The Braxtons of Miracle Springs

by Michael Phillips

Hearing the name of his enemy seemed to bring him a little further awake.

  “Where am I?”

  “In our house, Mr. Harris. We’ve been taking care of you—and praying for you.”

  “Prayin’—I don’t need no prayin’!”

  Already his old orneriness was starting to return.

  He twisted a little in the bed, winced in pain, then lay still. By that time, Almeda had come in, then Tad and I. We were the only ones in the house at the time. He glanced around, obviously recognizing both Almeda and me. Then his eyes came to rest on Tad.

  “You ain’t the Hollister kid—leastways, I don’t think . . .”

  He paused as if trying to remember something from a long time ago.

  “You must mean my brother, Zack,” said Tad. “No, I’m Tad Hollister.”

  “What is this—a whole blame house full of Hollisters? Where is Hollister anyway—I wanna see him.”

  Again his face grimaced from the hurt in his shoulder, and he closed his eyes and relaxed a bit against the pillow, breathing deeply. He was obviously weak, and his face was pale.

  “Do you think you could eat something, Mr. Harris?” asked Almeda gently. “A biscuit, a cup of soup . . . some coffee perhaps?”

  He only nodded, then coughed a couple of times, still with his eyes closed. Obviously the coughing was difficult and painful. He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Almeda turned and went back to the kitchen. About a minute later we heard the door of the house open and Pa’s boots coming across the floor. He was followed into the room by Christopher, who had run to fetch him the moment Mr. Harris awakened.

  Pa came into the room, then slowly approached the bed. The rest of us made room for him. He walked up and sat down at the bedside.

  Gradually Mr. Harris’s eyes opened again. He saw Pa sitting beside him.

  “What is this, Hollister?” he said in a soft, raspy voice. “What’m I doing here?”

  “This is my home, Jesse,” Pa replied as if he was talking tenderly to a child. “You were hurt. We’ve been taking care of you.”

  “How was I hurt?”

  “You were shot, Jesse.”

  “Shot! Who in tarnation shot me? I don’t remember nothing ’cept you standing there like a blame fool that wouldn’t fight me.”

  “I didn’t shoot you.”

  “Then, who?”

  “My son.”

  “The Zack kid? I never saw him.”

  “He was behind you, Jesse—waiting to see what you were going to do.”

  This information silenced Mr. Harris for a minute.

  Almeda returned with a cup half full of coffee and a buttered biscuit. She and Pa tried to help him sit up in the bed against several pillows. He didn’t seem to like anyone touching and fussing with him, but he accepted their help with only a few gruff expressions and grunts.

  “Why wouldn’t you fight me, Hollister?” he said after a minute. “I never took you fer one to go yeller.”

  “Because to fight a man like you mean, Jesse,” replied Pa, “you’ve got to hate him. I don’t hate you, Jesse. I love you.”

  “Confound you, Hollister! Don’t say things like that—you sound like a blasted woman!”

  “It’s true, Jesse. I do love you. It isn’t because I’ve gone soft and yellow, but because I’ve discovered the true meaning of manhood. That’s why I prayed for you instead of fighting you.”

  “Yer a fool like I said before, Hollister, if you believe that kind of woman-talk!”

  “It’s life, Jesse—for men as well as women.”

  “Bah, yer a coward! You wouldn’t fight me like a man!”

  “What do you think takes more courage, Jesse,” asked Pa, “to fight back when a man who’s your enemy is trying to kill you or to bow your head and ask your heavenly Father to do good to him?”

  “That’s moonshine!”

  “I’ve done both, Jesse, and I can tell you which one takes more guts. You talk about manhood and cowardice—I done lots of fighting in my life, Jesse, which I ain’t proud of now. I finally see it’s the coward who tries to settle things with fists and guns.”

  Pa paused a moment, then looked Mr. Harris straight in the eye.

  “It’s you that’s the coward, Jesse Harris,” he said. “You’re afraid to look yourself full in the face.”

  “What the devil do you mean? I ain’t never been called a coward! You think ’cause I’m layin’ here in this bed you kin git away with that?”

