The Dirty Baptism

The Cattywampus Church baptismal pool was once the scene of an epic religious battle that rivaled that fateful day Lucifer and his rebellious band of angels were cast out of heaven. A man will do a lot for some hot-blooded widow women and cold fried chicken.

Dirty Harry started coming to our church the summer I turned 12. The grown-ups whispered that the only reason he came every Sunday was because our church had air conditioning and free food – dinner on the grounds, which included all the fried chicken and casseroles a man could eat – but that’s up for debate. I always suspected it had something to do with all the hot-blooded widow women in the congregation. That’s what you get when all the old men die before their wives do: a church full of widows just itching for a man’s company, no matter how ugly or smelly he might be.  

They think I don’t know about “the old itch,” but I listen. I hear things. I can guess the rest. They call me Zach, by the way. My first name is Parnell, but don’t you dare call me that or we can’t be friends.

Why do we call him Dirty Harry, you ask? Oh, hell, that’s up for debate, too. Of course, he’s dirty, and by that, I mean he always comes to church in the same soiled, wrinkled clothes, smelling like “Who done it, and why?” He had been a plumber by trade, everyone knows that, but something horrible happened to him. Some say one day he got called to unclog a lady’s toilet and saw some things there that gave him PTSD. Others say he ran up on a leaky faucet that he just could not fix no matter what he tried, and the steady drip, drip, drip of that faucet drove him mad, just like that fella in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Either way, there’s no debate that the man does not like indoor plumbing and is deathly afraid of bathtubs and water in general, and bathes about every other total solar eclipse. Or at least, that’s what we all thought.

But enough about him. I’m trying to tell my story. I got into some mischief one day, and that’s why we are here. Apparently, hanging a Playboy centerfold from the antlers of a mounted deer head on the wall of the school’s wildlife center, on the very day the state judges were coming to inspect it, was much funnier to me than it was to the Swampton County School District Board of Trustees.

Daddy was mad because it was his Playboy. Momma was upset because “apparently I had no respect for women!”  Both of them said they were done with me. They said, or rather yelled, a lot of things, but they’ve said all that before.

But Granny, that’s my grandmother on my Daddy’s side, well, she has always been a woman of action and not words, so she snatched me up by the collar and took me down to the Cattywampus Church of Christ & The One True God to have me baptized and saved from my evil ways.

It must have been a popular day for getting saved, because there was quite a line of lost, young people waiting to take that holy dip. There was my friend Isaac, and my buddy Perry, and that ugly girl with the cooties, Eunice. The Lord was apparently calling all of His lost lambs and they were flocking toward salvation, or away from their Granny’s whip, depending on how you look at it.

Baptism is a sacred occasion in the church, they kept telling us, and one that should be treated with the utmost reverence, but right there in front of the line was old Dirty Harry himself, who had apparently overcome his fear of water and indoor plumbing for the sake of hot widow women and cold fried chicken.

God loves all people, and let it be noted I’m not passing judgement, merely observation, but when Dirty Harry stepped into the baptismal pool the preacher held his nose and drew an imaginary cross in the air, the choir ladies whispered to each other behind their Hymn Books, and a few noxious bubbles rose from the baptism pool before an oily film oozed off of him and made a metallic sheen in the water like you might see around a leaky Evinrude outboard motor. Folks on the first few pews started coughing and wiping watery eyes.  

When I saw this, I locked up my heels like a beef steer at the loading dock on butchering day.

“I’m not getting in that water after that nasty rascal!” I screeched, grabbing the door jamb until splinters went under my fingernails, refusing to budge.

 “Come on, son!” hissed the Reverend, not wanting a scene on this holiest-of-holy occasions. “What are you waiting on? The Lord must not be denied!”

“If Zach’s not getting in there, we’re not either,” said Isaac, and two of the boys behind him agreed, and they locked in their heels, too.

“I’d rather let the Devil jab me with his pitchfork than take a dip in that Dirty Harry water!” I yelped, and the Cattywampus Church baptismal pool had become the scene of an epic religious battle that rivaled that fateful day Lucifer and his rebellious band of angels were cast out of heaven. And to top it all off, Dirty Harry just sat there marinating in the water, grinning and making faces at me and my friends.

We held fast, and this backed up the baptism line quite a bit, and soon one of the choir ladies was dispatched to fetch Granny out of the pews to remedy the situation. Granny, in case you don’t know her, was the second oldest of four daughters born to a hardworking farmer during the Great Depression. She grew up working in the fields six days a week, then sat on hard wooden benches in “Primitive Baptist” churches every Sunday—with no air conditioning and no music, the men on the one side of the church, the women on the other.

What I’m saying is, Granny doesn’t tolerate foolishness and devilment, especially not in church, no sir. Legend has it Granny could nurse a baby on her hip, spank a child, and stir a pot of grits at the same time. She once beat her youngest daughter in a corn field for trying to wear makeup to church and kept a large wooden spoon in her purse for dealing harshly with unruly boys. She was also known to beat egg-sucking and chicken-tasting dogs… well I think you get the idea of the woman’s violent nature when provoked.

When my name was whispered in her ear as the cause of the commotion, you could see the old lady’s already-high blood pressure shoot up beyond the controls of modern medicine. And Granny’s bad hip had been bothering her, too, making it painful to walk, so by the time she limped her way from the back of the church and up the six steps to the baptismal chamber, still wearing her kitchen apron, she was red-faced and steamy as old Satan himself.

You know what? I think I’ve told you enough of my story. I don’t think I’m ready to talk about it all just yet. It’s still too painful.

Just take a peek at the Cattywampus Church baptism records. They will tell you that not only did one P. Zachariah McElhaney get baptized that day, along with Isaac and all his pals, their sins got washed away simultaneously in the pool right alongside Dirty Harry, making our church the first house of worship in history to baptize five people at one time.