XXVII – When the Story Ended (Though the People Never Do)
Nobody likes dying, but Randy was as ready as a man can be. And it showed on his face, the one Pastor David’s wife saw in the waiting room, behind and underneath those cheap black sunglasses. He’d been having the heart attack all day, but he never realized it.
No one ever knew any more than that Randy had brought Melanie to the hospital, because the only ones who could tell about it were off this earth, across the great chasm that looks greater from the other side. That’s what I imagine, anyway, and I have what seem to me to be very good reasons.
Randy was pronounced dead right there at St. Andrew’s, forty-seven feet from the room where Melanie was pronounced very much alive. Pastor David waited a few hours to tell her, both what had happened to her and what had happened with Randy. When he did, she was quiet for almost two hours, and she had a weight in her head and her heart that she couldn’t share with her mother and father, not then or, as it turned out, ever. She stayed in the hospital for one night, and she fell asleep watching The Little Mermaid in the uncomfortable hospital bed on her dad’s left shoulder.
But Melanie had a good dream over and over again for the rest of her life, her long life that ended with great-grandchildren, not out on the path at Mt. Airy Forest near the garbage can with the Pepsi bottle and the Taco Bell wrapper in it. The place in the dream would change. Sometimes it would be on a beach, sometimes on the country road where Bobbie Jo’s old house had been. But the weather was always the same, clear and warm, and it was always near sunset. She was walking next to someone she couldn’t see, and she felt like it was a father even though it wasn’t her own. But he had to be somebody’s father, because he made her feel safe in the way that he walked and the way that he laughed and the way that she always laughed back in the dream. She never knew why, could never see who he was. When the dream took place on that old country road near Bobbie Jo’s childhood house she would sometimes kick a stone down the road, and the stone would always come back to her, because dreams don’t make a lot of sense. But this one felt like her life, it always felt like the biggest part of the story she was in, and she woke up feeling warm and okay and even sometimes crying with how happy she was.
She could never remember the words, either. The words that formed a song at the background of the dream. They weren’t sung, but they were a song. That’s just how dreams are. The last time she had that dream she was eighty-seven years old, and she liked it even more than she had as a young girl. She never figured out who he was in this life, but he was a good man, and she just knew he had to be somebody’s father.
Which he was.
There was some part of his mind where Jesse knew Randy was dead, though he’d never admit it to himself on this side of the grave. The Jesse driving back to Cincinnati was a different one, but he never acquired the readiness to believe extraordinary impressions upon his own mind about events of the day. The world is a much stranger place than the cynical among us believe, and most of Jesse’s cynicism wouldn’t be washed away until he met his Maker face to face. But he was crying as he drove, and he was going eighty-five for most of the way, and so his muscles and his eyes and his face accepted what the reasoning parts would not.
What he felt as he drove, wanting more than anything to hug Janie and Jeremiah and Randy, lingering with each one for as long as he could, was clean. It was something he’d never felt before, not for even a moment. And as he crossed the state line back into Ohio he decided a phone call wouldn’t be enough. As anxious as he was, and as much as he needed to tell all three of them something, he knew he needed to look Janie in the eyes first. It’s strange to say he hadn’t considered yet that he was driving a rental car, considering a week ago he was still the sort of man who knew exactly how much he paid for the pair of socks he was wearing at any given moment, but he didn’t. He couldn’t have told you what color it was or whether he’d gotten the additional insurance or when he was supposed to return it. But he knew what to do with the coffee can, and the pocket knife, and he knew he was a Christian, now. That was a subtle thing, the becoming a Christian. It snuck up on him. But his own father was proof that God always gets His man, even when He has to chase him across the border into Ohio. Or, should the road wind round, back the other way.
The sun was down by the time he pulled into the driveway in a car Janie didn’t recognize. And told her everything.
He had two funerals to go to that week. The men knew each other, which made him smile. His father, a man tortured in at least two ways, but freed in the end because Jesus was and did no less than what He claimed. That first funeral went down like cheap coffee with cream. It was plain, but it did the job. His sister finally forgave him, and they hugged and she cried, and he touched the framed picture she’d chosen of their father in a golf shirt and standing in front of their grandmother’s house with an imitation smile on his face. The shirt in the picture was orange, and Jesse didn’t remember him ever owning it, but he knew now the middle-aged man in it was only twenty or so years removed from being violated in every way a boy can be by his twin brother. And then he looked over at Jeremiah, who was staring blankly at the casket as Janie cried into his sister’s shoulder. Jeremiah looked back up at him, and Jesse smiled and his son looked down at the floor, and Jesse remembered what Dwight had said.
“You know what retarded is son? Our father was retarded.”
He thought about that last time Bruce and Jeremiah were on the couch together. About when Bruce asked about him in the hospital that last night. And he smiled and decided he missed his father.
He didn’t remember that shirt, though.
Redeemer Church was packed for the second funeral. Randy was a beloved guy, but there was also just the reality that Redeemer was a healthy church. People liked each other, and so they showed up for funerals and weddings and whenever someone needed help moving. Even Lucy was there, who Randy had cut off on the way out of church last April and who had gossiped about him eleven times since then. She didn’t confess it, but she did get a lump in her throat when Randy’s sister sang a song to start the service.