  “You’ll take on anybody in the world. You’d fight me and a hundred men like me. But there’s one man you’re afraid of, Jesse Harris, and that makes you a coward when it comes to the truest kind of manhood of all.”

  “I ain’t afraid of nobody, I tell you!”

  “You’re afraid to look at yourself,” Pa repeated, “and at what you’ve allowed yourself to become.”

  “Blast you, Hollister! I won’t listen to yer insults!”

  “I’m sorry the truth makes you uncomfortable, Jesse.”

  “Confound this shoulder!” he cried, struggling as if to get out of the bed. “By heaven—if I weren’t laid up like this, I’d beat the tar out of you right where you stand! Get out . . . get out of here, you hear me? If I could git up I’d throw you out myself!”

  “No need for that, Jesse,” replied Pa calmly, turning. “I’m gonna leave peaceful.”

  As he went, he motioned for the rest of us to follow, which we did, leaving the invalid alone with his smoldering thoughts.

  Chapter 56

  Straightforward Witness

  It was early that same afternoon when Mr. Harris sent word through Almeda that he wanted to see Pa.

  Pa asked Christopher and Zack to go with him. The three of them went into the sickroom and closed the door. The rest of us waited in the sitting room, wondering what was going on, talking softly amongst ourselves, and praying. Aunt Katie and Uncle Nick had come down and were with us with their three rowdy young’uns. Ruth and the cousins had been sent outside.

  Christopher told me afterward what happened.

  “Hollister,” Mr. Harris said in a tone that didn’t have the anger in it from before. “I can see you are tryin’ to help keep me alive, and I’ll try to watch my tongue.”

  “Don’t mention it, Jesse.”

  Pa introduced Christopher to Mr. Harris as the two younger men took chairs on the other side of the bed from Pa.

  Mr. Harris and Zack nodded to one another.

  “Been a while, young Hollister.”

  Zack nodded.

  “Never expected to see you again like this. That’s the second time you outsmarted me.”

  “I’m sorry I had to shoot you, Mr. Harris—that’s what Pa says your name is.”

  “Well, I reckon a feller’s gotta stick up fer his own. I don’t reckon I can fault you fer sticking up fer yer own pa. I reckon I oughta thank you fer not killing me. But layin’ here like this, I think I’d have been better off if you’d done it.”

  “I was aiming for your arm, just so you’d drop the gun,” said Zack. “I didn’t mean to lay you up so bad as this.”

  Mr. Harris stared down into the bed in front of him for a minute.

  “I gotta tell you, Hollister,” he said at length, “I ain’t feeling none too good. All the while I been laying here—asleep, I reckon, though I ain’t sure if it was altogether like normal kind of sleeping—as I laid here I was having dreams that weren’t like anything I ever had afore. I saw the faces of men I killed and other things I don’t even know what they was.”

  His voice was agitated and fearful.

  “I tried to holler out,” he said, “tried to make myself wake up, but I couldn’t do it. I saw things that’d make any man tremble, things that would—”

  He stopped, then glanced up first at Pa, then over to Zack and Christopher, his eyes wide.

  “You gotta tell me straight, Hollister,” he said, turning back toward Pa with a wild fear in his eyes. “Am I dyin’? Is tha
t why my brain’s goin’ loco?”

  “I don’t know, Jesse,” answered Pa calmly. “I hope not, ’cause we’ve all been praying mighty hard for you. But if it’s your time, then none of us can stop the Lord from doing what he has to do.”

  Again it was silent.

  “You believe in heaven and hell, Hollister, now you got religion?” Mr. Harris asked.

  “Yep, I do, Jesse.”

  “I reckon we all know where a no-good varmint like me is headed, eh?”

  “It don’t have to be that way, Jesse.”

  “I done some pretty bad things, Hollister. Durned if I ain’t just exactly what the preachers call a sinner waiting fer the flames of hell. I heard them fellers plenty of times when they’d come into some saloon, trying to scare us out—bunch of women, I always thought. Leastwise, I don’t reckon there’s time left fer me to do much about it.”

  Pa glanced over at Christopher with a look of question. He didn’t know what to say in reply and silently beckoned Christopher to jump into the conversation.

