Reconciliation: 21

“School’s out,” I thought. “Three months of cowboy hideouts, baseball, and fighting pirates along Bayou Bartholomew.” It is the longest one in the world and passed within a half-mile of our little rural world. It was a magic world of fishes, snakes, turtles, abandoned treasures, and assorted dangers—paradise for a group of boys with no responsibilities for three whole months.

Then my mother told me I had to accompany my sister to Vacation Bible School.

Aaargh!

After fruitless arguments, I loaded into the family car as my pals all filed down a little dirt road called “King’s Road” after its lone inhabitant, an elderly black man with a sour disposition and a bad dog. Once safely past that, though, we followed it to a vast forest where we had once discovered a whiskey still. They were headed for our favorite hideout with a partial bag of Bull Durham tobacco, a book of papers, and some matches that Bobby Joe Hester had filched from his mother. In short, the promise of a fine day.

They were headed to have fun in the glorious splendifery of youthful boyhood. I was headed for the worst ten years of my life: two weeks locked in an unheated church suffering the indignity of having the chance of a righteous life pounded into my head, one so hard that it has been a wonderment of efficacy for eons.

It was a cousin’s Baptist church, moreover, so no one, save the cousin, knew us. The Tyrant, our name for the one who signed us up, got my sister’s name down correctly. Though we made it abundantly clear that we were brother and sister, she insisted upon listing me as “Jimmie Valentine.”  I am positive she effected the mistake on purpose, based on the several times she called my mother to report my lack of cooperation with “the salvation thing.” Not many years ago, while sorting through a box of family memorabilia, I came across a document verifying that Jimmie Valentine had, indeed, fulfilled his complete sentence, and had been let out on parole from the nightmare known as Vacation Bible Shool. I burned it with great ceremony.

The days consisted of things like drawing pictures of places where the Dark One would find you and claim your soul, i.e. hotbeds of ruination. We were fairly limited in our experience with sin, so we stuck to the normal ones with which we were constantly indoctrinated: swimming pools, movie theaters, skating rinks, anywhere people danced, and that sure-fire center of iniquity, the Methodist Church. I didn’t include smoke-infested hideouts, a sin of omission for which, on the darkest nights, I still fear retribution.

That all wore out quickly, so we practiced our coloring of saintly figures for a couple of days. The girls loved that part, especially when they got to cut out the finished products with which to decorate the sanctuary so the adults would know that The Tyrant was keeping us righteously occupied.

The boys did not fail to notice that none of their colorings made the, no pun intended, final cut. Some things never change, do they?

Then came blessed news.

The Tyrant was bringing a friend to teach us woodworking. Oh joyous day! That night, I began a list of projects that I wished instruction upon:

- A bunker with gun port for our hideout,

- A sawhorse for my saddle, in case I ever got a horse,

- A cage for keeping captured snakes,

- A go-cart with which to fly down the hill at O.D. Walker’s house,

- A box for housing stolen contraband, and

- A boat for crossing the bayou.

Then we learned the truth. We would spend two days making crosses.

What? Why?

The Tyrant answered, “To donate to the poor people at the “nigra” churches in our city.

Didn’t, we wondered, those people suffer enough indignations without religious fervor causing the piling on of more? Some things never change, do they?

The ordeal finally ended. We endured “Boo Hoo” day during which the church pastor gave us a sermon. That’s when, each year, we learned, the girls all “got saved,” some for the fifth or sixth time, and the boys all made mental plans for resuming a productive life.

I found out, upon release, that the tobacco was gone and the smoking of it had been one of life’s most glorious moments, although Nicky Austin did tell me once that the experience had been less than great, not as awful as our experience with chewing tobacco, but not great.

Perry Don Poteet’s daddy had taken everyone to the zoo in Memphis one day. It was an epic catastrophe that would require a Homer or a Tolstoy to do justice in the telling.

Milton Shilling’s cousin, Sally Mae Durant from Hot Springs, had come for a visit and had snuck off to the hideout one day with Benjamin Shannon, the oldest of our little band. We couldn’t imagine why. Girls didn’t smoke, chew, throw baseballs, or use slingshots worth a darn in those days. They wouldn’t even ride stick horses most times, for they said it wrinkled their skirts. What possible thing could they offer a real cowboy?

Let’s just say I missed a lot and may have missed more than I knew. Some things never change, do they?

Ah, Cowboys and Indians on a summer's day