VACATION BIBLE SCOOL
No Vacation for a Pirate
By Jimmie von Tungeln
The
following happened in different times. Not ancient times, just different times.
Most mothers were home all day then. Most fathers were away working. Children followed
their own instincts and must have been particularly annoying. Mothers missed no
opportunity to be shed of them for a few hours, or even all day. As I was to
learn, it was also a time set aside for my religious instruction, specifically
for a consolidation of my vague images of Hell, in form of a particularly nasty
institution known as—one can still almost hear thunder and the neighing of
horses at the mere mention of the word—Vacation Bible School.
Perhaps the
ill-timing of it all fueled my extreme reaction. They seem always to plan these
things in summertime and this was a particularly bad bit of scheduling. It
seemed to be set out purposely to interfere with the duties of a group of
ten-year-olds who had no other mission than protecting both the physical and
reputational well-being of their community. We had, over the last few months,
coalesced into the sort of group about which folk songs were written during the
Dark Ages. We were heroic. We were virtuous. We were protective of our lands
and people. In short, we had responsibilities, and they didn’t include religion.
A group of invaders
from north of Bayou Bartholomew, for example, was in the process of building a
raft with which to ravage the settlements to the south. This was the
established territory of our little band of privateers. Who would stand between
the invading hordes and our men and women folk if we were to be called away?
There were forts to be built, traps to be laid, and counter-offensive craft to
be built.
The
alternative spelled utter disaster. Ben Shannon explained it to us as we
gathered around a hastily built campfire near the bayou’s edge. He was not our
leader, per se, just older and more educated. “They’ll come rapping and
pillaging our women,” he said. “At tar’s pure histry.”
We
shuddered at the thought as our blood ran hot and fired our anger like an open
circuit suddenly lighting a darkened room. Rapping and pillaging indeed! (As
adults, when we absorbed the difference between rapping and raping, many of us
would come to think we would prefer the latter, but that’s a story for another
day.)
Pirates
were only a part of our problem. At the same time, a group of rustlers from the
Union Community had begun to range perilously close to our hideout on Ferdinand
Thompson’s land. We had to settle affairs with them once and for all and it
wasn’t going to be a sight that innocent folks should witness.
On top of
that, a group of semi-professional baseball players from the Hog-eye Bend area
was threatening to descend upon the field on the edge of Ridgway’s dairy land
and issue a challenge to any locals brave, or dumb, enough to meet it. We
weren’t the type of fellows to back away from anyone, even from a team that
reportedly fielded a player who could re-wrap a baseball with electrical tape
so tight that it hit almost like a new one. We’d knock his fancy ball right
back in his face.
In the
midst of all this, the two Hester boys, O.G. Stanford, Bobby Joe Benson, his
brother Robert, and I all heard the sentence pronounced.
“Unity Baptist
Church is having a two-week Vacation Bible School
and I have signed you and your sister up,” my mother said. She said it so
softly and matter-of-factly that she might have only been stating we were
having leftovers for supper. It failed to even register in a mind that was
filled with sword-fights, running gun battles and strikeouts.
“That’s
nice,” I heard myself say, not realizing the doom to which I had just sentenced
myself.
I forgot it
all until the next Sunday evening. I had lived through another Sabbath and was
preparing to assume my duties as the gang’s quartermaster the next day. In my
kit, I had packed a penny-box of matches and a book of cigarette papers filched
from my father’s grocery store. Eddie Holland had been swiping pinches of Bull
Durham from his daddy for weeks now and we had the goods to provide a swell
smoke for the entire gang. I also packed away a five-cent package of
firecrackers left over from Christmas and a picture of a Marilyn Monroe in a
bathing suit that I had torn from a Parade
Magazine. I had my Uncle Jack’s survival knife from the Korean War and a
magnifying glass that was useful for starting fires, and also for frying ants.
It was going to be a good Monday.
Then I
heard my mother yell from the living room, “Jimmie get in there and lay out
some clothes for Bible
School in the morning.
Misses Cochran’s coming at 8:30 and you better not make her wait.”
