The Prodigal: A Ragamuffin Story (17 page)

T
om felt poorly Saturday and went to bed early, which left Jack, Mary, and Dennis sitting around the table and enjoying one of Mary’s lemon meringue pies—homemade, not store-bought, as she so loudly proclaimed. Right out of the Fannie Farmer cookbook.

“I hope it’s not the flu,” she said. “That’s going around.”

“Or that intestinal bug,” Jack said. “Three of the reporters are out with it.” He smiled. “So far.”

“Hey, Twelve,” Dennis said. “I was—well …” His voice trailed off. Then he recoiled a little, as if someone had kicked him under the table.

“Did you just kick Dennis?” Jack asked Mary.

“I’ll never tell,” she said airily. “But I believe Dennis has a question for you.”

“Can—could—” He looked up at the ceiling, as though the answer might be up there somewhere.

“Just spit it out, Seventy-eight,” Jack said, “spit it out.”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve never been much for church—”

“Has not darkened the door of a church in his life,” Mary
said, and Jack suddenly realized that maybe it wasn’t just somebody’s failure to commit that held this relationship back from heading to the altar.

“But I was thinking maybe I’d come Sunday. Hear you preach.”

Jack nodded. “And you’re wondering if I’ll make you feel bad?” Dennis didn’t exactly nod, but he didn’t shake his head either. “If you’ll feel out of place?”

“I think he wants to know if it’s okay,” Mary said. “Honestly!”

“Dennis,” Jack said, “you are more welcome than you know.”

“I’m not exactly the world’s best person,” Dennis said.

“I don’t think you committed adultery on 123 channels,” Jack said.

“Unlike some people I know,” Mary said.

“Dennis,” Jack said, and he bounced a hand off Dennis’s massive forearm—it was like a tree trunk. “I’m just going to tell the truth. I’m going to talk about the good news.” He suddenly felt Frank’s absence like something physical; he couldn’t believe Frank was still angry at him, didn’t understand why.

Or did he?

“We’ll go to church Sunday,” Mary said. “You can sit with me. And afterward, we have another project, don’t we, Jack?”

Jack took a deep breath. “We do indeed,” he said. “Hey,” he said. “Did you see the piece on CNN?”

They both chose that moment to study the ceiling.

“Wow. That bad?”

Dennis nodded grimly. “I ought to—”

“Not in front of the pastor,” Mary warned. She turned to Jack. “It was pretty bad. I’m your sister, and Jamie even had me
believing some of it.” She swallowed once, and then she asked, “Jack, are you leaving?”

“They’ve made an offer,” Jack said. “You know that. I haven’t accepted it.”

She wanted to ask more, but thought better of it.

They talked about taking Alison to the San Antonio Zoo and down on the Riverwalk for dinner. They talked about buying her a pair of boots in Kerrville.

After Mary and Dennis left, Jack crept up to Tom’s room, opened the door quietly, and looked in.

Tom was in a fitful sleep, but he was resting.
That’s got to be a good thing
, he thought.

But Sunday morning Tom seemed worse. He was in the bathroom three times before they left for church. Jack felt his dad’s forehead and thought he was running a temperature, went for a thermometer, which Tom refused. “I am already dying, Jack. I am going to hear you preach.” How could Jack deny his logic?

The church was even fuller than the week before, and the media crush was like nothing Jack had ever seen. All four networks had sent reporters and a crowd of media stood in back. The deacons were having to keep them to one side just so people could get into the church.

“I’ll make y’all a deal,” Jack shouted, as they saw him and moved forward across the church lawn like a centipede. “Behave yourselves. I’ll give you one camera in the back of the balcony. You decide who does the feed, and you all share it. And I’ll say a few words to you after. Right here.”

He left them to argue the details. He had a sermon to preach, a church to meet.

Bill was standing at the door, and he greeted Jack with a smile, shook his hand. “Jack,” he said. “Welcome.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Your family okay?”

Bill nodded. “Thanks for asking.” Then he turned to welcome other visitors.

The service had the same shape. Gospel hymns, welcome by the chairman of the deacons, the readings. Tom was again tasked with reading the gospel lesson, and he was visibly weakened. He took the steps one at a time, coughed for an interminable stretch before beginning to read about John baptizing Jesus.

