Innocence

About forty people were gathered at the water’s edge, singing a hymn, and the preacher stood in the river with a woman of about thirty-five, engaged upon a full-immersion baptism. To one side of the choir stood a man and two children, who seemed to be waiting their turns for salvation.

Directly ahead of me, across an expanse of grass, past all those people, stood a humble clapboard church, white with pale-blue trim. Near the building, in the shade of a great spreading oak, were chairs surrounding picnic tables that appeared to be laden with enough food to provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner during a full day of church and family fun.

The members of the congregation stood with their backs to me, busy with their hymnals and focused on the joyous event in the river. If the minister looked my way, I would be screened by the members of his congregation. I might not have much time, but I thought I would have enough.

I stripped off my backpack, zippered open its main compartments, broke from the trees, and sprinted to the picnic tables. On the grass near them were baseballs, bats, and gloves, also a badminton net not yet erected, rackets, and shuttlecocks. I had never played such games or heard of them, and those items meant nothing to me; I would not be able to identify them, in memory, until years later.

When I tore the foil off a platter, I found thick slices of ham. I wrapped several in the foil and shoved them in the backpack. There were potato salads and pasta salads covered with plastic wrap or lids, pies and cakes, none of them easy enough to pack. But I also found baskets of homemade rolls and biscuits covered by napkins, oranges, bananas, hard-boiled eggs pickled purple in beet juice, and cookies of all kinds.

From a pocket of my jeans, I withdrew part of the wad of cash that my mother had given me, peeled off a few bills, and dropped them on the table. Considered in retrospect, I probably paid far too much for what I had taken. But at the time, shaking with hunger, I felt that no price was too high to satisfy my growling stomach.

Sweating cans of soda and tea and juice were layered in plastic tubs of ice. After I slipped the straps of the backpack over my shoulders, I snatched up a cold Coca-Cola.

Just then someone behind me said, “Child, it’s time for the Lord, not breakfast yet.”

Startled, I turned, looked up, and saw a man coming out of a side door of the church, carrying a pan piled high with barbecued chicken legs.

Under thinning hair and a high brow, his face was soft and kindly—until he saw my face enclosed but not fully hidden by the hood of my jacket. Behind wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes widened as if the darkness of Armageddon had suddenly fallen upon the world and as if he were straining to see what must surely be the devil come to wage a final battle. The pan of chicken legs dropped from his hands, the color drained from his face in an instant, and he staggered two steps backward on abruptly weak legs. When he had taken in the totality of my face, he focused on my eyes, and a strangled sound escaped him.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry.”

My apology meant nothing to him, nor did the cash upon the table, which I pointed out to him. He plucked a Louisville Slugger off the grass, lunged forward, and swung it, cutting the air above my head with enough power to have blasted a ball out of the park if the game had been under way.

I feinted left, he swung, I ducked and dodged right, he swung again and was almost quick enough to slam me. But then he seemed to be shocked by—aghast at—his sudden ferocious assault on a creature as small as a child, and he dropped the bat. Again, he reeled back from me, his face now wrenched with what might have been remorse or even anguish, a flood of tears sorrowing into his eyes, and he put one hand to his mouth as a cry of something like grief came from him.

They were singing louder than ever at the river. No one had yet seen the encounter by the picnic tables.

“I’ll go,” I said, “I’m sorry, I’ll go.”

As I broke into a run, I thought that in spite of his tears and his wrenching sobs, he was stooping to grab the baseball bat again. I raced past the back of the church, across mown grass, into a wild meadow, angling away from the river, desperate for the next pine barren, hoping that it would be furnished with more brush and with a topography more friendly to a fugitive.

I never glanced over my shoulder. I don’t know whether the churchman pursued me for a quarter mile or a hundred yards, or any distance at all. Perhaps half an hour later, after the land had risen from peaty flats to more solid slopes, when my lungs burned and I began to flag, I paused on a wooded knoll to look back through the trees, whereupon I saw that no vigilantes were at my heels.