Gunn Washington

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As a young child, I felt that my parents, my mother and my father, I felt they loved me very much.

I did, truly.

It was just that they and those people from their church, they were fighting something titanic, something urgent, demonic.

because their apostle Herbert W. Armstrong preached that this was the end of days, and they had to meet with each other, had to pray, to fast, to study their Bibles, to listen to cassette tapes from the headquarters church in Pasadena, California, and run the farm.

Farms, even failing farms like ours, do not run themselves.

So they worked and they worked and they worked from sunup to far past sundown.

Every night, with the exhaustion, I heard the fear, the terror behind my father's goodnight apologies.

Don't worry, he promised.

The kingdom of God will be here soon.

Then we'll have all eternity to play ball and go swimming and climb trees.

I told him it was okay.

But I didn't mind.

And it was true, I didn't mind.

Even as he asked forgiveness for not having the time to spend on me, I just wanted to be alone.

I liked being alone because I never felt alone.

I saw them mostly out of the corner of my eye.

The shadows, the shapes and figures darting in and out of sight.

Sometimes they would even make themselves plain.

Women, men, my grandmother, even a baby once.