The knock at the door woke me up from my slumber at exactly 6:45 am, Eastern Daylight Time (don't even get me started on how much I despise Daylight Savings). I struggled to get to my feet, having drunk more than a few spirits and also fucked my way through quite a few people the day before. It was nice, but it's good to have a chance to sleep such a marathon session off, too ... and that just wasn't meant to be ... I guessed that it was caffeine, and lots of it, for me and the Bottoms ... and the rest of the growing tribe. Little did I know that the tribe was ready to grow yet again.
It was Deacon Aaron Jones himself, looking a bit sore, tired, and worried for his part. I was glad that he wasn't taking this so well, naturally. The racist asshole deserved to suffer more than a little, though I hadn't gotten a chance to mail out the tape. Well, now I was naked as the day I was born, but luckily, as soon as they saw Aaron, Lowell, Mary, and Belle grabbed the three shotguns in the house and loaded up for bear, handing one of them to me as their Master. Even nude, my shotgun would send a powerful warning to the deacon about any crazy ideas.
"What the fuck are you doing here, Deacon? Without your Klan compatriots, too ... brave of you! Are you sure that you want to be around a bunch of dangerous folk, like, you know, lesbians, bisexuals, homosexuals, Yankees, foreigners, drag queens, Jews, blacks, Asians, and Latinos? It might rub off ... isn't that what you fear?" I taunted him just a little, but I was surprised by the way that he shook his head sadly and then hung it a bit.
"Okay, what gives? You were all tough and bossy last night, telling everyone to go to Hell who didn't fit the KKK/David Duke/Jimmy Swaggart/John Hagee version of the world that you hold ... what now? What gives?" I was startled that I actually felt some empathy for this bigot ... well, I did try to be a damn good human being ... shitheads like this guy didn't make it easy.
"I ... was expelled from the Klan. Rather unceremoniously, too. They wanted nothing to do with me. I angered and wrote off my wife, daughter, and two sons for them, and what did they do? Kicked me out! Those rotten, miserable, bedsheet-wearing, cross-burning asswipes! Well, fuck them! I know their secrets! I know all of their little hypocrisies, scandals, things swept under the rug for the sake of the Cause! I ... chose wrong. I gave my life to save the white, Christian South into which I was born, and for what?
"Those losers threw sand in my face, beat me up, and tossed me off the side of the road a mile from home ... I had to walk to an ER, no one even picked me up, and even then, the admitting clerk wanted nothing to do with me. It took much of the night to get treated for scrapes, bruises, cuts, and ... worse ... cigarette burns from them rubbing them out on my skin. They shaved my head and warned me never to trouble them again ... never to contact them or ask them for help again.
"So, now what ... I have no one," Aaron Jones asked, as he removed his wig, showing that his head had indeed been ... if rather roughly, shaved.
"You ... still have me, Daddy," Megan surprised us by hugging him, even naked as she was, "You're a rather bigoted, narrow-minded fellow, but you're still my father ... if I'm still your daughter. I did some things to hurt you in my anger ... but none of that should matter now. You're my father. I'm still gay, though. You're just going to have to deal with the fact that you need your lesbian daughter's love."
"Oh, dear, God ... I never realized ... what it meant to be hated ... I thought that I did. I thought that we were the victims of the hate, the persecution ... but it was because we were cruel to others, wasn't it? The hate that we showed them came back to hurt us. But, last night ... I was hated. I was called all kinds of names. Cuckold. N ... well, I won't repeat that word ... I've used it far too freely in the past. Fa ... well, there is another such word. They claimed that because I let my daughter be a ... lesbian, that it was a failure. That I had failed to bring my family along into the ways of the Klan, which is true, but it wasn't my fault, was it? They claimed that because Evan is gay ... and because Morty had an affair with what they called a 'loose woman' and a 'family of perverts, ' like the Bottoms ... that it was my fault, and that I was seen in the company of a Jew and three black men, plus a black woman.
