I’ve fallen behind on my segments from the novel “Sunday People,” but here at long last is the third one, from the chapter on the anchoring character of the book.
Orson
Woodrow Wilson died the year I was born. My pappy was a good Democrat, so my middle name is Woodrow. Orson Woodrow Caskill. Not many people know that. I foolishly told Fergus when we were boys and sometimes he calls me President and when he does I know he’s been up to something he knows I wouldn’t like so he goes whole hog and lets me know that I got no power over him. My folks, having given me the name, never mentioned it again. It’s there on the birth certificate but if any of my brothers and sisters even remember the fact they kindly let it lie. I want it put on my tombstone, though. The coming in and the going out.
I am dying. I sit here on the platform chanting and saying amen but I don’t think you can bargain with god, if he exists. Instead, I’m striking a bargain with my life. Yes, I have joined the church in my sixty-eighth year, letting my wife try to bargain with God.
It is good to look into the crowd sitting out front and see my son and his Bernice and Melissa and then Charlene with her two boys. Sweet thing to think of Tessie and Floyd at the house waiting for us. I thought Sarah Beth would be bothered about it when Tessie left the Baptists and joined Floyd’s Methodists, but she wasn’t. Across the platform on the women’s side sits my wife of forty some years, quietly listening. She don’t go in for the shouting that some of the members seem to think will get them into heaven. Since I hadn’t been to meeting for years, I’ve been mightily surprised by some of my neighbors carrying on like Hottentots. I don’t think they used to do that much of it or that loud. Lord have mercy, as Sarah Beth says when she throws up her hands and gives up on something. (Charlene rolls her eyes and says, “Spare me.” Jeff laughs and shakes his head. And Tessie goes about trying to set it right. Me, I crack another joke. Like when the finance company repossessed our furniture that summer after Char was born. I said to Fergus when he walked in the front door, “Sit down on your finger and rare back on your thumb.” I remember because then I thought there was something indecent sounding about that, though I hadn’t intended it that way. Sarah Beth turned her head and left the room, which she would have done anyway, feeling about Fergus the way she does. Fergus and I were going fishing, which was a good idea because there was no meat in the house.)
The truth about us. God’s truth? I tell the truth more often than not about things but I don’t always set them right. Telling the truth goes way back, maybe to the time when I lied about planting the beans in the upper cornfield. I was in a hurry to go play and just scattered them everywhere instead of poking them one by one into the dirt. Pappy didn’t find out until some of them sprouted, some of the ones the birds left. Instead of whipping me, as I expected, and pappy was a good whipper, he told me that the devil would get me if I kept on lying. I must have been seven or eight. I was afraid to go to sleep every night for I don’t know how long, for fear that that red monster would get me. Somehow, I figured if I could see I’d know what to do, so the problem was only at night. Didn’t seem to affect my daytime behavior any. For the first time, I felt that real bad things could happen to you, bad things pappy and momma couldn’t stop. Including bad things that you yourself could do. There’s been Fergus and the badness he gets up to, and how do I live with that? And back then there was the war and you were for sure breaking commandments. Somewhere in there I started keeping an account. It’s not that I’ve never lied nor been mean to someone nor in some way cheated, but I always make sure I tell myself about it. If god didn’t do the work, I guess I figured I would.
I am dying. I look at my family, as I’m doing right now in church, and I want them to know the truth about me, whatever that means. So here in church, where I’ve had no intention of listening to the preachers whoop and holler, I think I’ll work at thinking how I’ll tell my son who I am. And after I tell Jeff, then I’ll tell Sarah Beth that I’ve told him so she’ll know my first thought is for the family that we made together, the most important part of the truth. If an angel asked Sarah Beth to sacrifice Charlene or Jeff or Tessie-or me-she’d turn her back on that awful light.