Gate (9781441240569)

by Stouten, Dann A.

  It was time I came to grips with the fact that I’m not a kid anymore. In fact, I’m on the downward slide. I can’t see the finish line, but I know I’m probably closer to it than the starting blocks. If adjustments were going to be made in my life, now was the time. I set the jib on the Hobie and headed for the buoy.

  The sun hung low in the sky as I buoyed the sailboat and swam back to shore. I made my way up the front steps of the cottage, and that’s when I saw it—a rusted lime-green Chevy Vega was parked in the driveway. The rear bumper was crumpled and the right taillight was broken. Clearly the car had seen better days, but I recognized it immediately. It belonged to DL, my uncle David Lee. Actually, it was titled in my name, but it was DL’s nonetheless.

  ———

  DL was my mother’s youngest brother. He was a trailer born to Jack and Esther late in life, almost twenty years after Mom and Don. Everyone always knew that DL was different, but nobody wanted to admit it, much less talk about it. So for the first fifty years of his life, DL went without being diagnosed as autistic.

  As we grew up, my siblings and I heard little bits and pieces whispered from time to time by my parents in another room, but no one ever said much in front of us. When they did, it was basically about how smart DL was as a toddler until he fell out of that swing and hit his head. Grandma Jacobs insisted that he was never right after that. The rest of us never really bought into all that, but we kept our opinions to ourselves around her.

  The goal of life is not to finish first but to finish well.

  After Grandpa Jack died, Uncle Don and my dad were able to get DL a driver’s license so he could cart Grandma around, but he never should have been on the road. The man drove by feel. He’d pull up to something ever so slowly until he felt a thump. The bumpers on every vehicle DL owned would be bent up within a month. He banged into street signs, fire hydrants, brick walls, light poles in parking lots, and of course, other cars.

  If the autism wasn’t bad enough, DL started drinking after Grandma died. Every week my mom would give him money for food, which he would spend on beer and cigarettes, and before long he was hooked.

  Once when I was a kid, the phone rang at two thirty in the morning. A few minutes later my dad stood in my doorway and said, “Get dressed. It’s time you saw this.”

  We drove over to Grandma’s house. DL was sitting in his boxers leaning back in Grandpa’s recliner, wide-eyed and whimpering. “Do you see them?” he shouted, pointing into the shadows of the dining room.

  “See what?” Dad asked.

  “The demons! They’re coming for me!”

  Unfortunately, they already had him. Darkness has a way of dredging up old doubts and fears, and DL was totally out of touch with reality. He wildly shadowboxed his demons and yelled, “Look out! Look out!” Then he turned his rage on Dad and screamed, “You’re with them!”

  Dad tried to assure DL that he wasn’t with them, but by this time DL was seeing demons everywhere. He started throwing empty beer bottles, smashing them against the wall, and eventually one crashed through the living room window. Dodging bottles, Dad finally tackled him and held him to the ground.

  “Give me your belt,” he said, in a voice I remember thinking was way too calm. I gave Dad my belt, and he strapped DL’s arms behind his back.

  By this time, ol’ DL was kicking and screaming and yelling, “Don’t let them take me, Jesus! I’ll be good, I promise, I don’t want to go back to hell!”

  Darkness has a way of dredging up old doubts and fears.

  From what I could see, DL was already in hell, at least in his mind, and seeing him like that scared me.

  “It’s just the alcohol talking,” Dad explained. “He doesn’t mean it, and he can’t help it. He’s out of his head right now. Tomorrow he’ll sober up, and he’ll be his normal self.”

  At some point DL passed out, and we unceremoniously carried him out to the car. We buckled him in the backseat of the Vista Cruiser and took him down to the Salvation Army Rehabilitation Center’s drunk tank. There DL got loved sober. He lived at the Salvation Army for a couple years under the watchful eye of his guardian angel, a man by the name of Major Metts.

  Dad had to sell Grandma’s house to pay for DL’s treatment, and when he was released, we moved him to a room at the Lighthouse Mission. There DL played piano for their meetings, and he also guarded the shower room door whenever the women went inside to make sure that no unsavory characters went in after them.

