XXIV – When Jesse Made It to the House (after Almost Being Murdered By an Old Lady)
Jesse didn’t understand it, mainly because nobody ever understands anything in a Waffle House. He’d walked back to the table after getting a to-go coffee and paying his check, looked out the window in the hopes he might see Randy’s old F-150 pulling out, and somehow hurt that it was already gone, and as he’d reached into his side of the booth to get his suitcase and his other things he’d seen it sitting there right next to his father’s old coffee can. After Jesse realized where it had come from he wondered for three seconds why Randy hadn’t put it in the can, but that was all the time it took for him to realize that Randy saw that can as sacred space every bit as much as Jesse did. Only Henderson hands were invited into it, come what may.
If you’ve ever been given a gift by a grandfather or grandmother or teacher who knew you just a tick better than you knew yourself, you’ll know the feeling Jesse had as he picked it up, looking at it with strange tears in his eyes, tears he couldn’t understand or name, having no idea that Randy’s sister had once held this thing years ago on her front porch as she prayed for God to save her brother, no idea that it stretched back to when Randy was a boy and needing more forgiveness than any mere mortal could ever give him, no idea of any of it and yet still feeling the thing’s weight in his palm, the right one, since the left one was smothering a styrofoam cup of Waffle House coffee. Its real weight, not its mere mass times gravity.
Some of God’s people used to name rocks. It’s there in your Old Testament. Objects and places can be a certain species of holy because of what’s happened over top of them or right next to them. There’s no magic power within the twelve stones next to the Jordan River the Israelites put up, or Mizpah, the old heap of stones Jacob left behind on his long trek home, or Ebenezer, the stone Samuel raised up not far from Mizpah centuries later to proclaim God’s help. These are made things, specks of creation, nothing more and nothing less. But they reminded the hearts of the people who saw them what God had done, who God was, what the story was really about. And when the children who didn’t know the story saw such stones, they could ask their fathers what was meant by these things. And their fathers could tell them the true story.
This thing didn’t have a name, and Jesse didn’t know the story. But he knew the man who left it for him. And he couldn’t help but wonder what magic there might be in the world that he had overlooked.
He put it in his pocket and carried his things down to the car rental place he’d seen just within walking distance.
He’d never had a pocket knife.
After listening to nineteen minutes and fifty-four seconds of Brandon weeping and hoping for his wife, Rachel, laying in a bed at a hospital after suffering a miscarriage and a broken nose and broken teeth from trying to get down to see her dead baby boy, Pastor Terry Goldschmidt of Redeemer Church said what forever changed the course of Brandon’s life. Pastor Terry Goldschmidt, all boring purple polo shirt and simple glasses and forty years of loving the same woman through the deaths of three babies by the grace of Jesus Christ, whose graces are unsearchable by any pair of eyes in any head anywhere. He loved Brandon, and he wanted Rachel to talk again and get out of the hospital soon and come to church services and get pregnant again and be happy in her Savior. And it’s really startling how easy it is to say things that bless people when you know the truth and love them, and both of those things are happening at the same time.
“She needs to know her Jesus is as real as her pain.”
Terry waited fourteen seconds, because that’s how long it took for the words to register and for Brandon to wipe the new tears from his face. His eyes were so bloodshot and the circles under them so purple that Terry wondered for a second if he’d actually heard and understood, but then when Brandon looked at him and nodded once, he knew.
“Can I come to the hospital with you? If you’re going back now?”
Brandon nodded, and then he leaned over the back of the chairs Terry was stretched out on, and he gave Pastor Terry the most awkward hug that anyone had ever given in the sanctuary of Redeemer. Brandon was a big guy, and he almost fell over because of the dizziness that being tired and sobbing and wanting to save your wife will drown your head in, but Terry had had enough awkward hugs in his pastoral ministry to know how to pat Brandon’s back and just let what would happen happen. And then when Brandon said he’d meet him out front and began to walk towards the door, Terry called Candace, the twenty-nine-year-old social worker who had been in his small group a year before, and asked her.
She said yes.
That was how it started.
