walked away without a scratch. “Accelerator pedal must have stuck,” he said, grinning his foolish grin, only he said it ass-celerator, and my father said the only ass was the one behind the wheel.
“That will teach you to ever trust anything valuable to a Robichaud,” my mother said, and my father stuffed his hands so deep into his pockets that the top of his underwear showed, perhaps to ensure they would not escape and go someplace they weren’t supposed to.
Lenny Macintosh, the postman’s son, lost an eye when he bent down to see why the cherry bomb he’d put in an empty pineapple tin didn’t go off.
My brother Conrad lost his voice.
So, no—they weren’t all good things.
• • •
On the first Sunday that Reverend Jacobs took the pulpit, there were more people present than had been there in all the years fat, white-haired, good-natured Mr. Latoure had kept the church open, preaching his well-meant but obscure sermons and reliably welling up at the eyes on Mother’s Day, which he called Mother’s Sunday (these details came courtesy of my own mother, years later—I barely remembered Mr. Latoure at all). Instead of twenty congregants there were easily four times that number, and I remember how their voices soared during the Doxology: Praise God from Whom all blessings flow, Praise Him ye creatures here below. It gave me goosebumps. Mrs. Jacobs was no slouch on the pedal organ, either, and her blond hair—held back with a plain black ribbon—glowed many colors in the light falling through our only stained glass window.
Walking home from church en famille, our good Sunday shoes kicking up little puffs of dust, I found myself just behind my parents, so heard Mom expressing her approval. Also her relief. “I thought, him being so young and all, we’d get a lecture on civil rights, or banning the draft, or something like that,” she said. “Instead we got a very nice Bible-based lesson. I think people will come back, don’t you?”
“For awhile,” my father said.
She said, “Oh, the big oil baron. The big cynic.” And punched his arm playfully.
As it turned out, they were both sort of right. Attendance at our church never slumped back to Mr. Latoure levels—which meant as few as a dozen in winter, huddled together for warmth in the drafty, woodstove-heated church—but it dropped slowly to sixty, then fifty, and finally to forty or so, where it hovered like the barometer on a changeable summer day. No one ascribed the attrition to Mr. Jacobs’s preaching, which was always clear, pleasant, and Bible-based (never anything troubling about A-bombs or Freedom Marches); folks just kind of drifted away.
“God isn’t as important to people now,” my mother said one day after a particularly disappointing turnout. “A day will come when they’ll be sorry for that.”
• • •
During those three years, our Methodist Youth Fellowship also underwent a modest renaissance. In the Latoure Era, there were rarely more than a dozen of us on Thursday nights, and four were named Morton: Claire, Andy, Con, and Terry. In the Latoure Era I was considered too young to attend, and for this Andy sometimes used to give me head-noogies and call me a lucky duck. When I asked Terry once what it was like back then, he gave a bored shrug. “We sang songs and did Bible drills and promised we’d never drink intoxicating liquor or smoke cigarettes. Then he told us to love our mothers, and the Catlicks are going to hell because they worship idols, and Jewish people love money. He also said to imagine Jesus is listening if any of our friends tell dirty jokes.”
Under the new regime, however, attendance swelled to three dozen kids between six and seventeen, which necessitated buying more folding chairs for the church basement. It wasn’t Reverend Jacobs’s mechanical Jesus toddling across Peaceable Lake; the thrill of that wore off rapidly, even for me. I doubt if the pictures of the Holy Land he put up on the walls had much to do with it, either.
A lot of it was his youth and enthusiasm. There were games and activities as well as sermons, because, as he pointed out regularly, most of Jesus’s preaching happened outside, and that meant there was more to Christianity than church. The Bible drills remained, but we did them while playing musical chairs, and quite often someone fell on the floor while searching for Deuteronomy 14, verse 9, or Timothy 2:12. It was pretty comical. Then there was the ball diamond,