All That Endures

By Wilson Roberts

Anyone interested in the 1960s will be fascinated by the lives of Brud and Reggie Hicks, the brothers from Texas, their wives Gwendolyn Adams and Gwendolyn James, both members of historically prominent Boston area families, Sam Davis, the defrocked Methodist minister who joins them at Walden Brook, Leo Dennison, a local gun dealer and Keetsville native who is a former selectman, and Stacy Phelps, owner of the Keetsville general store. Brud, his wife, Gwennie, and Sam are hired to teach at Graham Community College, under the leadership of its president Colonel Walter Chapman Lewis, USMC, Ret., while Reggie pursues the outlaw ways that resulted in his being booted out of the Army after serving time in a military stockade in Germany. Leo rants against change, especially what he calls "that damned innersnake highway and them community colleges in Greenfield and Holyoke and Springfield, to say nothing of right here in Graham, and all them beatniks and Communists, and...all them other outsiders that will ride that damned road right into God's country here." All That Endures is a portrait of a world in transition, one that inevitably leads to today's troubled world. The novel will stir memories of those who lived through the times it recaptures. It recreates for those who came later an exciting, challenging, dangerous and often hilarious era in American life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilder Publications, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781633842625

Book preview

PART ONE

One

THE SUN BEHIND them, shadows long in front of them, two brothers from west Texas rode in to the Lower East Side in 1960, driving a yellow 1950 Oldsmobile convertible, its paint peeling, its tires nearly bald. Crossing the Hudson River, Brud Hicks looked at the view of Manhattan from the crest of the George Washington Bridge and patted the steering wheel.  He smiled at his younger brother, Reggie, sure they had left behind a hardscrabble legacy that promised little more than the agonies of their father’s and grandfathers’ hard and fruitless labors.

Five years earlier, their father, Ralston Hicks, had taken the Olds in partial trade for his ladders, scrapers and brushes, along with a ’55 Ford F-100 pickup. His job of painting street-side mailboxes for the Post Office had ended following a three week bender, during which Ralse woke up in an alley outside the American Bar in Juarez, three hundred and fifty miles from Lubbock where he lived and worked, a knife wound in his shoulder, his wallet gone, his pockets empty. It took him another week to make his way back home.

His job was gone, taken by José Medina-Diaz who worked for Ralse. He had been awarded the remainder of the city’s mailboxes by a postmaster fed up with Ralse’s drinking sprees and the cost overruns they engendered, a result of Ralse having to go back and redo painting jobs he had bungled in the early stages of any one of his numerous toots, before his drinking would escalate and he wandered off for indeterminate periods of time.

You got to at least throw in your piece of shit Oldsmobile, Ralse told José who offered him three hundred dollars for the ladders, —scrapers and brushes. You owe me at least that much in return for learning you the mailbox painting trade. I mean Jesus H. Christ, José, if I wasn’t the goddamn useless drunk my wife Imogene knows I am and that goddamn postmaster says I am and the Lord created me as, I’d still have the contract for painting those goddamn mailboxes and you’d just be another Mex working for a goddamn fat and blasphemous white man who abuses you at work and shorts you on your hours. Now you’ve got the contract and all I’ve got is empty pockets, a hangover, a knife wound that stinks of infection and a wife that’s so goddamn aggravated with me that she set up a tent in the back yard and put a goddamn sign on it that says Dog House and another goddamn sign over the back door says Abandon All Hope You Useless Drunks Who Enter Here.

Ralse eventually found work as a janitor in a dormitory at Texas Tech and stayed sober enough to keep the job for five years. He died of a heart attack while moving a three hundred pound sculpture from a room vacated by two graduating engineering students who had stolen it from the art department at the beginning of their senior year.

RALSTON GREGORY HICKS, JR., Brud to everyone except Imogene, had graduated from Texas Tech and had been offered a fellowship in linguistics at Columbia. Two months after his father’s burial, he planned to hitchhike from Lubbock to New York, taking along a notebook to record his adventures.

Tall and heavy like Ralse, but without the muscles his father had from years of hard work between sprees, Brud had thick and unruly hair that fell over his forehead. He invariably dressed in black chinos and white shirts, the chinos held up by a wide cowboy belt, the image of a racing stallion embossed on its brass buckle. Through high school and the first two years at Tech, he had thought he would be a professional musician. He and his friend, Bobby Lee Gilsum, formed a twosome they called the Sons of West Texas. Bobby Lee was the better picker and singer of the two, and Brud realized that his best chances for getting out of Lubbock were through writing and, if unavoidable, scholarship. During his last two years at Tech he forced himself to hunker down, avoiding the temptations of bars and music and the company of his musician friends. The sacrifices led to an ulcer and the fellowship in linguistics at Columbia.

By the summer of 1960 he had read On the Road for the fourth time and dreamed of writing a similar epic about a west Texas boy thumbing his way east to New York City. He was sure it would showcase his precocity and bring him the fame and fortune needed to avoid the graduate work that appealed to him nearly as much as the idea of painting mailboxes in Lubbock, Texas. Academic work was easy for him, but felt like pure drudgery, even if it could provide a pathway to the comforts of life that Ralse’s degenerate habits had made impossible for his wife and sons. He was ready for adventure on the road.

Imogene changed all that.

Like it or not, your brother’s going to New York with you, she told him. "And take that damn car. I get mad every time I see it and imagine your father hauling his sorry drunken butt from one bar to another.

Reggie’s crazy, Brud said. I’m not going to take him.

Imogene pointed her forefinger at him and shook her head, her lips drawn in, her eyes narrowed. Reggie’s crazy like a fox, but no doubt he’s trouble walking and he’ll surely end up like your father and that’s one god-awful series of events I will never live through again. Besides, he’s your brother and you love him.

I do, Brud said.

I know he can be a problem.

He hasn’t done a damn thing since he got thrown out of the army. He’s been acting like Daddy, getting drunk and fighting, except that he doesn’t show the slightest inclination of getting a job. At least Daddy had jobs to get fired from when he got drunk. The only thing Reggie got fired from was the Army, and that was for stealing that motorcycle in Germany.

