This is hands down my longest piece, so it is a good one for a Sunday read, and it is essential reading to why I am who I am. I wrote it in a creative non-fiction workshop with John Jeremiah Sullivan and a handful of other talented writers.
My fortunes were declining from the moment I decided to live in Gadsden, Alabama. There was only one industry left in town-- a Goodyear tire factory-- and, my hands were far too soft from academic achievement to sully them with callouses and rubbery tarred toil on the assembly line. For years I had been trying to subvert the necessary act of finding employment. I was an academic bum who failed to finish a doctorate in History, a fish bum who failed to guide for fish in a place that had money, and a hunter of wild game for leisurely sport rather than food. Subduing Satan by keeping my hands occupied in sport and scholarship was not an easy task, but hell, somebody had to attempt it. At middle age I realized that no one is going to pay me to simply know things, and be sporty.
She tried to tell me this simple truth, saying, “I am really worried about our future together. You haven’t worked at anything but internships since you left undergrad.”
I was not worried though. Agricola’s had “plenty” of money. When she became pregnant my father nearly lost his mind-- for real. He did not want me to make an honest woman of her. He thought she was after that old “Agricola discount,” which was his way of saying no one can love you for anything but your money, which sounds harsh, but I suspect he grew up believing this too about himself. Family wealth is tricky business as most understand; what most forget is that after five generations of wealth it usually runs out.
I began applying to work as a teacher in an evangelical school. There was no guarantee of a history instructor position, but I was desperate to find some form of responsibility to support my new family. At first I desired the responsibility of work and the trappings of the middle class machine to appear as any other working stiff, and better blend into the world around me. I had not worked a “real job” since I was fresh out of undergrad a decade earlier. This “real job” consisted primarily of walking the halls of a museum looking at artwork, pounding coffee, and pontificating about figural representations.
I was called West to the Plains of Wyoming when my time in the art museum led to a focus on Frederic Remington and Charlie Russell. Western illustrator art led me to see an opportunity to travel, sew some oats, and fish all the damn time. Once embedded, I realized that I could study the South with my new Wyoming vantage and understand my home more than I ever had while immersed in it. I worked a bit on a bison ranch, but the job entailed keeping the fridge stocked with beer, and not getting so drunk that I forgot to check the electric fences for a charge. My recurring nightmare was hundreds of prairie monarchs rampaging through downtown Laramie, because I was sleeping off a hangover.
I left Laramie to go live in Oxford, Mississippi. There, I produced some pretty derivative work on a labor war that occurred in Gadsden during the 1930s. The research centered upon “outside agitators” trying to unionize the Goodyear plant. I passed my thesis exam, but then became despondent by my inability to find work. I came home to Gadsden, but was unwilling to work a line job. I used my nest egg to buy a Florida skiff and start guiding. She hated my freedom-- so when she said, “Im pregnant,” I knew it was a happy accident.
After Trey was born in early March 2018, I enjoyed his company for several months before feeling the call to some higher purpose than butt wiping. I peered down at the greasy tar wipe and knew I needed something more in my life. I could have been elbow deep in tar at Goodyear. I sent emails to the private Christian schools in Gadsden. I wrote, “Dear Mrs Dumbjohn: I am writing because I am a Gadsden resident who would love nothing more than to teach History, or possibly upper level elective courses. I have a small family living in the community, and I would love to find work here. I am very passionate about broad swaths of the historical record, and could fill in wherever you need me. I am attaching my resume so you can sense my background. Thank you for taking the time to look at my past accomplishments.” It was a tidy package that she could sink her teeth into, but I was not really passionate about the idea of teaching in a born- again Christian school if I were fortunate enough to be hired.
I attached my resume that was impressive despite my lacking a teaching certificate. I had not worked a lot either, so these things were not favorable in my search for employment. I had been through hiring processes with the same record, and been unsuccessful in my earlier attempts. I tried the unconventional path of carp guiding for a few summers. I tried the conventional museum track that was congruent with my history and American Studies degrees. All of this effort would be to no avail when small town politics intervened in favor of other candidates who were in my opinion less qualified. It could have been my attitude and the fact that I put a lot of stock in those many college degrees because they were after all hard fought. Still anyone with experience who lacks degrees will always privilege experience, and rightfully so. But experience I did not have.
