Billy Goat Hill

by Mark Stanleigh Morris

  “I told her I hoped someday I’d have a wife who cared as much about me as she cared about Carl.”

  Melissa smiles. “I guess I am like her…I talk to Jesus, too.”

  “What does Jesus tell you?”

  “He tells me to never give up on you.” She kisses my neck again.

  Melissa removes Carl’s Bible from the box and hands it to me. It’s been a long time since I’ve held Carl’s Bible in my hands. I open it, and the pages separate where they are marked by a faded sheet of paper.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a copy of the sinner’s prayer. Esther gave it to me when she gave me the Bible.”

  An envelope slips from the Bible and drops in my lap. Melissa picks it up. “There’s money in here.”

  “Three hundred dollars. Esther gave it to me when I was sixteen and living on my own. She made me take it. Her kindness meant so much to me at the time, I could never let go of the money. Many times I went hungry, but I just couldn’t dip into Esther’s gift.”

  Melissa hugs me again. “You sure have come a long way.”

  “Do you really talk to Jesus?”

  “Yep, all the time.”

  “I didn’t know. Since when?”

  “Since Kate was born. The first time I laid eyes on her, I knew God was real.”

  I love this woman so much. “I’m sorry you couldn’t share that with me then. I’m sorry for everything I’ve put you through.”

  “I know, honey.”

  She reminds me so much of Esther it’s as if I were sitting at her kitchen table on Ruby Place.

  Melissa opens the faded piece of paper. “Have you ever spoken these words to God?”

  I close my eyes and I am there in Esther’s kitchen. “You keep that paper and I’ll pray for the day when you truly feel it in your heart to pray the prayer out loud for God’s ears to hear. When you do, I promise He will hear you.” Tears spill forth and drip on the pages of Carl’s Bible that Esther had bookmarked for me all those years ago.

  Esther’s love pours over me, and I know deep in that place in my heart that she touched all those years ago, that the gift that I am now being given is an answer to all of her prayers.

  I look down at Carl’s Bible, and my eyes are drawn to the answer that has been there all along… “For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.”

  “Wade? Are you okay?”

  I look at Melissa, tears streaking down my face. I rise up on my knees. “Yes, just be here with me. I believe God has answered my question. I know what’s been missing. I want to pray this prayer with you holding my hand.”

  Melissa smiles. “Okay, honey.” She gets on her knees next to me and takes my hand. “Can I say it with you?”

  Together we go forward united for the rest of our lives. “Lord Jesus Christ, I come to You now because I am a sinner. Today, Lord Jesus, I repent of my sin, I turn away from my sin, and I turn to You. I believe that You died for me. I believe Your shed blood covers all my sins. I believe no one else can save me but You, Lord Jesus. I ask You to come into my heart. Wash me, cleanse me, and make me Your child. I receive You in my heart by faith. Please help me to live for You until You come again. Thank You, Lord Jesus. Amen.”

  We sit there crying and hugging until Kate wanders into the garage. She finds us laughing and happy in a way she has never seen us before. “Oh good,” she says grinning. “I was beginning to think you guys had forgotten.”

  “Forgotten what?” Melissa says.

  “Today is my…birthday.”

  I reach for her and pull her into my lap. All three of us squish together in a wonderful hug. “Today is Mom’s and my birthday, too.”

  Kate giggles. “Presents for everyone!”

  It has been a year since that blessed day in the garage, and a lot has changed. I turned thirty not long ago; praise God, I am finally living in a kind of peace I never thought possible. We joined the church where Miss Cherry and Bob Serrano belong, and recently Luke and Trish have started coming. Melissa teaches Sunday school, and I am on the worship team, singing and playing guitar.

  Regular Bible study continues to give me answers to questions I have contemplated since I was a child. My faith is deepening, and my trust in God has helped me gain some perspective about the bad memories and unhealthy tendencies of the past. I understand God has forgiven me, but I haven’t fully released the contents of the deepest chamber of my heart. I still feel a final confession is owed, and I pray that God will give me the courage to speak of it and set it free. While the one remaining item on my spiritual to-do list is a huge one, based on the remarkable progress of the past year, it is hard to imagine that anything could go wrong.

