Gate (9781441240569)

by Stouten, Dann A.

  I recognized many of the volumes and slowed to read the titles of others. A ladder on wheels followed a track that was hooked around what had to be at least a ten-foot ceiling. I spotted a volume that looked for the life of me like the bound copy of a book I had started writing in college. At the time I had visions of writing the great American novel, but I never got around to finishing it. I started to climb the ladder for a close look, but Michael said, “I know the power books have over you, but now’s not the time for reading.”

  Mission-style furniture filled the larger southern wing of the living room. A chocolate-colored leather couch with plaid pillows, two end tables, a grandfather clock, and a red recliner lined the opposite wall, which was really a series of sliding glass doors that opened to a screened-in porch overlooking the lake.

  “This is my favorite room in the whole house,” Michael said as we stepped across the threshold.

  The screens were neatly tucked inside the stone columns that narrowed as they rose, and white wicker furniture filled the space. White and watermelon-colored pillows sat in the seat of a rocker, a porch swing, and two high chairs around a glass-topped table. The big pine cast its shadow across the entire front of the house, shielding it from the sun, and a gentle breeze rustled the leaves on the fruit trees outside and freshened the air on the porch. It was beautiful looking out over the lake, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was always so pleasant there.

  “I love it out here,” Michael said, as if he read my mind. “There’s always a breeze blowing.”

  Pointing out to a small aluminum rowboat tied to the dock out front, he said, “Feel free to go fishing if you want. The boat is at your disposal. There are poles and tackle in the carriage house out back. But if I know you, you’re probably more interested in exploring that library, right?”

  “Right,” I answered, turning to glance back at the books. But when I turned around again, Michael was gone.

  I walked back inside to the library, grabbed a book on ancient Egyptian archaeology, sat down in the leather chair, and began reading.

  3

  perseverance

  If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of perseverance.

  Rich DeVos

  The next thing I knew, Michael was gently shaking my shoulder and asking if I was hungry.

  “Sure am,” I said. “What’s for supper?”

  “You’ll have to ask the cook,” he said. “He’s out front by the grill.”

  As I got up to go outside, I caught a glimpse out the west window of a butter yellow ’67 Chevy Camaro RS Convertible. I’ve always been a car buff, even when I was a little kid, and I couldn’t resist taking the long way around to the front yard so I could take a closer look at the Camaro.

  I could smell the smoke of the charcoal grill as I went out the screen door in the kitchen, and I could feel my stomach growl. I hadn’t had lunch and I was really starting to get hungry. But the sight of that Camaro made me forget about my appetite. She was a beauty, and in mint shape too.

  The first thing I noticed was the raised red-letter tires. “I haven’t seen those in a long time,” I said to myself. “This must belong to a serious collector.” The car had polished chrome lake pipes running along the rockers and chrome reverse rims. The inside was leather, and there was a Beach Boys eight-track tape lying on the passenger’s seat.

  A familiar voice called out to me, “We can take her for a ride after dinner if you want.”

  As I turned around, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. It sounded like Roz, and it looked like him too, or to be more accurate, he looked like he’d looked in his younger years. This man was in his thirties, so it couldn’t be Roz, because he had been in his seventies when he died ten years ago. His wife Myra (Mike to her friends) had worked with my mom at Interstate when they were both in their twenties, and when they got together socially, my dad and Roz hit it off immediately. Both of them loved to hunt and fish, and they were both in the auto industry.

  Roz started a company called Autocast about the same time Dad started Capitol Engineering. Money was tight in my childhood years, but we weren’t aware of it. Our families would get together every other Saturday night and we’d have a wienie roast or an Indian corn boil, or sometimes we’d just play board games, make popcorn, and watch Gunsmoke on TV. Those were good memories, but that was almost fifty years ago, and the man in front of me was twenty years younger than I was.

  The sun was to his back, and I could make out the silhouette of a big man with curly hair. He wore Red Wing boots, khaki pants, and a short-sleeved, powder-blue silk shirt with wide lapels and an open collar.

  Whoever he was, he was big and strong, with arms like tree trunks. In his prime, Roz was two hundred fifty pounds, and it was all muscle. He used to say that he was “an eighth of a ton of trouble and fun,” which was really true! Like Roz, the man by the grill had a neatly trimmed, pencil-thin mustache riding above his grin.

  “It’s all right, boy,” he said. “Come on over here, and let me have a look at you.”

  Then he laughed. That’s when I knew it really was him. Roz had a great laugh. At first I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but when he caught me up in a bear hug, I cried like a baby. I’d forgotten how much I missed him. He was always one of those people you could lean into when times got tough.

  “How can this be?” I asked. “You’re dead and gone!”

  “Well, I’m gone, that’s for sure. Then again, as you can see, I’m here, aren’t I? I know it seems kind of confusing, but I’ll explain what I can and leave the rest for the others.”

  “Others?” I asked.

  The line between life and death is not as crisp and clean as we might imagine.

  “Sure,” he answered. “You didn’t think I was the only one with an invitation to come and eat with you, did you?”

  “Frankly, I don’t know what to think.”

