Under cover of darkness

The Beecher Bible and Rifle Church
Wabaunsee, Kansas

June 1-3, 2014 (cont'd)

"The darkness surrounds us, and . . . " - Robert Creeley 

“What are those damn things?” Nashe asked, when I opened the trunk so he could find a place to settle his gargantuan Gladstone bag. It wasn’t a question; I should have written: “What are those damn things!” Nashe snorted. The snort pointed to my golf clubs.

     I have a cousin in Topeka, another of Uncle Albert's “nephews,” that plays golf; and I thought I could get over there — it’s only an hour from Manhattan — get with him and exchange the frustrations of Roz’s family and friends for other frustrations. Nashe had arranged for a friend in Lawrence to pick him up after two Manhattan days and he’d go over there.

     Still, he managed to extract the usual half-assed and half-angry apology: “So I play golf. Shoot me.”

I began when I was thirteen with starter set: driver, 3-wood, 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-irons, ordered from Sears; it was hard even then (1971) to find left-handed “sticks.” It wasn’t hard to find a place to play: I could walk to the public course, where greens fees for kids were fifty cents. From the beginning — without any instruction — I was not bad; yet I never became good. I had a lovely swing patterned after Gene Littler’s, I hit my drives far enough, my irons crisply enough, and I had a decent short game. But I was an idiot (and remain one, proof of how bad habits are impossible for some temperaments to break). Mainly, I never met a shot I didn’t think worth trying — it didn’t matter that Littler knew better than to think he could pull it off. Throw in the inevitable pair of double- and triple-bogeys into every round; it didn’t matter if I could shoot one or two over par for the remaining fourteen holes.

What didn’t happen at The Thirsty Turtle in Columbia, Missouri. (See yesterday’s post.) Alcohol. Roz doesn’t drink in bars; Tom was next to drive; and I needed to sleep, since I was up after him. So, they shared a bottle of tonic water. The bartender actually brewed me a cup of hot chocolate. Sommers was working against a deadline; he had coffee.

     He and Nashe dissected the “bad old days,” especially wondering about a guy named Gabe Harvey, who was going to become the next Mike Royko but didn’t have an un-deadly-serious bone in his body. Harvey was grimly infatuated with a fellow student, “Kim what-was-her-last-name?” who was blithely sleeping with anyone but poor Gabe. Neither Sommers nor Nashe knew what happened to either grave Gabe or not-so-coy Kim; so they decided they’d gotten married, and we’d run across them and six of their eight children on a commune in Kansas. Kim would be editing the newsletter, and Gabe would have a regular column, “Commune Comments.”

We slid through sleeping Kansas City, crossing the Kansas River a little after three, Nashe still at the wheel. We changed drivers at the first service plaza on the Kansas Turnpike. It was there that Roz, who must always be examining the map, noted: “What’s the Beecher Bible and Rifle Church, do you think?” It was only about ten miles out of our way, and it was on the way to Wamego, so we could drive through there on the same detour and see if we couldn’t find Fred and Agnes’ house. This is part of the same part of Roz that wants more to know where we are on the map than on the earth: also, if you can make a trial run to somewhere you may have to go, or might want to go, some other time, make it. This one, in any case, was practically free: there was a road straight from Wamego into Manhattan; we could get from one to the other without having to come back to the interstate.

     So, somehow it was settled. I might suggest that a Bible and Rifle church, whatever it looked like on the map, might not be a place on the earth you’d want to be found snooping around at four-thirty in the morning. But then Nashe and Roz would blow raspberries at me as if they’d done shots instead of tonic at the Turtle.

Exit 328. North on the “Road to Oz Highway,” KS-99, to KS-18. On the map, the church is right there on the northeast corner of the intersection. On earth, it’s nowhere near. There is a brown “historic interest” sign on the southeast corner: this way →, west on 18. So, I’m pushing the car slowly down the cracked two-lane, Nashe beside me and Roz directly behind with their windows down peering out into the dark.  “Whoa!” Nashe catches sight of another brown sign pointing south down a dirt road: ½ mile. The road, we will discover, is Elm Street (where the nightmare took place). The church faces another dirt road, Chapel Street.

     Thinking “rifles” before “bibles,” I cut the lights as soon as we’ve found it. Tom takes several pictures. I find a brochure in the mailbox by the front door. Roz tries the damn door. Locked, of course.  And the windows are shuttered, so she can’t peer in with the flashlight she’s pulled out of the glove box.

Tomorrow: Bibles and rifles, slave and free, Patsy and Sam.

 F