XVIII – When Pastor Matt Told and Listened (and Said the S-Word)
“You got that angry?”
“Yeah,” Randy nodded as he set the screwdriver down on Miss Mary’s window sill and sat down. He rested his back on the wall, stretched his left leg out in front of him, and let his his right hand lay on his right knee.
He looked ashamed, and it was the first time he’d looked that way in a while.
The baby.
The abortion.
He didn’t drive away the thought of the son or daughter he’d just learned of this week, but he did transfer the weight of the shame to the shoulders of His blessed Jesus, because he had good practice knowing that was the only way any of who he was got paid for.
Margaret could never hate the old Randy as much as he did himself, though she’d have bristled at the suggestion, clenching her jaw and ready to tell you the three worst things he’d ever done to her. But Randy had been in love with Jesus for three summers and across four state lines now, and he’d learned the hard and good way that everything Jesus said was true. All his guilt, every screamed swear word and punched wall and cold abandonment of the woman he’d pledged to protect and to cherish, it had all been stashed inside the heart of a God he didn’t deserve, where it had in turn been nailed to a cross He didn’t deserve. He hated that his wickedness had been the momentum behind the murder of his baby boy or girl, but he rested in the claim of his Christ that this too would be forgiven. And so by the time he answered Pastor Matt he didn’t look ashamed anymore.
“Yeah. I screamed at her. Was terrible to her. I loved her, but I was a fool. That’s how I was saved, actually.” He smiled a little, that wry, buoyant, contagious smile he had, and Matt sat down on Miss Mary’s carpet to his right and laughed.
“How’d that happen?”
“I broke my hand by punching a wall at the dealership where I sold cars. We’d been rude to each other on the phone, and I just hated her so much for a minute. I punched the concrete wall outside, and a guy who saw me lose it, this really good guy I sold with named Jerry, he took me to the hospital.” Randy went back to Nebraska for a moment in his memory, and his heart hurt for missing Jerry. Odds were he’d never see him again, and sitting out here just on the other side of West Virginia as he helped a broken man chase something down, he just wanted to tell Jerry thanks.
“He was a Christian, straight as an arrow, man. I mean, I’ve never known another man quite like Jerry. I’d always thought highly of him, he just carried himself well. And he lived what he said. But in that one car ride, I don’t know.” Randy remembered Jerry’s simply parted gray hair and his glasses and the way his face was tender but at the same time wouldn’t take any of his crap.
“It’s like he fathered me.” He looked over at Pastor Matt to see if that made any sense, but Matt was just staring blankly ahead at the wall on the other side of the room.
“Anyway, he told me who Jesus was, what He came to do. The Gospel. And we talked the whole afternoon at the hospital, and then he drove me home. When we got there, Margaret was gone, and she never came back. Those next few months Jerry was my best friend, and Jesus ripped open my whole life and put me back together. I wouldn’t have changed any other way.”
“Do you still get angry like that?” Pastor Matt asked, still looking straight ahead.
“No, not like that.” He thought about it for a second. He’d spoken before he’d dwelled on it, but that really was the truth. “Is that weird?”
“I doubt it,” Pastor Matt said. “In my experience, Jesus turns the guns on the thing that was killing you most.” Now he smiled and looked over at Randy. Randy decided he was liking Matt more and more. He’d have to remember this church in case he ever moved to Jackson, Ohio (population 6,198, birthplace of Homer Marshman, first owner of the Cleveland Rams, now known as the Los Angeles rams).
“What was it for you?”
Two sentences then came at the same time:
“Sexual sin.”
“Iced tea?”
Pastor Matt and Miss Mary stared at each other for about four seconds, then she pursed her seventy-four-year-old lips and set the two glasses of iced tea down on the floor next to Randy and left the room quietly.
“That’ll be awkward,” Randy said.
“Nah,” Matt said, and leaned over and picked up his iced tea. After taking a sip, he said, “Yeah.”
They both laughed, and then Matt went on. “I was a train wreck. I looked at pornography daily, I paid for prostitutes, I was sleeping around on campus. It was appalling.”
Randy let it breathe for a second, unsure if Matt wanted him to change the subject, but then taking a drink and deciding Matt was a big boy. He could stop when he wanted to.
“I have a son with a woman I had sex with twice back then. He’s twenty-four now. I’ve tried to make it right with him and his mother, but I’ve never been able to.”
