I roamed the spacious corridors of my church, alone, while my mind pressed against the teachings I learned there. My parents and grandparents served in countless volunteer roles, so there was work to be done at my church nearly every day. My grandparents had joined the Gilead Baptist church in the late 1940s, and my father was a member when he married my mother in 1958. She joined the church then, too. My mother’s provincial desires rejected her large, Irish, non-practicing Catholic family. My father’s choosing a Catholic woman from a rouge family of drinkers and gamblers furthered the Baptist mission of saving the lost.
The passenger seat was cavernous to my little self, like a sky’s expanse to a single star. My family took this hour-long pilgrimage each Saturday for nearly a year. We did it for my grandma. On our first journey, it was 1970, and I was six. We piled into our new, tan Oldsmobile sedan for the fifty-mile trip to Louisville, all of us dressed in church clothes. We drove slowly away from our red-brick ranch house perched upon the highest spot on our farm, the house that my grandparents vacated when they built a new house in town shortly after I was born in 1964.
I pulled my father’s top left desk drawer out slowly, so it wouldn’t make a sound. It was a summer afternoon; my father was still out in the fields and wouldn’t be home for hours. I was nine years old. With the drawer halfway open, I could see his navy-leather, ledger-style checkbook, which he used to buy supplies like tobacco seeds. When I pulled the drawer all the way out, I found what I was looking for: the blue-and-white pack of True cigarettes tucked away in the back.