The officers hadn’t been able to find anything about the girl in the picture. Jesse appreciated their trying, but he was frustrated with the time he’d wasted since it was already late in the afternoon. So he took his rented Mazda3 with GPS (thankfully) out to the address Mrs. Carlisle had given him from his teenage runaway father’s 1960’s school forms. It only took thirteen minutes to get there, and as he saw the ramshackle place rise up in front of him and heard his GPS tell him he was certainly arriving at the house where some terrible things were, things his father had hidden and then run away to hide from, he felt every nerve in his body start to jerk and twist. But at this point he was too far down the slope to stop; inertia carried him into the gravel driveway, hearing the stones crunch under his rented tires like Jeremiah’s chewing of the ice in his fountain sodas that Jesse bought him on Saturdays at the Circle K a few miles from their house. And the same inertia carried him up onto the wooden porch, where his right hand curled up and prepared to knock, but was made useless by a very old and unhappy woman opening the door, staring into him like a bear who knew this creature was either a threat or its next meal. This old woman was scary.
But Jesse had steeled himself with enough anger and hopelessness to spit out that his father was Bruce Henderson, and that he’d died last Wednesday, and that he was just trying to figure out where he’d lived and what he’d run away from before the funeral.
Which is how Jesse found out the little blonde teenage girl in the forty-five-year-old picture was dead.
“June dated Bruce when she was a girl.” The woman said “girl” with just a little contempt in her voice, and Jesse honestly had no idea why.
“They knew each other from school, and he was a nice, quiet boy. They would take walks out behind the house or sit in here and listen to the radio with me and my husband or sometimes just sit on the front porch and not say much to each other. June liked to talk, but Bruce was always very quiet, and she learned to let him be.”
The moment took on that strange, surreal feeling he’d now had three or four times in the last few days, hearing a stranger describe his teenage father as essentially the same person he’d known, but in a form he’d never really believed existed until now. His father had actually had this life, back before he and his siblings existed. This was all real. He was also oddly charmed by the way she said “set in here” instead of “sit in here.”
“But then he was gone, and June didn’t know where he went to. Never did. She showed me a letter he wrote her once when we had a big fight about it, me telling her to move on, but I don’t think she ever heard anything about him ever again.”
“Where’s June now?”
The old woman pressed her lips together a little and breathed out slowly. Then she said, “Dead.”
The blood in Jesse’s forearms felt cold, and the room seemed to spin clockwise for a few seconds. But then equilibrium came back as she added, “June killed herself eight years ago. She was a good girl,” the old woman said, not sure who she was apologizing to but apoligizing all the same. “She was a nurse at a nursing home up in town. But she got prescribed some pills for her back, and they got hold of her and that was that.” Jesse looked at her eyes, which seemed angry but not as tired as he might have thought. This woman could fight a small bear if she needed to, and probably hold her own. The house had the clutter and other little signs of carelessness that Jesse had always associated with being weary and having given up, but her eyes and the way she sat forward in her chair just a bit and even the way her gray hair was pulled back tightly all gave him the opposite impression. This woman hadn’t given up, at least not in the way Jesse had always thought people gave up. She was furious about something, about how the world had dealt with her, and the sad state of the house and the front lawn were more calculated than he’d first thought. He suddenly wondered if she were raising an angry fist to fate, telling it that she would go when she was good and ready, and until then she would only do the dishes and cut the grass when she felt like it.
“Your Bruce’s boy, huh?”
Jesse should have felt more threatened than he did, but it was only the first of many times that day that his anxiety and sleeplessness and his own bitterness at what he currently thought was fate made him get into the roller coaster and not worry about pulling the bar down. “Yeah. My dad ran away from home, joined the army, and then got married and had me and my brothers and sister about thirty years ago.”
“And what makes you think you can come up to my house fify years after he run off and start asking questions about my daughter?”
Jesse stopped moving, and tried to remember quickly where the door was and how far it was to his car.
“Ma’am-”
“Don’t call me ‘Ma’am,’ boy. I don’t want your honor. I want to know why you’re here thinking you have any claim to be on my property and talking about my baby girl when your daddy is why she’s dead, as far as I’m concerned.”
Jesse said nothing. He had enough sense for that. As hard as his foolish heart was, Jesse Henderson never lacked good perception and intuition. He knew it was best to stay silent.
