Chapter One

I guess I can start with talking about Sunday before last, which was June 1, 1975. And I started that Sunday like most other Sundays, that is I was laying awake in bed real early, about 8:45, hoping that Mom was gonna oversleep, so that she wouldn’t get us up in time to go to the meetings. The “meetings,” that means the Kingdom Hall. Half the time, most Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t say, “We’re going to the Kingdom Hall,” or, “Are y’all going to the Kingdom Hall tonight?” They say it like, “We’re going to the meetings,” or “We’re going to the Hall.” At least that’s how we say it around our house, and all the Witnesses I know of talk like that, too.

The Sunday meetings these days begin at 10:00 in the morning, not at 3:00 in the afternoon the way they used to back in the days when Freddie was hoping it would burn down. Some genius Brother about five years ago figured out that it wouldn’t be nearly so hot in the summer if they started in the morning instead of in the middle of the afternoon. Last year they even broke down and put in air conditioning, so the heat’s not really a factor anymore. But none of the Brothers and Sisters wanted to go back to meeting in the afternoon. The congregation was allowed to vote on it, and almost everybody voted to stay with the 10:00 start. Here’s what I think: If you gotta go, then just get up early and go and get it over with. That way, it’s just your morning that’s shot, instead of your whole day being messed up by having to stop whatever it is you’re doing in the middle of the day and dragging yourself off to the meeting. That’s my way of thinking, at least. I bet a lot of Witnesses think that same way, too, they just wouldn’t come right out and say it like I’m doing here.

If Mom doesn’t get us out of bed by 9:00, it’s usually safe to say that we won’t be going to the meetings that morning, because it wouldn’t leave us time enough to get ready to leave the house by 9:30. It takes about thirty minutes to drive from our house in Campbell County to the Kingdom Hall in Lynchburg. It’s only about ten miles, but the county roads aren’t that great, and part of the way is through town, where you can get slowed down by all the church traffic. Sometimes you can make it in twenty or twenty-five, but thirty minutes is more like it. We’ve only got one bathroom at our house, and it’s three of us that have to get ready, so it doesn’t leave much time for washing up and getting dressed if we’re not all up by 9:00. It’s me and Freddie and Mom that have to get ready. Dad doesn’t go to the Hall.

I was laying there, like I said, agonizing over how slow the time was moving by, looking at my watch every other second, just waiting for 9:00 to come and go so I could safely roll over and go back to sleep. But just my luck, at about 8:58 Freddie’s alarm clock went off and Mom must have heard it in her room because about two seconds later she stuck her head in our door and said, “Y’all get up and get ready now, boys, and hurry up because we don’t have much time.” She closed the door, but opened it right back again and said, “I’m glad somebody remembered to set the alarm because I was probably gonna oversleep.”

Yeah, good going Freddie. Thanks a lot, pal.

So we got ready and dressed pretty quick, but we didn’t have time for breakfast or anything. I did get to grab an apple off the table as we rushed out the door, though, which I ate in the back seat of the car while we rode into town. Freddie always sits in the front seat with Mom, and I always sit in the back seat by myself. Sometimes Mom lets Freddie drive, since he’s got his learner’s permit now, but that’s only if we’ve got plenty of time to get there. We were in a real rush that morning, so Mom was doing the driving herself, and she knows how to drive pretty fast. Freddie’s a terrible driver. When we have the extra time and Mom does let him do the driving, I don’t know which is worse—getting the hell scared out of you on the way to the meeting because Freddie’s swerving all over the road and screwing up in traffic and stuff, or actually making it to the Hall in one piece and then having to sit through the stupid meetings. Yeah, that’s a real toss up.

I know one thing, before I burned down the Kingdom Hall, I’d always dreaded the day when Freddie finally got his real drivers license, because I figured then I’d probably never get out of going to a meeting. You see, every once in a while, usually just on a Thursday night, Mom would tell us that she had a headache or something and didn’t feel good, and so we wouldn’t go to the meeting that night. It didn’t happen very often, but sometimes it did. But I figured after Freddie got his license, Mom’s headaches wouldn’t make any difference anymore. I wouldn’t get to miss the meetings on those nights, because then Freddie would be able to drive himself, and of course Mom would make me ride along with him. But I don’t worry about it anymore, of course.

I guess you can probably tell by now that going to the meetings is not my favorite thing in the world to do. To tell you the truth, I hate going. I’ve always thought they were a royal pain in the ass, ever since I can remember. I’m just trying to be really honest here, which is what Mr. Franks told me to be.

One of the main problems I have with the meetings is that there are so many of them. There’s two on Sunday, one on Tuesday night, and two on Thursday night. That’s three different days in the week that you’re supposed to go. Every time you turn around there’s another damn meeting you gotta go to. And each one of them lasts at least an hour, and sometimes more. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re sitting there in the middle of one of them meetings, well, they can seem to go on forever.

If you’re a good Jehovah’s Witness, you’re supposed to make it to all the meetings, no matter what. If your long lost uncle that you haven’t seen for forty years shows up at your house just as you’re going out the door on the way to a meeting, you’re not supposed to skip the meeting in order to stay home and visit with him. Nope. You’re supposed to invite him to go along with you. If he doesn’t want to go with you, and he’s not still hanging around the house waiting for you when you get back home, well that’s too bad. You just can’t risk missing a meeting, you see. You just never know when something new and important might be brought up at the meeting, and you’ve missed it because you thought it was okay just this once to stay home and catch up with your uncle.

Right. Like anything new and important has ever been said during a meeting. Everything said at any meeting has already been said a million times before at a million other meetings. Same old songs, same old talks, same old Watchtower studies. Over and over and over.

On top of making it to every single meeting, they expect you to spend all your spare time studying the Watchtower and Awake magazines and reading all the books they give you to read, and then going out in Field Service. Field Service is where you go to people’s doors and try to share the good news of the Kingdom with them, to get them interested in coming to the Kingdom Hall and becoming Jehovah’s Witnesses, too. You do all this by getting them to buy a magazine or a book.

I guess knocking on people’s doors is one of the things the Witnesses are most famous for, but I’ll tell you about that part later. They’re famous for a lot of other things as well, like for not saluting the flag, and for not celebrating Christmas, and for not celebrating birthdays, and for not taking blood transfusions, and for not doing this and not doing that, and on and on. I’ll try and tell you about some of that stuff later on, too.

But like I was saying, thanks to Freddie and his stupid alarm clock, Mom didn’t oversleep, and I didn’t get out of going to the Kingdom Hall that Sunday morning, June 1, 1975.

If you’ve never been to the Kingdom Hall on a Sunday morning, and believe me you’re lucky if you haven’t, I’ll try to explain a little bit what it’s like.

Here goes.

There’s two meetings, the Watchtower Study and what’s called the “public” talk, which is probably called that because it’s the one meeting during the whole week that’s supposed to make some sort of sense to a regular normal person, that is, a person who’s not a Jehovah’s Witness. I guess it’s in case some poor idiot from the general public happens to wander in off the street at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, he can feel right at home listening to the talk. It’s usually about some bland subject like the flood of Noah’s day, or how to have a happy marriage and family life that’s based on Bible principles, or how to get along with your neighbors. Nothing too weird or off the wall, usually just stuff the average person could agree with no matter what religion they belonged to.

The weird stuff is saved for the Watchtower Study, which comes right after the public talk is over with at 11:00. The study is supposed to be over with at noon, but most of the time it’s like 12:30 or so before you get out of there. It tends to drag on and on.

It’s hard to explain what goes on at a Watchtower Study to someone that’s never been there, so you might have to pay attention real hard to follow me on this next part.

The Watchtower Study is where the whole congregation as a group reads line by line the same pre-assigned article from a Watchtower magazine, and they answer questions about each paragraph along the way. The questions for each paragraph are printed at the bottom of each page, and the correct answers to the questions can be found within the paragraph. I know this sounds kinda strange and probably doesn’t make much sense, but if you’ve ever seen a Watchtower magazine, and believe me you’re lucky if you haven’t, you might know what I’m talking about.

The idea is that you’re supposed to study the article at home first, and underline the answers to the questions as you go along, and then when you get to the meeting you can raise your hand and read out the answer to a particular question for a particular paragraph, if and when the conductor of the study calls on you to do so. And that’s where it can get pretty weird, because most of the articles are based on stuff that only Witnesses understand or believe in or care about, such as the fact that Jesus actually returned to earth in 1914, but most people don’t realize it, because his presence is invisible, so nobody can actually see him. But the Witnesses know he’s here already, even if they can’t see him, because of the increases in lawlessness and famines and earthquakes going on all over the place, and all the major wars and stuff that started with the outbreak of World War I, which was in 1914. I’ll try and tell you more about that stuff later, too, if I get around to it.

One thing that’s always struck me as pretty strange about answering questions at the Watchtower study is that sometimes the answer to a paragraph’s question is just another bunch of questions. Like for instance, the question at the bottom of the page for one of the paragraphs might be, “What questions arise concerning our world today?” What happens is this: The whole paragraph is read out loud to the congregation first, and then the conductor of the study will read out the question at the bottom of the page, which like I said might be something like, “What questions arise concerning our world today?” Then the conductor will call on someone who has raised their hand. You raise your hand because you know the answer and you want to give it to the congregation, as if they didn’t already know it themselves. So someone raises their hand and, after being called on by the conductor, says, “Will mankind ever live under a peaceful and righteous government?” And the conductor will say, “Very good, anyone else?” Then someone else raises their hand and, after being called on, says, “And when can we expect the Great Battle of Armageddon to be fought, thus ushering in a New World Order of righteous rule and paradise conditions?” And the conductor says again, “Very good, are there any more?” And then someone else raises their hand and, after being called on, says, “Is this life all there really is?” And on and on.

Of course the people that raised their hands and gave the answers had gotten the answers directly from the paragraph, usually word for word. They didn’t have to think up an answer at all. They had already underlined the answer to the question before they ever got to the meeting, which was the same answer that every Witness in the whole world had underlined for that question. I’ve been going to Watchtower studies for over ten years and I’ve never ever once heard of anyone giving the wrong answer to a question. It would be almost impossible.

What kills me is every once in a while you’ll hear someone refer to the Watchtower Study as the Watchtower “discussion,” but it ain’t no discussion at all. Your opinion about a question is not the answer they’re looking for. The only right answers are the ones that the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society puts right there in the dumb paragraph. And you’re supposed to underline it a million times, and then you’re supposed to believe it, until they tell you otherwise.

In fact, you might look over the Brother’s or Sister’s shoulder in front of you sometimes and get a glimpse of the magazine their holding, and they’ve got practically every damn sentence in every damn paragraph underlined. And maybe even underlined in red ink, to make them stand out or something. So you’re supposed to get the impression that they’re some kind of gung ho Witness or something, because they’ve studied the hell out of the Watchtower article in preparation for the Sunday meeting.

I’ll tell you something though. Sometimes I don’t even read it. Sometimes I just go through the article and underline a bunch of sentences here and there without even reading what the question is. That saves me a lot of time. What’s the difference, anyway?

Anyway, we got to the Kingdom Hall that morning with about three minutes to spare, and I did something that I like to do sometimes, and that is to slip into the little library room in the basement and look for a book or something to read during the meetings that are about to begin. They call it a library, but it’s not really much of a library, it’s more like a storage closet with a table and a couple of book shelves. They just mainly keep a lot of old Witness books and magazines and stuff in there, I guess in case someone wanted to do some research on a talk they had to give, or maybe look up the answer to a hard question somebody had asked them out in Field Service or something.

All of the books in the library are Witness books, they don’t have novels or Time magazine or stuff like that laying around. There’s an old set of Encyclopedia Brittanica from about the 1400’s down there, which you’d probably never want to use because the stuff in them would be so out of date. Somebody must have donated them to the Kingdom Hall. I guess it was easier than taking them to the dump. Usually I’ll just grab one of the old books that I’ve never seen or looked at before, and I’ll take it back upstairs to look at while I’m sitting through the meetings. Sometimes that’s better than actually paying attention to what’s going on. Not always, but sometimes. I think this is where I got the habit of reading all the time, from just trying to amuse myself during the meetings. In fact, I’ve read through practically the whole Bible using this method, not straight through from start to finish like you probably would a regular book, but a little bit here and a little bit there. I’d just flip through it, and whatever page grabbed my attention, I’d start reading there. Of course it took me about three million meetings to do it that way, but I had plenty of time to kill.

What I really wanted to do that day was hide down there in the library room and read one of my own books, which was a real book, not a Witness book. You see, we were in the middle of reading a book in my English class at the time, called Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, but I wouldn’t dare try to sneak it into the Kingdom Hall to read down in the library room while the meeting was going on upstairs. I couldn’t take the chance that Mom might somehow notice I wasn’t upstairs with everybody else. She’d probably send Freddie or somebody down to find me and bring me back. And I definitely wouldn’t be able to sit in the meeting upstairs and read one of my own books, even though I always sit in the back, because then it would be too obvious that I wasn’t paying attention and following along with what was being said.

I slipped into the library real quick—and almost broke my neck falling over a big cardboard box someone had left sitting right there in the floor just inside the door. As I was getting up off the floor, I could hear Brother Harris upstairs on the p.a. system welcoming everyone and inviting everybody to take their seats, so I knew the public talk was about to begin. I looked at the box I had just tripped over and noticed it was crammed full of old books, so I just grabbed one off the top without even looking at it, and ran back upstairs.

Like I said, I always sit in the back of the Hall during the meetings. Mom used to make me and Freddie sit with her when we were little kids, so she could keep an eye on us and make sure we behaved and all. But now that we’re older we can sit anywhere we want to. Freddie always sits up front and pays attention. I don’t sit up front because I don’t like the feeling that people are staring at the back of my head. And I also don’t like the feeling that someone’s always watching me to make sure that I’m paying attention, I guess because I’m hardly ever paying attention.

I sit about ten seats away from Sister Straiter. It’s usually just me and her back there. She’s eighty-some years old and is real hard of hearing. The reason she sits in back, instead of in front like you’d expect, with her hearing problem and all, is because the sound room is located in the back. They’ve rigged her up a set of headphones on a wire that runs off the p.a. amplifier in the sound room, out to her special seat. That way she can hear every word, loud and clear. I remember how her face lit up the first time she put them on and could hear everything being said, probably for the first time in thirty years or so. She thinks her headphones are a miracle of modern technology. I don’t know why, but it kinda makes me sad. I mean, here’s this eighty year old woman who lives by herself in a big old house, without a television or a radio because she couldn’t hear them even if she had them, sitting around all day reading the Watchtower or something, probably never reading a newspaper or talking to a neighbor or anything. And the highlight of her life is coming to the Kingdom Hall three times a week, putting on her headphones and listening to the meeting. She probably doesn’t know that men have walked on the moon. She probably thinks some old guy like Abraham Lincoln is still president or something.

Brother Harris welcomed everybody to the Kingdom Hall, and introduced the visiting speaker, who was Brother Borall, from down in the Danville congregation.

I guess here is where I should try to explain the difference between Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religions when it comes to preachers and pastors and stuff. Kingdom Halls don’t have full time pastors the way most Baptist or Methodist churches do. What the Witnesses have is a body of elders, with a presiding elder in charge of them all. The elders don’t get paid for being elders, either, so they all have regular jobs, like working at the Foundry or a car shop or the post office or something. None of them have the time to hang around the Kingdom Hall all day. They do their elder stuff in their spare time. Stuff like making sure the Kingdom Hall is kept clean. Deciding who’s gonna have what part at which meeting. Making sure the meetings run smoothly. And deciding whether or not someone should be disfellowshipped from the congregation. You get disfellowshipped for doing stuff like committing adultery or having fornication, or taking drugs, or going against one of the established beliefs of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I guess the point is, the same elder doesn’t give the public talk every week, the way the preacher at a normal church would. The elders take turns giving the talks, and a lot of times it’s given by an elder from another congregation, which was the case the Sunday morning I’m telling you about.

Brother Borall, the elder from Danville, came that morning to give a talk entitled “Building a Happy Family Life,” which was based on chapter 20 of the Truth book. When Jehovah’s Witnesses talk about the Truth book, they mean The Truth that leads to Eternal Life, which is this little blue book that spells out most of the stuff Witnesses have to believe in, in order to be Witnesses. It’s the main book that Witnesses take out in Field Service to try to get people to buy and read.