  There was a lot about life that DL didn’t understand. Life had treated him unfairly. He was autistic and an alcoholic. When God was passing out talents, DL only got two. First, he had a thing for numbers, particularly days and dates (if you’ve seen the movie Rain Man, you know what I’m talking about). If you told DL your birthday, he could tell you what day of the week you were born.

  “November eleven, nineteen-eighty—one, one, one, one, eight, zero. That was a Tuesday, yes, a Tuesday, I’m sure of it.” Or suppose you wanted to know the circumference of, say, Mars or Pluto, or its distance from the sun—well then, DL was your man.

  But his other talent, his real talent, was music. The autism giveth and the autism taketh away, and what it gave DL was the piano. If he heard a song once, he could play it. And he’d play it over and over again. Since playing piano was his one and only usable talent, he used it whenever he could.

  Life isn’t always fair, but God is always good.

  Life isn’t always fair, but God is always good, and he even used DL in his broken condition. He played twice a week at the county jail, every Wednesday at the Christian Businessmen’s Luncheon, every other Sunday night at Grand Avenue Christian Reformed Church, and every Saturday night for the recommitment service at the Lighthouse Mission where he lived.

  It sounds real nice, and it was, but the problem was that DL was short on social graces. He was rough and gruff and not easy to be around. Because of that, he didn’t have many friends. My sister, brother, and I were as close to him as anyone, but honestly, it was a duty for me. It was a promise I’d made to my mother to look after her little brother. So when he needed Aqua Velva, or new socks, or another electric razor, I’d get it for him. My sister was more of a reflection of my mother, and so when she’d stop by, she’d bring cookies and conversation. As for Ben, he had the patience of Job. He never seemed to mind DL’s peculiar ways, and sometimes he’d let him wash cars at the lot for a little extra spending money.

  As a family, we always had what my kids called “DL’s Christmas.” We’d go over to my mom and dad’s a couple nights after Christmas Day, and we’d all get him something. Mostly it was clothes, but we’d get him cookies, and candy, and passes to the movies too. We’d sit around and watch him open his presents, and then we’d eat dinner. DL would always tell us that this was his third or fourth Christmas dinner. He had one at the mission, another one at the jail, and sometimes he’d get invited to somebody’s house who used to live at the mission.

  The stories that affect us most are the ones that are about us.

  Every Christmas, my daughter Kate would get him to tell the shoe polish story. “Once I knew a man,” he’d start, “who was so addicted to the liquor that when he couldn’t get any, he’d pour shoe polish through a loaf of bread, and then he’d drink it. I know you don’t believe me,” he’d say, “but it’s true.” And then he’d get all misty. We knew that someone was him, but we acted like we didn’t know. The stories that affect us most are the ones that are about us, and that’s why we keep coming back to the stories of the Bible. Christmas is a story of redemption, and so after DL would tell his redemption story, we’d all say “Merry Christmas” and go home. The rest of us would go home to our nice houses in the suburbs, but DL would go to his room at the Lighthouse Mission.

  I was with him the night he died. By then he was living at the Good Shepherd home, and the nurse there called to tell me that his time was short. I went by one last time to say good-bye and to read to him from Luke’s gospel. It was h
is favorite, and hearing it soothed his soul. He lay quietly with his eyes closed while I read, and his breathing was so shallow that I thought maybe he’d already passed.

  “You know God loves you, don’t you, DL?” I asked.

  “I know. But don’t stop. Keep reading. I like to hear it.”

  I did as he asked, and a few minutes later, very faintly he whispered, “Do you hear it? Do you hear the music?” I didn’t but said I did, and he died a few minutes later. I have no doubt that when DL knocked on the door of heaven, he heard the Master say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

  ———

  That was three years ago now, and here he was sitting on the steps of the back porch. As I walked up, DL greeted me with the line he always used whenever he’d call my house in need of something. “IS SKY THERE?” he would say, loud and gruff and teetering on the edge of anger. But then he smiled. “Hello, little brother,” he said in a gentle voice that neither I nor anyone else had often heard him use before. It was DL, but it wasn’t. He looked different. First off, he had curly blond hair. I’d seen him with that hair in old pictures, but for as long as I could remember, he was as bald as an eagle.

