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Show in my father's house/ 180 My school friends sometimes invited me to their homes. In the second grade, I went home with Robert, the minister's son, thinking that my mother would be proud. She had told me that the Reverend Van Zeiter occupied the same place in his church as my father did in our group. But the house seemed a strange place for a spiritual leader to ]ive, the rooms emitting an odor of stale pipe tobacco. The mother of the family had died years before and there was an absence of glass and lace, of curtains and doilies and soft pillows. "She died when you were born?" I said. I was overwhelmed with emptiness for the father and child. "And you have no other mother?" The words were out before I could stop them. "Of course not! Silly. Everybody has only one mother." I blushed, then pushed my fear away, thinking he could not know. "Do you miss her?" He shrugged. "I never knew her. But my father misses her." I stared at him and could almost see his father:a dark, brooding man with mournful eyes. We walked into the den. "This is where my father writes his sermons." I stared at the desk, imagining the dark man with his sad eyes, writing what he would say to the people of his church to give them light, to bring them to God. My father always spoke under the influence of the spirit, saying whatever the Lord told him to. "Why does he write them? Can't he remember what the Holy Ghost tells him?" Robert looked at me curiously. "Are you Presbyterian?" |