Kenforth's Baptism
Photo credit: Branislav Rodman / Unsplash
My brother Kenforth's second baptism occurred on a sunny spring morning when the air was warm but the creek still cold, and it wouldn't have happened at all if he had just trusted me.
“There is no money in Pentecostals,” is what I said, my exact words. “Nor Baptists either. Don’t waste our time.”
But Kenforth had spotted Mrs. Tillie Anderson on the street in Clay Bottom, dressed all in black like the widow she was, her yellow hair tied up tight under her black hat. He didn’t know then that her late husband had been a preacher. When we found out, I begged him to move on. Our methods don’t work on church widows. They’re surrounded by nosy do-gooders. Plus they’re poor. The camel and the eye of the needle, and all that.
This was known to us through painful experience, which I will not go into here. But Kenforth could be mulish when he wanted something. He spent so much time making up to ladies he didn’t want, he said. He deserved a treat.
I had always prophesied that Kenforth’s fortune would be his downfall. By that I mean his face. You don’t often hear a man called beautiful but people said Kenforth was, with his dark curly hair and narrow nose. “Like Lord Byron,” said his schoolteacher. “Lord Diddleumday, for all the good it does you,” is what I said. But women fell for his pretty face over and over again.
Kenforth’s face is how we fell into this line of work. Kenforth had not yet left school when a widow lady began bestowing favors on him. Without him asking, it was a haircomb here, a fair ticket there. With my plain face, I had to work to get ladies to even look at me when I talked. But she hung on Kenforth’s every word, dull as many of them were. He struggled to free himself of her, in fact. It was then that Kenforth decided his face was a curse, and I saw an opportunity.
We had to go on the road, of course. Our town was too small, Kenforth too well known. We told our mother we were traveling salesmen. Which, in a sense, was true.
Here’s what you need for our line of work. The face, that’s Kenforth. The brain, that’s me. You need you a town of a size to where everybody doesn’t know each other, but they still trust strangers. And you need a mark.
I find the mark out of the newspaper obituaries. You can learn all manner of things from an obituary. I tell the newspaper office I had an uncle die in that town a few months ago, and get the back issues. You don’t want a fresh widow, of course. But four or five months, they’ve had time to look around them, feel how empty the house is. Not enough time for anyone to start properly courting them. Four or five months is a little fast, a mite unseemly for men with honorable intentions. It’s just right for me and Kenforth.
In Clay Bottom I didn’t get a chance to look at the obituaries before Kenforth saw Mrs. Tillie Anderson walk by on the street and shoved an elbow into my side. Then he shrank back against a storefront, and I put a bored look on my face and strolled after her.
By suppertime I had her address, and by the next day I had her name. The milkman I bribed said her husband was three months gone, and stingy with the milk order. I had a bad feeling.
Kenforth wanted to make up to the pretty widows. Since his face could win over almost any woman, it might as well win ones he wanted. That’s not good business sense, I told him. Get out there and find the older ones, the richer ones. Who cares if they’re pretty? Better if they’re not. When the morning comes that Kenforth is gone, along with some of their savings, perhaps some nice jewelry, they know they simply spent it to buy some youth, some time. They should count it well-spent. The day comes for us all that time and youth can’t be bought for jewels or cash money.
“You been reading too much on that Bible,” says Kenforth when I talk like that.
Kenforth insisted on Mrs. Tillie Anderson and though I hollered about it, I gave in. Kenforth needs some petting from time to time, and our last mark had put him through his paces.
We arranged it so Kenforth bumped into Mrs. Tillie Anderson downtown one morning with her arms full of groceries. She dropped the eggs and Kenforth insisted on running into the store and buying more. She stood on the street, red-faced and flustered until he rushed back, triumphant with his egg carton.
“I’ll carry these on home for you,” Kenforth said gallantly.
“Oh no. No,” Mrs. Tillie Anderson said. “A strange man following me home? No. People would talk. But thank you, of course.”
Thwarted, Kenforth gave her his best smile, one that had changed strait-laced ladies’ minds before.
