FUMING GEYSERS AND GUARDIAN ANGELS

My little big sister, Judy (right) Thanksgiving 2010

That night, Mother and Daddy did have a loud fuss. (Julie and I never called them ”fights” because most of the time, except for that one plate and the kitchen chair, they didn’t throw anything at each other except words.) But these words were horrible, sharp-pointed weapons that boiled up and spewed out of their mouths like the fuming geysers at Yellowstone Park that I had seen on the newsreels at the Rio. Sometimes in the middle of the night if Julie and I went in to try to help negotiate in some infantile way or maybe just showed up by surprise and shame them by letting them know we had heard them, I would look at their mouths and be surprised that their lips and tongues weren’t singed or blistered by the white-hot eruptions that had issued forth from them. Surprisingly, they were always still all in one piece with never any blood or even blisters. Later I learned that there really was all kinds of damage — hemorrhaging, blistering, and scarring — but that it was all inside, mainly inside my mother.

It didn’t look like religion was doing much for them either, at least not late at night when Julie and I needed to sleep and they needed to explode. In the daytime, to look at them both, you would have sworn that everything Reverend Holder was saying behind the pulpit at First Methodist was soaking in. My mother was a pretty and upstanding person who spent her days either fashioning impressively detailed dresses for her two daughters with her Singer sewing machine or working in her high-heeled shoes at “Pep’s Finance Company,” and Daddy dealt with an adoring public, treated his staff and their families with kindness and generosity, and went regularly to Lion’s Club on Thursdays at the BK Café. They had plenty of friends and were patriotic, all of which seemed like God and Jesus, His Son, would have been proud of, but it didn’t seem like Jesus was much a part of anything that went on in their bedroom late most nights.

So that night when I woke up to the geysers spouting off, I just got up and went to Julie’s room, even though I had the privilege of having a room of my very own. She let me crawl into her bed under the afghans and snuggle up under her wing where the pointy words couldn’t penetrate, at least until we had to come out to get some air. It kinda seemed like, freshman or not, that she was glad I was back, and most nights from there on out, I would sleep with her and not the clowns in my room. It’s a good thing, too, because she went back to reading the Bible to me every night and saying my prayers with me.

From fifth-grade on, I began to get a little of what was going on in the Bible stories she would read to me, and some nights I would stay awake for the whole story. People like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Abraham and Isaac, and Peter began to seem like real folks with real problems that could have sat and visited together on one of the twirling stools at the soda fountain of Green’s Drugstore or come walking out of the dime store with a sack of roasted peanuts as I passed by on the sidewalk. When she would read to me right there lying under the covers, two feet away in her fourteen-year-old voice, all of those “thee’s” and “thou’s” and holy words seemed to carry more meaning than when Reverend Holder would say them forty feet away down front wearing his long black robe and standing behind the pulpit in front of the choir on Sunday mornings.

Yessir, even though she was just a kid, I think in the long run you’d have to give Julie most of the credit for keeping me out of the Shelby County jailhouse.