We found seats in the fourth row from the front. There weren’t many children present, mostly adults. We sat amid the assembly of close to five hundred people watching the man onstage trumpeting the high points of salvation. The buzz from the crowd, the sense of their intense devotion to the man booming out his words, mesmerized me. Suddenly I had the impression I was the only person in the room. Leaning forward in my chair, I clung to every word and savoured every musical note as I felt beckoned to the power of deliverance and angelic epiphany.
I studied the face of the man who was preaching. Something about him reminded me of Grammie Mills. There seemed to be a glow around his head. Maybe it was just the large overhead fluorescent lights giving an afterglow to images. I’d seldom been in a building with lights that bright.
When the preacher searched in my direction, his eyes returned my gaze.
He sees me, I thought. He really sees me.
“Jesus will give you happiness,” he called out to me. “Jesus will be your friend. You just have to give Him your heart. Give Jesus your heart. Can you give Jesus your heart and let Him be your friend?” I rose from my chair and stumbled to the front, climbing the stairs to the stage with joyous tears streaming down my face, not even aware that Sharon and her parents had followed me up.
“Please, Jesus,” I said, “take my heart.” I wanted him to make it a better thing. I wanted to be saved. And, yes, I felt I was being saved.
The same woman with the long brown hair who had greeted me at the door joined me onstage and grasped my hand to pray. “Will you repeat the sinner’s prayer with me?” she asked.
I nodded and swiped the tears from my eyes, oblivious to the crowd before me.
“If you say the prayer and mean it, God will forgive you for every bad thing you’ve ever done.”
I nodded again.
“God will change your life for you. Do you want your life to change?”
“Yes.”
“Close your eyes and pray with me.” She shut her eyes and I shut mine. In a whisper I repeated the words the woman spoke: God, be merciful to me a sinner… And as I did so, I felt my heart swell to discharge its burden. My head grew light and I was gripped by an intense happiness I had never experienced. I was filled with holy light.
Opening my eyes, I looked out over the crowd. They were watching me and they were smiling and shouting out praise, happy that I had been saved.
Unfortunately the desperate situations at home didn’t change in the face of my new salvation. I started to become discouraged, yet I didn’t lose my faith. I continued attending church. I prayed and prayed for a better life. God, please make my mom stop drinking. Make her love me. Give Daddy a better job so he won’t be so angry all the time. And please make my grandfather go away.
I devoted myself to praying. I wouldn’t give up on God. When I was almost twelve, God answered my prayers. For years I had been imploring my parents to join me at church each Sunday. They would see me praying every day I thought, and might want to change, too. Then, to my astonishment and glee, they did begin attending church, and their drinking stopped. Everything will be all right now, I told myself. Everything will be so absolutely perfect.
My parents soon became pillars of the church. They renounced all worldly goods, a feat not that difficult to master considering their economic situation. The minister at the church became their direct pipeline to God, pronouncing new revelations that required greater sacrifice and more devout obedience. Women were commanded to stop wearing shoes with heels. They were to wear dresses that disguised their womanhood and hats that demonstrated their subservience to men. Even the baby girls were instructed to wear dresses that flowed to their ankles. Radios could only be switched on for the news, and televisions were positively evil, the sole creation of the devil.
On a warm spring day our family and a few of the church people gathered on the front lawn of our home. Before us sat our television, propped on a table. My father said a prayer of exorcism before raising the pickaxe and driving it through the tube. When the tube blew out a large puff of grey smoke, the small gathering cried, “Praise the Lord!” For them it was an offering. For me it meant no more Walt Disney, no more candy-coated escape into benign lands.
I was informed I had to stop wearing jeans, nail polish, and jewellery. I was warned never to cut my hair. I was to be excused from gym class. I wasn’t even permitted to play baseball at noon hour.
I still had a crush on Norman, but he wasn’t interested in church, so I decided I’d have to sacrifice my girlish feelings for my more serious devotion to Christ. I had never been allowed to spend time alone with boys, but now it was even worse. If I was caught alone with a boy, I’d be accused of all sorts of vile actions I didn’t even know about yet. I was used to being groped and prodded by adults, but I couldn’t so much as talk to a boy my own age.
Girls who thought about boys all the time were bad, sinister, wretched wenches. Since I did wonder about boys quite a bit, I suspected my parents were right. I must be bad. I must have the sinister worm of evil in me. Oddly I took a shine to that thought. It was a romantic notion: the seeds of insurrection neatly planted, the way it was in one of the characters in the books I’d read. If I was bad, then I’d need accomplices. That was when I started befriending the bad boys at school.
I was fascinated with a classmate named Raymond, a short, well-tanned French boy who could barely speak French. In fact, he couldn’t speak English all that well, either. He would often stutter when he was forced to read in class. He always wore light-coloured T-shirts, black jeans, and boots—never shoes or sneakers—and usually his clothes were too small for his stocky frame. I figured he bought them at the Salvation Army discount store because I knew firsthand how hard it was to find just the right size there. Immediately I empathized with his dilemma.
Raymond lived with religious foster parents. He never did well in school and was picked on by most of the teachers and the other kids, probably because he was so emotionally numb. He wouldn’t cry even when the principal strapped him for not answering a question. He told me he never even cried when his stepmother whipped him across the back with a belt and locked him in his room without supper.
I believed him and began to revere his suffering. He needed to be saved. He was in pain. I thought he was just about the bravest boy I’d ever met. I tried to help him learn how to spell so the teacher would stop calling him a dummy in class, but he never seemed to get the hang of it. He had a hard time pronouncing certain words and found it difficult to concentrate. Today he would be diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder or a learning disability. Back then he was just rebellious and incorrigible. His teachers told him he didn’t want to learn, but they never saw how hard he tried when he was with me, or how honest tears would float in his eyes when he couldn’t distinguish a b from a d. And he was so eager to please me.
I promised never to tell.
Raymond grew up with the tough-guy image clenched in every muscle of his body but also in his heart. He hated the world. When we were in school, we were constantly warned about him. Everyone said he’d come to no good. And I guess, in their own narrow-minded way, they were right.
Raymond was twenty-five when his body was discovered at the bottom of Lake Ontario. Rumour was he’d been dumped after being killed by a rebel biker gang. I never found out for sure how he died. When I heard the news, all I remembered was the curly-haired guy who loved red cars, tabby cats, and the colour black. He was the one who gave me my first bouquet of flowers when I was only thirteen—daisies, bluebells, and buttercups—with a note that read: “To my best freind. Love, Raymond.”
One of the most difficult consequences of my