Birmingham Born

Sure enough the first Sunday the pastor was away, during the congregational singing of the invitation hymn, "Just As I Am," down the aisle of the church came Shirley DeShazo, a sweet little church darling, with her red pony tail, freckled face and white lace dress crisply crinkling as she walked. Her parents beamed by her side. She was eleven. Travis looked up and breathed audibly, "Thank you, Lord."

He hugged Shirley, shook the hands of her parents and sat her down on the front row. He kneeled and asked her some leading questions, to which he gave her the answers, so when he introduced her to the congregation as its newest member she could just nod and he could say that's what she'd said. Her parents were taken by the effusive attention Travis lavished on their daughter, and that caused them to beam all the more. Fortunately they could not discern the subtle facial distinctions between interest and relief. However, Suzie DeShazo's decision to join the church would not be the final manifestation of the movement of the Holy Spirit that morning.

As he rose from his kneeling posture with Suzie's completed membership card in his hand, Travis sensed a dimming of available light. His eyes rose to behold a great shadow hulking toward the altar. Striding down the aisle was Heflin Barlow, whose sheer bulk, brawn, and reputation as the strongest and meanest interior lineman ever to play at New Albany High School, had earned him the inevitable nickname, "Hefty." His scholarship to Indiana University, it had been rumored, was a lock unless those messy charges concerning the hubcaps and the cherry bombs surfaced. Travis froze. "Please Lord, if it by Thy will," he beseeched, "let this be a rededication."

It was not. It was a genuine act of contrition and repentance from Hefty's heart. Travis knew that afternoon that, by tradition, both of the new converts would pass through the waters of baptism.

The time came to prepare the baptistry for the administration of the ordinance. The baptismal pool was not fixed in place, but was a modular unit that was assembled and rolled against the back wall of the church behind the pulpit and choir area. In appearance it resembled a county fair dunking booth. It's rear wall was a painting which purported to be the river Jordan, but looked a lot more like Panama City, Florida, where the artist yearly spent his summer vacations. The painting was fully visible through a glass front panel.

Since the pool had to be filled for both the diminutive DeShazo and the behemoth Barlow, there had to be some compromise. The pastor usually filled the pool, and he was on vacation. This crisis didn't appear to fit the parameters of the vacationing pastor's instructions for soliciting his consultation, but nobody else in the church knew exactly how much water to use. It fell to Travis to guess. Travis opened the valve and decided on a fit level for the event. He guessed wrong.

For little Shirley DeShazo there was too much water. Poised angelically on the top step, immaculate in her white cherubic robe, she descended daintily into the pool, releasing her mother's hand and reaching out for Travis' hand in the process. She let go of the first before securely latching onto the second. She sank out of sight, immersed before her time. Her head bobbed to the surface. Gasping, she dog-paddled the foot or so to where Travis stood. She panted. She vainly tried to tread water. Travis balanced her horizontally, as her mother whispered loud enough for the whole choir and the first three rows of the congregation to hear, "She can't swim! She can't swim!"

Travis had practiced over and over that afternoon with Patricia the words he would say in that solemn moment, but couldn't remember any of them except, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost," which he said very fast as he lowered Shirley DeShazo under the water again in what he imagined was a redundancy. He then accompanied her to the other side of the pool, whereupon she spit up what she had gulped down, and appeared to be secreting fluids from some other bodily orifice as well. Travis wondered for a moment if a baptism counted when the candidate gave part of the water back. When Shirley finally sat safely on the far step of the baptismal pool, Travis ventured a hope that Hefty had not taken undue notice.

Hefty had. In his well-intentioned eagerness not to repeat the fiasco just witnessed, Hefty reached the bottommost step, extended his hand toward Travis and jumped, ever-so slightly. When he jumped, Hefty's foot slipped. He lost his balance and belly-flopped into the pool.

What ensued was an exercise in Archimedean inevitability. Water spilled up over the glass. The entire men's section, which occupied the back row of the choir loft, was soaked to the bone. The overflow sloshed across the rest of the choir. Bouffant hairdos collapsed like fallen soufflés. Effie Pender let out a faint, but distinct, "Damn!". Effie Pender used to be the backbone of the soprano section, but in these latter years her vibrato had widened even more than had her ample waistline, and the volunteer choir director had been looking for some nice way to get Effie to just mouth the words on the high notes. He would have to worry no longer. Effie Pender was about to give up choir.

Enoch Blackwell, a tall bass who had been seated in the geometric center of the back row, had visited upon him the full force of Tidal Wave Hefty. Enoch whispered something that, though garbled, was reported by those around him to be something that, were it to become widely repeated, might permanently disqualify him from deacon eligibility. Even more traumatic for him as was the revelation to all but a few that Enoch wore a full hairpiece.

In real time all this took only seconds, yet those seconds would be remembered in agonizing detail, and would become grist for the southern Indiana folklore mill for generations to come.