church

An Asshole to the End

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

A few days after Peter died, I got a text from his pastor telling me Peter wanted me to read John 11 at his funeral. “That asshole!” was my reflexive response. The request was true to his character.

John 11, he knows, I cannot read at a funeral whose corpse I do not know, not without being overcome with the emotional force, so for him to make a dying request that I read over his was a coup de grâce upon our friendship, which death ended. That was it. It was over. The text made it plain: Peter is dead.

A thousand people moseyed over to the big Lutheran church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Of the thousand, I knew Angie, his wife. It’s possible some others from the early days of our friendship in the mid-90s were there, but I would only have recognized their faces and known nothing more about them. A thousand people, and never did I feel so alone, not even when my father died, for in that case I had my three sisters and my mother.

That one was also a rather large intrusion of claimants to the corpse. They had to have two separate funerals for my dad: one in southern Louisiana, where he died; another in northern Alabama, where he was raised. I skipped the first one because of the many claimants I would not have known. Besides, I had what they call a “complicated” relationship with my father, a deep and abiding love which was made white hot by long-standing patricidal notions borne of deep-seated philosophical disagreements, which were, at his death, which was sudden, then peppered with anger and guilt, as one would be when one hates how one was raised. I was a pastor’s kid. My dad was a Lutheran pastor. His many surviving brothers and sisters and their families and extended families, along with his childhood friends, were jammed into the Lutheran church in Hanceville, Alabama, where his mother was baptized by a Lutheran pastor from Milwaukee sometime in the 1940s, along with five of her children, including my father, who was five years old at the time. She was an American Indian. It was the Lutheran pastor from Milwaukee who broke down that racial barrier.

His corpse was in the narthex (the common area before you go into the sanctuary (the main room of the church where all the pews are)), a week old already, having sat in refrigeration during a particularly warm August, having been transported within the mysteries of the mortuary crafts from Louisiana to Alabama. We greeted family and friends, and they were seated. As it was, I had not seen the corpse, and I requested to see him with my sisters and mother. The mortician turned the appropriate latches, raised the lid, and there was my father, laid out in sacramental splendor, to be buried in his priestly garments, including a golden chasuble. When I reacted, every head in the sanctuary snapped back to stare. My mother comforted me. Peter was a pastor’s kid, too.

There is an expectation–at least, there was an expectation for a pastor’s kid, especially the pastor’s son, placing him on one of the two paths he can go by. He can either adopt a Pharisee’s mien, the faultless son of the Most High Pastor, who himself is the representative of the Son of God, and can make no error, neither his sons and daughters–a Pharisee’s mien, I say: a hard, cold, exacting, cruelty expected of a sniveling wretch who cloaks himself in an expertise of religiosity. Or he can unleash his anger in a destructive lifestyle, usually in a hedonism akin to that exhibited by the wonderful Sam Kinison. In either case, his identity is not his identity, but that of someone else. To craft an identity is exceedingly difficult, and much discouraged, both by Father and by his disciples.

It can be done, though, if he can navigate that Scylla and Charybdis. Indeed, forgiveness has been known to prevail upon those pastors’ kids who wreck their ships, and they can set sail again. I think Peter and I managed to escape, a pair of Odysseuses in our own right, but not without paying a heavy emotional toll. The tax is high, my friends, for those of us who wish to live free of those peculiar expectations. And, thus impoverished, Peter and I leaned on each other. We developed a shorthand with each other, much as twins do, and we leaned on each other.

Another lonely claimant was there, whose name escapes me. He was flown in from Ghana, where Peter served as a missionary over the course of over 20 years, both formally, and then later on as an emotional supporter of the burgeoning Lutheran Church in Ghana and throughout that stretch of Africa. That is to say, this second lonely claimant was another who had Peter as a close friend and confidant for over two decades, beginning together as young men with babies, enduring the travails of this ephemeral career in the visible futility of the Christian Faith, ending with teen-aged young-adult progeny. Ah! Death! You sting us! Where is your sting?

