Chapter One
Before Wayne Fletcher ran for U.S. Senate in Minnesota, he was baptized at age 33 in a pond behind the First Baptist Church in Olmsted County, Minnesota. The pastor of the Church had found him lying next to a 20-ounce Mountain Dew bottle and a Three Dog Night cassette tape along the side of U.S. Highway 14. The church volunteered its congregation to the community once a month April through October as part of the Adopt-a-Highway program.
When Pastor Saul Peterfield kicked Wayne's side with his boot, he was thinking about whether Wayne was homeless as well as dead. If he was dead and homeless then Pastor Peterfield was thinking he would have no other choice but to hold a service for him and pass the collection plate around his congregation to pay for his burial fees. When he kicked him, Wayne said, ``Ouch.''
``Oh, I'm sorry,'' the pastor said. ``I was just trying to see if you were, well, if you were awake or not.''
``You have to help me,'' Wayne said. ``You have to help me. I don't know what I'm doing.''
This was the first highway cleanup of the year because it was early April, so, being only a few days after Pastor Peterfield had given his Good Friday service, Wayne's words, ``I don't know what I'm doing,'' arrived at the ears of the pastor as a modern equivalent to a biblical event. The pastor had just this past Friday read aloud to his congregation the words of Jesus as accounted by the gospel of Luke, ``Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'' This similarity along with Wayne's obvious request for spiritual guidance was clearly a sign or at least a test for the pastor.
``I will do everything I can to help you,'' he said down at Wayne, who hadn't started getting up yet. In fact, he was beginning to nod his head backward in the pop bottle as his consciousness left him. The pastor continued, ``What ever you have done, what ever your sins are, you have to know that I forgive you. And you may stand before Christ, and he will forgive you, too.''
When Pastor Peterfield originally kicked Wayne into consciousness, Wayne had said, ``Ouch," and then, ``You have to help me. You have to help me. I don't know what I'm doing.''
But he had wanted to keep going and say, ``here.''
``You have to help me. I don't know what I'm doing here.''
It's impossible to say now, but it seems much more unlikely that Pastor Saul Peterfield would have recognized ``I don't know what I'm doing here'' as a holy call to action. But with Wayne Fletcher's alcohol level much too high and with the hot April sun baking his drunken blood, he was much too out of it as they say to speak his last word much less notice the pastor's Samaritan behavior.
Wayne Fletcher had been a computer help desk attendant at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, the largest city county seed of Olmsted County. He was lying in the ditch along Highway 14 because his car wouldn't run which was because he was trying start the car with his house key. He left his car in the Holiday Inn bar parking lot and started off on what he thought was the way home. The reason Wayne ever got drunk enough to use his house keys for the car in the first place was that a neuron in his brain finally turned on or off while he was at work the day before being found in the ditch. The switch of this one neuron let the rest of his brain know that it was finally time for the complete mental collapse of Wayne Fletch, or as Saul Peterfield would later call it, Wayne's spiritual lightening strike.
...
Wayne's first baptism had not been an immersion baptism, where the whole body is sunken by the minister in a pool or river. He parents had him dressed up in expensive baby clothes and the minister at their Congregationalist church in Connecticut dropped little handfuls of water onto his face and bald baby head. At that Congregationalist Church, like many others, the families of church each brought jars or cups or vases of their houses tap water to church when their was to be a baptism during the service. The baptismal music started and each family sent somebody to walk to the alter and combine their water with everybody else's and that collection served as the baptismal water. During the baptism the church members stood and swore to pastor and presumably God that their stake in the child's life was represented by their stake in the baptismal water. They were all the new family of the child and they were all ordered by God to watch over him.
Wayne and his parents moved to Minnesota a year after this first baptism, but their family did not come with them. Wayne hadn't seen any of his baptismal family again. He could have used a family like that, Pastor Peterfield told him during the drive from the ditch back to the church.
``Temptation is always around us. And you see, if you don't have the faith to stand up against it yourself, then you fall back onto the grace of others. If you were a member of a church you would have a whole family of people looking out for you.''
Wayne hadn't told the pastor much in the car. He said the he didn't attend church anymore, and even that was just by saying ``No,'' to the pastor who had asked, ``Do you still go to church?'' before even asking what Wayne's name was. His forehead rested against the passenger's side window of Pastor Peterfield's Lincoln Town Car. He still had alcohol in his blood stream even after urinating through his clothing as the highway cleanup team helped him to his feet and into the Town Car.
