Sharyn McCrumb - If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

Bill craned his neck to get a better look at the man he thought of as the defendant. Even with his shiny pompadour hair, Chevry Morgan did not make it to six feet in height, but he was big-boned and burly, with a ruddy complexion and a toothy grin. He was wearing an old tweed sport jacket over a teal-blue work shirt and khaki pants. He had on a bolo tie. Bill decided that his own coat and tie probably qualified him to be a bishop in this laid-back crowd.

Morgan walked to the podium, threw back his head so that his dark hair whipped back from his face, and hoisted the microphone into the air as if he was displaying a trophy. “Hallelujah!” he shouted.

“Hallelujah!” the crowd roared back.

Bill was still watching the two Mrs. Morgans. They stood together for a moment on the left side of the podium; then the minister set the microphone back on its plastic stand and motioned for them to join him. As they stood on either side of him he took their hands and held them up, shouting “Hallelujah!” above a chorus of applause and whistles from the audience.

Edith began flipping through a hymnal. “Looking for airsickness bags,” she murmured in answer to Bill’s look of inquiry.

Bill turned his attention back to the family tableau at the altar. Donna Morgan looked mortified to be the center of such raucous attention. She kept her eyes fixed on the carpeted floor and tried to smile, wincing a little when her husband dropped her hand and wrapped his arm around her for a bear hug. Tanya Faith Morgan seemed much more at ease. She grinned out at the applauding darkness and stood up on tiptoes to give her husband a peck on the cheek. She was a scrawny sixteen-year-old, trying hard to appear grown-up with a sophisticated hairdo, a white sheath dress, and two-inch heels, but she certainly didn’t look like someone who had been sold into bondage. Bill wondered which of the people in the audience were her parents and how they really felt about the matter.

After a few more moments of applause, the congregation sat down, and Bill could see Donna and Tanya Faith making their way to front-row seats. Apparently, they sat together at the services. Now Chevry Morgan had the stage to himself, obviously the way he wanted it.

He stepped up to the podium and gripped it with both hands. His wide-legged stance reminded Bill of a rock star. “Good evening, believers!” he roared at the crowd.

Most of them hailed back. Bill took out his pen and a small notepad to take notes on Morgan’s sermon.

“Are you strong in the faith, tonight?”

A louder roar answered him.

“It’s not easy, you know,” he said, picking up the microphone as if he were about to break into song. “It’s not easy being a believer, when what you know is right differs from the opinion of the majority.”

There were murmurs of assent from the congregation.

“People don’t believe that we can speak with the tongues of angels when the spirit moves us. Don’t believe that I had a revelation from the Almighty.”

Bill heard Edith mutter, “Amen!”

“But I did,” said Chevry Morgan, raising his voice to preaching pitch. “The Lord told me that man wasn’t any different from the rest of His creatures. He said, ‘Chevry, look at the rooster. There’s one rooster strutting around that barnyard, being husband to a couple dozen hens. And there’s one stallion presiding over an entire herd of mares, is there not?’”

Edith snatched Bill’s pen, and wrote Animal Husbandry ? on his notepad. Bill tried to look stern so that they would not both collapse into helpless laughter. They were a definite minority, though. The rest of the audience was murmuring encouragement to the florid man, who had loosened his tie in preparation for a real harangue.

“So the Lord told me that man was meant to live like the rest of His creations.”

Edith wrote: Outdoors? Eating raw meat ?

“-He told me to take another wife, to show my faith in His teachings.” He strode away from the lectern to point dramatically at Tanya Faith. “Behold the woman!” He shouted. “A gift from God!”

Tanya Faith stood up and waved solemnly to the congregation. Chevry Morgan motioned for her to sit back down.

Speaking of thinking you are God’s gift … Edith scribbled hurriedly.

The minister bowed his head, and the room filled with an electric silence. Finally he raised his head, eyes closed, and intoned, “There are those who would persecute me for my faith, believers.” His eyes blazed open, and he began to pace back and forth in front of the lectern, still clutching the microphone. “There are those who would mock my divine revelation. They call me names and laugh at my belief. They try to shake the faith of my wife Donna, and to make her think that the Lord’s chosen way is wrong. They want to lock me away in a jail cell for what I believe. In America , neighbors! Religious persecution!”

There were murmurs of protest from the crowd. Somebody shouted, “Keep the faith!”

What if you’re a devout ax murderer, and the Lord told you to do it ? Edith wrote on Bill’s notepad.

Bill wrote back: Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition .

All right… I’m calm now. I can continue writing this letter as a mature, objective adult, who is adjusting gracefully to the fact that her dowdy and probably senile old mother has just decided in the twilight of her life that she is a lesbian!

My first dizzy thought was that she had her terms muddled, and that she was actually going in for amateur theatrics ( you know: a thespian ), or that she had moved in with someone from Lesbia, Mississippi, or something. If you were reading this, Cameron, you would be snickering at me, or telling me how naïve I am, but, really, consider the situation. Here is poor old Mother, who got married as a teenager (back during the Crimean War or so) and has stayed married just forever , being a den mother, station-wagon mom, and all the rest of it; and then Daddy gets all lusty and peculiar with his midlife crisis and divorces her, and suddenly she decides that she prefers women ?

I mean, now? After fifty-something years? It just dawned on her? And, let me tell you, there were no signs of it prior to this, I can assure you. Why, I’ve seen that woman watch old Steve McQueen movies with such a look of rapt adoration on her face that she’d hardly even blink while he was on the screen. We’re talking serious magnetism here. And now she’d have me believe that it was Natalie Wood she preferred all along? I think not. I said as much to her in the Chinese restaurant while I finished pulverizing my fortune cookie.

Mother smiled sweetly. She admitted that she still thought Steve McQueen was adorable in an aesthetic sort of way-you know, the way one can admire irises or gazelles for their natural beauty, without wanting to get intimate with one. She explained that she was a political lesbian.

“Which is?”

“It is a philosophical stance,” she explained to me, sounding as if she were reading an invisible cue card. “Women have been oppressed for centuries by the patriarchal male. Woman-centered religions were dismissed as witchcraft. Female equality was denied by law. There has been systematic repression and exploitation of women by the male authority figures throughout the ages, so that to participate in a heterosexual relationship is to sleep with the enemy.”

“Political lesbianism,” she finished triumphantly, “is a conscious decision to renounce the male oppressor as a sacrifice to the struggle for liberation of our gender.” If I had heard that from one of my college friends, I probably would have applauded her dedication to a political ideal. To hear this, though, from someone who used to fox-trot with Dad when The Lawrence Welk Show came on, was a bit unsettling, to say the least.