When Mrs Dumbjohn wrote back to schedule an interview I grew nervous. Not in my record, but in the full dimensions of finding employment in a school I did not understand. I knew they were Christian, but I had not attended church regularly since my time at an Episcopal boarding school in Sewanee. She wrote, “When can you come for an interview?” It felt promising, but I knew better than to get excited. I thought to myself: “Maybe, I can just teach history and leave out the fact that I scarcely knew any scripture or the gospels.”
I arrived early at the school in my excitement. Afterall, my whole family was nervous for me to have an interview, as these were few and far between in my small town of Gadsden. The secretary had silvery brown hair and was a sweet lady. In a syrupy voice she said, “Can I help you?” “I am here to see Mrs Dumbjohn for an interview,” I proclaimed proudly. “Just a second.” She peeked her head into Mrs Dumbjohn’s office and said, “Mr Agricola is here to see you.”
I was wearing a white button down that hardly fit anymore because of the sympathy weight I gained when my wife Hillary was pregnant. Despite my unbuttoned collar where my double chin poured over the edges of the cloth and a red tie squeezed air from my every gasp, I sauntered in full of the false confidence of someone with too many college degrees. More graduate school had become the trend for my generation after the economic recession of 2008. But jobs are rare. The lady that was retiring from teaching middle school history was close to eighty years old, and according to some, she hobbled the halls like a person who lived in Notre Dame Cathedral, and rang the bells like an overworked ogre. She taught my cousin Marian fifteen years earlier, and I had called Marian for the scoop on the school. I did not know details of this school because though I was from Gadsden, it was hard to claim the place as my own since I attended the boarding school during my teenage years.
“Please be seated.” Mrs Dumbjohn said demonstratively. “Tell me about your time in Sewanee.” She said holding my resume and looking down through reading glasses.
A flash of recollection poured over me but not really out of me. After boarding school concluded, I followed my high school sweetheart like the dopey freshman I was to the sandstone gothic architecture of Sewanee--- an Oxford for southern lost causes. This was a move of roughly two miles from my high school to the neighboring university. Before I knew it I became swallowed up by the maelstrom of drugs and alcohol consumption someone who knows no limits might succumb to, and it happened over the course of one semester.
As a freshman in college at Sewanee, I snorted and drank my way into a “mountain” frenzy on the Cumberland Plateau. I remember vividly a wild juke night where I accidentally drank too much moonshine, erroneously believing the concoction to be bourbon and cola, and after a brief moment of recognition I came to only to hear my first love saying, “maybe you should just leave.” I stormed away from her after a rage filled aggressive man bluster concluded, and I took a wrong turn around the baseball field. My new direction was not to All Saints Chapel but to the darkness of the equestrian center. Spider webs ensnared me after a great deal of fulminations in the pitch black darkness, and the horrific blowing from scrawny deer all around me. I walked frantically through the darkened woods for the whole of the night until sunlit flares of luminance began to set right my path. My Sperry boat shoes, the unofficial footwear of all preppy over-privileged Sewanee freshmen, rubbed my achilles raw and bleeding during this tormented night. Amazingly, she afforded me one more chance after this tirade.
Psychiatrists say it takes nearly as long to pull out of a manic episode and the attendant depression as it takes to get in that cycle. I’d say my senior year in boarding school laid the foundation, and my senior religion class was the cornerstone of my issues. It was the psilocybin mushrooms that blew up that cornerstone by causing me to fixate on the task of becoming a “little Jesus.” It was in this setting that my reading of C.S. Lewis became reified as the answer to life’s deepest question-- what and how are we to be? So I started to look for answers in books about shamans and electric cool-aid acid tests. My fellow students were merry pranksters with me until this purported shaman experienced an existential crisis.
