by Ron Hall
Before we ever connected with him, we sometimes glimpsed Denver there, standing across the street, stock-still and trying to blend in with a telephone pole. I asked Sister Bettie about him. “What, specifically, is his problem?”
“Denver?” she replied in that soft way of hers, smiling. “Oh, he’s very helpful. Keeps my little truck running. And he can sing beautifully!”
From time to time, she said, she could coax him into doing so at the Lot, or at the chapel service where she taught on Thursdays. “With Denver, you must ask him only at the moment you want him, because with any warning, he’ll slip away and disappear.”
Though we’d become friends, Denver hadn’t entirely abandoned his vanishing act. Now, he felt guilty facing people on the street, many of whom he had, at one time or another, threatened to kill. They feared the old Denver, but the one that was emerging scared even him. So he would often disappear when asked to do “Christian” things, like sing for Sister Bettie. Deborah and I served as constant reminders to him that change was under way—change he could have lived just fine without.
Meanwhile, following hard after what she felt was her call to serve, Deborah blossomed. In twenty-nine years of marriage, I had never seen her happier. I can also attest that as a couple we had never been more deeply in love. The peace forged in counseling and the early years at Rocky Top had mellowed into an upbeat contentment.
We might’ve gotten there a lot faster if I’d been willing to recognize the truth of an old saying: “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” But we got there. And from the summit of our relationship, Deborah exported a fresh and contagious joy to the Lot. There, under the giant and ancient elm that shaded the benches, she always found some pearls hidden below the amber sea of crushed beer bottles and syringes.
The pearl she found one day glistened in the smile of a grizzled street veteran who lived under a railroad trestle in a cardboard box shaped like a casket. This man ate from garbage cans, an unpleasant truth you knew automatically if you had a nose. His beard was matted with dried vomit and the remnants of his last few meals, and he reeked so strongly of booze that it seemed he might explode if someone got too close and struck a match.
Here was a man whose life seemed disposable. Yet he found a reason to smile. Drawn to him, Deborah offered him a plate of home-cooked food and a prayer. Then, truly puzzled, she asked him, “Why are you so happy?”
“I woke up!” he replied, eyes twinkling in his haggard face, “and that’s reason enough to be happy!”
Deborah rushed home to tell me what he’d said, as though she’d been given a treasure that needed to be deposited immediately in my memory bank. From that day on, three words—“We woke up!”—were the first to come out of our mouths, a tiny prayer of thanksgiving for something we’d always taken for granted, but that a derelict had had the wisdom to see as a blessing fundamental to all others.
We greeted each other that way every morning, never suspecting that each morning would soon be a precious gift we could count on one hand.
27
It wadn’t long ’fore Miss Debbie and Miss Mary Ellen started askin me would I sing in their chapel service. I would, if they was smart enough to catch me. I’d sing some spirituals I brung with me in my heart from the plantation. Other times, I’d sing some songs I made up on my own. Like I said, I know plenty a’ Scripture.
It didn’t take long, though, ’fore Miss Debbie started gettin bossy again. She got a burr under her saddle ’bout somethin she called a “retreat.” Said her and a bunch of her Christian friends was goin up to the woods to “hear from the Lord.”
“I’ve been praying about it, Denver,” she’d say whenever she seen me, “and I believe God’s telling me that you should go with us.”
I asked some of the fellas round the mission if they knowed what a retreat was and not a one of em had any idea, ’cept Mr. Shisler. He said a retreat was some religious thing where you go off someplace lonesome and talk and pray and cry all weekend. I knowed for sure I didn’t want nothin to do with that. But Miss Debbie wouldn’t let up. I just shined her on, though, ’cause wadn’t no way in the world I was fixin to drive up in no woods with no carload a’ white women.
Well, then I guess she put Mr. Ron on the case. One day at Starbucks, he started in, talkin ’bout “retreat” this and “retreat” that. Said it wadn’t gon’ be just women. Men was gon’ be there, too.
“Think about all the nice folks you’ll meet,” he said. “And all that free food!”