Reggie was tall and lean with finely chiseled features inherited from Imogene’s Cherokee grandmother. His hair was black and thick like Brud’s and he wore it slicked down with Wildroot Cream Oil. Listening to Imogene and Brud from the next room he called, It was a goddamn dishonorable discharge. That’s different from being fired.

That’s right, son, Imogene said. There’s some honor in being fired, because at least you had a job to get fired from. You’re going to New York with your brother.

Ah, Ma, Brud said.

Imogene spoke slowly, carefully enunciating each word. I am moving to San Francisco to live with your Aunt Lois. If you don’t take Reggie with you he’ll end up being another bum looking for handouts and sleeping under bridges, when he’s not in jail.

Ah, Ma, Brud said again, but Imogene huffed twice and put on her tattered brown rag coat. Giving Brud one last look, she shrugged her shoulders and headed for the door. I’m taking the last of my rent money and going down to the Piggly Wiggly to get the fixings for a big goodbye dinner for you all.

THE BROTHERS LOADED the Olds with their most indispensible gear: Reggie’s Harmony 1114 Stella acoustic flattop guitar, their Uncle Ernie’s 1922 Whyte Laydie banjo, stringless with a broken head that Brud planned to have replaced in New York, two mandolins, one an ancient gourd style instrument that had been around as long as any of them could remember, the other a five year old Sears Silvertone Ralston had won in a card game. They found the Silvertone under the bed while helping Imogene pack her worldly goods into the cardboard cartons she was getting ready to mail to her sister before taking a bus to San Francisco.

Brud and Reggie had several cardboard cartons of their own, stuffed with clothes and books and a few mementos of what Brud described as their immensely unsatisfactory but highly interesting childhood, including one packed tightly with his attempts at poetry and fiction. The car loaded, they started east and north, headed for New York City where they planned to live on the income from Brud’s fellowship and sleep on the floor of his dormitory room while they settled into the city and Reggie looked for work.

In New Orleans Reggie was arrested as he was soliciting a teenage prostitute who had just picked a tourist’s pocket on Bourbon Street, the police alleging that he was working with her. Like everyone detained by the New Orleans Police Department, he was locked in a cell and ignored. Three days later the prostitute said at a hearing she’d never seen him before and a magistrate released him into Brud’s custody.

That’s one goddamn town I never want to get arrested in again, he said, walking out of the jail where Brud was waiting out front, the Oldsmobile idling in the hot sun. I’ve been in better jails in Morocco.

You’ve never been to Morocco, Brud said.

If I’d’ve been in jail in Morocco, it would’ve been a hell of a lot better than any they have in New Orleans, with goddamn rats on the floor and spiders on the walls and a toilet that doesn’t flush. I’d rather have a hole in the floor like in Morocco.

Where you’ve never been.

I’ve been there in my mind. That’s bad enough, and that goddamn parish jail I just walked out of… Reggie stopped and shook his head with an exaggerated shiver. I mean, goddamn, there can’t be anything worse than that. The goddamn stockade in Germany was a palace compared to that place.

Heading north, they camped along the way and spent a night and day in Bristol, Virginia, making a pilgrimage to 408 State Street, the place where Ralph Peer first recorded the Carter Family for the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1927. From there they drove north through the Shenandoah on Route 11, hit the Pennsylvania Turnpike and ended up on Route 1 in New Jersey. On August 15, 1960, they crossed the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan.

SITTING ON THE east side of the Connecticut River, opposite the Wessex County seat of Graham, Massachusetts, Eagle Falls is an unincorporated nineteenth century industrial village in the Town of Ashmont. Originally a planned community carefully laid out by Albert Montgomery, who established the first paper mill in what became Eagle Falls, the village fell on hard times after the Depression and remained untouched by the booming wartime and postwar economies. The solid brick buildings and milled oak woodwork interiors of its commercial buildings and housing grew shabby and coated with coal dust. Window panes rattled against mullions in winter and summer storms, their glazing putty long since dried and cracked into gray powder and blown away. Slowly the village deteriorated into a grimy refuge for people at the fringes of Wessex County’s economy, half of its mills shut down, others in partial operation employing a fraction of their original workforces.

The village stretches along two polluted miles of the Connecticut River, its gritty streets and the foul smelling Industrial Canal in stark contrast to the New England town in which it was located. Ashmont is a town of sprawling farms and several hamlets and villages. Ashmont Center looks like a calendar photo with its town hall and Grange, the Congregational, Episcopal and Unitarian churches, the Ashmont General Store and Post Office cluster around an acre of town common. Dozens of old homes line both sides of the four blocks of the main street. Set far back from the pavement, their back yards open into fields which give way to wooded lands leading down to the river, they are comfortably upstream from where the effluent pipes of Eagle Falls empty into the canal which runs into the Connecticut River just above the falls for which the village was named.

A narrow flight of uneven granite stairs leads from the sidewalk on First Street in the middle of Eagle Falls down to the Bear’s Den Bar and Grill in the basement of the Eagle Falls Hardware Emporium, a three story brick building in the middle of a block of brick buildings, the street level spaces housing a TV and appliance store, a doughnut shop and the Eagle Paper Company Employees Credit Union. The second and third floors, mostly empty, provide office space for three lawyers, a chiropractor, Miss Annabelle Lemieux’s Tarot Readings, and Nick’s Barber shop. The Bear’s Den, lit mostly by neon beer signs and a few overhead fixtures with forty watt bulbs, reeks of stale beer, cigarette and cigar smoke and the odors of human waste that drift through the transoms over doors leading to the men’s and women’s rooms.

It was nine-thirty on a Thursday night and the Den was empty except for Bear Moore, owner, bartender and chief cook, and three of his patrons, Freddy Keets, Ron Shippee and Marty Lemieux, whose wife ran the Ashmont Tarot and Fortune Reading Parlor two floors above the bar. Sitting at a table in front of the bar, the four men were playing poker and drinking beers with shots of whiskey on the side. Hank Williams singing I Heard that Lonesome Whistle Blow came from the jukebox, filling the spirit of the room as surely as smoke from cigarettes and cigars filled the air, clouding it so that it was difficult to see the dart board on the far wall. The lettering and logos on the neon beer signs on the walls around the room were softened by the tobacco haze, the lights glowing in the smoky mist.