The Truth book has been around for five or six years and like most Witnesses I’ve had to read it and study it and underline it about a hundred times, so of course I was already pretty familiar with chapter 20 and what it had to say about building a happy family life. Basically it says that if you’d only become a Jehovah’s Witness, then you’d have a happy family life.

I’d also heard this particular talk a bunch of times before, like most everybody else there that morning, so I was glad I had gotten that old book from the box in the library downstairs. At least I’d have something else to occupy myself with, besides sitting there listening to that talk again. But I had to play it safe and listen to the first couple of minutes, just so it would look like I was paying attention.

I had my Truth book with me, too, because we’d been told at the previous Thursday night meeting to be sure and bring it, so we could follow along with what Brother Borall was talking about. I even had it opened up to chapter 20, like everybody else.

“Good morning, Brothers and Sisters, I bring you greetings from the Danville congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Brother Borall said to begin his talk.

Then he smiled real big, took a step back from the podium, and made a big dramatic pause, as if he was expecting all of us to shout “greetings!” or something back at him. But everybody just sat there and looked at him.

“Brothers and Sisters,” he began again, thumbing through his Truth book, “the Bible gives us much sound advice concerning home life. It helps us deal with our everyday family problems. In fact, it’s the best place to go for advice, because Jehovah is the author of the Bible as well as the originator of marriage and family life. Could I get a volunteer to read to us the scripture at Genesis chapter two, verses eighteen and twenty-two?”

Freddie raised his hand and read the scripture out loud. I could already see how this whole talk was gonna go, because Brother Borall had practically read the first paragraph of chapter 20 to us word for word. Then he did about the same thing with the second paragraph, and had someday look up the scripture mentioned there, too. And then the third paragraph. It was pretty clear that his idea of giving a “talk” on chapter 20 of the Truth book was to actually just read it out loud to everybody. I’m surprised he didn’t just go ahead and ask us some of the stupid questions from the bottom of the page.

Well, ten minutes of that was more than a plenty for me, and I figured I’d been paying attention long enough anyhow, so I reached under my seat and pulled out the old book from downstairs, and started looking at it. The title on the cover was The Time is at Hand, which didn’t mean a thing to me. It sounded like any other title to any other Witness book. They all have titles like Babylon the Great has Fallen! God’s Kingdom Rules, and Then is Finished the Mystery of God, and Life Everlasting in Freedom of the Sons of God, and God’s Kingdom of a Thousand Years has Approached, and on and on. But when you really get down to it, after you’ve read a bunch of them, no matter what the title is, they all say mainly the same thing, which is that Jehovah’s Witnesses are the only people in the whole world who really know what’s going on with God and his divine plan.

But then I saw on the spine of this old book it said “Millennial Dawn, Vol. II.” So I knew right away that it really was older than hell, and I also knew right away who wrote it.

None other than Charles Taze Russell himself wrote it, that’s who.

In case you didn’t know, Charles T. Russell was the original founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. But back in the old days when he was still around they didn’t call themselves that. In fact, I don’t think they called themselves anything special at first. Then as there got to be more and more of them they became known as the Bible Students or something. People who didn’t like them called them Russellites for a while, as a way of making fun of them I guess. It wasn’t until around 1930 or so that they began calling themselves Jehovah’s Witnesses, which they took from a verse in the book of Isaiah that talks about Jehovah choosing a bunch of people as his servants right before the end of the world and saying to them, “You are my witnesses.” Of course, the Bible Students thought that scripture was talking about them and that they were the direct fulfillment of that particular prophesy, so they took up that name. Charles T. Russell was long dead by then, though.

I guess Russell was the first one who dreamed up a lot of the stuff that Witnesses believe these days, especially the stuff about 1914 being a marked year in Bible prophesy. He’s the one that figured out that Jesus wasn’t coming back to earth in the flesh, but was gonna be invisible to everybody when he returned. Then he somehow figured out that all this would take place in 1914. He came up with 1914 by adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing and finding the square root of a bunch of different historical dates he thought were tied to prophesies scattered around in different places in the Bible, like in Revelations and Daniel and Ezekial and books like that. It’s a pretty tricky formula, and I ain’t got it memorized, that’s for sure.

He wrote about all this stuff in the Watchtower magazine, which he invented, and he went around all over the world warning people about his predictions. He also wrote a bunch of books for all his followers to read. I think there was about seven or eight main books, and they were known as the Millennial Dawn books, for some reason.

One of the things about 1914, though, is that Russell at first said the world was gonna come to an end in October of 1914, which of course most regular normal people didn’t believe and so they just laughed at him for saying that. But then they stopped laughing and got a little scared when World War I broke out in the summer of 1914. I guess right about then Russell’s stock was looking pretty good, and all the Bible Students were getting pretty excited because they all thought they were going to heaven shortly. But then, of course, the world didn’t come to an end when Russell said it would, and he died a couple of years later, before he could figure out why or where his calculations had gone wrong. Maybe he forgot to carry a one somewhere, or something.

It wasn’t until after he died that they figured out 1914 wasn’t meant to be the end of the world after all, but only the beginning of the end of the world, and that the actual end would come before the generation that was alive in 1914 had completely passed away. I don’t have a clue as to how they figured all that out. I guess when 1914 came and went and they were all still standing around looking at each other and the world hadn’t ended or anything, they had to come up with something.

That’s really about all I know about Charles Taze Russell. I looked him up in a dictionary once, but about all it said was that he was the founder of the Jehovah’s Witness religious movement, which I already knew of course. I also tried looking him up at the Lynchburg Public Library, but I couldn’t find a biography about him, or an autobiography, or anything. They didn’t even have one of the books that he’d written. I bet if you asked anyone on the street who he was, they wouldn’t have a clue.

The Witnesses these days don’t say much about him anymore, I guess because he’s been dead so long. I mean, they don’t consider him to be a saint or anything, and they don’t go around hanging his picture up all over the place. They claim to look to Jehovah and Jesus as their true leaders, not to be followers of any one man. They just think that Russell was chosen by Jehovah to be the first one to start understanding His divine plan, back in the 1870’s sometime, because Russell was the only one at the time that was honestly searching for the true religion. They used to say that Russell was the “faithful and discreet slave” that the Bible talks about somewhere, because Russell sometimes claimed that about himself. But now that he’s dead they say the Bible actually means the whole Watchtower Bible and Tract Society when it talks about the “faithful and discreet slave,” because the Society is what Jehovah is using to spread His divine plan, through the Watchtower and Awake magazines and the other Witness books.

Every once in a while, the Watchtower or one of the books will talk about Russell a little bit, or mention some of the books and stuff he wrote, and maybe show a picture of him. But I’ve noticed they don’t show his picture much anymore, I think because he had a big beard and kinda long hair and all, and the Witnesses these days are totally against anyone having beards and long hair. In fact, Charles Russell probably wouldn’t even be allowed to be a Jehovah’s Witness these days, unless he agreed to shave off his beard and get a shorter hair cut.

So anyway, that old book I found, The Time is at Hand, was volume two of the famous Millennial Dawn books. I had read about those books before and heard about them, but I’d never seen any of them. The Society doesn’t sell them anymore, or try to get people to read them, like they do the Truth book or any of the other books I’ve mentioned. I opened it up, and what I found on the page facing the front cover was pretty interesting. Someone had written, “To dear young Sister Clara, may this book prove to be a blessing from the Lord.” The someone who wrote that must have been the author himself, because it was signed “Charles T. Russell, June 1, 1889.”

Then it started making a little bit of sense to me, what this old book was doing with a bunch of other old books in a big box down in the Kingdom Hall library. You see, young Sister Clara was actually old Sister Clara Flowers, and old Sister Flowers had died only a month or so ago. Somebody must have found all them old Witness books while they were cleaning out Sister Flowers’ house, and decided they’d stick them in the library instead of throwing them away.

When I say she was old, I mean old. Sister Flowers was ninety-nine. No fooling, she would have been a hundred years old sometime this year. Of course we wouldn’t have had a big party or anything for her, if she had made it that long, because the Witnesses don’t believe in celebrating your birthday, not even if it’s your hundredth birthday.

The thing about Sister Flowers was she was kinda famous in our congregation and in the congregations around here, like over in Rustburg and Amherst and Bedford. She was the oldest Jehovah’s Witness in the area and had been one longer than anyone else around. She was a Jehovah’s Witness back before they were even called Jehovah’s Witnesses, back when they were called Bible Students or Russellites or whatever. Another thing about her was that she was the only member of our congregation that was of the “anointed remnant,” which means that she was one of the 144,000.

Here I go again having to explain another Witness thing: The 144,000 are the people that are going to heaven when they die. The Bible says they are a “little flock.” A little flock can’t include everybody, or it wouldn’t be considered little anymore. Yes, I know, most religions believe that all good people will go to heaven, but Witnesses believe that actually only 144,000 are gonna go. Everybody else, all other good people that is, will stay dead when they die, but will eventually be resurrected from the dead and have a chance to live forever right here on the earth, which will be restored to a paradise again like it was back during the Garden of Eden. These people, the ones that will live here on earth, are called the “great crowd,” because their exact number is not given in the Bible.

All this is coming after the Battle of Armageddon is fought between Jesus and his angels on one side, and Satan and his demons on the other, which is supposed to happen later this year, 1975, sometime in October.

Of course, only Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of the “little flock” and the “great crowd.” Everybody else might as well kiss their asses goodbye and be done with it.

Sister Flowers never got married or had any children. She dedicated her whole life to being a Witness and going around trying to talk everybody she met into becoming Witnesses, too. Up until she got sick about six months ago she was still spending almost all her time going door to door, even though she was ninety-nine years old. She’d been doing that for about fifty or sixty years, I guess. I think she came from a fairly rich family and must have had an inheritance or something, because I never heard that she had ever worked at a regular job or anything. So I guess she had enough money socked away that she could afford to spend all her time out in the Field Service all those years.

Almost all of the people at the Kingdom Hall in Lynchburg had started coming to the meetings and turned into Jehovah’s Witnesses because sometime or another Sister Flowers had come by their house with the Watchtower or one of the old books. In Witness terms, that’s called “bringing somebody into the Truth,” when a Witness talks another person into becoming a Witness. When you hear an old Witness say something like, “Well, I been in the Truth for over forty years now,” or, “Yeah, it was Sister Clara who brought me into the Truth,” what they mean is they’ve been a Jehovah’s Witness for over forty years, or that it was Sister Flowers that first convinced them into joining up. Being a Witness and being “in the Truth” are the same thing, you see.

In fact, it was Sister Flowers that had come by our trailer about eleven years ago and gave Mom a copy of a book called From Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained, which was a book that explained the history of mankind down through the ages and how Jehovah’s Witnesses are the only ones in the whole world who really know what’s going on with God and his divine plan. So it was Sister Flowers that brought Mom into the Truth.

Sister Flowers gave Mom that book, the Paradise book, because Mom didn’t have fifty cents to buy it. Then she, Sister Flowers that is, came back to our house every week to supposedly discuss the different chapters with Mom. But what she had Mom doing was finding and underlining the answers to the questions at the bottom of each page, and then reading out the answers as they went over the paragraphs. I guess this was to get her in practice for when she became a Witness and had to underline her Watchtower magazines.

In Witness terms, Mom was the victim of a Home Bible Study. Except they wouldn’t use that word, “victim.” But I do. That’s the way you’re supposed to do it when you’re a Witness, get someone who isn’t a Witness to “study” through one of the books with you at their house, which is called a Home Bible Study, hoping that they’ll get interested and come to the Kingdom Hall and become Witnesses, too.

So Mom studied the Paradise book with Sister Flowers. The next thing you know, Sister Flowers had talked Mom into going to her first meeting at the Kingdom Hall, which was the meeting I told you about where Freddie said he hoped the Kingdom Hall would burn down. That was right after we had moved here from Pittsburgh, and Mom didn’t have any friends or anything here in Lynchburg. Dad’s family lived here, because this is where he’s from, but I don’t think they were too friendly to Mom at first, I guess because she was a Northerner and all. So she decided to go see what the Kingdom Hall was like and maybe meet some new friends of her own. What a day that was.

Like I said, Sister Flowers gave Mom that book because Mom didn’t have the fifty cents to buy it. Sister Flowers did the same thing for a lot of other people, too. If you didn’t have the money, she’d just give you the Watchtower and Awake magazine or the book she was trying to sell you. I’ve heard a lot of people say that. She believed in what Jesus said somewhere, “You received free, so give free,” or something like that. She really was a nice lady. What I always liked about her was that she was such a natural type of Witness. That’s the best way I can think of to say it. She definitely wasn’t the pushy gung ho type like Brother Harris is. She never came across as self-righteous, even though she was of the 144,000 and had the heavenly hope.

In fact, she donated the land that the Kingdom Hall was built on, which was a little corner lot on Fort Avenue. And that’s one of the main things that bothers me about having burned it down, that Sister Flowers had been the main reason it was built there in the first place. I know she meant well when she went around all those years bringing people into the Truth, including my Mom. I don’t hold it against Sister Flowers for doing that, because I know she was only doing what she thought was right and what she thought Jehovah God wanted her to be doing and all. I’m really glad she didn’t live to see me burn it down. But I guess she did see me do it, from heaven. It really bothers me sometimes to think about that part of it all.

Anyhow, like I was saying, that book The Time is at Hand used to belong to Sister Flowers. I was starting to flip through it while Brother Borall was up there giving his talk, to see if there might be anything interesting in it, or if it was just like any other run of the mill Witness book, which was my guess.

But suddenly, someone reached over from behind me and snatched the book out of my hands. I turned around real quick and it was Brother Harris standing there looking down at me. I don’t know how long he had been standing there.

“Can you come with me for a minute?” He kept his voice real low when he said it, so that it wouldn’t disturb anybody else. He motioned towards the swinging doors that separated the main part of the Kingdom Hall from the front entrance way.

I got up and followed him out into the foyer.

He said, “What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?” I was kinda playing dumb.

“I mean, why aren’t you paying attention to the talk, like you’re supposed to be doing.”

“Well, I don’t know, I was listening. I guess it’s because I’ve heard this talk before and I’ve read the chapter a bunch of times before, too—maybe it looked like I wasn’t listening, probably—but I really was. Honest.”

“And what’s this?” He held up the book he had taken away from me. “Where did you get this?”

“Uh, that’s just a book I was glancing at while I was listening to the talk. I got it from downstairs, in the library. I think it used to belong to Sister Flowers.”

“Well you shouldn’t have it. Those old books of hers haven’t been gone through yet. They’re not officially part of the library yet.”

He said that like we had a full time Kingdom Hall librarian or something. Somebody that spent all their time doing nothing but deciding what books to officially keep in the library and what books to officially keep out.

He stood there flipping through it for a minute or so.

“I was just looking at it, that’s all,” I repeated.

“Well, you take it back down there and put it back where you found it, right now. And then you come back up here and sit down and pay attention to the rest of the talk—and to the Watchtower study, too. You hear?”

He handed the book back to me.

“There’s nothing in them old books you need to know, all that material is long out of date,” he said. “They’re nothing but collector’s items now.”

Then he said, “Jehovah has lovingly provided these meetings for you today, Warren, for your personal benefit. And you should be showing your grateful appreciation, by listening to the fine counsel being given.” It sounded to me like a speech or something that he’d memorized.

He went back through the swinging doors, back into the main part of the Hall, but then suddenly stuck his head back through and said, “You know, you could stay out of this kind of trouble if you’d be like your brother Freddie and sit up front. It’s so much easier to follow along with things when you’re closer to the front. Much easier.”

Then he pulled his head back through the doors and disappeared, this time for good.

I was half surprised he didn’t say that last part like, “Why don’t you follow young Brother Freddie’s fine, fine example? You know, he used to want to see the Kingdom Hall burn down, but now he sits up front at all the meetings, just so he doesn’t miss a thing that’s said. What a fine, fine example to us all.”

I just kinda stood there by myself for a minute, thinking about what Brother Harris had just said. I guess part of me was pretty mad at him for thinking that he could tell me what to do, like he was my dad or something. I didn’t see where it was any of his business what I did during the meetings, whether I was listening or not, as long as I wasn’t making any noise or bothering anybody else that was trying to listen.