My blood
froze. Bible School? Was she kidding? I answered back
immediately in my best pirate voice. “Huh?”
“You heard
me.”
“Did you
say something?”
“Now don’t
even think about opening that little smart mouth of yours to me. You get
ready.”
“Aw momma.”
Did she want to be rapped and pillaged?
“Don’t you
‘aw momma’ me. I gave them a love offerin’ and you’re goin’.”
“But Sonny
Averitt has a new snake and he said we could come over and look at it in the …”
“Don’t make
me have to come in there.”
So, the
gang of prisoners dutifully reported outside the church next morning. There
were five of us—Bobby Joe had rubbed some mustard in his eyes and convinced his
mama that he might have the “chicken pops.” True pirates are born to embrace
suffering.
Anyway, we
lined up as if we were awaiting the boat to Devil’s Island
outside the church door. They let all the girls in first, including my sister
who was older than the rest of us and ended up being a sort of guard for the
duration, in addition to her normal job of reporting my every movement and
utterance to the authorities at home. There were about 10 of us boys in the
group, and not a happy face among them.
Finally,
our teacher, a Misses Krebbs, appeared at the door and bade us enter the foyer.
Once that far inside, she stopped us and, as we huddled in a tight bunch near
the coat racks and tables piled with offering plates, taught us the daily
prayer we were to utter before we entered the church each morning.
I
am a sinner, let me pray,
God
has given me this day.
At
every step, I’ll stop and say,
He
will guide me all the way. Amen
I think she
made it up herself because she seemed mighty pleased with it. After a dozen or
so tries, we got to where we could say it together and she allowed us in the
church.
Miss Krebbs
was a stout little woman with reddish hair pulled into a bun. She had obviously
been through this before, for the first thing she did after she sat all the
boys down in the back of the room—the girls were already up front singing
songs—was to single out the baddest looking boy in the room. He was a big boy,
older than the rest of us, named Terry Clayton and was from the east side of
town where they raised the tough ones. We learned later that he was in Vacation
Bible School as an alternative to reform school, so he was prepared to endure a
good deal of unpleasantness. It started immediately. Miss Krebbs brought him to
the front of our little group. He turned and faced us with magnificent defiance,
and we all envied his “look.” She then presented him as the type that would
reap great benefits from the coming experience. She patted his back. He turned
a crimson red, and those of us who were experienced in the ways of the truly
fearsome saw dead bodies and raw bloody veins swirling in his head.
Next, she
looked at him and asked, “What do you expect to get from coming to vacation
bible school,” she asked.
Well, she
might have just as well asked him what he thought of the philosophy of Immanuel
Kant. Here was a boy who had never planned even a half-step beyond his
immediate existence in his life. He turned even redder and finally looked at
the floor.
Miss Krebbs
made him suffer for what seemed like minutes before she sat him down, broken
and humiliated. Then she asked, “Who in here loves Jesus?”
Every hand
shot into the air.
I won’t go
into great detail about the ordeal that followed. As the remnants of our little
band proceeded, without us, to build a raft capable of transporting the band
all the way across the bayou to intercept the interlopers, we were cutting out
pictures of the prophets to paste on large poster boards. The only part of our
day that offered any chance of relief for our tortured mind was singing. It
didn’t take long before we discovered that we could change the words of songs
ever so slightly without drawing the attention of Misses Krebbs or one of the
other guards. Of course my sister was a little more worldly-wise than the
adults so we had to be extra careful. She knew the easy ones such as Gladly, the Cross-eyed Bear. We did
manage, though, to slip by her such gems as Flour
in the Mud.
But our
pleasures were few, all in all. Once, we had to study the Book of Job, which
consisted pretty much of a story about how God and the Devil took bets on how
this poor guy named Job would act if they played tricks on him. I guess they
thought it pretty funny. Actually, we had done the same thing a few times with
our gang’s favorite jester, Buddy Austin. We would, for example, twist him up
in a bag swing and let it twirl him around a bunch of times and then take bets
on how far he could walk before he fell. It was a kid’s game, at best, but I
still think we showed more decency than the other two I mentioned.