  “That’s going to take some time,” Roz replied. “For now, I think the steaks are just about ready.”

  We walked over to the grill where there were two porterhouse steaks the size of dinner plates and four ears of corn still in the husks.

  “A little pink in the middle all right?” he asked.

  “Perfect,” I answered.

  Roz put a steak on my plate along with an ear of corn, and we walked over and sat down on the front steps.

  “Still use ketchup?”

  “Still do.”

  “It’s over there on that little folding table,” Roz said.

  On the table were salt and pepper, Heinz ketchup, and a Mason jar three quarters full of water with an inch of melted butter floating on top.

  I peeled back the husk on my corn, revealing the familiar purple, blue, and yellow kernels.

  “Field corn?” I asked. “I haven’t had this in years!”

  “Yeah, well, you know how it is,” Roz said. “Old habits are hard to break. Besides, it sounds more exotic if you call it Indian corn.”

  When I was a kid, we’d sometimes go over to their house in the country and that’s all we’d have for supper. We’d dip the ears in the Mason jar and they’d come out slathered in butter. By the time we were done, our faces would be covered in salt and pepper, and butter would be rolling down our chins. Afterward, there would be homemade ice cream for dessert.

  “After supper what do you say we go for a ride?” Roz asked. “You crank, and I’ll drive.”

  “Crank?”

  “You’ve got to do something to earn your dessert,” he said. “Besides, that ice cream isn’t going to make itself.”

  The two of us caught up over dinner, and afterward I learned exactly how hard I was going to have to work to earn my dessert. Roz put milk, eggs, crushed ice, and other ingredients in a wooden bucket. Then he snapped the lid on top and said, “Here you go.” There was a quart of fresh strawberries on the floor in front of my
seat. They were mashed up and mixed with brown sugar, and I assumed that when the ice cream got a little harder we’d pour them on top, just like we did when I was a kid.

  We drove east in front of the cottage as the sun set behind us. The side pipes on the Camaro rumbled as the Beach Boys’ favorite hits played on the eight-track. Neither of us said a word until we rolled to a stop at the end of the road. Roz told me that the place was called Promise Point.

  “This is a great place to go fishing,” he said, and as I looked around there was something strangely familiar about it. It was a grass-covered finger of land that jutted out about a tenth of a mile into the lake. Cattails hugged the edge of the shore, and two large white pines stood like soldiers on sentry duty on the beach at the end of the point. The two of us made our way out to a weathered old picnic table that sat beneath the pines.

  When we sat down I noticed that someone had carved their initials in it years ago along with the words “I PROMISE” in capital letters. I wondered if the promise was ever kept, but before I could say anything, Roz started dishing up the ice cream and berries and said, “Okay, Scout, I know you’ve got questions, so ask away.”

  “I’m not sure where to start,” I said. “But okay. Why am I here? How are you here? And where the heck is ‘here’ anyway?”

  “All I really know,” he replied, “is that each of us has something for you, something you can take back and share if you want to. What I’ve got, you already know. I’m supposed to remind you that God’s not done with you yet. He has so much more in store for you.”

  God’s not done with you yet. He has so much more in store for you.

  “That’s it? That’s all? God’s not done with me yet?”

  “Let me see if I can help you understand this a little better,” Roz replied. “Remember when you were little and I took you to my dad’s shop?”

  “Sure. That’s the first time I ever sat on a horse.”

  Roz was really named Roswell Boyce Stillwater III. His dad, R. B., was a blacksmith, as were his grandfather and his great-grandfather.

  “Well, life is like that,” Roz continued. “Dad would grab hold of those shoes, stick them in the fire, and mold and shape them until they conformed to the shape he wanted. Some of them were made for plow horses, some for racehorses, some for show, and some for ice and snow. Each shoe took the shape it needed to best do its job.

  “Now, if you were to ask one of those shoes if they liked going through the fire or being hammered into shape, my guess is they’d say no, but it was necessary. And sometimes it’s the same way with us. We’ve got to go through some of that if we’re going to conform to the life God wants us to live. Does that make sense?”

  “Some,” I said. “But why does it have to be so hard?”

  “That all goes back to a garden and a decision that you might not ever totally understand, at least not for a while.”

  Roz went on. “Remember how I showed you those old horseshoes that my grandfather put in the crotch of that tree?”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember. The tree grew right around them.”

  “And that’s my point. When we stop doing what God made us to do, we sort of get swallowed up by the busyness of life, and then whatever goals, dreams, and aspirations we might have had can evaporate. Our souls get trampled on by the lesser things of life.

  When we stop doing what God created us to do, the goals, dreams, and aspirations he has for us get swallowed up by life.

  “In many ways,” Roz continued, “life is like a marathon race. There’s a starting line and a finish line, but the race is won or lost somewhere in between the two. Everyone is enthusiastic and hopeful at the starting line, and as they cross the finish line, whether they win a medal or not, there is a feeling of accomplishment. But races are won and lost in between, in the middle miles. When your legs ache, and your chest heaves, and you’re not sure you have what it takes to finish. That’s when you discover what you’re really made of. And that’s the way it works in life too.”

