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dozen in winter, huddled together for warmth in the drafty, woodstove-heated church—but it dropped slowly to sixty, then fifty, and finally to forty or so, where it hovered like the barometer on a changeable summer day. No one ascribed the attrition to Mr. Jacobs’s preaching, which was always clear, pleasant, and Bible-based (never anything troubling about A-bombs or Freedom Marches); folks just kind of drifted away.
    â€œGod isn’t as important to people now,” my mother said one day after a particularly disappointing turnout. “A day will come when they’ll be sorry for that.”
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    During those three years , our Methodist Youth Fellowship also underwent a modest renaissance. In the Latoure Era, there were rarely more than a dozen of us on Thursday nights, and four were named Morton: Claire, Andy, Con, and Terry. In the Latoure Era I was considered too young to attend, and for this Andy sometimes used to give me head-noogies and call me a lucky duck. When I asked Terry once what it was like back then, he gave a bored shrug. “We sang songs and did Bible drills and promised we’d never drink intoxicating liquor or smoke cigarettes. Then he told us to love our mothers, and the Catlicks are going to hell because they worship idols, and Jewish people love money. He also said to imagine Jesus is listening if any of our friends tell dirty jokes.”
    Under the new regime, however, attendance swelled to three dozen kids between six and seventeen, which necessitated buying more folding chairs for the church basement. It wasn’t Reverend Jacobs’s mechanical Jesus toddling across Peaceable Lake; the thrill of that wore off rapidly, even for me. I doubt if the pictures of the Holy Land he put up on the walls had much to do with it, either.
    A lot of it was his youth and enthusiasm. There were games and activities as well as sermons, because, as he pointed out regularly, most of Jesus’s preaching happened outside, and that meant there was more to Christianity than church. The Bible drills remained, but we did them while playing musical chairs, and quite often someone fell on the floor while searching for Deuteronomy 14, verse 9, or Timothy 2:12. It was pretty comical. Then there was the ball diamond, which Con and Andy helped him create out back. On some Thursdays the boys played baseball and the girls cheered us on; on alternate Thursdays it was the girls playing softball and the boys (hoping some of the girls would forget it was their turn and come in skirts) cheering them on.
    Reverend Jacobs’s interest in electricity often played a part in his Thursday-night “youth talks.” I remember one afternoon when he called our house and asked Andy to wear a sweater on Thursday night. When we were all assembled, he called my brother to the front of the room and said he wanted to demonstrate the burden of sin. “Although I’m sure you’re not much of a sinner, Andrew,” he added.
    My brother smiled nervously and said nothing.
    â€œThis isn’t to frighten you kids,” he said. “There are ministers who believe in that kind of thing, but I’m not one of them. It’s just so you’ll know.” (This, I’ve learned, is the kind of thing people say just before they try to scare the living crap out of you.)
    He blew up a number of balloons and told us to imagine that each one weighed twenty pounds. He held the first up and said, “This one is telling lies.” He rubbed it briskly on his shirt a few times, and then held it against Andy’s sweater, where it stuck as if it were glued there.
    â€œThis one is theft.” He stuck another balloon to Andy’s sweater.
    â€œHere’s anger.”
    I can’t remember for sure, but I think it likely he stuck seven balloons in all to Andy’s homemade reindeer sweater, one for each of the deadly sins.
    â€œThat adds up to over a hundred