Boys Life

about a hundred other people in the sweltering hotbox of the Freedom Baptist Church on Shawson Street near the gargoyle bridge. Neither Dad nor I wore a coat and tie, as this was not a Sunday service, and some of the other men even wore their field-stained overalls. We saw a lot of people we knew, and before the service began the place was standing room only, including a lot of sullen teenagers who looked as if they’d been dragged into the church on nooses by their cheerless parents. I guess the reverend’s urgent hollering had gotten his message across, as had the signs he’d posted all over town that proclaimed he would be “wrestling with the devil on Wednesday night-our children are worth the fight.” A record player and speakers had been set up at the front of the church, and at long last Reverend Blessett-flush-faced and sweating in a white suit and a rose-colored shirt-strode out onto the podium with the offending 45 rpm disc of black vinyl in one hand. In the other he held the leather grip of a wooden box with small holes on its sides, which he placed on the floor out of the way. Then he grinned at his audience and hollered, “Are we ready to fight Satan tonight, brothers and sisters?”
    Amen! they shouted back. Amen! and Amen!
    They were ready, all right.
    Reverend Blessett began with an impassioned sermon about how the evils of the big city were creeping into Zephyr, how Satan wanted to drag all the young people into hell and how the citizens had to fight the devil every minute of their lives to keep from being fried in fire. Reverend Blessett’s face sweated and his arms flew this way and that and he paced back and forth before the congregation like a man possessed. I have to say, he put on a great show and I was more than half convinced Satan was hiding under my bed waiting for me to open a National Geographic to one of the naked-bosom pictures.
    He stopped pacing and grinned out at us with his glistening face. The doors had been propped open, but the heat was stifling and the sweat was sticking my shirt to my skin. In the hazy golden light, Reverend Blessett was steaming. He held up the record. “You came to hear it,” he said. “And hear it you shall.”
    He switched on the record player, put the disc down on its thick spindle, and held the needle over the first groove. “Listen,” he said, “to the voices of the demons.” Then he lowered the needle, and a static of scratches clicked through the speakers.
    Those voices. Demons or angels? Oh, those voices! Round round get around I get around. Way out of town. I get around.
    “Did you hear it?” He jerked the needle up. “Right there! Tellin’ our children that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence? That they’re not to be satisfied livin’ in their own hometown anymore? It’s devil’s wanderlust they’re singin’ about!” Again the needle went down. When the song reached the part about having a car that’s never been beat and never missing yet with the girls we meet, Reverend Blessett was almost dancing with delirious rage. “Hear it? Doesn’t that tell our young people to race their cars in the streets? Doesn’t it tell them to indulge in free and easy pleasures of the flesh?” He said it like a sneer. “Think of it, folks! Your sons and daughters inflamed by this garbage, and Satan just a-laughin’ at us all! Picture our streets runnin’ red with the blood of our children in wrecked hotrods, and your pregnant daughters and sex-mad sons! You think such things happen only in the big city? You think we here in Zephyr are safe from the prince of darkness? You listen to some more of this so-called ‘music’ and you’ll find out how wrong you are!” He let the needle play some more. The sound wasn’t very good. I think Reverend Blessett himself had listened to the song a few dozen times, judging from all the scratches. I don’t care what he said; the music was about freedom and happiness, not about crashing cars in the streets. I didn’t hear the song like Reverend Blessett did. To me it was the sound of summer, a slice of heaven on earth; to him it was all stinking brimstone and the devil’s leer. I had to wonder how a man of God like he was could hear Satan’s voice in every word. Wasn’t God in control of everything, like the Bible said? If God was, then why was Reverend Blessett so scared of the devil?
    “Heathen trash!” he roared at the part of the record where the Beach Boys sang about not