“’Cause your daddy was a preacher?”
“’Cause it was all I had,” I say.
She nods like she knows something about that.
TITHES
I received my first guitar after a church meeting I wasn’t allowed to attend. I’d been banned from the sanctuary after Lady Crawford’s anointing failed to heal me. The book of Leviticus says no man with a defect can approach the altar, so I was made to stand outside and listen to the services. While other local sanctuaries had a steeple and white siding, our church was constructed with rough, split logs the congregation helped fell from the other side of the creek. The amalgamation of untreated oak, sycamore and locust stayed covered in bark. Knots like puckered scars were plentiful and the stubs of sawed branches stuck out from our cabin walls like the nubs of amputated limbs. The fist-sized holes between logs were filled with a mortar made of mud that washed away bit by bit with each storm. I spent that morning peeking through one of these holes.
When my father got what he referred to as “the call from the Lord,” he knew no church in town would suit him. His doctrine was too archaic, the demands too pious. His rituals of worship carried a similar strangeness: An opening benediction in my father’s rough voice, followed by a brief reading from one of the angriest sections of the Bible. Always Old Testament reminders of the cost of disobedience, never any emphasis on mercy. Jonah swallowed by the great fish, not delivered from it.
Our parishioners were all outcasts. Strange hill folk whom the starched-shirt preachers in town wouldn’t want to touch long enough to baptize in the creek. They seemed genuine about the Lord but were full of the worst aspects of superstition. My father’s darker sermons appealed to that. Most considered me marked like Cain. Touched by something even the witch lady’s holiness couldn’t counteract. That morning, they walked past me holding Bibles against their chests like shields.
I mention all this because the fever ran especially heavy on the day I received my guitar. The worshipers came outside after the service still stunned from their trances where they babbled in tongues. They brushed the church’s dirt floor from their clothing, unconcerned that the mud they wallowed in was the same ground where wild animals came inside to piss and rut. Lady Crawford exited first. A middle-aged woman with her body hidden in a white dress, her eyes scanning the tree line rather than look at me. Looking back, there was something beautiful about her long dark hair and the sallow paleness of her long neck. Of course, I didn’t see any of this back then. She frightened me so much that my eyes could only concentrate on her fingers. The way the yellowed, brittle nails were always caked with earth and how they’d felt rubbing the holy oils onto my concave chest.
Weeks earlier, I had caught her fucking my father. The two of them hidden in the brush by the creek, The Reverend (the title with which I thought of my father) in a continuing state of undress that passion wouldn’t allow him to complete. He still wore his coat, pants slid down below white shins as his black wingtips worked for purchase in the dead leaves. Lady Crawford lay underneath him, writhing the same way she did when entered by the Holy Spirit. I still don’t know if she refused to look at me because she knew I’d witnessed their sin, or because she failed to heal me.
Annabel Freemont, the daughter of the portly guitarist who played our hymns, followed on Lady Crawford’s heels. I loved Annabel. She was one of the only girls my age I ever interacted with and was probably single-handedly responsible for my puberty. Still, I knew she was afraid of me and kept her distance.
Inside, I could hear my father speaking with Mr. Freemont, but their voices were too hushed to discern. I retreated around the building and put an ear against the best listening spot in the wood.
“This is my church,” The Reverend said. “I built it with my own hands. I won’t harbor those who do not contribute.”
“I just don’t have it,” Freemont said. His voice cracked whenever he raised it. Now I realize this is one of the reasons my father thought of him as a suitable deacon. He needed a quiet man who would offer praise and never challenge his authority.
“For the Lord’s house to flourish, we all must sacrifice,” my father said. “He requires we all tithe.”
“I just don’t have it,” Freemont said. A whine stifled in his throat.
“Do you believe I would extort you?” The Reverend asked. “Do you think I’m some swindler?”
“Of course not,” Freemont said.
“Then why this refusal?” The Reverend asked. “Have you forgotten your scripture? ‘One gives freely, yet grows all the richer. Another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want.’ Proverbs, Chapter Eleven, Verse Twenty-Four. Do you still say you have nothing to give?”
I heard something passed from one man to another. I sprinted from my hiding place, cautious to be nowhere near the spy hole when they emerged. As I rounded the corner of the church, I almost crashed into Annabel. She kept her head down until blond hair covered her face, strands catching light as if she wore a golden mask. I thought she might tell them I’d been snooping, but she stayed quiet when Mr. Freemont stumbled out and took her by the hand. They disappeared into the tree line as The Reverend came out carrying Mr. Freemont’s guitar. I remember how weathered it was even in those early days. Covered in nicks and scratches, strings played so thin they threatened to snap with the next vibration. He handed it to me.
“Carry this up to the house,” he said.
In those days, we lived in a three-room camper without running water and only a generator for electricity. Instead of spending time in that hotbox, I took the guitar down to the creek. I sat on a fallen log, pantomiming the finger placements I witnessed Mr. Freemont make. When I strummed, the thinnest string broke, lashing my palm as if in retaliation. I kept at it anyway. Tried to make the odd shapes on the neck that allowed Freemont to perform his plainsong gospel. I knew those formations were the key to unlocking something more. I never made music that day, but it was the start of something.
The following weeks belonged to the guitar. As soon as my eyes sprang open, I had the instrument in hand. I carried it out into the woods and played a racket that frightened anything feral. Eventually, my presence became so normal even the squirrels ceased barking and fled into the leaf-packed globes of their nests. The guitar never fell silent until late into the night.
By the third week, I began to wonder why my father wanted the guitar in the first place. He hadn’t sold it to help the church. Looking back, I suppose it was something to keep me occupied. It allowed him to slip away with Lady Crawford.
My fingers had surpassed the malingering pace of dark country ballads, discovering joyous speed. It was during one of those faster sessions that the uppermost string snapped. I tried to repair it, but the severed coil was too short to thread through the eye of the tuning key. I knew my father wouldn’t replace it, but I took it home anyway.