XIX – When Jesse and Janie Wondered Things (a Hundred Miles Apart)
How It Went for Jesse
The best meal after which to have a good laugh? Pork chops. They’re satisfying without being too filling. Your senses aren’t dulled.
“A lot of the Bible stings you,” Pastor Matt said. He was sitting in a plain white recliner with a white mug of decaf coffee in his right hand. His wife Sandy was relaxed on his massive lap, her head leaning on his left shoulder as she played with his hair.
“When I read the story of Korah, I get reminded of what I really deserve and what the world’s really like. And it’s harsh. It doesn’t go down my twentieth-century throat very easily.”
Jesse liked that these guys didn’t nervously tiptoe around the edges of their Christianity on his account. He didn’t buy any of it, but to a guy trying to figure out if his dead dad was a serial killer and ready to Google “divorce attorneys” when he got back home, there was something comforting about knowing exactly who you were lounging around a living room with. Working at his office was like trying to cross a cracked pane of glass laid across the Grand Canyon; every step he took had to be so ginger he was barely sure he took it. Everyone gossiped about everyone, and everyone wanted to see everyone else screw up and get fired (except for Lenny in the mail room; for some reason everyone liked Lenny). For between 48 and 51 hours a week Jesse trusted no human being, and for the other between 117 and 120 hours he trusted Jeremiah. It was hard enough to be happy before The Wednesday (it had become a proper noun in his mind by the time he and Randy had crossed Brown County Saturday afternoon). Since then, he’d instinctively leaned on Randy, now hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, perched on the brick fronting of Matt’s darkened fireplace over to Jesse’s right. But here were 3 other people who, like Randy, believed deeply in this religion, and who, like Randy, were plainspoken and forthright about it. For a frantic, tired soul, it was good medicine to listen to people talk with obvious feeling about even a love he thought was silly and misguided.
“What’s Korah?” Jesse asked.
“He was a man who came against Moses, God’s chosen guy, shortly after God had freed all His people from slavery in Egypt.” Matt didn’t miss a beat, didn’t give the slightest impression that it was a child’s question in the middle of a grown-up’s conversation. “This Guy Korah, he yells at Moses and his brother, Aaron, God’s chosen priest. He tells them that they’d put themselves forward, ahead of everybody and into these special jobs they had. He does it despite the fact that God had already made it clear putting Moses and Aaron in the roles they had was His choice. But this guy Korah and another named Dathan try to shout Moses down. So Moses tells them to show up the next morning. He says they’ll each talk to God and see what happens.”
“It wasn’t good,” Randy said, looking at Jesse and raising his eyebrows. He said it the way you’d say it in the middle of a story your friend was telling about the time you had both tried to steal a cop car.
“God causes the ground to open up and swallow them,” Matt said. “And then Moses asks God to spare the rest of His people, who have all shown that their hearts don’t beat that much differently from Korah’s.”
“How do you have any idea this is true?” Jesse asked. “The Bible and Jesus and all of it? Everyone has a different take on God. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, plus the thousands of different Christian takes on Jesus and the Bible and Heaven and Hell. How do you know you’re the one group that has it right?”
“Jesus said He is the truth,” Matt answered. “He’s the composer and the pitch pipe. How out of tune you or I or anything else is a function of whether we’re singing His notes.” Matt set his mug down on the little brown table to the right of his recliner. Jesse looked at it for a moment from across the living room where he was sitting, in a white loveseat. He wondered why Matt didn’t use a coaster. To be fair, Matt’s wife wondered the same thing.
“We know what’s good, what’s evil, what’s precious or true or false because the God who made all this chose to pull back some of the curtain. That’s how any of us know anything. Yes, there are Christians all over the world who go to the source, to Jesus and His Word, and reach some different conclusions. Chalk that mostly up to our frailty. But don’t use it as a reason to not run to Jesus with all your head and your heart. He’s as true as He says He is.”
“Amen,” Joe said with his deep and grinding voice, like a rake drug through a gravel driveway. He was to Jesse’s right on the couch, holding a glass of water, looking at a spot on the hardwood floors over on Matt’s side of the living room.
“Yeah, but how do you know He’s true?”
