which had a big hole in its trunk near the bottom, I witnessed a red fox carrying a pup into the hole. She didn’t seem to notice me. She looked to her right and to her left with the little blind pup whimpering and dangling from her mouth. All at once she jumped into the hole. At that moment I knew I would not dare ever bother the fox and her pups by looking into the hole, and I knew as plain as day that I didn't believe the Bible. It was not a bit more real than the man in the moon. It had to be a collection of stories just like Edith Hamilton's Greek Mythology, which was one of my favorite books. The red fox was my Bible.
Evolution made perfect sense to me—survival of the fittest was the mechanism that governed all living things. The fox hiding her pups proved it to me. That wasn't the end of my heretical ponderings. I also figured that the universe was too big to house just us Earthlings. It seemed to me there had to be other forms of life in the universe. Sometimes I'd lie on my secret moss patch late into the night and look up at the stars and the Milky Way just trying to take it all in and put some meaning to it.
Mamma about died when I was forced to tell her about my beliefs after church one Sunday. Two things led up to my personal revelation to the world: my nightmares about Jesus stopped after I admitted to myself that I didn’t believe the Bible and six years of sitting in Sunday School and Wednesday night Prayer Meeting classes listening to some grown up talking about the Bible stories like they really happened. I just couldn't hold it in anymore. Mamma said to Aunt Nell I was too shy to open my mouth for twelve years, and when I finally did, look at the evil things that came out.
She said it had to come from Daddy's side of the family. They never were proper Christians — half Catholic Episcopalians. She said that no-good Daddy of mine never set foot in the church again after they got back from their honeymoon at Myrtle Beach.
Right when school was winding down in late April, I had spring fever real bad and was impatient with everyone, especially dumb adults. During Sunday school, Mr. Hays was going on about how Moses parted the Red Sea. It was more than I could bear.
“Mr. Hayes, if you expect us to believe that really happened, you must think we’re all morons,” I heard coming out of my mouth. “And another thing, the Bible is just a book of myths, and we are all most assuredly developed from apes. Science, not the Bible explains everything,” I added.
All the other boys' eyes popped open and a couple of them laughed out loud. Rusty looked at me nervously and didn’t say a word.
“Mr. Hays! Mr. Hays! The devil’s gotten a hold on Bobbie and he’s fixing to come after us all,” Jimmy Gilstrap hollered. Jimmy was Preacher Herndon’s nephew.
“Bobbie, hush your mouth right now. I can’t believe you’d say such a thing in the House of the Lord,” Mr. Hays stared me down as he spoke. “Where’s you faith, boy? I know your Momma raised you as a God-fearing Christian. You better get down on your knees and pray for forgiveness right now.”
Mr. Hays was not one of my favorite people, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me on my knees begging for forgiveness. I looked around at the other boys and seeing that nobody appeared to be on my side, even Rusty, I got up and walked home.
Mamma didn't say a word while she and Aunt Nell were fixing Sunday lunch that day. Aunt Nell gave me a few sheepish smiles. My big sister Carol, who had virtually ignored me ever since she became a teenager year before last, glared at me while we set the dining room table for lunch.
“You in big trouble for what you said in Sunday School today, Mister Smarty-pants,” she snapped at me.
“I don’t care a bit. Besides, you’re just jealous because I made the honor roll at school and you didn’t,” I shot back.
“You think you’re so smart. Well, let’s see you worm your way out of this one. Mamma’s mad as hell,” she said. Carol loved to use cuss words in front of me lately, but she was always careful Mamma wasn’t close enough to hear her.
“It doesn’t make any difference to me. I know what I know. The rest of you can stay in the middle ages forever,” I offered and made the decision not to talk to Carol anymore that day.
Carol used to be so much fun when we were smaller. She’d let me in her bedroom anytime — now it was strictly off limits. We’d make tents with yardsticks and sheets and pretend to be camping in the wilderness. Sometimes Rusty would spend the night with me, and we’d launch massive attacks on Carol’s Barbie Doll Dream-house with our GI Joe’s commanding my toy soldiers. Carol always put up a good fight, and when we got tired of playing, she’d drag out her Easy Bake oven and fix us little cakes that we would wash down with sweet cherry Kool-Aid. Nowadays, when she wasn’t hogging the telephone talking to one of her girl friends, she remained shut up in her room playing forty-fives of The Beatles, Gary Pucket And The Union Gap, and Tommy James And The Shondells. Mamma didn’t know it, but Carol even had some Rolling Stones records.
