by Ron Hall
Then, as if an eraser had wiped the smile off his face, he turned dead serious and stared into my eyes. “Nothin keeps you honest like a witness,” he said.
64
When we heard them steps thumpin toward us from inside that boarded-up room that wadn’t fit for no human, I thought my eyeballs was gon’ pop outta my head. We hightailed it outta there like nobody’s business. But when I was runnin, I started feelin a little silly, thinkin maybe what we heard coulda been a vagrant or somebody just holed up in Hershalee’s house. But when we slid around the side a’ the house and my skin started crawlin, I was purty sure it was somethin, not somebody. And when Mr. Ron’s brand-new car started actin like a spooked horse, I knowed it for sure.
After we got past Hershalee’s house, I told Mr. Ron that it wadn’t the first time I seen strange things on the plantation. Like that time my auntie, Big Mama’s sister, made it rain.
Lookin back on it, I think Auntie was what you might call a spiritual healer, like a “medicine man,” ’cept she was a elderly woman. She lived out there near the bayou ’bout half a mile from Big Mama’s, and I used to go over there and see her sometimes. I was scared of her. She always wore a long, dark skirt and a rag around her head, and when she laughed, sounded like a flock a’ birds scared and flyin away. But Big Mama made me go to show my respect and also to help Auntie gather up the fixins for her medicines.
She used to take me with her down by the swamp where she’d be gatherin up some leaves and roots. We’d go in the evenin, just when the sunset was givin over to a cool twilight, and take us a little basket. I’d carry it for her, pickin our way through the cypress trees, while the bullfrogs and crickets were tunin up. I always kept one eye out for gators.
“Now Li’l Buddy, this here’s for takin the pain out a wound,” she’d say, pullin up a root and shakin off the earth. “And this here’s for pneumonia.”
She musta knowed twenty different kinds of roots and what have you, and what she knowed musta been a secret ’cause she made me promise I wouldn’t tell nobody what she was pullin and where she was pullin it.
Auntie lived by herself. She had a room in her house with a big table in it covered with jars in all kinda sizes.
“See them jars?” she told me one time.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“In each one of em, I got somethin for anything that happens to you.”
Folks used to go see Auntie when they was sick. But if folks wadn’t sick, they stayed away. I wadn’t surprised. She had some kinda spiritual thing goin on in that house. Ever time I went in there, she made me sit on a little stool in the same spot, even facin in the same direction, like she didn’t want me to mess up whatever voodoo she had goin on in there.
One day when I was sittin on that stool, she sprinkled some powder on the wood floor. Then she walked over to me and stared into my eyes and said real low, “Do you believe I can make it rain?”
I looked out the window and didn’t see nothin but blue sky. “I don’t know,” I said, half-scared but kinda curious.
“Sit there,” she said.
Then Auntie picked up her broom and started sweepin that powder around on the floor, hummin a li’l tune like no song I ever heard. She hummed and swept, hummed and swept, brushin at the floor with small strokes. She swept that powder all around the front room, then swept some onto the front porch, hummin all the way.
Then she called to me. “Li’l Buddy, walk out on the porch.”
I did, and this is the truth: A cloud had formed right over the house. Just one cloud—not a whole skyful. And right when I looked up at it, that cloud flashed with lightnin and thunder cracked. I could feel it rumblin up underneath the house. Then it come a rain right there on the porch.
Auntie turned her face up into the sprinklin drops, smilin a little, like she knowed a secret. “I told you,” she said.
’Cept for Mr. Ron, I never told nobody ’bout that, ’cause most people gon’ say that’s just superstition. They’d rather pretend things like that don’t happen.
65
I guided the miraculously healed Suburban back over the red dirt road that eventually spit us out onto Highway 1. We drove a mile or so looking for another dirt road, just a slit in the weeds really, so narrow we missed it a couple of times and had to double back. It was the road to Aunt Pearlie May’s house. In the 1960s, she’d moved into a shotgun house out closer to the plantation and had lived there ever since.
