper and tobacco each time the handle was pulled. I wish I could go on about this, for to my boy’s mind this manufacturing process was more interesting than anything that ever happened at church. 

What happened to Grandpa at the B.M.C. was predictable. He would arrive for Sunday morning service, and inevitably the preacher would find a suitable point in his sermon to preach on the sinfulness of tobacco. The irony of this was sharp and its effect inevitable. Grandpa had always been a church-going man—at least after the arrival of his first child, before which time he played the fiddle at country dances and was known to take a drink or two—and even taught Sunday School and led the singing at Oak Grove, before the family moved into town. The inevitable was that he found another church to attend, the Freewill Baptist Church, where the theology was more liberal and they made him a deacon. It was a small church, smaller even than the BMC, located I think down in the hollow near the black part of town and had gray asphalt-shingle siding. Wherever it was, they didn’t preach against tobacco or whale after holiness. 

3.

It was the urge for holiness that accounted for a small group of people in Chandler’s Church of the Nazarene splitting off and forming their own group. I’m not old enough to remember when Mama attended the Nazarenes, though I remember the church well enough, since we lived across the street from it during my high school years. The splinter group was small, probably not more than twenty people including the sinful men married to strenuously pious women . I could name most of the people: besides Mama and Daddy and Daddy’s parents, there were Daddy’s cousin on his mother’s side, O. C. Lay, known as “Ocie,” whose wife remained in the Nazrene church and never graced our doors; an old German couple named Eyestone, whose grandson Jimmy Guinn was a talented athlete who hated school, never darkened a church door, and was known as a pool shark. Another old couple named Glascox lived west of town on Highway 66. Then there were Jess and Zelda Alsip and the two of their four boys still young enough to be coerced, David and Danny; Belva Jones and her husband Fate, who’d lost an eye in an oilfield accident; Una (Belva’s sister) and Larkin Herd and their grown son Billy, who would drive down sometimes from Oklahoma City in his new Pontiac; the widow Rachel Schofield (Zelda Alsip’s sister), and now and then for a few years Rachel’s boy Merle, older than I, a hell-raiser whose fate I never learned. When they could get them sober, Rachel and Zelda brought in their whiskey-drinking brothers Bob and Elwood Saulsberry. 

The power behind the come-outers was, any way one looks at it, a women’s movement. I can’t say I know this for a fact, but it had to be. The specific issues I recall were gender-neutral: watching TV and having “socials” (meals) in the church basement, the Nazarenes allowing both. But in all the protesting group named above, only the women were pious in the sense I intend, as if since salvation was considered to be much more becoming in women than in men. With the qualified exception of Cousin Ocie and the brothers-in-law Fate and Larkin, the men were not pious. These three would occasionally testify briefly in church because it was obligatory, or they were getting pressure from the distaff side, but outside of church they didn’t talk about religion. That was for women. Men just believed they should respect their wives’ religion and, knowing no better, they assumed their wives were right. Probably it had been their mother’s religion too, making it all the harder for them to dispute and all the easier to conceive themselves as wrong and the women as right. Certainly that was Daddy’s case. In my teens he kept telling me, “Son, don’t argue with your mother. It doesn’t show respect.”

A women’s movement, and a characteristic American development. Who knows how and when it happened, but sometime between the first Great Awakening of the 1730s and the second decade of nationhood, piety in our country went public and religion became the province of women. Mrs. Trollop commented on it when she visited the United States in the 1820s. It struck her because the Church of England had always been and still was a men’s affair. 

In Chandler, I don’t think there was a preacher involved at the formative period in 1952. Nor do I remember where the little group of outers met, but my sister says sometimes it was in our house. I don’t recall this, but she says we children were shut into the hallway, where we made too much noise rolling marbles across the hardwood floor and were scolded. What I do remember is the building of the church and its builders—who of course were men. I don’t know where they got the land, two corner lots, but Jess Alsip--a drinker, curser, reputed fornicator and known bootlegger, a bull of a man and rough as oak bark--was the man who made it happen. He owned a lumberyard, and he gave the church the lumber. He and his crew, which probably included his two oldest boys Tommy and Dale, in their teens at the time, ran the concrete foundations and helped with the carpentry. Larkin and Daddy’s cousin Ocie were the principal carpenters. Larkin was a little slow, they always said, but if he built something he built it right. The other men helped too, including Daddy and Grandpa Pounds, because in a town like Chandler in those days any man worth his salt could carpenter a little. They built it in their off hours, after work and on Saturdays (never Sundays) and holidays. 