  This year we decided to celebrate Kate’s birthday on Saturday, though she actually turned seven last Wednesday. Kate wanted to wait for the weekend so Miss Cherry could attend the party. Miss Cherry’s car is scheduled to be in the shop over the weekend, so I agree to pick her up early to allow time to go present shopping.

  Miss Cherry complains of a headache when we’re browsing in the toy store and takes something for it. I am a little concerned for her but know she is a trooper. Soon we are making our way home with birthday presents safely hidden in the trunk.

  “How’s Luke these days?”

  “Luke is Luke, fine all the time.”

  She nods but doesn’t smile. “It will be good to see him.”

  “Is your head feeling any better?”

  “Worse.”

  “Maybe I should take you home. Kate will get over it. One look at all the presents, and she’ll be oblivious anyway.”

  “No. I’ll be fine. It just takes a while for the aspirin to work.”

  As is always the case when I spend time alone with Miss Cherry, the past and my desire to speak with her about it flutter like moths feeding on memories stored in the closet of my mind. They drive me crazy, flitting about, stirring up dusty images. If I could just do it, pry open my head and let those moths out, I’d be done with it. Somehow, I have always felt Miss Cherry should be the one to hear my final confession. One of these days.

  Deputy Bob keeps telling me about a Christian workshop he thinks would be good for me. It deals with spiritual bondage, and how to overcome negative thinking about the past. If I could just let those moths out, I could probably teach the class.

  All I know is I am always watching, always sizing up the moment, always flirting with the possibility of revealing my last secret. I want to shed the burden of Three Ponds so badly, yet I always fall short of finding the nerve to do it. Always, always, always.

  The impulse to do so strikes me again for the ten thousandth time, and with little confidence that I will actually say anything, I turn my head and look at Miss Cherry. There is always a glimmer of hope that my mouth will take charge and spill the beans for me. “We have a little extra time. Would you like to stop somewhere and have a cup of coffee?”

  She gasps and puts her hands to her head. I touch her shoulder and feel tremors moving her against her will. I turn the car around, furious that the nearest hospital is at least ten minutes away. I try to keep her talking, the pain in her head making that impossible as she screams out twice, tears streaming, hands pressed tight to her temples. Then, still more than a mile from the hospital, she slumps unconscious against the car door.

  Everything seemed so right this morning. Kate put us in a celebration mood at the crack of dawn by jumping on our bed and making us all sing “Happy Birthday.” But slowly, the day unfurled its fronds of trickery, intimating nothing coming of extraordinary magnitude. Sneaking killer earthquakes give little or no warning.

  I see the hospital’s emergency entrance up ahead. Please God, don’t let her die!

  Even with the untimely death of my mother and the warning it portended, it never once crossed my mind that a time like this could come, a time when it might be too late to tell Miss Cherry everything. No
w faced with that daunting possibility, I feel as if I have been banished from our private elevator and stranded in a stairwell that climbs and descends but never ends in either direction.

  I pound on the car horn as we screech to the curb and come to an abrupt stop behind an unattended ambulance. Hospital personnel respond immediately, and within a minute Miss Cherry is placed on a gurney and rushed inside. I call home to Melissa, and soon the entire family huddles in a vigil in the waiting room.

  I am fine when I shake Miss Cherry’s doctor’s hand and introduce myself. I sit across from his desk staring blankly past him at rain-streaked windows. Then something—his professional comportment, the massive desk, the expansive collection of books lining the shelves, the plaques, the certificates—gives me permission to drop my guard. The drizzle set me up. I can’t help myself. I let it out in a downpour.

  The doctor sits quietly unaffected while I rein in my sorrow.