“Not from Jump Street!” I said. “I ain’t goin! I ain’t goin nowhere to no retreat to meet nobody! And I ’specially ain’t goin to no retreat with no white lady that’s somebody else’s wife!”
Just so we’d be clear on the whole thing, I eyeballed him like he was crazy.
I ain’t real sure what he told Miss Debbie after that, but the very next time I went through the servin line, she blowed out from behind that counter like a streak a’ lightnin. And here come that skinny finger in my face again. “Denver, you are going with me to the retreat, and I don’t want to hear you say anything else about it!”
Now here I is, six feet, 230 pounds, a mean sixty-two-year-old black man, and this skinny little white lady thinks she can make me mind. Not even Big Mama talked to me like that. There was fixin to be a problem—a big problem.
Finally, the day come for the retreat and Miss Debbie drives down to the mission lookin for me. I was doin my best to hide out, but some helpful fellas spotted me and told her where I was at. She convinced me to at least come on out to the car and see who all was goin. I didn’t want to be ugly to her ’cause we was gettin to be friends and all. So I walked on out in front of the mission.
I looked in Miss Debbie’s Land Cruiser and sure ’nough, there was four other white ladies sittin inside. In my life, I had bad enough luck with just one white lady. And here was four, all smilin and wavin at me. “Come on, Denver! We want you to go with us!”
Right about then, one of the street fellas sittin on the mission steps started sing-songin like a little girl: “Yeah, Denver, you go right on!” and busted out laughin.
Then his friend piped up and started singin’: “Swing low . . . sweet chariot, comin for to carry me home . . .” And they both busted up.
I didn’t think it was funny. But I had to make up my mind. There was all them white ladies in the car tryin to be so nice to me, and there was them fellas sittin on the steps singin me a funeral song. I guess I knowed I was takin my life in my hands when I got in that car, ’cause it was a cold day in January, but I was sweatin like a hog in August.
28
While I’d been getting to know Denver, my art business percolated profitably, with clients seeking out my partners and me, instead of the other way around. We worked with an elite group of clients who were interested only in the finest works. Even so, in the fall of 1998, I received the kind of call of which art dealers’ fantasies are made.
The call came after Denver and I had begun making the rounds of museums. I had just dropped him off near the mission when my cell phone rang. The man on the line headed a large Canadian real estate development firm that had purchased a thirty-six-story bank building in downtown Fort Worth. Fortunately for the Canadians, the deal included “Eagle,” a forty-foot sculpture by the twentieth-century master Alexander Calder, one of only sixteen monumental stabile sculptures the artist executed in his lifetime.
At that moment, Eagle was firmly nested eighteen inches deep in the concrete plaza outside the bank building, a spot that dominated the heart of the city. The citizens of Fort Worth had long considered the master sculpture public domain, a symbol of the city’s place in the world of art and culture. The new Canadian owners, however, weren’t so sentimental; the man on the phone said they wanted me to sell it.
My heart raced as I thought of the possibility of making this seven-figure deal—likely to be the biggest of my career at that time or ever—especially since a Calder sculpture of that categ
ory would almost certainly never be for sale again. At the same time, I realized that if I did sell it, I risked being run out of town. I knew that to be a fact because the prior owner, a bank in crisis, had asked me to explore a sale only a couple of years earlier, but had ultimately backed down, bowing to citizen pressure so formidable that even local museums had declined to buy the Calder and left it in the city instead. But the Canadians, the man on the phone said, wanted a deal that was clean, fast, and silent. And, as it happened, I had a buyer.
We developed a plan shrouded in secrecy that included code names, as well as “The Phoenix,” a Delaware corporation my partners and I set up just to handle this very special transaction. We hired two eighteen-wheel trans-port trucks, along with crews and drivers who would jackhammer and disassemble the twelve-ton sculpture under cover of darkness. I joked that if word leaked, the workmen might need to wear body armor. But maybe I was only half-joking: So great was the need for absolute secrecy that the plan included the proviso that the crews would not be told where they were taking “Eagle” until they crossed the Texas border into Oklahoma.
