New Heart Church

by Jim Barringer

  Chapter Seven

  A few minutes later, sky growing darker by the minute, we stood on the shore of Lake Worth, the big reservoir on the west side of the city. One of Stanley’s friends (of course) owned a big house on the lake, and Stanley had gotten the okay to fish on the place anytime. Like I told him, I’d never been before, so I watched on, feeling rather useless, as Stanley expertly untangled the lines and tied big, three-pronged hooks onto the end before opening a bag of round pellets.

  “Take you a whiff of that,” he said, offering me the bag.

  I sniffed and almost threw up. Between gags, I spluttered, “What is that?”

  “Stinkbait. Catfish love it.” He pulled some latex gloves onto his hands and molded a couple of pellets onto each hook while I kept a respectful distance. Then, satisfied, he hauled back and casted the line as far as he could. I saw a splash in the water about seventy yards out, then the bobber drifted back to the surface.

  “So how does this work?” I asked him.

  “We sit here for a while feeling like men until we see one of those bobbers go under. That means there’s a fish on the end. At that point we set the hook, reel the fish in, put it in that cooler over there, and take it home to fry up some night.”

  “Seems really simple.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see if the fish are cooperating.” Stanley tossed the second line out, a couple of yards to the right. “That one’s yours. Keep an eye on the bobber.”

  There were enough lights from the city and highway that I could see the little plastic ball pretty clearly even in the dark, so I settled onto the ground and waited.

  A few minutes of silence later, with no fish biting, I looked over at Stanley. It was odd, but I kept thinking the words “New York.” Finally, I said, “Stanley, what’s the deal with New York?”

  He leaned back a bit, not taking his eyes off the fishing line. “You sure are curious about it.”

  “Sure I am. You told me at the cookout that you’d lived there for a while, then left it out of the list of places you’ve lived. When I tried to follow up, you just said you didn’t think of it as home. You’ve never been evasive about anything. Actually, just the opposite, every time I’ve tried to dodge from you or give you a partial answer about anything, you’ve nailed me to the wall until I spilled the whole story. I think, the way you’ve been so nosy with me, answering a question honestly is the least you owe me.”

  He nodded, chuckling softly to himself. “Well, you got me.”

  “Got you?”

  “Yeah, son. You got me.” He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. I told you we moved to Jersey when I was a teenager.”

  “Right, I remember that.”

  “Jersey, if you know your geography, is connected to New York City, and a lot of my buddies at the time were straight-up gangster types from the city. I was dumb; I didn’t know any better.” He smiled wistfully. “Man, I was dumb.”

  I’d never heard Stanley talk about himself this way, and I didn’t know how to react, so I just watched him to see what else he would say.

  “I grew up without a dad, Eli. That’s why I asked you about your parents. Lots of kids in the city grow up without parents, never knowing love. Insecure. So they get in fights with each other, you know, over respect and that. So I was a fighter.” He clenched his hands, hands that had probably collided with dozens of faces. “One day I was over in the city, kid tried to start some stuff with me and my buddies. I shanked him.”

  “You what?”

  “Stabbed him, son. With a knife.” He seemed agitated by the interruption.

  “Sorry. Keep going.” Part of me was sure he was making up the story as he went along. There was no chance the Stanley I knew had ever done something like that.

  “Anyway, the kid died, the police found out, I got busted, and did twenty-five years in the People’s Hotel of New York.”

  “Wait, you killed him?” I sounded more aghast than I wanted to, but I was so shocked that I couldn’t help it.

  “I murdered him, actually, or at least that’s what the state said. That’s a steaming pile, by the way, because murder requires premeditation, and I’d never met the kid before that night. Don’t ever tell me the system’s not biased against black folk. But whatever, they had the right idea. Stanley Raines, murderer. It’s got a decent ring to it, you have to admit.”

  I was trying to picture it in my head, to see a younger Stanley whipping out a knife and stabbing a man, maybe dropping the knife and running away in horror when he realized what he’d done, maybe just standing there in disbelief. I couldn’t imagine it.

  I was silent for so long that Stanley stopped staring at the line and looked at me instead. “You happy now?”

  “What the fu– er, I guess I shouldn’t say that.”

  Stanley laughed, shaking his head. “Nothing else really sums it up, right?”

  “Stanley, you’re honestly trying to tell me you’re a convicted murderer?”

  “I’m trying to, yes. As you may have guessed, I don’t tell many people. When I got out, I figured I’d move as far away as I could and start over. That’s how I ended up here.”

  “So wait, when did you start doing the whole God thing?”

  “Ah yes, that.” He was looking back at the water, and very quickly reached for his fishing pole, giving it a quick yank. The pole bent over so far I thought it was going to break, and Stanley slowly started reeling in the line. “Son, you don’t know how hard I fought God. I went every week to the prison’s church service, listening to that old chaplain preach at me – not because I was interested, mind you, but because I could get out of my cell for an hour. I figured God was for other people. When I heard people say that God loved me and wanted a relationship with me, all that just bounced off.”

  I squinted at the end of my fishing line, where the bobber still bobbed resolutely on the choppy water. “So what happened next?”

