Baptism by Christina Osborn

Twenty nine black books in a box. Twenty nine black tongues in white teeth holding no particular spot on the books but heavy with the weight of the words I have rained upon ivory pages since I was eight years old and baptized in the white font at the feet of my Michigan relatives and the Utah ones too who had flown all the way across the midlands to see the second oldest of my grandmother’s brood initiated into the family faith. I didn’t really want to get baptized; it seemed liked a lot of paperwork and a ceremony so archaic and fraught with vagueries filled me with a dread born of apathy and ambivalence. I felt the same way when I voted in October (early voter, I’m not an overachiever just a vagabond so I figured if I wanted to get my digs in I’d better act quick or the clerks would be sneering at one less democratic ballot before throwing it on the thin pile that means there’s a tenacious sense of reality in this state full of sheep). I voted this October and I voted in March of 1998 with my toes as they slipped into the warm water where my father waited with his white robes and receding hairline, smiling with the encouragement of one prisoner to another, Don’t worry, Stockholm is pretty in the Spring. Eight years later my father and I left the church together, he with his faith far behind him, dead and bled and half-buried under a cracked bathtub and me with the acid taste of too many ambiguities on my tongue, so when the bishop came to implore me to leave my name on his books I burned through his bullshit with the cool logic of a girl too many times assumed to be a fool. Sitting for the dinner in the golden late afternoon after I’d allowed myself to be tilted backwards and held under the hundred and twenty degree water while my grandmother cried and my father spoke a twenty second burble of dogma that couldn’t quite cut through the ripples of ceiling panels and fluorescent lights, I remembered feeling nothing. I felt nothing as the shadows grew and relatives I barely knew patted my pigtails and I stared straight ahead at the flower settings and the fat black bible with my name crawling across the leather in silver script, the bible that I opened only a handful of times when I was thirteen and looking for something to hold onto and it didn’t turn out to be that book. I dragged that three pound catalogue of human metaphor across the country and through the warren of desperation my mother dragged us through and when I threw it away it was because I was trying to rid myself of dead weight. On that day when I was eight years old, the bible seemed to be the important gift, the one everyone knew would help me so much. Joseph Campbell said the best way to avoid a religious experience is by expecting one but I don’t think my family ever read any Joseph Campbelll. So the journal my father gave me was overlooked by everyone except me, because eight year olds can still see things for the way they are, can still see the hope in someone else’s face, and I saw the hope there in my dad who was my favorite person, my mentor, my comrade. He didn’t enjoy my mother’s company, so he sought me out. He didn’t want to talk to her so he talked to me. He didn’t have any friends, so I was his friend. He didn’t trust anyone so I was the shoulder he cried on. And that is not the cross a child should bear but I bore it  because what else do you do when you are the confidant of not just one but both parents who never grew up and don’t know what to do, so they stay on the phone all night talking it through with a kid cuddled up learning the language of pain at the feet of the two people who should’ve been teaching a language a love, who should’ve found out who they were before filling a cup that cracked before it could be drunk from again. So I have this box full of word and I guess if I get cold and there’s nothing else I could start a fire. Or maybe there’s wisdom still buried in those years that I didn’t see my dad, when my mom was giving me plenty of material for my daily scrawl, when sometimes I would get so angry that I’d write from top to bottom for two hours before I could speak his name again. I didn’t believe in getting angry because it didn’t seem to help, so I wrote it away and held it all down. And not that I’m older and not writing as much, I see why that shit all had to come out and I see why the feeling of anger couldn’t be felt, but only recorded. I have these twenty nine books in a closet and I can’t spend them or grow them or call them by name but they may be the one last physical trace of a past I ignored for almost ten years and now it’s bubbling up out of this black pool inside me that smells like a cold golden afternoon on the lawn of a church three lifetimes away.