The Calling Dream

Chapter 2-2

Then Daddy forked out a thigh and leg for Teddy and asked me what I wanted. I always wanted the breast meat and sometimes the gizzard, but a gizzard by itself wasn’t quite enough. If Daddy felt like I had been good, he would go ahead and put the gizzard on my plate too. After he served me and Teddy, then Momma served Hannah. After that, Momma and Daddy served themselves. Then, we started passing the bowls around the table. By the time it was all done, we each had a heaping plate full of good food.

Momma’s fried chicken would make you want to sing praises to the Lord. It was so good you had to fight the urge to moan when you tasted it. The skin was always crispy and brown, fried up in some lard, and she somehow got even the breast meat to stay moist on the inside. I took a big bite of chicken and chewed it well before I swallowed. I had to get a bite of that before I did anything else. Then I said, “Daddy, Momma says I was called to preach!”

Daddy held his chicken in both hands in front of his face and looked at me with a kind of smirking grin on his face. “Oh, she did?” he mumbled while chewing chicken and looking over at Momma.

Daddy was kind of a handsome man, kind of. He was bald, but he had blue eyes and dimples on his cheeks that made his smile look twice as wide. He was a tall man and thin. Everybody always said I looked like my daddy in the face, but I never got that tall or went bald like him. Whatever clothes Daddy wore looked kind of like they flowed around him instead of clinging to him, and thick chest hair always curled above the top button of his shirt. He had big hands, and the veins on the back of his hands made them look manly and strong. This time of the year, the sun had darkened them so much you could barely see those veins, but in wintertime, when his skin lightened a bit, the veins looked like road maps across his hands. He was such a strong, fine-looking man, you would have thought he would have been called to war, but Momma said he didn’t go because he had rheumatic fever when he was little. I guess that must have done something to him to keep him from fighting, along with the fact that he was already older with a family when World War II started, and he was too young to fight in World War I.

“Yeah,” I said. “I had this really weird dream when I was off taking a nap, and Momma said it means I was called to preach.”

He glanced over at Momma again. She sat quietly chewing, not looking up much from her plate except to make sure Hannah was getting properly fed without too much mess. She gave him a shy glance, and he turned his attention back to me.

“Did you dream about angels coming down and telling you to speak the Word of the Lord?” he asked.

“Well, not exactly, Daddy,” I replied. “I dreamed I was down at the pond in the barn lot, and the water was all silver like, and there were little Roman soldiers standing around the pond. When I came to the pond, they all stood at attention and pointed their spears to the sky. Then I touched the water to my lips, and it parted like the Red Sea, and up out of the parted waters came this beautiful redheaded woman wearing white flowing robes. She had bright-red lips, and she came up out of the pond and came over to me and put her hands on my cheeks and kissed me right on the lips. Then I woke up.”

Daddy looked at me stern and scornful for a second like I had just done something terrible to him. Then he glanced around the room like he was checking to see if anybody saw his reaction.

“That sounds to me more like the dream of a sinner than a man called to preach,” Daddy said. “Cavorting with some red-lipped Jezebel that rose up out of the pond don’t exactly sound to me like a dream that a man of God would have. That sounds to me like you were giving in to lascivious temptation.”

Teddy was snickering by this time, and I was mad that he made fun of me. He was sitting right next to me, so I slapped him on the leg and said, “Shut up, Teddy!”

Daddy immediately reached over and smacked me flat handed and hard on the back of my head. “You stop that nonsense and behave yourself at the table!” he said firmly.

“But, Daddy, Momma says the dream means I was called to preach,” I pleaded, “and Teddy was laughing at me.”

“Was not,” Teddy defended.

“That’ll be enough of that!” Daddy snapped. “I don’t care what your Momma says. That’s a sinner’s dream! You dreamed about fornicating with a strange woman, and your momma thinks that means you were called to preach?” He looked up at Momma with an angry stare. She didn’t say anything but just kind of looked down at the table. The truth is she was disciplined by him just like we kids were. Daddy kept staring at her. Then in a moment she said, “I’m sorry. I really didn’t hear the boy. I was busy and just wanted to rush him on out of my way.”

“Well, you gotta be careful what kinds of things you say to a child,” Daddy scolded. “An impressionable child gets the wrong idea about things like that. If anything, he should have been scolded for having smut like that in his mind.”