The study
of poor Job did provide one bit of drama. Toward the end, when the unfortunate
man had endured almost more than humanly possible, Misses Krebbs stopped the
discussion and asked who could provide an explanation for it all. Well, old
Terry Clayton just sat there for a few minutes. We were ten days or so into the
sentence by then, and I suppose the imagined peace and manly freedom of reform
school were beckoning him like the Sirens of Phorcus.
He all of a
sudden blurted out, it was the first time he had spoken since his opening day
humiliation, “I guess it means that when you have nothing to lose, it’s better
to be the shooter than the dice.”
It was the
last I saw of him until a number of years later when he stopped me for
speeding. He was five years in the police force by then and let me go, a favor
from one victim to another.
On another
occasion, they brought in this carpenter who was going to show us how to work
with wood. We thought this was going to be really neat until we found that the
project would consist of building crosses and not anything useful.
I
immediately got crossways with our instructor because he didn’t like my choice
of wood. I was, and still am, partial to the darker woods like walnut. He
claimed we should use lighter wood to symbolize the purity of Christ. Jesus!
After a few
days of sawing and bending a number of nails, our crosses began to take a
number of shapes, few of them recognizable as the stated intent. On top of it
all, the man refused to answer any questions of a practical nature, such as
tips on building rafts or stockades for a hideout.
As the end
of our cross-building approached, O.G. Stanford finally asked Misses Krebbs
what the finished products would be used for. She didn’t hesitate a second.
“You are building them to be donated to the poor nigra churches in town.”
We just
looked at one another. Hadn’t these people suffered enough already?
The
absolute most idiotic thing about the experience was that Misses Krebbs never
even learned my name. She knew my sister’s name, and she knew our relationship.
But for some reason, she insisted on calling me Jimmie Valentine, for the pure sadistic
pleasure of it I suppose. I still have, among my clippings about the Tet
Offensive, my photos of a storm at sea, and the results of a tornado which I
survived, a small folded certificate stating that Jimmie Valentine had, indeed,
survived (it actually says “graduated from”) Unity Baptist Church Vacation
Bible School.
Ten week
days passed like turtles doing the shuffle and the worst ten years of my life
neared its end. In this case with “Boo-Hoo Day.” That’s the day they wrap it up
with a children’s sermon from the church’s preacher and, traditionally, all the
girls get “saved,” some of them for the fourth or fifth time, boo-hooing louder
each time. All the boys declined the honor except for Johnny Staples and that
is a complete story in itself. Let’s just mention he later went to California
to become an actor and salvation probably held him in good stead.
For the
rest, we returned to our gang to learn that, in our absence, the remnant
members had discovered that rafts made from green pine trees don’t float well
enough to support the weight of a pirate gang. To make matters worse, Ferdinand
had discovered our cowboy hideout on his land, torn it up, and reported the
discovery to my father to whom he handed over the bottle containing a half-inch
of bourbon that someone, we denied any knowledge, had been carefully collecting
from throwaways for months. Of course the baseball game had to be forfeited and
our team was forever known and “The No-shows.”
A pretty sad experience? Yes, in many ways.
The gang never reorganized. The next summer my father secured me a job working
on a milk truck and a succession of summer, then part-time, and finally
full-time employments followed until one day I awoke to be staring at the face
of a grown man in the mirror. Sadly, it was not the face of a pirate. It was a
face, however, honed to some degree from raging along the banks of Bayou
Bartholomew, once, with a ragtag gang of fierce warriors, protecting an
imaginary group of innocent women from the prospect of rapping and pillaging.
So I am glad of my youth, even with that summer’s terrifying experience.
Outdoor freedoms such as we enjoyed back then seem to have disappeared along
with pirate gangs and second-hand baseballs.
Were there lessons learned? There
was one, After enduring Misses Krebbs, and vacation bible school, there was
never any doubt in our minds about the true horrors of Hell. That has always
provided a little touch of religion in the night.