I love the sound of the pedal steel, Bear said. It’s a cruel and lonesome sound.

The door opened and Maureen Keets walked in. Seven months pregnant, she moved slowly across the room and sat on a stool just behind her husband, Freddy.

Thought you was coming home right after you cashed the paycheck. Using a closed fist, she rapped Freddy on the shoulder. How much of it have you lost playing cards with these assholes?

Freddy raised his hand as if to slap her. She cringed, pulling her face beyond his reach, and folding her arms, glowered at him.

Cool down, Bear said, wrapping his hand around Freddy’s wrist and holding it still.

Ain’t nobody except you in all of Eagle Falls that’d dare do that, Freddy said to him. And just because you’re as big as I am don’t mean I can’t take you and one of these days I will. You and me could step outside right now, if you wasn’t chickenshit.

Releasing Freddy’s wrist, Bear relit his cigar, never taking his eyes away from Freddy’s. There’s no chicken shit about it. I don’t want to fight you, and if I did you’d come off the worse for it. They taught me things in the Marines that guys like you never heard of.

Turning to Maureen, Bear said, You go home and take care of those kids you got back there, and that one you got baking in your oven. It don’t do any good for you to come in here and bother Freddy about whether he is or he isn’t gambling away his pay check. He works hard for it and it’s his to spend.

Maureen jumped from the stool and moved quickly to the middle of the room where she turned around and looked at the four men. He’s got mouths to feed and bills to pay.

You and the brats starving? Freddy said.

Only because you come home drunk on your ass and fall asleep on the couch with money in your pocket, which I take and use to feed you and them.

Ron and Marty laughed.

She’s got you there, Freddy, Ron said.

Freddy rose and turned, as if he were about to charge across the room at Maureen. Bear grabbed his shoulder. It’s your deal. Play cards or get the hell out of my bar.

Freddy raised his middle finger in Maureen’s direction. Go home now, bitch.

Ron clacked his tongue. Jesus H. Christ, Freddy, Gloria’d cut my throat in the middle of the night if I treated her like that.

She likes it, Freddy said, yelling at Maureen’s retreating figure. Knowing I’m the boss gets her horny as all hell, right Mo?

Without turning, still walking away, Maureen raised her middle finger.

Marty Lemieux whistled. She’s a handful. All Annabelle ever does is whine and cry when I try to set her straight.

Mo likes it when I talk mean and she likes it even more when I am mean.

Gloria wouldn’t like it even a little bit, Ron said. She’d take a kitchen knife and sure as hell give me another smile. She likes it when I bring her flowers and play the guitar for her. He pulled in his lips and looked at Freddy. I’d bet that Maureen doesn’t like it all that much, Freddy. I’d bet that she’s eating her gut out right now and if I was you I’d go after her with a beer and bring her back in to lift a couple more of them with us.

Swiveling with the speed of snake, Freddy Keets knocked Ron’s glass from his hand. It spilled across the table, soaking the cards, and crashed against the side of the bar, glass shards scattering over the floor. Don’t never try to tell me how to handle my wife, you pussy-whipped weasel.

You’re going to have to clean that mess up, Bear told him.

Let little pussy-whipped clean it up. I got business at home.

Bear stood and pulled Freddy upright by the collar. Ron didn’t make the mess, right Ron?

That’s all right, Bear. I’ll clean it up. It was my glass.

Like hell. Freddy will clean it up if he wants to come back here again. Right Freddy?

Freddy faked a laugh and a grin. Sure, Bear. Just because Ron threw his glass as me don’t mean a friend like me can’t help him out and clean it up for him.

I’ll get a broom, Ron said.

Like hell you’ll get a broom, Bear said. Freddy will take care of the whole mess. Right Freddy?

Right. And when I’m done that bitch I’m married to is going to have some explaining to do, her coming in here and fucking up our card game. She needs a lesson or two from Freddy.

That’s between you and Maureen, Bear said. What’s between you and me is you cleaning up the mess you made in my bar.

There’s other things between you and me that are going to take some straightening out sometime, Freddy said in a low voice.

Bear rolled his eyes at Ron who returned the look with a quick smile, both men knowing how low the odds were that Freddy Keets would get into a fight with a man nearly his equal in height, weight and strength. Maureen, they knew, would have her hands full that night.

Two

IN 1962 SAM Davis was in the final weeks of his last semester at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary. He had already been assigned to a small church, a rural congregation in Keetsville, a western Massachusetts hill town of less than 600 people. The town of Graham, bordering Keetsville to the south, is the seat of the most rural county in Massachusetts, and like its neighboring counties of Franklin, Hampshire and Hampden, Wessex County is split down the middle by the Connecticut River.

In early May, Sam and Matt Tillich, his roommate and a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia, were having a late beer, hamburger and fries dinner at a neighborhood bar on the upper west side of Manhattan.

I’ve got two tickets to a New Lost City Ramblers concert at Town Hall and nobody to go with, Matt said.

It’s a date, Sam said.

Afterwards we’re invited to a little party at my friend Brud and his wife Gwennie’s apartment on the Lower East Side. He just finished his masters and starts work on a doctorate in the fall. She’s already got her Ph.D. You’ll dig him and Gwennie and his brother Reggie.

Who are they? Sam asked.

Two of the most interesting people I know. I met Brud at a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y. We got talking and found that we both like folk music and both like to fool around with the guitar. Since then we’ve played music at jams around town. He’s a beatnik from Texas, if you can imagine such a thing. His brother’s a little weird, just as smart as Brud but off somehow. Listening to his stories you get the impression that he thinks of himself as some kind of outlaw.

Is he?

Matt waggled his hands. He’s handsome, charming and smart as hell. Whenever there are women in the room, they’re around Reggie listening to him talk about growing up in West Texas, breaking broncos and driving down into Mexico to drink and gamble and generally raise hell. They love to hear his stories about being stationed in Germany with the army, sneaking over into East Berlin on missions, spending time in the stockade, and other outlandish tales.

