Chapter 1: Restless Dog / The World's First Ever Baptist Crime Novel

When Brother Bagston preached, you could see the spittle fly if you were sitting to the side in the choir and the sun shone just right through the window.

Lord! When would he get done?

The women were fanning away with their cardboard fans, the ones with Jesus praying in the garden on the front and the back saying Hudson-Bailey was your best bet, the only bet really, for the maximum grave experience.

It was the P words that got the most trajectory. The folk in the front row were getting baptized and didn’t seem to know it. Sprinkled really. Hmmm…. wasn’t sprinkling a Methodist thing? My mind reeled at the theological implications. Would a Methodist-type sprinkling of Full-Dunk Baptists given and received unawares count as a sacrament? Holy Spit!

Wups! Everybody was standing up now for altar call. I stood too. Yep, here she came. Miss Evelyn. Right on cue. She always came during the invitational hymn. She had an altar ego.

And so I amused myself on Sunday mornings. I already had all the sermons memorized and would experiment with different endings than the one the expectorator would inevitably give. Like Joan and the Worm instead of Jonah and the Whale.

It was funny how folk always focused on God preparing the Whale, but not on his preparing the Worm. Right there in the Bible too. It was like a magician trick. Put the attention on the Whale and the Worm would just slide by.

Kind of like the preacher did with Millie Huckleberry.

She was the only one who knew about the preacher and the blood that stained his hands. And it wasn’t the Blood of Jesus either.

I did not like the preacher and what he stood for. I am guilty of the sin of haughtiness and pride. I know that everything I saw in him and detested has a seed, a germ that if watered would flourish within me.

And yet, what he did was wrong. I know that.

I was going through what the mystics of all faiths call the dark night of the soul. It seems to come after a period of great illumination. And I’d had that. And now this.

I was like a dog turning round and round before it flops down on its resting place.

Except I could no longer find the resting place.

The church had gotten too small for my soul. Martin Buber said that religion “rests on an enormous simplification of the manifold and wildly engulfing forces that invade us.” I was feeling the truth of that.

The preacher said that was where I fell into trouble in the first place, going to night school and then to evening college, getting exposed to those ideas that ran contrary to God’s teachings in the King James version of the Bible.

Maybe he was right, but I don’t think so. I was doomed from early on to exploration of all bounds. Tomorrow’s heaven always rested on today’s reality. And I felt the bounds of today’s reality were manufactured, then accepted, by those less adventurous.

I think Jesus came to tell us this. But that’s another story.

With my beginning to see the preacher’s version of the universe as grade school teachings and looking to move on to junior high, I found myself, to continue the analogy, staying outside at recess more and more, and in my mind, though my body continued to attend, skipping school altogether.

Though I wasn’t into naked women and discharging shotguns, Luther Huckleberry and I were more alike than others might think. We both had trouble with boundaries. And so did the preacher.

Lest you think I am just a self-righteous finger- pointer, I tell you this up front right now, in recounting this story, I tell the state of my own soul.

(The World's First Ever Baptist Crime Novel can be ordered here.)