  When I speak, my throat is tight, constricted by heavy-heartedness. “She’s only forty-eight years old. I thought strokes were something only old people had.”

  I look around the doctor’s office absorbed in my frustration, despondent. A single unforeseen event has brought back old adversaries—powerlessness and despair. The urge to take a drink wages a dishonorable war against my weakened resolve. I fight the war with the only weapon I have, the one Miss Cherry helped me obtain, three AA meetings per day for the past fourteen days, and prayer—the most powerful medicine for a most powerful disease. Miss Cherry would be proud of me.

  The doctor taps a pencil on the file folder lying open on the desk before him. “Yes, Mr. Parker, strokes are generally associated with the aged, but there are many different causes of stroke. In your aunt’s case;…”

  I had told him I was Miss Cherry’s nephew and only living relative—a lie, but not too far from the truth.

  “…we believe the weakness in the blood vessel in her brain was due to a congenital defect. Her hypertension no doubt also contributed to the stroke.”

  The doctor’s bearing is forthright and businesslike, which I appreciate. At the same time I am a little put off by the clinical detachment in his tone. After all, we are discussing the condition of Miss Cherry, someone I love, not a damaged car that has been towed in for repair.

  “I didn’t know she had high blood pressure.”

  “Nor did she, apparently. That’s the terrible thing about high blood pressure. Often there are no symptoms.”

  My mind drifts momentarily. I am angry that something like this should happen to her, especially after she worked so hard to kick the booze habit.

  “It’s been two weeks. What’s your assessment of her long-term prognosis?”

  Since the day of the stroke, I have spent every evening at her bedside. The entire right side of her body is paralyzed—leg, arm, even her facial muscles. Her once beautiful face now lists to one side in a dour snarl that seems to be getting worse. She cannot speak, though it is clear she can still hear and to some extent understand.

  We have worked out a rudimentary way to communicate. With considerable effort, she is able to answer simple questions with yes or no responses by extending one or two fingers on her left hand. I have to keep my chatter very simple, almost childlike phrasing, or she doesn’t seem to comprehend. It upsets me that she isn’t improving. I am very discouraged.

  “It’s difficult to know with any certainty how any stroke patient will recover. Statistically speaking, we know that some patients will recover some, if not all, lost motor skills. Speech can also return to normal. I believe your aunt’s condition is stable and that she will survive this terrible ordeal. As for her medical treatment and outlook for recovery, we’ll just have to wait and see. Time will tell.”

  I listen carefully, doing my best to understand and accept what has happened to Miss Cherry. But I can’t help conceding that the bottom line is clear: Miss Cherry might not recover from the stroke. She might be stuck in a semi-vegetative quagmire for as long as she lives.

  I evidently appear as stoic as a stroke patient myself, because after some indeterminate period of time the doctor escorts me out of his office and back to Miss Cherry’s room.

  “It’s good that you’re spending so much time with her. I’m a strong believer in fostering the will to recover. Sometimes I think we practitioners of modern medicine have barely scratched the surface of the science of healing.”

  “That’s not very encouraging.”

  “Ah, but the brain is an amazing organ. We should never underestimate it. Keep talking to her, Mr. Parker. I know it does her a lot of good.”

  The doctor pats me on the shoulder and leaves the room.

  I return to the familiar chair next to Miss Cherry’s bed and sit down. She is asleep. I carefully lift her delicate hand into mine. She looks pale and her hand feels cool, lifeless—frail as a baby bird fallen from its nest. Clear plastic tubing disappears into both nostrils giving her enriched oxygen to breathe. Saliva tends to pool at the unnatural, down-turned corner of her mouth, which I dab occasionally with a tissue. I dote over her for hours at a time.

  Her once lovely face, contorted to one side as though some silent hurricane force wind tugs at the flesh covering her skull, still is beautiful to my adoring eyes. To me she remains as enchanting as she was the day she appeared at Ruby Place and surprised Luke and me with unexpected treasures. I still envision her as that beautiful angel standing beside Queenie, bathed in a shaft of afternoon sun. And though I know I can never go back, my mind allows time to fold back on itself.

