Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [68]
I took Aunt Alma’s warning as a challenge and started talking to Uncle Earle about faith and good works. I played him Mama’s most tearful gospel country music and repeated all the most dramatic soul-saving stories I’d found in the pamphlets the Christian Ladies’ Aid Society passed out. Earle loved the whole thing, my sincerity, the Bible verses, and the thinly veiled threats of perdition. But most of all he loved the argument. While I tried to prove to him that God was love and Jesus saved, he set out to prove to me that the world was irredeemably corrupt.
“Never mind the ninety and nine, let’s talk about the poor lost sheep in this county,” Uncle Earle would start off. One shot glass of whiskey and a tall glass of beer and he was ready to address the issue of Jesus, only occasionally reminding me of his wife, Teresa. He blamed the loss of Teresa on Jesus, naturally—Jesus who made Catholics, Catholics who were so particular on the subject of fornication and made it so hard for a decent Baptist man to get a divorce. He was funny about Catholics, damning them for making his life so difficult and admiring them at the same time.
“At least,” he told me, “Catholics are interesting, got all that up-and-down stuff, chanting, velvet carpet on the pews and real watered wine for communion. What the hell Baptists got? Grape-juice communions, silly rules against dancing and movies, self-righteousness by the barrelful, damn-fool preachers in shiny suits, and simpleminded parishioners! Baptists could learn something from the Catholics.”
Sometimes in his arguments, Uncle Earle would get Teresa, the Catholic Church, and the county marshals a little confused. Given enough whiskey, he’d start talking about the way they had all united to blight his life. If there was a God, Earle had decided, He was on the side of Teresa, the Catholics, and the marshals. But there was no God, Earle told me, no God and no hope in churches. People were better off learning to rely on themselves and each other, instead of running around praying for what they weren’t going to get.
“I gave up churches—all churches—because I saw what they were,” he told me. “Take a look at those oil color paintings on the wall of every Sunday school in South Carolina. Jesus in the mountains. Jesus in the desert. Jesus against the night sky. Jesus got the lost one in his arms. Jesus wants you, each and every one of you. He’ll climb mountains, walk the hot sands, brave the night winds, search among the many for the one not found. And you are never so valuable as when you stand outside the fold, the one God wants. Oh, don’t I know! Don’t I know?
“They want you, oh yes, they want you. Till they get you. An’t nothing in this world more useless than a hardworking religious fool. It an’t that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won’t let you drink a little whiskey. Won’t let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won’t let you do a damn thing except work for what you’ll get in the hereafter. I live in the here and now, and I need my sleep on a Sunday morning. But I’ll tell you, Bone, I like it that they want me, Catholics and Baptists and Church of Gods and Methodists and Seventh-Day Adventists, all of them hungry for my dirty white hide, my pitiful human soul. Hell! None of them would give two drops of piss for me if I was already part of their saggy-assed congregations.”
Uncle Earle would drink and swing back his glossy black hair. The more he drank, the more he would talk. Perversely, the more he talked, the more I wanted to hear, though every word out of his mouth was blasphemy. What I really liked was how he talked about Jesus. He talked about Jesus in a way I understood even when I couldn’t put it together with all he said. He talked about Jesus like a man dying for need of him, but too stubborn to sit down to the meal spread within reach. Earle talked