But another part of me was thinking that maybe he was right. I mean, about me needing to be more appreciative of all the meetings, and all. Maybe it was Brother Harris’s business if I wasn’t paying attention, because after all he was the head elder in the congregation, and he must have gotten that position because Jehovah God knew he was the best man for it. Maybe it was my own fault that I hated the meetings so much, because maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough to develop the right attitude, especially in the last couple of years or so, and that’s what was holding me back and keeping me from wanting to be a good Jehovah’s Witness, not having the right attitude and all. A lot of times they say that you have to “cultivate the proper heart condition” to be pleasing to Jehovah, or something like that. I know I’ve tried to before, a bunch of times, I really have. I used to try to want to go to all the meetings, and to pay attention when I got there. And I used to try to like going out in Field Service. And for a long time I studied and underlined my Watchtowers and all the other books, every week, just like I was supposed to. But no matter how much I tried and how hard I tried, my heart never felt any different. Even after I’d prayed and prayed to Jehovah God to help me straighten it out. There was always this something inside of me that made me feel like Jehovah was still not pleased with me, and never would be, for some reason.

To tell the truth, I’ve never really figured that part out. What my heart is supposed to feel like, I mean. I remember once when I was a little kid I asked Mom how did the people that were members of the 144,000 know for sure they members of the 144,000? How did Mom know for certain that she wasn’t a member, and how did Sister Flowers know for certain that she was?

Mom said that it was just something in your heart that tells you. Your spirit is made to know it by means of Jehovah God’s spirit, if you’ve been chosen as a member of the 144,000, she said. But the same thing must be true for the “great crowd,” it seems to me. If Jehovah has found you worthy to be a member of the “great crowd,” wouldn’t you somehow feel it or know it in your heart?

Like I said, I stood there for a minute, thinking about all those things, but I didn’t take that book back downstairs like Brother Harris told me to. I wasn’t gonna try to read it during the rest of the meeting, that’s for sure, but I figured that I’d take it home with me to look at later on. Something about it still interested me. I could return it any old time. Brother Harris would never know the difference. So I stuck it up on the top shelf of the coat rack out there in the foyer, back behind some old hats and things that people always forget about, so nobody would notice it up there. I’d try to remember to pick it up on my way out.

Then I returned to my seat, and payed real close attention as Brother Borall read word for word the rest of chapter 20 from the Truth book: “Building a Happy Family Life.”

When the talk was finally over, which was when Brother Borall had read out loud to everybody the last paragraph in chapter 20, Brother Harris returned to the platform and invited everybody to stand and stretch their legs while we all sang song number 41 from our songbooks, after which the Watchtower Study would begin.

Song number 41 is based on Psalm 23 and is called “Jehovah is my Shepherd.” It’s not too bad a song, as Witness songs go. It’s actually a pretty good one. If you’re wondering if the songbook the Witnesses use is different from the songbooks that other churches use, I suppose the answer is yes. Of course I’ve never been to a regular normal church before, so I don’t know what they have, but my guess is that they have a hymn book or something. Well, the Witnesses don’t have a hymn book. They have their own special songbook called Singing and Accompanying Yourselves with Music in Your Hearts, and it’s full of songs that probably only a Jehovah’s Witness can relate to. They’re all mostly about Witness stuff. So they do an awful lot of singing about going out in Field Service, and getting prepared for the Great Tribulation and the War of Armageddon, and making sure they don’t get themselves ensnared by false religion. False religion is any religion other than Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Most of the Witness songs are kinda peppy, really. That’s the best way I can think of to describe them. They don’t sound like the hymns that I’ve heard in movies or on TV, like “Amazing Grace,” or “How Great Thou Art,” or “The Old Rugged Cross.” Of course the Witnesses would never sing “The Old Rugged Cross,” because they believe that Jesus was put to death on a straight stake or pole, not on a two-piece cross. They think the cross is a pagan symbol that the Catholics allowed the converted pagans to keep and bring into the Church. You’ll never see a Jehovah’s Witness wearing a cross, not in a million years. They’d definitely get themselves disfellowshipped for that.

Some of the Witness songs do sound peaceful and somber, like some of those hymns I just named, but to tell the truth, a bunch of them sound kinda like broadway show tunes. At least to me they do, anyway. I have a theory about that. My theory is that a lot of the Witness songs were written by some old guy that used to write songs on broadway before he became a Witness. When he came into the Truth, someone decided to put him to work writing a batch of songs for a new songbook they were getting ready to come out with. Then they threw his songs in with the ones that another old guy had just written that were more like normal type hymns. And that’s how we ended up with a few fairly nice hymn-sounding songs like “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” and “God’s Loyal Love,” and “Walking in Integrity,”—mixed in with a bunch of jumpy marching tunes like “We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses,” and “This Good News of the Kingdom Let us Preach,” and “From House to House.” Those last ones sound like something out of Oklahoma! or The Sound of Music or something.

Another thing you won’t find at the Kingdom Hall, besides hymn books and crosses, is a choir. I’m not sure why that is, and I’ve never asked why. I guess they figure if you don’t have a preacher, you may as well not have a choir either. When it’s time to do a song, everybody in the congregation stands up and sings. Nobody does a solo or anything.

For years and years, a lady named Sister Lewis used to play the piano while everybody sang, but now they just play the song over the p.a. system from a record. You can get all the songs on record albums from the Watchtower Society, which I guess is good for congregations that don’t have pianos or piano players. The reason Sister Lewis doesn’t play anymore is because she moved away, which is too bad because she was really good. She was another reason why I’d always sit in the back, because that’s where the piano was, and I liked to be real close to the piano when she played it.

After Sister Lewis left, these two other Sisters volunteered to take over the piano playing, and they were supposed to take turns from one meeting to the next. One of them was okay, but the other one was just dreadful. I think the reason she played so bad was because she was really old and probably half blind and couldn’t see the music written in the songbook, or maybe she couldn’t even see the damn keys, I don’t know. When she played, she kinda lunged around through the song, speeding up and slowing down and muttering to herself and hitting more wrong notes than right ones, and nobody could tell which way the melody was gonna go next. It usually took her ten minutes to get through a song that should’ve only taken four or five. It was pretty obvious that she had to be stopped, but I guess no one wanted to hurt her feelings or had the heart to tell her she was just too lousy a player to play anymore. It got so bad, I was almost ready to start sitting up front, just to get as far away from the piano as possible. But I didn’t have to do that after all, because the elders decided to sell the piano and buy all the records and a record player to play them on. So I kept sitting in the back.

So anyway, they played the record for song number 41 and everybody sang the song, and the Watchtower Study began. Of course, Brother Harris was the Study Conductor, which means he was the one controlling the meeting, reading out the questions for each paragraph, and then calling on someone who had raised their hand to read out the answer.

The name of the Watchtower article we were studying that morning was “The Reason for Choosing to Worship Jehovah.” It was 29 paragraphs long, so I knew it was gonna take forever to read them all out loud one by one, have all the answers read out, and then have all the scriptures that were mentioned but not quoted read out, too. To go through all that in only an hour would mean allowing only two minutes for each paragraph, which I knew was impossible. I figured we’d be stuck there at least an hour and a half. And since the Study started at 11:00, that meant it would be probably 12:30 or so before we’d finally get out.

Well, I had underlined the article the night before, but I hadn’t read it. I was kinda paying attention as the study went along, though, because I was still feeling a little guilty about what Brother Harris had said when he caught me looking at that old book instead of paying attention during the talk.

Basically the article said that a good reason to choose to worship Jehovah now, was because the time is coming pretty soon when He will be the god of a New System of things. You see, even though Jehovah God is God and everything, Satan the Devil is the real god or ruler of the current evil system of things, the one we’re all living in now. Jehovah is allowing Satan to be the god of this system. But Jehovah is getting ready to smash up this system we’re living in now, and throw Satan and his demons into an abyss somewhere. Then all the worldly governments will be replaced by Jehovah’s theocratic government. When all that happens, it’ll be too late to decide to worship Jehovah and be a Jehovah’s Witness. So you better choose to do it now, while you still can.

What I just said in six or seven sentences, the Watchtower took 29 stupid paragraphs to explain. Of course, all of it had to be backed up by some scriptures, too.

And of course as always, the article couldn’t pass up the chance to pat the Witnesses on the back a few million times along the way. Nope, nope, couldn’t let that happen. It had to point out that they’ve been the only ones in the whole world to see all this coming down the pike, the smashing and abyssing. The Witnesses have been the only ones in the whole world for the last fifty-six years or so going around warning the nations that their evil governments are about to get creamed. And don’t forget that the Witnesses have been the only ones in the whole world for the last fifty-six years or so that have spent all their time proclaiming Jehovah’s new government, and preaching about the New System of things.

All that back patting stuff was in paragraph 25. One of the questions for that particular paragraph was something like: “What will happen to the politicians of the nations after they’ve been notified about Jehovah and His coming new government, and how will they respond?” And the answer was: “Then those defiant politicians will learn to know who Jehovah is and what happens to those who disdain worshiping Him. The Kingdom action will not convert them to the worship of Jehovah but will destroy them.”

I remember that part pretty good because I was the one who read that particular answer out loud, believe it or not. You see, even though I don’t want to, sometimes I’ll raise my hand and give an answer, because I know it makes Mom feel good, and it gives her and everybody else the impression that I’m trying to be a good little Witness boy, so then maybe they’ll leave me alone and not come around and encourage me to be more spiritual and all. I hate it when somebody does that, tries to encourage you to be more spiritual. It’s awkward as hell, because they have to say it without really coming out and accusing you of losing your spirituality or something. So they come up to you and say something like, “Warren, we’ve really been missing your fine comments during the meetings lately.” Or, “Warren, we’ve really been missing you out in the Field Service the past few weeks.” And that kinda puts you on the spot, because you’ve got to come up with some polite and acceptable response, just so they’ll go away and leave you alone, when what you really want to say is something like, “Well, the questions have been so stupid lately, I just haven’t felt like reading out one of the answers for a while. Oh, I’ve still been underlining the answers, don’t worry about that, I’m just not too keen on reading them out loud.” Or, “Well, you know, I try to avoid going out in the Field Service as much as possible, because I’m afraid somebody from school might see me and realize why I’m such a complete and total geek.”

Anyway, like I said, I answered that question out loud, which really just means I read the answer word for word from the paragraph. I’m sure Brother Harris about dropped his teeth when he saw me raise my hand, because he fell all over himself calling on me to give the answer. And I’m sure that he thought the whole reason I answered it was because of what he had said to me during the talk, about paying attention and appreciating the meetings and all. Before going on to the next paragraph, Brother Harris said something like, “Brothers and Sisters, don’t we all, young and old alike, look forward so much to the New System of things? Won’t that be a fine, fine time?”

Of course, nobody raised their hand and said, “Yes, Brother Harris, that indeed will be a fine, fine time.” Nobody tried to give that answer because it wasn’t something they had underlined in one of the paragraphs.

I guess here I should try to explain a little bit about the “New System” I keep mentioning. Witnesses talk a lot about the New System. Sometimes they call it the New World. Especially the old-timers talk about it. They’ll say something like, “When I get to the New System, I’m gonna build me a really big brick house out in the country, or maybe a little log cabin up in the mountains somewhere, or maybe even a house-boat.” Or they’ll say something like, “In the New World, I’m gonna travel all over the world and see the sights. You can’t do that in this system of things, no-sir-ree, because the world nowadays is just too dangerous a place to be going traveling around in. But in the New System, I’m gonna travel all over the place, and then I’m gonna learn to play the piano, because I’ll have all the time in the world to practice, you know. I’ll have forever and ever to practice.”

That’s some of the kind of talk you hear about the New World. Some Witnesses also spend a lot of time discussing what kind of things they’re gonna have there. Like if they’re gonna have cars and TVs and telephones and stuff. Of course, nobody really knows much about what will be there, but they sure do know a lot about what won’t be there. Mainly, sickness and death and sin and crime and bad people won’t be there. Everybody will be working together to restore the earth to its original condition as a paradise, like it was before Adam and Eve sinned the first time. Pretty much the whole world is gonna be like one big Garden of Eden, and you won’t have to worry about lions and tigers and bears attacking you all the time. I guess you’ll even get to swim in the ocean without worrying about sharks. I wonder sometimes if there’ll be any snakes around.

Another thing that’s gonna happen in the New World, after the paradise conditions are restored, is the resurrection. That means all your dead relatives and everybody else that died before Armageddon will be raised from the dead and come back to life, and it’ll be your job to teach all them dead people the Truth and tell them what all happened since they died, about the War of Armageddon and the abyssing of Satan and all. If these people accept the Truth and choose to worship Jehovah in this new paradise, then they’ll be given eternal life, too. If they don’t accept the Truth, they’ll get the axe again. But why would anybody not accept it?

When I was a littler kid, I used to think about how neat it’d be if I was given the job of teaching the Truth to somebody like Ty Cobb in the New World. And then he could teach me how to really hit a baseball. Or maybe I’d get the job of teaching the Truth to Mark Twain, and it would cheer him up and then he wouldn’t hate the human race so much anymore, because his wife and daughters would be there with him in paradise, too. But with my luck, I doubt you’ll get to choose who you’ll teach the Truth to in the New World. And even if you could, so what. It doesn’t look like I’m gonna be there to find out one way or the other anyway. Not after what I’ve done.

Of course, Satan won’t be hanging around in the New World, trying to get you to eat an apple or something the way he did with Adam and Eve. He’ll be in the abyss. He’ll be released after a thousand years is up, though, by which time the paradise will have been restored and everybody will be perfect again. Jehovah will allow Satan a short time to try to mislead anyone he wants to, but Jehovah will finally destroy him for good before he can mislead too many people.

Now most of this New System stuff is in the book of Revelations, which anybody can read for themselves if they want to, even though it’s hard to understand because it’s all written in signs and symbols, like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the Seals of the Mysterious Scroll and the blowing of the Seven Trumpets and everything. The Witnesses are the only ones in the whole world who have figured out what it all means. You can check it out by reading Then is Finished the Mystery of God.

Well, the Watchtower Study dragged on and on, just like I knew it would. Finally at about 12:20 the last paragraph and the last answer and the last scripture was read. All that remained were some announcements, the singing of the last song, and the closing prayer. Of course all of that could take another fifteen or twenty minutes.

Brother Harris read out the announcements, since he was already on the platform. He said, “Brothers and Sisters, we have two announcements this morning, or this afternoon I should say, which are really just reminders, really, as I’m sure everyone is already aware of all the special activities coming up this next week and beyond.

“First, don’t forget that Brother Gottwald, our new Circuit Servant, will be visiting us this upcoming week. He’ll be with us here starting Tuesday, so you’ll all want to be sure to be at all the meetings and hear all the fine, fine things that he will no doubt be saying. And by all means, you’ll want to spend a few hours out in Field Service with him, if at all possible, as that’s always a special privilege, and is sure to be a blessing to all those who can take advantage of the opportunity to do so. There will be groups leaving the Hall every morning at 9:00, from Tuesday through Saturday, so by all means plan to come along and join with Brother Gottwald in this important work that we have been commissioned by Jehovah to carry out before He brings an end to this wicked old system of things.”

I guess the only thing I haven’t told you about Brother Harris so far is about the way he talks, w-h-i-c-h i-s r-e-a-l-l-y, r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-ooooo-w. I mean, I swear the man must be from Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere, the way he drawls out his words. He says every word like it’s got fourteen syllables in it, even if it’s only got one or two. But the thing is, I’m pretty sure he’s from right here in Lynchburg. I know he wasn’t doing it on purpose, but I swear it was driving me nuts, the way he was dragging that meeting out.

“Also,” Brother Harris continued with his announcements, “a reminder that this year’s District Assembly will be held in Roanoke, at the Roanoke Civic Center, which is the first thing you come to when you get into Roanoke if you’re driving in from Lynchburg, starting on Thursday June 19, and going through Sunday June 22. I’m sure everyone has already made their arrangements to be there, and is really looking forward to the four full days of fine, fine fellowship and encouragement to be enjoyed with all the other Brothers and Sisters throughout the entire District who’ll also be in attendance, there in Roanoke. And I especially want to point out that if anyone has a desire to be baptized during the Immersion Ceremonies on Saturday morning, June 21, as a symbol of their dedication to Jehovah and His Theocratic Organization, please come and see me as soon as possible, as there’s not much time left between now and then, and the Eighty Questions meetings will need to be organized for the benefit of the baptismal candidates.”