I thought I’d found the answer in all the chocolate mushrooms I was eating during this year. Something about how infinitesimally small I felt in an expansive universe, but I still felt deeply connected to all creatures from the salamanders I found in a rock overhang in Abbo’s Alley to the rostafarian Jamaican who knew my roommate and had smuggled hashish into the country. The world was simultaneously pulsating big and small vibrations that I felt I was tapping into. Still, I ate too many and became plagued by thoughts of spiritual meaning in my life. But after I ruined the relationship with my first girlfriend for good, I then became too mired up trying to blame my earthly father for my relationship ending. I was so fucked up that I drove from Sewanee to see my Dad in our family home of Guntersville, Alabama. I had vague memories of him hitting my mother with a colorful inflated carnival crayon during one of her manic spells. She was undoubtedly bitching about some matter of domestic harmony and he had presumably had it with her outburst and came across her cheek with the soft airy blow of the purple Chinese manufactured toy. In my desperation to create meaning around the loss of the girl I interrogated my poor father about his abuse of my mother. Of course he saw past my charade of confrontation, and before I knew it I was meeting with the Sewanee psychiatrist in my dorm room. I couldn’t help but chain smoke my rambling disorientation of reality, until he offered, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” And he also said, “It can take nearly as long to get out of a manic spell as it takes to get in one, so we are going to ask you to leave for a little while until you are well.”
That night my father and his girlfriend picked me up and brought me home. This early December night of 2002 would become formative in my future. Consumed by the loss of the girl and the dissonance of leaving Sewanee after being dismissed for a medical leave of absence-- my home for the previous five years of school-- we stopped in a Rising Fawn gas station. It was like an out of body experience. The lights buzzed a little and some twangy country dirge played that I internalized as being about my all too tragic life. I could see the other customers looking at me and my parents with a kind of brief sympathetic glance then a return to their own lives in a modern instant, like maybe they hadn’t really seen us after all, seeing only the realities in their own minds as well. Just like me, like all of us. There was a man in flannel and a wrinkled denim Ford hat shaking his head. I stalked through the aisles looking for something, and nothing-- the other customers were polite, but all the while they judged my family with their cold stares. I went home to the loft of my father’s cabin. I turned on the news and began to stew in my own chemical juices. Kim Jung whoever was testing ballistic missiles seemingly all night on a news loop. Prior to this night I had not encountered the 24 hour news cycle, as tv was limited in Sewanee. I remember going to my father’s basement and looking at his mini-14 and wanting to end my life, or at least visualizing shooting the automatic rifle. That night I called a 1-800 number from an infomercial and told them emphatically and deliriously: “I cannot become a martyr.”
“Sir, can you tell me what you mean?”
I could not. Words failed me, and I hung up the receiver.
The next morning my father and I drove to Birmingham. I had not slept but was full of the false energy of messianic delusion. CS Lewis had written that “The whole business of Christianity is to become a little Christ,” and I had taken that message to heart. I now truly believed that I could save the world from future 9/11 events if I could just reach the world stage with my vision of empathy for all those around me. But when I arrived at my mother’s house there were no crowds awaiting the miracles I wanted to perform. Only an obese black beagle named “Fudgie.” I laid hands on him for the hell of it. I felt his pain. I feel my parents’ pain today.
Then we were sitting in the waiting room of the psych ward in order to be admitted and I unnerved children by waving idiotically at the tv where President Bush seemingly waved back as he exited the stairs of Air Force One. I must have been frothing at the mouth I was talking so fast, because I remember the doctor saying, “Do you think you are smarter than me,” and “you can do anything you put your mind to except be the President.” I guess the doc reasoned that sleepless nights were not part of being presidential, and something told me this depends on the character of the President. This was the first time in my whiny over- privileged life that I heard I had a ceiling of achievement. It was too soon for that kind of reality, but in that moment I believed him and I soon was on the road back to health.
Mrs Dumbjohn prodded, “Do you recall anything about Sewanee?” It had only been a few seconds but the memories had rushed to the foreground of my mind. “The cross is nice there.” I said flatly.
In Mrs Dumbjohn’s office she asked about my relationship to the Lord God following from my expression about the cross being “nice.” I had scarcely gotten comfortable in my chair and she hit me right out of the gate with the question: “Well, I have to ask. Tell me about your relationship with the Lord?” I regurgitated some C.S. Lewis about faith being a long process of struggle. That mystery is a necessary component of any faith, and that sometimes I just did not know, but ultimately I always turn back to Him for answers in my darkest valleys. She might have preferred a discourse on sanctification, but I was not there yet.
