History Lessons by Clifton Crais

Author:Clifton Crais [CRAIS, CLIFTON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000; BIO026000; SCI089000; FAM019000
ISBN: 9781468309805
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2014-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

Dad visited that August 1969, on his way to the Gulf Coast a week after Hurricane Camille. I don’t know who he was going to help, Pat or Dorothy the Witch, but he came up the stairs and sat a while and brought me a brand new softball. I had not seen him for more than a year. I think I knew he had moved to California, though I had no idea where California was, just that it was distant and now he was here, sitting on a chair, and I was on the couch. He stayed no more than an hour, just to say hello and see how I was, and to give me the baseball, which felt smooth and dry in my hands. Then he put his fedora over his silvered hair and left.

In September I changed schools, my third in as many years. Saint Francis Assisi, on State Street, must have seemed far away. I had to cross Magazine Street, and walk a mile and a half. In the 1960s before school desegregation, there were only a few reasons for going to a parochial school: religion, wealth, or because you were in trouble. I was definitely in the last category, though no one ever said as much. There was, I guess, the discipline that was supposed to emerge by the mere fact of wearing a uniform. And there were the sisters and the priest and the church itself, with its neat rows of pews and the murals of Christ’s tribulations I have since revisited, wondering what sense I made of them.

I had to wear a uniform of dark pants and shoes, and a white shirt. I have a vague recollection of standing in the playground watching the other kids, less a memory than a feeling of shame. There is a ball being thrown around, a basketball court, and childhood conversations going off in a million directions. It is the clothes I remember. Everyone else seemed cleaner, properly put together, even as shirts starting loosening their way from pants and belts.

Although I had been baptized and my grandmother and I did the rosary, I was less than an ideal Catholic. I hadn’t taken my Holy Communion. Divorce had effectively exiled my mother from the Roman Catholic Church, which might have offered her some solace. So the sisters insisted on my confession and communion. The latter was easy enough. You simply followed the others from the pew to the front of the church, kneeled, and repeated whatever the person next to you said, or simply mumbled something incoherently. Then you walked back, kneeled one last time while making the cross, and scooted your bottom along the pew.

Confession was a wholly different matter, private and, I imagine, menacing. What went on in there, what could happen behind the pulled curtain? The sisters must have given me a booklet to read, instructions of exactly what to say, the whole spiel beginning with “Forgive me Father,” except that by the appointed day I hadn’t memorized a single word.

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