I remember the smell of the new lumber, the glorious cacophony of saws and hammers, as the first scantlings were cut and the beams erected and cross-braced, and my growing amazement as I watched a house grow up from the ground. For the House of the Lord that they built was simply that: a glorified frame house, about fifty feet square with a roof that is giving me problems to reconstruct. It wasn’t a gambrel or a gable, so it had to be a modified mansard with the shallow top slope laid flat and tarred. The flat part was an error in the design, for it held water and later leaked. Three of the corners in the building were occupied by Sunday School classrooms and the fourth by a toilet. The entry way or “vestibule” was on the north end, and on the south was the podium with its pulpit and a two-bench choir which I never saw used for anything except to store hymnals and hold the state and national flags apart. The roof was finished with blue-green asphalt shingles, the outside with composite siding in a mock-wood grain the color of curd, and inside with sheetrock painted a lint blue-gray the color of the August sky before a storm. In winter, heat was supplied by two gas stoves, one on each side behind the sinners’ pews. In summer the windows were open to the breeze, if God sent any. The benches were unfinished pine and had no cushions. There may have been some small electric fans, but if so I don’t remember them. Women carried folding fans in their purses, or they had those stiff one-piece paper fans with plastic handles the undertaker distributed at summer burials. The men wiped their foreheads with their shirt sleeves. Such was the house that Jess Alsip built with the help of a handful of jackleg carpenters and strong backs from the sinners’ bench. 

That bench was, inevitably, the place where I gravitated, the place where the pine best suited my posterior, though it took me some time to get there. At first, when I was small, I had to sit beside Mama. This wasn’t any fun, for beside her watchful eye I couldn’t entertain myself. I liked the singing, because singing at least was doing something. The testimony part of the service was tolerable, because different people would be taking turns and I could turn toward where the testifier stood. If this was behind us, it allowed me to stare at people’s faces. For the most part, however, there was nothing to look at but the back of the people’s heads sitting in front of us and the minister. He got the lion’s share of the service, and this was where the boredom got monumental. 

I’d stand it as long as I could, then I’d tell Mama I had to go to the toilet. On the way back, I’d sit down in the next-to-the last row or the last one, knowing she wouldn’t disturb the service by coming back to get me. I was cautious and calculating, starting with say five minutes, stretching it after a few weeks to ten, and so on until by the age of ten or eleven I had established my place on the sinners’ bench. I found the climate in the back more congenial to my soul. I didn’t dare bring a book to read, but at least in the back I could draw pictures. It was friendlier back there too. My companions were Zelda's brothers Bob and Elwood Saulsberry and occasionally her husband Jess Alsip and sometimes even a passing pilgrim they’d sobered up enough to look respectable. Who else may have sat back there, I don’t recall, but Bob and Elwood and Jess I remember. I liked them. They had big rough hands and red faces (from the drink, I later understood) and wore clean faded overalls. They were convivial men and, by my lights, able conversationalists. They told stories about pickups and dogs. They were my kind of people. I grappled them to my soul.

When the service ended we’d be the first out the door, and I’d follow them out to the parking lot where they’d joke and tell stories. They always had a joshing line for me and the touch of a large hand on my shoulder, and I liked the attention. I knew I was welcome to listen while they talked about work, fishing and hunting, and dogs and pickups. Of course the pious also eventually came out and stood in groups talking. They were well meaning and would ask me some question, usually about school. They never seemed to understand what I realize now the men on the back row knew without ever needing to think about it. A ten-year-old boy doesn’t want to talk with adults. If he can’t be with his own kind, he wants to observe adults, listen if there’s a story or a joke, and then feel free to leave and pursue his own affairs.

The only boy near my age was Jess Alsip’s third son David, better known to his friends in later life as Dog. I have said that some of the preachers had kids, including a couple of boys, but preachers’ kids were by definition transients and never weighed very much in the larger scale of things. I liked and envied Dog. He had the humor to tag Fate Jones with the nickname Dead-Eye Dick, a witticism that had to originate with Jess, the sharpest tool in the woodshed. His father was a better role model than mine—Jess resisted church attendance more effectually than Daddy, so Dog got to stay home more often. He never came for evening services, only Sunday School and one summer for Bible School (classes taught by Rachel Schofield and her sister-in-law Hazel Saulsberry: Bible stories illustrated with paper cutouts of Noah, Moses, Jesus and sundry subalterns on a green feltboard, a convenient target for spitballs), and by the time we got to highschool he was too big for his mama to whip and came no more. I also envied him, as did every other boy in the first grade, for his tree house, which he and his three brothers built in a large elm with scrap from the lumberyard. The Alsip house and lumberyard were between our house and the gradeschool David and I attended, but Daddy and Mama didn’t like for me to stop there to play. The tree house in its own right must have troubled them, but more than anything they didn’t want me being friends with a boy whose father was as rough as Jess. Their minimal ambition for me, I guess, was to grow up to be smooth, but I was smooth only in the sense of being deceptive. 

The great charm of the sinner’s bench, for all its free masonry of the spirit, was also its one fault: there was no room for deception. To sit on the back bench was an open declaration of no-faith, and the preachers and the evangelists who came for revivals knew it. When the preaching got down to hell-fire and brimstone, it got warm back there. This kind of terror-based preaching is too well known to warrant comment, except for this: for a kid it’s all potentially terribly true and, since he’s been taught the depth of his own iniquity, believable. My brother as a small child had nightmares about the devil, and one time even saw him crossing a field. I was never as afraid of the devil as I was of his herald and spokesman, prophet and forerunner, the Reverend Elbert Dodd. 