While sitting a semester out from Sewanee my father’s stepson and I moved into my father’s home in Birmingham. BB had flunked out of the University of Alabama after a college roommate died in a car accident. I found an opening at a chain restaurant in the newspaper, and I started waiting tables. BB got a job working at a furniture store selling expensive L couches. We became closer than we had been when I was away at boarding school. He taught me the art of cheese on crackers toasted. We called this hard tack morsel—the “BB snack.” We spent many a late night partying and smoking-- telling stories about how it had come to this. He taught me to play spades, and I learned at work how to slip and fall in the kitchen and catch the plate sacrificing my body so the cooks would like me. It was a hard knock semester. BB was my best friend.
He was five years older than me and his life was functioning like a negative exemplum for where I did not want to end up. I did not want to be in the service industry all my life. So I went to Tuscaloosa for Summer school and took some eastern religion classes where nihility seemed to always be at the core of the Taoist text. I couldn’t buy into that though. Life has to mean something. After a decade of university learning I came home to Gadsden— a small semi-industrial hamlet located along the foothills of Southern Appalachian North Alabama.
My step-brother, BB, died from cirrhosis a year after I returned. BB was nearly universally beloved because he always brought his infectious sense of humor to any gathering he attended, always quick to help anybody with anything, but he could not bare to help his mother who was dying from Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). In 2012, his mother was diagnosed with a condition that would not allow her eyes to track to the ground, resulting in difficulty walking and a propensity for falling. People were usually given five years to live after this diagnosis is made. We waited six months after the diagnosis to tell BB, because he was at his core a mama’s boy.
BB’s eyes were turning yellow before anyone told him that his mother was dying from PSP. I have a vivid memory of saying to him: “why are your eyes that color?” To which he responded by turning around quickly, fully expecting to see his “mama” behind him; as if my concern was some kind of sibling rivalry and I was telling on him. I had already lost one stepbrother a decade earlier in a fiery car crash in Birmingham off 280 Interstate, and I was trying the only way I knew how to express concern. BB and I had bonded over the fact that his roommate had died in a similar way-- all too early. I was unwilling to curtail my own consumption because the devil on my shoulder said, “it is not my eyes that are turning yellow; this is his problem.” Six months may have passed before anyone mustered the courage to tell him that his “mama” was dying.
We found a hundred empty Maker’s Mark bottles strewn about the woods in his backyard after he expired. We were not snooping, but it had become my father’s and my job to straighten up the house of an addict to put his home on the market. He told everyone that he was quitting the hard stuff, and that “It's just beer now.” He was a portly fellow when he was healthy, but since his alcoholism festered he was strictly a performance eater. Booze was the only nourishment BB took in when no one was supervising his eating habits. He ate when people were watching. When they weren’t, he’d feed the steak to the dog. He was afraid to see a therapist because people in Gadsden often gossiped about such things, and so he made promises about wanting to go see Father Michael. He never did.
In the office I squirmed a bit when Mrs Dumbjohn said, “As long as you know that God is sovereign in all things.” “I know.” I replied and began to push back with some authority on the subject.
It was in the hospital, with B.B. on a ventilator and dying, I met my future wife, Hillary. It was not a match made in heaven, or any other romantic nonsense. I thought she was sexy, and I needed a healing after BB’s tragic demise.
I thought she was a good emotional fit because as a partner I would not have to make her aware of the ghost that haunted me, because she knew the bastard personally. She was a friend of BB’s during high school, and they had gone to a formal together during college. BB, or “Big Baby” as his friends often called him, was a lovable chubby kid for his whole life, even into his mid-thirties, and I was certain that he and Hillary did not ever “hook up,” because he would have shared this with me. His sexual experience was limited. I also knew BB would have been vitriolic about me dating Hillary if he was living. Who was I kidding? I never would have met her if BB had not died of an alcoholic suicide. I was a tinder guy up until we met, and the women that I was meeting for one-night stands were closer to sea-monster than mythic siren.
I was angry that BB had left the world and left me to help my father care for his mother, and he knew I had lost another stepbrother a few years after I got out of the hospital. Sterling was a year older than me when he died at 23 in a drunk driving accident, and his crash occurred promptly after he and his fiance had concluded their hike of the Appalachian trail. The fact that BB knew my pain about Sterling and he still decided to take the easy way out really irked me because he and I were best friends; he knew what I had gone through and I knew what he had gone through.
