the floorboard. By the time we arrived I always had a headache and was in 28
Damien Echols
29
no mood to sit through two hours of bible thumping. Going to protestant churches became the bane of my existence.
The usual routine consisted of thirty minutes of singing, followed by an hour to an hour-and-a-half of preaching, and then twenty more minutes of singing to close the show while people waved their hands in the air, stared at the ceiling as if they were witnessing heaven, and shed copious amounts of tears. Every so often there was a surprise, like having a television set up. The lights were turned off, and a movie about the end of the world played. After it was over and everyone had the shit scared thoroughly out of them, there was a mad rush to the “altar” (a picnic bench). Everyone crowded together, huddled on their knees, and prayed that Jesus would take them home so they wouldn’t have to face the horrors of the end times.
Once, quite against my will, I was even in a Christmas play. All the kids played the part of toys hearing the story of Christmas for the first time. I was a toy motorcycle rider, and one of my stepbrothers had dressed me in all his biker finery for the occasion. I looked disturbingly like Rob Halford, the singer from the band Judas Priest. Very few people can pull off that stereotypical biker look, and I am not one of them.
There was a constant stream of new preachers that passed through after plying their trade for a short while, because the congregation would vote them out. One night someone would call for a vote, and that would be that. It was usually the result of the preacher siding (or being perceived to side) with one or another faction of the congregation. If one group felt that he was showing more sympathy to one backbiting clique than another, he’d soon be sent packing. We waved goodbye to many preachers as they drove off into the sunset with a moving van full of furniture.
Meanwhile, back on the home front, our financial situation continued its steadily downward spiral, and the tension continued to build. We started trying to grow our own food, and it was hot, backbreaking labor. We had no irrigation systems, or even a hose and running water, so we had to haul water by the buck-etful to our garden. Everything was done manually. Some days you go up one row and down another with hoe in hand, busting up the dry, cracked ground.
Other days required you to spend hours hunched over, pulling weeds from between plants with bare hands. That task was especially hazardous, as you had to constantly be on the lookout for poisonous snakes, bumblebees, and wasps. If you let the monotony of the task lull your mind into a stupor you’d often receive a nasty surprise. After all the hard work, only about half the food was edible. The Damien Echols
30
bugs and animals would have gotten some of it, and other areas couldn’t be saved from rot.
The only thing we didn’t have to do ourselves was crop-dusting. Our house was in the middle of the field the plane flew back and forth over, and it gave us a healthy dose of poison every time it passed overhead. If you didn’t run for cover when you heard him coming, you’d get dusted too. I have personally inhaled enough pesticides to put a small country out of action. My mom and Jack’s advice? “Don’t look up at the plane, and try not to breathe deeply until he gets a little ways passed.” I developed allergies so bad that my mother had to start giving me injections at home. She wielded that syringe in an entirely unpleasant manner.
You had to be certain you had all the food out of the garden by the end of summer, or there was a chance the fire would destroy it. Every year after the final harvest, farmers rode through the fields surrounding our house and set them ablaze with instruments that looked like flamethrowers. This was so that all the burned and leftover vegetation fertilized the ground for the next year’s crop. I don’t know
Damien Echols
29
no mood to sit through two hours of bible thumping. Going to protestant churches became the bane of my existence.
The usual routine consisted of thirty minutes of singing, followed by an hour to an hour-and-a-half of preaching, and then twenty more minutes of singing to close the show while people waved their hands in the air, stared at the ceiling as if they were witnessing heaven, and shed copious amounts of tears. Every so often there was a surprise, like having a television set up. The lights were turned off, and a movie about the end of the world played. After it was over and everyone had the shit scared thoroughly out of them, there was a mad rush to the “altar” (a picnic bench). Everyone crowded together, huddled on their knees, and prayed that Jesus would take them home so they wouldn’t have to face the horrors of the end times.
Once, quite against my will, I was even in a Christmas play. All the kids played the part of toys hearing the story of Christmas for the first time. I was a toy motorcycle rider, and one of my stepbrothers had dressed me in all his biker finery for the occasion. I looked disturbingly like Rob Halford, the singer from the band Judas Priest. Very few people can pull off that stereotypical biker look, and I am not one of them.
There was a constant stream of new preachers that passed through after plying their trade for a short while, because the congregation would vote them out. One night someone would call for a vote, and that would be that. It was usually the result of the preacher siding (or being perceived to side) with one or another faction of the congregation. If one group felt that he was showing more sympathy to one backbiting clique than another, he’d soon be sent packing. We waved goodbye to many preachers as they drove off into the sunset with a moving van full of furniture.
Meanwhile, back on the home front, our financial situation continued its steadily downward spiral, and the tension continued to build. We started trying to grow our own food, and it was hot, backbreaking labor. We had no irrigation systems, or even a hose and running water, so we had to haul water by the buck-etful to our garden. Everything was done manually. Some days you go up one row and down another with hoe in hand, busting up the dry, cracked ground.
Other days required you to spend hours hunched over, pulling weeds from between plants with bare hands. That task was especially hazardous, as you had to constantly be on the lookout for poisonous snakes, bumblebees, and wasps. If you let the monotony of the task lull your mind into a stupor you’d often receive a nasty surprise. After all the hard work, only about half the food was edible. The Damien Echols
30
bugs and animals would have gotten some of it, and other areas couldn’t be saved from rot.
The only thing we didn’t have to do ourselves was crop-dusting. Our house was in the middle of the field the plane flew back and forth over, and it gave us a healthy dose of poison every time it passed overhead. If you didn’t run for cover when you heard him coming, you’d get dusted too. I have personally inhaled enough pesticides to put a small country out of action. My mom and Jack’s advice? “Don’t look up at the plane, and try not to breathe deeply until he gets a little ways passed.” I developed allergies so bad that my mother had to start giving me injections at home. She wielded that syringe in an entirely unpleasant manner.
You had to be certain you had all the food out of the garden by the end of summer, or there was a chance the fire would destroy it. Every year after the final harvest, farmers rode through the fields surrounding our house and set them ablaze with instruments that looked like flamethrowers. This was so that all the burned and leftover vegetation fertilized the ground for the next year’s crop. I don’t know
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