We set the date for the move: April 10. Months passed as my partners and I hammered out the details. Meanwhile, I worked on my relationship with Denver. In late December, I’d started trying to talk him into going to the mountain retreat with Debbie. But by January, I’d pretty much given up on that idea. Deborah and Mary Ellen were still going, but I wasn’t there to see them off since the retreat coincided with the Palm Beach Art Fair.
That’s where I was when my cell phone rang just as I was attempting to sell a Matisse drawing to a fancy couple wearing matching pink slacks. It was Deborah, calling to tell me that she’d convinced Denver to go to the retreat. Our son, Carson, by then twenty-two and aiming toward a career dealing in art, had joined me on the trip, so I excused myself and let him take over. In light of Denver’s “Jump Street” speech, I couldn’t believe he’d actually gotten in Deborah’s car—or, even more amazingly, that he had stayed at the retreat the whole weekend.
The highlight, Deborah chattered over the phone, was the last day when Denver—urged on by all the white ladies—sang. Reluctantly, he sat down at the piano in the worship area and belted out a song he made up as he went. His audience gave him a standing ovation.
“I wish you had been there,” Deborah said.
“I wish I had, too.” On the other hand, I thought, if I had been, maybe Denver and I would have been off fishing when God wanted Denver to be singing. “On second thought,” I said, “I think everyone was exactly where we needed to be.”
I couldn’t wait to hear Denver’s take on the retreat—the horrors of hanging with white ladies and all that. But that Tuesday when we went down to the mission, I learned that no one had seen him since Deborah had dropped him off on Sunday. And the next day, still no Denver. That night at home, Deborah and I had started to feel like a family member had gone missing when the phone rang. It was Denver—calling from a hospital.
“I’m okay,” he said. “But when I got home from the retreat, I was hurtin so bad, I walked to the hospital and checked myself in.”
I dropped everything and took off. The Harris Hospital is a good two miles southwest of the mission. I sped there, making a quick stop at What-aburger to pick up Denver’s favorite milk shake, vanilla. Inside Harris, I remembered the floor but forgot the room number, so I walked down the long hall, peeking into each room as I went. Finally, I saw his name, hand-printed on a card, slipped into a slot on a closed door.
A pretty blonde nurse stood nearby, jotting notes on a chart. “Can I help you?”
“Well, I just spent the last ten minutes looking for my friend’s room, but I guess I just found it,” I said, nodding toward Denver’s name card.
“He won’t be in there,” she said, lowering her voice confidentially: “The man in there is black and homeless.”
I grinned. “Then I’m obviously in the right place.”
Embarrassed, she skirted off, probably hoping I wouldn’t tell her boss. I pushed my way through the door. “Hey there, Denver! All those white ladies put you in the hospital?”
Denver, by now able to laugh, told me about his long walk to the hospital through the hood. “Don’t tell Miss Debbie, but out there at the religious resort, I just kept eatin all that free food, but I just didn’t feel right ’bout usin the Man’s bathroom, so I didn’t go the whole time I was up there. So here I am, tryin to get unplugged!”
We both howled. When we finally settled down, he got serious. “Miss Debbie knowed what she was doin takin me up to that retreat.” He didn’t confide any details and I didn’t press.
A couple of weeks later, when his innards were ready, I took Denver to the Mexican restaurant where he had first learned to identify the parts of a combination plate. He ordered his usual—taco, enchilada, rice, and beans—but he pushed it all around on his plate, more interested in talking than eating.
“Miss Debbie knowed what she was doin—takin me outta the street environment I was in so I would have time to think about my life,” he said. “You know, you got to get the devil out the house ’fore you can clean it up! And that’s what happened to me up in them woods. I had time to clear my head and shake loose of some old demons and think about what God might have in mind for the last part of my life.”