“I wouldn’t dream of doing something improper. I will simply live in hope that we meet again.”
He dipped her a courtly little bow that has made other ladies flutter.
I watched Mrs. Tillie Anderson’s house for two more days before she headed back downtown. I had to actually run to get Kenforth and send him off to find her.
By the time I got my breath back, Kenforth had managed to get Mrs. Tillie Anderson to have a coffee with him in the very public drug store. Very proper.
“She talked a lot about the Lord,” he said when he got back to our rooming house.
We came to learn that Mrs. Tillie Anderson had strong notions about propriety. She would not see Kenforth alone, no matter how hard we contrived to organize it. He was fast becoming acquainted with her two closest lady friends, plump matrons who tutted and blushed but were quick to mention “something your late husband the Reverend used to say” if they felt Mrs. Tillie Anderson or Kenforth had been too familiar. They were an unrelenting wall of starched cotton and lavender scent.
Days ticked by as Kenforth paid a kind of halting courtship, built around visits to the drug store lunch counter with Mrs. Tillie Anderson’s friends. I began to worry that we’d never get past this stage of the relationship.
Finally we ventured a new tactic. Kenforth proposed that he bring his dear brother along to meet Mrs. Tillie Anderson. The matrons tittered, but we saw a chink in the wall--she offered to fix us Sunday dinner, her first invitation for Kenforth to visit her house. When Kenforth told me of this victory, we toasted with cheap whiskey we kept hidden in a suitcase lest our landlady think us disreputable.
“You always know how to talk to widows, Durley,” he said. “They say you seem so serious, like you could be a banker or a preacher.”
Sunday arrived and so did we, spit-shined and hair-slicked on Mrs. Tillie Anderson’s front porch. She opened the door, her matrons twittering behind her.
We gathered around Mrs. Tillie Anderson’s dining table, set with lace and what was probably her wedding china. On the buffet sat framed photographs of a younger Mrs. Tillie Anderson with a somber, chicken-necked man.
I offered to say the blessing, and proceeded to do it so thoroughly there could be no doubts about our familiarity with the Lord.
Finally Kenforth kicked me under the table. “Amen,” I said, and slid my knife into a chicken breast.
“That was a lovely blessing, Durley,” Mrs. Tillie Anderson said. “Kenforth tells me you all were raised up in the church.”
This was true.
“Oh yes ma’am. Went twice on Sundays. Our mother’s father was a preacher.”
This was not true.
“What church do you all go to now?” she asked, passing the cornbread.
“Well, it’s a shame to say it,” I said, “but we have fallen away from it, what with the traveling way of life.”
I took a bite of peas and stepped on Kenforth’s foot to remind him to speak up.
“Oh yes,” Kenforth said. “The traveling way of life. We would be ashamed to tell our own mother, but we’re backslid.”
“Ooooh,” the women gasped. I scooped more potatoes onto my plate.
We had calculated that this would pose to Mrs. Tillie Anderson a challenge she could not resist. I have yet to meet a woman who could pass by the opportunity to improve a man.
Mrs. Tillie Anderson proved no different. Presented with a person in need of spiritual guidance, she leapt at the chance. By the time she served dessert, she and her friends had plotted out a course of rehabilitation to get Kenforth and me back on the road to salvation.
It was exhausting. We studied scripture and had long talks about the sorry state of the world and the difficulty of being good Christians in this day and age. But gradually, Mrs. Tillie Anderson became easier around Kenforth. Sometimes they even spoke alone, while I entertained her chaperones with tales of the life of a traveling salesman.
Still, I was growing restless. We had devoted weeks already to Mrs. Tillie Anderson, and I couldn’t see that Kenforth had her any more willing to loan him her cash savings for his dying mother than she was the day she dropped the eggs. It was time to cut our losses. Funds were getting scarce. We needed to find a new town and a new widow and give her the proper time and attention to replenish them.
“It’s time we moved on,” I told Kenforth. “You’ve had your fun. We’ll be in Clay Bottom till Christmas at this rate.”
