“So roomie,” Jerry drawled, hitting the lights the night of our first floor meeting, “What do you make of Delbert Moon?”
“Which one was he?” In the long shadows of the lower bunk I pulled the sheets and blanket to my chin, brushing my penis back upon my belly.
“The late guy, who asked about that stuff with your pastor.”
“Oh yeah.” Careful so as to not inflame my loins, I flipped my cock down against my right thigh before folding my hands behind my head. An elbow was moistened by a stain of Cheeseman’s tears and I rolled to my side in disgust. “What about him?”
“He’s a funny guy.” Jerry paused for my, “Funny how?” but I said nothing. He waited so long that I was nearly asleep by the time he added, “A real funny guy.”
“Funny how?” I finally mumbled, but Jerry didn’t answer. He was snoring a minute later.
My roommate aside (who was, I’m sure, my father’s nightmare of what I would become), I was thrilled to be at Bible College. I threw myself into my studies and obedience training. I wanted to melt into the mould of God’s plan for my life, which he’d known (and God was a he; the heist He) since before the foundations of the world. I was delighted to be suddenly subject to the rules of sober men (and they were men; and by God they were sober) whose selfless, sole concern was that I and my classmates grow into the disciplined officer core of the Church Triumphant’s shock troops. My hair is too long, and has to be off the collar and behind my ears? Off it comes. I’m to be woken daily at six for a 30 minute spell of private prayer, and I’m to be asleep by 10:30 (11 on weekends) after another half hour of compulsory devotions? Hey, I’m awake — I’m asleep. No folk music, not even Burl Ives, let alone rock and roll? I’ll take my Heavenly Father over Big Daddy 10 times out of 10. (And even now Bob Dylan — that Bob Dylan — was singing about Jesus and the End Times and being born again. How much am I, I thought, on the right side of history?) I’m permitted to speak with female students on the O.B.I. grounds, but only so long as we’re walking, and walking in opposite directions? I don’t have a problem with that; I can do without. I can do without everything but the Truth, I wrote in the flyleaf of my Bible my first night on campus, and without everyone but Jesus.
Overcomer Bible Institute had been a baby of the Great Depression; conceived, delivered and breastfed by the Reverend Charles Kaye Barstowe of the popular Glory Hour radio program. As a young Baptist minister in rural Alberta, Barstowe believed he had heard the call of God to evangelize China, and was to sail with his wife and child for Shanghai when, as described in his book, At Home with God,“God stopped me with a cow”:
We’d brought in nearly all the Derby’s crop of barley, such as it was, when a great ruckus drew us to the barn. “Father! Edwin! Pastor! Come quick! It’s Libby!” Derby’s youngest lad, Pelton, cried at the top of his nine-year-old lungs. When we arrived upon the scene Pelton’s eyes were wide as saucers, and he was jumping up and down as he shouted, “Libby talked! Libby talked!”
“What do you mean, boy?” The elder Derby, as flummoxed as I, asked with the patience of Job.
“I was cleaning out her stall, just like you asked, and she lifted her big face towards me and said ‘Proverbs 16:9.’”
“What do you mean?” the good farmer repeated. “Our cow’s quoting scripture?”
“She didn’t quote it,” Pelton explained. “She just gave the reference.”
“‘A man’s heart deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps,” I recited.
“Cows can’t talk, you crazy pug!” said Edwin, tearing a strip from his little brother.
I said nothing while the family argued their heifer’s loquaciousness. Finally, Derby sent the children away so as to confer with me in private.
“Perhaps it is true,” he ventured cautiously. “If God could speak through Balaam’s donkey, I suppose He could speak through my cow. Perhaps it’s a sign that you’re meant to stay.”
“Brother Derby, I began, “I have no doubt that Cod could speak through a rheumatic cockroach if He saw tit. I think, however that young Pelton is the author of this ‘miracle’. You know of course that he’s quite good chums with my boy Matthew, and he’s dreading the thought of our sailing.
“Furthermore, I believe that Miss Ibbotson’s lesson last Sunday drew heavily from the 16th chapter of the Book of Proverbs. Ask him about this before we call it the Lord’s work. If he confesses, let your correction be gentle yet firm — he meant well, though his little heart came close to blasphemy”
1 waited in the barn while Derby repaired to the house to confront his son as to the cow. As I suspected, Pelton owned up to it all, weeping mightily upon his father’s breast for forgiveness. (Which he was given — along with a tender paddling, of course.) I was in no shape for self-congratulations, however, for shortly before Derby returned to collect me the cow suddenly dropped dead, falling upon my legs and breaking them both. Regardless of whether God had spoken through the animal in life, He spoke clearly through her in death: my travel plans were immediately cancelled.
Within the year Derby surprised Barstowe with a deed to one quarter of his land, with the provision that he build a Bible school upon it. (In his mischievous Your Shoes Are Too Big, Lord, the late, self-ordained Reverend Beau Hammond of the Beiseker Four Square Christian Academy hinted that Derby’s cow had been demon possessed. During the autumn of ‘43 the issue was more hotly debated in some prairie evangelical parishes than the timing of a second front or the true count of Hitler’s testicles. To most believers of the day, Barstowe satisfactorily answered Hammond’s charge with his famous Glory Hour sermon, “The Milk of Divine Kindness” Shortly thereafter, Hammond disgraced himself with a pair of war widows and returned to his native Montana, where his ministry flourished until the summer of ‘57 when three boys, drunk on their first guns and beer, mistook him for a scavenging, flannel-vested moose.)
Barstowe was still alive during my time on campus, though he’d passed the mantle of presidency to his son a decade before.
The years and the harsh prairie winters had shrivelled him like a failing star — a brown dwarf, not a black hole — and he seemed to have collapsed upon himself until all that was left was all that was necessary for him merely to be. Judging by the photos in his book and on the library walls, Barstowe had had a pinched and aged face — a face perpetually expecting a fist to be thrown at it — since his high school days in Lethbridge when he played goal for a junior hockey team, and each puck that struck his unguarded nose drew blood by the permissive will of God. Holy shit happens. “The determined set of his modest frame, when filled with the Spirit, has scared many a sinner to heaven,” read the back cover blurb to At Home with God, but as his body twisted and withered to at last match his face, Barstowe grew quaintly freakish; becoming both more humane and less than human. Watching him and his wife of half a century carefully measure their steps from bungalow to church and back again, I’d sometimes reflect on the tenacity of God’s grace or the persistence of godly love, but mostly I’d be reminded of a set of novelty ceramic salt and pepper shakers grown precious with age.
In the fourth floor washroom, early in the morning after our Sing ’ Share, Delbert Moon took the sink beside me, cocked his smooth head at a sharp angle and said, over the soft buzz of fluorescence and electric shavers, “I dreamt of you last night.”
“Really?” I laughed, nervously, then squirted a ball of shaving cream into my hand and spread it thick across