 You didn’t answer the question.

Matt nodded, hesitation in his voice. I like being around him.

I hear a but.

I wouldn’t trust him with my sister, my money or my car.

Is there any truth to his stories?

Brud says Reggie is telling the truth about being in the stockade, but that most of his stories are bullshit.

What’s Brud like?

He’s a scholar and a writer and pretty honest about what he is and what he isn’t. He’s also very hip if you know what I mean.

Sam shrugged. Seminary didn’t qualify me as a judge of hipness.

What did it qualify you for?

They say it means I’m ready to preach the gospel.

Matt rolled his eyes. And just what in the hell does that mean?

Sam rubbed his hands over his face. I’ve got no idea what it means. I thought I believed in God and Jesus and miracles and salvation, the whole ball of wax, until I started studying the history of religion and theology. For three years I studied Christianity, its documents, its ideas, its meaning and truth, its theory and practice, its secrets and its revelations, and you and I have sat up night after night talking about theology and philosophy, about the meaning of life, about all that shit.

He stopped, took a bite of his hamburger and washed it down with beer, all the while staring at the bottles lined up on shelves in front of a mirror behind the bar. Looking back down at the platter before him, he picked up three French fries and dipped them in ketchup and chewed loudly. Raising his eyes to meet Matt’s, he smiled. I’ve got a Master of Divinity degree and no faith in the divine. In four months I’m supposed to be ministering to people I haven’t met and preaching about things I don’t think I believe anymore.

What do you believe?

Licking grease from his lips, Sam sighed. That’s a hell of a question for a philosopher to ask a student of theology. You people write thousand page books talking about what you believe and nobody ever reads them except other philosophers. He leaned back in his chair. I believe it’s important to help people get through life’s rough patches.

You don’t need a degree in theology to do that. You just plunge in and help them.

I know. I think I’d do just about anything to help another person as long as it didn’t involve hurting another one, including myself. Taking a drink, he set the glass on the table and ran his thumb and forefinger up and down it, making streaks in the frost on the sides.

They drank without talking for a while. Halfway through his second beer, Sam almost whispered the words, My father committed suicide.

Matt leaned forward and rested a hand on Sam’s forearm. I didn’t know.

Sam smiled. I was a kid.

It’s hard for a kid to lose a parent.

Sam shrugged. I hardly knew him. He was one of the first people drafted after Pearl Harbor and he came home a year and a half after the war was over. Mother met him at the door, shook his hand and asked him if he got the letter she sent him when he didn’t come home with everybody else, back when there were parades and celebrations and every returning GI and sailor was treated like a hero.

She shook his hand after he’d been gone, what, five or six years? Nothing else?

The letter was a Dear John.

Was there another guy?

Sam shook his head. She said that when she didn’t miss him after he’d been away so long, she realized she didn’t love him and actually liked living without him. He’d never gotten the letter and told her he hadn’t come home because he was tortured by the memories of the things he’d done during the war and the memories of the people he’d done them to. He didn’t know how to face the people he loved after being part of such horror. Mother let him in and told him he could sleep in the guest room. Two weeks later he drove into a stone bridge abutment on the road outside of Langhorne, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. Ma felt so guilty that she fell apart. A Methodist minister, Reverend Mike Daniels, kept her from going off the deep end. After that both Ma and I assumed that I’d become a minister and help people like the Rev did. She married him, by the way.

She chose the ministry for you.

Sam laughed uncomfortably. She did, but I bought into wanting to help people, and in spite of a lack of faith, a degree in theology technically certifies me to do that, and the church will provide me a living while I do it, even if it doesn’t make me hip or cool.

Matt smiled. No doubt. Tillich isn’t as cool as Sartre, and hymns and organ music can’t compare with Miles Davis’s music.

Sartre I know, but who’s Miles Davis?

One thing at a time, Matt said. Tomorrow’s about old timey country music, not jazz.

Old timey?

That’s what they call it.

I know some country music, Hank Williams and Roy Acuff, George Jones, Porter Wagoner.

Matt rolled his eyes again. Back at Brud’s place after the concert he and Reggie will probably play some music. Brud’s wife, Gwennie, is as interesting as he is. She’s smart and funny and good looking. Not pretty, but handsome and with a smile to light up Carnegie Hall, and wait until you hear her sing. She’s got a voice that Joan Baez would kill for.

THEY MET IN front of Town Hall. Standing outside on the sidewalk of 43rd Street, Matt introduced Sam to Brud and Reggie Hicks. Brud shook his hand and putting his arm around a woman standing beside him, drew her close. Thin and angular, she was taller than Brud, taller than Sam and Matt. Her sandy hair was cut short and she wore a white cotton blouse with bright hand embroidered flowers, a light blue skirt and sandals. She smiled at Sam and he thought her beautiful.

This is my wife, Gwendolyn.

She extended her hand. To avoid confusion, I go by Gwennie.

Sam smiled back at her. How does that avoid confusion?

Gwennie’s laughter was soft and warm. You’ll see.

Brud patted her shoulder. Gwennie’s grandfather was president of the Beacon Hill Bank back in the pre-income tax days. The family’s got money up the ass and is the epitome of Boston Brahminhood, although you wouldn’t know it to look at her.

As if my grandfather has anything to do with me. She laughed again.

All that matters is that I’ve got something to do with you, Brud said and looked at Sam, who was grinning at both of them. We met at Columbia. Gwennie just landed a teaching job at City College.

With a gentle motion she shook off his arm and patted his head. My baby Texan husband is three years younger than I am and thinks it’s cool that he landed an older woman who comes from an old Boston family and already has a job.

It is cool, Brud said. She’s a member of the Mayflower Society.

Gwennie laughed. There’s nothing cool about that. My mother signed me up when I was born. I’ve never been to any kind of Mayflower gathering. You’re the one that’s cool, she told him.

Reggie frowned. He had been standing to the side watching and listening, and Sam felt as though he was preparing to pass judgment on him. For crissakes, let’s go inside and cut the goddamn cute shit. We’ll miss the show.