There is a version of this story in which that woman (Velma) sputtered a few more increasingly rage-filled and delusional accusations at Jesse and then shot him in the chest with the handgun she kept in her bedroom nightstand just down the hall. She then sat on the couch calmly and drank a beer and called the police to tell them she’d just murdered a boy and didn’t feel bad about it and they could come fetch her whenever they pleased. But it didn’t quite happen that way.
Not at this house, anyway.
I’m sentimental about park benches. But what happened to Melanie at Mt. Airy Forest took a different sort of turn than I’d prefer to associate with a park bench. She waited for Bobbie Jo for twenty-seven minutes, which was the first sign that this wasn’t going to go the way she’d prayed it would. Every few minutes she was more anxious, knowing she was probably about to lose her best friend but not knowing exactly sure how, thinking about the time they’d each eaten a half a stick of a butter on a dare from Jennifer Sanders. Melanie had thrown up, but not Bobbie Jo. She sat there nervously now and stretched her trim fingers and tried not to cry. Every few seconds she asked God again to let this end with Bobbie Jo knowing what was right and loving Jesus and wanting to obey Him. But when she finally saw her walking up in the late afternoon sunlight that was just barely falling through the dense treetops hanging over the trail, she knew Bobbie Jo thought as much of her as she thought of a used Kleenex. It was on her face and in her walk, the way she didn’t smile but made no show of it, walked slowly as though she had no hurry to say unimportant things to an unimportant girl. They’d played frisbee golf back here in these woods once, or at least tried. That was two summers ago. Melanie savored the memory for a few seconds, trying to muster all the love she could for her amiga.
“What? What did you want?”
The words cut Melanie in a part of her heart she didn’t know she’d had before. How could this be happening? How could someone who made you laugh to the point of tears more times than you could count, who knew what scared you about bus stops and why you liked peach ice cream so much and had once watched To Catch a Thief with you three times in a row talk to you like you were barely a person?
“Bobbie Jo, you know I love you.”
She rolled her eyes as she got to the spot just in front of Melanie and stopped. She crossed her chest with her left arm, grabbing the strap with her left hand and reminding Melanie she’d forgotten hers. “You’re dumb.”
Melanie felt like she’d punched in the mouth. This was going off the tracks quickly.
“You need help,” Bobbie Jo added, meaning nothing except to hurt, and landing it exactly where it needed to have that effect. When she saw Melanie was about to cry, and she let herself be pulled further into the hate she’d started to enjoy indulging, she stepped up to her former friend sitting on the park bench where she’d waited for her and leaned in close to her face. “I don’t need your trash,” she said, and tapped Melanie’s left cheek twice before reaching into her purse and pulling out a handful of scraps of paper. The letter Melanie had written to her. Prayed over. Cried over. Bobbie Jo jammed the handful of torn up sheets of paper into Melanie’s lap and then turned and walked back up the trail, passing a trash can where she and Melanie had once landed a putter because neither one had had the slightest idea which frisbee to use when.
Melanie started to sob, and by the time Bobbie Jo had made it the half-mile back to the parking lot, she was crying like she hadn’t since she’d been nine years old and their family Jack Russell Terrier named Mitsy had been hit by a car two blocks from the house. She’d heard her little brother scream from the front porch where she’d been reading Little Women and had run to him, and he’d been too small and too upset to do it, so she’d carried Mitsy’s bloody body back home, and by the time she got back she’d cried so much and so hard that she almost fell asleep in her father’s arms when he got home twenty minutes later and held her on the couch and let her cry into his chest.
She cried that hard now, and after about ten minutes she found she had trouble breathing, and realized the pollen count was high that day, and about the time she understood what was happening she also realized that it was a very big deal that she’d forgotten her purse.
Jesse hoped to never see that old woman again, and he was a little weirded out by her sudden turning on him, but he was grateful that his father hadn’t murdered a teenage girl. At least not that teenage girl. And the woman had just enough stray decency to tell Jesse how to get to the Henderson house , despite the fact that she wanted to slap him or spit on him or kill him a little. Jesse was pretty good with directions, so within three of “Country’s latest hits” (according to the radio station in his rental car that he didn’t have the will to change) he was pulling up to the house where all the evil Bruce had hid in the 1950s and 1960s was still just waiting to be discovered.
Which Jesse would do within the hour.