4.

I heard a lot of hell-fire and brimstone preaching in my childhood, since the B.M.C. believed in putting the “fear of God” into the young and tender, and that was one way to do it, along with not sparing the rod. But I remember the Reverend Dodd for his eloquence, or at least his performer’s ability to create an atmosphere of sulphurous fear. As a good orator must, he became possessed by the thing of which he spoke. I don’t remember any words, just images: death as a “green-eyed monster” coming out of the dark corner of a dying man’s room to seize his soul while the Reverend’s own eyes turned glittery green; the length of eternity so impossible to imagine that the time it would take a fly to cut through a steel basketball by walking around and around on it would not even be a second in that endless unendingness. The images remained in my memory because in them was a crude poetry—in late Victorian poetics the whole problem of poetry was putting "the infinite into the finite.” I’m sure that fly’s still out there walking. If the room is quiet at the moment when I die, I expect to hear it buzz.

There is a folk story called "The Shepherd Boy" by the Brothers Grimm where a wise shepherd boy is brought to a king to answer three questions. The third question the king asks is "how many seconds of time are there in eternity?" To which the shepherd boy replies, "In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over." It was this kind of image, but with local geography--the Wichita Mountains and Black Mesa--substituted for “Lower Pomerania” and “Diamond Mountain.” As a small boy in tutalege of the B.M.C., with all the apocalyptic clouds on the horizon, I never expected to live to be more than ten. When I got to ten, I upped the limit to fourteen, and at fourteen to sixteen. At seventeen I went off to college, but to this day I am sometimes surprised to check my pulse and feel it still blindly beating away.

Born in the Cherokee Strip of Indian Territory in 1902, Elbert Dodd was not an educated man. No one had ever suggested to him that his crawling fly was an image of time and not eternity, since only in time can movement, which is change, occur. Still, Dodd (his name cognate with the German word for “death”) made his impression, and not on me alone. According to the hagiography occasioned by his death in 1981, which I read in the Missionary Revivalist, official organ of the B.M.C., in his early pastorates in rural Oklahoma and Texas he would take a church in a town of 2000 people and build it’s attendance from 30 to 500. Perhaps it’s fortunate for Chandler that Rev. Dodd merely passed through on the revival circuit. We couldn’t have put a quarter of the population of Chandler in our 50-by-50 building, and all the other churches in town would have been out of business. Besides, the Chandler B.M.C. had its own technique for instilling fear, not unworthy of note, which gave it local notoriety. 

5.

To understand this crowning touch to the building erected in 1952 requires a grasp of the geography of Chandler. When the town was laid out in blueprint at the capital in Guthrie, it was to be built on the flat land northwest of the present town, but the engineers, so the story goes, got drunk and staked it out on the hilltop it now occupies. Route 66 bisects the town east and west and State Highway 18 north and south. But the town is not a crossroads. Rather, because of the hill, it’s a swastika. (No irony intended. The swastika, let it be recalled, was for thousands of years a symbol for temples and holy places before the Nazis got hold of it, and in reversing the direction of the arms made it into something the reverse of holy.)

To get through Chandler on Highway 66 east and west requires two 90-degree turns, and on 18 north and south requires four. The Bible Missionary Church was built on the south side of the northwest dogleg. If you’re heading north out of town on 18, you come down hill going west and cut back north. No problem if you’re leaving town because you’re driving 30 or 35 mph as you turn north, still within the city limits. It was a different story with in-coming traffic from the north. You were coming off the state highway, between 55 mph (the legal limit at night) and whatever was your actual speed above that. The corner was marked with two signs, Speed Zone Ahead and Curve, but imagine: this is 1950 or 1940 or 1930. You’re coming into town down a mile-long slope. Maybe your foot’s off the gas but the car isn’t dropping speed. It’s night, headlights good for about a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet. The road is two-lane blacktop with no shoulders. You’re in the right hand lane coming into a left turn that is not just a turn but a ninety-degree elbow, and centrifugal force is pulling you to the right where there is no shoulder. In short, it was a corner famous for wrecks, especially at night. 

That was the case, at least, until about the fall of 1952 when the B.M.C. church was erected and the car wrecks stopped. God works in mysterious ways but this event was easy to explain. On top of the church’s brief gabled front porch, right where your headlights would hit as you coasted downhill into town from the north, the builders crowned their design with a sign in six-foot phosphorescent letters: prepare to meet thy God. and in smaller, flat black paint: “Amos 4:12.” What the redemptive effect of the sign was, I can’t say, for our Sunday-morning congregation never got much above the thirty odd we had at the start. But the effect on traffic safety was miraculous. In my memory at least, in the decade 1952-1963, there were no wrecks. At least not of automobiles.