I NEVER KNEW anyone like Brud before we met, Gwennie told Sam back at their apartment after the concert. He’s smarter than anybody else in the doctoral program and he’s the opposite of all the Ivy League types I grew up around and dated before I met him. He’s filled with fresh ideas.

That must be interesting, was all Sam could think of to say.

She breathed a sigh of pleasure. You can’t imagine how interesting.

The apartment was a shabby efficiency with a sofa bed, the floor stacked high with books that overwhelmed the brick and pine-board bookcases that lined the walls. Next to the door leading to the hall was a knee high cardboard box, papers filled with typed text nearly flowing over the top.

Handwritten on a large note card tacked to a wall were the words, Fuck Communism, across the room on another wall, Fuck Capitalism, and on a third wall, on a large sheet of poster paper, carefully lettered, Fuck the Pope, Fuck Mary Baker Eddy, Fuck the Dalai Lama, Fuck Aimee Semple McPherson, Fuck Father Charles Coughlin, Fuck Joseph Smith, Fuck Madame Blavatsky, Fuck Norman Vincent Peale, Fuck Billy Graham, Fuck Alastair Crowley, Fuck Herschel H. Hobbs, President of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Fuck any other Religious Charlatan and Useless Sonofabitch I may have forgotten to include on this list of people with their heads up their asses and their brains full of shit.

She pointed to the poster. Nobody in my family would have thought of something so clever.

Sam fought the impulse to roll his eyes.

Shit, Brud said, drawing the word out to three syllables. Nobody in your family ever said fuck anything. And the poster’s not clever. It’s pissed off. For crissakes, being raised up in Cambridge you never got your nose low enough to smell real people and your folks never had much to be pissed off about.

FDR infuriated them, Gwennie told Sam. Father was an undersecretary of the Treasury under Hoover and was irate when Roosevelt ended the gold standard. He and his friends Prescott Bush and Sterling Clarke, along with other conservatives, tried to overthrow Roosevelt back in the Thirties. Fortunately they didn’t succeed. I’m a Norman Thomas socialist myself.

Brud turned to Sam. You can’t imagine the size of the house she grew up in. There’s wings on the mansion’s wings, and they’ve got a big enough art collection that museums all over the world have tried to buy, paintings by famous painters all over the place, a Van Gogh landscape, a sketch of her grandfather by Picasso and a series of miniatures by Degas, landscapes by Hudson Valley School artists, several Klimts and things you can’t tell what they are by modern painters. Ain’t nothing like the way we grew up in west Texas.

I tried to steal one of the Degas miniatures, but Gwennie caught me, Reggie said. She waved a hand at him, laughed and snuggled up to Brud.

She affected a style of a wide-eyed innocence. Reg is so funny and I love it when Brud says ain’t. He’s so free and easy with the language as he grew up with it in Texas. She took a joint from his hand. Father would have raised the roof if a Degas disappeared.

She toked long and hard and passed it to Sam, her faux innocence gone. There’s an energy, a vitality and vision in Brud’s language that years ago was drained from the language spoken in my family and the circles they travel in. It’s the difference between Woody Guthrie and Robert Lowell.

Brud laughed. Her daddy only knows how to talk money. He’s the managing partner in Benson, Hobson and Dray, one of the biggest law firms in Boston. He’s got resources.

And he just absolutely hates it that I married Brud.

Maybe that’s why you did it, Brud said.

She pinched his butt. I had other and better reasons for snagging you.

Sam held the joint between his thumb and forefinger, turning it over several times.

Reggie shrugged and looked at Sam. It’s out. They always go out. You got to keep lighting the goddamn things. He pulled a Zippo lighter from the pocket of his jeans and flicked it, holding its high flame toward him.

Sam put the joint between his lips and bent over, took a light puff and exhaled.

Your first joint, Reggie said. It was not a question.

Sam nodded.

Had to be, the way you puffed on the goddamn thing and blew the smoke out right away. You don’t smoke cigarettes, do you?

I tried it once, in high school.

You don’t know how to smoke. You got to take a deep drag, pull it down into your lungs and hold it there until you feel like you’re going to pass out. Then you exhale. He lit a Camel and demonstrated, holding the smoke in for a count of thirty before slowly exhaling it through his nostrils. Like that.

Sam took a drag on the joint and pulled it deep into his lungs. His throat constricted and went into spasms of painful coughing. Reggie passed him a beer. Try another drag after you drink this.

On the second try, fighting back the spasms, he managed to keep the smoke in his lungs. After several long moments, he smiled. My face feels tight.

You got a good hit that time, Brud said.

Sam laughed. I think I feel…different.

Goddamn, you’re finally getting stoned, Reggie said.

Stoned?

It’s what the dope does to you, he said.

Stoned, hunh? He laughed, took another toke and passed out.

HE AWOKE ON the unopened sofa bed to the sound of several guitars, a banjo and a fiddle. Gwennie was strumming on a mandolin and singing in a modal key, her voice pure and clear, her eerie melody rising and wrapping around the harmony coming from a fiddle played by a woman Sam had not seen earlier. Standing beside her, Brud and Matt were playing the guitars and Reggie was picking the banjo.

Matt set his instrument down when he noticed Sam was awake. He crossed the room and flopped next to him on the couch, pushing several books and papers out of the way to make room. How are you feeling?

Sam grinned. Dandy. Dandier than a dandelion.

Matt ruffled his hair. "Cool.

I never heard a song like that, Sam said.

It’s an ancient British ballad called The Dæmon Lover. No one knows how old it really is. He clapped him on the shoulder. Besides feeling dandy, are you having a good time?

I think so. Probably. I don’t know yet. And I’ve never heard a voice like hers either.

Gwennie’s amazing. She’d be a star if she wanted to be.

Who’s the violinist?

Fiddler. She’s a fiddler.

What’s the difference between a fiddle and a violin?

You’ve got a lot to learn, Matt laughed. And after three years of seminary you’ve got a lot to unlearn as well.

The first thing I want to learn is who the fiddler is

Gwendolyn James. She’s Gwennie’s cousin. She just graduated from Harvard Law School and is getting ready to take the bar exam.

Two Gwendolyns?

It happens. Old families with old money like old names. Their grandmother was a Gwendolyn as well.

