Bugsy, Brent and I were three happy teenagers that Saturday in early June. Working chartreuse jigs around willow clumps, we filled two stringers with slab-sided speckled crappie. We couldn’t wait to be back on the lake at daybreak the next morning.
“Fishing on the Lord’s Day?” Mama hissed, glaring holes through our sinful souls. “Heathens! You will do no such thing. You’ll attend church, and when I look up in the balcony during the service, y’all better be listening to the preacher, not cuttin’ up. Now … eat supper and dress them fish.”
Reverend Calvin Crane was a tall, skinny, cadaverous man of the cloth who looked more like a sardonic, skeletal scarecrow than a sanctified soul saver. We called him Ichabod because he reminded us of Washington Irving’s schoolmaster in “The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow.” He often flagellated his followers with doomsday diatribes about swimming eternally in Satan’s fiery lake, where, Sunday or not, nobody fishes. On this particular Sabbath, he held forth on how mortals must joy in tribulation like the apostles and be fishers of men.
Well, we weren’t joying in the tribulation of hearing his harangue, nor being told to fish for men, not crappie. So, we entertained ourselves and ignored Ichabod.
All three of us got Swiss Army knives for Christmas. While Brent and I opened and closed our blades, screwdrivers, scissors, pliers, gut hooks, compasses, and magnifying glasses, Bugsy was quietly using his knife’s fingernail file to remove the brown skin from almonds. As his name implied, Bugsy was a tad “tetched.”
As Ichabod slowly spooled up to his usual crescendo at about five minutes before noon, at which point lost souls must opt for salvation or damnation, Bugsy elbowed Brent in the ribs and motioned for him to do the same to me.
Having gained our undivided attention, he tucked his lower jaw under the upper one and startled us with a sinister smile in which he had positioned two gleaming white almonds with the pointed ends down — turning him into a teenage Dracula!
Brent and I panicked, not because our pew mate was a fanged monster, but because there was no restraining the rising pitch of howling hysteria we were so hopelessly trying to strangle within ourselves.
Another glance at Count Dracula, and the fountains of our great deep were broken up. Snickers became giggles; giggles, guffaws; guffaws, howls. Ichabod froze, his mouth gaped open in mid-sentence, and a sea of angry faces craned upward, glaring at three modern-day Gadarene demoniacs.
Our dilemma hastened toward Hades in a hand basket. Dashing for the exit, I stumbled and went sprawling; Brent closed his knife on a finger and was bleeding like a cutthroat goat; and — compounding the certain corporal consequences of our crime — the tetched one flashed his diabolical dentures at Ichabod and his flock!
Although many years have passed since Satan deployed us as delegates of disruption, I can still hear Ichabod screaming above the congregational chaos: “Can we puh-leez have reverence!”
Jimmy Reed is an Oxford, Mississippi resident, Ole Miss and Delta State University alumnus, Vietnam Era Army Veteran, former Mississippi Delta cotton farmer and ginner, author, and retired college teacher.
This story is a selection from Jimmy Reed’s latest book, entitled The Jaybird Tales.
Copies, including personalized autographs, can be reserved by notifying the author via email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
