Free Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer Page A

sermon was about the Holy Trinity and how the Holy Trinity was a Divine Mystery: Three Beings in one and the same God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
    After Mass, in front of the church, my father took my picture, with my mother behind him telling me how to smile so my crooked bottom teeth didn’t show.
    But being confirmed didn’t change things as much as I’d hoped. It didn’t stop any of those red flags, if you know what I mean. The only difference, as far as I could tell, was that I got a new name. I got to choose the name of the saint I most wanted to be like. From then on, it would be my confirmation name for the rest of my life.
    I read The Lives of the Saints to help decide which saint to pick. Jacob was my given name, but the original Jacob was no saint; he wasn’t even in the New Testament, let alone a Catholic.
    One night, as the story goes, Jacob was just lying there in his bed when an archangel named Penuel descended and started wrestling with him. Jacob thought Penuel was a devil. All night they wrestled, breaking things and knocking things over, Penuel making that flapping sound with his wings. When morning came, Jacob had got the best of Penuel even though Penuel was an archangel. That’s when Penuel told Jacob who he was. Jacob told Penuel he wouldn’t let go until Penuel blessed him. Penuel had no choice. He gave Jacob his blessing.
    In The Lives of the Saints I started reading about St. John Vianney. As soon as I read his story, I knew, he was the one: St. John Vianney, the Curé of Ars. I didn’t know what that meant, “the Curé of Ars,” but I chose him because he said he had wrestled with a devil, a real one. He was just lying there in his bed and a devil descended and St. John knew it was a devil right off. He wasn’t fooled for a minute. I figured this St. John Vianney guy could help me out. He knew a devil when he wrestled with one. Plus he was a Catholic. So I chose him.
    My confirmation certificate was written in that fancy kind of writing and it said that I had received the Sacrament of Holy Confirmation and that my confirmation name was John. I hung the certificate up on my bedroom wall next to the picture of the guardian angel helping the two little kids across the bridge.
    I liked my new name a lot for about a week, but then, as it turned out, I never really got to use it. Everybody at the Hawthorne Junior High School was a Mormon so they wouldn’t have understood about my new name, not that I ever talked to them much anyway. The only other people I talked to were my mother and my father and they didn’t call me any name when they called to me. My father called me “lunk-head” now and then, so I just stuck to my regular name and Haji Baba when I was in the loft of the barn or up in the cottonwoods.
    I still liked the story of Jacob and the Archangel Penuel and St. John Vianney and the devil going at it, though, and there were a couple of nights I woke up ready for a fight, but I was alone.
    I SAW THE nigger two more times before I saw him hanging there from the winch in the back of the barn, strung up with the ropes of my swing, although I really didn’t see the nigger the first of these two times.
    The Matisse County Mounted Posse hadn’t been around for some time, and the nigger’s lean-to looked no different from the first few times that they had ransacked it—the window was still broken, the back door was open, and there was stuff strewn all over the backyard, busted up. I figured the Matisse County Mounted Posse had long since given up on the nigger since I hadn’t seen them around for so long. One evening I heard my father tell my mother that the sheriff had told him that the nigger had probably hopped a freight and gone south—back to his own kind. “Or joined the circus,” I said aloud in the hallway of the butterflies and dice when I heard my father tell my mother about the nigger jumping a