Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

Since tomatoes were the principal cash crop in that area of Virginia, and since Christianity played a significant role in nearly every Warsawian’s life, it’s hardly surprising that the Almighty would be occasionally invoked in a field where the love apples grew. I personally witnessed such an invocation, and a quite effective one, albeit with the opposite intention of the usual agricultural prayer.

In my teens, I lived for two successive summers on a farm owned by the family of a high school buddy, where I, along with a half-dozen other boys, was hired to pick tomatoes. We were paid ten cents per basket for green fruit, five cents for ripe. The green ones were destined for the grocery stores and produce markets of Florida, its growing season being the reverse of our own, and they had to be unblemished and of a particular size, whereas the ripe ones, which we’d haul at night to a local cannery to be turned into juice or sauce, had no such restrictions and thus were far easier to pick. On a good day, a boy might earn four or five bucks, which could light up a good many pinball machines and add any number of comic books and girlie magazines to one’s Librorum Prohibitorum.

The camaraderie, moreover, though unspoken, was relished by all of us, and we shared a sod-sullied bond strengthened by the perpetual japes and jabs of inane teenage redneck humor. Ah, but as wise men know, a big front has a big back, and the beefiest backside of this summer job was that on July afternoons it could get hot enough in those low-lying fields to melt the humps off a camel. There were days when the sunshine seemed not only weighty, not only textured, but almost audible: it sounded like drops of oil crackling into combustion, or a bluesman vamping on a harmonica made out of lard. On one of those days, the heat became so unbearable it apparently called for divine intervention.

Lancelot Delano (that was his actual name, though his friends called him “Gumboot”) was a tall, gawky youth, strong as a mule but sweet as molasses and just about as slow. Lancelot wasn’t really a halfwit, not exactly a simpleton, just… well, slow. He was related to two of the pickers, and all of us knew him even though he’d kissed school good-bye in the fifth grade and rarely came to town, even for a movie. Gentle and good-natured, he was never ridiculed, but, rather, elicited from his peers a measure of rough affection — and, one day, the torturously torrid day aforementioned — a kind of awe.

The temperature flirted with one hundred that afternoon, humidity hard on its heels. We sweated like thawing snowmen, and in our wilting ears heat made a faint fuzzy chirping noise, like the spasms of wounded crickets. Bending over the tomato vines as we worked our way down the rows, we were sinking ever more deeply into a miserable stupor, when suddenly we heard Lancelot Delano’s voice, addressing the heavens: “Good Lord, if it’s in Thy power,” he intoned, “send us that knocking-off shower.”

What happened next strains credibility, but I swear to the truth of it. Within fifteen minutes or less, the pale blue sky broke out in bruises, dark tanks of cumulus came rolling in, bucking and heaving like a Russian rodeo. Claws of lightning ripped a turbid bodice, thunder neighed like all the czar’s horses. Farmer Packett, our boss, kept glancing up nervously, and by his fourth or fifth glance he had rain in his face.

The downpour didn’t last especially long, but afterward conditions in the field were too muddy for effective picking. We happy boys piled into and onto a big farm truck and sped off to the Rappahannock River, where we frolicked in the cool, salty water until suppertime. I’m unsure if any of us questioned our goofy liberator about his cosmic connections, but for weeks thereafter I’d catch boys, including myself, looking at him with something akin to wonder.

On several overheated occasions later in life — laboring on a construction site, drilling on a military parade ground, trekking in sub-Saharan Africa — I attempted to duplicate that little meteorological miracle, lifting my eyes and muttering, “Good Lord, if it’s in Thy power, send me that knocking-off shower.” Nothing happened. Not one drop. I’d lacked both the courage and conviction to speak my prayer aloud; I’d lacked the pure heart and spirit of Warsaw’s sweet Sir Lancelot, Saint Gumboot of the Tomatoes.

Summer, tomatoes, religion, the river — and the actress Natalie Wood — are all tangled up in the web of my memory. Let me see if I can separate the strands.

Had the summer I turned thirteen been the Kentucky Derby, it could have been won by a hobbyhorse: that’s how slowly those months dragged by. Too young for gainful employment, even in a tomato gang, I passed the long, steamy days reading, napping, attending Vacation Bible School (yawn!), composing with my “talking stick” (about which, I’m afraid, I’ll have more to say later); impatiently waiting for a Tarzan movie, a circus, or a traveling carnival to find its way to town. Other than that, my primary activity was hiding from Dr. Peters.

Pastor of the Warsaw Baptist Church, Dr. Peters was tall, gaunt, and pale, with a weak damp smile and cold damp palms: shaking his hand was like being forced to grasp the flaccid penis of a hypothermic zombie. And he did always want to shake my hand. Whenever he managed to corner me, that is. I considered Dr. Peters more creepy than refrigerated possum slobber, an opinion not shared by my mother, who found him John the Baptist incarnate and the ideal shepherd to steer my soul to Jesus.

The two of them, Mother and Dr. Peters, believed that very summer — the summer when testosterone first barreled into my plasma, piloting a red speedboat and scattering large pieces of childhood in its wake — to be perfect timing for redeeming Tommy Rotten, and they conspired to facilitate my salvation. At Mother’s invitation, the good pastor kept dropping by for a glass of iced tea, intent on engaging me in spiritual conversation. Rather quickly, I developed a sense of his impending arrival and a strategy for avoidance that more often than not consisted of me vanishing into the thicket behind our garage, pretending not to hear my name being called.

A weeklong revival meeting was scheduled for mid-August at our church and on those occasions when I failed to elude him, Dr. Peters would solicit my pledge to come forward during one of the evening services and commit my life to Christ. I wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea. While I would have preferred that Jesus be a lot more like Tarzan, I had nevertheless bought into the prevailing view of him as the greatest figure who ever trod the earth, the heroic loving martyr who would return someday to dispense to true believers their personal slices of sky pie. Certainly, I didn’t wish to burn, Warsaw’s summer was plenty warm for me; and although descriptions of heaven made it sound disturbingly similar to Vacation Bible School, only an imbecile would trade a little boredom for the fires of hell. I convinced myself that I loved Jesus and might be worthy of his love in return — but why did Dr. Peters have to be the matchmaker?

There was a livelier preacher in the area: a rather flamboyant African American who drove a light blue panel truck upon whose sides were painted in fiery red letters several ominous Bible verses, along with the preacher’s name: THE REVEREND EVER READY. This is not a joke.

Every so often, the Reverend Ever Ready would drive up to the little black-friendly Texaco station, fling open the rear doors of his van, and step aside as six or seven noisy children, all seemingly under the age of ten, swarmed out and began running wildly hither and yon. The good reverend would oversee the filling of his tank, the checking of his motor oil (this was prior to the advent of self-service), then go inside to swill a Coca-Cola, dig some soul tunes, and shoot the breeze with the proprietor. After a quarter hour or so, he’d emerge, and bellow in his powerful pulpit voice, an operatic baritone so volcanic it could be heard blocks away, “All aboard! If you can’t get a board, get a plank! If you can’t get a plank, get your ass in the truck!” The kids would come racing from all directions and dive for the doors just before he pulled away.