But in the Roman Catholic Church, even though they didn’t believe in Jesus, or the Inerrancy of Scripture, and worshiped Mary and prayed to dead people and were probably the Whore of Babylon, they did things I liked to watch. It wasn’t as if I was making fun of God or telling bad jokes about the Bible or anything sacred because we knew that none of their empty rituals were pleasing to God. So I didn’t think it was wrong to play Catholic, but I knew that Dad and especially Mom would be really mad if they saw me taking the wafer and crossing myself and kneeling next to old ladies and even once lighting a candle in front of Mary and saying, “Hail Mary, full of Grace” just like the little South American boys did before the missionaries got to their village in our nighttime devotional storybook Pete and Penny Play and Pray, which had stories about how Christian missionaries had gone to explain about Jesus to the Roman Catholic pagan children living in darkness and superstition and trusting in men rather than in God and the Bible.

In our church we sang a hymn about the Bible. The chorus was “The B-I-B-L-E, yes that’s the book for me!” And we got to scream it out and wave our Bibles over our heads because there was nothing wrong with praising the Lord joyfully and without ritual, superstition, and liturgy.

Then we’d play Sword Drill. We’d hold our Bibles by our sides and when Mom called out a verse, we’d draw our Bibles like swords, and whoever could look up the verse first got a sticker with a Bible verse on it to stick on his Sunday school attendance chart. I never won since I could hardly read because my mom was teaching me at home when she had time because she didn’t want me in the Roman Catholic Swiss schools being taught by nuns. So she taught me, and I sometimes did some schoolwork with Janet, when she came home from the Protestant girls boarding school she and Rachael attended in Lausanne.

Janet taught me by giving me Indian burns on my wrist if I wouldn’t concentrate. Mom let me take a lot of recesses out in the yard. So I had a lot of trouble finding the Bible verses or reading them. Rachael would sometimes help me look one up, and then I’d try to read it while she whispered the words to me. She had been at a real school in St. Louis before we had moved. Mom would say, “That’s very good, Calvin,” even though she knew I’d been helped. She and Rachael and Janet would all exchange sweet smiles just like the pictures of all the women in long dresses on the book cover of Little Women, which Mom had already read to me twice.