  “This is a big old fish,” he said, forearms tensing as he pulled the pole toward him and reeled in a few inches of line. “What happened next, you say? I got out of jail a couple weeks after my 46th birthday and landed here, in Fort Worth, in the same apartment where I live now. Did construction cause it was all I knew how to do. I’d spent the last 25 years behind bars; I didn’t know a thing about computers or DVD players or any of that stuff. I had to learn how to drive, you believe that? Lived in Pittsburgh and Jersey for so long that I never needed a car, so I never learned to drive.”

  “Crazy.” I watched him slowly, methodically pulling the fish closer toward shore. It was about thirty yards out now, and launched itself into the air, trying to free itself from the hook. I didn’t know much about fish sizes, but it sure looked big to me.

  “Right. Actually, it’s funny we’re here, cause I met God out on this lake.”

  “No way.”

  “Serious. I was out in a little canoe, thinking about my life, how I’d thrown away half of it for a moment’s worth of stupidity, you know? Now I’m going to carry this black mark on me for the rest of my life, convicted felon. It’s a good thing I don’t have to work cause nobody respectable would hire me. So I was on this canoe, just feeling like my life didn’t have a point to it, like it wouldn’t matter too much if I tossed myself overboard and no one saw me again.”

  He glanced at me, still fighting the fish. “And I just felt something inside me telling me that my life had meaning. I didn’t know what it was; thought I might have been going crazy. Then I got real mad, you know, asking what my life could mean, and that little thing inside me told me that I already knew, I’d already heard. Bible verses kept popping into my head, verses I’d heard the chaplain say, that I never remembered memorizing. Finally I figured, well, God’s after me.”

  I was thinking by then about what Abbie had told me the day before, about her mistakes and how she had carried around guilt and shame for s
o long afterward. “So…ah, I don’t know how to say this, but did you have any baggage left over from what you had done, maybe like you hadn’t forgiven yourself?”

  “Hell yeah, son, scuse the language.” Stanley chuckled; the fish was nearly to shore now, and Stanley lifted it up out of the water. “That’s a fish,” he affirmed. “Stick that thing in the cooler for me.”

  It had to weigh ten pounds at least. I grabbed it by the sides like Stanley showed me and carried it to the cooler, where I kicked the lid off and slipped the fish inside. “Alright. It’s in.”

  “Good.” Stanley tossed the line back out, waiting for another bite. “Baggage, Eli. Yeah, I had baggage. The hardest thing for me to believe was that God could love me and forgive me, that everything could be okay after I’d done something so savage. I felt like I should have a permanent price to pay for doing something with permanent consequences. And I was right. I should have. But God’s forgiveness means that Jesus took my permanent price on himself. All my guilt and all my shame landed on his cross instead. There are still mornings where I have to tell myself that, you know. I ended a kid’s life. I had to look into his parents’ eyes, there in the courtroom, see the tears that I’d put on their faces. Who wouldn’t have baggage?”

  A quiet plop announced that my bobber had gone underwater, and I grabbed for my pole. “How do I do this, Stanley?”

  “Give it a quick, hard tug. That’ll set the hook.” His voice was calm, reassuring, and I did what he said. “Good. That was good. Now pull the rod toward you and slowly start to reel in the line.”

  I hadn’t imagined how much force would be tugging at the other end of the line, as the fish thrashed all over, trying to loose itself. Slowly I pulled the line toward me, my reel periodically creaking an objection, Stanley watching me intently.

  It feels a little strange to say it, but I felt like God was with us there on the bank too, like he was telling me something. Here was Stanley, who knew how to fish, teaching me, the newcomer, everything he knew. The same was kind of true of our faith. Stanley had been a believer for longer than me – though not that much longer, certainly not as long as I’d thought – and there, too, he was showing me the ropes, teaching me what to do so I could learn from him. Maybe he was even a father figure to me, taking the role that my own parents, for whatever reason, had never bothered to fill.

  I stopped talking, then, consumed by the task of fighting this giant fish. The closer it got to shore, the faster my heart pounded. I could see it twenty feet out from shore, wriggling under the waves, being pulled closer and closer until finally I guided it into Stanley’s waiting hands.

  “That’s an impressive catch for your first time,” Stanley told me. “I bet it weighs every bit of twelve pounds. What do you say we take these boys back home so I can fillet them up?”

  “Sounds great to me.”

  A short car trip and a round of goodbyes later, I laid in bed, hands behind my head as I stared at the ceiling. My mind was wide awake, thinking about all the things that were happening in my life, all the things I was learning about my friends and about myself. I’d never been excited about the future, not once in my life that I could remember. Yet every day here new things were happening, and I was starting to get a good look at the person I might be. Stanley hadn’t told me, but he hadn’t had to: my own baggage was that I was scared of intimacy, because no one had been close to me before. And I got the distinct sense that God was curing me of that by planting me around people who were determined to get close to me. I’d never been loved, so God had dropped me into an apartment with people who would stop at nothing to love me. I could imagine him smiling over me, celebrating, seeing that I was finally learning the most important things about life, the things he had meant for me to know from the beginning.

  “Thanks,” I whispered, and closed my eyes.

  Part Five