Then he looked up from his notes and said, “Are there any more announcements anyone can think of, maybe something I missed or left out? Anyone?”

Jesus, I was sweating bullets back there. I just knew somebody like Brother Smithers was gonna raise their hand and say something like, “Yeah, uh, Brother Harris, could you, uh, repeat all that one more, uh, time, please, but, uh, a little slower this time?” Brother Smithers says “uh” after every other word, practically.

I was holding my breath. Nobody moved or said anything. “Well, if not, I guess that’s all. So let’s all stand and sing together song number 76, “Take Sides With Jehovah.”

We sang the song. Brother Smithers gave the, uh, closing prayer. And the meeting was, uh, finally over.

The meeting was over, but there was still the matter of getting out of the Kingdom Hall, getting everybody into the car, and then getting home. And man, all that could take a while, because sometimes Mom likes to stand around forever and visit with some of the Brothers and Sisters, and be in no big hurry to leave. I was guessing she’d do just that on that particular Sunday, because of the fact that we’d been late getting there that morning, so she didn’t have any time to do some visiting before the meetings began.

And on top of Mom’s visiting time keeping us from getting home any time real soon, there’s also the fact that we always give old Sister Straiter a ride home after the meetings. So that always adds a few extra minutes to the ride home. And we can’t just ride her up to her house and push her out the door. Remember I said before that she’s real old and can’t hear anything and has to wear them head phones to be able to follow along with the meetings? Well, her hearing problem also affects her balance, too, so me or Freddie has to hold her by the arm and walk her to the car, and then walk her from the car to her house when we get there. And Sister Straiter doesn’t walk too fast, let me tell you.

I’m really not sure why it is that we give Sister Straiter a ride home after every meeting. It’s just something we’ve been doing for a long time now. I don’t really mind doing it, holding her arm and helping her around and all, because like I said, the meetings are probably the highlight of her whole life and all, and she can’t help it if she’s old as hell and can’t hear and has got no balance. She’s a nice lady. The funny thing is, and by funny I don’t mean ha ha funny, but peculiar funny, her son always brings her to the meetings, but he never comes back to pick her up afterwards, when the meetings are over. Her son is not a Jehovah’s Witness. He’s married and doesn’t live with her. I don’t know what his name is.

The reason I was in such a damn hurry to get home is because I wanted to be sure to get back in time to get a ride with Danny Riley and his dad to the park. You see, Mr. Riley always takes us into town on Sunday afternoon, to Miller Park, so we can play baseball. Miller Park is in the middle of Lynchburg, and it’s got these three really nice baseball fields, and there’s usually a bunch of kids there our age, kids who live in that neighborhood. So it’s pretty easy to get enough guys together to get a game up. And if we get there and there’s no kids around, well, Mr. Riley gets out his fungo bat and starts hitting pop-ups to me and Danny, and pretty soon a bunch of other guys will start showing up, and before long we’ll have enough to choose up sides. Mr. Riley has some kind of heart condition, and he gets out of breath real easy, so he can’t do much more than hit us fly balls and grounders and stuff. He can’t do any running around. He’s always the umpire during the games, and what he says goes.

Danny Riley is my best friend. He lives down the road about a half a mile from me. I say down the road because we don’t live on a street, like in the city with sidewalks and all. We live on a county road. And there’s not many other kids that live around us, either, which is why we have to go all the way into town to play baseball. In fact, on our road, there’s just Freddie, Danny, and me. And even if there were enough kids in our area to get up a game, there really wouldn’t be anywhere to play. Danny’s backyard is big enough to throw the ball around in a little, but there’s trees scattered here and there, so you couldn’t play a game back there even if it was big enough. And my back yard ain’t level enough to hardly walk on, much less play baseball. It must really be nice to live in a neighborhood with three baseball fields.

But we don’t have any baseball fields out where we live, and it’s not really what you’d call a neighborhood, even, so that’s why Mr. Riley takes us into town every Sunday afternoon, which is great. I live for Sunday afternoon.

But if Mom didn’t hurry up and finish her visiting so we could leave on out of there and drop Sister Straiter off at her house, well, we’d probably get home too late for me to catch a ride with Danny and his dad. They usually come by my house about 1:30 or so, and it was already almost 1:00. So I was just standing out in the front foyer of the Kingdom Hall, sweating bullets again, wishing that Mom and Freddie and Sister Straiter would hurry up and come through the swinging doors, so we could get the show on the road. Then I suddenly remembered about the old book I’d stuck up on the coat rack, The Time is at Hand. I was standing right there in front of the rack, so I just started to reach up behind there and grab the book.

“Warren!” I about jumped out of my skin. I turned around and it was who else but Brother Harris standing there, looking down at me. I just knew he was gonna see that book up there and give me hell for not taking it back downstairs to the library like he’d told me to.

“Warren, I just want to say what a fine, fine comment that was you gave during the Watchtower Study, and what an encouragement it is to see you and all the other young ones in the congregation making an effort to participate in the meetings. I just hope our little chat we had back there during the talk helped you to appreciate the importance of taking full advantage of the opportunities afforded to us during the meetings, for us all to show our respect and appreciation to Jehovah. Wasn’t that a fine, fine message contained in this morning’s Watchtower Study? It really makes you realize the seriousness and urgency of the times we’re living in, and how we need to be sure to ‘take sides with Jehovah,’ like the song said, right now, while the opportunity is still available to us. Don’t you agree?”

He must not have been looking for an answer, because he patted me on the arm a couple of times real firm like, and then walked on out the front door. Of course, after saying all that, as slow as he says anything, I’m sure he was already late for where ever it was he was heading off to. Field Service, probably.

While I was standing there waiting some more, there must have been about fifty or sixty Brothers and Sisters who passed by me on their way out, and of course they all had to stop and comment on the comment I had made during the Study. “Fine comment there, Brother Warren, keep up the good work.” “I so much enjoyed the way you brought out that important point, Brother Warren.” They really pound it to you sometimes.

Finally, at about ten minutes after 1:00, Mom and Freddie appeared through the swinging doors, each of them holding on to one of Sister Straiter’s arms, helping her along. And Mom said, “You ready, Warren?” Jesus, I could have walked home by now.

I just nodded my head. They went on out the door. I reached up and grabbed The Time is at Hand, and stuck it between my New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures and my Singing and Accompanying Yourselves with Music in Your Hearts, and followed out behind them.

Well, twenty minutes later, we had dropped Sister Straiter off at her house and were halfway home. We were gonna be cutting it close, for me to get there in time to catch my ride with Danny.

So we’re riding along, and Mom says, “Warren, I was talking to Brother Harris after the meeting this morning...”

And all I could think of was, uh-oh, Brother Harris told her about me trying to read that old Charles T. Russell book during the talk, and not paying attention and all. And now she’s gonna jump all over me for it, and maybe even find out that I’m sitting there in the back seat with that book hidden between my Bible and my songbook, when I was supposed to have put it back in the library, and she’s gonna take it away from me, and tell me that I gotta sit with her during the meetings from now on so she can make sure that I’m paying attention to everything, and then maybe ground me and not let me go play baseball with Danny today. This could be bad. Real bad. And what was even worse, Mom tends to drive slower when she’s driving and talking at the same time.

“...and he complimented you on the fine comment you made during the Watchtower Study, and said it looked like you were starting to mature and make good progress in the Truth, and said he hopes you’ll keep it up.”

Well, I wasn’t in trouble so far.

Then Mom said, “He asked me if I thought maybe you might be ready to symbolize your dedication to Jehovah, and get baptized at the assembly in Roanoke this month. Remember? He mentioned the baptismal ceremonies and the Eighty Questions meetings during the final announcements today? Remember that?”

“Yeah, I remember,” I said. I said it real low. I didn’t want to sound enthusiastic or anything.

“Well, he said we ought to seriously talk about it, you getting baptized, especially considering the shortness of the time remaining for this old system of things. We’re halfway through 1975, you know. October is just around the corner. Armageddon will soon be upon us, there’s no mistaken that fact.”

Then she reached over and patted Freddie on the leg and said, “Aren’t you glad you got baptized last summer, honey? Don’t you feel that now you’re straight with Jehovah, and prepared for when Armageddon gets here?” Freddie said yes.

She tilted her head over to the side, so that she could see me in the rearview mirror. Then she said, “I’ve raised you up in the Truth for practically your whole life, Warren, so you know the Truth as well as anybody does. You know how serious and urgent things are, and what it all means. I think it’s time you made the commitment to serve Jehovah and His Kingdom. And you need to symbolize your commitment with water baptism, the same way me and Freddie have already. I’m just praying to Jehovah that the three of us get through the Great Tribulation and Armageddon together. You hearing what I’m saying?”

Yeah, I could hear what she was saying, alright. But I definitely didn’t want to talk about it. Not right then. I just wanted her to drive faster so we could hurry up and get home, so I could catch my ride with Danny and his dad, so I could play baseball for the rest of the day, and not have to think about the Kingdom Hall, and not have to think about Jehovah’s Witnesses, and not have to think about Armageddon and the seriousness and urgency of the times.

“We’ll talk about it later,” she said, “so be thinking about it. But there’s not much time left for talking. We all know that.”

I didn’t say anything the rest of the way home. When we finally got there, at ten minutes to 2:00, Danny and his dad were just getting ready to pull out of our driveway. I hopped out of our car and ran over to theirs and said, “I gotta change clothes, it’ll only take me five minutes, will you wait for me?”

“Sure,” Mr. Riley said.

I ran into the house and changed as quick as I could. Of course I didn’t have time to eat lunch. So I grabbed another apple off the kitchen table as I ran out, like I had on the way to the Hall that morning. I knew I was gonna be pretty hungry by the time I got home, but it didn’t matter to me, because I would rather play baseball than eat, any day.

When me and Danny and Mr. Riley got to the park, there was already a bunch of kids there that had just started a game, but they had room for us. To keep the teams even, though, it meant that I had to go on one side and Danny had to go on the other. Which was okay, but we like it better when we get to be on the same team.

I played center field most of the day. I always play somewhere in the outfield, because I’m really good at catching pop-ups. I can’t play in the infield because I’m bad at fielding grounders. I couldn’t come up with a grounder if my life depended on it. I don’t know why it is, but I just can’t keep my eye on the ball when it’s hit on the ground and coming straight at me, I guess because it’s bouncing and hopping and skipping all over the place. The thing about a grounder is, you really don’t know what it’s going to do next. But a pop-up is different, because it usually flies true, so you pretty much know where you have to be to catch it. Sometimes a line drive will swerve a little bit, but you can still tell where it’s gonna go. It isn’t going all over the place like a grounder usually does.

I love to catch pop-ups. In fact, I don’t really mind it on those Sundays when not enough kids show up to play a real game, so Mr. Riley just hits pop-ups to everybody for a couple of hours. There’s just something magical about being able to catch one. It’s like you probably shouldn’t be able to, but for some reason you can. And it’s not something that somebody can tell you how to do, either. You have to stand out there and get somebody to hit you a million pop-ups until you catch one. And then after you catch that first one, it somehow clicks something inside of you, and from then on you can pretty much catch them all. I remember when I couldn’t catch them, and Mr. Riley kept hitting and hitting them to me, and Danny was out there saying try it this way and try it that way, and think about this and think about that, but they were still landing all around me because I couldn’t figure out where the ball was gonna end up while it was still in the air. But then I finally caught one, somehow, and then another and another, and that was it. I had a hard time learning to ride a bike at first, too.

The funny thing is, even though I can catch pop-ups easy as pie now, I can’t really explain to anybody how it’s done. It’s like you’re standing out there in the outfield and you see the guy at bat take a big swing at the ball, and you’re off and running practically before he’s even hit the ball, because something tells you where it’s gonna go. I’m pretty fast too, so if it’s hit high enough and there’s room for me to get there, I can usually get there. And boy, that’s the best feeling in the world, running and running and running and knowing there’s no way in the world you gonna get to it, and then you’re there and the ball is there and at the last possible second you reach up and grab it. And the batter is really pissed, because he’s been robbed again. Outfielders live for that.

Danny is a year older than me, and he’s kinda big for his age, and he either plays first base or pitches. He can really hit the ball, too. He hits them a long, long ways. He’s got this huge bat that I can hardly even swing. He’ll take that bat and hit the ball over the fence right-handed, then he’ll turn around and hit one over left-handed. About the only thing that Danny can’t do is run real fast. But, as he always says, when you can hit them as far as he can, you don’t need to run real fast. Whenever he says something like that, his dad always tells him to shut up and quit bragging. Danny is not really a bragging kind of guy, though. I guess his dad just wants to be sure he doesn’t turn into one. I think it would be hard not to brag if you could clobber the ball the way Danny can.

Me, I can’t hit them like that. I can barely get them out of the infield, most of the time. I’m pretty small for my age. I’ve always been small for my age. I’m fourteen, soon to be fifteen, but I look more like I’m twelve or something. I can’t hit them anywhere near as far as Danny can, so I concentrate on hitting them down the third base line or up the first base line or up the middle. And I’m pretty fast, like I said, so I can usually get a lot of infield hits, hitting them like that. That’s why me and Danny like to be on the same team, because I’ll bat before him and get on base with a little dinky hit or something, and then he’ll come up and smack it right out of sight.

Danny’s a pretty good pitcher, too. He can throw real hard, of course, because of his size and all. But he can also throw a curve ball and a screw ball. Mr. Riley won’t let him pitch a whole lot on Sundays, because he doesn’t want Danny to hurt his arm or anything. You see, Danny pitches for his Pony League team, just like he did for his Little League team. Next year he’ll probably pitch for the Rustburg High School Red Devils. That’s where we go to school. Danny’s in the tenth grade, and I’m in the ninth grade.

I never got to play Little League or Pony League, all because of: “Do not be mislead. Bad associations spoil useful habits.” That’s a direct quote from I Corinthians 15:33 of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, which is the Bible that Jehovah’s Witnesses use. When I asked Mom if I could sign up for Little League, she said no, because “bad associations spoil useful habits,” which means that if you start hanging around with worldly people, sooner or later their bad worldly habits will rub off on you, and you’ll become just as worldly as they are. To Jehovah’s Witnesses, anybody that’s not a Jehovah’s Witness is worldly. That’s the ultimate put down, to say that someone in the congregation is acting worldly.

That was when I was in the fourth grade, when I asked Mom if I could sign up for Little League. I had just started to play softball at school, and all the other boys in my class were talking about the Little League season coming up, and a couple of them said I should sign up to play, too. That was a big thing for me, them telling me I should play Little League with them, because I was a new kid in the school and didn’t really have any friends, and it was the first time they had acted like I was okay or something. Before that, a lot of them had kinda picked on me some since I had come there. Maybe it was because I was real small or something, and easy to pick on. In fact, the first day I was there, one of the kids called me Grubworm. Mr. Roberts had stood me in front of the class the way teachers will usually do when a new kid comes into the class. And he said something like, “Class, this is Warren Grubber, he’s just moved here from Lynchburg, and I want everyone to be hospitable and show him a warm welcome.” But the class didn’t yell out “Welcome, Warren” or anything, they just sat there looking at me. And I just stood there looking at my feet. I wish teachers wouldn’t do that to the new kids, introduce them in front of the whole class like that. It really makes you feel self-conscious, which is how I’ve always felt anyway, being so much smaller than most of the other kids, and being a Jehovah’s Witness to boot. Of course, nobody at the new school knew I was a Witness, and I wasn’t about to tell anybody either. I figured if I didn’t tell anybody, it would be one less thing they would have to make fun of me about. I’d had enough of that crap back at my old school.

But anyway, Mr. Roberts introduced me in front of the whole class, like I said, and then during recess this one guy kept calling me Warren Grubworm, while they were playing tag or something. He kept running around yelling, “The Grubworm’s It! The Grubworm’s It!” I guess he was expecting me to start chasing them around, which is what you’re supposed to do when you’re playing a game of tag and it’s your turn to be It. But they never asked me if I wanted to play tag with them. That guy just kept running around laughing and yelling, “The Grubworm’s It! The Grubworm’s It!” I just stood there watching them run around and around.

