Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) Read online

  Welcome to Fred

  Table of Contents

  Also by Brad Whittington

  What They're Saying About the Fred Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Quote

  Chapter One

  I. The Yankee Exile

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  II. Fred

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  III. The Mystical Land of Ultimate Cool

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Rate "Welcome to Fred!"

  A Preview of “Living with Fred”

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Discussion Questions

  SAT Word list

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Brad Whittington

  Living with Fred

  Escape from Fred

  Buy a signed copy of the Fred books at SignedByTheAuthor.com:

  Welcome to Fred

  Living with Fred

  Escape from Fred

  What They're Saying about the Fred Books

  “Whittington spins an enjoyable, literary story and is definitely a novelist to watch.”

  — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY —

  “I gobbled up the book in a couple of enjoyable evenings.”

  — WANDA ADAMS —

  Honolulu Advertiser

  “Brad Whittington is an artist with the pen.”

  — ETHAN C. MCDONALD —

  DancingWord.com

  “Every once in awhile, you start reading a book and you start to smile. The images on the page begin to unfold, and you realize that this writer has, in some unaccountable and miraculous way, lived in your skin. Reading Brad Whittington’s prose was like that for me. By the time I’d finished the first couple of paragraphs, it was as if I’d found an old friend I never knew I had. Do yourself a favor: read Welcome to Fred.”

  — THOM LEMMONS —

  author of Jabez: A Novel and the Daughters of Faith Series

  “I know a good, insightful coming-of-age story when I read one. Welcome to Fred is a joy. There are lessons to be learned here, but they’re all couched in Brad’s winsome prose so they don’t hurt. I commend this to you. This is good stuff. And I’m not just saying that because he’s from Fred.”

  “Brad Whittington is a funny guy. And I know from funny. Everything he writes about Fred, Texas, is true. And I know from Fred because I once lived in Woodville, only twenty miles away as the crow flies through the Big Thicket of East Texas. According to some people, not far enough away from Fred.”

  — ROBERT DARDEN —

  Assistant Professor of English, Baylor University; Senior Editor, The Door Magazine; Author of Corporate Giants: Personal Stories of Faith and Finance and more than twenty-five other books

  “What do you get when you cross Dave Barry and Garrison Keillor? Two very irritated men. Besides that, you also get a great talent like Brad Whittington. Brad can take the awkward moments of growing up and turn them into something really ridiculous. But don’t take my word for it—visit Fred yourself.”

  — ROBIN HARDY —

  author of the Strieker Saga, the Sammy Series, and the Annals of Lystra

  “It is always a joy to find a new writer that knows what he is doing. Welcome to Fred presents us with just such an author. Written with gravity and levity, this coming of age novel is a delight to read. As a young city boy is transported to very rural Texas, he must discover who he is. The process is both thoughtful and hilarious. I look for more good things from this author.”

  — RICK LEWIS —

  Logos Bookstore, Dallas

  “Brad Whittington is a welcome new voice in the world of fiction and faith. His fresh story of a young pastor’s son’s coming of age, filled with nostalgia and interesting characters, will make you smile.”

  — CINDY CROSBY —

  author of By Willoway Brook

  © 2003 by Brad Whittington

  All rights reserved

  Kindle Edition 2011 Wunderfool Press

  produced by ePubEdition.com

  978-1-937274-00-9

  Quote, partial lyrics of “Child of the Wind,” written by Bruce Cockburn, © 1991 Golden Mountain Music Corp., used by permission

  Unless otherwise stated all Scripture citation is from the RSV, Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyrighted 1946, 1952, © 1971, 1973.

  For Robin Hardy,

  who deserves most of the blame for the fact you are holding this book in your hand right now.

  Little round planet

  In a big universe

  Sometimes it looks blessed

  Sometimes it looks cursed

  Depends on what you look at obviously

  But even more it depends on the way that you see

  --Bruce Cockburn, “Child of the Wind”

  CHAPTER ONE I found it in the back of a drawer in his rolltop desk. Not that I was looking for it. I was just cleaning out the desk. I didn’t mind. In fact, I preferred it to cleaning out the closets, which Hannah was doing, or cataloging the furniture, the job Heidi had chosen.

  It was a small, black, cardboard ring binder with a white label. The printing on the label was definitely Dad’s—a small and precise lettering from a hand that seemed to be more comfortable with cuneiform than the English alphabet. It read: “The Matthew Cloud Lexicon of Practical Usage.”

  Intrigued, I flipped through it. There were tabbed dividers for each letter of the alphabet. Each page appeared to have a single entry consisting of a word and a definition. I flipped back to the beginning. The first entry was:

  Adolescence: Insanity; a (hopefully) temporary period of emotional and mental imbalance. Symptoms: mood swings, melancholia, rampant idealism, insolvency. Subject takes everything too seriously, especially himself. Causes: parents, raging hormones. Known cures: longevity, homicide. Antidotes: levity, Valium.