“Wait,” Kenforth said. “I got one last card to play.”
His card was based on Mrs. Tillie Anderson’s own innocence. She could not conceive of a person lying to God. In her world, no one would proclaim an allegiance to the Lord for any reason other than because they felt it in their heart. No one would dare.
She did not understand Kenforth.
It was time, it turned out, for the church’s annual association meeting. Baptists from all around met up together to preach and eat. The association meeting was also a popular time for baptisms. This was Kenforth’s last card, which he presented to Mrs. Tillie Anderson over a Sunday dinner of cornbread and sliced ham.
“I believe I’d like to be re-baptized, if you don’t think anyone would take it amiss,” he announced.
Mrs. Tillie Anderson and her matron friends squealed and squawked with excitement.
“Oh, I have prayed and prayed you would come back into the church,” she told Kenforth. She clasped his hand across the peas, then dropped it quickly. She blushed and Kenforth gave her a soft smile he didn’t usually use on marks, like the matrons and myself weren’t even there. I frowned and cleared my throat to focus him on business.
I did not personally care if Kenforth got baptized, again. It hadn’t done him any harm the first time. But it would draw people from other towns, someone whose path we might have crossed before.
I warned him. “It will draw a crowd” were my exact words. “What if it’s prophecy I’m speaking?” Kenforth puts great stock in my prophecies, even if he won’t admit it.
“You worry too much, Durley,” he said.
The day dawned. The church’s wooden pews were packed, with more cars pulling in outside, women unloading dishes for the dinner later. The preachers took it in turns, working themselves up, hollering about sin, then collapsing onto a pew in sweaty, righteous exhaustion as another took up the thread.
The crowd was primed for a good baptism.
The whole church marched toward the riverbank. In the early spring noontime, the water was murky and smelled of mud, and crocuses nodded along the bank.
Those getting baptized took it in turns to wade out into the icy water with the preacher, who held their heads and dunked them backwards while he said words over them. Then they slogged back up the riverbank, where church members handed them blankets and fussed over them. The young girls’ mothers cried.
Kenforth went last. He gamely went out with the preacher and got his dunking, and was wading back to shore to Mrs. Tillie Anderson’s waiting arms, when a voice from the crowd said, “Kenny?”
At the water’s edge, Kenforth froze. For he, like me, knew that voice. That voice was once the owner of $814 dollars, some heavy silverware, and a nice gold bracelet. Kenforth said later, once he was free, that the bracelet was for his pain and suffering.
“Kenny!” the voice called. “Kenny! Where is my mother’s silver, Kenny?”
A plump woman in a too-tight navy dress and a straw hat pushed her way through the crowd. Baptists parted for her like the Red Sea had for Moses as she marched, wobbly but determined, down the riverbank toward the water. Clutching hands reached for Kenforth’s arm as he stood in ankle-deep water, caught like a rabbit that didn’t know which way to jump.
I reached past the quivering straw hat, and I shoved. Kenforth fell backward into the current, arms outstretched, pure surprise on his face.
“Swim, you fool!” I shouted as I ducked into the crowd. In the distraction, I slithered free of the people staring at the spectacle of Kenforth floating downstream, as the plump woman screeched in frustration.
It would look bad to run, but I walked quickly up the street to our car, where I’d already stowed our things for a getaway. I’d had a bad feeling, and I always trust my bad feelings. I’d left our rent in an envelope in our room. The landlady would have a story to tell her friends.
I drove toward the river road, picking it up downstream of the baptism. There was little traffic and I kept one eye on the riverbank, looking for Kenforth.
I didn’t expect to see Mrs. Tillie Anderson on the road. How she had shaken off her matron friends, and indeed her whole congregation, I did not know. But she stood by the edge of the road, staring at the river, and when she heard my car coming she turned and stepped out in front of me.
I had no choice but to stop.
We stared at each other through the windshield. I sighed and turned off the car, and stepped out to face her.
“Well, Durley. Looks like you’re going somewhere,” Mrs. Tillie Anderson said. “Was the baptism not exciting enough for you?”