Well, after that guy called me Grubworm out on the playground that first day, a lot of the other kids got to calling me that, too. Grubworm, or Grubby, or Wormie. I thought they must have all hated me for some reason, the ones that called me that. Why else would they be making fun of my name like that? That’s why it was such a big thing for me when a couple of them said I should sign up for Little League with them.

You see, what had happened was, our teacher Mr. Roberts took us outside for recess one day, a couple of weeks after I had gotten there, and he told us that since it was springtime we were gonna play softball. Well, I had never played softball before. The school I came from only had blacktop playgrounds, so about the only thing we could play out there was kickball, which is kinda the same idea, but also a lot different because you don’t have bats and gloves and stuff. Then Mr. Roberts did something pretty strange. He grabbed me by both shoulders and marched me out to a certain place on the field and said, “Okay, Warren, you’re gonna be my shortstop.” I was thinking, that’s nice, I’m the shortstop. What’s a shortstop? So Mr. Roberts goes over and starts pitching to the first batter, and I’m standing out there with my hands in my pockets, staring at the tops of my shoes or something, and all of a sudden I hear this loud CRACK sound, and I look up to see what’s going on, and I see this softball coming straight for my head. I didn’t have much time to think about ducking or jumping out of the way or anything, so I just kinda nonchalantly removed my hands from my pockets and reached up and caught the ball. I wasn’t even wearing a glove. Well, then a bunch of the other guys out there in the field with me started yelling, “Great catch, Grubby! Way to go, Grubworm!” and stuff like that. They must have thought I knew what I was doing, but really all I was doing was trying to keep from getting killed. I threw the ball back to Mr. Roberts and he just stood there for the longest time, smiling this big smile at me, like something really great or important had just happened. And the way the other guys out there were acting, I realized that something great had happened, because it was the first time since I had started going to this new school that I felt like the other guys thought I was okay. I guess they figured that if a guy could catch a line drive without even using a glove, well, he couldn’t be all bad. When I think about it now, I’m just glad it was a line drive that was hit at me, instead of a grounder or something. I would have screwed up a grounder, for sure.

It wasn’t very long after that, that me and Danny got to be pretty good friends, too, mainly because he was the only other kid besides Freddie that lived on our road. Right away, Danny gave me one of his old baseball gloves and Mr. Riley hit all them pop-ups to me, trying to teach me how to catch one. I’ve been living and breathing baseball ever since.

That Sunday in the park with Danny and Mr. Riley and everybody turned out to be a really great day, even though me and Danny were on different teams. All in all, we must have played for about three or four hours. I was happy with the way I was playing, too. I made a few pretty good catches, nothing spectacular, and I didn’t drop anything or make any errors. And I hit the ball real good, and only got out once or twice all day. Danny of course hit a homerun practically every time he came up to bat, except for this one time he struck out swinging so hard that he fell down. That happened when he was batting left-handed. His normal way to bat is right-handed.

But the thing that happened that made me feel so great about the whole day, was the last hit I got. Danny had played first base all day, and then his dad said it was okay for him to pitch, because it was gonna be the last inning because it was getting kinda late and we would have to be leaving pretty soon. So Danny goes and strikes out the first two guys up, and then it was my turn to bat. I was really scared, because Danny was throwing so hard. I wasn’t scared that he was gonna hit me with the ball or anything, just that I would strike out like the first two guys did. You see, one thing I really take a lot of pride in, is the fact that I hardly ever strike out. That’s because I choke up on the bat, and I have this really small bat, so I can usually make contact. But I knew that Danny could throw hard and sneak in some fancy curve balls if he wanted to.

Well, he went with his fastball and threw the first two pitches right by me, and I just knew I didn’t have a chance at the next one.

Then something strange happened. Danny’s third pitch to me was probably the hardest one, but it was like it was moving in slow motion, the way I saw it coming, and I took what I thought was my normal choppy little swing at it, but when I made contact, it didn’t feel like any other time I had ever hit a ball. It had a real solid feel. And the ball just kinda jumped off my bat. It was a line drive that went right over the second baseman’s head, and just kept climbing and climbing. Then it went right over the right fielder’s head, before he even had a chance to turn around, and rolled almost all the way to the fence. Of course, the outfielders were playing me in real shallow to begin with, because everybody knows I don’t have any power.

Anyway, by the time the right fielder got to the ball and got it back into the infield, I had gotten a triple out of it, which was great, because usually if I get a hit it’s just my normal infield single or something. The very next guy up after me struck out, which left me stranded at third base, but that was okay, because I was still so happy and excited about my triple.

On the way home, Danny said he was gonna give me his big bat to hit with from now on, the way I hit that last pitch. He was just making a joke, of course. He wasn’t mad or anything that I’d hit that triple off of him. All I could talk about was how shocked I was that a little guy like me could ever get lucky and get a hit like that, because it had never happened to me like that before. Mr. Riley explained that sometimes when a batter hits the ball, everything just seems to fall in place. The batter sees the ball coming real good, almost like it’s in slow motion. He takes a nice level swing. He keeps his head down and shifts his weight from the back to the front exactly at just the right time. He hits the ball perfectly on the sweet spot of the bat, and follows all the way through with the swing.

“It takes practice and practice and practice to be able to do that with consistency,” said Mr. Riley, “but that’s how come even the small guys in the big leagues can hit it out every now and then. The big guys can do it with sheer power. Maybe you don’t have a lot of power, Warren, but it all came together for you on that one pitch.” Maybe so. All I know is, that was the only hit that I’ve ever gotten that gave me the same magical feeling I sometimes get when I chase down a really long fly ball.

When they dropped me off at my house, the last thing Danny said to me as I was getting out of the car was, “Warren, you hit my best pitch.” And I walked down the driveway and into the house feeling like I was ten feet tall, which is pretty tall for a small guy like me.

Well, I went into the house, and Mom and Freddie were sitting at the kitchen table studying next week’s Watchtower article. And I could tell right away that something was going on because Mom had on her Mad Face. That’s what I call it, anyway. It’s this expression she always has if she’s mad about something. It’s strange, but sometimes she’ll be mad like that all the way to the Kingdom Hall, but as soon as she gets to the Kingdom Hall, she puts on what I call her Kingdom Hall Face. Just like that. And she’ll be all smiles and happy and cheerful for the entire meeting, up until right after we drop Sister Straiter off at her house after the meeting, and then she’s got the Mad Face back on, same as before we went to the Kingdom Hall.

I knew the only way to avoid whatever it was that was going on, was to just say hi and keeping on walking through the kitchen and then go on to my room. That’s what I tried doing. But Mom stopped me and said, “Warren, your father and his fellow drunks are downstairs in the basement, and he keeps yelling up here every five minutes to see if you’re home yet, and when he finds out that you are home, I wish you wouldn’t go down there with them, because they’ve been down there all day, and I’m sick and tired of listening to them, and I just want them all to hurry up and leave. They’re all just a bunch of no-good, worldly drunks, your father included, and they’re all nothing but bad association for a boy like you.”

“But, Mom—“ I said.

“I can’t forbid you to go down there,” she said, “but I’m asking you to take my feelings into consideration, just the same.” That was her way of saying that if I knew what was good for me, I’d better not go downstairs. “Besides,” she said, “you ought to sit yourself down here at the table with me and Freddie and study next week’s Watchtower. That’s what we’re doing. Now run and get you Watchtower for next week.”

Well, I knew Dad and his fellow drunks were down there before I even walked into the house, and before Mom told me they were, because I saw their cars out in the driveway, and I could hear the music and talking and laughing going on from outside.

You see, a lot of times on Sundays, a bunch of my dad’s cousins and uncles come over to the house, and they all go down to the basement with their guitars and fiddles and stuff, and they sit around all day playing their guitars and fiddles and singing country music songs. And smoking cigarettes. And drinking beer. Lots and lots of beer. Everybody brings a six pack or two. Dad bought an old refrigerator for down there, for them to keep their beer in, so they don’t have to come upstairs for anything, not even to use the bathroom, because they go out into the backyard when they have to take a pee, which is right often, because of all the beer they drink. There aren’t any houses anywhere near our house, so nobody can see them out there peeing in the backyard.

They never come upstairs and bother anything, but you can hear all the noise and music from upstairs, so it’s pretty hard to read or watch TV or study or anything when they’re all carrying on down there, which is why Mom had on her Mad Face when I got home that day, because her and Freddie were trying to study their Watchtowers.

All them drunks usually leave by 6:00 or 7:00 or so, because most of them have to get up and go to work the next morning, so they don’t want to stay too late. But Dad works second shift, so he doesn’t have to be at work until late Monday afternoon, so he usually stays downstairs by himself after everybody leaves, mainly because he’s in no shape to make it up the stairs, but also because even if he did make it up the stairs, he’d have to listen to Mom for the rest of the evening, fussing at him about his drinking and playing music and carrying on and all. So he’ll just sit down there on this old beat up couch he bought for himself, or in this old lounge chair somebody gave to him, strumming his guitar and smoking cigarettes and drinking his beer all by himself, until he finally passes out. Then he’ll sleep right there in the basement until it’s time for him to get up and go to work the next afternoon.

The reason Dad was yelling up to see if I was home yet was because he wanted me to come down and sing a song for everybody. You see, I used to like to hang around down there when I was a little kid, and watch them play and all, because I didn’t have anything else better to do. And naturally I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, too. I guess I was at the stage when a kid wants to be like his dad. Well, I kept bugging and bugging Dad to buy me a guitar, because I wasn’t allowed to touch his. Finally one day he came home with this real old beat up guitar that he had bought from somebody for ten dollars or something, and he gave it to me. He put a new set of strings on it, tuned it up, handed it to me, and said, “Go to it, boy.” He wouldn’t show me any chords, or show me how to go about playing it or anything. He said the best way for me to learn was to sit around and watch him and the rest of them play, on Sunday afternoons, and then to go off by myself and figure it out. He said that was the way he had learned how to play, watching other people.

Right after he gave me that guitar, one of his cousins gave me a chord chart, which is this big chart that shows you where to put your fingers for making all the different chords on a guitar, and it tells you which chords go together when you’re doing a song in a certain key and all. So I took that chart and taught myself the chords. Then on the Sunday afternoons that they all got together, I’d sit in the background and watch everybody’s fingers while they played, and I’d try to follow along as best I could.

So then one Sunday, after everybody had been playing and drinking for a couple of hours, I got up my nerve and stepped out from the corner where I usually sat watching them play, and I said, “Dad, can I do one?”

Dad hadn’t been paying any attention to me, but he knew I had just said something, so he turned to me and said, “What was that, boy?”

“Um, can I sing one?”

Now all of them had heard what I said, and they started laughing and carrying on, and one of them said to my dad, “Yeah, Les, let the boy sing one. How about it?”

So Dad said, “Okay, boy, let’s hear what you got.”

I was pretty nervous, but I stood up there in the middle of all of them, holding my guitar, which was practically bigger than I was, and I started singing this song that I had taught myself by listening to the country music radio station. The name of the song was “I Remember the Year that Clayton Dulaney Died.” After I got to going on it, they all fell in with me, playing right along, and it started sounding pretty good. Of course, when I finished singing it, they all whooped it up and made a big deal about how good it sounded, and how good my guitar playing was coming and all, which made me feel really good. And I could tell that even Dad was a little impressed.

When I think about it now, I guess it was something that I learned to play that guitar like I did, pretty much by teaching myself, and how I could teach myself a song just from hearing it on the radio, even if it was just a simple country song. But of course that didn’t make me a genius or nothing, because the fact is, most all country songs are simple, and if you know how to play one, you can pretty much play any other one you want to. The hardest part is going to the trouble of writing down the words and then learning them. After a while, it gets pretty boring. And the thing now is, I don’t really like country music much anymore, ever since Danny got a new stereo a couple of years ago and I started listening to rock and roll records at his house. Dad doesn’t allow rock and roll in our house.

So anyway, now whenever they all get to playing, Dad always wants me to come downstairs and sing that Clayton Dulaney song for everybody. But I don’t particularly like hanging around down there in the basement with them anymore, because country is not my kind of music anymore, like I just said, and they’re all usually halfway drunk and carrying on, and I’m usually out playing baseball with Danny on Sundays, anyway, or hanging around at his house.

Well, I’ll tell you the truth, I didn’t feel like doing either one of those things, going downstairs to sing for Dad and his fellow drunks, or staying upstairs and underlining my Watchtower for next week. I really just wanted to go to my room and be left alone. But just as soon as Mom said that stuff about wishing I wouldn’t go down there with them, Dad yelled out from downstairs, “Betty, is Warren home yet?”

And Mom just sat there at the table with her Mad Face on, underlining her Watchtower. She didn’t look up at me to see what I was gonna do, and she didn’t bother to answer him.

“Betty!” Dad yelled again. I could tell he was pretty drunk.

Mom still didn’t answer him or look up at me. Her and Freddie both just kept underlining their Watchtowers.

“B E T T Y!” Man, Dad was really howling this time.

Finally, I pulled open the basement door and yelled down the steps, “Yeah, Dad, I’m home.”

“Well, get on down here, boy. Everybody’s fixing to leave, but we all want to hear you do your song first.”

Mom still just sat there. She didn’t look up.

“I can’t Dad, I just got home, and I got a lot of studying to do for school tomorrow.” Which wasn’t really a lie or anything, because I did have to read a couple of chapters of Slaughterhouse-Five for English class.

“Just come on down and do that one song, that’s all I’m asking,” he yelled, “it won’t take you five damn minutes.”

“Really, Dad,” I yelled back, “I got a lot stuff I gotta do.”

“Dammit, boy. I said get your skinny ass down here and do your song. NOW GET YOUR SKINNY LITTLE ASS DOWN HERE AND DO YOUR SONG!”.

Jesus, I didn’t know what to do. I knew Mom was gonna be really mad at me if I went down there, but I could tell that Dad was getting pretty mad, too, the way he was yelling and cussing and everything. I knew it was making him look bad in front of his uncles and cousins and all, and I knew they would really rub it in to him if he couldn’t get me down there to sing that song, and that would just make him madder than he already was. Plus, there was the fact that he was drunk. I mean, Dad isn’t mean or anything when he’s drunk, so I wasn’t too worried that he’d come upstairs and slap me around or anything. He’d never done anything like that before. But I know how he is when he’s drunk. He just won’t give up. He would’ve stood there forever, yelling and screaming up at me to come downstairs. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Really, it was just such a stupid situation, the whole damn thing. It was gonna be a whole lot easier for me to just go down there and sing the damn song and get it over with and make Dad happy and shut up his yelling, than to keep yelling back and forth up the steps, making him madder and madder, and pushing him further and further into a corner, so to speak.

Well, this time I didn’t even look back at Mom. I went on down the steps, and closed the door behind me.

Uncle Merle was down there, and his two sons, Clyde and Roy. And Uncle Virgil was down there, too. I guess Merle and Virgil are really what you’d call my great uncles, if you wanted to be technical about it, because they’re the brothers of my Dad’s mother. So they’re really my Dad’s uncles, which makes them my great uncles. I think that makes Clyde and Roy my second cousins, but I’m not too sure how you’re supposed to figure out stuff like that. I only point this out because they are all a lot older than me. They’re all grownups. Usually when somebody talks about one of their cousins, they’re talking about somebody that’s about the same age as they are. But that’s not the case here. Clyde and Roy are my Dad’s age, I guess, or there abouts. Of course, Uncle Merle and Uncle Virgil are a lot older. They’re old as hell.

Uncle Merle owns a septic cleaning company, and Roy and Clyde work for him, driving the trucks that come to your house and pump out your septic tank. Uncle Virgil is on disability and hasn’t worked for years and years. I think he’s got a bad heart, and bad lungs, and bad kidneys, and a bad liver, and emphysema, and most of his hair has fallen out. I guess you could say that about everything that could be wrong with him, is wrong with him. But he’s a nice guy, though. He’s always been really nice to me, maybe because he never had any kids of his own. He drinks a lot, and he smokes a lot, too, even though he knows it’s not good for him, because of everything that’s already wrong with him and all. He doesn’t seem to care too much about what is and what isn’t good for him, far as I can tell.

