Brother Harold

I saw him twice,
two-times in two days
almost a year to the day
before he met his demise.
He was found in a death sprawl,
alone in his small wood frame house
he had lived-in for over fifty years.
He had been dead for several days.
His neighbors finally found him.
Bad heart – no foul play involved.
He was obese and had suffered bad health
for quite some time.
When I was a small child
he had carried me about in his arms while
socializing after church services, a tradition in
the Deep South of the 1950s.
He was a postman, a part-time insurance salesman
and an on-and-off
fundamentalist preacher for most of his
adult life.
A few years before his death
he was falsely declared
unstable and
institutionalized against his will,
rumor has it
at the behest of his own children.
After a long day’s journey into what must have been
a night of self-doubt, whisper and opprobrium,
a name-sake nightmare that seemingly had no end,
he was deemed mentally fit and released.
“Mistakes have been made” they said …
“He isn’t crazy or dangerous after all.”
His wife returned to live with him again only to subsequently
pass away after a very short period of time. He survived her almost a year.
His empty house, just a block or so up the street
from my mother’s place, is still empty.
His yards are immaculate.
Someone must come and cut the grass.

**

Clarence Jenkins

Clarence Jenkins was a singer and song leader at Jackson Street.
Jackson Street was the Central Alabama Pentecostal church
I was raised-in as a child
during the late 1950s and early 60s.
Clarence was big man.
Big and robust, about six-foot six, two hundred eighty-five pounds
in his stocking feet.
He was in a parachute regiment during WWII and had jumped into Normandy on D-Day
and later into
Holland.
He played softball for the Methodists and went to all
the Sidney Lanier High School football games.
These activities were considered worldly and ungodly
by all the seriously sanctified at Jackson Street,
yet he somehow managed to do all that
and still lead the choir
without raising too many
eyebrows.
He wasn’t much on prayer meeting and rarely,
if ever,
came to revivals.

Clarence’s secret to successful song leading was swift, short, circular arm strokes
and a booming baritone
voice.
He never missed a beat.
He never got lost.
He always held his hymnal in his left hand
and stroked with his right.

He lost the faith sometime in my early teens
and stopped coming to church.
I only saw him once again at a funeral.
I have always wondered why his music faded and his enormous smile dimmed …
especially after I learned
what all he had gone through
during the war.

He died in the early 90s and rests near his wife
who survived him for about
nine years.

I still miss the smile.
Sometimes
I can still hear the
baritone.

**

Louis Leveert

Strange to write lines about someone
unseen,
unthought of
in more than thirty years.
The last time I saw him we were
totally ruining an old Oldsmobile parked
in front of a Pentecostal church.
My father was singing
“Oh Promise Me”
at the wedding of a middle aged
couple he knew, second time round for the both.
The guy’s name was Freddy and he had a
son who was a Master Chief Petty Officer in the navy.
Louis and I agreed to meet and trash their getaway
car, we both thought it would be a gas as well as
something nice for the two, car trashing at weddings
being a socially acceptable form of vandalism
when I was seventeen.
So while my father belted-out “Oh Promise Me That
Someday You and I,”
we promptly dumped sardines-in-oil over the engine,
rear seats and carpets of the Olds,
then tied-up old tin cans to the rear bumper.

It turned-out to be a bittersweet socially acceptable
evening for me.
Louis had this souped-up fifty-five Ford with a transplanted
357 engine he thought I was envious of
while all I really wanted was to get into his sister’s pants.

Freddy’s son got killed in Vietnam
right before he was supposed to retire.

I never got into Janice’s knickers.

I lost track of Louis long ago too.

**

J.C.

J.C. was a carpenter turned Pentecostal preacher from Northwest Alabama
who gained a bit of holiness notoriety in the central part of the state as the
pastor of a small church
in the suburbs of Montgomery during the early
1960s.

He was then called-up to Jackson Street, a much larger congregation
but only after a bitter fight between two rival factions in the Jackson Street parish.
Jackson Street was the Pentecostal church of my childhood in Montgomery, Alabama.

He lasted about five years. He got involved in preaching on the radio
and state politics.
He ended-up having a nervous breakdown which
promptly rendered a lot of empty Budweiser cans,
Jim Beam bottles,
a marital separation
and an enormous and unprecedented scandal
at Jackson Street.

After he returned to carpentry
he and his wife eventually got back together.
He never set foot in any church of any denomination
again.

In spite of it all, most of J.C.’s kids turned-out ok.
There were three…a girl and two boys.
The oldest boy became a multi-millionaire land developer.
The youngest boy became a neurosurgeon in Atlanta.
The daughter married a fireman immediately after she finished secretarial school.
A few years later, right after she had had her fourth child, her husband fell out of a tree and was
permanently disabled.

I never saw J.C. again
after his sudden fall from grace.

I did know his daughter—
who was, for awhile,
a close friend of my sister.

I saw her once again at a funeral about two years ago.
Her eyes looked tired.