Pilgrimage of Joy . . .

THE DAY MY FATHER WAS BAPTIZED
by W. Carl Ketcherside

It was early evening and the sun was only beginning to slant toward the west when my father came out of our little house to sit down on the top step and smoke his pipe. My brother and I sat down on the bottom step on opposite sides so each of us could lean against his legs. This was almost a ritual. Miners who worked the day shift always ate an early supper and then sat out in the front yard to relax and try to cool off before time to go to bed and get some rest as a preparation for going underground the next morning. In the curious jargon of the miners, who had their own word for everything, this was called “hog-eyeing” but I do not know why.

I only recall that my brother and I were always glad when our father came out to “hog-eye” and it made us feel proud to sit down and lean against him. Miners did not tell people they loved them, but our father did not need to do that. It would have seemed a little silly to say something you already knew. While we were sitting there, not saying anything, but just glad to be together, our uncle L. E. came by and stopped at the front gate. We all liked him a lot! He never became angry and he knew how to treat folks. He even talked to us boys as if we were grown-up men. That is why we felt kind of sad inside that he had “gone nuts over religion” and started “going to church every time someone jerked the bell-rope” as our father said.

We knew he was on his way to another meeting in Flat River and that he would climb the huge chat dump and cross the high rail road trestle which had been haunted ever since a miner slipped from it one night and was killed when he landed on the rocks below. Some of our neighbors heard his ghost shriek as it was falling again on dark nights. Uncle L.E. leaned on the gate and talked a little about veins and stopes and levels and other underground stuff, and then said, “Well, I’d better be shoving off. I dare you to come and go along with me.”

The two of us on the bottom step looked at each other and grinned. We knew what our father would say even though we hated to see him cut our favorite uncle down. We couldn’t believe what happened. Our father knocked his pipe out against the edge of the top step. He got up and we thought maybe he was going to fight our uncle. But he said, “I never took a dare in my life, and by God, I don’t intend to take one now. Wait till I get my hat.” We watched the two of them walk off together toward the chat dump and we were hurt and angry. We felt betrayed and sold out. Tears came to my eyes. I hated religion which broke up good times that were quiet and peaceful and which took a father away from his boys.

The next evening we were just playing around in the yard waiting for our father to come out and “hog-eye” so we could sit beside him and lean against him. But he didn’t come out very soon and when he did he had his hat on. We watched with foreboding as L. E. came again. We walked to the gate with our father. He patted both of us on the head. We could feel the roughness of his palm with the hard callouses from the pick and shovel. I watched until the two of them climbed the chat dump where they were momentarily silhouetted against the evening sky and when they disappeared from sight I ran blubbering to the backyard. I jerked a bean-pole out of the garden and began to savagely beat the rear wall of the summer-kitchen. The neighbor kids were on their knees looking through the fence. One of them yelled, “Whatcha doin’?” I acted as if I did not hear. I wanted to die.

It was about a week later, and we were sitting at the supper table when my father said to my mother, “Annie, I am going to be baptized.” My mother did not become angry. She spoke softly but firmly, “I knew you would be, but please do not ask me to go and see it. And don’t ever ask me to change from what 1 grew up in. Never!” My father said, “I’ll take the boys to see it.” Mother replied, “I can’t keep you from doing that, but don’t forget you signed your word to rear them in the Lutheran Church, and please remember what you’ve said about this religion that L. E. has talked you into.”

It was about a mile over to the company pond and when we got there on Sunday afternoon a crowd of strange people had already gathered and were waiting. They stood around talking until one of the men took out his watch, looked at it, and then held up his hand to get attention. He began to speak about how my father had repented of his sins. 1 didn’t like that because I did not know my father had any sins. The man continued that he had made the good confession and was going to be buried in baptism. I didn’t like the word “buried” either, because when people were buried you didn’t see them again. The crowd began to sing a song called “Happy Day” and my father walked out into the water with a man. When they got to the right place they stopped, the man raised his hand and said something and then buried my father out of sight. It was years later I realized that I never again saw the father who was buried.