  That prompted a chuckle. I had no doubt this entry had been written while Jimmy Carter grinned from the Oval Office. I sat back in the swivel chair for a welcome bit of reflection, which was to be expected, seeing as how we were settling Dad’s estate. Nostalgia traps were likely to be rampant in closets and drawers all over the house.

  I suppose adolescence is somewhat like insanity. In both cases isolation is sometimes seen as a method for limiting the damage. I suspected that in 1968, when I turned twelve, my parents must have sensed the initial stages of the dreaded malady. I could think of no other reason why they would have moved from metropolitan America to Fred, Texas.

  I know you’re dying to ask, so I might as well tell you right up front. Fred is located in East Texas, between Spurger and Caney Head. It looks different now, but back then it spanned nine-tenths of a mile between city limit signs and included six buildings of note: a general store, an elementary school, a Baptis
t church, a hamburger joint, a service station, and a post office. The nearest movie theater was sixteen miles south, in Silsbee. The nearest mall appeared in the early 1970s, forty miles south in Beaumont.

  In many ways Fred was idyllic. There was nothing but pine woods and dirt roads to be explored, creeks to be splashed through and swam in, and fresh air to suck into your lungs in an eternal draught. Since I was only twelve and had not yet succumbed to the symptoms of adolescence, I loved it. By the time I hit sixteen, however, Fred’s greatest assets had become, for me, its greatest liabilities. There was nothing but pine woods, dirt roads, and creeks.

  Still, as a twelve-year-old, I reveled in the unruly semiwildness of the Big Thicket. I delved pine thickets, ferreting out hidden sanctuaries in oil-company tracts, miles from any road. The lust for adventure shared by all young boys provided me with traveling companions.

  Swaying one hundred feet in the air at the top of a pine and surveying a green ocean, we were Columbus, devoutly seeking land after months at sea. Cresting the top of a limestone outcrop and finding a bottomless pool in an abandoned quarry, we were Balboa gazing in wonder upon the Pacific. Picking our way through a stagnant bayou, balanced precariously on moss-covered logs and leaping from one knot of ground to another, we were Francis Marion —the Swamp Fox— cleverly eluding the British once again. Following the meandering trail of a dried creek bed, we were Powell winding through the Grand Canyon.

  But even in the passion of exploration, caught in the frantic surmise that we were probably the first humans to have ever seen a particular secluded hideout (deduced from the absence of beer cans or other trash), I felt the subtle walls as real as stone between me and my companions.

  For example, the names Balboa, Francis Marion, and Powell meant nothing to them. (Of course they knew of Columbus. After all, he had a day named after him to guarantee his immortality.) One of my failings—academic success—didn’t endear me to my peers.

  Language was yet another plank in the scaffold of my isolation. My parents had taken great pains to weed ungrammatical habits out of their children, with mixed success. In my speech such phrases as “I done did,” “I seen him,” or “I ain’t” were conspicuous by their absence. I discovered that Fredonians didn’t trust anyone who talked differently.

  But those differences paled against the Great Divider. We had moved to Fred because my father was the new pastor of the Baptist church. I was a preacher’s kid (or PK, as we say in the business). Nothing is guaranteed to bring a spicy conversation or a racy joke to a dead halt like the arrival of the preacher’s kid. I became as accustomed to seeing conversation die when I approached as a skunk expects the crowd to part when it walks through.

  Nonetheless, I tolerated those inconveniences in my preadolescent state, glorying in the remote wilderness like a hermit. It was only when hormonal changes initiated the symptoms of the malady of adolescence that I began to languish rather than glory in my isolation from modern culture. The crude tree house that had served variously as fort, ship, headquarters, prison, hideout, and throne now did duty as a sanctuary of solitude to which I retreated to puzzle out Fred’s provincial culture and my place in it.

  Many teenage boys would have loved such an environment; indeed, most native Fredonian teens thrived in it. With graceless effort they shot deer, snagged perch, played football, and rattled in pickups down dirt roads. George Jones and Tammy Wynette oozed from their pores like sweat. Under black felt Stetsons they sported haircuts as flat as an aircraft carrier. Pointed boots with taps announced their coming as they approached, and leather belts with names stamped on the back proclaimed their identity as they departed. They dipped snuff, spitting streams like some ambulatory species of archerfish. Their legs fit around a horse as naturally as a catcher’s fist nestles in his mitt. They split logs and infinitives, chopped wood and prepositional phrases, dangled fish bait and participles—all with equal skill.