Sam studied Gwendolyn James. Tall, she had raven black hair that spread out over her shoulders, her dark eyes wide as she played. She wore a sheer and flowing white dress and with the light behind her Sam could see the outline of her body sway in rhythm with the music.

She’s got a face like a Botticelli.

The rest of her isn’t too bad either. She must have outshone Gwennie all the time they were growing up. Even as lovely as Gwennie is, it had to be tough having a cousin who looks so perfect.

Gwendolyn James saw Sam and Matt staring and winked at them. Sam gave her a brief, embarrassed smile and looked away, noticing that Reggie was also staring at her. Brud’s eyes were locked on Gwennie. A smile passed between them. She puckered her lips and smacked them. He pretended to catch her kiss and put his hand to his cheek.

Several times during the evening Sam tried to talk with Gwendolyn James, but each time Reggie interrupted them, offering a joint, or a beer, or asking her to play another tune.

You’re not getting anywhere, Matt said.

Am I that obvious?

Very obvious.

Sam sighed. They both know the same music, and my musical background’s limited to pop stuff and hymns.

I told you that you had a lot to learn. Matt patted Sam’s shoulder.

Hours later, and many tunes and many beers and many tokes later, Sam and Matt were preparing to leave, Brud and Gwennie standing beside them at the door. Sam pointed at the cardboard box containing the typed sheets of paper.

Gwennie’s eyes followed his gesture and laughed. Brud calls that his Thomas Wolfe box. He’s convinced that some latter day Maxwell Perkins will come along and shape a great novel out of the chaos he’s got piled up there. He writes by inspiration. I write academic papers and keep a journal, she paused. I’ve written in it every day since my sixteenth birthday, but neither it nor my papers are particularly inspired.

I could pull the novel together all by myself, Brud said.

Or you could call what you’ve got in that box practice sheets, burn them and then sit down to write a disciplined novel.

Brud sighed and rattled his lips. Discipline is for the scholar I seem fated to be. It’s overrated in literary artists.

It is not. Her tone did not invite contradiction.

The conversation trailed off. Sam and Matt edged into the hall. Brud gave them each a final handshake and was about to close the door when Gwendolyn James pulled it wide open.

It was nice to meet you, she said, her eyes locked on Sam’s, adding in a near whisper, I have to see you again.

He’s a preacher. Brud pointed at his fuck religious charlatans poster.

Gwendolyn smiled. Her lips were full and her teeth white and straight. Judging from the look in his eyes, that won’t last long.

BEFORE MOVING TO Keetsville and taking over his church, Sam spent much of his free time at Brud and Gwendolyn Adam’s apartment. Brud taught him the basic guitar chords and he would thump away as they played and sang songs by the Carter Family, Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams, Oscar Brand’s bawdy ballads and some Stanley Brothers and Flatt and Scruggs bluegrass tunes. He enjoyed playing, but never felt comfortable with the guitar and envied the easy ways Brud and Reggie had with their instruments. Each time they got together Sam hoped he would run into Gwendolyn James, but she was never around. Twice Brud said that she had taken Reggie to her parents’ summer home on Nantucket.

The rest of the time, he said, She claims is spent at home in Cambridge studying for the bar exam.

Near the end of June Sam left New York and settled into the church’s manse in Keetsville. Busy with church business, he did not find time to get back to New York, although he and Brud kept in touch by mail and occasional telephone calls.

During an October call to Brud, just before hanging up, Sam asked in his most casual tone if Gwendolyn James had passed the bar exam.

She decided not to take it, Brud said.

I thought she was studying for it most of the summer.

She said she was.

He waited for Brud to say more, but there was only silence on the line.

Why wouldn’t she take the exam?

Because her father wants her to be a lawyer. She says she went to law school so she could tell him at the last minute that she wouldn’t stand for the bar. The Gwendolyns have very complicated relationships with their fathers. Gwendolyn James’s mother was as nuts as they come. Her father was sane by comparison.

Meaning he was just not as crazy?

Brud cleared his throat and there was a moment of silence on the line before he replied. The mother would go around the bend once or twice a year and Gwendolyn’s father would have her committed to monkey ward at McLean outside of Boston. Every time she was on the looney bin the old bastard would insist that Gwendolyn sleep in his bed with him.

Sam’s voice caught in his throat and he gasped. Jesus, that’s sick.

She says he never touched her and as soon as she was old enough and big enough to rebel, she refused. He threatened to sell her car, to cut off her allowance, and to send her to a school with a reputation for disciplining young women, but she told him to go go to hell. He’s a cold, stern s.o.b, used to having people jump when he tells them too. It drives him up the wall that he can’t control his children.

Children? Sam asked.

There’s a brother, Henry Adams James. He’d be a halfway decent jazz drummer if he wasn’t a drunk.

Behind Brud’s voice over the phone Sam could hear the noises of New York traffic coming through an open window in the apartment. A siren rose above the sound of car horns and the growling of trucks and the loud whines of motorcycle engines.

I miss the city. I wish I was back in seminary trying to figure out the nature of God and the meaning of life, if God has a nature and life has a meaning.

You’re a scholar, not a preacher, Brud said.

Gwennie’s cousin may have been right about me and the ministry when she said that I wouldn’t last long. The members of my congregation aren’t at all interested in theology and they certainly don’t like it that my sermons support the civil rights movement and oppose Kennedy’s ideas about American involvement in Southeast Asia.

They’re church people, not Christians, Brud said. You know that poem of Ferlinghetti’s that goes, ‘Sometimes through eternity some guys show up?’ It says it all.

Sam shook his head. Don’t know it.

You should read it.

I’m not interested in the people in the congregation, and I don’t give a damn about their problems. One of them, a one-eyed old codger named Leo Dennison, has taken a special dislike to me and has been agitating to get rid of me. He’s been a selectman, chairman of the school committee and now he’s the treasurer of the church board. He’s got most of the rest of the board on his side.

What’re his complaints? Brud asked.

That I’m an outsider, a Communist, and an over-educated snob, and that I preach about things other than the Gospel and that I’m more interested in politics than in saving the souls of the fallen sinners who make up the entire congregation. On that, I think he’s right.