  “There is always time, Mr. Harris,” said Christopher.

  “Time fer what? What kin I do?”

  “The single most important thing in life.”

  “Don’t talk in riddles, young feller! What in tarnation do you mean by the most important thing?” he asked, coughing again.

  Pa handed him a towel. He coughed into it again a time or two.

  “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.”

  “Ain’t no time for that” he returned spitefully. “My life’s near over. For all I know, it is over.”

  “It takes no time to believe, Mr. Harris.”

  A long silence followed, during which Mr. Harris calmed.

  “What’m I supposed to believe about him, then?” asked Mr. Harris at length.

  “We must believe in him, not about him,” said Christopher. “We must take what he has done and bring it into our hearts—each of us for ourselves. He is mankind’s Savior and Lord, but we have to make him our own Savior and our own Lord.”

  Both men fell silent. Mr. Harris seemed to be thinking. How much of what Christopher had said he could grasp, Christopher couldn’t tell.

  “It all sounds like nonsense to me—I can hardly make out what’n the heck yer talking about.”

  “It’s never too late to tell God you’re sorry for what you’ve done, that you’re finally ready to do things his way,” said Pa, now resuming the conversation with Harris.

  “Being sorry don’t much make up fer the wrong a body’s done.”

  “I reckon you’re right, Jesse,” said Pa, “leastways the way we look at it. But God’s got a different way of figuring things. And when a man’s sorry enough for what he’s been to repent of it, then God has a way of setting it all right no matter when that time is.”

  “Even if a man’s dying?”

  “If dyin’s what it takes to wake a man up, then sometimes that’s what God’s gotta do—though he’d rather people woke up before then, so he could show his love to them while they’re still here. That’s why we’re here in the first place, you know, Jesse.”

  “Why?”

  “So God can show us how much he loves us.”

  “There you go again, talking about love. Whoever loved a mean, no-good killer like me? Ain’t nobody ever loved me. Not even my own daddy loved me.”

  “The God who made you loves you. You’re his child—how could he do anything but love you? And because he loves you, so do we.”

  This time the silence that followed was lengthy.

  “I gotta tell you, Hollister,” said Mr. Harris after a while, “what you did out there—whenever it was—it ain’t somethin’ I kin git outta my mind. It weren’t natural, Hollister. Why . . . blamed if you wasn’t gonna let me kill you! Dad-burned, Hollister—how could you do that? You wasn’t gonna lift a finger against me! Why . . . it was almost—but whoever heard of such a thing? It was almost like you. . . .”

  He stopped and glanced down, his voice choking. Christopher told me later that Mr. Harris was starting to cry. He and Zack looked down at the floor, not wanting to embarrass the poor man.

  Only Pa kept looking straight into his face.

  “Like what, Jesse?” Pa said.

  “Like . . . like you were putting me ahead of yerself . . . like you were willing to die yerself rather than hurtin’ a hair of my head.”

  “I ain’t saying I wasn’t scared, Jesse,” said Pa. “I was. I didn’t know what you’d do. But you’re right—I was willing for you to put a slug in me if it came to that, ’cause I wasn’t going to hurt you.”

  “But . . . but why, Hollister?” stammered Mr. Harris.

  “I told you before, Jesse—because I been praying for you ever since we heard that you were coming here, looking for us. Zack and I and Christopher here, we’ve been praying for you, praying for your good. As we prayed, we couldn’t help growing by and by to love you just a little, Jesse. That’s why.”

  In the silence that followed, Mr. Harris’s tired, worn, pale cheeks began to glisten from the tears trickling down them, right down into the big scar above his neck.

  That fearsome outlaw lay listening like a little child to words too incredible to believe. Yet because of what he had witnessed, he did believe them. What he would have scoffed at in a sermon, he could not help believing—because he had seen it lived out in a man’s life before his very eyes.

  “But that’s not the best of it, Jesse,” Pa began again with a childlike enthusiasm. “Our love isn’t anything compared to the love God has for you. In fact—do you want to know something that’ll really surprise you, Jesse? There is somebody that wasn’t just willing to die, but who did die just for you.”