  As he spoke I nodded in agreement. There was a part of me that had been stuck in the middle ever since Ben’s accident. I knew that I had to figure out a way to get past it, but the problem was, I didn’t really know where to start. Here I was a psychologist with a successful Christian counseling practice. I was the guy people came to when they couldn’t get past this kind of stuff, and ironically, I couldn’t get past it myself. That thought caused me to listen with even greater intensity as Roz continued talking.

  “When I first started out in business,” he said, “it was hard. I put in long hours for little money, but Myra and I were excited about the possibilities. We were chasing the American dream. I went to work every day fueled by the adrenaline of being my own boss, of being in business for myself. And years later, when we’d made it, there was this great feeling of accomplishment. We felt blessed. We felt like God had been with us every step of the way. We felt good knowing that we’d done what we set out to do and that it was better than we’d ever dreamed it would be.

  “But during the in-between years, when I was working late every night, when the kids were growing up and I wasn’t around to see it, it didn’t always seem so great. We were living in an old farmhouse, bills were piling up, and there were lots of nights when I wondered if we’d make it, if it was worth it, and if I should give up and go to work for someone else.

  In the race of life, the middle miles always seem longest.

  “Now, looking back, it all seems so crystal clear, but at the time it wasn’t. There were days when we were just feeling our way along, taking life one day at a time. And what I’m saying is, that’s the way life works. We do most of our living in between. In between relationships, in between jobs, in between where we were and where we’re going. And along the way you may have days when you feel like quitting, days when you wonder why God doesn’t step in and give you some kind of sign. It’s on those days I want you to remember that God’s not done with you yet. I know it’s been rough lately, and in the race of life the in-between miles always seem the longest and the steepest, but hang in there, don’t give up, because he has some amazing things in store for you.”

  With that, he pointed to the Camaro and said, “I’ve got to get you back.”

  As he turned the car around, I reached over and shut off the eight-track and said, “Roz, thanks for coming. You don’t know how much it means to me. But I’ve got one more question.”

  “Shoot!” he said.

  “Is God Paul Newman?”

  “No, but he sure looks like him, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And he sounds like Gregory Peck.”

  “I’ve noticed that too, but when I’ve come for supper when other people were staying here, he hasn’t always looked like that. In fact, the last time I was here, he looked like Charlton Heston and he sounded like Morgan Freeman. I think he slips on the costume that best fits our expectations. I once heard Paul say that he was all things to all people so he might save some, and I imagine that it’s the same way with God. He reveals himself to us in many different ways, but we don’t always recognize him. As Jesus once said, ‘Let those with ears hear, and those with eyes see.’ Does that help you, Scout?”

  God reveals himself to us in many different ways, but we don’t always recognize him.

  “Lately, I’ve seen more than I’ve understood,” I replied.

  “Sometimes that’s the way it works,” Roz responded. “But wisdom comes to those who wait.”

  After that we didn’t say much, and on the way back we listened to the eight-track and replayed old memories in our minds. It was well after dark by the time we got back to the cottage.

  “It was good to see you, Scout,” Roz said as we stood on the little porch outside the kitchen.

  “Aren’t you coming inside?” I asked.

  “No, I’ve got to get going, but I’m really glad we had this time.” Then he put his arm around me, gave me a hug, and said, “Go on in, they’re waiting for yo
u.”

  With that, he walked back to the Camaro and got in.

  “Tell Myra I’ll be waiting for her,” he yelled as he rambled down the drive. “And tell the kids what I told you. Oh, and one other thing . . . Cut Ben a little slack, will you? God’s not finished with him yet either. Ben’s just not quite as far along in his race as you are. He’s had a few tough breaks—some were his fault, and some weren’t. He’s starting to get his game together. Give him a little time. You’ll see, you’ll see.”

  I watched until the bullet-shaped taillights faded out of sight, and then I turned and walked inside.

  4

  questions

  It is not every question that deserves an answer.

  Publilius Syrus

  As I walked in the screen door to the kitchen, Michael was sitting at the table.

  “You must be tired,” he said. “I’ll show you where your room is.”

  We walked through the library past a smoldering fire and up the staircase to the second floor. The landing was a six-by-six-foot area. Three doors led to bedrooms and one went to a bathroom. Each door had a window above it that tilted in to allow the air to circulate. Like in the kitchen, the doors and wood trim were white. Again beadboard lined the walls, but here the wall above it was painted a dark khaki color.

  Michael motioned toward the west bedroom and said, “This room is yours. You’ll find clothes in the dresser, and the towels and toiletries in the bathroom are for you as well.”

  As I opened the door to my room, a slight breeze blew in. I turned to say thank you, but Michael was already gone.

  Inside there was an oak dresser, a blue tweed wingback chair, and two twin beds covered in blue-and-white checked quilts. It looked kind of like the room Ben and I shared as kids at the cottage. The book I’d started reading that morning sat open on the dresser to the page I’d read last, and next to it was an old picture of Carol and me and the girls. Kate and Kelly wore matching green corduroy dresses that Carol had made, and Tara was a toddler.