“Mrs. Anderson, you’re blocking traffic.”
She crossed her arms.
“What I don’t know is whether you’re leaving Kenforth here to fend for himself, or if you’re both running away.”
Behind her, the road hugged the curve of the creek bank. Down the way, I saw a figure emerge from the trees. It looked damp. I gave my head the tiniest of shakes.
“Who was that woman at the creek bank, Durley?”
“Never saw her in my life.”
“She sure seemed to know Kenforth. Seemed to know him pretty well, in fact.”
“Well. He’s kind to people, you know.”
“Oh, I do know.” She looked toward the river. Down in the bend, the damp figure did as he was told, and stood still in the shadows of the trees.
“I know, all right. Kind to poor widows, I think it is. Kind to their friends.” Mrs.Tillie Anderson swiped an arm across her eyes, and I realized she was crying. I reckon other widows in our past had cried, but we were never there for that part. I found I didn’t care for it.
“Kinder to you than he is to most,” I said, handing her my handkerchief. “But you see that he can’t stay. It wouldn’t be safe for him.”
I wasn’t sure she’d mind.
“Oh, I see,” she said, stepping closer to me, close enough to spit in my face or jab a finger in my chest. She seemed ready to do either one. “I see a lot. I see who’s been running this show. I see who you are, Durley. I think you like being the man in the shadows, pulling the strings. Did you send that poor woman a message and tell her where to find Kenforth?”
I did not answer.
“I hoped those Bible lessons would rub off on you both. But you can’t save a liar. I see what you’ve done here. Does Kenforth see it? I wonder.”
She turned toward the river, threw her head back, and shouted.
“Kenforth! When you’re done with your brother, when you want to come back to me, you come on! There’s a place for you here.”
She looked back at me, threw my handkerchief on the ground, and stepped around the car, walking fast down the road toward town. She didn’t look back.
I got into the car, fired it up and rolled down the road to where Kenforth stood at the edge of the trees, watching her. Newly baptized, he looked no different that I could tell.
“Get on in, then,” I said.
He stared at me like a stranger, and I wondered if that smile over the peas was a bigger problem than I’d thought. He could choose Mrs. Tillie Anderson, much good it might do him with our past how it was.
“Tillie’s a good woman, Durley.”
“I know.”
“She deserves better.”
“That she does.” I held my breath, waiting on his choice.
Then he sighed and opened the door, and I knew I’d made the right call. For both of us. He settled down in the passenger seat, his side of the car always. I put my foot on the gas and we drove together toward the next town.
Editor’s Note
I’m a sucker for a con artist story. Even more so if it’s set in the American South. “Kenforth’s Baptism” by Chelyen Davis is a tale of grift and manipulation about two brothers who find weakness in their marks and exploit it. The manipulation goes not only for the widowed women that Durley and Kenforth target, but also for the relationship between the brothers themselves.
Durley (the brains) uses Kenforth to get what he wants. Kenforth (the looks) seems to be along for the ride, arguably as much a victim as the marks they scam. We get glimpses of Kenforth’s humanity, moments where he wishes for a different life. Perhaps this tenderness and longing is what Mrs. Tillie Anderson sees when she invites Kenforth to leave behind his life of crime and join her. We have to wonder if Kenforth will ever manage to swim free of his brother’s toxic current.
Josh Boldt, Editor
Story Track
The concept of blind devotion is both romantic and destructive. Our culture often idealizes a kind of devotion that plunges headfirst with reckless abandon. And, sure, there’s something to be said about pledging loyalty without reservations, about being willing to do anything for those we care about. But devotion without rationality is easily exploited by, well, anyone who seeks to manipulate us.
Waylon Jennings’s “You Ask Me To” explores this romantic ideal of self-sacrifice and the potential risks inherent within it. I like how the song’s theme can be applied both to the relationship between the con men and their marks, and also to Kenforth’s devotion to his brother as he decides whether to stand up for himself or to, yet again, quietly resign to Durley’s demands.