  Mr. Harris glanced up, puzzled. He obviously had no idea who Pa meant.

  “Why don’t you tell him about it, Christopher,” said Pa, glancing across the bed.

  “You’re doing great, Drum,” replied Christopher. “I don’t know when I’ve ever heard the gospel make so much sense. I want to hear what you have to say.”

  Pa took a breath, then continued.

  “You know who I mean, don’t you, Jesse?” he asked.

  Mr. Harris shook his head.

  “Don’t reckon I do, Hollister.”

  “It was Jesus, the Son of God. He died for you Jesse—just for you.”

  “Well, I heard about that, of course—but how do you mean, just for me?”

  “He died for me, too, and for all of us. But that don’t take nothing away from his dying for every one of us like we were the only ones. When he died, it was different than if I’d died.”

  “How you figure that?”

  “’Cause you see, Jesse, he was the Son of God. He didn’t have to die.”

  “Why did he, then?”

  “’Cause he loved us. When he died, his dying took care of all the sin of the world—and that means yours and mine, Christopher’s here, Zack’s . . . everybody’s. Took care of it all ahead of time. That’s what I was talking about before, about how God’s got a way to make things right when a man makes up his mind to repent. That’s how he does it—Jesus’ blood washes all that sin away.”

  “I heard those words before—never thought much about ’em.”

  “That’s why you can tell God you’re sorry, and repent of the man you’ve been, and tell him you want to be his son. Tell him you’re ready to do things his way. Don’t matter if you’re gonna die tomorrow or if you got fifty years left—the blood washes away the sin all just the same. That’s what Jesus died for, so that we could become God’s children.”

  Chapter 57

  John 2:3

  A long silence.

  Mr. Harris glanced over toward Zack.

  “You believe all this stuff, young Hollister?”

  “Yep, I do, Mr. Harris,” said Zack. “Everything my pa’s telling you’s true—every word.”

  “What about ol’ Nick?” asked Mr. Harris, looking at Pa again. “He was always a pretty tough felle
r—he go in for all this religious way of looking at things?”

  Christopher was already on his way to the door. He opened it a crack and motioned for Uncle Nick to join them.

  Uncle Nick approached the bed, then gave Mr. Harris his hand. The sick man shook it feebly.

  “How’s it going, Belle? Been a long time.”

  “Jesse,” said Uncle Nick.

  “Drum’s been telling me some of the durndest things I ever heard, and I asked him if you go along with it all.”

  Pa briefly recounted the conversation.

  “I reckon I’d say I do,” said Uncle Nick when he was done. “I was a little slower than Drum to see some of it. Reckon my pride got a mite more in the way than his did. But yeah, Jesse—what he’s telling you’s the truth. If you wanna make things right and you wanna get rid of the wrong you done, then you gotta let God do it. Ain’t no other way. You can’t get rid of the sin yourself. Nobody can. That’s why we gotta give it to God. Every one of the four of us here’s done it—and we’re all here to tell you that God keeps his word. And we’re all better men for it.”

  Pa and Zack and Christopher all nodded as Nick spoke.

  Another long silence.

  “Blamed if it don’t sound too good to be true,” said Mr. Harris, shaking his head slowly. “But I reckon there ain’t nothing else left but for me to try it, seeing as how I’ve made a worse mess of my life than most folks. I gotta tell you, it ain’t been no way to live.”

  No one said anything. Jesse Harris lay in the bed with his thoughts. The four men around the bed waited for the Spirit of God to carry out the final persuasion and take conviction to the needful corners of his being. They wouldn’t say or do anything to force the heart’s door open ahead of its time.

  “So tell me,” said Mr. Harris after five or ten minutes, “what do I gotta do fer God to make what I done all right, like you say he can?”

  Both Pa and Uncle Nick glanced over at Christopher. Pa gave a little nod.

  “All you have to do, Mr. Harris,” Christopher said, “is tell God that you’re sorry for what you have done and the kind of man you were. Tell him that you repent of it, and ask him to forgive you. It’s as simple as that. Ask him to take away your sin. The Bible calls it being born again. It’s not something you can do for yourself. But he can do it for you, and all you have to do is ask him to.”