Jesse sat with his wife and Jeremiah and Joe Granger and Pastor Matt, the last two having driven the ninety minutes in Pastor Matt’s CR-V without even considering not doing so, because there’s a thing men like Joe and Matt and Randy have in common, and it goes deeper than the place where we weigh our options. Joe had never been to Cincinnati before and decided that the city wasn’t for him, which anyone who’d known Joe would have told you was about right. Jesse told them both he was a Christian, and then he started to cry, and he hugged Pastor Matt without introducing him to Janie or knowing that Matt wasn’t much of a hugger, and so that was an awkward fourteen seconds. But Jesse laughed the kind of laugh that makes everyone in the circle feel better. Then right there on the sidewalk in front of Redeemer, where literally no one knew any one of them (now that the man in the casket was asleep), Jesse told them that Janie and he had spent virtually five straight days talking, and that she was a Christian, too, and that the part where she’d stopped him wasn’t when he told her about Dwight and about who his father really was and what he’d escaped, but when he brushed her hair behind her ear on the front porch and said the thing about being scared.
“What was it?” Joe looked curious, which was a very becoming look on his big granite face, the face that held a deeper place in Jesse’s heart than any other until the day he died, though he only saw it two more times after that day at Redeemer.
Jesse started to say, but Janie interrupted him, saying it with a tear rolling down her left cheek and no smile on her face, though happy all the same. “I’ve been scared my whole life of being a man not worth being.”
Pastor Matt looked down at Jesse, because Pastor Matt had to look down at everyone, at least until he met his peer, Pastor David, inside the building, and he shook his head, stunned by how much his Lord could still surprise him. And then he grabbed Jesse by the back of the neck and kissed the top of his head, and decided that it was one of the weirdest and most beautiful things he’d ever done.
“Is this your son?”
“Yeah, this is Jeremiah.”
Jeremiah waved his hand without looking up, and Joe Granger pulled out his thick wallet and took a hundred dollar bill out of the back, one that had been minted in 1998 and had been in 21 states before finding its way to Joe, but had never been a part of anything so special. Joe squatted down, ignoring all the fire in his knees and his hips, and looked Jeremiah in the eyes.
“Did you love your grandpa?”
Jeremiah nodded.
“I did, too. I owed him something. Can I give it to you?”
Jeremiah nodded, and Joe held out the hundred dollar bill, and Jeremiah took it in his hand. Then he walked three steps forward and hugged Joe Granger, not really knowing all the reasons why, but grabbing the big man tight, and feeling Joe’s massive arms lightly over his shoulders. Neither one cried. Both felt it in the bones, though.
Brandon was there, and Rachel sat next to him with her eyes closed for much of the service. She wasn’t healed yet, but it was coming. And by month’s end they would be signing the last of the papers to adopt Harmony, a two-year-old Candace had helped connect them with. Harmony, whose hair was jet black and whose favorite things were bubbles and My Little Pony, and who would say at her wedding one day that her best friend was her mother, Rachel. Pastor Terry would have been at that wedding if he hadn’t died ten years before, but he was never more content in the years he had left than when seeing Brandon and Rachel and Harmony sitting together in church services on Sunday morning, Brandon always giving her a piece of gum during the last song as service closed.
Pastor David was the last one to speak during the service. He told everyone how Randy had come to faith in Christ, moved to Cincinnati, worked for his brother-in-law Bo, and found Redeemer Church through Bo and Linda. And then his eyes met with his daughter’s, and he couldn’t keep it together anymore, and she mouthed some words to her dad that no one else saw, and he mouthed his part back. Jesse was pretty sure it was “Little fish.”
“Randy was a good man. And I’m going to miss him. And I’m glad he’s with his Jesus now. I wish I could say better words than that, but I don’t have them.” He looked down at the open casket, and he thought about that day at St. Andrew’s as he said, “I’ll miss you, Randy. Until next time.”
The next day, in his backyard, Jesse took Jeremiah to the eighty-year-old oak tree at the back of their property. There, they buried the old blue coffee can, and then Jesse showed him the pocket knife. His eyes lit up when Jesse flipped the blade out, because all boys have some things in common.
“What is that?”
“This was-“ Jesse thought for four seconds, and then decided the words that he wanted were the true ones. “This belonged to a friend of your grandfather’s. And I want us to carve something right there for him.”
And so they did.
It took another few months for Jesse to put his marriage back together in a sturdy enough way that it would weather the storms of the next few decades. But he did, and it did. And since Bo was a good man, Jesse found being his General Manager, administrating all of his various businesses, about as pleasant a work as he could imagine. Being a member of the same church as your boss was also very satisfying, something he never would have guessed, even if someone had been able to convince him in his prior days that church was a thing worth being a part of.
Jesse had found himself in a fascinating story, and the story is never more lively than the Teller.
And thanks to Randy’s pocket knife, that tree in his backyard now told the truth.
Grandpa and Randy, Until Next Time
John 11:25
An Epilogue
In 1959, 5 miles southwest of the city center of Omaha, Nebraska, a woman named Susan pleaded with God to please save and protect her little boy, Jeremiah, sleeping as he was in his bedroom down the hall from her. A half-century later he would go by Jerry and sell cars with a man named Randy who would break his hand and need a ride to the hospital, but today he was a four-year-old asleep under a cowboy blanket, and his mother was the one nursing an injury. Her husband would be home soon, and he would be bringing all that he normally did with him, but this moment was hers, and she ignored the pain in her jaw and her right shoulder and prayed.
Use him. Save him and use him, God. Use our little boy.
When the headlights finally shone through the living room window, she stood up and swallowed the fear. She prayed it one last time, and then the door opened.
An hour later she went to sleep, leaving to faith what she could not know.