BOY’S
FAITH
not e s f rom a sou t h e r n ba p t i st u pbr i ngi ng
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Hamilton Cain
Crown Publishers
New York
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
brook ly n, n ew yor k, 20 03
O ver the course of that cool, damp spring, the news had
grown steadily worse. Not long after my wife, Ellen, and
I had brought home our first baby, Owen, from the hospi-
tal, we noticed he wasn’t hitting his early developmental mile-
stones. At two months he couldn’t hold up his head. At four
months his quick kicks and fluttery hand movements abruptly
ceased. His pediatrician described his condition as hypotonic;
his muscle tone was acutely low. When she tapped his knee
with a rubber hammer, his leg remained inert, indicating the
absence of deep tendon reflexes. At her urging, we’d moved
numbly through a battery of doctors, tests, and specialists,
shuttling from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back to Brooklyn,
hoping to pin down the cause of his severe weakness. The con-
versations were conducted in low, lockjaw tones with sidelong
glances— look how calm and rational I seem, but in reality I’m about
to jump out of my skin.
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One June afternoon a few weeks later, Ellen and I rushed Owen
to the emergency room of our neighborhood hospital. He was
suffering from respiratory distress. A nurse whisked him off to
the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, his oxygen saturation dan-
gerously low and his temperature running high.
The pulmonologist listened to Owen’s breaths with his
stethoscope, commenting darkly on the crackling sounds he
heard, the erratic contractions of the baby’s belly, the shiver-
ing tongue. A surgical team embarked on their own investi-
gation, a spate of chest X-rays and a bronchoscopy, a pygmy
camera lowered into the windpipe to check for any anatomi-
cal abnormalities— a flap of tissue or a bone spur— that might
be constricting the airway. None. The X-rays did reveal an
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she delivered her coup de grâce. “Why, we’re barely well our-
selves. We’d only be a burden to you and to Ellen.”
My voice cracked. “What about the next week?”
Her tone had found its serenity once again. “Sugar, I cannot
come to New York anytime soon. That week I’m teaching Va-
cation Bible School. It would be too late to find a replacement,
and all those little children are depending on me.”
After we exchanged strained good-byes, I inhaled from the
diaphragm, like Owen, to calm myself. Why did I still bring a
child’s logic to each conversation with her, the magical belief
that this time would be different? Of all people, she should be
empathetic to my dilemma: she’d lost a baby before I was born.
But those little children were depending on her.
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I hadn’t thought about Vacation Bible School in years.
As I was growing up in a devout Southern Baptist household
in the 1970s and ’80s, church played a central role, especially
from the time I was seven, when I came to Jesus on a trampo-
line. “That Sugar, so eccentric!” my mother would say to Mrs.
Swope and Mrs. Norway at Sunday School breakfasts in the
Fellowship Hall, nibbling a powdered doughnut and sipping
coffee from a thermos she’d brought from home. “Just jumped
and bounced his way to the Lord!” The trampoline put a stamp
of authenticity on the experience, signaled to my congregation
that I was special.
The elders— a few women but mostly men, as only they
were permitted to hold leadership positions— considered me a
prodigy. Mr. Draper or Mr. Coker would stop my father in the
prayer chapel, where the deacons would cluster in their odors of
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We’d conclude each day with a Bible story, the miracle of the
loaves and fishes or the parable of the talents. I preferred the
Old Testament tales, the drama and urgency in Genesis. Jo-
seph’s coat of many colors. Jacob wrestling with the angel. The
Sacrifice of Isaac.
22:1 And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt
Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold,
here I am.
22:2 And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom
thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him
there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will
tell thee of . . .
22:9 And they came to the place which God had told him of;
and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and
bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.
22:10 And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to
slay his son.
22:11 And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven,
and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I.
22:12 And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do
thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God,
seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.
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Owen’s hospitalization stretched into weeks, then months, ap-
proaching his first birthday. I kept up the pressure on my par-
ents, and they returned the favor, continuing to resist even after
Vacation Bible School ran its course and summer deepened its
emeralds along the palisades, across the Hudson River from the
hospital. In long-distance conversations, I could hear myself
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gaunt, red- eyed resident darted in, looked over Owen’s chart,
darted out.
“Of course you wouldn’t like Howard Dean. He’s a Demo-
crat who opposed the war,” I said.
“We had to do it,” my father said, folding the magazine, nos-
trils flared, daring me to pick a political argument right here,
right now. “That monster was killing his own people.”
“Sugar, did I tell you Barb Draper’s husband may be called
up to I-raq?” my mother said.
“Who?”
“He’s in the reserve. Her married name’s Gentry. Four chil-
dren, all girls. You did Bible Drill with her.”
My hands curled involuntarily, remembering the spine of a
Bible. Present swords. The Salvation Verse: Begin. A boy standing
at nervous, rapt attention, sweating in an oversize suit and re-
citing John 3:16, words like sediment in his throat.
