XVI – When Pastor Matt Cared (andIt Cost Him $40)
“It’s kind of hard to explain.”
Randy downed the second half of his cup of coffee and cleared his throat.
“Jesse was at the end of his rope the day we met at the coffee shop where I work for my brother-in-law. He’d found out he might lose his job, his dad was laid up in the hospital, his marriage is hanging on by a thread, and he’s always worried about his little boy Jeremiah, who’s autistic. He’d walked out of his office in the middle of a nervous breakdown, and since he forgot his keys and had walked to the coffee shop, I gave him a ride down to the hospital to see his dad. We talked for hours with him, and his dad ended up saying he wanted to tell Jesse something he’d kept secret all his life when he got out of there. And I shared the Gospel with the man,, and we prayed, and I think he was born again right there in the hospital bed. But he died later that night.
“So Jesse went to his dad’s house and found some things in the closet that helped us figure out where he was originally from. Jesse and his brothers and sister never knew much of anything about his life before he’d gotten married to their mom, who’d died when they were kids. He was able to figure out he grew up in Pleasants County, West Virginia, then ran away here to Jackson to live with his aunt before he joined the army. But back there in West Virginia as a kid he apparently wandered into the sheriff’s office asking if he’d go to jail for something, and there was something under his house he didn’t want to tell anyone about. I don’t know, I guess in a crawlspace or something.”
He gave it a second to (a) see if Jennifer the server was nearby so he could hold up his empty coffee cup and give her a friendly wave and (b) make sure Pastor Matt didn’t have any questions. Joe, who already knew all of this, was nonetheless listening stoically from his spot across the table next to Jesse’s empty chair. Pastor Matt, though, sitting on Randy’s right, was absorbed by Randy’s quick recap, and after looking at him thoughtfully for another few seconds, shook his big offensive lineman head and said, “Wow,” before taking a sip of his Coke.
“How’s his boy?” Joe asked in his deep, simple voice.
“I don’t know,” Randy said honestly. “I think he and Bruce, Jesse’s dad,” he added for Matt’s benefit, “were really close. But I don’t know how much he understands about his grandfather dying. Or how he’s taking this.”
“And Jesse’s an atheist?” Matt asked, stirring the ice in his Coke glass with his straw.
Randy finally made eye contact with Jennifer and gave her the signal. She happily headed back to the kitchen to get a coffee pot for the big, happy, Italian looking man at table seventeen, and as she re-emerged from the kitchen Randy answered Matt’s question. “That’s what he says. But no one’s a real atheist, right, Pastor? ‘What may be known about God is plain to them,'” Randy said, quoting Romans 1:19.
“Right,” Pastor Matt answered, liking Randy even more. “I can’t believe you guys became this close after only a few days.”
Randy shrugged. “I love him. And we spent those last hours of his dad’s life together. It just happened this way.”
“So what’s next?”
“Tomorrow morning we’re going to head up to the high school, where he graduated after running away here to his aunt. Jesse’s hoping he can find something out there. Then we’ll try to find his house and see if we can figure out whatever this secret thing was before the funeral next week.”
“What can I do to help?” Matt asked, looking at Randy with studious eyes behind his glasses.
Randy smiled softly. “Let me think about it. Thank you. I love this man. I just do. That’s why I have to see it to the end.” He stopped for a second as a thought occurred to him, and he looked across the table at Joe. “What do you think Bruce did? Apparently there’s something out there at that house. What do you think? Murder?”
Joe breathed in deep, and exhaled loudly and slowly. “I chose to not think about it much. But I don’t think it was something he done or seen one time.” He looked at Pastor Matt on Randy’s right. “He told me one morning when he was a teenager living here, forty years ago, he knew he was going to Hell.” He looked back at Randy. “I think it was something that happened a lot. And yeah, I’d wager it was as bad as murder.”
Randy felt his upper back and neck tingle, and he felt like a cinder block had been dropped on his chest as he realized Joe had to be right.
“Where is he?” Pastor Matt asked, realizing it had been more than ten minutes since Jesse had excused himself.
“Yeah,” Randy answered. “Let me go check on him.”
Matt put his hand on Randy’s forearm. “Do you mind if I?”
You’d have had a better chance of getting Randy to lick a toilet bowl than say no to a pastor. So I don’t need to tell you which big dude went looking for Jesse Henderson.
He was sitting in one of the rocking chairs that lined the wood front porch of the Cracker Barrel.
“Hey, Jesse.”
The face that turned to look at Matt was pale, nervous, and frustrated. He looked seriously ill. He had a plastic Cracker Barrel shopping bag on his lap, and his left hand was just laying on it limply as though it were the hand of a man dead asleep.
After Jesse didn’t say anything or nod at all, Matt said, “Can I sit?”
Jesse nodded without making any facial expression, and so Matt came over and sat his large frame as best he could in the blue rocking chair to the right of Jesse’s. It creaked under him, but having been the size of a door frame for most of his adult life he was used to the sound, and had a good sense that the chair would hold.