  For brief merciful moments I am that little boy again, securely embosomed by a kind and beautiful angel. I stroke the back of her hand as I recall the silly anxious heart of that naive bashful kid. I remember exactly the butterfly feelings as I hesitated, gazing from the front porch that day long ago. The fool of April spun like virgin wool yarn around a spool of adolescent fantasy. An ocean of water has passed under the bridge since then.

  The bridge!

  My breath catches. I haven’t thought about the bridge, in what, maybe five years? I stop rubbing Miss Cherry’s hand and just hold it for a little while. I shake my head when I think about how close I had come to jumping to my death. I shudder as a picture of me on the bridge looking down into the lonely mist flashes through my mind.

  I remember how Mac whimpered when I slid the bedroom window shut and began my morbid march in the dark. I think about all of the stuff I would have missed—mostly bad stuff, but a lot of good stuff, too. Luke and I enjoyed our share of fun, and certainly there is wonderful Melissa and my adorable daughter, Kate. Yes, there is a lot of good. I hold some of it in my hand right now. I look at Miss Cherry lying here helpless and vulnerable, as much so as I had been way back then. Please help her, God.

  Tears well up again as I think about how she came along as a salving force, nursing me along with her personality, her attention, her caring. I was wreckage in need of salvage, and she was a vital part of the team that collected my scattered pieces from along the shoreline of my disastrous life. She and the Sergeant, working in tandem, had quickened the rebonding of my broken pieces.

  Man, what a day we had at Dodger Stadium. That was far and away the best day of my entire childhood. Mental snapshots of that awesome experience fill multiple catalogues in my head. I smile, remembering when she reentered my world to help me break with my pathetic reliance on the poison in the bottle.

  Miss Cherry was my reformation. Deeply committed to her own quest for redemption, she worked diligently to share her passion with me. Like Rodney and Esther, Miss Cherry was sent by God to reveal Himself to me. Without her taking an interest as she did, I would have always thought of myself as the murderer kid who never got caught, never was punished, and never did his time in the reformatory where he belonged. In the disturbing quiet of the hospital room, I run it through my mind again. I killed a human being. There was no arrest, no confession, no punishment, and no forgiveness.

  How can that be?
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br />   Perhaps that’s why I worked so hard to punish myself. How unmerciful I was in my masochistic campaign of self-torture, a relentless psychological blooding intended to purge the guilt that could never quite be eliminated. It seemed that no matter what I did to myself, I could not repay my debt. The man I killed remained dead forever, a fact from which I could not escape.

  It was a miracle when Miss Cherry reentered my life. The way she bolstered my fading spirit came with such miraculous timing it must have been marked by God’s own mysterious schedule. She understood my pain, without, I believe, understanding its real cause. Seeing her here before me as helpless as I had been not long ago, it saddens me to think I may never be able to tell her the whole truth. I owe Miss Cherry my very life, and now I may never get the chance to repay her.

  I wish I could perform a miracle for her. I wish I could lay my hands on her and make her well.

  The doctor’s advice echoes through my mind. “Keep talking to her, Mr. Parker. I know it does her a lot of good.”

  But can she understand me? Can she really understand me? A new sense of regret begins to seep in. Unconsciously, I fondle the keys in my pocket, my fingers toying with the silver ball bearing which now hangs from my key ring on a loop of its own.

  Subliminal impulses travel up my arm and blow in my ear—the voice of a demon perched on my shoulder. Maybe Miss Cherry’s stroke is part of your punishment? It is an old familiar voice.

  “Please, God, please stay with me.”

  I shake off the demon. These ridiculous thoughts are nothing more than the leftover ruminations of a once desperate man. As always, the ball bearing offers no helpful advice. It’s signals, if there really are any signals, are only in my mind. And they are always questions, or painful reminders, never any answers—the demon’s tactics for a slow, punishing defeat.