BB’s father was by most accounts a “piece of shit.” Bobby was a remarkably intelligent President of Compass Bank in Gadsden during the early eighties-- the youngest to ever hold this position. Stories of his infidelities while married to BB’s “mama” abound in the Gadsden social sphere, and I remember BB’s constant disappointment during the nineties when his father, Bobby, would buy him a new mustang, only to have it repoed a month later at school, and in front of all his peers. Nothing like the smell of ritualized torture every time his “dad” bought him a new vehicle, smells like teen spirit, smells like napalm. Every time he would get a new Ford Escort, he would in his resilient humor dub it “the fresh-court,” and bump rap music with no self- conscious irony. The music connected with Big Baby and he grew into appearing as a white Rick Ross if Ross dressed like a ‘Bama. Then even the ‘fresh court’ would be taken away from him when the repo man would come to tow it away. Bobby, by the late nineties, had developed an addiction to crack cocaine. Every time BB was held up in his emotional development with hope for his father being a ‘Dad’ he would fall victim to his own great expectations and BB’s hopes would be dashed like a wave on the riprap of the Coosa River without fail.
One time, BB was driving a Ford Bronco that my father helped him purchase after the dozen cars Bobby started making payments on had finally forced BB’s “mamma” to say, “enough is enough,” and “Jack, please buy Blair a car. We can find something on the cheaper end.”
My father had been gifted a baby blue Ford Bronco in 1972, and perhaps the miserly artist in my father, or his subconscious nostalgia for his old college stead, compelled him to buy BB an Alabama red 1972 Ford Bronco. BB’s Bronco was much like Bobby-- “a piece of shit.” One time driving down Gadsden’s main drag, the pinion bearing gave out, and BB soon saw the wheel rolling past the car. Then the axel dropped and he grinded to a screeching halt, sparks flying.
BB also looked to my father to be his Dad when in the late 1990s he incurred thousands of dollars in debt to a bookie with an unsympathetic attitude, and who was determined to break BB’s knee caps if he did not pay him. He phoned home and my father picked up the slack for Bobby. BB remembered that save his whole life, and he soon became like a loyal and happy dog to my father and assisted in all matters of service from grass cutting, to cook, to Alabama football opinion maker in the mode of an excitable Paul Finebaum. My Dad sometimes even called him: “BB dog.”
BB often told me that he thought of my Dad as his Dad, though he was never emotionally stable enough to say, “I love you.” For years we would all gather for football games on the weekend and BB would drink whiskey drinks as if there was no bottom to the glass. It was only when his liver began to pickle that he began to slip and get so slobberknocker drunk that he would fall through glass tables, wreck his vehicle into the gate of our lake house compound, or nearly murder me when I refused to admit that we were in fact brothers as he wanted to believe, as gave him hope. BB thought of all his friends as brothers. They were brothers in BB’s love for the world.
My close encounter with fratricide happened after a wild game cook-off. After wandering around a pavilion sampling rabbit lasagna, bear sliders, and endless versions of venison chili we arrived home at the lake compound. In the living room of our home BB was no longer shaking from a lack of whiskey, because it was coursing through his bloodstream, and he was feeling froggy. He kept poking me, like I was rabbit pasta, and he slapped me on the back of the head saying, “Ok brother, whatever you say.” To which I replied, “I am not your brother, friend.” He pancaked me to the zebra black and white rug with his knee in my throat until I apologized. This all happened towards the end of his life. Even Jesus experienced rage at the moneychangers in the Temple in Jerusalem.
We did not speak for quite some time after the incident with BB’s inner bear and the zebra rug. Our long silence was mainly because I knew his mother was dying, and I have typically been defined by my immediate family as a person having “loose lips.” The metaphorical ship they did not want me to sink is another story, but suffice it to say my family are prodigious secret keepers.
One day, I was fishing at the farm, and BB called. We had always gone to Alabama National Title games together.