They just sat there for a minute. Across the parking lot was some very tall, unmowed grass, and just looking at it in the afternoon sunlight made Matt itch. He prayed for about thirty seconds, thought about what he could do for Jesse for another ten or fifteen, and then said, “Not many guys wear a suit jacket to services anymore. You stood out like sore thumb.”
Jesse looked down as if he were surprised at what he was wearing, then looked over at Matt, who was still staring at the grass as though he were painting it, and then he laughed. It felt good. And he didn’t care if he was being played. “Not the first time.”
He gave it a second, feeling the humidity clinging to his chest and wishing there was a breeze and deciding he still liked Matt enough. “I don’t believe in Hell. But when my dad was a teenage runaway here in Jackson he told Joe in there that’s where he was going. And if anybody deserves it, I guess he does.”
“What makes you say that?”
Everything Jesse could perceive, and he perceived more than I do, told him Matt wasn’t a man to be trifled with, despite the fact that he could tell for some childish reason the stranger actually cared about him. There were trap doors around that question, because this was a serious man, not a simpleton who peddled harmless little platitudes he’d heard on daytime TV. But ninety-six hours in, Jesse was still just as desperate, and even if this guy’s counter punches took him down he figured he had nothing to lose.
“I’m here because he was a bad father. He told us nothing. We never met his parents, never knew where he came from, where we came from. When my mother died, he didn’t cry, didn’t ask how we were, didn’t talk about it ever. We missed her by ourselves. Just kids, all four of us. My sister got her ears pierced by her best friend and learned what her period was from our neighbor because not talking was my father’s religion.”
Jesse breathed in deep. The air was so warm and still. The shade here on the porch didn’t help much. He looked over at Matt, who was looking back. He stared into his blue eyes and, even though he could tell Matt was hurting for him, Jesse wanted to hit him hard, and hit his father hard, and hit God hard.
“My father did just enough to not be a deadbeat, worked his butt off and made sure we had clothes and food and haircuts. But all the things that make a man a dad?” He rolled his tired eyes and gave a painful laugh. “And then he finally acts like he wants to tell me what it is that made it happen like this, and he dies, getting off totally free. He never has to have the one hard talk. Instead I have to dig through his closet to find some scraps of paper from forty-five years ago in an old coffee can and leave my son-” and here he couldn’t stop the tears and the breaking of his voice into words that were more choked and burdened- “my boy, two days after his grandfather, who he loved like fire, so I can find out who he was and try to decide whether to tell my little brothers and sister what I figure out, whether our father was a murderer or a rapist or whatever I’m supposed to find out there.”
Jeremiah would be out in the backyard right now. He loved playing with their neighbor’s dog, a little Jack Russell Terrier, on Sunday afternoons when she got home from church. He’d be letting the dog chase him through their yard, his unruly little boy’s hair flying around his head like leaves in a rainstorm, neither him nor the dog tiring out.
I hate him. I want to tell him so much.
I hate you.
“There’s nothing else to say.”
Jesse looked straight ahead again at the tall grass across the parking lot. There were little white butterflies dancing on the tops of the blades, and that was able to take him outside of himself just enough to lay some of the anger down.
“I’m sorry. Thanks for coming out here.”
Matt rocked for about ten seconds.
“Once Jesus was walking with His disciples, and they passed a blind guy. Born that way. And Jesus’ disciples ask Him, ‘Whose sin caused this? The guy’s parents’? Or his own?’ Jesus told them it was neither.” Matt kept staring out at the grass, though Jesse now looked back at him. There was a kid out there now, looking for something he’d dropped. Matt watched him as he continued. “It wasn’t that sin isn’t why there’s blind people. It is. There are blind people and people with pancreatic cancer and murderers and thieves and dictators because of sin. That’s how pain and death entered the stage. But this guy’s blindness didn’t owe its existence to an individual act of his mom or his dad or himself.”
Matt took a second, leaned forward as the wiry little boy kept looking through that grass out there on the other side of the restaurant property, and then brought his mind back to finish up. “Jesus said it was for God’s works to be displayed in the man. And then He healed his blindness, provoking a bunch of angry religious hypocrites with no more love for God than they had for the blind man, to holler and pitch a fit because he’d done it on the Sabbath. And provoking the man to worship Him.”
Jesse was arrested by Matt’s calmness and his gravity, but he was still too frayed at the edges to be polite. “What’s your point?”
“Whatever bad things shaped your dad, and flowed downstream to you, might display the works of God to people.”
Jesse wanted to either roll his eyes or hit something. But he did neither. His mind and heart and body were still, and while he didn’t know this was the reason, it was because it was clear how much Matt was invested in him. That concern had tamed the violence in Jesse for a moment. And now Matt squinted as he watched the boy out there, studying him out there in the grass, walking back and forth and holding down the tall blades and stalks with his hands as he scanned the ground. And then Matt got up and walked intently across the parking lot towards him, and Jesse, though confused, decided to follow.
“Are you looking for something?”