  Second, he didn’t have glasses. DL always wore thick Coke-bottle glasses that were often taped together in some way because he’d broken them. If he broke a lot of cars, he broke even more pairs of glasses, and between visits to the eye doctor, he would tape the frames together with white athletic tape.

  Third, he seemed taller and certainly thinner. Once, when my wife wanted to buy him some new pants, she asked him what size he was. DL said that he was a perfect 40-30. A 40-inch waist, 30-inch inseam. My girls said he looked like a Weeble, the little round toy dolls that bounced back up when you knocked them over.

  ———

  One year when I was in junior high, my parents rented a cottage up at Stony Lake, and because they knew that if they didn’t take DL on their vacation, he wouldn’t get a vacation, they invited him along. My siblings and I were mortified at this thought, but when Dad said, “Family is family,” we knew it was final.

  Mostly DL stayed by the cottage, but one afternoon while I was talking to my friends down at the public beach, he came walking down the road. “Who’s that weirdo with his pants pulled up to his armpits?” someone asked.

  I did my best to pretend I didn’t know him until he walked up and said, “Hi, Sky.”

  At times I was embarrassed to be his nephew, but he was always proud to be my uncle. Whenever I’d visit him at the mission, he’d always tell everyone that I had to call him uncle. Then he’d look at them as if to say, “That’s right, I’m his uncle.”

  No matter what you do, God will never pretend that he doesn’t know you.

  In later years, DL would tell anyone who’d listen that I was a major, the rank he thought I’d earned in the Salvation Army. In his mind, anybody who’d gone to graduate school automatically got commissioned as an officer like the preacher at the rehabilitation center. I’d try to correct him, but he didn’t listen. It annoyed me. “I’m not in the Salvation Army, DL,” I’d say. “I’m a psychologist.” But he kept saying it.

  Then one day when we were out getting him a haircut, he told me that he called me Major because I reminded him of Major Metts. Metts was his hero. He was one step below God. I realized then that in DL’s mind, I was his protector, the one who watched out for him. So I stopped correcting him.

  ———

  “What’s for dinner?” DL asked, bringing me back to the moment.

  “Why are you asking me?” I replied. “I thought you’d be making me dinner like everyone else.”

  “Not this time, Major,” he said. “You’re the chef tonight.”

  Actually, the idea of making dinner sounded good to me. At first I thought I’d make bread and milk. It was a Jacobs thing. You fried up pork fat in a pan, added whole milk, salt, and pepper, and after it thickened, you would dunk stale bread in it. I know—it sounds awful. But trust me, if you were raised on it, it was a little taste of heaven.

  “What are you hungry for?” I asked.

  “Something I used to have at the mission. Surprise me. You know what I like.”

  That made it easy because there wasn’t much DL didn’t like. But the more I thought about it, the more I leaned toward chicken soup. The mission made great chicken soup “like Ma used to make,” DL would say.

  Sometimes when DL said “Ma,” he meant Grandma Jacobs, and sometimes he meant my mother. Fortunately for me, they used the same recipe. It started with a roasting chicken. The trick was to slow cook it in a stockpot on top of the stove for hours. Then when it was falling off the bones, you took it out of the pan and pulled the meat off the bone. Half of it would be reserved for sandwiches or something, and the other half went back in the pot with the broth. Then you’d add vegetables, seasoning, and rice. The problem was, it took all day, and I didn’t have that kind of time.

  But when I walked into the kitchen my time concerns evaporated. Ahbee had already done the grocery shopping for me. A stockpot was already simmering on the stove.

