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Show Go Love/137 17. The road O.W. drives to the funeral home is a rerun of my teen years Farmboy, on the corner where the highways cross, where I used to ride Happy boy and tie him to a bike post out front to buy bread the winter we burned the neighbor's Kentucky white fence for heat Almost to the train tracks, Woodhead's Feed and Seed, next the slaughterhouse where Deputy Biggs Self shot the white bull after the tornado of 76 Over there's Tastee Freeze and the new Willy Ray Courthouse Building with its jail where I'd bled the night Angle broke my nose and Mama'd had to post bail and hire one of the town ambulances to haul me to Saint Vincent's Emergency Room, where they performed the procedure that saved me from freakhood. First Baptist Church rears j beyond the red light, only different now The old sanctuary sits abandoned, emptied of the pews even where I'd once sat beside Mama and O.W. with my stomach growling and watch the stained light passed through Mother Mary and the white sheep and onto the thighs of the organists playing "Pow'r in the Blood." In some devilish competition with the Methodists and Pentecostals, Brother Dellwood Walker somehow swung enough tithes to build the new monster which covers an entire block and possesses no windows. What's a church without light? The new church |