The boy looked up. He was about ten years old, had close cut black hair and a sleeveless shirt with big hole in it up near the neck. Jesse could see right away how upset this kid was. His eyes were wide and his face was flushed and sweaty. And he didn’t speak for a second. Jesse read it on his face: the boy was trying to decide if he should trust this strange man. And then, in a turn that ripped his heart a little, Jesse watched the boy give it up and shout it out.
“I lost it!”
He started crying. He covered his face with his right arm, sobbing into his elbow hopelessly.
“What did you lose?” Matt asked calmly.
“The money she gave me! My grandma!”
“You were walking through here?”
The boy put his arm down and looked up at Matt, his eyes were now red and soaking wet. But the boy sniffed and then stopped crying and sighed to clear it all away. He had some sense of who he was talking to, a faith that Matt might have a better plan than to just stand out here and panic. “From her house.” The boy looked back across the road and north, where about a quarter of a mile away there was a residential street with a handful of houses.
Jesse looked at the waist high grass and cat tails. It was a lost cause. If it was even in this mess.
“How much was it?” Matt asked.
The boy looked scared. He bit his lower lip and his eyes welled up with more tears, and he shook his head again.
“We can look for it together, like a team. It’ll just help to know how much we’re looking for. How much was it?”
The boy stood there for a solid ten seconds, then said, “Forty dollars.” It sounded like it had cost him everything to say it.
Matt pulled his black wallet out of his back left pocket, opened it, and took out two twenties and gave them to the boy. “Go on,” he said. “We’ll probably find the money you lost, but you go on.”
The boy looked at the ground as though he were ashamed. He said, “Thank you very much.” And then, without looking up, he ran to Matt and hugged him, and he sobbed as Matt knelt down and hugged him back, and rubbed the top of his head.
“It’s okay, little man. Go on and get home, okay?”
The boy walked east across the parking lot. Jesse and Matt looked at each other, and Matt shrugged.
“You only live once.”
He gestured to Jesse that they should head back inside the restaurant, and made his way back himself. Jesse just stared at him for a second, frozen.
“If that,” he muttered to himself.
What did it feel like to die?
Stop thinking that!
Rachel scratched her forehead, closed her eyes as tight as she could, fought the urge to shout. To scream.
There was no way out of this. He had been with her for six months and eleven days. Inside her. They were together. He was her baby. Her son. And now he wasn’t, and never would be again, and next week they would bury him, and she wasn’t a mother anymore. For the last half-year every moment had been colored with hopes for their baby son. His first pair of shoes, what his voice would sound like, the first time he looked at her and knew it was her, his becoming a Christian and loving the church.
None of it would happen now.
Brandon had fallen asleep in the chair to her right. She felt like she would never sleep again.
She didn’t resent him for that, did she?
Yes.
She resented everyone right now. The nurse who would come in here in a bit to irritatingly look at her heart rate on the blue screen on that machine to her right and who probably had a child or two, healthy and waiting for her at home.
He was gone. He was downstairs with some hospital staffer, being handled by someone who didn’t care and would just be wondering about what he’d watch on TV when he got home. That’s what the doctor had said, “They’ll take the baby downstairs.” He had been nice and he had said “baby,” and that was right, and she’d appreciated it, but his face was blurry in her memory now in this uneven hospital room darkness. He was downstairs, but he was also gone.
She couldn’t take it anymore. This was a mockery, laying here in this building when he was somewhere downstairs, when every muscle and thought in her was aching to touch him and kiss him and hear him and see him. This was false, fake, this bed with its clean sheets and little plastic tray table made to look like wood and all of the sanitized instruments they used up here. They couldn’t save him.
This was not how the world was, up here in the room. The world wasn’t pristine machines monitoring your well-being and instructional hospital videos suggested for your viewing. The world was her dead son down there, her dead baby boy, and her up here, and she would fight that world, scrap with it with every last bit of mother in her before that flame died out and all they had was a memory and a sadness and a wondering what would have been. What should have been. She would not lay up here in this lie.
Pulling the pick line out hurt, but she made it out of the room before Brandon was fully awake from the loud beeping the machine made, and she was on the elevator before he had found a nurse and groggily asked her if she knew where his wife was, she has red hair, we just lost our baby, she had a miscarriage, I can’t find her.
The elevator doors were shut, but the elevator was just staying there. It was the middle of the night. No one else on any other floor had pushed a button for the elevator, so Rachel and the big metal box just hovered there together, 9 stories up, each waiting for the other to make a move.
What floor?
One. Let’s try one.
You can ask someone down there. No one could help but tell you. They would see the fire in your eyes, and they would know he needed you, even though he was gone he needed you, and you needed him. And that’s how the world really was. She was able to get off the elevator when the doors opened to the first floor, despite the pain burning her up down low inside her, but she lost consciousness four steps after the turn to the right down the next empty hallway towards the main entrance and the information desk. Her face hit the hard floor, and the blood came quick from her nose and her mouth, and it began to soak her light blue hospital gown.