Hamilton Cain - This Boys Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing

Copyright 2011 by Hamilton Cain

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The extract on is from Im No Kin to the Monkey written by Dave Hendricks. 1982 Chestnut Mound Music (BMI). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission. All rights on behalf of Chestnut Mound Music administered by Cal IV Entertainment, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cain, Hamilton.
This boys faith: notes from a Southern Baptist upbringing/Hamilton Cain.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Cain, Hamilton. 2. BaptistsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title. BX 6495. C 24 A 3 2011
286.1092dc22
[B]

2010041026

eISBN: 978-0-307-46396-8

Jacket design: Nupoor Gordon
Jacket photograph: Susan Fox/Trevillion Images

v3.1

For Owen, Nathaniel, and Peter

She had gone under a wave, which nobody else had noticed. You could say anything you liked about what had happenedbut what it amounted to was going under a wave. She had gone under and through it and was left with a cold sheen on her skin, a beating in her ears, a cavity in her chest, and revolt in her stomach. It was anarchy she was up againsta devouring muddle. Sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing consolations.

Alice Munro, Carried Away

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar

The names and characteristics of some individuals in this book have been changed.

SACRIFICE OF ISAA

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK , 2003

O ver the course of that cool, damp spring, the news had grown steadily worse. Not long after my wife, Ellen, and I had brought home our first baby, Owen, from the hospital, we noticed he wasnt hitting his early developmental milestones. At two months he couldnt hold up his head. At four months his quick kicks and fluttery hand movements abruptly ceased. His pediatrician described his condition as hypotonic; his muscle tone was acutely low. When she tapped his knee with a rubber hammer, his leg remained inert, indicating the absence of deep tendon reflexes. At her urging, wed moved numbly through a battery of doctors, tests, and specialists, shuttling from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back to Brooklyn, hoping to pin down the cause of his severe weakness. The conversations were conducted in low, lockjaw tones with sidelong glanceslook how calm and rational I seem, but in reality Im about to jump out of my skin.

Then Owen contracted a simple cold, the common currency of infants and children. With no motor neuron ability, he couldnt cough up the mucus that pooled along his airways. As the season turned warmer, his right lung filled with fluid and collapsed. The color in his face faded like a doily, leaving a touch of blue around the mouth. Somehow he knew to concentrate on the next shallow breath, and the next, and the next, the good lung working like a fragile bellows. His tiny abdomen would fist out with a bubble of air, release it, tense again for the inhale.

He lost weight, veering to the point when his tissue would feed on itself, shutting down his organs. The doctors sank deeper into a quandary, debated the pros and cons of a prolonged hospitalization. Snippets drifted back to us.

We cant seem to get a genetic diagnosis, but well call it an SMA phenotype, thats spinal muscular atrophy.

These patients typically develop chronic pulmonary problems.

Well treat him the best we can, but we all must be realistic.

The statistics paint a bleak picture: most babies with this type of SMA dont live to see their first birthdays, none their second.

Ellen fell into her own depression, weeping in the shower each morning. We braced ourselves for the clinicians imminent verdict, one that loomed over us like a judge wielding a gavel. Parents, please rise: just love your child, keep him comfortable until

And when that sentence stalled before its awful period, when the worst failed to materialize, Ellen rallied. She doled out responsibilities: shed take care of the 2:00 A.M . feedings and schedule the copious medical appointments while Id handle the apartment chores and the frequent runs to the pharmacy. She made lists for the eventuality of a hospital stay, leaning her willowy frame against the kitchen counter, dark hair gathered behind horn-rimmed glasses. Id often give in to an inner vertigo, however, slumped light-headed for hours on the couch in the living room and staring out the window at the ivy-caped wall of the brownstone next door. Stunned into a stasis, estranged from everything.

You cant keep it all bottled up, Ellen said. It will choke you.

But I couldnt compare it to anything. Except I remembered flying once, in a commercial jet over Virginia, when a mechanical glitch had triggered a sudden, erratic motion. The pilot had announced that we needed to land ASAP. Id been sitting in coach, reading a novel, when the plane lurched to one side, inscribing a steep, descending arc. For twenty minutes I bent forward, ears popped, taut body caging a writhing, atavistic snake, while the pilot wrestled us down to an elegant glide on the tarmac at Dulles.

I recalled what Id done: Id prayed. Id prayed the whole time.

Just an ingrained reflex, or something else?

On Sunday, then, I donned a conservative outfitstarched shirt with an Eton collar, pressed khakis, and a navy blazerand walked the few blocks down Lafayette Avenue, with its nave of elms, to the imposing brick Presbyterian church. For a while I lingered on the sidewalk, looking up at the steeple and spandrels, unsure of myself, until a smiling elder, apple-cheeked and snowy-haired, greeted me with a bulletin and a handshake.

An image stirred from its dormancy: my father standing in our churchs vestibule in Tennessee, wearing a robins egg blue leisure suit, handing out bulletins.

Inside, I scanned the sanctuary for some sacred detail to relieve the miasma that had furled over me, heavy as a quilt. The pews velvet cushions. The green hymnal with gilt lettering blurred from decades of use. The stained-glass rosette window. The spare balcony spangled with red, gold, and azure. Like an emigrant returning to the old country, strutting jauntily down the Jetway into the arms of a thronged family, I felt Id come home.

Or was the feeling less glorious, more alloyed somehow?

As the organist played an overture, I spied an acquaintance across the aisle, a woman in her late forties, her hair raked into a gray bun, her face waxen. Shed folded her arm loosely around her son, a boy maybe ten years old, saucer-eyed and dimpled, dressed in chinos and a rep tie. Her gesture was so subtle I doubted he realized she was cradling him; yet to me it seemed fierce and protective, evoking a bond I was only beginning to learn, and to mourn.

Another image: another boy, wearing a clip-on tie and sitting rigid next to his mother as she pressed a silver dollar into a brass collection plate.