During lunch nobody said a word. Finally, I asked Mamma if she would please pass the biscuits. She shot me a disapproving look and asked, "Well what do you have to say for yourself young man?"
"Mamma,” I hesitated. “Mamma, none of this Bible stuff has ever made sense to me. It is nineteen sixty-nine, men will be walking on the moon this summer, and science explains most of what people used to be able to explain only by making up stories."
"Mister Science Man, you'd better bite your tongue right this minute," Mamma said, her voice rising and her face blushing red as she waved her fork with a piece of white breast meat stuck on the end of it at me. "I've spent the best years of my life raising you to be a good Christian, and I won't have you speaking blasphemous words in my house. Don't you realize you are going to burn in hell if you say things like that?"
"No such place as hell or heaven, for that matter," I heard myself say.
Mamma gasped, Aunt Nell dropped her fork, and Carol nearly choked on a mouthful of macaroni and cheese.
"Do you mean to tell me you don't believe in God?" demanded Mamma.
"God is the universe and everything in it, Mamma--birth, life, death, nature, the formation of galaxies. All these things make up God," I offered.
Tears were forming in Mamma's brown eyes and she said to me "You sound like a heathen.” She looked at Aunt Nell and said “Oh Nell, I knew I should have remarried. He wouldn’t be talking like this if he had a decent father.”
It always made me angry when Mamma blamed everything on us not having a decent father. It felt like somebody punched me in the stomach, and deep inside hate for a father I had no memory of would well up. I was always secretly and deeply jealous of all the other boys and their dads who showed those boys how to fish, to camp, to carve with pocketknives, and most importantly, how to excel at Little League baseball. I taught myself how to fish, and Aunt Nell would throw the baseball with me, but it just wasn't the same. I was able to learn things by reading, and I was never able to find a good set of instructions on playing baseball, carving, or doing all those things Cub Scouts were supposed to do. I barely got my Bobcat badge—I forged Mamma’s signature throughout my Cub Scout Manual in all the little parental sign-off boxes beside the required tasks for the badge.
I was so mad I was about to cry at this point, and I got up, slammed my linen napkin down and yelled "I don't need a decent father, I'm doing just fine by myself."
I stormed through the house to the back door as the angry tears began. I ran as fast as I could to my secret place--the place where nature revealed her secrets to me--the place I first gained my freedom.
Late that afternoon when I wandered back home, Aunt Nell was sitting on the front porch swing drinking a tall glass of fresh lemonade and smoking one of her Kent cigarettes. Aunt Nell made the best lemonade on earth. I loved to watch her smoke, and it always gave me a warm feeling to see the red lipstick marks on her cigarette butts lying around in ashtrays. I also loved the smell of a freshly lit cigarette. Sometimes I'd sneak into her room and steal a cigarett
e and take it to my secret place to smoke. I always about choked to death when I tried this, but it made me feel real grown up.
"Tiger Babe, come over her and sit beside your Aunt Nell and swing a bit. I'll pour you a glass of lemonade."
I never could resist Aunt Nell. She was so pretty with her auburn hair and big green eyes, and she always smelled so good. She never got mad at me, and she always listened to me. She was Mamma's older sister who never married. After Daddy ran away when I was two years old, Mamma moved us in with Aunt Nell. We all lived in the same house Aunt Nell and Mamma grew up in.
Aunt Nell put out her cigarette, poured me a glass of lemonade, put her arms around me, and we swung to the sounds of the creaking porch swing chains and a million crickets. Every once in a while you could hear the spooky, gargling call of a whippoorwill.
"Tiger Babe, I think it's all right for you to believe whatever you feel is right. But you have got to consider other people's feelings. That's the only decent thing to do."
I could tell Mamma had been working on Aunt Nell real good.
"Now your Mamma has been through as much as any woman could ever stand. You shouldn't be saying things in Sunday school and at home that will upset her. We had to call up Doctor Franklin and get her