The funeral was horrible. It was just horrible. Peter wrote it. He wrote the structure of the service, picked the readings to be read, picked the hymns to be sung. Structure? There was no structure. It was a vile Sacramentarian Baptist service with Lutheran trappings. There was no Kyrie, no proclamation of the gifts of the sacrament of baptism, no declaration of the resurrection of the body because there was no Apostles’ Creed, only that godawful John 11, gaping before me like the grave itself. And he had me read it. He did it on purpose. He did the whole despicable thing on purpose because he knew I was the only son-of-a-bitch in that building who would weep while the confrontation of that text was being laid out before us. Do you understand me? He laid out a structure-free funeral service, departing from every form and norm known to our tradition in order that he might have my weakness for reading that particular text in public actually highlight that thing around which his hope revolved.

It’s not the part where Jesus weeps that gets me, nor the many indications of the upwelling of utter despair expressed by a despondent people. Those are, indeed, difficult to read, but where my throat constricts, where my chest heaves, where my mouth clamps into a quivering vise, is the question. “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” At this comes the existential pause, where you stare into the abyss, and it stares back, tearing at your guts, shouting, “WHAT A LOAD OF STUFF AND NONSENSE! RUBBISH! THERE’S NOTHING HERE! DO YOU HEAR ME? NOTHING!”

Do you believe this? Peter’s corpse is within arm’s length. What an asshole. Truly, he was a brother. Peter Kelm, 1972-2017, RIP.

 

But He Will Rule You

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

Mary Ellen was always pretty as a girl, and she knew it coming through grade school. She kept the boys enthralled with a wit that drew them close and kept them at bay, like Redbones on the scent without a command to hunt. “You might be tall, Hugh Johnson,” she told him, “so tall the Lord God couldn’t reach up to put any brains in your head.” When she blossomed, they howled. Right then she determined not to marry in her town because they knew her too well.

In the next town they ached for her. The other young ladies frowned severely, each trying to look through the back of her gentleman’s head, whose neck was twisted dangerously, too tight, you might say, if you understand what I mean by that frown. They puzzled, too, wondering how a girl without much in the way of physical attributes could twist every neck in town. Was it her dress? Her shoes? Her hair? Her money? All were the same as theirs. In fact, nothing about her stood out except her glow, and when she smiled: oh, my…

Was there a man in town made for her? In fact there was a man every young lady hoped she was made for. He was Jeremiah Fenton, Jeremiah, Jr., in fact, the son of Jeremiah, Sr., who was the owner of Fenton Construction, a contracting outfit interested in new home builds, garage builds, remodels, and general home repair. As for Jeremiah, Jr., he was a savvy businessman himself, right out of high school, having the good sense to listen to his father, who had built up that business before the war, during those dark times of the Great Depression, then holding on until the soldiers came home. The soldiers listened to him, and then to his son, whom he taught the business.

It didn’t hurt that Jeremiah, Jr. was the very definition of strapping, with shoulders broad and proud. Good humor tinged everything Jeremiah said and did, so that even when he made a mistake, a customer could point it out with equal good humor such that whatever was lacking was made right without much fuss for either party. “If I had used a bigger hammer,” Jeremiah said to Willy Gaithers, “I might have had to build you a new sun room on the back of your house.” Willy Gaithers laughed while Jeremiah’s crew plastered over the hole Jeremiah had made while putting some finishing nails in the trim Willy Gaithers wanted around his windows.

Jeremiah took the blame, but everyone knew (because Willy Gaithers told everyone) what really happened was Jeremiah discovered a leak in the roof which had rotted away one of the wall studs next to the window frame. He climbed up on the roof, found the problem, fixed it, figured out a way to replace the stud without taking out the whole wall, then patched the greater hole that had formed anyway. In other words, everyone knew that not only was Jeremiah an honest businessman, he was generous.

When he saw Mary Ellen out of the corner of his eye, his neck twisted so hard that he was forced to let go of Martha Johansenn’s hand and pursue Mary Ellen’s. “Aha!” he declared. “At last! I have a woman who is for me!” Mary Ellen thought that was nice, and she told her folks, and her folks met with his folks, and the two towns were, on the wedding day, brought together in the union of this man to this woman. It was a match made in heaven, and everyone treading that ground knew it, and they smiled under the blessings of God.