His parents once owned a Town Car. They bought it after arriving to Rochester. They had driven to Rochester from Connecticut in behind the moving trucks in a blue Honda Civic hatchback. The new Town Car was tan like the pastor's Town Car. The newer years of the Lincoln Town Car had buckets bucket seats like the pastor's. His parents' Town Car was a much older year and had a long bench seat in the front that the driver and passenger shared. Wayned would request to sit in between his parents in the middle of the front bench seat. His parents' also had manual windows they had to crank to lower. The pastor's were automatically powered, and while he drove Wayne through Rochester toward the church he automatically rolled down Wayne's window, which was supporting his head. His forehead skin wend down with the window until it snagged because the friction force was overcome by the force of his still in tact body's desire to stay in tact.
``What you need is some fresh air. Look out there,'' the pastor said then paused. He hadn't asked the man he found for his name. He quickly asked, ``I'm sorry, what's your name?''
``Wayne,'' Wayne said, but his mouth was yawning so ``Wayne'' sounded like ``Duane.''
``Look out there, Duane. This is what God has made for you. Look at the clouds. Look at the sun. Well, don't look right at the sun, but look at how the sun makes the grass and everything look beautiful.''
Wayne stared directly up at the sun. He winced and pushed his shoulders up toward his eyes. The pastor kept listing things to look at, but Wayne could only see where the sun's light had burnt a whole in his vision. A blue glow followed his focus around the car and out the window. It was easier to close his eyes and watch the blue glow change hue and shape against the back of his eye lids.
The glow faded enough to open his eyes as the Town Car entered the parking lot of Son of Bethlehem First Baptist Church. Pastor Peterfield was still talking to Wayne, but Wayne hadn't been listening ever since the sun blinded him. He was working his fingertips into his temples and breathing slowly into his palms.
...
The pastor took Wayne by the shoulder and showed him into the church kitchen. He told Wayne that there was food he was going to warm for him in a microwave oven while Wayne used the bathroom. The bathroom did not have a shower, but Pastor Peterfield told Wayne he could wash his face and anything else he wanted to wash in the sink.
Alone in the bathroom, Wayne stood in front of the sink facing the mirror. His eyes closed and opened. His eyes closed and opened again. Then his eyes closed and stayed closed. He saw lines of colors and splotches of other colors with his eyes closed. It was dark, but the light in the bathroom through the skin of his eyelids made the darkness red-colored, especially at the top where he would have seen the light if his eyes were open.
Wayne blinked and came into the toilet stall. He sat on the toilet seat and repeated what he had done facing the mirror. He looked at the floor, tiled in white with black tiles patterned throughout the white. His shoes had bits of grass in between the laces, and he picked it all out and put it in the toilet bowl. He looked between his thighs at the grass in the toilet. Most of the grass floated at the top of the water, but one green blade sank slowly to the bottom and down the bottom of the bowl until he could not see it any longer. After 30 minutes, Pastor Peterfield came into the stall where Wayne was asleep sitting on the toilet with his head rested on his knees.
The rest of the day the pastor tried to keep Wayne conscious by telling him how his life was now saved and it was up to Wayne not to fall back into the devil's business. Tomorrow would be Thursday, and Wayne could be baptized by him during the Thursday night service.
Baptisms were usually held during Sunday morning services because there were usually a planned celebration. Peterfield considered this an emergence baptism. Wayne needed to be baptized immediately. He spent the rest of the day with the speechless Wayne teaching him why he had been born again as a true christian.
Wayne spent that night on the couch in Pastor Peterfield's office. By evening he was no longer drunk at all, but had yet to see any reason for saying anything to the minister who as far as he could tell had abducted him.
The door of the office woke Wayne the morning of his baptism when it shut behind Pastor Peterfield and the assistant minister, Pastor Tom Flick. Before falling asleep the night before, Wayne remembered being sent home from work the day earlier. Then he remembered the ditch and the highway cleanup people and uncovering his eyes as he was led into a church kitchen and Pastor Peterfield. Wayne sat up and looked at the two pastors walking toward him. He laughed and coughed, and they stopped in the middle of the room. Wayne quoted a poem he'd read in a mens magazine:
``There once was a man of the church
who, from pulpits where he did perch,
sold bottles of rum
and sticks of mint gum
and penises made out of birch.''