Then Denver got quiet again. Finally, he parked his fork tines in his refrieds, wiped his hands on his napkin, and put it back in his lap. “Mr. Ron, I got somethin important to tell you. The work Miss Debbie is doin at the mission is very important. She is becomin precious to God.”
Denver’s brow wrinkled and his head dropped. Then with that dark glower that always preceded his most serious pronouncements, he said something that still rings in my ears today: “When you is precious to God, you become important to Satan. Watch your back, Mr. Ron. Somethin bad gettin ready to happen to Miss Debbie. The thief comes in the night.”
29
Certain days in life, you remember the headlines.
November 22, 1963: JFK assassinated. Easy to remember since I had a front-row seat.
July 20, 1969: Neil Armstrong took one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind as Deborah and I, newly engaged, made out on the couch in my apartment at TCU.
April 1, 1999: I remember the headlines from that day less for the events themselves than for the fact that April Fools’ Day was the fulcrum that flung our lives down a path we could not have foreseen.
Per our usual coffee-in-the-kitchen routine, it was the Bible for Deborah that morning, the Star-Telegram for me. Albanian refugees were pouring out of Kosovo, the paper said . . . former Catwoman Eartha Kitt was still lounge-singing at age seventy-two . . . Texas Governor George W. Bush had pulled in $6 million in less than a month for his likely presidential campaign.
After coffee, Deborah took off for her exercise class, then to her annual physical. She was military about that yearly visit—she checked in, got the “you are in fantastic health for a woman half your age” report from the doctor, then made her appointment for the following year on her way out the door. Weddings, parties, and travel plans all were scheduled around that physical.
I headed out for my office in Dallas, looking forward to a lunch date with our daughter, Regan. She had been working for me in the gallery. With an art history degree from the University of Texas and a certificate of completion from Christie’s Fine Arts course in New York City, it seemed like a natural fit. But she hated it.
Even in high school, Regan had felt more comfortable around the dis-advantaged than the privileged. She often would whip up a batch of sandwiches and, we were mortified to find out later, take them alone to the bums living under the bridges in downtown Dallas.
During the Christie’s course, she discovered she did not enjoy the art business—the pampered clients, the self-involved dealers, the pretentious power lunches. But maybe it was just that way in New York City, she thought. So she kept mum, came home, and stuck it out at our Dall
as gallery for a while. Carson, meanwhile, was a senior at TCU, and Deborah was enjoying having all her chicks back in the nest.
But Regan’s discontent grew daily. So we met for lunch that day at Yamaguchi Sushi and, in a corner booth over raw tuna topped with jalapeño slices, got down to the serious business of charting another course for her life. As we discussed options, grad school and ministry among them, my cell phone rang. It was Deborah.
“Craig felt something in my abdomen,” she said, her voice thin and strained. The doctor, a personal friend named Craig Dearden, wanted to do a sonogram in his office then send her to the hospital for X-rays. “Would you come back to Fort Worth and meet me at All Saints?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll be there in half an hour. And don’t worry, okay? You’re the healthiest person I know.”
I hated to cut short lunch with Regan, but we agreed to reschedule the next day, and I told her I’d call as soon as I talked with Craig. When I arrived at All Saints, I found Deborah in the radiology waiting room. Mary Ellen was already there. So was Alan, an All Saints physician and former chief of staff.
I scooped Deborah into a long hug. Her shoulders felt tense, but she gradually relaxed. I pulled back and looked into her eyes. “You okay?”
She nodded, trying on a weak smile.
Deborah got X-rays, but also a CAT scan. When the films were ready, we sat in an examining room, lights dimmed, X-ray illuminator glowing. Another doctor, John Burk, clipped the first film to the illuminator. At first, the amorphous image, milky white on gray, meant nothing to me.
“This is Deborah’s liver,” Dr. Burk explained, drawing an invisible circle around a shape on the screen.
Then I saw them: shadows. Her liver was completely covered with them.
As we stared at the film, several more doctors filtered into the room, their white coats and serious faces vaguely blue in the dim light. A couple of them experimented with sounding upbeat.