That you’re not interested in fallen sinners?

Sam laughed into the phone. No. He’s right that the congregation is full of fallen sinners.

Assuming you believe in sin.

That’s another discussion. Anyway, last Sunday, after services, Leo came up to me and pushed his yellow crooked teeth into my face. ‘By God,’ he said, and this is word-for-word. ‘You’re a worthless do-gooder preacher with too much education and too little godly fear. This congregation should get rid of you and all your Methodist baloney and go off on its own as a church dedicated to the holy Gospel. We don’t need you telling us that it’s God’s will that the coloreds should be in every school and what the government should do for the poor and all the rest of that Communist load of foolishness.

He knows what God wants? Brud said.

Sam laughed again. He told me that he spoke with God every day about the moral and spiritual inferiority of over-educated preachers who think the Bible is something for them to interpret.

He called you over-educated twice?

I told him that I’d pray for him, but I didn’t.

You’re one hell of a preacher, Reverend Davis.

Not that it’ll ever happen, but if there is a God I hope he’ll condemn the old sonofabitch to the everlasting torture of a burning hell, just like the hells in the old EC horror comics I read when I was a kid.

If there is a God?

Sam’s sigh came from somewhere deep within. I’ve always had a niggling fear there isn’t anything more than us creatures crawling out of and sinking back into the muck of the world. In addition to wanting to help people like the Rev, I suppose I went to seminary so I could find out I was wrong.

Brud’s laughter crackled over the phone. Reverend, you sound more like my old Daddy than like a man of the cloth, although he’d’ve said we’re critters, not creatures.

Sam’s laughter joined Brud’s. So much for my dark night of the soul. There was another long silence on the line, then he said, It’s really odd about Gwendolyn and the bar exam.

How interested in her are you? Brud asked. He could almost hear Sam’s shrug come over the line.

She’s gorgeous and I’ve never met anyone like her.

She’s not preacher’s wife material.

I’m not much of a preacher, and I probably won’t be any kind of a preacher before long.

Can you just walk away from it?

If Leo Dennison and his friends have their way I won’t have any choice.

How long were you in seminary?

Three years.

How long have you been a preacher?

Three and a half months.

And you’re not going to fight this Leo asshole?

I don’t know.

I do, Brud said. I hear it in your voice. You’re going to walk.

Just like Gwendolyn James walked away from the law.

I like you, Sam, but you’re nothing like Gwendolyn.

Maybe no one is.

Don’t set anything by her. You’ll get your heart broken.

That night, trying to fall asleep, Sam wondered about his growing obsession with Gwendolyn. It was a new experience for him. He’d had girl friends since junior high school. In college he and Lydia Howard had experimented with sex and even talked about getting married. Nothing came of the sex or the talk. There had been other girls and women he fancied himself in love with, some he thought he would marry, but either he or they would end it. The feelings swirling around Gwendolyn were unlike any he’d had before. They had never touched; he did not know her. They had exchanged few words, but she appeared in his fantasies, in his dreams, and he found ways to mention her in conversations with Matt and Brud. Other women paled in comparison.

He pulled the covers over his head and counted backwards from a thousand until he fell asleep somewhere in the low five hundreds.

OVER THE YEAR Sam’s ministry continued to fail. He did not rise to Eleanor Sanderson’s crisis of faith sparked by twelve burned loaves of bread she had been baking for the church dinner. Harley Deane, Chair of the Board of Selectman, asked Sam to persuade his wife Annie not to leave him after he spent a weekend in Atlantic City with Marlene Shippee, the town clerk. Sam called him a two-timing ass and told him it would serve him right if Annie divorced him and took everything he owned, leaving him with nothing but a half acre of rocky scrub land to put his dog house on. When Royall and Margaret Phelps’s seventeen year-old daughter, Rowena, was arrested for drunken driving in Graham, he told her parents he was sorry, suggesting that they talk to her and perhaps find a counselor who might be of help. He also suggested that they find a good lawyer.

The weddings and births, the deaths and funerals, the celebrations and bereavements in his congregation seemed like sad slices of meager lives of little importance, and he increasingly felt as though his own life was one of far less consequence than any of those he had been hired by the church to counsel. The windows of the shabby house the church provided for him leaked cold air and the rusted Ashley woodstove could not keep pace with the frigid winds that whipped over the high plateau on which the house sat. The building shook with each blast of winter wind. The windows rattled and the stove pumped wood smoke into the one room that stayed halfway warm. Taking the mattress from the bed where he slept alone, he put it on the floor near the stove and still, to keep warm, he had to sleep fully dressed under a pile of blankets.

Shortly before Christmas he got a call from Brud. I have a new sign on the wall, ‘Fuck Graduate School.’ I’m so ready to quit I could puke.

I’ve started to pray, Sam said.

I thought you were losing your faith.

Lost. Lost is the word. I’m praying that Leo Dennison will succeed in getting me fired and that I never see the inside of a church again.

Who’s listening to prayers like that?

My mattress.

You get down on your knees beside the bed to pray for release from the church?

Hell no. I lie on my stomach with the pillow over my head and scream, ‘God; get me the hell out of here.’

Why not just quit?

I’ve never quit anything. In my junior year of high school I went out for the football team and developed plantar warts on the balls of my feet. I was a running back and I played the whole season in agony, but I played.

Sounds like a dumb thing to do.

Extra dumb. I didn’t go out for football in my senior year, but I stuck it out during the season of my junior year.

I’m not so single minded. Simple minded, maybe. They both laughed.

You’re going to drop out of school?

I’m ready, but I haven’t done it yet. My advisor asked me to work with her on a project involving Melville’s manuscript of Billy Budd. I countered with a suggestion that I work on something connected with Kerouac’s On the Road, maybe tying it to eighteenth century picaresque novels. She said she had read enough Kerouac to know that his writing was banal and trite. I asked her how much that was and she said five pages of hackneyed, prosaic, clichéd, trivial and commonplace prose in On the Road was enough. I suggested that if she consulted a Thesaurus she might be able to come up with a few more synonyms, stale and humdrum, for example. She told me to make an appointment with her when I decided to become a grown up graduate student. I suggested she read all of On the Road. She said it would be a waste of time.

