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






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