Left side of the sanctuary six pews from the front just beside the stained glass window of Jesus in the temple. That was where our family sat every Sunday after Adam insisted we start going to church. He was none too keen on Polly becoming a Jesuscizer until she started bringing home the church ladies for tea. When he realized that most of these ladies were Winchendon’s society dames and that all their husbands perched in the spreading limbs of the First Baptist Church he was quick to join the flock.

I can still remember the first Sunday we all went to church together.  Adam sat by the sunny painted Jesus in the window. Paul was beside him. Mother sat between my brother and me. I was next to the church lady with the big feathers in her purple hat who smelled of Ben Gay and face powder.

Paul and I got coloring books again.

“Momma I’ve already colored this one?” I said as I thumbed through the same book I had been given the day mother visited Doris.

Adam leaned across the pew and shushed my face. I felt the little sprinkles of his spittle tickle my eyelashes. Mother flashed him a cross look that quickly melted under his glare.

“Well why don’t you just use the inside covers and color Momma some pictures of the pretty windows Natty?” She patted my hand.

I put  my head down and nodded. I blinked fast to get the spittle out of my eyes before Adam could call it tears. He had a thing about boys crying especially in public.

I glanced over at Paul who was viciously scribbling his second page with one brown crayon. Then I looked around for other children and noticed that many of them were engaged in the same race to cover their coloring books with as much crayon as they could. Some wielded blue crayons. Some red. One little girl had even brought her own markers and was blacking in the eyes of every picture in the book. I turned to the front inside cover of my book and carefully drew a rectangle in brown crayon.

The service began. My family stood. I sat engrossed in the triangles and squares that made up the temple around the boy Jesus. Three hymns passed and I was working on the faces of the doctors who questioned Jesus (though I didn’t know that’s what they were at the time). The offering plate slipped by and all I noticed was that the green of the money was the same color as the table-cloth depicted in the window. Doris preached. I colored. Doris gave an invitation for people to come down to the altar. I was coloring the walls around the window.

“Come on!” Adam said grabbing my hand.

He took me and my brother forward. Mother trailed behind tears in her eyes. Doris beamed.

An older man approached and drew my father away from the family. Doris began to lead the congregation in Amazing Grace.

I smelled Ben Gay. My mother and the church lady took my brother and I aside. Mom held my hand as the church lady talked with Paul. He was almost seven. He watched my father praying in the corner and nodded his head as the lady asked him questions. He bowed his head and prayed with her. My mother wept as two of her men joined her in Jesus. I held my picture close to my chest as the church applauded.

The service ended and we began to make our way out of the church. People kept stopping us.

They would shake my father’s hand and say things like “Welcome to the family Adam.”

Paul was swept away by a group of children who wanted to bask in his altar-made- celebrity.

I held my coloring book up to my mother, “See Momma. I finished the window just like you said.”

“So you did baby boy! It’s beautiful!” She gushed hugging me.

That was the day I fell in love with art.

In case you missed it here is The Celebrant Pt. 1    https://josephelonlillie.com/2013/06/29/the-celebrant-pt-1/

In the dark I heard the shrieking wail of metal on metal. I felt the clacking thunder shudder my rib cage. The air smelled of sulfur,  pine pitch and summer sweat.  I gagged as blood and vomit expelled themselves from deep inside my gut.  I sat bolt upright in bed as the darkness of my dream dissipated in the comparative light of midnight. My fingers explored the heavy covers around me expecting to touch upchuck that would insist  some part of my dream had been true. Finding nothing I drank in the air through my runny nose. The sulfur and the pitch were well gone and all I could smell in the air was the lemon of furniture polish and the itchy fragrance of white linen treated with Clorox.

The dream had plagued me all my life. It came more frequently during my times of high nerve, which means it visited more as I advanced into my teen years. The nightmare paralleled two things:  my downward spiraling relationship with Adam and every outbreak of zits. The latter would have been natural enough, I suppose. I know of no teen-age boy whose vanity is unaffected by the plague of youth. All of us react differently. My brother,  Paul, shaved the zits off his face religiously and pushed it off to old razor blades. I dreamed of life’s train running me down in the dark, engineered by a father who refused to accept me.

