DEMERITS
kurt nimmo
Eddie and me were walking to school.
When we passed the Protestant Church on Hilbert Street Eddie turned and said to me, “Blake, you believe in God?”
“I don’t know,” I answered.
We walked a little farther. It was five minutes until eight, we were in the ninth grade, and we would be late for school again. When you were late they gave you a demerit. If you accumulated too many demerits you were made to stay after and do special, tedious assignments. I had three demerits. Eddie had five or six demerits. He had to stay over and write the assignments.
“Do you believe in the Devil?” said Eddie.
I looked at him. “I don’t know,” I said. “If there’s a God, then it stands to reason that there’s a Devil. If you believe what they tell you.”
“Do you believe what they tell you?”
“Some of it,” I said.
“What parts of it do you believe?”
“I believe there was a Jesus.”
“Was He the Son of God?”
“I don’t know.”
Eddie took out a cigarette and lit it with his Zippo. “If you don’t know if there’s a God,” he said, “why do you go to church?”
“Girls,” I said.
We both went to the same Lutheran church on Sundays. Eddie worked the altar and helped pass out the holy wafers on Communion. When I went to the altar to get Communion Eddie was there with the reverend. He’d usually crack a smile and then I’d get the wafer and the holy words that went with the wafer. Next I’d get the wine. I always liked the wine part.
Later I’d like wine even more.
~'You go to church only to see the girls?” said Eddie.
“Yeah, basically,” I answered.
“It’s a sin to think about girls the way you do.”
””ou think of ‘em in the same way.”
“I know,” Eddie admitted, and then he took a drag on his cigarette.
It was wrong for us to be smoking cigarettes. If they caught you smoking in school they doled out demerits. Or told your parents. I preferred demerits. With demerits you’d do the stupid assignments and that’d be the end of it. I was careful. I didn’t want my old man to know about the cigarettes. Any excuse and the old man came down on me like a ton of bricks.
It was going to rain.
I looked up at the sky. It would rain before we made it to the school. Once again we’d be five minutes late. We’d come in wet from the rain and they’d stack the demerits on us.
I had Mrs. Kramer for the first hour. She loved to stack demerits on you. Mrs. Kramer was a big fat block of a woman. She liked the girls in class and hated the boys. Practically every boy in her class had a sizable amount of demerits stacked against him. It wasn’t fair. I was beginning to learn about fairness. Life’s chocked full of Mrs.
Kramers, demerits, endless sin, and one set of people unfairly chosen over another set of people. Even the bible teaches unfairness.
“Do you believe that Jesus loves you?” Eddie asked.
“Sure,” I said. “I guess he kind of loves me.”
But in truth I didn’t know.
How can somebody who died almost two thousand years ago love somebody alive now? I couldn’t grasp ahold of the concept.
It all came down to faith.
Either you believed in Jesus as the Son of God or you didn’t.
I wasn’t sure what I believed in.
It was all strange and incomprehensible -- the church with its stained glass, the crumby Communion wafers, the white and green and gold vestments Reverend Porter wore on Sunday, the tart white wine, the prayers and hymnals and organ music shoved through brass pipes.
But it wasn’t enough for me.
I wanted to see Jesus up close.
What I really wanted was to take Karen Bengle in the cloakroom and run my hand up under her Sunday dress. I wanted to skip the sermon and go out and smoke a cigarette. I wanted to return again and again to the altar and drink strong white wine from Reverend Porter’s gold chalice.
“Let me ask you something,” I said to Eddie after he pitched off his cigarette. “Do you believe in Jesus, God, Moses, water from a stone, and all of that stuff?”
“I believe what the bible says,” he answered.
“What if none of the stuff in the bible has any truth to it? What if it’s all some kind of ancient hoax?”
“Blasphemy,” said Eddie.
“I don’t believe in blasphemy/” I confidently told him.
We didn’t say anything more. Eddie seemed to be angry and confused. We walked silently down the street until we came to the school fence. I heard the school bell clang. It was about a minute after eight. As we walked up the athletic field the rain started to come down. Not hard but enough to get your clothes and hair wet. Blasphemy. I wasn’t sure if it was possible. I didn’t really understand Reverend Porter’s and Eddie’s and Karen Bengle’s faith in the love of Jesus Christ. If you love somebody you do something good for them. I didn’t see much good or bad in anything. I took the pack of Winstons from the pocket of my jacket and put them in my right sock. It was coming down pretty hard by the time we made it to the school entrance. It was three or four minutes past eight o’clock in the morning on a rainy Tuesday. I was headed for another big fat black demerit in Mrs. Kramer’s book. She stood solidly behind the teacher’s desk and glanced at her wristwatch and noted my absence in her dry classroom of good students.
Blasphemy and demerits.
I didn’t understand.