As I eased the truck along the pitted trail, bumper-high johnsongrass parted to reveal a slice of America that most Americans never see. Six shot-gun shacks squatted in a clearing in the woods, lined up like prisoners held hostage from another era. No yards divided the lots. Instead, junk huddled in heaps around every house—old tires, beer cans, car seats, rusted mattress springs. In the middle of the road, lay the bloated carcass of a dead mongrel dog.
In front of one house, a young black man and woman watched us from a molting sofa someone had dragged out into the dirt. The woman pulled on a cigarette as chickens pecked around her feet. Smoke boiled into the air from one yard, where two kids tended a pile of burning trash. Nearby, a girl pinned wet laundry to a rope that ran between the house and a dead tree. She looked about twelve and was pregnant.
I slowed down as if driving past a bad accident. The residents stared at me like I was an alien.
“Stop right here,” Denver said. There, sitting on a tree stump beside the road was an elderly woman sucking on a can of beer at three in the afternoon. Dressed in men’s trousers and a stained T-shirt shot through with holes, she lit up when she saw Denver. He got out of the truck and hugged her then handed her a $5 bill. With a wheezy giggle, she poked her hand through one of the holes in her shirt and tucked the money in her bra.
“Y’all come on in the house,” she rasped. “I got some greens on the stove and they’s fresh.”
Denver politely declined and hitched himself back into the Suburban.
“She ain’t no kin,” he said. “Just a friend a’ Pearlie May’s.”
We crept down to the last house, past a man working on a tractor. He had disassembled the machine into several dozen pieces near his front door, which wasn’t really a door at all but a red-plaid blanket tacked up to keep the flies out.
Pearlie May’s house sat at the end of the row. A dozen or so plastic lawn chairs littered the dirt out front, punctuated with huge pyramids of empty Natural Light beer cans stacked like fire logs. Next to the porch lay a mountain of brown Garrett snuff jars, hundreds of them. From the end of a long chain, a spotted mongrel dog yapped at a flock of unperturbed chickens, who knew just how long the chain was.
“Li’l Buddy!” Aunt Pearlie May said when we walked up to her porch. “Lord, if you ain’t got your daddy’s nose!” Denver gave her a hug—not a big one—then she leaned on the rotten porch railing and aimed a four-letter word at the barking hound. “Shut up, dog, ’fore I come out there and shut you up!”
She turned then and smiled at Denver, but her weathered face telegraphed concern over my presence. To ease her mind, I nodded at the snuff-can mountain and told her that my grandmother and great-aunts had dipped Garrett snuff. That seemed to make her feel better.
Aunt Pearlie May invited us into her parlor, a space that measured about six feet by eight feet and was wallpapered in a patchwork of Christmas wrap, along with three pictures of Jesus. Somehow, someone had managed to shoehorn two worn-out love seats into the room and arrange them facing each other. When Denver and I sat down across from Pearlie May and her husband, our knees touched. We chatted about this and that, except for the husband, who sat across from me expressionless, and never said a word. Later, Denver said that was the friendliest he’d ever seen him.
“Y’all come out back and see my hogs,” Pearlie May said after a short visit. “I’m thinkin’ ’bout sellin em off. Want you to see em case you know anybody wants to buy em.”
We unfolded ourselves and covered the distance to the back door in three lon
g steps. Outside, two corpulent hogs snuffled and grunted, wallowing in mud up to their bellies. Pearlie May made a little porcine sales pitch, then yakked cheerfully about her new indoor toilet. She’d had it installed in 2001, and paid for it with proceeds earned over a lifetime of bootlegging Natural Light beer through her bedroom window for a buck a can. Said she still mainly used her outhouse, though, since all the kinks hadn’t been worked out in her indoor plumbing yet.
We left just before dark, and as we drove away the images of poverty and squalor burned themselves into my brain like hated tattoos. I could hardly believe places like that still existed in America. I thanked Denver for taking me there, for taking my blinders off.
“Mr. Ron, they’re livin better than I ever did when I was livin here. Now you know it was the truth when I told you that bein homeless in Fort Worth was a step up in life for me.”