When Pastor Saul Peterfield kicked Wayne's side with his boot, he was thinking about whether Wayne was homeless as well as dead. If he was dead and homeless then Pastor Peterfield was thinking he would have no other choice but to hold a service for him and pass the collection plate around his congregation to pay for his burial fees. When he kicked him, Wayne said, ``Ouch.''
``Oh, I'm sorry,'' the pastor said. ``I was just trying to see if you were, well, if you were awake or not.''
``You have to help me,'' Wayne said. ``You have to help me. I don't know what I'm doing.''
This was the first highway cleanup of the year because it was early April, so, being only a few days after Pastor Peterfield had given his Good Friday service, Wayne's words, ``I don't know what I'm doing,'' arrived at the ears of the pastor as a modern equivalent to a biblical event. The pastor had just this past Friday read aloud to his congregation the words of Jesus as accounted by the gospel of Luke, ``Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'' This similarity along with Wayne's obvious request for spiritual guidance was clearly a sign or at least a test for the pastor.
``I will do everything I can to help you,'' he said down at Wayne, who hadn't started getting up yet. In fact, he was beginning to nod his head backward in the pop bottle as his consciousness left him. The pastor continued, ``What ever you have done, what ever your sins are, you have to know that I forgive you. And you may stand before Christ, and he will forgive you, too.''
When Pastor Peterfield originally kicked Wayne into consciousness, Wayne had said, ``Ouch," and then, ``You have to help me. You have to help me. I don't know what I'm doing.''
But he had wanted to keep going and say, ``here.''
``You have to help me. I don't know what I'm doing here.''
It's impossible to say now, but it seems much more unlikely that Pastor Saul Peterfield would have recognized ``I don't know what I'm doing here'' as a holy call to action. But with Wayne Fletcher's alcohol level much too high and with the hot April sun baking his drunken blood, he was much too out of it as they say to speak his last word much less notice the pastor's Samaritan behavior.
Wayne Fletcher had been a computer help desk attendant at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, the largest city county seed of Olmsted County. He was lying in the ditch along Highway 14 because his car wouldn't run which was because he was trying start the car with his house key. He left his car in the Holiday Inn bar parking lot and started off on what he thought was the way home. The reason Wayne ever got drunk enough to use his house keys for the car in the first place was that a neuron in his brain finally turned on or off while he was at work the day before being found in the ditch. The switch of this one neuron let the rest of his brain know that it was finally time for the complete mental collapse of Wayne Fletch, or as Saul Peterfield would later call it, Wayne's spiritual lightening strike.
...
Wayne's first baptism had not been an immersion baptism, where the whole body is sunken by the minister in a pool or river. He parents had him dressed up in expensive baby clothes and the minister at their Congregationalist church in Connecticut dropped little handfuls of water onto his face and bald baby head. At that Congregationalist Church, like many others, the families of church each brought jars or cups or vases of their houses tap water to church when their was to be a baptism during the service. The baptismal music started and each family sent somebody to walk to the alter and combine their water with everybody else's and that collection served as the baptismal water. During the baptism the church members stood and swore to pastor and presumably God that their stake in the child's life was represented by their stake in the baptismal water. They were all the new family of the child and they were all ordered by God to watch over him.
Wayne and his parents moved to Minnesota a year after this first baptism, but their family did not come with them. Wayne hadn't seen any of his baptismal family again. He could have used a family like that, Pastor Peterfield told him during the drive from the ditch back to the church.
``Temptation is always around us. And you see, if you don't have the faith to stand up against it yourself, then you fall back onto the grace of others. If you were a member of a church you would have a whole family of people looking out for you.''
Wayne hadn't told the pastor much in the car. He said the he didn't attend church anymore, and even that was just by saying ``No,'' to the pastor who had asked, ``Do you still go to church?'' before even asking what Wayne's name was. His forehead rested against the passenger's side window of Pastor Peterfield's Lincoln Town Car. He still had alcohol in his blood stream even after urinating through his clothing as the highway cleanup team helped him to his feet and into the Town Car.