It wasn’t that Mary Ellen was dissatisfied with the money; she wanted the prestige. While the two towns waited for progeny to embody the union, Mary Ellen lay awake at night crafting a plan to attain an upper middle class lifestyle, and from there, to step into the elite class, replete with its invitations to invitations, invitations to socialize in air-conditioned buildings up off the ground and away from the people of the land.

She said, “You should think about commercial construction. There’s a building boom going on.”

“You mean business buildings?” Jeremiah, Jr. shared with Jeremiah Sr. his misgivings.

“Can’t get comfortable,” said Jeremiah Sr. “There ain’t no such thing, not in construction. You can grow the business out or you can grow it up.”

“I’m going to need a construction manager,” he said to himself. “And a loan.”

What made Mary Ellen leave her town to make a union in Jeremiah’s town made her make Jeremiah leave his deliberations and take out a loan. A tax accountant advised them to stay liable for the money instead of sheltering it in a corporation. Something about equipment depreciation. Jeremiah barely understood. Mary Ellen guided his hand onto the bottom line. “This is our house, too,” he said.

The money froze the marriage. Progeny were not possible.

Jeremiah doused his God-given natural desire by gulping down Tennessee Sippin’ Whiskey, a habit that made him a little unpleasant in the mornings, which made his hired hands a little displeased in doing their work, and they made mistakes. He roared at them, and they quit. While he was watching them leave, the bank tapped him on the shoulder, demanding to know just what in God’s name happened to those contracts to build additions, wings, wards, and extensions to hospitals, churches, department stores, and supermarket groceries.

The bankruptcy judge was perfunctory and cold. He didn’t even shake his head in disappointment. Mary Ellen was in the truck outside the courthouse, waiting for Jeremiah. He hopped in without a word. She was in tears. “We still have each other, don’t we?” she asked. He stared straight ahead, with his jaw clenched. Mary Ellen fixed her eyes upon her man, Jeremiah, Jr., waiting for a word from a him, that he might treat her as his bride. At a stoplight near their house, which now belonged to someone else, Jeremiah turned to his wife, and with all the strength he had in his broad shoulders to maintain his calm, he uttered, “This is all your fault.”

The light turned green and he turned his attention to the task of driving home.

Where was home?

Perfectionism

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

Old Earl–I saw this with my own eyes–Old Earl leaned down to put his face into his wife’s face–I was in the kitchen with them, just the three of us. They were sharing an early-evening snack with me. I was visiting as a friend of the family. She leaned back against the kitchen sink when he did this. He leaned down to put his face into his wife’s face, which fell, and a little fear came into her eyes, realizing that she had provoked her husband. I recognized the face.

Her daughter, my friend, had been ill and in the hospital, and while I was visiting her, the doctor came in to deliver bad news, seriously bad news: surgery and a very long recovery, along with an abrupt change of lifestyle. Her face expressed wonder girded up by fear and framed by anger.

I think her mother’s expression was anger slow-cooked over the course of several decades so that her face was now expressing tired rage. Nevertheless, she shrank because his own expression overpowered her resentment.

They called him Ole E which took me forever to understand as a diminutive for Old Earl and not Olie. They called him that, being a long-time president of a local, and under his leadership the local had grown, never experiencing any scandals with money or other kinds of abuse. He was telling his wife what time and where the great-grandkids’ soccer games were that evening. He went outside to take care of something in the yard. His wife relaxed and came to me, setting a bag of powdered doughnuts before me. I indulged.

“Do you have any children?” she asked.

“Two,” I said. “Two boys, 10 and 8.”

“I had two boys,” she said. “And a girl. Do you take them to church?”

“Almost every Sunday,” I said.

“Do you dress them up?”

“What?”

She looked at me, then she said. “I remember dressing the kids for church every Sunday. We would walk to church. Church is only three blocks from here, so we walked. It didn’t make much sense to start the car just for a three block drive. We walked to church every Sunday.”