66
By the second week in September, more than half a million dollars had poured into the mission. A couple of days before the groundbreaking ceremony for Deborah’s chapel, Mary Ellen called me. She wanted to share with me something that Jesus had told His disciples, a metaphor for His own death recorded in the Gospel of John: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains by itself, alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
In prayer that morning, Mary Ellen said, she’d felt God whispering to her heart, Deborah was like that kernel of wheat.
The next day, Denver dropped by for a visit. Sitting across from me at my kitchen table as he had so many times, he said nearly the same thing but in the language of a country preacher. “Mr. Ron, all good things must end,” he said. “And nothin ever really ends that somethin new don’t begin. Like Miss Debbie. She’s gone, but somethin new is beginnin.”
Three days later, on September 13, we gathered to break ground on “New Beginnings,” the new mission. Only two days before terrorists had crashed a pair of passenger jets into the World Trade Center, changing America forever. Carson lived in New York City. It had taken me hours to reach him by phone, as I sat before the live TV news coverage, stunned at the news, knowing it was now not only my own world that tragedy had changed forever.
The nation ground to a halt, but in honor of Deborah, the mission board decided to go ahead with the groundbreaking. I followed the familiar route she and I had driven so often to the mission, past train tracks and derelict buildings and underpasses that doubled as outhouses for the homeless. The first time Deborah and I traveled East Lancaster, she’d dreamed of bringing beauty there. And she had, but not in the way she’d first imagined. Instead of lining the sidewalks with picket fences, she’d fenced out fear, prejudice, and judgment, creating with her smile and open heart a sanctuary for hundreds. Instead of planting yellow flowers, she’d sown seeds of compassion that changed hearts, mine and Denver’s only two among them.
So I stood with Regan, Denver, my mother, Tommye, and nearly a hun-dred friends that day, under God’s blue canopy, using a ceremony program to shield myself from the sun. We listened as Mayor Kenneth Barr and State Senator Mike Moncrief spoke of the hope this new mission would bring to the homeless of Fort Worth. Behind them, a ten-foot patch of red dirt lay exposed and four shovels festooned with blue ribbons stood like soldiers, ready to turn over the soil. Ready to receive the kernel.
Now on East Lancaster Street stands a new mission that includes new services for the needy: residential rooms for women and children and the Deborah L. Hall Memorial Chapel. Both are a memorial to a woman who served the city, a woman God took home so that in His strange providence, the sick and the lost might find greater refuge and hope. Bitterly, I wondered if He could have managed to build them without taking my wife. It could have been called God’s Chapel and Deborah Hall could have served Him there.
I remembered what C. S. Lewis said of the clash between grief and faith: “The tortures occur,” he wrote. “If they are unnecessary, then there is no God, or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary for no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t.”
The pain of losing Deborah still brings tears. And I cannot mask my profound disappointment that God did not answer yes to our prayers for healing. I think He’s okay with that. One of the phrases we evangelicals like to throw around is that Christianity is “not a religion; it’s a relationship.” I believe that, which is why I know that when my faith was shattered and I raged against Him, He still accepted me. And even though I have penciled a black mark in His column, I can be honest about it. That’s what a relation-ship is all about.
Still, I can’t deny the fruit of Deborah’s death—Denver, the new man, and the hundreds of men, women, and children who will be helped because of the new mission. And so, I release her back to God.
The Sunday after the groundbreaking, Denver and I pulled into the parking lot of the New Mount Calvary Baptist Church, a church in a depressed neighborhood in southeast Fort Worth. Pastor Tom Franklin had heard Denver speak at Deborah’s memorial service and for months had kept after me to try to convince him to come and preach at his church. Finally, Denver agreed. I had prayed for a standing-room-only crowd, but by the looks of the parking lot, folks were standing somewhere else that morning.
If Abraham Lincoln had been black, Pastor Tom would have been his twin. Gray-haired and bearded, he greeted us at the church door, pulling us each into a lanky hug. Peeking into the sanctuary, I could see only a few people scattered through the pews.
Pastor Tom read my thoughts. “Don’t worry, Ron. Everyone the Lord wants to be here will be here.”