His parents once owned a Town Car. They bought it after arriving to Rochester. They had driven to Rochester from Connecticut in behind the moving trucks in a blue Honda Civic hatchback. The new Town Car was tan like the pastor's Town Car. The newer years of the Lincoln Town Car had buckets bucket seats like the pastor's. His parents' Town Car was a much older year and had a long bench seat in the front that the driver and passenger shared. Wayned would request to sit in between his parents in the middle of the front bench seat. His parents' also had manual windows they had to crank to lower. The pastor's were automatically powered, and while he drove Wayne through Rochester toward the church he automatically rolled down Wayne's window, which was supporting his head. His forehead skin wend down with the window until it snagged because the friction force was overcome by the force of his still in tact body's desire to stay in tact.
``What you need is some fresh air. Look out there,'' the pastor said then paused. He hadn't asked the man he found for his name. He quickly asked, ``I'm sorry, what's your name?''
``Wayne,'' Wayne said, but his mouth was yawning so ``Wayne'' sounded like ``Duane.''
``Look out there, Duane. This is what God has made for you. Look at the clouds. Look at the sun. Well, don't look right at the sun, but look at how the sun makes the grass and everything look beautiful.''
Wayne stared directly up at the sun. He winced and pushed his shoulders up toward his eyes. The pastor kept listing things to look at, but Wayne could only see where the sun's light had burnt a whole in his vision. A blue glow followed his focus around the car and out the window. It was easier to close his eyes and watch the blue glow change hue and shape against the back of his eye lids.
The glow faded enough to open his eyes as the Town Car entered the parking lot of Son of Bethlehem First Baptist Church. Pastor Peterfield was still talking to Wayne, but Wayne hadn't been listening ever since the sun blinded him. He was working his fingertips into his temples and breathing slowly into his palms.
...
The pastor took Wayne by the shoulder and showed him into the church kitchen. He told Wayne that there was food he was going to warm for him in a microwave oven while Wayne used the bathroom. The bathroom did not have a shower, but Pastor Peterfield told Wayne he could wash his face and anything else he wanted to wash in the sink.
Alone in the bathroom, Wayne stood in front of the sink facing the mirror. His eyes closed and opened. His eyes closed and opened again. Then his eyes closed and stayed closed. He saw lines of colors and splotches of other colors with his eyes closed. It was dark, but the light in the bathroom through the skin of his eyelids made the darkness red-colored, especially at the top where he would have seen the light if his eyes were open.
Wayne blinked and came into the toilet stall. He sat on the toilet seat and repeated what he had done facing the mirror. He looked at the floor, tiled in white with black tiles patterned throughout the white. His shoes had bits of grass in between the laces, and he picked it all out and put it in the toilet bowl. He looked between his thighs at the grass in the toilet. Most of the grass floated at the top of the water, but one green blade sank slowly to the bottom and down the bottom of the bowl until he could not see it any longer. After 30 minutes, Pastor Peterfield came into the stall where Wayne was asleep sitting on the toilet with his head rested on his knees.
The rest of the day the pastor tried to keep Wayne conscious by telling him how his life was now saved and it was up to Wayne not to fall back into the devil's business. Tomorrow would be Thursday, and Wayne could be baptized by him during the Thursday night service.
Baptisms were usually held during Sunday morning services because there were usually a planned celebration. Peterfield considered this an emergence baptism. Wayne needed to be baptized immediately. He spent the rest of the day with the speechless Wayne teaching him why he had been born again as a true christian.
Wayne spent that night on the couch in Pastor Peterfield's office. By evening he was no longer drunk at all, but had yet to see any reason for saying anything to the minister who as far as he could tell had abducted him.
The door of the office woke Wayne the morning of his baptism when it shut behind Pastor Peterfield and the assistant minister, Pastor Tom Flick. Before falling asleep the night before, Wayne remembered being sent home from work the day earlier. Then he remembered the ditch and the highway cleanup people and uncovering his eyes as he was led into a church kitchen and Pastor Peterfield. Wayne sat up and looked at the two pastors walking toward him. He laughed and coughed, and they stopped in the middle of the room. Wayne quoted a poem he'd read in a mens magazine:
``There once was a man of the church
who, from pulpits where he did perch,
sold bottles of rum
and sticks of mint gum
and penises made out of birch.''
posted by Gary Crane at 3:45 PM
0 comments