  However, in the throes of the teenage condition, I gradually grew dissatisfied with this remote Eden. Although native Texans, our family had spent four years in Ohio. (Since Yankeeland is technically in the same country, no visa or inoculations are required to move there. However, as far as Texans are concerned, Yankeeland is a foreign country and travelers should update their cultural resistance immunization before spending any significant time there.) Nothing can stop the onslaught of adolescence, but perhaps my parents had hoped that my first eight years in Fort Worth were sufficient to inoculate me against Northern influences. Unknown to them, however, I contracted the germs of a companion disease during my four years of Yankee exile.

  In the North, I watched in fascination as hippies and “flower power” bloomed around me. Although too young to participate, I was mesmerized by Peter Max, paisley, and psychedelic posters. Still, I arrived in Fred seemingly intact. But as the symptoms of adolescence surfaced, they triggered the dormant 1960s-counterculture virus, which in turn sprouted in that unlikely Texas garden.

  Fred was no place for a would-be flower child seeking sympathetic flora. The British Invasion of the seventeenth century took more than one hundred years to reach East Texas. As I surveyed Fred, I suspected it would take the second British Invasion—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin—at least that long to reach me.

  My distinguishing features, combined with my growing detachment, separated me from the culture short of complete social isolation. Consequently, I remained on the outside looking in, spending most of my teenage years observing rather than participating.

  But I guess I should start at the beginning.

  The Yankee Exile

  CHAPTER TWO In 1964, when Mom and Dad returned to Fort Worth with the news that we were moving to a place where snow stayed on the ground until after Easter, I was skeptical. Who did they think they were kidding? At eight years old, even I knew that snow didn’t hang around until April, not even in the Panhandle where they always got snow in the winter. The March ice storm that had accompanied my birth had been a fluke, like the lions whelping in the streets and men on fire strolling through Rome the night before Caesar got it in the neck.

  Yet my parents insisted they had actually seen the stuff, right there on the ground. Snow, I mean. Not lions and flaming men. And parents are never wrong.

  I wasn’t particularly anxious to go north. I felt that living on Felix Street gave me a special connection to Felix the Cat and his bag of tricks, and I was loath to abandon that magical location. Plus, there was a cute girl down the street I wanted to look at a few hundred more times. But, alas, it was not to be.

  Heidi didn’t welcome the idea either. She was two years older than I was and looked more like Dad—brown hair, green eyes, and tending toward plumpness. Unlike Dad, she was shy and didn’t make friends easily. The announcement struck her like a prophecy of exile. No sackcloth and ashes were available at J. C. Penney’s, so she had to settle for gloomy looks as she moped around the house.

  Hannah didn’t share Heidi’s outlook. At six years old, she had the inverse apportionment—Mom’s looks (slim, blond hair, blue eyes) and Dad’s disposition. She looked forward to the trip, her only regret that the snow would be melted before we got there.

  As seems to be my lot in life, looking backward at what I was leaving behind left me unprepared for what lay ahead—the change in status from obscurity, as son of a graduate student in theology, to prominence as a preacher’s kid. PKs, like preachers themselves, seem to have a spotlight perpetually trained on them, highlighting their every success or failure. But there’s one minor difference: preachers are, hopefully, prepared to live in the limelight. Given their choice of careers, perhaps they prefer it.

  Somewhere in the seminary curriculum must certainly exist a course explaining that as a member of the congregation an open fly might be noticed by twenty or thirty people, but as the pastor a similar lapse in vigilance in the pulpit will result in hundreds of devout Christians discussing it for weeks, if not years. I suspect the students are required to sign
a statement absolving the seminary of all blame in the event of dire embarrassment from undue public exposure. They accept it as part of the territory when they take the gig.

  PKs get this fringe benefit with or without prior knowledge or consent. Or signing the form. This gives them plausible deniability, but that is little consolation to those who suffer under a weight that proves too great for many. They break under the strain and tumble into a life of dissipation, taking up bad habits such as spitting and scratching in public or leaving their beds unmade, and they eventually run off to join the circus and fraternize with undesirables such as hurdy-gurdy hustlers and actresses, or other people of that sort.

  But my immediate future didn’t include actresses, hurdy-gurdies, or even spitting.

  The long trek to the North culminated in my first moment in the spotlight. Sunday morning arrived and, as per custom, I found myself in a church. But this was not a large brick building of imposing proportions, with pipe organ, white pews, scarlet carpet, and matching seat cushions. Instead, it was a white nineteenth-century frame building on the edge of downtown, all wood and stained glass, and able to accommodate about three hundred souls, penitent or apostate. Instead of sitting in relative obscurity somewhere in the middle, I sat on the first row in the semigloom. The man in front wasn’t some imposing silver-haired gentleman; it was Dad, a pale man, short and dumpy, with a crew cut that made no attempt to disguise the receding hairline, and glasses recovered from the estate of Buddy Holly. He called us up to be introduced. Heidi, Hannah, and I stood in stair-step fashion next to Mom and faced a crowd of perhaps one hundred people who got a good look at us, as though to be able to pick us out in the lineup afterward should there be any trouble.