This is the first chapter from my uncompleted novel entitled, My Father’s House. It is an opening account of the narrator in a letter to his son—whom he has met only a handful of times—after he learns that he will be ordained a Catholic priest in just one month. In the letter, he explains why he does not believe in God because of his experience as an adolescent in a fictional, postmillennialist church known as the First Church of Christ which incorrectly anticipated the world’s end on January 1, 2000.

My two best friends, Chris and Jessica, sat nervously beside me on the presumptive edge of world history. Our Bible study leader, Sam, sat opposite us, head down, muttering exhortations about the perseverance of the Old Testament judge, Gideon. He’d become completely undone in the last few hours.

The four of us, and the rest of our church were battle-weary believers—poised to be our Lord’s welcome committee for the inauguration of His 1,000 year reign that would treat the world of its innumerable evils.

The basement of the First Church of Christ where my mom, dad, and the couple dozen or so others waited had grown muggy with our existential anxieties and the sense that our faith was about to be proven or disproven with more veracity than ever before. Why in the hell did we wait in the basement anyway—like we were hiding from something? Maybe there was something deeply Freudian about this slip like the way a toddler chooses to poop in their diaper in some corner of the house as a way to reckon with their own self-consciousness. In eleven minutes in northern Louisiana, the Lord would appear or not appear at midnight of January 1st, 2000.

I suppose I was more agnostic then than I realized because two futures seemed to hold similar probability of manifesting in my mind. First, I considered some quasi-earth-heaven where angels and humans co-managed earth’s various industries like apple orchards and oil wells. I foresaw my role in this scenario as something like an Indiana Jones-esque pastor. I would go out into the godless jungles of the Amazon and deliver them unto our Lord for conversion.

I also considered the possibility of walking out of that basement the same way I’d entered—namely by a set of dreary stairs back into an unbelieving world. The only difference being that my Lord’s failure to appear would be a necessary reason to transform myself into one of those unbelievers. I then imagined for myself a dreary echo of my father’s own life prior to the Church of Christ. I would graduate high school, learn to operate a forklift at the cotton processing plant, and eventually live in a one-floor ranch decorated dully with sickly-looking Bermuda grass and faded lawn ornaments on every side.

My father never played sports growing up. He wasn’t smart or industrious. Even to this day, he explains how he was always the last student whose name a teacher held to memory during the school year. Other than by my mom, the Church of Christ is where he felt noticed for the first time.

My mom and he became pregnant with my older sister the summer after they’d graduated high school. They’d barely been dating a week and neither of them were people who knew what to do with the attention they’d suddenly wrapped each other in. Well, I suppose they did know because they ended up conjugal in the backseat of my dad’s car after going to see The Way We Were. That resulted in my older sister. Ten years later they had me.

Most guys with a new kid just out of high school would have felt threatened by the responsibility of a baby, but, he was smart enough to know what he could expect from this life and knew he wouldn’t be doing brain surgery or law in some fancy city 1,000 miles away from Linden, Louisiana.

My mom on the other hand—I always sensed in photographs of the family, her eyes betraying some alternate life being played out behind them. Feminism was beginning to bloom, albeit faintly, even in Linden and she enjoyed its promised sweetness and dabbled in its secular spiritualities in the middle of high school. She even attended a small bra-burning event in the woods outside of town with her best girlfriends.

By having a kid, I think she felt like a failed feminist before even trying.

Being a few miles from the Mississippi and half sunken in swampland, Linden and its water, smelled faintly of sulfur—or so we were told. I never tasted sulfur-free water or breathed sulfur-free air before high school. Only then did I learn what sulfur smells and tastes like. Northerners passing through could be spotted holding their nose or inquiring about it to whatever business whose water they were patronizing.

Back to that swampland for a second. The Interstate hovered twenty feet above us from our northern city limit all the way to the Gulf because our ground was so persistently wet and unsuitable for ordinary road engineering. It felt as if federal legislation officially sought to protect travelers from our backward ways until absolutely necessary at an exit or on ramp. On the outskirts of Linden, everyone had some half-crazy aunt or uncle who lived deep in the bayou and so, our imaginations were charmed for the supernatural from the earliest age possible. There was the pterodactyl which loomed down by Colter’s property. It was said to have swiped Mrs. Hennepin’s new triplets straight out of her arms in 1935. There was also the Shrieking Banshee of the Bayou. Maybe a few times each summer—this blood curdling scream would bleed from seemingly every direction of the bayou. Heard it myself! I suppose the apocalyptic churches scattered around the fringes of those swamps were simply a natural extension of Louisianians appetite for that which could only be halfway-explained. Fear and anxiety weren’t vices there. They were just another way to hold our world together.