"Well, they'll wish that they had never heard of me! I know things about them that could ruin them all! They think that I'll be too scared to talk? I have nothing to lose but my life. I destroyed my marriage for them! I lost my relationship with my children ... well, okay, so maybe I can salvage something of it, but what else? I'm going to make them pay! I don't just own a dry cleaning business ... I have contacts, those jerks ... yeah, they'll pay," Aaron Jones stood there, white as a ghost, with a truly horrified look on his face.
"I've ... been a bad man, haven't I? I thought that I was a good man. I really did! I did what Papa and Mama taught me to do. I believed as they did. I was 18 years old when they swore me into the Ku Klux Klan. I've never known any other way to live! I never went to college ... nor even the military, because I felt that the real fight was closer to home. God, so many wasted opportunities in life! I was the good son. The oldest. I took over the family dry-cleaning business. I was responsible. I did what I had to do. I joined the KKK. Papa was so proud that day, you know. I resented both of you, getting to be wild and free, rebellious. I had to do the right thing, be respectable and steady. Reliable."
"Sit down and have a stiff drink, man," I told him, as David brought him a tumbler and some Johnnie Walker Red.
"Look, man, really ... you need to face facts. Yeah, you goofed up in life. We all have ... though your errors were worse, but it's not too late, man! It's not! I had to start over, yet here I am. Become who you want to be, even now! Stand up! Be a man! So, you had to learn late in life and the hard way that hate and prejudice are the wrong way to live! So, you have to rethink everything that you've ever been taught ... well, look around you, man! That's basically everyone in this house! We're oddballs ... freaks ... perverts, sinners, rebels, black sheep, libertines, and God knows what else! And we're proud of it! We've broken free of what we were taught in life ... and so can you!
"We ... have become a community ... and a family ... and ... a church. We can bring you in, but it will be a sort of rough process at first. You'll have to learn ... and un-learn some things. You'll have to learn to open your mind to new teachings, some of them shocking. Keep your heart ready to accept some things that you would have thought absolutely revolting some time ago. Consider it a sort of ... rebirth and a baptism by fire or whatever. The point is that you need to be cleansed of your old ways, so follow me," I had a brainstorm now, drawing upon both my Jewish traditions of the mikvah bath and their bastardized Christian copy, the baptism.
I led the man to the swimming pool, where I commanded him to, "Strip. Now. Completely. You need to be purged of your past ... you need to reject your old ways and be washed of your stains of hate and bigotry."
Aaron was a little nervous, being a bit of a tall, lanky, scrawny guy ... and he wasn't likely to have ever kept up the weight and muscle mass to have served, anyway. Contrary to many folks' expectations about men like him, he wasn't a chubby guy at all. He had a mustache ... and it was one of those mustaches that made it seem that a man was compensating for or hiding something.
"Brother Carver, as an elder of our new church, will you be so good as to baptize this man in the name of the Fatherhood of God and the Brother of Man? Help immerse him in truth and wash away the lies in the bath," I directed Carver, knowing that this was the acid test of Aaron's sincerity ... would he accept the authority of a black man and surrender to it?
Aaron undressed without further ado and promptly joined Carver in the water, whereupon Carver improvised a baptism rite of sorts, "Do you, Brother Aaron, renounce your prior beliefs of white supremacy and fundamentalist Christianity? Do you reject racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, and all other evils and injustices that seek to drive men apart from their neighbors and subvert goodwill?"
"I ... do," Aaron looked nervous, half-expecting lightning from his old god to strike him dead and send him straight to Hell, but it never happened, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
"And do you, Brother Aaron, profess your belief in the eternal Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man, in the essential goodness that Man can achieve, even if he fails to do so at times? Do you profess your faith in the necessity of reason, empathy, and openness to others not like you, your willingness to live in accord with your neighbors? Do you profess your faith in the essential oneness and unity of the Cosmos?"
"I do," Aaron gulped now.
"Then, by the authority vested in me by our Prophet, Brother George Jacobson, I now baptize you in the name of God and Man alike. Rise, purified of your stains and prepare to serve God as well as Man," Carver declared as he immersed Aaron in the cold pool water and then lifted him up from the water.