As is the Southern tradition, Ansel Head’s religious education started early. He faintly remembers attending the Mountain Brook Methodist Church in the heart of Crestline Village in the center of the Tiny Kingdom. That building, now sporting a reddish-purple paint, is used for more secular purposes. In order to better symbolize their high station, its members moved the Church early on to a grander structure with a lofty steeple rising ever upwards to the heavens.
Head remembers nothing of his lessons at the Methodist Sunday school; but he has never forgotten having to abandon his holster filled with silver bullets and two six-shooters and being forced into a collarless tweed jacket, ruffled shirt, hideous short pants, knee socks, and highly polished Buster Brown tie-ups. Continue reading
Watching his friend Ansel Larry die was a hard lesson. But even for the uninterested Head, an education in death was a required course for his education. In a short span, he had been forced to study at close hand his brother’s death, his mother’s deteriorating health, his own knee replacement, and then his friend’s departure. Things were getting too near to Head for him to disregard the subject any longer.