“He’s given us enough pledges of it to fill four books that men and women have died for for twenty centuries,” Matt said, his voice gathering speed as it rolled more and more downhill. “But the trunk and the roots of my faith in Him, my certainty that He’s the truth the world was founded by and on, is more like how I know we’re really alive and in this room, and not just shades in someone else’s dream. I know it. Jesus told a misled and misleading guy named Nicodemus that unless you are born a second time, given a new nature by God Himself, you can’t even see the Kingdom God’s building through and for this Jesus. He told people who wanted Him to do more miracles for them that unless God draws them they won’t come to Him. You and I are born as blind as earthworms, knowing just enough of our God and His goodness to make us guilty. But once God gives a man a new self, a different set of eyes and a different heart, He knows there’s no one but Jesus worthy of being his true north. I know Jesus is the truth because He gave me eyes to see how true He is. And now every page of my Bible reads more like it should.”
“Are there any pork chops left?” Randy asked, already standing up because he was about 75% sure he knew the answer.
“Sure,” Sandy said with the warm, green-tea-and-honey voice Jesse had grown very fond of over the last three hours. “They’re right there on top of the stove. Help yourself to as much as you want. There’s some more corn, too.”
Randy made a little kid giggle that creeped Jesse out and did a mock scurry into the kitchen to their left.
“I’m not getting it,” Jesse said, not the least bit annoyed, but feeling like he should be.
“How do you know what’s true?” Matt asked, his facial expression so rested and placid that the point at the end of the question didn’t hurt much at all. “How do you know you’re sitting in this room?”
“My senses,” Jesse said. “I can see that table in front of me, I can feel this chair under me.” He thought for a second, decided he liked the smell of the white candle Sandy had lit on the small table to the right of the raised fireplace wall where Randy had been perched. “I can smell that vanilla candle over there.” He smiled, satisfied more by the pork chops and the candle than by his own answer.
“How you do know your senses can be trusted?”
Jesse thought honestly for about three seconds, which is about all it took for a man with an IQ of 167, even when that IQ was as tortured as his was. “I guess because they’re all I have.”
“You trust them because you trust them,” Matt said. That sentence was the Arnold Palmer of sentences, about 50% question and 50% answer.
“Yeah,” Jesse said, and nodded as truthfully as he was able.
“We all have a foundation at the very bottom. That’s the foundation. The thing you trust because you trust it. And, I think I can say this correctly, that’s what Jesus claims to be worthy of.” Matt reached over to his right and grabbed a Bible from under the table where he’d set his coffee. “Jesus says here to one of His disciples, the night before He goes to the Cross, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ Then, the next day, the Roman governor who’s trying to avoid putting Him to death says, ‘So you are a King?’ and Jesus answers him, ‘You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world – to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.’ And the governor, Pilate, says, ‘What is truth?’
“We’re all standing on something we trust. It’s how we do everything from sitting down and expecting the chair to really be there to getting indignant when someone does something we think is actually, objectively wrong. We’re all trusting something. Jesus is the One worth trusting.”
“I’m just going to check on Misty,” Sandy said quietly and stood up to go down into the basement and look in on their cocker spaniel. She tapped Jesse’s left shoulder as she passed him on her way out of the room. He smiled lightly and squinted as he tried to decide why his chest felt warm and why he had no idea how to be angry at Matt or what he said.
“You want to play ping pong?” Matt asked, face as calm as ever.
“I better get on back home,” Joe said, standing up with all the breath and chair creaking that came from a three-hundred-and-fifty pound man in his late sixties. “But you all stay. I’ll leave the door unlocked for you.”
He thanked Pastor Matt and headed out to his car, making the standard, understated Joe Granger exit. Randy looked at Jesse and shrugged happily, then started to the garage, where Matt had told them the ping pong table was earlier. Matt stood up from his own chair with a creak and a sigh twenty years younger but just as heavy as Joe’s and followed Randy out there.
Jesse stayed behind for thirty seconds and looked at his hands, wondering something he’d have trouble explaining to anybody but his son.
Assuming ping pong was invented, and not delivered to earth by an angelic host, I’d wager it was invented by a couple of men in whom the thirst for athletic conquest was still strong but for whom knee surgery and lower back pain had sadly constrained their human frames. And who had some spare space in their basements or garages.