  I looked under the lid and found a roasting chicken falling off the bone. Chicken soup is a combination of what the recipe calls for and what’s in the house, so as always, I improvised a little. Along with the other ingredients, I added long grain wild rice, mushrooms, and a small bowl of corn that had just been cut off the cob. Under a towel on the table I found a loaf pan with dense, dark, grainy bread dough of some kind rising inside.

  God knows our thoughts before we do.

  It was getting dark by the time we sat down to dinner. We pulled up a couple of chairs at the little table in the kitchen, and I ladled the soup into some large bowls that I found in the cupboard. DL sliced the bread and I buttered a piece for each of us. Then he prayed in a soft, gentle voice, “My Father, you welcome us to your table with grace, love, and forgiveness. Thank you for this meal and for this time we have together. Amen.”

  We sat at the table and talked well into the night about people from the past, and finally DL said, “I’ve got to get going, little brother. I only have one headlight, and I never did like driving after dark.”

  God has a special place in his heart for lost sheep.

  My mind went back to a night years before when we’d all been at my mom’s for DL’s Christmas. It was a cold December night, and the roads were dusted with freshly fallen snow. DL had left about five minutes before us, but within a couple miles we caught up to him. He was hunched over the steering wheel, creeping along in the right lane as if the road were covered in ice.

  DL had run into a fire hydrant a few weeks before, and his right front headlight tilted up at a thirty-degree angle. The light reflected off the falling snow, and Carol said that it looked like he was shining for angels. As we passed, he was talking to himself and waving his arms wildly. He was on his way back to the Lighthouse Mission, and I was struck by the irony of it all. One headlight pointed the way down the road to the mission, and the other pointed the way to heaven; either way, somehow he’d find his way home, because God has a special place in his heart for lost sheep. That night, to our surprise, this one made his way back to the mission.

  As I walked him out to the car, I must have had a pained look on my face.

  “What’s wrong?” DL asked.

  “I guess I never thought that anyone would drive a Vega in heaven,” I explained. “I feel bad, because it’s such a bucket of bolts. You shouldn’t have to drive that!”

  “I could drive any car I want,” DL replied, “but material things don’t really matter much here. What matters here is people, and every time I get in this car, I think of you and Ben. You bought it and he kept it running. Anytime anything would break, I’d bring it by the lot and he’d always help me out. And when I’d leave it would always be with a full tank of gas and a twenty sticking out of the glove box. You gave me whatever I needed; he gave me my dignity. Besides, I’m driving this car for your sake, not mine. I
t’s what I have for you: we were put on earth to serve, not to be served.”

  DL explained. “Remember what Josh said: ‘What you’ve done to the least of these my brothers, you’ve done to me.’ If you divide the world into two groups of people and you called one the most and one the least, you’d be numbered among the former and I’d be in the latter. There’s a gap between your group and mine. That’s not your fault, and it’s not my fault either. It just is. There’s an inequity to life. It isn’t always fair. As my namesake once wrote, ‘Sometimes fools ride horseback and kings and princes go barefoot.’ There will come a day when that will no longer be true, but it’s true enough today on earth, and no one can deny it.

  We were put on this earth to serve, not to be served.

  “What I’m trying to say,” DL continued, “is that Ahbee doesn’t expect you to correct every wrong or confront every evil, but he does expect you to correct and confront some, at least the ones he puts in your path, and you did that for me. There is no question that you were my lifeline. When I had no place else to turn, I could always turn to you. Those little acts of service from you and Sharon and Ben kept my head above water. You were your brother’s keeper, or in this case, you were your uncle’s keeper, and I’m eternally grateful for that.

  “But I have a question for you: Who took my place? Who are you keeping now? Who needs you the way I needed you? Like I said, there’s a gap between the most and the least, and what you have to ask yourself is, ‘Am I filling the gap?’ ”

  His question hung in the night air as he hugged me good-bye and drove away. I walked back inside and found Ahbee and Michael sitting at the kitchen table.

  “Are you okay?” Michael asked. “You look like a man with a lot of questions.”

  “There’s just so much I don’t understand,” I said, pulling a chair up to the table.