Anyway, Roy handed me his guitar, and I sang “I Remember the Year that Clayton Dulaney Died,” which for some reason is just what everybody was dying to hear. They all got a big kick out of it, as always, when I sang it. Except this time they got an even bigger kick than usual, because of the way my voice kept breaking up while I was singing it. Dad even said, “Damn, boy, I don’t remember that being a yodeling song,” and everybody laughed. Everybody but me. You see, for the last month or so, my voice has been in the process of changing. It’s starting to get a lot deeper, which is how it comes out now most of the time, except every now and then a higher sound will come out mixed in with the deeper sounds. The bad part of it is I don’t have any control over it whatsoever, so whenever I open my mouth to say something, I have no idea what it’s gonna come out sounding like. Mostly it comes out sounding like a croaking frog or something. Of course, I’m pretty self-conscious about it, especially at school. So I’d been trying to watch myself and not say anything much to anybody, or give answers in any of my classes, unless I had to. It hasn’t gotten so bad yet that I have to keep my mouth shut completely, and I hope it never does. I’m hoping it gets better, instead of getting worse. But with my luck, I’m sure it’ll just get worse and worse. I’m sure it will.

So I sang the Clayton Dulaney song and they all got their laughs about my voice cracking up, and then everybody was packing up their guitars and fiddles and stuff, getting ready to leave because it was getting late and all. I was going around picking up all the empty beer cans, because I knew Dad was gonna make me do it anyway, after everybody left. And then Clyde came up to me and said, “Hey Rusty, how old you getting to be, boy?” He asks me that every time he sees me. And for some reason he always calls me Rusty instead of Warren, either because he thinks it bothers me to be called that, which it doesn’t, or because he thinks he’s being cool or something.

I said, “I’m fourteen. I’ll be fifteen next month.” My voice cracked real bad when I said the word fifteen.

“Almost fifteen. How about that,” he said.

I knew just exactly what his next question was gonna be, because it’s the same one he always asks me, after he’s asked me how old I’m getting to be.

“Well now, tell me something here, Rusty,” he said, “You been getting any yet?”

Well, everybody thought it was hilarious, him asking me that question, again. That’s always good for a big laugh. So they all just gathered around and stood there laughing, waiting to see what my answer would be this time.

I just shrugged, and didn’t say anything, which is what I always do. When I was just a little kid, I didn’t even know what Clyde was talking about, of course, so it didn’t really bother me when he asked me that. Back then, everybody would laugh a little bit, and I’d say something like, “Getting what? Getting what?” And that would make them laugh some more. But ever since I got old enough to know what he was talking about, it does bother me a little bit, when he asks me that same stupid question every time he sees me, like it’s any of his business or something. But I try as hard as I can not to let it show that it bothers me.

Usually that’s where it stops, after Clyde asks me if I’ve been getting any yet, and me just shrugging at him. But this time Clyde said, “Well, I don’t know about you, but when I was fourteen and fifteen, I was getting me some.”

“Ah, leave the boy alone, Clyde,” said Uncle Virgil, “nobody wants to hear any of your bullshit.”

Clyde said, “That ain’t no bullshit, I was getting it when I was his age.” I find that hard to believe, though, that he was getting it back then, or even ever. I mean, Clyde’s never been married and has always lived with Uncle Merle, and besides that, what woman in her right mind would want to give any to a stupid bastard that drives a septic tank truck for a living?

Then Clyde turned to me and said, “You better hurry up and get you some, boy. It’ll sure clear up them pimples you got on your face, you know.” Then he really busted out laughing.

Well, it was nice of Clyde to point that out to everybody, that I was starting to get a bunch of pimples on my face. My voice was changing, I wasn’t getting any, and I had pimples all over my face. What else did I have to look forward to, Clyde? How soon will it be before I get a big fat ass and go bald as hell like you, Clyde? Jesus, that’s what I felt like asking him.

“Clyde, shut up and let’s go,” said Roy. Everybody was on the way out the back door. Clyde followed behind them, laughing and laughing the whole way out to his car. It’s funny though, that I wasn’t really mad or anything at Clyde for the way he always picks on me, even though it did bother me a little bit sometimes. But that’s just the way Clyde is, he likes to give everybody a hard time about something. I don’t think he means any harm by it. In fact, it was Clyde that gave me that chord chart I was talking about before, the one that helped me learn how to play the guitar. And he didn’t just give it to me because he had it laying around and didn’t need it anymore. He actually went out and bought it, just for me. That’s just the way he is, giving you a hard time about something one minute, but then being nice to you the next. He’s a really good fiddle player, too.

I thought they were all gone, but then Uncle Virgil stuck his head through the door and said, “Warren, you gonna be able to come and cut my grass next week, if it ain’t raining?”

That’s something I’ve been doing for the last couple of summers, cutting Uncle Virgil’s grass, ever since I was big enough to push a lawn mower. He always comes up to the house on Saturday morning and takes me back to his house in Lynchburg, and I cut his grass. And a bunch of other old folks that live on his street get me to cut theirs, too. It started out that I was just cutting his yard. And then the old woman that lives on one side of him asked him if I could cut hers, too. So one day after I had finished cutting his, he told me to push the mower on over to her house and cut hers. She gave me four dollars, and I tried to give half of it to Uncle Virgil, because after all I had used his mower and his gas to cut hers with. But he wouldn’t let me give him any of the money. Then the next week the old man across the street asked Uncle Virgil if I had time to do his. And pretty soon I was cutting practically everybody’s grass that lived on the lower end of Maryland Avenue, which is the street Uncle Virgil lives on. Knowing Uncle Virgil, I bet he was going up and down the street asking people if they’d give a good kid the job of cutting their grass. I don’t mind, that’s for sure, because that’s the only way I have of making any money. And I do pretty good at it, too. Uncle Virgil pays me seven dollars to do his yard, which is way too much, because his yard ain’t that big really. And everybody else gives me anywhere from three to five dollars to do their yards, so I can make between thirty and forty dollars every Saturday, just cutting grass on Uncle Virgil’s street. It takes me five or six hours to cut all that grass.

I save as much of the money as I can, too, to buy things I know my folks won’t buy for me, or can’t buy for me. Like Converse tennis shoes. They cost about twelve dollars a pair, but Mom says that’s too much for just a regular pair of tennis shoes, when she can buy two pair for ten dollars over at K-Mart. But what she doesn’t understand is, they aren’t just regular tennis shoes, they’re the ones you have to wear to be cool, because that’s what everybody else at school is wearing. Same thing with blue jeans. I gotta have Levis like everybody else at school, but Mom thinks that K-Mart jeans are good enough. Of course, I understand why she’s like that, because we’re not rich or anything, so we can only afford so much, and she doesn’t see any sense in paying a lot for something, when you can get about the same thing a lot cheaper from somewhere else. But I tried to explain to her that the difference is being cool and not being cool. So she said fine, if you want to wear stuff just to be cool, you can just pay for it with your own money, which is what I do. Then she gave me a big lecture about being disappointed in me for trying to fit in with the worldly kids at school. Freddie wasn’t like that, she said. Freddie wasn’t too good to wear K-Mart jeans and tennis shoes, she said. And, of course, the Watchtower Society really frowns on anybody trying to fit in with the worldly fashions.

But I don’t just buy Levis and Converse with my grass cutting money. I buy baseballs and other stuff I need, and rock and roll albums, which I keep over at Danny’s house, because we don’t have a stereo to play them on, and Dad wouldn’t let me play them at our house, even if we had a stereo, because he only allows country music in our house. Last summer, I saved up a bunch of money and bought a ten speed bicycle, because I knew Mom and Dad didn’t have the extra money for something like that, so I didn’t even ask them to buy it for me. I was gonna save up this summer and maybe get me an electric guitar or something, because I’ve thought about learning how to play rock and roll, which would be really hard to do on my old country guitar that Dad gave me.

Anyway, Uncle Virgil had asked me if I was gonna be cutting the grass next week, so I said, “Yes, sir, I’ll be ready Saturday morning, like always.”

“Alright, then, I’ll see you next Saturday morning,” Uncle Virgil said. He winked at me, and then he was gone.

It was just me and Dad left down there in the basement. He was already stretched out on the couch. I knew he’d be passed out in another five minutes or so.

“Take them empty cans out back to the trash can,” he said, “before you forget.” He eyes were already closed when he said it.

I took the empty beer cans outside and put them in the big garbage can, and sure enough, when I got back inside the basement, Dad was already asleep, sprawled out there on his couch, with all his clothes on, and his shoes still on, too. I sat down in a chair across from him, trying to decide if I should try to take his shoes off of him or not, or just leave him alone and let him sleep like that for the rest of the night. To be honest, I wasn’t really in any hurry to go back upstairs, because I didn’t know if Mom would be waiting for me in the kitchen, to yell at me for going against her wishes and coming downstairs to sing the Clayton Dulaney song for Dad and his fellow drunks. I’d had enough yelling and screaming for one night, and I wanted to avoid any more of it, if at all possible.

I just sat there looking at Dad for a while. And sitting there like that, watching him sleep, got me to thinking about things, like about how I hardly ever see Dad, except when he’s drunk, or passed out, or both. You see, his job at the Foundry requires him to work second shift, like I said before, which means he leaves for work before I even get home from school, and I’m usually in bed asleep by the time he gets home from work, which is real late at night. And he’s in bed asleep when I get up to go to school in the mornings. And a lot of times I don’t see him much on Saturdays, either, because I’m usually up and gone somewhere before he ever gets up in the afternoon. And then when he does get up, he usually goes off drinking, to one of his uncle’s or cousin’s houses, or somewhere.

What usually happens on Saturday night is, Mom gets a phone call from where ever Dad is, to come pick him up, because he’s either passed out or too drunk to drive home, or both. These days, Mom just leaves him where he is, when he can’t drive himself home. But for a long time there, she used to would put me and Freddie in the car and drive off to pick him up and bring him back home. And sure as the world, Dad would puke his guts out in the car on the way home, which would really get Mom mad, even though she was already plenty mad for having to go pick him up in the first place. The funny thing is, he’d never say, “Betty, would you pull over, I think I’m about to get sick.” Instead, he’d just be sitting there, not saying much of anything to anybody, all glassy-eyed, and swaying from side to side as Mom drove through the curves, and bouncing up and down because of the bumpy roads, until, without warning, uuugggghhhhh, uuugggghhhhh, uuugggghhhhh, all over himself and all over the front seat. Then he’d sit in silence the rest of the way home, with his head down, listening but not listening to Mom yelling at him about what a sorry father and poor example and worthless husband he was, and how the bottle was gonna kill him the same way it killed his father, if he kept it up.

And I’d be in the back seat wondering why we had to go through this same thing, every single weekend. And hoping I wasn’t gonna be the one that had to clean up the puke.

For the life of me, I don’t know why Dad drinks so much. It seems to be the only thing he likes to do. I mean, he’s never spent much time with me and Freddie, or with Mom, either, as long as I’ve known him. He doesn’t play ball with me and Freddie, or take us fishing. He never takes Mom out to a restaurant or anything. All he does is work and drink and play his guitar with his uncles and cousins, and shoot pool with them over at Uncle Merle’s house.

And another thing we never do, we never go on a vacation to the beach or anywhere, the way Danny Riley and his family do every summer. I’ve never been to the beach. Everybody I know has been to the beach, except for me. Even Freddie has been to the beach, back before I was born. Dad took Mom and Freddie to some beach in New Jersey, and we’ve got a picture of Mom holding Freddie up, with the ocean in the background. Freddie was only about a year old.

I’d be afraid to ask Dad this question, but if I did ask him how come we never get to go on a vacation to the beach like everybody else, he’d probably say because we don’t have enough money to do the things that other people do, because his pay check has to support a wife and two kids and a house payment, and keep two cars on the road, and there’s all the other bills, besides. But the thing is, I bet if he took all the money he spent on beer and cigarettes in a year’s time, we’d have enough to spend an entire month at the beach, not just a week. But I’ll tell you what, I’d never ever say that to Dad, suggest that he give up his beer and cigarettes so that we could go to the beach. I don’t know what he’d do if I said that, and I definitely wouldn’t want to find out. I do know he’d get pretty mad, and probably tell me to shut the hell up, that it’s none of my business what he does with his money, that I ought to just be glad that I’ve got a mother and a father, and food to eat, and a roof over my head, and can go to school, because a lot of kids aren’t lucky enough to have those things. Which is true.

Dad drinks a lot, but he goes to work everyday, too, and he brings his paychecks home every week. I wonder if Mom ever stops to think about that.

One night Mom was yelling at him in the car on the way home from somewhere, the usual stuff about him being useless and worthless and all, and then she said something like, “You used to talk and talk about how you wanted to be the next Hank Williams, well, you keep up this drinking, buddy, and you’re gonna die a drunk just like he did, except nobody’s gonna know or care who Les Grubber was, after you’re dead, not the way they do Hank Williams.”

You see, when Dad was a kid, about my age I guess, he learned to play the guitar, and he’d play with his father and uncles, kinda the same way that I used to play with him and Uncle Merle and Uncle Virgil and Clyde and Roy all the time. And one day, Hank Williams came to Lynchburg to play a show at Miller Park or somewhere, and Dad and his father went to see the show, and from that time on, that’s all Dad wanted to do, to be just like Hank Williams. I’ve heard Dad say that old Hank was roaring drunk that day, but he still put on a pretty good show. That’s what Dad always calls him, old Hank. And Dad says that after the show, him and Grandpa Grubber were standing out behind the bandstand area, admiring a couple of Cadillacs parked around back there, and Hank Williams came staggering along and was getting into the back of one of them Cadillacs, and Dad said hello or something to him, and Hank Williams turned around and said hello or something back to Dad, and even reached out and shook his hand. “I shook hands with old Hank.” I’ve heard Dad say that to Clyde and Roy a bunch of times, whenever they were arguing about who knew the most about country music or how to play a certain song or something, especially if it was a Hank Williams song they were arguing about. “Listen,” Dad would always say, “I shook hands with old Hank, so I think I ought to know what I’m talking about here.”

“What the hell does shaking hands with Hank Williams got to do with anything, Les?” That’s what Clyde would always want to know.

“Well, did any of you ever get to shake his hand? Did you? I didn’t think so. So there, you see.”

“See what? All I see is that you’re full of shit, that’s all I see.”

And then Uncle Virgil would usually jump into the middle of it all with his story about how he once saw Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs at the farmer’s market in Roanoke one Saturday morning, and they’d all jump on poor Uncle Virgil about how that wasn’t really Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs that he saw, it was just somebody that looked like Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, because what in the hell would Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs be doing at the farmer’s market in Roanoke on a Saturday morning, anyway. And Uncle Virgil would say something like, “Buying tomatoes, I guess, how the hell should I know what they were doing there? I just saw them, that’s all I’m trying to say. I didn’t shake their hands, I just saw them, that’s all.” And they’d all just laugh at Uncle Virgil, and one of them would say, “Shut up, Virgil, you’re drunk,” and they’d all laugh at him some more. And it would go on like that for awhile, until you thought the discussion was over and done with and forgotten. They’d even play a few more songs together, and get to talking about something entirely different. But then an hour later, Uncle Virgil would say something like, “Well tell me this then, what I can’t understand is how come a guy that just happened to look like Lester Flatt also just happened to be with a guy that just happened to look like Earl Scruggs, unless it really was Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs? Tell me that. You can’t, can you?” And then they’d all pick it back up again and go around and around with it some more. Keep in mind that they’d all be drunk as skunks during all this. How else could anybody stand it?

Anyway, after meeting and shaking hands with Hank Williams, Dad kept playing his guitar and singing, and trying to write country songs. And everybody says he got pretty good at it, and all his relatives were sure that sooner or later when he finished growing up, he was gonna go off to Nashville and be a big hit, because that’s all he ever talked about doing. But somewhere in there, Grandpa Grubber died, Mom says from drinking too much, but Dad says from cancer or a heart attack or something. I don’t know how Mom would know what he died from, because she never met the man, and she wasn’t even around back then or anything. But anyway, for some reason, after Grandpa Grubber died, Dad’s mother didn’t pay him much attention anymore or care much about what he did or where he went, so Dad went to live with Uncle Virgil. And when Dad got old enough, he quit school and then joined the army. Well, in the army, he met my Uncle Johnny, and they got to be best friends and drinking buddies the whole time they were in the army together. So when they were both getting out of the army at the same time, Dad decided to go home with Uncle Johnny, to Pittsburgh, and that’s where he met my Mom, who was Johnny’s little sister, and she was only 15 or 16 at the time. So Dad hung around Pittsburgh, and him and Uncle Johnny got a job at the same place, and they even lived in the same house and put their money together and bought a car and all.

