where he came from

Thomas Eugene Patterson Knowles announced over Easter dinner that he had decided to give up his faith for lent.

His sister Karen didn't even bother to roll her eyes, but reached in front of him for the creamy mashed potatoes.

His mother used real cream in the potatoes and beat them til they were heavenly (which is not to say that she beat the hell out of them, though, if she had not been a nazarene like her mother and father and her husband had always been, and if she had been more of the sort of sottish pagan that her maternal grandfather had been, in that case, she may have said, "beat the hell out." But what was the difference? she would ask if you brought up this point to her, why *not* say it the nice way? Can't we use a bit of Heaven in this hot kitchen?

Thomas' father had heard him. He stared at his roast beef as if it were a leprous cadaver.

Karen, once she recognized this silence, and all that would come with it...paused in shaping the countours of her potatoes so that the rivulets of butter could run down just exactly right...rolled her eyes at her brother.

Nancy Ann (Patterson) Knowles corrected her son: We don't celebrate lent, honey. We're still nazarene.

Thomas looked around the table. He looked at the pile of green beans pushing against the mashed potatoes.

I don't celebrate lent anymore either, mom.

Now she looked up at him. You're not going to be a catholic anymore, son?

She looked at Eugene. Had he heard this?

I gave up my FAITH for lent.

OH! Now she rolled her eyes and joined her daughter in shaping their potatoes. May as well craft an enjoyable plate to weather the oncoming storm.

You can't just give up your faith for lent! Roared Eugene. Lent is just a made up thing anyway!

Nancy Ann wished he wouldn't respond this way. She wasn't sure but that her husband could end up with an annurism like Ted Johnson the deacon who had passed the offering plate to them for years. And now, this week, out of the blue, ended up at Mercy Hospital in the prayer request section in the bulletin.

SHe had stopped taking their son seriously when he was fifteen. Why change when he was still just twenty eight? Twenty eight year olds were practically toddlers. If they must lose their faith...oh well.

Karen ate each bite enjoying it. She allowed the warmth and the gentle interpenetration of the potatoes and cream and butter and salt fill her mouth and her body so full that she couldn't hear a thing. Not a thing.

Thomas ate his dinner fiercely. His father ate nothing.

When they had easter dinner together twenty years later, it was as if this dinner had determined everything for the two of them. Thomas was fiercely obese at forty eight and his father looked as any fat had been transpanted from his bones to his son. The blades of his shoulders by that time looked skeletal when he removed his sport jacket on Sunday, clad only then, in a practical cotton dress shirt from JC Pennys.

The long and short of the argument ended this way.

EUGENE: You shouldn't change your mind about everything until you study up on what you come from. Maybe you need a bit of serious bible study son.

THOMAS: That's an unarguable argument, dad.

EUGENE: Well then...?

THOMAS: What? Didn't you take any leaps of faith from where you were brought up?

(knowing full well the answer.)

And the great irony was, that after the mashed potatoes were gone, the dishes were cleared, and Thomas and Eugene had both disappeared into bitte silences, Thomas decided that he'd show his father up.

When they had dinner on easter in the year of Thomas' 48th year, Thomas had returned to the land.

He had traced the lineage of the family only as far back as the family homestead in Indiana. No records went back any farther. For six years he worked as hard as he could to earn back the family homestead. He grew organic food, didn't use the phone or ride in cars.

When his father poked fun at him. Thomas took the most joy of all in admonishing him:

You shouldn't change your mind about everything until you study up on what you come from. Maybe you need a bit of serious bible study dad.

He couldn't have pointed to a bible verse to back up his luddite resistance, having abandon his faith twenty years hence, but he couldn't resist the completeness of the phrase. His father was pained by it, would not respond, and to Thomas it seemed a glorious repudiating refrain to cling to.

Since he had set all the other lifeboats adrift already.