“But you drive now?”

“Three blocks is an awful long way when you’re as old as we are.”

I wolfed another powdered doughnut. “I’ll bet,” I said.

“I used to press the boys’ pants into perfect creases, every Sunday morning, and then I hung them over the easy chair until just before we left for church. Do you know why  I did that?”

“No,” I said, licking the powdered sugar off my fingers.

“Every Sunday, right after I pressed the creases into the boys’ pants, I would do Lucy’s hair, so that the curls would be just right. It seemed to me that just about every time I was pulling the bow into her hair, trying to set it perfect, the boys would start wrestling on the living room floor.”

“Oh, I get it,” I said. “They’d mess up the creases in their pants.”

“That’s right,” she said. “So I started hanging their pants over the easy chair.” She laughed. “Such a funny memory: the boys in their underwear, a shirt, and a tie, wrestling on the living room floor. I lost my voice almost every Sunday morning, screaming at them to settle down.”

I wished at that moment I had had a little brother, or even a big brother, to wrestle with on Sunday mornings.

“Earl taught them to polish their shoes, and we made them polish their shoes every Sunday morning while I got Lucy’s hair right. Oh, I remember her glossy black shoes, Mary Janes!”

“Mary Janes?” I asked.

“Buckle shoes,” she said.

“Oh.”

“They slipped right over her perfectly white Sunday tights, and she walked so tall and so proud, leading the way to church. I can still see it to this day: we showed the whole neighborhood what a good Christian family looks like!”

“Lucy?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Lucy doesn’t look like someone who ever wore white tights and black Mary Janes.”

“People nowadays have no respect for church. If they even go, they wear jeans and crumpled t-shirts, like they just rolled out of bed to meet the Holy Lord Almighty.” She shook her head.

One day, by invitation, I walked the path from Ole E’s house to the church, the full three blocks under the gaze of the whole neighborhood and God himself. It wasn’t a Sunday, but there was stuff going on. In fact, there was a hive of activity, busy little religious bees buzzing about, setting up tables for a fundraiser of some sort, baskets and displays emerging like so many six-sided cells. Over in one corner of the comb, several would-be queen bees were having a very quiet, but mortal, argument over who would be handling the money. I steered clear. Repudiated queen bees have a deadly sting.

On the day Lucy came home from a long stint in a rehabilitation facility, I saw Ole E put his nose into a nurse’s face, but instead of shrinking away, this nurse drew up in indignation. His wife suddenly piped up, “He does that to me all the time.”

Ole E stood, silent, thunderstruck.

The nurse replied, “You let him push you around like that?”

“Oh,” his wife said, “it’s not so bad if you just forgive him.”

“Forgive him? I’d never put up with that from my husband.”

His wife laughed. “You girls nowadays. You know, he got that from his mother, putting his nose down in people’s faces. She used to do that all the time.”

Ole E finally spoke. “I do that?”

“Your whole life,” his wife said.

Tears sprang into his eyes. “I do that to you?” In his face, I saw a wave of realization wash over him. “I do that to the kids?”

“You did,” his wife informed him. “But not anymore, now that they’re bigger than you, and out of the house.”

Ole E wheeled to talk to Lucy. “I did that to you?”

“My whole life, Dad.”

“Oh, dear Lord,” he said, sitting down in his son-in-law’s easy chair. “Oh, dear Lord. I didn’t mean to do that to you. I tried to be a good father. That’s not good; that’s what my mother did to us!”

I excused myself, wishing Lucy a happy and quick recovery.

Lucy told me, when I asked, that the whole family had been transformed. Not only had things gotten easier between her father and her mother, and easier with her and one of her brothers, but it had gotten more tense between her father and the other brother. Until Ole E’s dying day, Thanksgiving and Christmas were gala affairs, with more wine spilled, and more laughter with it, and also palpable tension with the brother who retained the perfection instilled in him in his childhood.

The funeral was a gala affair, with one third of the family excusing themselves quite before the celebration had begun.