As the service began and the tiny congregation filled the air with old spirituals, Denver and I huddled on the back row. Pastor Tom had wanted me to introduce Denver from the pulpit but spend a few minutes telling his life story first. As I suspected, Denver wasn’t having any of that. During the singing, he and I huddled on the back row to negotiate.
“It ain’t nobody’s business how I got here!” he whispered. “’Sides, I don’t want to tell em ’bout me. I want to tell em ’bout the Lord.”
“So what do you want me to say?”
He paused and stared down at the Bible laying on the bench next to me. “Just tell em I’m a nobody that’s tryin to tell everbody ’bout Somebody that can save anybody. That’s all you need to tell em.”
And so, when the singing stopped, I walked down front and said just that. Then Denver took the pulpit. At first, his voice quavered a bit, but it was loud. And the longer he preached, the louder and stronger it became. And like a magnet, his voice pulled people in off the street. By the time he wiped the sweat off his face and sat down, the pews were nearly full.
Like a cannonball, Pastor Tom shot out of his seat into the pulpit, raising his arms toward the people. “I believe God wants Denver to come back and preach a revival!” he said. The congregation, most of whom had been drawn into the sanctuary by Denver’s voice, exploded into applause.
My mind flashed to Deborah’s dream, her seeing Denver’s face, and recalling the words of Solomon: There was found in the city a certain poor man who was wise and by his wisdom he saved the city.
Again, something new had begun. Something I was certain had my wife dancing for joy on streets of gold.
67
Like I said before, when Mr. Ron promised he wadn’t gon’ catch and release me, I was skeptical. But listen to this: Not too long after I preached at Pastor Tom’s church, Mr. Ron asked me would I move in with him. And you ain’t gon’ believe where—at the Murchison Estate in Dallas, in a mansion where Mr. Ron said United States presidents, movie stars, and even a fella named J. Edgar Hoover used to stay.
I guess the Murchisons at one time was the richest folks in Texas and some a’ the richest in the whole country. In 2001, Mrs. Lupe Murchison passed on, gone to join her husband, and their kin was wantin Mr. Ron to live on the estate and sell off all a’ their art. They had hun’erds a’ pictures and statue
s and what have you. Mr. Ron said it was all worth about a zillion dollars. So he hired me to live on the estate with him and be the night watchman. That suited me ’cause I was ready to work for a livin and earn some money of my own. The mansion was real old and grand, built in the 1920s, Mr. Ron said. A coupla nights while I was guardin it, I met some ghosts wanderin around.
Not long after I moved into the mansion with Mr. Ron, I found some paints in the garage and decided to paint me a picture. I was gettin paid to guard all them silly-lookin pictures by fellas like Picasso. Didn’t look to me like they was very hard to paint. Sure ’nough, it only took me a coupla hours ’fore I had made a picture of a angel that was ever bit as good as some a’ them I was guardin.
Mr. Ron liked it a lot when I showed it to him the next mornin. “How much do you want for it?” he asked me.
“A million dollars,” I said.
“A million dollars!” he said, laughing. “I can’t afford your paintings.”
“Mr. Ron, I ain’t askin you to buy it. I’m askin you to sell it like you sell them other million-dollar pictures.”
After that, though, I showed my angel picture to Sister Bettie and she said it was her favorite paintin she had ever seen, so I gave it to her. She’s like an angel to me anyway. Then Mr. Ron set me up my own studio in the room right next door to Lupe Murchison’s five-car garage. I guess I’ve painted over a hun’erd pictures by now. Sold some of em, too.
Carson and Mr. Ron have done sold off most a’ the Murchisons’ art, and somebody bought the mansion, too. Now we’re livin in another house on the estate while they sell the rest.
During the day when I ain’t workin, I carry Miss Debbie’s torch, the one the Lord told me to pick up so she could lay it down. I still go down to the Lot and help Sister Bettie and Miss Mary Ellen. Sister Bettie’s gettin on in years, and I worry about her. Once a month, I preach at the Riteway Baptist Church. I take clothes over to the homeless people and take care of my homeboys that’s still on the street, maybe give em a few dollars.