with great principle and moral fiber, refused. My father would say, “Now, Mom, you know we don’t eat that stuff.”
“You used to. I don’t understand you, James. Vat’s the matter vith some pork?”
Within minutes, the two of them would be in the midst of a fierce argument, breaking into heated German, and ending with my father throwing up his hands and yelling, “I don’t know what the HECK is the matter with you, Mom! You think up is down and down is up. I’m so mad, I could bite the head off a tenpenny nail!” and he would stomp out the door. My father was a yeller and screamer.
Grandma offered us long diatribes on what a good man Martin Luther had been and what a bad man that Armstrong was. About Luther, she said, “Zat poor man, he valked on his knees up ze steps of ze Vatican!” Grandma didn’t understand how her son had given up Martin Luther for “Zat nasty man! I don’t know vhy you give your money, vhich you vork very hard for, to zat nasty man.” This short, white-haired, rotund dervish would sometimes confront her tall, broad, strong son as if he were a small child. “Ja, he iss nasty, I tell you!” and Grandma would stomp her foot (my father and grandma were both enthusiastic stompers) and let loose a barrage of German, enraged that my parents gave so much of their money to the church. I snuck out the door when they fought. The last thing I wanted was confrontation.
I hated to agree with Grandma, but even though I knew that we had to suffer the sacrifice of the material for the spiritual before Jesus returned and saved us, it would have been nice to have had new shoes instead of hand-me-downs. Or to have curtains cover the living room windows so that people couldn’t see straight in when they drove past. I wanted Baggies for our lunch sandwiches instead of reused brown paper bags. I wanted new clothes, not skirts and shirts that had been handed down from twenty years ago and had to be safety-pinned to fit. And yes, it would have been wonderful to have a car without rust running down the fender, seats with foam rubber emerging from big gashes, and a loud, clanging muffler.
I was acutely aware that belonging to the church placed me firmly on the periphery of the community. Having so many siblings, living out on a country road, using food stamps, and not having money for new clothes just added to the whole weird package. Once, when my younger sister Liz and I were driving with our father, I half-ducked my head so no one would see it was me. Liz kept her head up and laughed at me. She refused to be intimidated by anyone who dared judge her for driving through town in a pink Caddy that died at stop signs and groaned going up hills. The sacrifices of the material for the spiritual were just part of the necessary trials and tribulations.
My father had had to quit school after eighth grade to help his dad on the farm, and without a high school diploma, he could only find jobs that necessitated physical, not mental, ability. He worked in construction to support his ever-growing family, leaving early in the morning, dressed in gray or navy-blue work pants and shirt and heavy boots. My mother packed him beef bologna sandwiches on whole-wheat bread for lunch, and he returned by five or six, hungry and weary. He belonged to the laborers’ union and was sent out to build a reservoir in the county, work at a power plant, lay concrete on I-64, and do various other jobs requiring his formidable strength and endurance.
However, he was also an avid reader and picked up books at antiquarian book fairs, including Plutarch’s Lives and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. One of his favorite books, which he attempted to get all of us to read, was The Two Babylons: Or, The Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife. He was fond of quoting this book, published in the mid-1800s by a Protestant minister named Alexander Hislop, which claimed that the Catholic Church was a continuation of the pagan religion of Babylon and was nothing less than the Whore of Babylon referred to in the book of Revelation.
I read parts of the book several times, and given the extensive footnotes, it seemed to be a reliable and even scholarly work. Yet, I could never read much of it without putting it down. Not only was the language dense and bombastic, essentially an attack against the Catholic Church as “a synagogue of Satan,” but I was disturbed by something else in the pages, something that I couldn’t articulate even to myself. The book put forth many of the same arguments as our church—that the Catholic Church was the Antichrist, which had to be vanquished before Jesus could return—but it was overly self-righteous and lacking respect for another faith, even if I was taught that that faith was wrong.
Several times, in a fine fury, Grandma shouted that the Worldwide Church of God was a cult. This really incensed my father, and he would decide we couldn’t go to the farm anymore if Grandma was going to be so contrary and foolish and perhaps even influenced by Satan. Herbert Armstrong preached that anyone who disagreed with church doctrine likely had the devil working on him or her.
Poor Grandma, I thought at the time. She was doomed.
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After leaving Grandma Himsel on Sunday afternoon, we drove past open fields, farmhouses, and barns and silos, through Jasper and across the Patoka River to my mother’s parents. We turned onto Schnellville Road and crested Pete’s Hill, where my grandparents’ farm came into view: the white farmhouse, the summer kitchen, and the still-in-use outhouse that my grandmother referred to as “a damn-filthy, stinking shithouse.”
Tumbling out of the car, we’d often find my grandfather and uncles in the middle of butchering a pig, conversation between them limited to how much they should freeze, how much to keep. My brothers usually ran off with some of the other male cousins to fish down at the pond or maybe shoot at sparrows or go turtling at the creek.
The five youngest at the time—Abby, me, Liz, John, and Sarah—immediately asked our grandmother if we could hunt eggs. She gave us little plastic buckets and reminded us, “If the egg is marked with an ‘x,’ don’t you take it! That’s a nest egg, and if you don’t leave it, the hen won’t have her egg to hatch.” So we scooped up eggs from the smokehouse, the tractor seat, the combine, the hayloft, and behind the barn, placing them gently in our buckets. We were as careful to leave the nest eggs as my father had been not to disturb the wren’s nest.
We brought the eggs back to the kitchen, where the aunts reigned, peeling potatoes, opening jars of homemade turnip kraut, and making Jell-O salad and ribley soup (from the German Riebelesuppe), which consisted of eggs and flour beat together then crumbled into hot chicken broth. Should a barn cat venture into the kitchen, my grandmother would mutter, “You little shitass,” and kick it out. I delighted in hearing my grandmother say such forbidden words in her dismissive way. She not only called the cats shitasses but also her husband and grandchildren.
We then returned to the barnyard, maybe checked out the baby kittens in the hayloft, or sat in the corncrib, where corn covered our bodies up to our waist, or we asked my grandfather if we could help slop the pigs. I liked the word “slopped.” There was something in it of sun-spattered mud puddles and late-night giggles. When my grandparents said “slop,” though, they pronounced it “schlop,” and the word became an earthy, sensual thing—the sound of pigs squealing and snorting, swallowing and salivating.
In his bib overalls, heavy work boots, and the John Deere cap that covered his half-bald head, my grandfather was a lonely figure. Tagging along at his side, we helped slop the pigs and pluck the chickens. Cigarette dangling from his lower lip, ax in one hand and chicken in the other, he lowered the ax, and the chicken’s head was a small bloody mess next to the concrete block while the body flew and hopped and jumped around until it came to a sudden flopping stop.
Then he dipped the chicken into a pot of boiling water, swirled it around, and after it had cooled, he handed it to us to pluck. We sat in comfortable silence on wooden crates, ripped off the feathers, and brought the bare chickens into the kitchen, where we rested them on the table covered in newspaper. My mother and aunts made quick work of gutting them, saving the liver and gizzard and heart, and tossing everything else away.
My father often said that our mother was just like her dad. “They are both stubborn as all get out,” he declared. “Hardheaded, them two stick up for each other. They’re thick as thieves.” He meant many things by this, but one of the things he was referring to was my grandfather’s excessive consumption of Falls City Beer and my mother’s refusal to either criticize him