Coffee and doughnuts in the church kitchen was like a homecoming for me. Once Brother Ben found I was from Alabama, he cornered me in conversation while Red cornered Sister Thelma. Brother Ben, I found, had been a loom-fixer in a Jackson, Mississippi, cottonmill and had worked for a season on a shrimp boat out of Pass Christian. He had gotten the Call while at sea, and hence the name “Sailor Ben.”
Once in a lull in Brother Ben’s conversation, I heard O’Hara say to Sister Thelma, “Lassie, I’ll pluck a feather from an angel’s wing to grace your bonny hair,” and I knew he was zeroing in on Thelma. Glancing their way, I noticed Thelma was slinging her pelvis toward Red as he talked, and again nostalgia assailed me. I had forgotten how the girls hunched down South and I had not seen such hunching since my last Baptist Young People’s meeting at Jacksons Gap.
When I finally squeezed in a few words with Thelma, I apologized for Red’s I.O.U. “That’s the way they pledge contributions in Ireland,” I told her, “and I’m pledging twenty dollars myself.”
“I’ll declare,” she said (but she did not hunch for me), “that’s the most generous thing, Brother John. Why don’t y’all come back Saturday for a chicken supper.”
I promptly accepted. Forty dollars is a lot of money for a chicken supper, but I was determined Red should honor the I.O.U., and if Brother Ben’s mission did not get the money by Saturday night, there’d be nothing left from Madame Chacaud’s to put into the plate Sunday morning.
Once on our way again, I said, “Red, you’re honoring that I.O.U.”
“Certainly, Jack. Thelma’s a lovelier lass than any at Madame Chacaud’s.”
“Whoa there, boy,” I said. “If you’ve got any ideas about Thelma, drop them. To circumnavigate that little behind, you’ve got to get a shotgun away from her pa, assistance from a preacher and learn to speak in unknown tongues to show you got religion.”
Thereafter, Brother Ben’s Mission became our favorite charity, and Brother Ben’s sermons spurred me to reread the New Testament. It surprised me how appropriately the Scriptures could be interpreted in the light of the New Relativity. Once when discussing the parables from the Sermon on the Mount with Red, showing him how they could apply to the Space Age, Red agreed.
“Yes, Jack. The meek shall inherit the earth because it takes guts to blast off from this planet.”
Red quit cheating at solitaire during those days and after a month’s attendance at the mission, he dropped cards entirely and took to reading love poetry. I approved. Any man who read poetry couldn’t criticize a man for reading the Bible.
O’Hara pulled no stops to get to Thelma Pruitt’s heart, if that was truly his direction. He wore his green polka-dotted drawers on their first date, but his space charm did not work on Earth. In May, he “got the spirit.”
It’s hard to fake the unknown tongue. When Red rose to his feet and began to shout in the midst of a sermon, he fooled me completely. His language had the accents and rhythms and nonrepetitive phrases of a genuine Pentecostal experience, and I was so convinced that he had been touched by the Holy Ghost that I was even adding “Amen” behind the logical pauses in his shouting.
Blasphemy and sacrilege!
With unfocused eyes and waving arms, he stood before that congregation, and all were clapping their hands and shouting encouragement to this new member of the church. Brother Ben was thanking Jesus, and Sister Thelma, her face glowing with pride, was moving to the piano to begin softly playing “Come to Jesus.” Then Red, in his final fervor, shouted out a phrase I recognized: “Erin go bragh.”
Red O’Hara’s unknown tongue was unknown to Mandan but familiar to Dublin. He was shouting in Gaelic.
So lie entered into the brotherhood of the Holiness Church, with a false passport. Thelma wept for his salvation but she would not yield. He got her, finally, but not the way he intended.
Late June at Mandan is a season of sentiment. From the needled spires of the Academy, the prairies lay green to horizons purpled by heat haze. Alfalfa blossoms sweeten the air. The axial tilt of the earth seems to toss the Dakotas toward the sun in apology for the winter. Rivers are flowing once more, birds are returning and the senior class is going.
But life orbits. Circles of farewell merge into circles of greetings and circles are wedding bands. Graduating midshipmen, freed of matrimonial bans, marry and start other circles of honeymoons and sowings to forget, for a spell, the approach of another farewell, their first cruise into outer space.
O’Hara and I got orders to lift-off in early January, to scout a sector near Lynx. Buoyed by my growing faith, I felt no trepidation about our coming probe, but O’Hara resorted to conventional methods of allaying apprehensions. Red married Thelma Pruitt and left on a six-month honeymoon of sun and fun in Jackson, Mississippi.
When Red broke the news of his honeymoon site, I broke for the clothes closet and prayed that his bride be given the strength and the nuptial talents to divert Red’s mind from both our coming probe and a real and present Jackson. Once I had spent five hours in Jackson, Mississippi.
For me it was a pleasant summer spent in fishing up and down the Tallapoosa, meditation, prayer and quail-hunting in the fall. Fishing was good, I got the Call and the birds were numerous.
By meditating, I learned that the Lord’s Will was for me to carry His Word to other galaxies, but there was a law against missionaries in space. Before the union of nations, the law had been put through by former colonial nations. After the union, the law was retained by the Interplanetary Colonial Administration, with full agreement of once underprivileged countries, to permit Earth colonization of planets inhabited by nonbelievers.
I had the Call to preach to beings of alien species, and the Call was in violation of Navy Regulations.
Red O’Hara was having his troubles, too, over in Mississippi. Four days before I was scheduled to leave for Mandan, a rented auto pulled up at the farm and Red got out. After the introductions and after Papa had taken him out to the barn for a drink (Papa still sinned), I showed Red over the farm.
“Thelma and I were staying at her Aunt Ethel Bertha’s, the one that raised her after her ma died,” Red explained. “Thelma didn’t want me to fly back. She got a little nervous on the flight down and swore off flying, for both of us. She thinks I’m driving back, with fourteen feet of snow on the ground. So I thought I’d drive over here and fly back with you, without letting Thelma know. Thelma says if God intended man to fly, He would have given him wings.”
“How was the honeymoon?” I asked.
“Tell you the truth, Jack, that was about the best honeymoon I ever had.”
“Were you married before?”
“No. Never had to before.”
Red had never been one to burden others with his problems and Jackson had added to his maturity, but inadvertencies occurred.
When he returned the car to the rental agency, I trailed him in Papa’s car to drive him back. Not once did he suggest that we stop at a bar, nor did he inquire about the pleasure parlors available at Jacksons Gap. I commended him on his righteousness.
“Thelma’s Aunt Ethel Bertha was pretty strict about those things. She was dead set against drinking and smoking. She caught me in the woodlot one evening smoking a cigar and she blessed me out. You know, Jack, I’m tolerant with you reformers. But it doesn’t set well with me to get blessed out for smoking by a woman with a dip of snuff.”
“Didn’t Thelma defend your right to smoke?”
“Well, Thelma was the reason I was smoking in the woodlot. My little angel didn’t want me to defile our bedroom with tobacco smoke.”
Red was taciturn for the few days he spent with us, but Mother loved him. He begged off quail-hunting and spent his mornings with Mama watching “The Pitfalls