Journal 2 • Creatures From The Dark Side
Creatures From The Dark Side
There are many Journals of The Willy Enkel Stories to come. In case you missed one, or if you want to re-visit one in the future you will find links to all the Journals I have posted at the beginning and end of every Journal.
The Willy Enkel Stories
Forward: I Am Willy Enkel
Journal 1: The Little Town
Journal 2: Creatures From The Dark Side
Journal 3: The Missing Horse
It was the end of the summer and I was about to enter the fifth grade. I was looking forward to seeing my old classmates, but a new adventure was right in front of me. Of course, I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I am glad I wrote about it in my Journal. It was something exciting for a kid, and even today when I think about it, I have smiles and shivers at the same time.
My mother knew I wondered a lot about God and how he thought and what he thought. I was always questioning her about the subject, I thought that was the reason she decided I should volunteer at the church. Neither my mother nor my father went to church; they sent me as their representative, at least that was how I thought about it. I didn’t know why they didn’t go to church. Both of my parents referred to God in their personal conversations. But I knew it had something to do with the Pastor of the Church. The first clue was my third-grade teacher, and my second-third-grade teacher’s husband was the pastor of our only church. My mother thought Pastor Batt might be a genius, and my father thought he was an idiot. It was a big, controversial subject in our family, and my parents spent hours discussing the subject. My mother thought maybe my father was a racist, and he had something against left-handed people. I told my mother, in one of our serious conversations, that Dad couldn’t be a racist because, after all, I was left-handed. That did cause her to look at me with a peculiar squinting of her eyes. It was like the sun was blinding her, or I thought she may have just realized that I was a genius, just like Pastor Batt.
Well, the first few months of my church adventure went quite well. I learned a lot about what God didn’t want me to do, and I discovered God liked money. God was concerned with the first fruits. That was part of a parable that was supposed to lead me to the conclusion that God was interested in part of the money I would get from selling the first fruits that dropped from my fig trees. I didn’t know what fig trees were, and they didn’t grow fig trees in our village that I called The Little Town, and God had to know I didn’t have a fig tree. The Farmers in the village I called The Little Town grew grapes, lots of grapes. They grew on vines, not trees.
I always brought a penny or two from my 10-cent allowance to drop in the collection plate, which was passed around at the beginning of every service. I thought the collection plate should be passed around after the pastor gave his sermon. That would have made more sense to me, but then, I was just a little kid with a lot of questions about a lot of things. And there was something else. Pastor Batt always shook the hands of everyone as they left his service. To me, a little kid with a lot of questions, I thought he should shake everyone's hands as they entered the church before they gave their first fruits to God. When everyone left the Pastor’s service, many were half asleep. I noticed Pastor Batt shook their hands as they left with his right hand, not his left, and I wondered if Mrs Batt made him do that. I did see him reading the Bible once, and he was moving his lips. I thought to myself, “Mrs Batt would not approve of that. When I was in the third grade, she didn’t allow me to move my lips when I was reading to myself”.
I was still in the 5th grade when a situation arose. I was at the church on a Friday evening. Pastor Batt and his secretary, Ms. Promber, were getting the church ready for Friday night fish dinner. My job was to help Ms Promber arrange the tables. I had a question about whether the forks were supposed to be next to the spoons or the knives, so I went looking for Ms Promber. As I approached the Pastor's office, I heard a lot of noise. It sounded like the kind of noise cats make at night when they wake everyone up. But it wasn’t night, and the church didn’t allow cats; they were viewed as creatures from the dark side. But there I was with a huge problem. I didn’t know what to do. We had a bell on the roof of the church, and I had been told by Pastor Batt if there was ever a fire or a serious problem, I was supposed to grab the rope and pull it down, then let it go up, and then let it go down and keep doing that for as long as I could and help would come.
Well, this was a serious problem. There was something serious going on in Pastor Batt’s office. There could be creatures from the dark side, or only God knew what. But it was serious. I grabbed the rope and started pulling on it as hard as I could, letting it go up and down. The bell was very loud. People on the streets started rushing into the church. The sheriff came in yelling at me, asking me what in the hell was going on. What was I doing? His language scared the heck out of me. I told him the whole story and the noises that sounded like those made by cats or maybe creatures from the dark side. Just then, Pastor Batt’s office door opened, and Pastor Batt came rushing out. He was yelling, “Everything is ok! Everything is ok, Ms Promber saw a mouse that all. You know the eye-squinting look I told you my mother had when I told her dad couldn’t be a racist because I was left-handed just like Mr. Batt? Well, that was exactly the same look all the people had, including the Sheriff. Pastor Batt had that same look on his face, except his nose was sort of wrinkled up, and his lips sort of poked out like he was mad at me, but of course, he wasn’t because he told me later I had done the right thing, and he was very proud of me. There were a few giggles from the women in the crowd that had gathered, and most of the men were smiling or shaking their heads. When I got home that evening, my father put his arm on my shoulder and told me I had done a great job. That was the first time he had ever done that. It was like I was one of his lodge buddies, and we were best pals. While Mother was telling me that maybe Pastor Batt wasn’t a genius after all. My father, who was in the room, couldn’t stop laughing, at least not until Mother gave him that Look, and then he stopped but just kept grinning.
It was a few years before I figured the whole thing out, but that was my last day at the only church we had in the village, I called The Little Town. From that time forward, Mother always thought we should have two churches in The Little Town, and my father could be heard saying Pastor Batt wasn’t an Idiot, and then he would start laughing unless Mother heard him and gave him the squinting eye look.
I never went back to our only church in the village, I called The Little Town, and for some reason, Mr. Batt and Mrs. Batt decided to move to another town. I didn’t know where or why they went. I thought maybe Mrs. Batt was afraid of mice or creatures from the dark side. Maybe all the excitement caused her Blind Word problems to get worse, or maybe she started writing with her left hand. I just didn’t know. It was one of those mysteries I wouldn’t be able to solve until I got older.
My mother didn’t give up on my religious education. My father and I were required, on Sunday Mornings, at 10 o’clock, to sit for an hour and listen to a famous preacher on the radio. It relaxed my father so much that he usually fell asleep within the first 4 or 5 minutes. He told me listening to the word of God had that effect on him. My mother said it was disrespectful and he was going to hell. I never fell asleep during those radio broadcasts. Hell was not a place I wanted to go or have anything to do with, after all, I had an experience with the creatures from the dark side, and I didn’t want anything more to do with them. But as things would have it in my life, another adventure was just around the corner. It was all written down in Journal 3.