My father, the Reverend Doctor S. Mancil Bell, wrote several hundred sermons. They were written Saturday evenings, a time when silence was commanded in the parsonage.
Father was tense. We were tense. Probably even our dog of the moment was anxious. One and all waited for an explosion in his study of outrage and a cutting defamation of which ever one, or all, of us had raised his ire.
This period of high anxiety ended after church on Sunday. Then our father returned to us at least for a while, jocular, charming and fully engaged with us.
But one Sunday morning was different. In June, 1972, my father went blind. His vision eclipsed suddenly directly in the middle of his sermon, when standing in the pulpit of his church, Grinter Chapel in Kansas City, Kansas.
He paused in his sermon only to say to the congregation, “You can see me but I can’t see you.” Then he calmly finished the sermon.
My mother, who sat in the congregation every Sunday giving him her calm slight smile, always took a pew front and center. She would sit proudly erect, chin up, in a vague ephemera of French perfume. Later she remarked that father knew the sermon by heart. It was one he’d dusted off for that morning’s service written years gone by.
Sermon finished he asked the ushers to come forward and help him down from the pulpit. An ambulance had already arrived and so away went father, mother beside him, still in his pastor’s robe and stole. Leaving from the last church her would serve, from the last sermon he would ever preach.
I was in Florida at the time working for my older brother Steve on a Greyhound farm near Live Oak. I had been working there for several months and liked it even though it was hard labor. I was 23 but still a boy, although just then beginning to age.
Mother’s voice on the phone when she called, so typical of her so unwavering and composed, was as difficult for us to handle as the news she had to tell.
I tried imaging the mental confusion and fright at going blind. I could’nt fathom it at all.
My brothers and I often discussed what we termed the ‘Bell’ temperament over a beer and/or a joint. This involved emotion first and then explosive anger and a violent acting out. That afternoon something trivial brought out the Bell temperament in us both, even knowing it was sparked by the news about our father.
We almost but didn’t come to blows. Actually for all the hot and high words, not once did these dramas lead to actual violence. However I did quit on the spot. Neither my brother’s asking me to stay—a major concession for him– or more important my sister-in-law Georgia’s tearful pleading could move me.
Georgia drove me into the sleepy, dreamy town of Madison, Florida where I caught the bus toward home. I knew like a bitch in heat what I needed most to do.
This factual part of my life speaks to me also of the imagination, of how the act of something experienced powerfully, remembered acutely becomes the art or the essence of story telling.
My father going blind marked one turning point in my life, not the first or last, just one of many. I used it in writing the short story “Homeland,” included in Dr. Pepper Tales on this website, and which was also anthologized in a collection of stories by various writers entitled Volunteer Periwinkles.
These memories of my father blind are mythic to me. They connect him to Prometheus, Samson, Milton. I had always known him as a grand personality and a great character. But blindness has now tilted him towards the truly heroic.
A question has come to haunt me. What did he see as his vision passed away? I’m sure he saw his wife’s sweet small smile locked onto him. But was he annoyed by the dumbfounded and dumb ogling of his congregation? I hope not. I prefer to think he noticed something about the light in the clear church windows in a way I can’t imagine? Light to save for illuminating his dark passage onward.