Braver than I

He had read my book, as I had read his. But that had been a long time ago—how would it read now? 

And what would I make of the dragons in the book—my uncle and my cousin’s girlfriend? The book is A Crossing and the author is my cousin Brian Newhouse. And I’m happy to say it’s just as good as I remembered it. 

Brian ventured from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic sometime in the nineties on a bicycle—but this is only incidentally a biking book. In fact—blessedly—it’s not at all a bicycling book. It’s a book about a nice guy and two lunatics. 

 “A cock tease,” was Franny’s diagnosis of Karen, Brian’s girlfriend, after she had read the book. She’s a hyper-“religious” girl who likes to test Brian’s “faith” in the Lord by proposing to sleep—and nothing else—together. So he’s lying there, stiff as a board in many senses, and she puts his hand on her breast. 

Brian? 

There is such a thing as too much Minnesota nice. And Brian, you’d crossed the line a country mile back. 

Well, eventually he can stand it no more, and goes to sleep in the guest bedroom. I’d have left the house and never looked back. Karen uses religion variously as a cudgel or a noose, and she’s no dab hand at either. When Brian can take it no more and breaks up with her she attributes the event to the work of Satan, who cannot abide the sight of two loving Christians standing together—the man leading, being a “cover” for the wife. 

I know—pass the Mylanta…. 

Well, he got an interesting character out of her, at any rate. 

And the other lunatic? His father. Just as crazy on Christ as the girlfriend, if not more. 

In the early days, my father would get a call from my aunt, saying that Bill was down in the village, preaching against sin and vice to drunks leaving the saloon. My father would get in the car and drag him home. 

“He was a really funny, high-spirited kid,” said Franny once about Bill. “Then, something happened to him, and he just turned into a religious nut….” 

Who also uses the Bible as a weapon. There always was something sad about going to their house, a farm on the Illinois / Wisconsin border. Religious tracts were everywhere—by the toilet, in the barn, on the table. A sermon was always impending, looming like an August thunderstorm. Any remark could be slash, meant to jolt you to your senses, repent, accept Jesus into your heart, get saved. In short, become as crazy as he. 

It might have been tolerable if there had been any joy, any fun in it. But this is the real fire-and-brimstone stuff, that old-time religion of talking in tongues and walking to the altar and accepting Jesus into your heart. Satan is real and he has his claws in his wife and his brother and his kids. By definition, anyone who is not saved is…. 

 …fallen? 

I don’t know. Nor do I know how he stood it, feeling that he was alone in his faith, and that his family was headed for perdition. 

Also don’t know how anybody else stood it. Because in addition to the religion, we get a guy who has an emotional straitjacket that no one can cut through. This one we know, on the other side of the family. Because Jack never got the religion, but the repression? 

Not in spades—more like the backhoe. 

“Once, my father came back from one of his trips, looked at me, and then shook my hand,” said Jack, my father. “He’d never done that before, and we never did it again. The only time I can remember touching my father….” 

Or how about this? 

“I always tear up when I hear a train horn. Makes me remember seeing my father off on trips so many times.”  

My brother Johnny took him on, as Brian took on his father. And one of the most heartfelt, poignant moments in A Crossing is the moment when Bill calls Brian and they talk at last. Brian gets it off his chest—he crossed a whole continent to get a good word out of the old man. And what does he get? A flip remark about a bad penny from a father who has judged, and judged him a failure. 

Oh, and is sorry he ever had him in the first place. 

Johnny did much the same thing to Jack. And Jack, stunned to hear that Johnny seriously questioned—hey, do you love me?—went to the hardware store, got a plumb bob, some string, and a piece of dowel. Then he went to the garage, found a board, nailed in a support, put the dowel as a crossbar, and hung the plumb bob. Next, he wrote a letter: 

Johnny, 

There are two things that are true.

 1. A plumb bob always hangs true 

 2. A father always loves his children 

 I love you, 

Pop 

Brian waded through this mess, though how I don’t know. “You were never abusive,” he tells his father at one point. 

Yeah? I think telling a kid he’s gonna go to Hell and suffer for eternity and the devil has entered him and if he doesn’t repent now he will…. 

I think that’s abuse. Brian praised Iguanas for its courage. 

I think Brian is braver than I.