Randy watched him stare at the empty wall across from them. Other than a paint roller and some plastic wrap that it was laying on over to their right, the whole room was empty. Matt had explained to him Miss Mary was having this room converted into a bedroom for a young lady in the church. Matt and another guy named Doug had apparently painted the room for Mary last weekend, and the young lady would move in next weekend. She had a baby named Andrew. She’d been considering getting an abortion until she’d talked to Pastor Matt and admitted what she already knew. He’d helped her get a job with an insurance agent he knew, and Miss Mary had said she could move in with her rent-free for the next year. Not many twentysomethings would be thrilled with the idea of moving in with a seventy-four year old woman who ended each weekday with two cups of decaf coffee and an episode of Diagnosis Murder, but Christy had cried when Miss Mary had offered, and she’d hugged her right there in the middle of the sanctuary, and she couldn’t let go even when Andrew had started crying from his car seat on the chair next to them. And Miss Mary had been uncomfortable, but she didn’t let go.
Pastor Matt had told him the story with great pleasure, not caring at all about his own claim in any of it. He just loved the story, and loved the girl, and loved Miss Mary (even though right now she was out in the kitchen scrubbing a plate that was already clean trying to forget the awkwardness of what had happened two minutes earlier).
“How did it happen?” Randy asked.
“I loved all of it,” Matt said. “All the sexual sin. It was my life. All I woke up for. But one day this guy named Paul was reading the Bible and street preaching out on the main green in front of the Arts and Sciences building on campus. And he looked at me and asked if I thought I was a good man. And I stalled, said something about how I tried. And he ripped me to shreds.” Matt laughed and shook his head, and his laugh had something sad about it, but Randy didn’t feel sad. He just looked and waited for what he knew was coming, but waited breathlessly all the same.
“I ended up threatening to kill the guy,” Matt said, looking back up and then letting the laugh die out a bit. “And he was a little guy. I expected him to be scared. But he wasn’t. And the next week he was back, and he asked me to come and talk to him. I just walked away. But before I got ten steps, right where the grass met the walkway that led to the chemistry building where I was headed for my next class, I turned back around. And he looked me dead in the eyes and asked me to come back again. And I did. And he spent an hour telling me I was a sinner and that Jesus came to die and be raised to make sinners forgiven.”
He thought for a second, about what Randy had no idea, but when he was done he said, “I thought about killing him again, but I was just done. God had me somewhere about ten minutes in, and I could never go back to the way it was. I hated all the things I loved before. I tried, I tried to keep up with the sex, but it all felt like death from that day on.”
Matt took a huge gulp of iced tea and then stood up, towering over Randy until he followed suit. “I think our work here is done,” he said, and gave a satisfied nod as he looked at the brand new outlet cover sitting squarely amid the newly painted offwhite wall. He gestured with his big head towards the door and then headed back out into the living room, where Miss Mary was now sitting on the couch and reading. She stood to see them off, smiling primly and uncomfortably at her giant pastor who had just said the s- word in her house. He smiled warmly back at her, free from all the bad memory that had just been hounding him a moment before in her spare bedroom, and he leaned down, and he kissed the top of her head.
“I’ll see you soon, Miss Mary.”
And then she laughed, all the discomfort fluttering away like frightened birds, and she patted his lower back and gave him a gentle hug.
“Thank you ma’am,” Randy said, wishing he had a hat to tip to her. She seemed like the kind of lady you should tip a hat to.
“Thank you, Randy. It was very nice meeting you.”
He smiled brightly at her, and Miss Mary thought about what a good man he seemed to be. I was going to say that Miss Mary would have been startled to know the old Randy, his fury, the f words he once screamed at Margaret because she’d forgotten to show up at an appointment with their tax man, but that’s selling her short. Miss Mary was no fool. She knew what kind of people Jesus came to reclaim, and she knew what He did with them once He had them.
“Do you ever see him? Your son?”
They were driving out towards Matt’s house, now, about ten miles outside of town. He’d called Joe and asked him to bring Jesse on back to his place for dinner when they were done fishing (Joe had sounded different, but that’s probably another story). If he’d been driving himself, Randy would have had his window down to feel the late afternoon summer sun on his arm as he played some Willie Nelson on the radio, but he wanted to be able to hear Matt, and so his window was all the way up now.
“He came out to stay with us for six weeks seven years ago, during the summer. That was the last time.” Matt turned the A/C down a notch and paused to take a deep breath and shed his fear of telling Randy the truth. “His mother got married when he was two, and she asked me to give up my rights so that man could adopt him. They got divorced when he was eight.”
Randy thought about the kid, wondering who wanted to father him. He could see why Matt hesitated in telling the story.
“He doesn’t want much to do with me. And his mother doesn’t, either. Understandably. I’ve tried to be upfront about it with the church, my wife and kids, and I think they understand. But he’s my son, and he’s angry. He’s sad. And I’m part of the reason. It’s hard to know what the right step to take is year-to-year. I’ve tried to go see him three times in the last two years, and each time he won’t buzz me into his building or meet me.”