Sounds like a real meeting of the minds.

It went downhill from there. I’m looking for a new advisor, just in case I decided to stay in school. But I didn’t call you to complain about my lousy academic career. I thought you should know that Gwendolyn is pregnant. She Reggie and are getting married. Her parents are setting up a trust fund of over a million to support the baby.

Sam had to force his voice through a sudden tightness in his throat. I didn’t know they were serious.

Those kinds of people are always serious, especially about money.

I meant Gwendolyn and your brother.

They’re getting married. That’s serious. Brud cleared his throat. Reggie’s serious about her money and he’s serious about his drinking and smoking. I reckon if she buys the booze and dope and cigarettes and he stays drunk and stoned, they’ll do just fine. She’ll be his cash cow.

He’s your brother, so I won’t comment.

Good idea. I’ll be in touch.

Brud rang off and Sam sat with the receiver to his ear listening to the sound of emptiness on a line that suddenly was connected with nothing.

Two days later he got an invitation to the wedding, to be held the following Saturday in Cambridge. Scrawled across the bottom margin Gwendolyn had written, Please come. Given the lateness of the invitation no RSVP necessary.

 He drove east from Graham, headed toward Boston on Route 2, the hills of western Massachusetts receding behind him. Coming down from the high plain surrounding Mount Wachusett, he remembered Gwendolyn’s eyes and her words the night he left Gwennie and Brud’s apartment where they had met, I have to see you again, and how, in the end, nothing came of the promise the moment seemed to hold. He felt he had missed something that might have taken him in a different direction, shown him new possibilities. Her words played over and over in his mind as he drove until, from the deep recesses of his consciousness, he recalled Brud’s comment, Don’t set anything by her. You’ll get your heart broken.

During the wedding and later during the reception at the Parker House in Boston, he watched Gwendolyn. She never once looked his way. At the reception line, she shook his hand while talking to a woman behind him, her touch slight, her skin cool, her eyes elsewhere. He watched her dance with her father, the sound of her laughter as he whispered to her seeming to fill the room. When she circulated from table to table, resplendent in her wedding gown, her black hair bedecked with flowers, her back always seemed to be turned to him. Even at the table where he sat with Brud, Gwennie and Matt, she never looked directly at him, nor did she directly say anything to him. Yet she was not rude; there was nothing he could describe as any kind of slight in her lack of attention to him. Rather Sam felt as though he were a phantom, an airy thing she looked through as she spoke to the others.

At the end of the reception, getting ready to drive back to Keetsville, he approached her. She and Reggie stood by a long table, icing from the wedding cake still on their faces.

He shook Reggie’s hand. Congratulations. You landed a rare beauty.

Reggie put his arm around Sam’s shoulder and whispered, Did Brud tell you about all the bread her old man laid on us, just because of the goddamn baby?

Sam nodded.

I’m goddamn rich, Reggie said, his whisper almost loud. If only Daddy could see me now.

He turned to talk to another well-wisher, leaving Sam alone with Gwendolyn.

She took his hand, held on to it. I hear you’re still a preacher. Her face betrayed nothing, but there was a trace of laughter in her voice.

It’s wearing thin, he said.

I told you it wouldn’t last long. She sighed and looked around the room, her eyes settling on Reggie who wandered toward the bar. This isn’t how I meant it when I said I had to see you again. Why didn’t you call me?

We’d barely met and I didn’t know what you meant. I still don’t.

I certainly didn’t mean for this to happen. She touched her abdomen and waved her arm over the room, encompassing the wedding, the reception, the child growing within her.

You didn’t have to marry Reggie.

She made a slight motion with her shoulders. It’s what the James and the Adams women do, the right thing, no matter how wrong it is. In this case, we either go off to some remote place and have the baby and give it up for adoption, or we go off to an even more remote place to have an abortion, or we marry the father. I chose to marry Reggie. He is beautiful and brilliant, in spite of having a dreadful dark side and many problems. Besides, Daddy’s paying for my wedding to a man he can’t abide. He thinks that Reggie is lower than low. Daddy says he’s like Eliot described a character in The Waste Land, ‘One of the low on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.’ Of course, now with the baby’s trust fund Reggie is a millionaire, of sorts. She laughed. And Daddy is livid about the whole thing, but he won’t do anything for fear of Mummy and me teaming up on him. She winked at Sam. And Mummy is quite crazy, you know. Bonkers as they come. He keeps his bedroom door locked when she’s at home instead of in a straight-jacket at McLean, afraid she might slip in and slit his throat.

Could she?

She could, but she wouldn’t. When she’s back home instead of being wrapped in cold sheets and getting shock treatments at the hospital, she’s usually too drunk to plan and carry out a murder.

Freeing her hand from his, she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. Daddy is a bastard, you know, but he loves me and he’d do almost anything for me. Even pay for me to marry Reggie. Laughing, she waved the fingers of both hands at him and turned to talk with Gwennie, who had rested a hand on her shoulder.

THE FOLLOWING SPRING Leo Dennison convinced the church board to write the Methodist bishop, asking him to remove Sam from the pulpit. The bishop wrote back saying that Sam’s rotation in Keetsville would end in two more years and it was the board’s duty to support him in God’s love as he found his way to fully grow into his ministerial vocation. The day after receiving the letter, the board voted to disaffiliate the congregation from the Methodists, and locked Sam out of house and church. Leo personally piled all his belongings on the Manse’s porch.

That same day in May, 1963, one year to the day after he first heard Gwendolyn James play The Dæmon Lover, Sam also broke his affiliation with the Methodists, packed his car and drove the eight miles down into Graham, where he took a room at the Depot Street Hotel, which in the local newspaper, advertised furnished rooms at the rate of three dollars a week. A week later, the Dean of Faculty at the newly opened Graham Community College hired him to teach philosophy and history.

 I was lucky, he told Brud when he visited in New York shortly after he was locked out of what had been renamed the Keetsville Community Church.

Extra lucky, Brud said. "You’re not on the God Squad anymore, and