And then Jack was standing in the pulpit, looking out at the throng. Every pew filled to overflowing, every additional chair full, people standing in the back of the sanctuary and the back of the balcony, even people standing in the narthex. The camera was set up in the balcony, and untold numbers of people would see this now or later. Jack smiled.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” came the thunderous reply.

“It’s nice to see you this morning,” he said. He smiled at Dennis, whose massive bulk was pinned in on either side by Mary and a young woman he didn’t know. “Welcome to Saint Paul’s.”

He went on to talk about the story of the baptism of Jesus. Who was this John the Baptist? Why did Jesus want to be baptized?

He noticed that Father Frank had slipped in and was standing in the back, a defiant tilt to his chin.
I’m here, but I’m still angry.

“I was talking to a friend this week,” Jack said, “and she said something that I’m sure will resonate with a lot of us. She said, ‘There’s nothing as powerful as knowing your father loves you.’

“Mothers have to love us. They gave us life, nurtured us,
fed us, sometimes from their very bodies. And, women, please believe me when I say we are grateful. I loved my mother and I know she loved me up to her dying day.”

He blinked, looked down at his notes for a moment, looked back up.

“But knowing your father loves you is different. Your father doesn’t have to love you. He didn’t give birth to us. The father has traditionally been outside the home working, hunting, farming, doing tax audits. We are separate from our fathers in ways we aren’t from our mothers.”

He looked down at Tom, who was coughing quietly into a handkerchief. “Dad,” he said. “I’d like to tell a story about you. Can I have your permission?”

Tom looked up, lowered the handkerchief. “Does this story make me look good?” he asked.

Jack nodded.

“Then by all means,” Tom said, to a ripple of laughter.

Jack looked out at them, picked out familiar faces.

“Those of you who live in Mayfield know that my father and I didn’t speak for many years. Maybe all of you know that. It has been widely reported,” he said, looking the news camera in its one eye. “I did something that disappointed my father, and in my anger and rebellion, I walked away from him for a decade. He was not a part of my life in any way, although he dearly wanted to be. He continued to reach out, even after I had pushed him to the side.

“And then one day not so long ago, I was at the end of my rope. I had made the very public mistakes that all of you know, and I thought I was done for. You know, like in the movies: ‘You guys go on without me.’”

Jack smiled, although this wasn’t very funny.

“Without even asking forgiveness—I don’t think I’ve ever asked forgiveness,” he said suddenly, surprised by the revelation. He turned to Tom. “Dad, I am truly sorry. But without my even asking him for forgiveness, my father forgave me. When I had done nothing to deserve his love, he loved me.”

Tom was nodding. It was true. Jack looked down at his notes again. He got his voice under control.

“And when I thought I had no reason to go on, my father loved me enough to tell me that I was at the beginning of something, not at the end.”

The church was quiet again, many people leaning forward in their seats.

“And I thought to myself, if my earthly father shows this kind of love and forgiveness to his son, won’t God’s love and forgiveness be that much more amazing?

“In this story of Jesus’s baptism, Jesus is not being baptized because he needs his sins forgiven—we believe that he was the one blameless and perfect human being. But he’s doing it on our behalf—on behalf of all of us whose humanity he shares. And he’s doing it so we too can understand that God loves us. Sinful, sad, broken as we may be, God loves us beyond reckoning.”

He looked out at them, left, right, up into the balcony, and he knew they were ready for his conclusion. “When Jesus comes up out of the waters, his Father says to him, ‘This is my beloved son, and I am so pleased with him.’ My brothers and sisters, we should know that God is uttering the same words about each and every one of us. ‘This is my beloved child, and I love him, I love her, without reservation. No matter what.’”

He raised his hand in blessing, and without his bidding them, they stood to their feet. He smiled out at them, and in that moment, he felt something he had never felt in Seattle—not pride, not excitement, but something deeper, something richer: an intense love for every person in that building.

An intense sense of their holy connectedness.

“Walk out those doors and into your life, secure in the knowledge that your Father loves you. And may the blessing of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—be upon you this day and forevermore. Amen.”

