For those who enjoy splitting hairs, I was neither born nor conceived in Eliot, but I can truthfully say I was gestated in that teeny town where my dad answered the call to serve the Lord. After being ordained in Boston, he accepted an appointment to a church that none of the other ministers wanted because even religious men have ambitions, and Maine is really cold in the winter. When he and my mother arrived in Eliot, they were an eager family of three. I was merely a pesky case of indigestion that, a few months later, popped out as a pesky case of indigestion with hair on its head.
Some of the congregation objected to my father being appointed to lead their church. Mind you, they were not racists. They had nothing against chinks, gooks, or slant-eyes, excepting, of course, the commie ones in ‘Nam. Without them Chinamen over there in Japan, MacArthur would have had to make do with fighting Russians, and they’re not nearly as much fun to shoot. They welcomed immigrants, just as long as they comes here legal and speaks good English. No, they objected to my dad’s . . . uh . . . his interpretation of the liturgy! They didn’t like the way he planned to run the service. Too many hymns. Not enough scriptural readings, plus he was using the Revised Standard Version of the Bible instead of King James. What are we, Unitarians?
Rather than compromise their religious principles, the objecting faction traipsed off, firm in their moral rectitude and taking their best church supper recipes for glazed ham. I imagine they started their own church, something like the “Rhythm Methodists,” because that would be a very American thing to do, starting your own denomination when the old one doesn’t suit you, and then making as many miracle babies as possible to fill up those pews. My father felt bad that some parishioners felt that way, but Jesus still loves you, and them, and as long as they were worshipping the Almighty, he had no cause to complain. He’d already been through an unpopular war, and had no interest in fueling another. God has a plan. It is not our place to judge His ways.
My mother, however, had her own feelings on the subject. She tended to get resentful. She talked to herself, and I have dog ears. I heard everything until I stopped listening. I still heard too much.
After my baby sister was born, Auntie Ima started helping my mother manage us kids. We were each a little over one year apart, and my brother was a state-certified genius who required full-time monitoring lest he dismantle the record player and build a satellite out of the parts. Because she could sit on him if necessary, Auntie Ima took charge of my brother, my mother watched my baby sister, my dad tended to his flock, and I was left to my druthers. In nearly every frame of my parents’ home movies, I’m the heel of a patent-leather shoe, a hem of a corduroy jumper, or just not in the picture at all. But when I came back from the twilight woods, I’d head to Auntie Ima’s house and launch myself into her bulk. She was very fat. Invariably, I’d find her and my brother planted in spindle chairs at the kitchen table, where he’d be munching a slice of homemade blueberry pie and working through equations. She’d be playing solitaire, keeping one eye on the cards and the other on his motorized doodads. She smelled like old lady lavender and her flesh was fresh bread dough, powdery soft and fluffy, as if pumped full of air. She didn’t mind that I’d pet her arm and play with the batwings as if they were kittens. She was over sixty, and had no use for vanity.
“I knew you before you were born,” she’d say to me. There is something very weird about that.
She and my Uncle Loren were German Protestants from Ohio. They were a childless couple and good church people, as my dad would say. My Uncle Loren was a bespectacled, retired GE man who was older than his wife. He’d been some kind of engineer, and he spent hours helping my brother perfect his sister-torturing devices. Not only did I end up harboring a visceral dislike of anything with an electrical current, I was banished from my brother’s basement laboratory after that time I tiptoed downstairs to peek, and all his gizmos exploded. This only served to increase my resentment, because he got new stuff for his lab, and I got in trouble even though I’d done nothing but stand on the steps and glare politely at him.
Still, despite the fact that I was hopelessly bereft of mechanical ability and quite possibly haunted by a poltergeist, I was Uncle Loren’s favorite, and he was mine. We were alike in our crabby natures and dislike of children. He didn’t want any, and neither did I. He was dour in the manner of a summertime Santa on a day when the elves were playing hooky, and he knew that I knew it and didn’t expect him to change. We were two grumpy old men sitting on the porch, drinking our glasses of ice water and watching the chickadees at the birdfeeder. It never really occurred to me that he was old. For that matter, it didn’t occur to me that he was a “he.” My Uncle Loren was the closest thing I had to a cat. I was four and he was bald, and we were best friends. I adored my Uncle Loren, because he never expected me to do anything. I didn’t even have to cook for him. He had Auntie Ima for that, and she was very good at it.
One day, he went to sleep and never woke up.
He’d died of a heart attack. I suppose he died without knowing he was dead. The adults were tiptoeing around the subject, trying to shield us kids, but of course I knew what death was. All kids do. On cartoons and television, people die by the dozens every day. I’d stared at paintings of crucifixions and martyred saints my whole life. I’d just never seen an actual human corpse. It was my first wake. He was lying in an open casket and I climbed up to inspect him. He was wearing an ill-fitting suit that struck me as being oddly formal for bedtime. There was a small smile on his face. He looked happy, which was not his usual expression, and that really confused me.
“He’s gone to Heaven,” my dad explained reassuringly, as my Auntie Ima sobbed loudly into a large embroidered hanky.
“No, he didn’t. He’s right here,” I complained. “If he’s gone to Heaven, shouldn’t he be Assumptioned?”
“That’s Catholic,” my brother corrected me, because he was a genius, and I was always getting my theological dogma wrong. “Protestants don’t believe in that.”
There’s a soul, and there’s a body. Unless you’re Mary, Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ, or Christ the Savior himself, your body sticks around and gets stuffed full of embalming fluid so little kids can stare at you and wonder why you smell funny. I didn’t cry, because I wasn’t sad that my Uncle Loren had died. I was too angry at him. It was one more reminder that every positive comes with a negative, and every life demands death as its price. Uncle Loren was the one person I could count on to take my side. So God killed him, as if to say, “Defend yourself, already! What, you think being a little kid earns you a pass? A century ago, you’d be working full time in a factory and dead of dysentery by age six. So whine all you want. Boo hoo!” My dad had lived through two great tragedies, the Korean War and the car accident that destroyed his legs, which turned his life into Madame Butterfly meets The Sun Also Rises. I just had stupid allergies and an annoying older brother, whose very existence seemed to be God’s way of letting me know, “Yes, Little Egg, there is a Hell!” And then He cracks me on the head.
“He’s in Heaven,” my father repeated solemnly. “He was a good man.”
My Auntie Ima blew her nose loudly, and resumed blubbering.
The problem isn’t death. It’s the horrible feeling that something has been taken away. It’s Lucy van Pelt convincing Charlie Brown to kick the football, then—“AAUGH!”—she whisks it away. “You shouldn’t have trusted me, Charlie Brown,” she tells him smugly as he lands with a hard thump on the ground, mentally kicking himself for being such a chump. The joke is that he never learns. Again and again she persuades him with a sweet smile, “Kick the football, Charlie Brown!” and he keeps hoping that this time it will be different, and the ball will soar through the unseen goalposts, earning him cheers from the crowd and kisses from the Little Red-Haired Girl. He falls for the line no less than forty-two times. “You shouldn’t have trusted me,” Lucy reminds us. We know the outcome and yet, a teeny part of us still hopes that maybe, just maybe, forty-three is the charm . . .
AAUGH!
Sometimes I wonder