They were out in the country, now, and Randy let his eyes drift from Matt’s suddenly tired face to the lush green of the soybean fields on the left side of the road. Then he felt his cell phone buzz, and he pulled it out of his pocket quicker than he usually did. He was worried about Brandon and Rachel. But his heart stung when he saw “Margaret” on the little preview window of his blue Nokia flip phone. His right thumb wouldn’t flick the phone open. It was marble, and the phone just looked up at him and waited.
“Anything important?” Matt flipped his turn signal on as he asked. There was a pickup truck and a tractor behind them, and they’d be turning right down a smaller country road at the intersection about fifty yards ahead.
“Margaret. My ex-wife.”
“Serious?”
“I’m guessing. I just found out she’d had an abortion towards the end. I called her last night, really upset about it. I’m not sure if it was the right move, but-” he stuck his chin out, then rubbed his temples a half-inch under his dark black hairline. He closed his eyes and breathed in deep. “I never knew I was a father. My sister just told me that Margaret had called her and confessed the abortion and a short affair to her towards the end of our marriage, three years ago. I guess I just needed to hear it from her own lips.” A blanket of gray clouds passed between the countryside and the sun, and the soybeans on the left and corn on the right suddenly took on a shade of blue that struck Randy somewhere under the covers. What did that remind him of? When had he had a ride like this before? Late afternoon and a cornfield under cloudcover and A/C hitting him at the top of his chest as he sat in the passenger’s seat and tried to think? When had this happened before?
“You okay?”
He shook his head and blinked the questions away. “Yeah. I think-” he took it back. “I wanted to know if it was true, and I wanted to know if it was my fault. But I already knew the answers to both.”
Matt turned his CR-V right and Randy stared ahead and tried to guess which house was his. There were two white farmhouses he could see on the left side about a quarter of a mile apart, and a newer brown ranch house on the right just ahead of them.
Matt didn’t move, didn’t speak. But Randy appreciated him all the same. He knew he’d listened, he knew he was thinking about him and wondering what he could do for him, and even though the answer was plain (nothing), he was grateful for the steering wheel being under the hands of a brother in Christ who had felt pains of his own making and knew they weren’t easy to walk through. He looked back out his window and smiled, because Randy always ended up smiling. Find it irritating (like George back at Bo’s Coffee) or find it irresistible (like almost everyone else who ever met him), Randy just smiled.
It wasn’t until that night in bed, when he finally read Margaret’s text message, that he remembered when he’d done all this before.
It was getting dark. June could see the fireflies floating above the tall grass.
Would he come tonight? She hoped so. She always hoped so. And she was usually wrong. But that wasn’t his fault.
But after about ten minutes of staring at the violet summer sky, sure enough, he came walking through the tall grass around the back of their house and up to her on the front porch. His shirt had probably been white when it had been bought, however long ago and by whomever, but by now it was light brown like the dry dirt in front of her wooden porch. His blue jeans weren’t quite as dirty, but the old brown boots he had on looked like they’d walked a thousand miles through mud and over mountains. The laces were fraying and they were as scuffed as old bicycle tires. He didn’t smile when their eyes met, not with his mouth, but she knew.
They both did.
He came up to her on the porch and sat down, right next to her, just like he had last time. He smelled like sweat and dirt, but that was okay. They sat there together and looked into each othere’s eyes for three or four seconds, felt everything they had inside themselves for each other, like bonfire sparks that floated up from the chest and into the eyes where it rested and made them want to float away holding hands into some better place. She set her head down on his shoulder, and they both looked out over the that tall grass again, out towards the road that stretched out to the woods a few miles away.
“I finally heard that new Beach Boys song,” she said. “I Get Around. I liked it.”
He didn’t say anything, but she knew he’d heard her because he flicked his left thumb under the index finger. He always did that when she said something he liked.
“Are you going to come back to school tomorrow, Bruce?”
He pulled her off his shoulder and stomped his left food down on the front porch. She was scared for a second, scared for him and of him, but she also got a little angry. They loved each other. She couldn’t control it any more than he could. Why was he like this all the time?
He couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t. Only three people knew about what was down there, and only two of them, really, if you thought about it. “Special things.” Down there in the dark, down under the house, where there was fear and hate and an old metal flash light and cool dirt. No words, Bruce just sat there clenching his jaw and stretched his two taught, muscular, teenage hands.
Two years later he’d be be walking a highway over the border into Ohio, and June would be as much behind him as what he held away from her would be.
“Yes,” he finally said, and he did it merely to make her quiet. “I had a dream last night.” He hadn’t meant to say it, but June had his heart.
“Was it like the last one?”
He stared past the blades of summer grass, out at the road, rough and old but straight.
“Worse.”