By Kerry Temple
Everyone called the foreman Jaybird, but it was the truck driver, J.D., who presided over that Mississippi pipeline crew. J.D. had a presence. He had big forearms and big shoulders and something of a Buddha belly, but he presided mainly because of his authoritative ways. There was nothing he wasn't an expert on and he had a way bullying you with that knowledge (both real and bluffed).
We had a two-seat pickup truck and J.D. always drove us to our work sites with Jaybird riding shotgun. The rest of us crammed into the backseat, practically sitting in each other's laps, with the outside guys sticking half out the windows.
Milo had no teeth. They'd been pulled and he ran out of money before he could get 'em replaced. He was a wiry old guy with a lot of little boy in him. Johnny had played football at a Mississippi junior college. He was young and blond and handsome and too good, I thought, to be embarking on a lifetime as a pipeliner. Milo had kind of taken Johnny under his wing, tempering his wild and youthful ways with some righteous Bible study of the Southern Baptist kind.
Willie was a 19-year-old black boy -- skinny as a rail, loose as a rope, with a smiling, grinning face, always laughing at our band of incongruent parts. L.C. was an old black man who hardly ever talked. He was my favorite. I liked his eyes and I liked his smile and I liked his often stoic countenance when J.D. said stuff to infuriate, using bad words for people of color and pontificating about this and that. Then there was me, still trying to figure out the world and myself.
We talked religion a lot. In fact, when I met Jaybird (old and bony, beak-nosed, flap-eared and heron-like), he talked about the guy I replaced. "Ya know what was weird about that guy," he said. "He believed we come from monkeys. That's right. Believed we come from monkeys. We argued it all summer long. And finally we got him. We asked him a question he couldn't answer. We said, 'Well, if we comes from monkeys how's come we're here and they's here?'" Then he cackled and said, "We got 'im," and looked out the window with a faraway gaze, relishing that forensic triumph. Of course, I did know the answer but I wasn't telling Jaybird my first day on the job.
So that's how it went. We worked hard and sweated a lot and in between talked religion. There was always a Bible around, with Milo indoctrinating Johnny, with L.C. quietly noting things like, "no, that's in Proverbs 8, not the Psalms," and J.D. blowing on the bagpipes. J.D. Easley was the kind of person who didn't just say something, he made pronouncements. "The poor," he would proclaim, "thou willst always have with thee," adding, "so an honest day's work for an honest day's pay," somehow attributing both statements to Jesus and thus summarizing the Lord's take on charity, blacks, welfare freeloaders, and the Protestant work ethic all at once.
He was often ridiculing Catholics (going on about statues and the saints, about the "superstitions" and the "hocus-pocus" and the pope) and for a month or so I tried steering him somewhere nearer the truth. But he would have none of it. Then one time he talked about a Catholic woman who had died. "They laid her out," he said, as if spinning a ghost story, "and put those beads in her hands and sprinkled that potion on her and they surrounded her with candles and they brought in a priest all dressed up and he prayed over her. You know -- said those magic words trying to raise her from the dead. But you know, she didn't come back. She was dead sure enough. Deader'n a doornail."
Everyone gasped and nodded except for L.C. and they shook their heads staring at the floor. And I tried to explain it was just extreme unction 'cause that's what we called it then: Last rites, anointing of the sick or dead, to help bless them into heaven.
And J.D. looked at me, glared at me, one eye cocked my way, and he pronounced, "Now, Kerry, what you have is two kinds of Catholics . . ." And he proceeded to explain how some Catholics may do this while other Catholics do that. And I knew he was wrong, that he was trying a diversionary tactic. But then again, I thought maybe there was something about Mississippi Catholics I didn't know -- having known some well-professed Mississippi Christians who wore white robes and hoods while burning their crosses.
It was later I told L.C. how peeved I was and asked him how he could take it, the things said about blacks and all. And L.C. said, "There's a sign outside my hometown that I pass everyday. Says it's 12 miles to my town. But I know it's 8. It's 8. No bout-a-doubt-it. But no matter how loud I scream at that sign it will always say 12. That sign's just like J.D."
He grinned at me so I could see some gold in his teeth and a couple of places where teeth were missing. "He don't bother me no more than I let 'im. And I don't let 'im."
L.C. taught me a lot that summer. So did Johnny and Milo, who was a good, generous and joyous man -- the one who brought along balls and rope and a little hoop for us to play volleyball or basketball when out of sight in the Mississippi woods and who once caught an armadillo and wrote "Bob" on its back in red paint, sort of an experiment to see if we'd ever see Bob again.
J.D. taught me a lot too -- maybe not what he intended, but plenty. Partly I learned something about being Catholic from people who didn't really know the truth about Catholic ways; and that was good, seeing stuff through their eyes and trying to figure how they'd gotten that impression. Mainly I learned from watching all of them, keeping quiet and seeing what people do. Which is the best way, I think, to see if someone's religion works.