22. Bompie and the Pastor. In Cody’s next journal, he says that he came up on Dock having another serious conversation—this time with Frank—and that the two hushed up when they saw him. Another weird thing happened, too, when he went below deck on The Wanderer and found his father (Mo) crying in his bunk. When Cody asked his father what was wrong, he said that nothing was, and that everything was normal. Cody says that he’s never seen his father cry before.
Cody then retells another Bompie story from Sophie, this time about when Bompie was baptized. When Bompie was a teenager, his mother decided that he needed to be baptized, and so she got in touch with the local pastor and they arranged to do the baptism in the Ohio River. Bompie and the pastor, however, were at odds with one another because Bompie was dating the pastor’s daughter and had brought her home past curfew too many times. Bompie, therefore, wasn’t pleased to hear that the pastor would be dunking him under the water. When the day of Bompie’s baptism came, Bompie’s reservations were justified—the pastor held Bompie under water for an excessively long amount of time, and Bompie eventually bit the pastor’s hand, freeing himself. As usual, Bompie’s father gave him a whipping and his mother gave him some apple pie.
Yet again, it seems that something eventful is happening in the adult world that’s being kept from Cody, Sophie, and Brian. What it is isn’t clear just yet, but it’s perhaps connected to Mo’s crying. Since Dock has had such serious conversations with both Joey and Frank, we might suppose that they have something to do with Rosalie.
Once more Bompie has a dangerous encounter with water, yet this time he’s not entirely responsible for why he ends up in it. The story otherwise follows the same pattern as the former two, and Bompiereceives a whipping and some pie. We can also now begin to see why Bompie’s stories are so important to Sophie—what deeper relevance they may have to her own life’s story. The fact that Bompie avoids drowning in every tale might be something which taps into Sophie’s fear of water—and, since Bompie always defeats the water, perhaps something in Sophie finds this reassuring.