I don’t know what happened to his plans of going to Nashville and making it big as the next Hank Williams. That’s what he should have been doing when he got out of the army, instead of hanging around Pittsburgh with Uncle Johnny, it seems to me.

Well, the next thing that happened was, Mom came up pregnant, and it turned out that Dad was the guilty party, so to speak, even though he really wasn’t her boyfriend or anything at the time. Grandpa Hollins has a bad temper, and he got pretty mad about that, his baby daughter being pregnant and all, even considering the fact that before it happened, him and Dad were good friends, and he liked Dad a lot and all, because Dad and Uncle Johnny and Grandpa Hollins were all drinking buddies together. That’s probably the only thing that saved Dad, being drinking buddies with Grandpa Hollins. So, instead of shooting Dad or having him arrested or something, for getting his daughter pregnant, Grandpa Hollins made Dad marry her. And Mom had to quit school. I think she was in the tenth grade or so.

So then pretty soon Freddie was born, and he was named after Grandpa Hollins, whose name is Frederick Hollins. And Dad and Mom and Freddie lived there in Pittsburgh. And then I was born a couple of years later, and I was named after Grandpa Grubber, even though he was dead already. Then a few years after I was born, Dad couldn’t stand being in Pittsburgh anymore, because Uncle Johnny had just gotten killed by the husband of some woman he’d been messing around with or something, and because by that time Dad hated his job anyway, and most of all because he hated Pittsburgh, because he says it’s always so damn cold up there all the time. So we all moved to Lynchburg, Mom and Dad and Freddie and me. And that’s when Mom became a Jehovah’s Witness, because she wanted to make some new friends when we first moved to Lynchburg from Pittsburgh, like I said before.

I guess by then Dad had to forget about ever being the next Hank Williams, or the next anybody, because he had a wife and two kids to support. He got a job at the Foundry, and we lived in a trailer park in Lynchburg, until I was in the fourth grade, which is when we moved out to Campbell County.

That’s about all I know about our family history. I’m sure there’s lots and lots of things I’ll never know. What’s funny is, a lot of this stuff I just said, is stuff that nobody really told me about. I’ve had to kinda figure it out all by myself, from bits and pieces of things I’ve heard Mom and Dad talking about or yelling about, here and there. And I’m not about to come right out and ask a bunch of questions about anything, either, for the same reason I’m not about to ask Dad why he doesn’t give up his beer and cigarettes so that we can go to the beach one summer. It just wouldn’t go over too well. I just try to keep my mouth shut as much as possible.

The only reason I know anything about what happened to Uncle Johnny is because I heard Grandpa Hollins and Dad talking about it late one night when I was supposed to be in bed asleep. Actually, I was supposed to be asleep on the sofa in the living room, because I was letting Grandpa Hollins sleep in my bed, while he was visiting us. I guess I was too excited to go to sleep, because Grandpa Hollins had just gotten to our house and I hadn’t had a lot of time to see him before Mom told me I had to go on to sleep, because it was getting late. You see, Grandpa Hollins still lives in Pittsburgh, and of course we never go to Pittsburgh to see him, because Dad still hates Pittsburgh so much he refuses to even go back on a visit, so we only get to see Grandpa Hollins when he comes to visit us, which is only about once a year or so. Sometimes it seems longer than that. And me and Freddie used to always get real excited when we found out Grandpa Hollins was coming, because he’d always bring us something. He gave me a Timex watch once, when I was in the first grade. I don’t wear it anymore because it’s too small for me now, but it still runs and I still have it. That’s the kind of thing he would give you back then, a watch or a pocket knife or something. Nowadays he says he doesn’t know what kind of stuff we like or what we need, so he’ll give us each a ten or twenty dollar bill or something, which is a lot.

Grandpa Hollins and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table that night that he first got to our house, drinking beer and talking and smoking cigarettes like they always do, and I was supposed to be asleep on the sofa in the living room, and that’s when I heard them talking about Uncle Johnny. Grandpa Hollins said something like, “I told Johnny he’d better stay away from that bitch, she was just bad news, but he wouldn’t listen to me. And that crazy bastard she was married to, I knew he was the kind that would go and do something like that.” And Grandpa Hollins went on about how the man came in and found Uncle Johnny and that woman in bed together, and how the man shot and killed Uncle Johnny, but he didn’t shoot the woman, though she was the one he should have shot, and not Uncle Johnny, because any man would have been doing the same thing with her, the way she was always throwing herself at Uncle Johnny and every other man that came into that bar where she worked. And Dad said, “I know.”

So that’s how I found out about what happened to Uncle Johnny and what all went on before I was born, and things like that, from hearing somebody talking about it when I wasn’t supposed to be around to hear it. But some things are never talked about, so I never get to overhear anything about them. Like for instance, Mom never talks about what it was like when she was a kid in Pittsburgh, or the things she used to do up there, or the first time she met Dad, or anything like that. And Dad’s never around much to talk about anything, as I’ve said. And when he is around, he doesn’t talk about things like what Lynchburg was like when he was growing up, or what his father was like before he died, or what the army was like, or the first time he met Mom. He just tells you to go empty the trash, or go cut the grass, or rake the leaves or something. About the only things I’ve ever heard Dad say about being a kid is that he taught himself to play the guitar, and that he once shook hands with old Hank.

One thing I do know, Mom and Dad don’t really have much of anything in common, especially since she became a Jehovah’s Witness. But if you stop and think about it, I don’t know if you could say they ever had anything in common in the first place. Just look at all the things that’s different about them. She’s from the North, and he’s from the South. She never drinks anything but ice tea, and about all he drinks is beer. She doesn’t smoke or cuss, and he smokes and cusses all the time. She doesn’t like him playing his country music, and he plays it every chance he gets. She doesn’t like much of anybody on his side of the family, especially the ones she calls his fellow drunks, but his family, especially his fellow drunks, are about the only friends he’s got. She goes to the Kingdom Hall all the time, and of course he never goes.

Though he did go to the Kingdom Hall one time, believe it or not. What happened was, Mom and Dad had been having a big shouting match one Saturday night after we’d had to go and pick him up from somewhere because he was too drunk to drive home. And Mom was yelling the usual stuff about his drinking and all, and she threw in something about how she wished he could be more like the husbands at the Kingdom Hall, instead of the way he was. That was the first time I’d ever heard her yell something like that at him.

“Oh, so that’s what it is. You want me to go to the Kingdom Hall with you. Is that it, Betty?” he yelled. “Do you? Do you? You think that might turn me into the perfect damn husband and the perfect damn father, just going to the damn Kingdom Hall?”

“It certainly couldn’t do you any harm,” she yelled back at him.

“Well, Betty, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll just make a little deal with you, Betty. I’ll go the Kingdom Hall with you. I swear I will. In fact, I’ll go to the damn Kingdom Hall with you tomorrow morning.” He was pretty drunk, that’s for sure, but I had never seen him so drunk that he’d start talking about going to go the Hall.

“But the deal is this, Betty. I’LL go to the Kingdom Hall with YOU tomorrow morning, if YOU’LL drink a beer with ME tonight.”

Well, I figured that was that. Because I knew Mom would never agree to drink a beer, not for anything, not even if it meant that Dad and all his fellow drunks with him would go to the Kingdom Hall the next morning. Not the way she was always yelling about Dad’s drinking, how it was killing him and ruining his life. I figured that Mom would kiss Satan the Devil himself before she would agree to drink a beer.

And that’s probably what Dad figured, too. After yelling his deal at her, he just stood there waiting to hear what she’d yell back next. But she didn’t yell back anything. She marched downstairs, was down there for a minute, then marched back upstairs to where they were yelling it out in the living room. She had a beer in her hand. She opened it up, raised it to her lips, and drank it down in about six or seven gulps, the whole time never taking her eyes off of Dad’s face.

When she finished the beer, she threw the can down real hard on the floor where she stood, and said, “Okay, MISTER, we’ll just see who’ll keep their end of this bargain.” Then she went into their bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

Dad just stood in the middle of the living room floor and laughed and laughed. Me and Freddie had been sitting on the sofa, watching all this the whole time, not knowing what was gonna happen next. Dad finished laughing and turned to us and said, “Yeah, I guess we will, won’t we, boys.”

Then he stumbled on down the steps and spent the rest of the night on his couch in the basement. But believe it or not, he got up bright and early the next morning, and went with us to the Kingdom Hall, just like he said he’d do, if Mom drank that beer. We got there exactly as the talk was starting, and we left as soon as the talk was over, during the song. We didn’t stay for the Watchtower Study. Mom and Dad didn’t speak a word to each other the whole way there, or the whole way back. And because of the way we came and went, she didn’t have to introduce him to anybody at the Hall. I don’t know how Sister Straiter got home that day.

All that happened a long time ago. Dad never went to the Hall with us again. As far as I know, the subject was never brought up again, either. At least it never was during any of their yelling matches after that. Not the ones I heard, anyway.

I know that Mom and Dad got married in the first place because she was pregnant with Freddie and all, even though nobody’s ever come right out and said that, at least not to me. But I know when they got married and I know when Freddie was born, and I can count. But that doesn’t matter to me, really. I mean, I don’t think bad things about them because of something like that happening. In my case I guess I should be glad about it, really, because otherwise I probably would never have been born. What I wonder about sometimes is why they’ve stayed married all this time, especially since they have absolutely nothing in common. The only reason I can think of is because of me and Freddie. Maybe Dad wants us to grow up with a mother and a father, even if he isn’t around much at all to be the father. I guess Mom has stayed married to Dad because she feels that way, too, and because Witnesses don’t believe much in divorce. And maybe she figures it won’t be much longer before the New World gets here, anyway, with Armageddon coming in October and all. I’m definitely not gonna ask either one of them why they do what they do. All I can say is that it used to bother me a lot when I was a little kid, them not getting along and yelling and fighting all the time, because they were my Mom and Dad and all, and I loved both of them with all my heart, and wished they would get along, and we could all somehow be a normal family, like the families of the kids I knew at school. But between Dad’s drinking and Mom’s becoming a Jehovah’s Witness, being anything close to normal was definitely out of the question.

So anyway, I was sitting there looking at Dad sleeping on the couch with his clothes on and his shoes on, thinking about all this stuff and trying to figure out his drinking and all, and I did something I’ve never done before. I went over and looked inside Dad’s refrigerator, and there were three or four beers still left in there. So I took one out and opened it as quietly as I could, and I took a sip of it, just to see what was so great about drinking beer. But I’ll tell you the truth, it tasted like shit to me. I wanted to spit it out as soon as it was in my mouth, but I didn’t have anywhere to spit it, so I just swallowed real hard and held my nose so I wouldn’t smell it on the way down. Then I poured the rest of it down the drain hole in the middle of the basement floor, which is there in case the basement gets flooded or something, I guess. Then I took the empty beer can outside and put it in the big trash can with all the others. I came back inside and took another look at Dad, to make sure my opening that beer hadn’t woke him up or anything. It hadn’t, because he was still passed out there on the couch. So I untied his shoes and pulled them off. I don’t know about you, but I’ve accidentally fallen asleep with my shoes on before, so I know how much your feet hurt when you wake up in the morning after having slept all night with your shoes on. That’s why I pulled his off. I knew I wouldn’t get any thanks for it or anything, but I did it anyway. Then I went back upstairs.

Well, I guess taking that little sip of beer downstairs reminded my stomach that I hadn’t had anything but two apples to eat all day, because suddenly I was starving to death. So I went into the kitchen and fixed myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of ice tea. And I sat down at the kitchen table to eat by myself. Mom and Freddie had gone to bed already, I guess, even though it wasn’t really that late, really. In fact, it was only about 8:00.

A lot of times when I’m eating by myself, I like to read something while I’m eating, like a newspaper or something. Mom won’t let me read anything at the supper table, because she says it’s not polite, and she wants us to have “upbuilding family conversation” during supper, whatever that means. But I usually get to read something when I’m eating by myself at the breakfast table, in the mornings. When I have time to eat breakfast, that is. Most of the time I have to skip it because I’m in too much of a hurry, trying to get off to catch the school bus on time, to make it to school. But when I do have the time, I like to fix myself some cinnamon toast and a glass of chocolate milk, and then eat while I look at the baseball scores in the newspaper. That’s the first thing I do in the morning, when I can. I wash up and get my school clothes on, and go out to the paper box at the end of our driveway and bring in the morning paper, to check on the scores and all. That’s all I’m interested in, in the mornings. But Mom has other plans for what I should read in the mornings. She keeps the Yearbook on the kitchen table, and me and Freddie are supposed to read the daily text to ourselves every morning before we go off to school. She trusts Freddie to read it every morning like he’s supposed to, but sometimes she’ll ask me a question about the text, when I get home from school, just to make sure that I’ve been keeping up with it the way I’m supposed to. The trouble is, even if I did read it that morning, I’ve usually forgotten what it was about by the time I get home from school.

I guess I better explain what I’m talking about here, about the Yearbook. Well, it’s this book that the Society comes out with every year, and this year it’s called the 1975 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the same way that last year it was called the 1974 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so on, though I don’t guess there’ll be one for 1976. Anyway, it’s just a book full of stuff about what the Witnesses were up to around the world in the previous year, in different places, and how many of them got baptized in all the different countries, and how many books were distributed, and how many Watchtower and Awake magazines were distributed, and how many hours were spent out in the Field Service by everybody that year, and how many of them were still claiming to be of the 144,000. And on and on. Big whoop. All that stuff just takes up the first part of the book. In the second part is the daily text section, where they take each day and give you a scripture to read, and then a little paragraph under it that tells you what the scripture you just read relates to and what it means, in case you couldn’t figure it out for yourself. So every morning, you’re supposed to open up the Yearbook and look up the text for that day, and read it, and then try to think about it from time to time as you go about your business that day, as some sort of inspiration or something.

Like I said, Mom is always after me to see that I’ve read the text for the day every morning, but I’m mostly interested in getting to the newspaper and finding out what happened in the major leagues the day before. That’s about the only thing I care about, the baseball scores.

I was sitting there at the kitchen table that Sunday night, by myself, eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I saw the Yearbook sitting there on the table. I wasn’t doing anything else, so I picked it up and was looking at the text for that day, which was June 1, 1975. And the text was from Luke 16:10, which says, “The person faithful in what is least is faithful also in much, and the person unrighteous in what is least is unrighteous also in much.” And the Society’s comment under the text went on about how your righteousness comes from having a heart that is loyal to Jehovah, and how you have to practice the Truth every day and make it your way of life, and so on.

Now the thing that always bothers me about reading the daily text is, that no matter what scripture it’s taken from, it always seems to be making some kinda point that’s directed straight at me. Like, I was reading that text, and all I could think about was how unfaithful and unrighteous I was about everything, how I was such a lousy Witness all the time, and how lately I hadn’t even been making a half-assed effort at being a good Witness, hardly. That got me to thinking about what all I had done that day. First, I went to the Kingdom Hall that morning and got in trouble with Brother Harris because I was trying to read that The Time is at Hand book, instead of paying attention to the talk. And I didn’t take that book back downstairs to the library like Brother Harris told me to do. Instead, I actually hid it in the coat rack and then sneaked it out of the Hall so that I could look at it later, and it was in my room right then, hidden in a pile of books by my bed, which is where I stuck it when I got home from the Hall that afternoon. And then, after the talk was over with that morning, I hardly followed along at all with the Watchtower Study, and hadn’t underlined my article beforehand like I was supposed to, and I spent the whole meeting just wishing it would hurry up and be over with so I could go home and go play baseball with Danny Riley. And then I got real fretted when Brother Harris was going on and on with his closing announcements after the Watchtower Study, and dragging out the whole thing, and I got pissed off because Mom was taking her sweet time saying hello to everybody after the meeting and wouldn’t hurry it up, and I wasn’t very polite to all those Brothers and Sisters who took the time to compliment me for giving an answer during the Watchtower Study, even though I knew they were only doing what they thought was right, trying their best to give me some encouragement and all. And then I came home and went off to play baseball, instead of doing something spiritually upbuilding, like going out in Field Service with Freddie, which is what he does every Sunday afternoon, instead of going off to play baseball like me. And then I came home and went downstairs and sang my Clayton Dulaney song for Dad and all his fellow drunks, instead of staying upstairs and studying my Watchtower with Mom and Freddie, like Mom had asked me to do. And to top it off, probably the worst thing of all, I actually snuck a beer out of Dad’s refrigerator and took a sip of it, which is something that Mom would really have a cow about if she ever found out. Jesus, talk about being unfaithful and unrighteous, all that was just one day’s worth. About the only thing I didn’t do was smoke a cigarette and get into some fornication somewhere. Yep, reading that daily text really did the trick of cheering me up, that’s for sure.

