“Here you go,” I yelled back at my mother from the garden battlefield, “use this!” I hurled a large potato at my mother, lobbing it through the air in her direction. Being unable to deflect the flying tuber, the lumpy potato struck my mother squarely in her chest. Wounded, she grabbed herself and crumbled to the ground, spouting some religious nonsense about being a martyr as she fell.
The fighting in the garden immediately took pause.
“Holy shit,” Bobby Boop said to me, looking back and forth between me and our fallen mother. “You just hit mom in the tit with a potato!”
No I didn’t,” I stated. “I didn’t throw nothing. That was you.”
“I just watched you throw it. You’re in trouble now, Keaton.”
“I am not,” I fired back. “You’re in trouble. You did it.”
“Nah-uh, you did!”
Seconds later, the fighting resumed. All the while, my mother lied upon the grass, crying, holding herself. No one came to her rescue.
~*~*~*~
In addition to holding regular family prayer, each Mormon household is encouraged to maintain a garden and to keep a sizeable food storage. This practice stems from the belief that families should be self-reliant so that they might be able to weather the storm of any political or financial hardship that may befall them. From the early days of the Utah Pioneers to present time, Mormons have passed on their knowledge of agriculture through many generations. My family was no different from the typical Mormon collective, as my father kept a massive garden and often enlisted the slave labor of his three sons to keep care of it.
When the multitude of our garden crops grew ripe in the fall, my mother would spend many days bottling and preserving the nasty vegetables. She canned beets, pickles, asparagus, and corn, along with peaches, crabapples, and plums from my father’s many fruit trees. The produce that derived from my father’s garden and small orchard was far more than my mother could process through her laborious bottling endeavors. Further, the food storage in my parents’ house soon expanded to outgrow the holding capacity of their basement stockpile. Whatever produce that could not be bottled was given away by the bushels every year. But still there were leftovers, lots of leftovers. This excess produce provided ammunition for a fall tradition of neighborly exchange known as: Harvest Wars.
Each Autumn, the kids around my neighborhood would collect all of the unused vegetables from their respective gardens. They would then gather their forces, typically in small hordes of siblings and close friends, and wage war upon their closest neighbors by using the unused garden produce as munitions. My brothers and I usually did not fare well during Harvest Wars. This was largely because Bobby Boop and Stinky Steve were both limp-wrist pantywaists. The other major complication toward my wartime success was that the produce from my father’s garden was substandard. Where I had potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and the occasional zucchini at my disposal, my neighbors generally had larger gourds, melons, and eggplants available to them. This match up was the equivalent of being armed with a pistol and waging war against an enemy that had heavy artillery. No matter how many spoiled tomatoes I had, they did not compare to the firepower of a large squash.
After several consecutive years of getting my ass kicked during Harvest Wars, I suggested to my neighbor rivals that we organize the event into a competition of sorts, as opposed to all out warfare like we had usually conducted. It sometimes became difficult to determine which opponent had lost at the conclusion of our previous Harvest War campaigns, as both victor and defeated enemy alike would be covered with vegetable stains all over their clothing. With so much carnage all around, arguments often erupted as to which faction truly had won the war. Organizing the event into a clear competition, I argued, would make it so the winning side was easily identified.
My idea was quite simple. I suggested that each neighborhood kid take a turn riding their bicycle down the street. As they did so, the enemy forces would be allowed to bombard the rider with whatever garden produce that they had at their disposal. If the rider made it completely down the block without wrecking his bicycle or being forced off it through the vegetable bombardment, they would win the competition. In the end, whichever team had the most kids make a successful bicycle run down the street, they would be declared the champions. After a brief negotiation with the other neighborhood juveniles, my tournament suggestion was accepted and a date was set for the Harvest Wars competition to commence.
Once the competition was underway, several of the kids encountered terrific wrecks on their bicycles as a direct consequence of having vegetable matter caught up inside their wheel spokes or pedals. Others were unable to make it half way down the street before getting pelted off their two-wheeled chariots by fruit that was hurled by my brothers and I. Several of the neighborhood children’s bicycles were significantly damaged during this competition. And, of course, many of the participants received physical injuries.
When it was my turn to navigate the treacherous street on my bicycle, I became apprehensive. In the minutes preceding my run, I had sent several kids home, crying in pain, and I became worried that I might meet their same fate. As I started pedaling down the road, I became more confident with each passing yard. Tomatoes splattered against my shirt. I pedaled on. Cucumbers struck my legs. Still I pedaled on. With the finish line in sight, I ducked my head down low and furiously pedaled, picking up valuable speed. Out of my periphery, a cantaloupe soared through the air. Then another. I steered around the melon onslaught just as a lumpy, yellow squash spun toward my head. With splashes of orange, seed-laden pulp, all around me, I dodged the squash and made my final push toward the finish line.
My bicycle run was cut short by an eggplant. The rotten, purplish nightshade slammed into my head with such force that my eyesight momentarily went blank. Flung from off my bicycle, I stretched my arms out and did a Pete Rose maneuver across the asphalt, scraping away my flesh like a cheese grader. Fifteen feet and several blood stains later, my battered body came to a rest. My bicycle was lying in a crumpled mess in the middle of the street, my broken body not far from it. As I looked up from my prone position spread out across the street, I saw my neighbors congratulating each other with high-fives and cheers over my defeat. I slowly picked myself up and dragged my mangled bike over to the curb and swallowed the hard truth that I had yet again lost Harvest Wars.
CHAPTER 4
And I, knowing of their unconquerable spirit, having proved them in the field of battle, and knowing of their everlasting hatred toward you because of the many wrongs which ye have done unto them, therefore if they should come down against you they would visit you with utter destruction. -Book of Mormon, 3 Nephi 3: 4
To help bolster the indoctrination of the Mormon gospel, teenage church members are strongly encouraged by their parents and church authorities alike to take part in youth activities with other peers from their ward. This structured socialization process makes it so Mormon kids usually only interact with and make friends with other LDS cultists. The influences of other religions are thus never thoroughly explored by Mormon youth, as all of their formal friendships and dating experiences are typically engaged in with like-minded youth who share the same values as they were brainwashed into having.
Although I went through the motions of conducting the Aaronic Priesthood rites and suffered through the church and family traditions of my religion, I never fostered any friendships with truly obedient Mormon kids. Because I was not ever fully invested into the Church, I tended to associate myself with other peers who shared a shade of deviance with me. One of my closest friends was Dirty, a good-natured Mormon teen on the surface but a budding criminal at his core. I attended a few youth activities with Dirty but always held ulterior motives for doing so. Typically, Dirty would beg for me to join him for the likes of temple trips for Baptism of the Dead rituals and I would generate various excuses to avoid going, along with ditching most of the other youth activities that held no personal benefit for me.
During