“Amen,” the congregation said in unison.

Bill had asked Jack to serve communion. This Sunday, he and Bill dispensed the bread, and for what seemed a never-ending stream of people—Mary, his father, Dennis, Mrs. Calhoun, and finally, Father Frank—Jack tore a piece of the homemade bread, placed it in their hands, and told them, “This is the body of Christ, broken for you.”

He was surprised at first how many people had tears in their eyes, but when he thought about it, it made sense. Is there a more tangible symbol of how much the Father loves us than the broken body of Christ?

After church, he stood at the doors and greeted parishioners and visitors—mostly visitors. He was almost crushed by Dennis’s bear hug, and Father Frank shook his hand and told him it was a lovely sermon, “and true as well.”

He seemed to have been forgiven, without even asking.

The press conference was a short one. It was mostly Jack telling the media he was in Mayfield, he had work to do here, and they should probably go cover some other story. Surely some other priest or pastor had screwed up in the past week or so.

“But, Jack, are you going back to Seattle?” was the question that came from every quarter, and many of those exiting the church or rubbernecking at the media circus leaned in to hear his answer.

“I had a call from Seattle,” Jack said. “I have no immediate plans beyond tearing down somebody’s garage as soon as I can change out of my church clothes. And I’ll be welcoming my daughter for her first visit to Texas next week. That’s all I have to report.”

The questions didn’t stop when he reached the Gobels’ house. Although they stood tearing shingles off a rickety carport that threatened to collapse beneath them at any moment, Sam Rodriguez would not stop asking, “We’ve got a good thing started here, hombre, you know?”

“I know,” Jack kept saying. Out in the street, on the other side of the pile of building materials people had brought, on the other side of the growing block party, he could see that Randy Fields was seated in the police cruiser, his jaw clenched, shaking his head.

“We’ve got a good thing started here, hombre.”

Jack nodded. “I hope we get to keep on doing it.”

The crowd was even bigger today—more folks from First Baptist had come. Although James Taylor was not one of them, Cameron was one of the high-school boys taking joy in swinging a sledgehammer to bring the old carport down, and Darla was dispensing what Jack assumed was good sweet iced tea over amongst the food and beverages. Someone had set up tables and chairs.

“Looks like some excellent food from the First Baptist ladies,” Warren Koenig told Jack, wiping his brow.

The old carport came down with a roar like the death of a dinosaur to the cheers of the high-school boys who now had advanced degrees in demolition. One group of workers began
framing the walls, another worked to secure base timber into the concrete, a third began unloading material for the new roof. Jack and Mr. Gonzalez had decided that as long as they had the labor—and they certainly did—and as long as the material was there—and people had brought more than enough—they would build the Gobels a proper garage with walls and everything.

Too many men and boys had showed up for all of them to work at once, so Jack and Mr. Rodriguez kept teams at their tasks, cycled people on and off, supervised to make sure that the volunteers drove the nails straight and measured angles correctly.

Jack kept one eye on Randy, who seemed eternally angry about this situation and just sat in his cop car, his lips perpetually pursed.

When the walls went up and they started securing the roof supports, Jack noticed Randy on the phone. He was nodding, his jaw still clenched, and he seemed even angrier than before.

People were shaking Jack’s hand, patting him on the back, but he sensed that many regarded him with a degree of either curiosity or suspicion. Jack’s remedy for that was to work as hard, or harder, than every man there. To carry the heaviest, to hammer the most—

“This is not an Olympic event, boyo,” came the voice of Father Frank from behind as Jack stepped away to take a swig of Shiner and rest his aching muscles.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

“You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.”

Jack turned around. “I think I do. To myself. To them. Maybe even to you.”

“Did you even listen to the sermon you preached this morning?” Frank said. For the first time in days, he was smiling.

“I’m not trying to earn something,” Jack said. He stopped. “That’s not why—”

“I know,” Frank said, holding up his hand. “You’re doing this because it’s a good thing. The right thing.” He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans, kicked at something on the ground. “And I’m sorry, Jack. For my anger. If you choose to go, I think you’ll leave here a different person. But I hope you don’t go at all.”