Well, I finished reading the text, and I finished my sandwich, and I figured I might as well go to bed. It wasn’t that late really, but I was in no mood to do anything else.

For some reason, I just kept sitting there, still thinking about that Yearbook text, and how unrighteous I was, especially compared to Freddie, and how there wasn’t much time left before October would come and Armageddon would kick off, and how I’d better start getting a move on it, if I was gonna turn myself around and change my ways, and have any chance of making it through Armageddon and into the New World. To do that, I’d have to somehow get a loyal heart, like the text said, and become a real Jehovah’s Witness, instead of just being somebody who knows the Truth but doesn’t practice it. That meant I was gonna have to quit doing a lot of the bad things I was always doing, like lying and cussing, and having bad associations with worldly people, and always being so critical of the Brothers and Sisters at the Kingdom Hall and complaining about how the meetings are so boring and slow and all. And some other bad stuff I haven’t even mentioned yet.

But the more I thought about it, the more I knew how hard it was gonna be to turn my life around, because of all the times in the past that I had tried to do it and couldn’t. Like I said before, I think my problem is there’s something about my heart that’s gone wrong, and I just don’t know what to do to make it right. Maybe the thing is that once you’ve got a bad heart, it can’t be fixed. There’s this song that we sing at the Kingdom Hall sometimes, from the Witness songbook I was talking about before, which is actually a pretty good song, as far as the way the music sounds and all, and it’s called “Guard Your Heart,” and it says that you need to pray and study and have good associations at the Hall and keep your mind on serious and true things, and guard your heart from all other things, and then you might win life’s prize. Well, I’ve done all those things before, all the things that song talks about, for practically my whole life, as much as I possibly could. Mom’s been making me do all those things ever since we became Jehovah’s Witnesses. But somewhere along the way I must have let the guard down on my heart, and let bad things creep in and turn it treacherous, like the Bible says somewhere, and now I’m feeling like come October there’s no way I’m gonna win life’s prize. Jesus, I’ve got a bad heart.

Well, I was starting to feel worse and worse, sitting there thinking about how my heart got to be so treacherous. But then suddenly out of nowhere, my triple popped into my head, the one I’d gotten at the park that afternoon off of Danny, off of his best pitch. And remembering that triple made me feel a little better. Not a whole lot better, but just enough to keep me from wishing that it was already October and I was already dead or something. So I decided to just go on and get in bed, and read my English assignment, and then go on to sleep.

I got up from the kitchen table and went on to my room, which is also Freddie’s room, too, on account of our house only has two bedrooms, so me and Freddie have to share a room. Danny’s house has three bedrooms, so he gets to have a room to himself, and his sister has her own room, too. But I’ve got to share one with Freddie. All my life I’ve had to share a room with Freddie, even when we lived in the trailer.

Freddie was in his bed already, but he wasn’t asleep yet. He was laying there reading a Watchtower or his Truth book or something. He didn’t say anything when I came into the room. So I layed down on my bed and picked up my Slaughterhouse-Five book, because I had to read chapter eight for English class the next day.

As soon as I got my book opened up to where I was supposed to start reading, Freddie said, “Mom’s mad at you.” He didn’t look up from his magazine or book or whatever it was he was reading to say it to me, he just said it like he was talking to the wall or the ceiling or something.

“I kinda figured she would be,” I said, “what else is new?” I was facing the wall on my side of the room, talking to it.

“No, I mean she’s really mad at you this time, madder than usual. You shouldn’t have gone downstairs like you did.”

“I had to. I didn’t have any choice, the way Dad was yelling and screaming at me.”

“Well, you could have at least come back upstairs quicker than you did, instead of staying down there and socializing until everybody left. That’s mainly what she’s so mad about, that you stayed down there so long. And she’s mad at Dad for yelling for you to come down in the first place.”

“Like I said, what else is new?”

He didn’t say anything else for a while, and I was trying to get into my book.

Then he said, “All I know is, I hope you been thinking about those things Mom was talking to you about on the way home from the Hall this morning, ‘cause she said y’all had to talk about it pretty soon. That’s why she wanted you to come back upstairs, so y’all could talk about them things.”

“What things?”

“About you getting baptized at the assembly in Roanoke this month. You know what things.”

“Well, I haven’t had much time to think about much of anything today, that’s for sure.”

“All I know is, you better start doing some thinking about it, real quick, ‘cause she’s not gonna let it drop. At least that’s what she was saying tonight, while you were busy downstairs singing about remembering the year that Clayton Doolittle died.”

“Dulaney,” I said.

“What?”

“The year that Clayton Dulaney died, not Clayton Doolittle. It’s Dulaney.”

“Whatever. She hates that song, and you know it. And that’s the only reason why you’re so eager to run down there and sing it all the time.”

“What? What are you talking about? I wasn’t eager to run down there and do that song. I was trying everything I could think of to get out of singing it. Dad made me go down there and sing it. Besides, how do I know what songs Mom hates?” The truth is, I knew Mom hated all country music songs, not just Clayton Dulaney. All of them. “Why would anybody hate Clayton Dulaney?”

“Well, I don’t know. Let’s think about it for a minute. Let’s see. Well, maybe it’s because it’s about a stupid kid that worships a stupid old drunken guitar player, so much that he wants to learn how to play the guitar too, just like his stupid old drunken idol, but he mostly just learns how to become a stupid old drunk, just like his idol was. Could that be it? Maybe that’s it. I don’t know, but it could be.” Freddie was saying all this in a “smart aleck” voice, which is the way Mom always talks when she’s trying to be sarcastic or something. He sounded just like her.

“For your information, I sing Clayton Dulaney because it’s the first song I ever learned how to play on my guitar, all by myself, just because it was an easy song to learn, not because it’s about a kid who wants to learn to play the guitar from an old drunk. Not because of anything except it was an easy song to learn, so I learned it. That’s all. Dad and Uncle Merle and Uncle Virgil and Roy and Clyde like to hear me sing it, so I sing it. That’s all. Big deal.”

“Yeah, and it certainly is more important to please all them old drunks all the time, instead of trying to please Mom once in a while, isn’t it? Yes, it certainly is.” That was his “smart aleck” voice again.

I didn’t say anything. I was trying to read. He didn’t say anything for a few minutes.

Finally he said, “Well, are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Are you gonna get baptized in Roanoke this month?”

“I don’t know. How do I know? Will you shut up and let me read this, please. I gotta have this chapter read for school tomorrow.”

“Mom says you have to.”

“Have to what?”

“Get baptized, stupid. She said tonight that you were gonna do it, even if she had to make you, for you own good.”

“Why are you telling me all this? Would you just shut up, please?”

“I’m just telling you what she said, that’s all. Things you might want to know. That’s all I’m doing.”

I kept trying to read. I knew he was waiting for me to say something back, but I didn’t.

Then he said, “All I know is, ain’t much time left between now and October. Ain’t much time.”

I still didn’t say anything. I kept trying to read. I had been reading the same couple of sentences over and over the whole time, because he’d been interrupting me every five seconds, and I kept losing my concentration.

Then he said, “That ain’t all she said, either.”

“SHUT UP,” I yelled at him. I had jumped up off my bed, without even realizing it, and was standing right over him, with my fists all clenched up, like I was getting ready to punch him or something. I looked at him and he had a smirk on his face. He still wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at his Watchtower or Truth book or whatever it was he was looking at.

I stood there a minute, and then I started feeling kinda stupid for just standing there and not saying anything, so I decided to go back into the kitchen to finish my reading. I knew that as long as I stayed in the same room with Freddie, he was gonna keep on running his mouth about how Mom had already planned this for me and how she had already planned that for me, and how I was gonna have to do this and how I was gonna have to do that, whether I wanted to do this and do that or not.

I wanted real bad to slam the door when I left our bedroom, but I didn’t want to wake Mom up, if she was asleep already, if I hadn’t already woke her up by yelling at Freddie. I didn’t want her coming out of her room to see what was going on, because sure as the world she’d get started on me about going downstairs and singing Clayton Dulaney, and about how I was gonna have to get baptized in Roanoke whether I wanted to or not, and everything. I just didn’t want to face all that right then. I was too tired.

I took my Slaughterhouse-Five book and went back into the kitchen and sat down at the table. That was the only way I was gonna get that chapter read.

I guess I better describe Slaughterhouse-Five a little bit. Well, it’s this book written by Kurt Vonnegut, and it’s about something that actually happened to him during World War II, so it’s kinda like a true story. But it’s also kinda like a science fiction book, too, because of what’s happening to the main guy in the book. The guy is named Billy Pilgrim, and he’s an American prisoner of war, and the Germans are keeping him and a bunch of other prisoners in a city named Dresden, which is somewhere in Germany. The prisoners are kept in an underground meat locker or something. And one night the whole city is bombed by the Allies, and everybody there is killed, except for the prisoners who were underground in their meat locker.

The bombing part of the book is the true story part, because all that stuff actually did happen back in World War II, and Kurt Vonnegut actually was down there in that meat locker. The science fiction part of it is that, the whole time all this bombing and stuff is going on, Billy Pilgrim is floating around in some kind of time warp or something, and he keeps bouncing around all over the place, re-living different parts of his life, over and over, the same way every time.

It’s really a strange book, the way it seems to have everything happening to Billy Pilgrim, his whole life, all at the same time. It’s strange, but I like it. It’s short and easy to ready. And it’s unpredictable. I don’t know about anybody else, but I hate a book that you can pretty much guess what’s gonna happen next, even though you’re barely off of the second page or something. But in this book you never know where Billy Pilgrim is gonna bounce to next. I’m glad Miss Hiller got us to read it. When she first passed it out in class, she told us it was about the war, so it had a mature theme and all, and that there were a few dirty words in it here and there, and she asked if anybody would object to that, and of course nobody did. I guess if I was a good Witness, I would have objected, and said I didn’t want to have to read a book filled with bombing and killing and dirty words. A real Jehovah’s Witness might have said that, somebody like Freddie. He probably would have suggested that everybody in the class read the Truth book instead of Slaughterhouse-Five. But I’m not much of a Witness, so I didn’t object.

What I really liked is when Miss Hiller would read parts of it out loud to us in class. She’s a good reader, when she reads out loud, and she seems to know how to make you understand it better than when you read it to yourself the night before. When she’d get to a dirty word, if it wasn’t too bad a word, like damn or hell, she’d just go ahead and say it and keep on going. She even said son of a bitch when she got to that. But when she got to a word that was really dirty, she would just cough or something, right when she was supposed to say it, and then keep on going. Everybody would laugh when she did that.

The chapter I was trying to read that night was chapter eight, and it was the chapter where the actual bombing of Dresden takes place. Billy Pilgrim and the other prisoners were down in the meat locker, so they survived. All the Germans in the city, everybody above ground, were killed. They were all burned up. The whole city was more or less melted, from all the fires that started when the bombs hit the ground. To me, it sounded kinda like what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah, in the Bible.

And of course, while all this was happening, the bombing and all, Billy Pilgrim was bouncing all over the place in his time warp.

When I was finally finished reading my chapter in Slaughterhouse-Five, I went back to our bedroom, and Freddie was still laying on his bed, reading. But as soon as I got in my bed, he switched his light off and turned over to face his wall, away from me.

I layed there in my bed and stared at the ceiling, even though I couldn’t really see it because it was so dark. I had my eyes open and was really just looking at the blackness where I knew the ceiling was. For some reason, I got to thinking about Dresden, and what it must have been like to have been there while it was being burned up by all those bombs falling out of the sky. All I could think of was, it must have been like Armageddon.

And thinking about that reminded me of something in the From Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained book, which is the book I told you about a while back, the book that Sister Flowers gave to Mom, and Mom read it and decided to become a Jehovah’s Witness. Well, back when Mom first got that Paradise book from Sister Flowers, she would read it all the time, and study it every week with Sister Flowers, and she’d also read parts of it out loud every day to me and Freddie. I was probably about four years old back then, and Freddie was probably about six. Mom would sit on the sofa in our trailer, holding that big orange Paradise book on her lap, with me on one side of her and Freddie on the other, and she would read to us from that book, and get us to look at all the pictures as she went along. There’s a lot of pictures in there, but they’re not really photographs, of course, because there are no photographs of Adam and Eve and Moses and Jesus and the Four Horsemen, or anybody else in the Bible. When I say pictures, I really mean drawings, not photographs.

There’s a chapter in the Paradise book that explains how the world comes to an end, and it talks about how people everywhere will suddenly start killing one another out in the streets, and some of them that don’t kill each other will be killed by Christ’s angels. And some people will catch some kinda plague or something, that makes their skin fall off their bones. “Their flesh shall rot while they are standing on their feet, their eyes shall rot in their sockets, and their tongues shall rot in their mouths,” it says. Dead bodies will be everywhere, and they’ll be eaten up by worms and birds.

Mom read all that stuff to me and Freddie, a long time ago, back on the sofa in the trailer. And she got us to look at the pictures in there, too. The pictures show what Armageddon will look like. Those pictures are the ones I was reminded of when I was thinking about the bombing of Dresden. They showed tall buildings falling over on top of people as they were running around in the streets. And the sky had opened up and it was raining fire and brimstones and water, all at the same time, and people were drowning in the water because it was flooding up the streets and floating their cars away. And they were being pelted and squashed by the brimstones, and the fire from the sky was burning up everybody’s houses, and people were panicking and running every which way, and running into one another, and fighting with everybody they ran into, and trying to get away from what was falling from the sky.

And one of the pictures showed a big gully or trench that had been ripped into the ground, by an earthquake or something, and men and women and little boys and little girls and dogs and cats were falling off the edge of the trench, over into this big pit or whatever it was, into the middle of the earth. And cars and houses and bicycles and stuff were falling in behind them, like the earth was swallowing them all up or something.

I still remember the first time Mom read that stuff to us and showed us those pictures, even though I was only about four years old at the time. She explained what was happening to all those people in the pictures. She said they were being destroyed at Armageddon, because they were all bad people. I looked at the people and I started crying. They didn’t look like bad people to me. They all just looked scared. I couldn’t understand why all that was happening to those people in the pictures. All I knew was that I didn’t ever want to fall down into that big hole in the ground with all those other people.

Well, laying in my bed and staring at my ceiling and thinking about Dresden and all that Armageddon stuff was kinda depressing, that’s for sure. But then, just like before, right when I was feeling the most depressed about everything, I started thinking about my triple again. I knew Freddie wasn’t asleep yet, over in his bed, because of the way he was breathing. He always breathes real deep when he’s asleep. I knew he wasn’t asleep yet, so I said, “Hey, Freddie, I hit a triple today. I got it off of Danny’s best fast ball.” I don’t know why I was telling him about it, because I was still a little mad at him for saying all those things before, but I guess I was a little sorry for yelling at him like I did.

He waited a minute, then he said, “So.”

“So, I’m just telling you, that’s all.”

He didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Then he said, “Danny’s gonna be destroyed at Armageddon, you know.” He didn’t say it with his “smart aleck” voice, just real calm and matter of fact like, like he was telling me that it was supposed to rain tomorrow or something.

I said something back, but Freddie didn’t hear me. What I said was, “So am I.” My mouth moved when I said it, but the words didn’t come out.

Then I went to sleep.






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