I felt a surge of affection when my mother pulled a chair
to Owen’s bed to read One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish,
e-nun-ci-a-ting the rhyme even though he was really too
young for Dr. Seuss. This was her element, entertaining a baby.
He watched her intently, craving the cadence of her voice, his
unblinking hazel eyes the exact shade of her own.
Ten minutes later she clapped the book shut, stood up, and
wiggled her thumb like a hitchhiker, signaling my father.
“Your daddy and I need a cup of decaf. Can you recommend
someplace nearby?”
They were gone for almost three hours, returning with a
paper bag stained with lukewarm coffee and a bagel smeared
with cream cheese. I noticed how far back from Owen’s bed
they now stood. “This is for you,” my mother said magnani-
mously. “You’re like a ghost, so white! Bet you don’t get outside
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priest paced a few feet away, tall and silver-haired and flustered,
hand busy at his white collar, mustering his courage before
infiltrating the clique of women. A man of faith late to the
game, his error compounding the medical failure. They noticed
him then. In an instant their dolor transformed into animosity,
gushing forward, magmalike, to engulf him. He stepped back
to brace himself.
“They told me the wrong floor,” he said loudly.
The charge nurse winced. Owen’s nurse dropped a can of
formula, knelt at the priest’s feet to scoop it, looked up through
a fringe of ginger bangs. “We sure coulda used you, Father.
’Specially the family.”
“They said ER.” He drew out the syllables as though to ex-
culpate himself somehow, wro-o-nng floo-uurr, Eeeyy Arrrr.
The charge nurse shot out from behind the counter like a
bullet train, jabbed a finger against the lapel of his coat, her
throat quivering its wattles. “The last rites, Father. These were
godly folks. The one damned job you’re supposed to do, and
you screw it up . . .”
The priest rocked back and forth, knees bent, arms scarecrow-
limp, a Christian in the pit of the Colosseum, encircled by li-
onesses. Life and death, religion and science, men and women;
all the intractable conflicts, right there before me, beyond the
reach of any pat resolution. He swiveled on his heels, beat a
wordless retreat down the corridor, chased by the charge nurse
calling after him.
Father, Father.
I drew the curtain shut, crawled stiffly back onto the lounge
chair like an octogenarian, wondered again if all those values
and concepts I’d learned— sacrifice, steadfastness, redemption,
apocalypse, magic— would buoy me when the moment came,
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The next morning the alcove across the floor gleamed empty,
scrubbed by the housing staff, awaiting its next patient. I’d seen
a similar room a long time ago but couldn’t recall it precisely.
My parents arrived to repeat yesterday’s routine: a perfunc-
tory hello to Owen, a leisurely interlude at a deli on West 168th
Street. En route to the men’s room, I found them sitting in the
lobby and listening admiringly to Ernie, a respiratory therapist
whose loquacious stories peeved the hell out of the rest of the
hospital staff. He was bragging how in a Zen trance he could
lower his heart rate to eight beats per minute.
“For a fact. Docs hooked me up to one of dem pulse-ox
machines.”
With arms on the backs of my parents’ chairs, I deposited
myself between them, clasping their shoulders for balance, re-
duced to a thirteen-year-old’s pose. My mother glanced at me,
her face shining with delight.
“He’s telling the most fascinating stories. Never heard of
such a thing.” I knew they’d go back to Tennessee with Ernie
as their favorite souvenir, regale their Sunday School class with
a little Yankee show-and-tell.
“You want to come back to Owen’s room?” I said.
“Oh, of course, Sugar.”
At the baby’s bedside, an awkwardness settled over us like a
colorless toxic gas. I recited what the neurologists had told me
about the disease, chapter and verse, the techniques that kept
Owen’s lungs clear and dry, my information wilting beneath
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The car doors slammed, and the cab swung into traffic, fend-
ers filmy with grime. I breathed exhaust as my past sped away
from me, only to boomerang back, whipping space and time.
An implacable God tested Abraham’s love of Him by de-
manding the sacrifice of the child of his old age. With Isaac at
his side— whippet-thin, clear-eyed, trusting his father’s alibi—
the patriarch cobbled together a crude altar from hewed stones,
shoulders bowed with arthritis and anger at his Deity. He
stretched out his son across a bier of dry wood and desiccated
vines, head swimming with contradictions, the ardent desire
to please God with the impulse to curse Him, both consum-
ing emotions balanced on a blade’s edge. As he raised a knife
to gore the boy, an angel called out to Abraham, staying his
hand: he’d passed the test. He fell across Isaac’s contorted body,
sapped by the revelation that love and rage could collude to-
gether, that a parent’s agonizing sacrifice could somehow spare
this boy’s faith.
What’s past is prologue, Shakespeare wrote.
The past is never dead, Faulkner wrote. It’s not even past.
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