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Thomas Earl Privette 
You got to walk/that lonesome valley You got to walk/it by yourself Nobody else/can walk it for you You got to walk/it by yourself - Mother Maybelle Carter I DIDN´T know her. None of the other boys did either. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was wearing my Sunday suit. My hair was slicked down with hair tonic. Howard Kirkley told me that winos drank hair tonic when they ran out of wine. I did not necessarily believe him. As a child I used to climb into the car every Sunday and ride for a long time to church. I did not particularly mind going to church. I was more or less used to it. In any case, I had no choice. Nevertheless I was restless and "squirming like a worm in hot ashes," as my father used to say, sitting in the long, polished wooden pew as the final prayer was intoned. I would bolt from my seat, and walking fast through the crowd, I would pretend I was making a touchdown run. I tried not to brush up against anybody. If I did happen to touch an elbow or step on someone´s toe, I was "down." The object of this game was to make it to the car in four downs. I always made it. I would break into the clear at the edge of the parking lot and go all the way for a touchdown! in the last second! as the crowd went wild!... Looking back on it now, the churches we went to don´t seem to have had much to offer. It was a washed out experience, bland an superficial. There is no one I can remember that would compare to any peasant in South America with a true spiritual identity. It was all meetings and committees and nebulous doctrinal debates over the interpretations of "the Scriptures." There was no spiritual truth that informed the lives of the congregation. They used to say themselves: "Preachin´ on Sunday, livin´ on Monday." Going to church was basically a social event. It was like a country club without a golf course. It was so feeble that, as a child, it depressed me on an unconscious level. I tried to liven it up at times, and usually paid the price, but not always. Once I was forced to sit in one of the front pews with the choir director´s horse-faced wife, and, knowing I had to be absolutely still for an hour or more, and finding such a prospect beyond endurance, I began to think about the assistant pastor´s daughter, a little girl about my same age, who had recently pulled up her dress---apparently for my benefit---while doing a hootchie-kootchie dance. I pictured this in my mind´s eye all through the sermon. The time passed quickly, and we were soon singing the last come-on-down-and-give-your-life-to-Jesus hymn, and there being no converts, I could count on leaving right away. After the service was concluded, my mother asked the choir director´s wife if I had behaved myself, the expression on her face showing clearly she expected the worst, and the choir director´s wife, looking at me and smiling, said, "Kept his eye right on the preacher the whole time." Sunday afternoons were deadly dull. Everything was leaden, soporific. The sun shone through the window into an immaculate room--the "living room" although no one actually lived there. A lazy patch of sunlight on one paw of a leg of the coffeetable, a fly buzzing against a window pane, the drone of the TV. There was nothing to do in the doldrums of Sunday afternoon except watch old Tarzan movies; or you could go down to the creek. The overgrown creek ran through the entire length of civilization; past the houses with manicured lawns and For Sale signs (the wife points to the creek and says, "Does it smell in the summmertime?" as the real estate agent shows her the pretty willow trees in her new backyard) and past all the indices of the civilized world; past the cement driveways and asphalt streets with names like Waterbury and Brookhaven; past the carports and basketball goals and "patios" and the black and yellow streets signs---the creek keeps on going past everything to a realm of antediluvian land in the midst of progress known as Hobbs´ Farm. In the woods on Hobbs´ Farm on a summer day, the air dances over the surface of the land in the sultry heat, and a boy can feel the boundary between himself and the physical world vanish. He becomes, in such a moment, a part of the slow moving air and the rustling of leaves high in the tops of the trees. The interweaving patterns of light and shade ripple over the landscape. The boy, in a trance, gazes at the current moving at a languid pace around the next bend in the creek. He feels his toes sinking in the cool sand next to the water. He feels the inner freedom. His soul stirs to life as heavy-laden clouds cross the timeless sky. The layers of his indifference are peeled away and the world is opened up for his own personal delight. The suffocating world of business-as-usual is pushed back beyond the horizon. There is only the earth and the elegant old trees arching over the creek, and the insect droning, soothing, sounds of summer, and the boy´s shadow on the ground. The inside of the church was the same except there were more flowers. I looked at the little girl. The casket was open on one side. She had choked on a balloon. She was three years old. Someone said, "She looks so much older." Howard Kirkley, also cleaned and pressed in his Sunday suit, leaned over and whispered to me, "She looks so much older because they drain all the blood out." I looked at her face and thought about all her blood being drained out. It was true. There was no color in her face. Her lips were dark. The people in the church had decided to have children as pall-bearers for a dead child. I don´t know why I was selected. I was just in the neighborhood I suppose. The coffin was not heavy even though it looked heavy. It was too late to watch Tarzan when we got back so I set out by myself for the creek. After a while I heard a train whistle far in the distance. I pictured myself riding the rails and feeling the wind in my face as the train rumbled through new and strange territory.
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