All of the Cantwell people who had gone to the pond walked back with us, and they all talked to my father whose wet clothes clung to him as he walked. We turned in at our gate and my father went in and changed into a dry outfit. When he came into our other room, he lifted the lid on the cookstove and threw his pipe into the glowing embers. He threw his plug of chewing tobacco and his sack of Bull Durham into the trash sack by the woodbox. One of his nephews dropped by and my father gave him his fiddle together with an extra supply of resin for the bow. “I’ll not be needing it again,” he said. Two days later when he gave away his treasured Marlin shotgun, my mother became convinced he had lost his mind.

On Monday evening my brother and I were out in the yard again. We did not know if our father would come out or not. Our fears were relieved, for he came and sat down on the top step. We sat down on the lower one as usual. He did not have his pipe but he had a book which L. E. had given him. “Boys,” he said, “this is a Bible and it is the word of God. God lives up in heaven and he loves us, and because he does, he gave us this book to tell us how he wants us to live. I don’t know much about it yet but I intend to learn what’s in it, and I want you to know also. I’m going to read it out loud and that way we will all learn.”

We leaned against him and listened as he read. He took it slowly, like one treading unfamiliar ground and that was good. After awhile he closed the book and said, “That’s enough for this evening.” He began to ask us simple questions about what he had read and when we knew an answer he patted us on the head and made us feel good. I knew then that my fears had been premature. I still had my father and this was the best way to “hog-eye” in the world, with someone you loved reading to you. I wished that our mother could share with us but she couldn’t. She said she didn’t trust the Bible written in English, and she wished we could understand it in German like Herr Luther had fixed it up. When she talked about other men she called them “Mister” but she always spoke of her favorite hero as “Herr Luther.”

Almost every day L. E. stopped by and he and my father talked about the Bible and turned to it to read things they had found in it. My brother was too young to care, but I lay on the grass between them when they brought their chairs out under the cherry tree and listened to every word. They were always explaining to one another what they thought something meant and you could tell they loved it. I loved it too, although I didn’t know all it was saying. And every day our father read to us. God came to mean about everything to us and nothing else really mattered.

L. E. and my father wanted to start a church in our village. They said it was too far for everyone to walk to Flat River. They decided to start meeting in a grove of trees, and they made seats which were just planks laid across two-by-fours. The two men went to every house and invited everyone to come for the first Sunday. I had never really been to a church because my father had promised before 1 was born that I would be raised in the Lutheran church. But now he said to my mother, “I’d like to take the boys. with me when Sunday rolls around.” We added our pleas and mother said, “All right, go on. It isn’t really a church anyhow when a bunch of people meet in the woods.”

It was hot and dry and dusty when Sunday morning came, but when we got to the grove it was cool in the shade. The Ketchersides whom L. E. had baptized were all there. Some others he had baptized were there also. The songbooks which had been loaned by Flat River were passed out to the grown folks, but L. E. said, “Give the boys books also.” It made us feel big to have our own books with the name Voices for Jesus on the front. A man had come from Flat River with the books to lead the singing and when he had finished, my father read a chapter and then prayed. L. E. gave a little talk, my father following by telling about a verse he had read and what he thought God was saying in it.

An old man got up to “wait on the table” but he started to cry and couldn’t say anything, so L. E. got up and said the tears were nothing to be ashamed of for the old man had been baptized when he was a boy but had not seen the table of the Lord set for years. He called on my aunt to give thanks and she prayed better than any of them. Later, my father told me it was because she was in practice, that she had prayed every day for him for ten years. Before we finished we all got up and walked to the table and put money on the white cloth. My brother and I marched up with the others and put the pennies on the table which our father had passed on to us. I looked longingly at mine lying there by the dimes and the one quarter. I wished I could have kept it and gone with it to the company store but there was no way I could do it.

After everyone had shaken hands and hugged one another and cried and laughed we all went home with grandfather and grandmother. My father let us walk with them while he went home to help our mother carry the baby. I heard one of the men say that my grandfather was in “hog heaven” because so much company was going to his place. He loved company. While the women were busy in the kitchen the men sat out on the front porch which was shaded by a clematis vine filled with flowers. They talked about getting a place to meet before the rains set in. L. E. was an excellent carpenter and he suggested buying an old saloon building, cutting it in two, and moving it to a lot in the village and joining it together again. No one had ever seen this done, but he was convincing. They agreed to borrow the hundred dollars for purchase of the saloon. L. E. said that we would give those who came a different sort of drink than they had been served across the bar.