A Flashback: A Summer Family Experience that Framed the Rest of My Life.
We all have stories to tell about how we grew up, about the experiences that made us who we are, about the unsettling moments that defined us. This is one of mine.
One day in my eleventh year, without notice, everything went quiet in our house. The crows stopped cawing, the mules stopped braying, the cat stopped chasing the mouse. The vultures had finished their morning scan. It did not feel like “just another day” in the life of a fundamentalist missionary family in the Amazon jungles of Bolivia.
It was 1952, the year Rocky Marciano became world heavyweight boxing champion when Jersey Joe Walcott went down in the 13th round.
My younger brother began shadow boxing with gloves that looked like large gourds tied to his scrawny arms. My mother retreated early to the far corner of our house, where she tended her tomato garden. My father was in the third courtyard tinkering with the Jeep, gunning the engine, raring to go. My older brother was dressed in new pants that pooled over his Buster Brown shoes. He had a new jacket that drooped over his shoulders like a tent. He was sitting on a stump stool outside his bedroom looking like Rodin’s The Thinker. An old scuffed-up suitcase, tied with a worn sisal rope, was next to him.
I knew where everyone was, but I had no idea where everyone was going. Nobody had said anything to me. Nothing out of the ordinary about my older brother was mentioned at last night’s evening prayers. There had to have been planning meetings, talk-it-through sessions, but I had not been invited.
A two-finger whistle sliced the silence, a sound my father had trained us to hear in case we ever got lost in the jungle where calling out names would not have been a good idea. My brother got up, dragged his suitcase to the Jeep, and hopped in. He liked to ride shotgun.
Without a word, they drove off.
Many hours later my father returned by himself.
I imagined this was some kind of drill, a practice run he was testing. I asked him where my brother was and he told me he had boarded the weekly DC-3 Pan Am flight and flown off to a foreign place called Ben Lippen, some kind of Jesus School in North Carolina in America for his education. A place I had never heard of. He said it as casually as if he had said “gone to the candy store across the plaza.”
I wondered what he had done wrong to deserve this punishment, this singular isolation from our family. Nothing was said about when or if we would see him again. He was my best friend, not just my older brother. I quivered a little, realizing that I would now be the oldest white boy in this isolated part of the world. I always did what he told me to do, even though I hated it when he said, “you’re not old enough to know about that, yet.” Always the anticipated “yet” of a younger brother.
I asked my father why it had taken so long for him to return from the airport, a five-mile drive from our home. This was the part of Bolivia where an occasional oxcart would constitute traffic on wide grass-dirt roads. He said, “Some things just take a while.” He was only a man of words and explanations when he was standing behind a pulpit.
My mother was still in the garden, weeping, not weeding. Maybe they are the same thing sometimes.
Before I could ask, she said, “It’s God’s plan for us.”
“What?” I almost asked: God likes to split families apart? We could all have gone to North Carolina. There are lost souls there too.
I had been sucker-punched.
My younger brother’s shadow was now twice as big as he was, looming large in a foreboding way with nothing to say.
I took a silent standing eight-count. It was time for me to find new ways to stay busy so I didn’t have to go play to be happy at the end of the day.
A week later, my mother gave me a puppy. All I remember she said was “a dog is a boy’s best friend.” I had nothing to say. The week felt like a month of Mondays.
I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of the end of my family. Would I be next? My father had just put mission before family. He had decided that serving God was better than serving family. It would take me twenty-five years to experience the weight of that day.
