In the place where I had fallen Jesus awaited me. I saw that Jesus was displeased with me but he would not speak harshly to me, as my father did, to reprimand me.
My father did not ever explain to my mother (who heard us from downstairs) why he had “disciplined” me in this way and why for a long time afterward he would not look at me, and did not wish that I would enter any room in which he was; why I had to eat my meals alone in the kitchen after the rest of the family had finished. It was not the behavior against Albert Metzer that infuriated him so much as the fact that I would try to lie to him.
Even when I accompanied my father to work, and worked beside him at a construction site, he did not speak to me except when necessary. Though he was a Christian my father did not easily forgive, and he did not easily forget. Eventually his fury and disgust at me diminished with time like a slow wearing-out in the way that a new-polished linoleum floor loses its shine and becomes dull with grime and you cease to notice it.
I was sick to think that my father did not love me—now. He had loved me (maybe) as a father would love his son but now, since I had disappointed him, and had no way to stammer an apology nor even an explanation or excuse, for having dared to lie to him, he could not look upon me with love or even patience. And once I had seen in my mother’s face, when by accident I turned clumsily in the kitchen, in a small space, and came near to colliding with her, a look of fright—She thinks that I would hit her. She thinks that I am an animal.
One by one my older brothers had disappointed my father, in their own ways. But they would mature, and move away from home, and marry, and have children; and he would look upon them as men like himself, and forgive them. Or rather, he would forget his anger at them, when they were ignorant boys and lived in the house with them, taking up so much room; and so in that way he would forgive them, also.
It was at that time that I came to realize how Jesus does not reprimand us. The way of the world is to accuse and punish but it is Jesus within us that will speak to us when the time is ripe, in our own voices. For of course we know all there is to know of the teachings of Jesus. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
These things we know, that Jesus has died for us. Though in the blindness and fever of rutting sin we are ignorant of it, and pretend not to know.
STILL, WITH GIRLS I continued to behave badly. If a girl was aloof to me I hated her as stuck-up and if she was friendly to me I hated her as sluttish. I am ashamed to say, when I first met Edna Mae Reiser, it was sex-thoughts that came to me in a rush and not a wish to “love.” Though I understood this girl to be a good, Christian girl, and respected her. It was impressive to me too, that Edna Mae was training as a nurse’s aide and worked part-time at a nursing home in Muskegee Falls.
After we first met, we did not meet again for some months. For I was seeing another girl then. I would see adult women, one of them a divorcée with small children.
By then I had dropped out of high school. My grades were C’s and D’s except in vocational arts (shop) where my grades were B’s and where our teacher Mr. Bidenmann often asked me to help out the other students who were unskilled and clumsy using their hands.
When I met Edna Mae Reiser another time I was not so shy. Though I knew that Edna Mae was a virgin, and very innocent of men, yet I coerced her into certain acts against her wishes, and made her cry. I felt sorry for her but also impatient with her, for it was a dirty thing I had made her do, touching me with her bare hand, and letting me touch her. And other things that passed between us, that I made Edna Mae comply with, that would have provoked Felice Sipper to stab me in the gut. And then later, it was around Christmastime, when we were alone together in her parents’ house that smelled of fresh-cut evergreens, I saw a look in Edna Mae’s face that was stiff and pleading and I heard myself say, You have shamed yourself. I don’t want to see you again.
It was for the thrill of saying such words that I said them. I had not ever said such words before in my life but now I went away disgusted, or pretending to be disgusted. I did not call Edna Mae for twelve days but returned to seeing another, older girl from high school who did not expect so much of me. In the parking lot of the nursing home I waited in my car to observe Edna Mae walking into the rear of the building, in her white nurse’s aide uniform, and with thin white stockings and white crepe-soled shoes, sometimes with other girls in white uniforms, and sometimes alone.