“But, Daddy,” I started imploring.

“Shut up, boy!” he snapped before I could finish my sentence. “Eat your dinner!”

We didn’t say much for the rest of that meal. Even Teddy kept his mouth shut. We all knew better than to push when Daddy was in a bad mood.

After dinner we rested a little bit for the remainder of the afternoon and then had to do evening chores before supper. That meant that the cows had to be gathered into the barn for milking, the hogs had to be slopped, the chickens fed, and eggs gathered. Our chickens were free range, but it was easy to feed them in the coup to lure them in for the night. We locked them in the coup at nighttime to protect them, but varmints still got to them pretty often. Now and then, Daddy would get hold of a wood shipping crate that we would fill with straw and place in a corner of the coup in hopes the chickens would take to nesting in it. Sometimes they would still nest out in the weeds, and some old hen would come marching up one day with a passel of fluffy yellow chicks trotting around her.

I didn’t say another word about my dream through supper or Bible study at church in the early evening, and that night after we went to bed, we heard Daddy chewing Momma out for saying “frivolous things” to children. I felt sorry for Momma because she got scolded and punished just like one of the kids. I wanted to go in there and tell him it wasn’t her fault, but I knew better. Besides, I would have had to crawl over Teddy to get out of the bed, which was shoved up into a corner by a window. He would have just pushed me back and told me to go to sleep. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if Teddy was protecting me from Daddy or helping him out. After a while the yelling stopped, but I didn’t fall asleep right away. I just lay there on my back, staring into the darkness and thinking, What if Momma was right? What if my dream means I was called to preach?

What if Momma was right? What if my dream means I was called to preach?Before Daddy came to get us up for chores the next morning, I had another dream. I was back down in the barn lot. The pond was still shimmering with silver water, and the little Roman soldiers stood at attention all around it, but this time I heard wailing and crying off to the side. I turned around, and there was Jesus nailed to the side of the barn with arms outstretched like he was nailed to a cross instead of the old gray barnwood. He hung on the side of the barn just above the opening to the corn bin. He had thorns all around his head, and they were poking into his forehead, so little streams of blood ran down his face. He had big iron nails through his wrists and hands. He had big nails through his knees and his feet, so they were bleeding too. Streams of dripping blood ran down the side of the barn onto the ground. There on the ground before him was the redheaded woman who had come up from the pond in my other dream. She was kneeling down and crying in great horrible sobs. Her pure white dress was stained with his blood. She looked up at Jesus and said, “My Lord! My Lord! Why have you forsaken me?” Then Jesus looked down at her and said, “Wait, wait patiently, for the time will come when all will be revealed.” After he said that, he looked over and saw me standing there looking up at him, and he shouted in this voice that echoed all over the whole farm, “YOU ARE MY WORD!” The next thing I knew, Daddy was shaking me awake, shaking Teddy, and telling us to get up.

“My Lord! My Lord! Why have you forsaken me?” “Wait, wait patiently, for the time will come when all will be revealed.” “YOU ARE MY WORD!” Summer wasn’t much fun for us. There was always a lot of work for us to do on the farm, and Daddy always got us up just before the rooster crowed. By the time he woke us though, Momma already had pork chops, eggs, biscuits, and gravy ready on the table. The smell of breakfast and fresh coffee filled the house so sweetly you could almost float into the kitchen on the aroma.

Since it was summer, there was no school to attend, and Daddy would have us out on the farm working all day. We would be fixing fence, cutting firewood for winter, or something similar to that. There barely ever was a day Daddy didn’t have us working. All year round we worked. As soon as we came home from school, we had chores to do. Through the colder months, Teddy and I attended school together in a little one-room schoolhouse that was about a two-mile walk from our farm, and all year-round we worked.

After we washed for breakfast, we came in and sat down at our places at the table. Daddy said prayer, as he did before every meal, and then he began to pass the biscuits around. I waited for him to say something to me because I wanted to tell him about the other dream, but he didn’t speak to me. I knew I would only get smacked if I spoke first, so I didn’t say anything. He never asked me if I wanted a pork chop—nothing. He just passed the bowls around and motioned for us to take what we wanted. Momma didn’t say anything either. I guess she didn’t want to upset Daddy after he got mad the day before.