BB asked, “Hey brother, I’ve got tickets to the LSU game, do you want to go with me?” I thought for a moment about his rage, and my sympathy for “big baby” welled up into empathy and I said, “Sure, I’d love to.”
Every morning before a game BB would text me “B-A-M-A, Roll Tide Roll!,” as a way of staying connected. It was our tradition, and even when I was off at school he would send them. The morning we went to Tuscaloosa was no different. BB was big on traditions, even the silly invented kinds. He was even more keen on the tradition of whiskey on game day. At the game, BB couldn’t drink. He was shitting blood, and jaundiced. Something told me it was our last vacation together, and I was not wrong. I remember going to pick up our dogs at the kennel together and him telling me goodbye in the parking lot. There was a deep sadness in his voice, but he was concealing it with aplomb. “See you next time,” he said with a faint but lighthearted grin.
He did not resurrect himself until I gave over to the storytelling instinct, but I am getting ahead of myself.
I wanted to start my own family because all of mine seemed to be dying. I love my son Trey, and from the moment he entered the world I was devoted to his life, and that meant applying for the teacher job. Up until this point, jobs I had were things I designed for myself like a project director of a public history project on the cultural history of fishing. The grant I wrote did not pay as well as I imagined after paying the guest lecturers their honoraria. I was also a carp fly fishing guide who occasionally wrote fishing articles at 25 cents a word. In Gadsden, Alabama neither of these occupations were financially promising. Hillary had been let go from an administrator position at an assisted living facility. I had a bevy of humanities degrees and I lived in a small town, and in that way I was only qualified to teach. The rub is that despite my degrees I did not have an education certificate.
The evangelical school that required teachers to be born again christians was the only private school teaching position with an opening, so I faced my fears about spirituality and squirmed nervously in the chair that faced Mrs Dumbjohn’s desk. For years spirituality felt to me like tin foil feels on a filling in one’s teeth. I avoided it. I loathed it. It made me very uneasy for fear the hallucinations might return. When you think you are Jesus but lack the alchemical powers to transmute water to wine in a psych ward, you are deflated by your own powerlessness. You hate yourself for believing that you ever had power. Later you repress the memory of the hospital, and all that remains is your shameful reveries about ever thinking with grandiose visions. I had recurring dreams of being the center of the universe, but generally, in my waking breaths, I ascribe to myself a kind of hysteria, and I disaffected from religion of all kinds, especially the boisterous histrionics of evangelicalism.
When I was 34, newly fathered and unsure of who I was or what I believed, I submitted the application to an evangelical school in Rainbow City, Alabama. Hillary and I discussed the dilemma at length before my second interview with the school leaders. “They just aren’t like us. We will have to hide our drinking.” Or she also said, “I work out with a lot of those moms at the gym. They are just so judgmental.” She was right. My cousin went to school there around 2006, and was sent home one day because she did not have pockets on her jeans and they were said to be distracting to the learning environment. She was in seventh grade.
I was thrilled to get a call back from Mrs Dumbjohn to schedule a second interview. The principal was like an evangelical nun in her piety. Her office was spartan except for pictures of her family, and some gilt cross paintings. I felt I knew her. But this interview would include two new personalities: Vice Principal “Bubba” Vice and a history teacher named Coach Studebaker.
Bubba sat by the door in a seemingly ready position to flee if the conversation was not about sports. So I intentionally took it there. After he smiled at my attempt to put him at ease he asked, “Why do you want to teach here?” As if “here” was different in some tangible way from any other school. In some ways it was because of the call for teachers to teach from a Christian foundation that I was petrified. Other than for one week feeling like a little Christ in the psych ward I knew very little of the gospels. I did have a servant’s heart after waiting tables at O’ Charley’s after my dismissal from Sewanee. I said, “I want to serve these students by teaching them about history.” Coach Studebaker quickly chimed in eagerly: “But how will you teach it from a Christian perspective?” I thought for a mere moment then replied, “I guess I will let CS Lewis be my guide.”