Jesse was good at ping pong, even though he’d only ever played eleven times (eight of them in the rec room on the sixteenth floor of his college dorm). But Randy was phenomenal, and Matt wasn’t far behind him. And both of the two older men were unashamedly competitive, though in different ways. Randy was the more traditional, focused competitor, fully engaged with every muscle and thought and staring at the ball as though it were his child about to be bit by a poisonous snake on the other side the back yard. His million dollar smile didn’t return until he’d scored his point, and then the old, normal Randy came back with a few puffs of exhaust coming out of the tailpipe, and sat idling beautifully as he took in his triumph.
Matt’s competitive streak was more like the rest of him, serious and heavy, but quieter than his huge form made you think it might have been. Jesse won the very first game, which he played against Randy as Matt sat in a canvas lawn chair and watched with a big, F-350 diesel grin on his face, but Jesse never won again. Matt had left the garage door behind him open since it was such a beautiful night outside, and in the rematch Randy slammed almost every point he scored so hard that the ball went out into the driveway and the clear night beyond. Jesse would roll his eyes and head out to retrieve it as Randy stared out at the edge of the table where planned to hit the next one with the total concentration of a marine sniper.
Matt had white Christmas lights hung on the walls of the garage, and they gave the place a very cheerful feel in the middle of the flat countryside as it sat adrift among the night and the sound of crickets outside. Jesse sat down to watch Matt and Randy play each other and decided to give up on his pride and his fear and call Janie so he could hear his son’s voice. He was a little happy, though in a strange way.
“Why are you calling?”
“I just wanted to talk to Jeremiah.”
“He’s already in bed.”
“Is he asleep?”
“No.”
“Then can I talk to him?”
There was silence on the other end, and then Janie came back on.
“He’s already asleep.”
“Oh.”
“Anything else?”
“I gues not.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Jesse shut his cell phone and stared at it for ten seconds, wondering how he could hate someone so much.
How It Went for Janie
It started with a Sharpie.
Jesse had left a Sharpie on the ledge by the front door when he’d left Saturday morning. Janie hadn’t noticed it, but Jeremiah had. He’d taken the cap off and experimented with it, coloring his left hand, drawing a picture of Mrs. Gardener’s dog on the wall above his bed, and drawing a map on the bathroom’s tile floor showing how to get to the bathtub and then proceeding along the floor of the bathtub showing where the water came out and where the drain was. There were arrows. It was very precise.
Jeremiah, all fifty-seven quirky, artsy, autistic pounds of him, didn’t really understand why it was a bad idea. But that didn’t make it less traumatic for Janie, who was only vaguely aware of where in these midwestern United States her husband currently was. Her father-in-law had just so happened to die the same day her husband’s father had died, because that’s just how God made the world, but she wasn’t permitted the same sort of sorrow Jesse was. Bruce wasn’t her dad, though he was the quiet and good man who occupied no less than half the square footage in her little boy’s heart, and she knew the last act of love she might be able to give the man who no longer loved her back was to let him chase something far enough away that his last credit card activity showed in a county she’d never heard of a hundred miles away. The second-to-last act was taking the ire of his sister, who’d called Janie Sunday afternoon livid that Jesse had left town three days after their father had died.
“Where did he go?”
“I’m not actually sure.”
“How are you not sure, Janie?”
The bite in the way Jesse’s sister had said her name was both intentional and successful, though it didn’t satisfy her, as such things have a way of not doing.
“I’m just not, Amy.”
“Well that’s great. So would you mind helping me understand what we’re supposed to do? We have to get dad’s things together for the table at the funeral home. Pictures, things like that. Do you even know when he’ll be back?”
Janie closed her eyes and tried not to cry, wondering what Jeremiah was watching out in the living room and hoping he hadn’t seen mommy’s face get red when she threw that Sharpie in the garbage can or heard the words that came out of her mouth when she’d said daddy’s name as she’d done it. But that was an hour ago, and this was now, and no she didn’t know exactly when Jesse would be back.
“He said he’ll be back before the funeral, but no I just don’t know much more than that.”
“Well, that’s just great. I’m going to go over to Dad’s and take care of this myself. Bye, Janie.”
And that was the last adult Janie talked to until Jesse called. Which is why when she and Jesse hung up on each other seven hours later, she wondered how anyone could have the power to hurt her so much.