The fact that Adam did not love me nor I him was absolutely not natural. I wanted to connect to him but just couldn’t. To say that  our relationship was unnatural is not to say that it was uncommon. I know I am one of many who have lost their dad’s long before they died.  The bogey man of alienation comes to us all; But the fact that so many of us allow the love that should be between a father and a son to be totally consumed by differences, that is unnatural.

I spent years wondering how Adam became the driving force behind my nightmare rather than my savior from the repetitive terror. I worked through a very complicated web of differences that played out between us: He was a conservative  business man.  I was a teen-aged socialist. He was a man’s man, an arm-chair quarterback, a died in the wool sportsman and I was what my brother liked to call a band fag. Add to that my penchant for calling out every little hypocrisy I saw in my father’s church and how could we not have been at odd’s. But after many years of searching I at last found the hinge that the door of our separation hung on. It lived  in my ten-year old memory. Oddly, it all came back to the Fruitlands where my mother told me her story of the night I was born.

“That whistle was blowing the night you were born Natty. It made me glad to know we weren’t alone. All I could think as I pushed you out was how here we were in the middle of nowhere and there not 300 yards away was a whole train load of people watching me give birth.”

Adam harumphed as she finished, “It just creeped me out.”

Like most walls ours was built on a foundation of agreement.

Skin tells tales. Dolly, a friend of mine in high school,  could usually wash with soap and water just fine; But when she got agitated Irish Spring would burn the skin right off her hands like it was fire. She always used to say that was because her mother was Irish and Momma Rose was usually the source of Dolly’s consternation. At any rate it was always easy to tell when Dolly and Rosie were on the outs.  I suppose my skin speaks volumes about my own story. My upper lip is usually beaded sweat mingled with peach fuzz and while my face is generally clear that has more to do with Proactiv than the fact that acne isn’t a problem. I like to keep my arms and back covered for that reason; So swimming isn’t one of my favorite pass times. Too bad it is Paul’s. Adam likes to make the community pool a weekly family affair to highlight his favored son. Sucks to be me.

The surface never lies; It just doesn’t tell the whole story. Even straight-up  falsehoods find their anchor in some truth deep inside. You might not think so but dig long enough in your own lies and you’ll find the grain that led you down the primrose path to Hell. Trace it back far enough and you’ll find the seminal truth that made your very biggest lies so believable. That’s the problem with the stories we tell each other, whether their bold-faced prevarications or lily-white truths they’re still just bits of the whole. Happy endings are part sad and tragedies usually leave someone somewhere chuckling because they see the other side. The “Hallelujahs” and the “Aww Hells” are all mixed together and no story really ends with “The End”. We just can’t tell it all so we do our best and leave the rest to providence.

I was born in a field, or so my mother tells me.  We lived out Rte. 2 about twenty miles out of Concord just the other side of Ayer by the Oxbow preserve. Mom’s OBGYN was out of Emerson in those days and no one thought anything about the distance to the hospital. Paul had been a thirty hour delivery that nearly killed Mom just eleven months earlier. My conception was not therefore hailed with flags and fireworks. The “Should’ve used protection” comment has floated around my unhaloed head more than once. Who knew I wasn’t supposed to take that comment seriously?

Mom’s labor started sometime around  one in the morning on July fourth 1989. Adam took a shower before loading her into the car. If I’d been more like Paul everything would have been fine but  by two thirty I was popping out in one of the flowery fields alongside route 110. I hear I ruined a perfectly good picnic blanket but hey at least the upholstery in Adam’s new Ford Escort was spared the bloody mess.

When I was 10 we went as a family to see the Fruitlands and stopped by the spot where I made my world-wide debut. The field is wide and flat rising up to a stand of pines,  sentinels to all that goes on in the valley below. I realized they were there at my birth. In my ten-year old head I thought maybe the trees could tell me why I had been born. My thoughts diverted, though, when I heard the whistle and the thudding of the train pistons. The Boston to Maine cut  its course through the field of my birth. I shuddered with the sudden revelation of my life’s nightmare.  The crunching thunder of steel on steel,  the banshee screams of hydraulic brakes mixed with coal smoke sirens.

Mom remembered too, “That whistle was blowing the night you were born Natty. It made me glad to know we weren’t alone. All I could think as I pushed you out was how here we were in the middle of nowhere and there not 300 yards away was a whole train load of people watching me give birth.”

She smiled remembering her moment of fame.