Hungry for the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

itself in her own life: the alcoholism she saw as her birthright, the violence and dislocation. Her silent and submissive role was an extension of the self-protection she had learned while growing up with a father made rageful by his weakness for drink and his frustrated desire for wealth, a man who ridiculed her for every mistake, until her very existence brought with it its own kindof humiliation. Here was a way to redeem her future, a place far away from the rejection and shame. She came home from her meetings glowing, collected, and still.
    My father watched her, listened as she spoke of her newfound peace, her absolute salvation. He read the Bible she had left near his chair. Soon after my mother’s conversion, he laid his own soul upon the altar.
    The Scripture was familiar to my father, but as he began to study more carefully the teachings of Christ and His followers, he came to understand how his own father’s life had been ruined by willfulness. How different would it have been had his father heeded his call to the ministry, taken up the cross instead of the bottle, if it had been tent meetings where he met his brethren and not the riotous bars where he badgered the man with the moonshine into floating him another jug?
    My father vowed that he would do God’s bidding without question, and in this way he would gain salvation not only for himself but for his family as well. He would embrace the faith his own father had abandoned, commit himself to a life of spiritual submission, gain absolution for all past sins.
    Here, too, was argument for the simplicity he longed for. He possessed a holy man’s antimaterialism; his contentment often seemed linked to our lack of anything beyond the barest of necessities. Even after we had moved from the camps to the small logging towns, when we lived in houses with running water, my father preferred to stop at the spring and dip his hand and drink. Given a choice between an outhouse and an indoor toilet, my father chose the rough-hewn privy. He was a loner, a hermit, a would-be anchorite, if not for his family, whom he loved, and his need to support them. But now his eccentricities, his seeming lack of ambition,were no longer odd or ignoble but necessary to his quest toward spiritual enlightenment.
    It seems, too, that my father’s inherent mysticism had to find this home. In the time and place of his childhood—in the Oklahoma Bible Belt—his uncanny sense of the future, his dreams that seemed less dream than prophecy, must needs come from somewhere, and as far as his people knew, there were only two possibilities: such powers came from Heaven, or they came from Hell.
    After his redemption, my father’s dreams were no longer dreams but
visions:
sometimes they foretold the future, which he could not change. Sometimes they were apparitions—demons that fouled the air with their breath. There were times when he fasted and prayed for days so that God’s will might be made clear.
    This new father was the same and not the same. He still played the guitar and sang in his fine tenor’s voice, but now the songs were not the country ballads he’d learned on the leaning porch in Oklahoma; now they were songs of redemption and revival. Instead of Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour, he spent his spare moments immersed in the King James Bible. When he read, we knew not to interrupt him, not because he might be angry but because it would do us no good: once fixed on his chosen text, nothing short of a shout could gain my father’s attention, and no one in our house was allowed to raise his or her voice except in prayer.
    The church reinforced our family’s already existing patriarchal structure—God to rule over man, man to rule over woman. The man was the physical and spiritual leader, the lawgiver, the interpreter, the one on whom the task of discipline fell most heavily. No decision could be made withouthis approval. My father’s authority had always been absolute, his command of