great regret). None of those whom I have loved since Baby Harper have ever given me more.
Baby Harper asked me where DeAnne was tonight. In between bites of Bridges’s pulled pork, I said that DeAnne was a witch. Baby Harper let out another little hiccup. He always enjoyed it when my responses didn’t answer his questions. He liked it when they came close but then would swerve and miss. What I wanted my great-uncle to know was that I held DeAnne responsible for Bobby, but under the fluorescent lights, amid the drone of nuclear families dining, awash in the vinegary miasma of Bridges, I couldn’t say his name aloud.
Monster. Menace. Blade.
Later that night, when I finally told my great-uncle Harper, he cried. He held my hands and cried. His own hands were trembling. I told him that it would be all right, that it had been all right for years now, seven, in fact, which did little to console him. We were sitting side by side by then, on the green velvet divan that was the centerpiece of his living room. My great-uncle was a sixty-two-year-old, never-married male librarian with a velvet divan, which he pointed out to me was the same color as the curtains that Scarlett O’Hara had made into a gown. These weren’t clues; they were flashing signs. I loved him more because of them. The good folks of the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area looked at my great-uncle and looked right past him. They are the unlit pigs, I remembered thinking that night.
Revelation is when God tells us the truth. Confession is when we tell it to Him. Or when we tell it to the person in our lives who makes us feel closest to Him. Kelly and I had come up with the “Or” and what followed it. Before Bobby, before the summer of Dill and Wade, Kelly and I were amateur theologians who supplemented our Sunday-school education with our own addition to the Scriptures. We drafted a new book of the New Testament, and we entitled it Illumination . Kelly came up with the name. She had a sophisticated vocabulary for a ten-year-old. She said the title aloud to me and asked, “So?”
“Prunes scallion,” I replied, making a face.
Kelly laughed. She understood that there was something unpleasant hidden within the word “prune” as well as the word “illumination,” so she repeated both words until I begged her to stop.
“Or what grahamcracker ?” Kelly asked.
“I’ll never bubblegum speak lemonade to you cannedgreenbeans again pancakenosyrup!”
“You cannedgreenbeans never bubblegum say any rice thing tomato to me now,” Kelly said, rolling her eyes.
If you charted our friendship, 1978 was a peak year for us. Our world was small and intimate and complete. We were ten years old. We were in the fourth grade. We had no pets, no siblings, and no crushes. We had our devotion to each other, to Dolly Parton, and, with Illumination , our devotion to Jesus. In letter #253, I asked Kelly what that word meant.
“Light,” she wrote back. “Also what happens when we have light. We can see more and better things.” Kelly dotted the i in the two lights and the one things with a heart, an anatomically correct one, complete with left and right ventricles.
Illumination began with how we felt about Jesus. We started with a list of the things that we loved about Him.
We love you Jesus! because you were a real cute baby .
We love you Jesus! because your arms are always wide open, and you want to hug us .
We love you Jesus! because people follow you around like sheep .
We love you Jesus! because your hair is long and shiny . (We think you use Breck shampoo.)
We love you Jesus! because wherever you go you bring your own illumination .
At the end of the writing of Illumination , when we were almost eleven and felt very confident about our faith (which was good, as we were about to stop believing in ourselves), we listed the Ten Commandments and then the ways out of them. Kelly said they were called “Exemptions,” and then she asked,
Baby Harper asked me where DeAnne was tonight. In between bites of Bridges’s pulled pork, I said that DeAnne was a witch. Baby Harper let out another little hiccup. He always enjoyed it when my responses didn’t answer his questions. He liked it when they came close but then would swerve and miss. What I wanted my great-uncle to know was that I held DeAnne responsible for Bobby, but under the fluorescent lights, amid the drone of nuclear families dining, awash in the vinegary miasma of Bridges, I couldn’t say his name aloud.
Monster. Menace. Blade.
Later that night, when I finally told my great-uncle Harper, he cried. He held my hands and cried. His own hands were trembling. I told him that it would be all right, that it had been all right for years now, seven, in fact, which did little to console him. We were sitting side by side by then, on the green velvet divan that was the centerpiece of his living room. My great-uncle was a sixty-two-year-old, never-married male librarian with a velvet divan, which he pointed out to me was the same color as the curtains that Scarlett O’Hara had made into a gown. These weren’t clues; they were flashing signs. I loved him more because of them. The good folks of the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area looked at my great-uncle and looked right past him. They are the unlit pigs, I remembered thinking that night.
Revelation is when God tells us the truth. Confession is when we tell it to Him. Or when we tell it to the person in our lives who makes us feel closest to Him. Kelly and I had come up with the “Or” and what followed it. Before Bobby, before the summer of Dill and Wade, Kelly and I were amateur theologians who supplemented our Sunday-school education with our own addition to the Scriptures. We drafted a new book of the New Testament, and we entitled it Illumination . Kelly came up with the name. She had a sophisticated vocabulary for a ten-year-old. She said the title aloud to me and asked, “So?”
“Prunes scallion,” I replied, making a face.
Kelly laughed. She understood that there was something unpleasant hidden within the word “prune” as well as the word “illumination,” so she repeated both words until I begged her to stop.
“Or what grahamcracker ?” Kelly asked.
“I’ll never bubblegum speak lemonade to you cannedgreenbeans again pancakenosyrup!”
“You cannedgreenbeans never bubblegum say any rice thing tomato to me now,” Kelly said, rolling her eyes.
If you charted our friendship, 1978 was a peak year for us. Our world was small and intimate and complete. We were ten years old. We were in the fourth grade. We had no pets, no siblings, and no crushes. We had our devotion to each other, to Dolly Parton, and, with Illumination , our devotion to Jesus. In letter #253, I asked Kelly what that word meant.
“Light,” she wrote back. “Also what happens when we have light. We can see more and better things.” Kelly dotted the i in the two lights and the one things with a heart, an anatomically correct one, complete with left and right ventricles.
Illumination began with how we felt about Jesus. We started with a list of the things that we loved about Him.
We love you Jesus! because you were a real cute baby .
We love you Jesus! because your arms are always wide open, and you want to hug us .
We love you Jesus! because people follow you around like sheep .
We love you Jesus! because your hair is long and shiny . (We think you use Breck shampoo.)
We love you Jesus! because wherever you go you bring your own illumination .
At the end of the writing of Illumination , when we were almost eleven and felt very confident about our faith (which was good, as we were about to stop believing in ourselves), we listed the Ten Commandments and then the ways out of them. Kelly said they were called “Exemptions,” and then she asked,
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