When Mrs Dumbjohn interviewed me that second time, again, she put me on the spot a bit about my relationship to the Lord. More so than the first go around because of the added burden of two more Christians. I reached deep into the recesses of my intellectual tool kit for a screw driver of sorts to try and secure the job, because it was necessary for me to procure insurance for my new family. Mrs Dumbjohn was at the time of the interview a stranger to me, and if I had gone to school in Gadsden she might have been my head mistress, that is if I had been evangelical like most of Gadsden, Alabama. I was not, however, non-denominational, Baptist, Church of Christ, Pentecostal, or any other “low church offering.” Instead my family was enmeshed in the Episcopalian tradition. My grandfather had gone to seminary in Sewanee and my father had attended St. Andrews there as a day student. In some form of performative loyalty to the family tradition of boarding schools, I demanded that I be allowed the very expensive education and independence of living in Sewanee from fourteen to eighteen. My Agricola predecessors had all attended some form of boarding school.
“Tell me about the high school you attended?” Mrs. Dumbjohn asked, presumably to see if I would fit into the culture of her school. This was the second time she asked this for the two other witnesses to see how I answered. Nostalgia for my teenage years reminded me how poorly I would have fit into their world as someone who experimented with drugs, sex, and alcohol.
“It was very much like this one.” I offered. They were both 2 A Christian schools after all. “In my senior year we did a religion class with the headmaster, Father Wade, where we studied world religions.” I omitted that muslims were part of our inclusive academic environment.
“But are you born again?” She sifted the pepper through my fly shit answer.
“Well, not exactly. We believe in one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, but my faith, I learned, is full of the mystery of not knowing precisely if God is there, but continually turning away from and back towards him.” I was banking that Mrs Dumbjohn had not read C.S. Lewis. Coach Studebaker certainly had.
If hired, every class was supposed to be taught from a Christian foundation, and so I would eventually be at a loss to connect the gospels to doing your best-- a philosophical tenet that in its simplicity had become my mantra. In the first summer away from the Sewanee mountain, after my stint in the hospital concluded, I learned of Max Weber’s ideas about the Protestant work ethic in an American Studies class at the University of Alabama. This Weberian political thought was about God’s chosen or elect being marked by his favor and grace, and actually from the perspective of Weber’s secular humanism the prosperity gospel created a Puritanical people who saved and worked harder to prove they were chosen by their neighbors.
“Well, as long as you know that God is sovereign in all things I’d like to pray about your hire and get back to you.” Mrs Dumbjohn said in a very Godly way.
Thinking reflexively back on my education I do believe that I was pursuing a hyper liberal arts education to prove I was elect, but not in a sacred “blessed” way, more in a profane (by evangelical standards) worldly way. I wanted my thinking to be sophisticated. I wanted to be an “intellectual,” one that knew right out of the gate that Mrs Dumbjohn wanted a very certain narrative from me. She saw my many degrees, but she was vetting my relationship with God, and more precisely with Christ. I knew myself, but did I really know Christ without knowledge of the gospels.
“So if I asked you about your testimony, what would you tell me?” Mrs Dumbjohn asked.
I told her about how I lost two stepbrothers in alcohol related deaths, and how I met my wife in the hospital, and that it was clear to me that God had a plan for me— because my life begets Trey. I don’t mean this in some kind of apostolic succession, rather as the fulfillment of my dreams. She wept a single tear, and whether this was simple affectation I’ll never know. The two men did not shed tears.
Maybe it was an exercise of free will to choose Hillary. I view Trey as God’s son. All BB ever wanted was a family. Maybe multiplying ourselves is all anyone wants on a primal level if we are being honest. I had gotten the job at the Christian school, but now the trouble is explaining familial needs in an evolutionary context. They would rather read it as being fruitful and multiplying God’s Kingdom. That is not what I was doing.
BB was respected at his job as an assistant greenskeeper at the municipal golf course. Most everyone in town knew him and would attest to what a kind hearted soul he was. With Trey, “Big Baby’s” life would not be for naught, rather I would construct meaning and a new life on his ashes. Maybe seeing BB’s ultimate purpose as constructive is merely another delusion, but if he martyred himself because of an enfeebled sense of self that came from the void of his father’s role in his life, then this lesson helps me see the importance of being in Trey’s life, and the loss of “Big Baby” serves my dream of having a little baby Trey grow up in a healthy environment. I pray that Big Baby is in heaven with his true Father, the almighty one, who is probably laughing at my unwillingness to admit his predetermined sovereignty.