Crossroads

For the longest time, for more than sixteen years, Clem had admired his father precisely for his strength. In the beginning, in Indiana, where the parish house had been decaying faster than his father could keep up with its maintenance, Clem had been awed, even frightened, by the roping and contraction of his father’s large muscles when he swung a pickax or drove a nail; by the torrents of sweat that ran off him when he scythed weeds on a hot August day. The sweat had a unique, indefinable scent—not stinky, more like the smell of a young toadstool or fresh rain, but still upsetting to Clem in its intensity. (It was a revelation, much later, when he worked for the nursery in New Prospect, to catch the exact same smell from his own soaking T-shirts. As far as he knew, no one in the world except him and his father produced that smell. He wondered, indeed, if anyone else could smell it.) One push from his father at a swing set had sent him so high that he clutched the chains in fear of falling off. One mild flick of his father’s wrist, and a baseball came at Clem so hard it stung his palm through his glove. And the yelling. His father’s voice, raised in anger (always at Clem, never at Becky), was a sound so blasting that a spanking, which his father did not believe in giving children, might almost have been preferable.

In Chicago, he’d come to appreciate his father’s moral strength as well. When he read To Kill a Mockingbird, in junior high, he recognized Atticus Finch and felt proud. His political views were a perfect replica of his father’s, and they must have been authentic, because they survived his mother’s praise of them. He shared his father’s abhorrence of the Vietnam War and his belief that the struggle for civil rights was the defining issue of the day. During his father’s campaign to desegregate New Prospect’s public swimming pool, he went ringing doorbells by himself, handing out literature and repeating verbatim his father’s words about racial prejudice. Although he didn’t have his father’s scope of action, didn’t have a pulpit to preach from, didn’t ride a bus to Alabama, he followed his example in smaller ways. The jocks at Lifton Central who persecuted the faggots, the wussies, soon learned to keep away from him. When he saw someone weak being picked on, he became so hot with anger and so numbed to pain that he could hold his own in a fight. He mostly wasn’t friends with the kids he defended—they were social pariahs for a reason. He was just doing what his father had taught him was right.

The only sore points between them were religion and Becky. Nothing metaphysical made any sense to Clem, neither God the Father nor, still less, the absurd Holy Spirit, and something had gone wrong from the start regarding Becky, some jealousy or overprotectiveness on his father’s part. Being alone with Becky made Clem aware of a peculiar duality in himself. He would have had a fistfight with anyone who said a word against his father, but he couldn’t stop trying to undermine his sister’s respect for his father’s Christianity. What made this even stranger was that his own ethics were basically Christian. He admired Jesus greatly, as a moral teacher and a champion of the poor and the marginalized. But there was an imp of perversity in him, a sarcastically dissenting alter ego, and being alone with Becky brought it out. He walked her through the absence of evidence for immaterial forces, the lack of hard corroboration for the stories in the Bible, the unprovability of the proposition that God existed, the imperviousness of “miracles” to scientific experiment; and it worked. He made a junior atheist of Becky, and this became another thing that united them, another thing to love about his sister—the way her lip curled whenever God came up at the dinner table.

If he was more circumspect with his own atheism, it was partly out of respect for Jesus and partly because he and his father worked so well together. His father was patient in teaching him to use tools, and Clem, no matter how tired he got, refused to be the first to quit when the two of them were moving earth or raking leaves or painting walls. He wanted his father’s approval, for his work ethic no less than for his politics, and he appreciated how frequently and warmly his father expressed it—he couldn’t have asked for a better dad in this regard. When he started tenth grade, and his father had the inspiration of reorienting his church’s youth fellowship toward a work camp in Arizona, Clem saw no reason to let metaphysics stand in the way of joining it.

Rick Ambrose had come aboard at the same time. During the first year, when he was a full-time seminarian and only a part-time fellowship adviser, Ambrose had worn his hair short, shaved his face, and deferred to the associate minister. But after the political tumult of the following summer—Clem had campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, working alongside his father, who in August had his lip split open while trying to intervene between cops and protesters in Grant Park—Ambrose returned to the fellowship with long hair and a Fu Manchu. Some of the boys from the church, notably Tanner Evans, had adopted the same look. There was a new rowdiness on Sunday nights, a new impatience with authority, as long-haired kids from other churches, or from no church at all, started showing up at meetings, but it never occurred to Clem to worry about his father. Who cared if an ordained minister still carried a Bible and started every meeting with a metaphysical prayer? MLK had been devout, and no one had admired him any less for it. Clem didn’t know a man who worked more passionately for social justice than his father, and when you really loved someone, the whole person, you simply accepted the little things you might have wished were different. He could see eyes being rolled when his father waxed religious at a fellowship meeting, but Becky herself rolled her eyes like that. It didn’t mean she didn’t love him.