Riven

by Jerry B. Jenkins

  As soon as he got his first paycheck, Brady paid his mother, put a down payment on a junk car, then found he was forced by law to insure it. And so he did. Which put an idea in the back of his head. A bad place for any idea.

  The new leaf he had turned over crisped up and blew away when “just one or two joints to relax” made a little crack cocaine sound interesting. Soon he began showing up late for work, then lost his job, then began missing car payments. When the loan company threatened repossession, Brady hid the car at Agatha’s, reported it stolen, and tried to collect the insurance.

  When Agatha made the mistake of borrowing the car and was pulled over for a bad taillight—and possession of a stolen vehicle—she quickly broke down and admitted that Brady had put her up to it. Had he not recently tried to dump her by having someone else tell her he had enlisted in the army and been killed in a training accident, she might have been more loyal.

  Brady turned on the charm—along with producing cash (from yet another drug sale—this time to three junior high girls, no less) for the missed payment and the next one—and talked the company into dropping the charges and letting him keep the car. It had all been a misunderstanding, you see.

  Money talks, he learned.

  As soon as he had the car back, Brady bought a can of charcoal lighter fluid, stuffed a rag in the top, set it afire, and tossed it into the backseat.

  Fortunately, the automobile was insured for more than it was worth.

  Unfortunately, it was all the fire department could do to keep the blaze from burning down Brady’s mother’s trailer, not to mention the rest of the park.

  Most unfortunate? It took arson investigators less than an hour to identify the accelerant and trace it to the convenience store in the trailer park.

  “Anybody buy charcoal lighter recently?”

  “Yeah, matter of fact. We don’t get much demand for it this time of the year, but I just sold a can this morning to Brady Darby. Why?”

  Brady tried to tell the cops he still had that new can, unless somebody stole it, and, yeah, hey, come to think of it, there had been a suspicious guy hanging around the trailer.

  But Brady had been apprehended at the insurance office, where he had hitchhiked to file his claim. And he had both marijuana and crack on his person.

  Two weeks later Brady stood before the same judge. “Last chance, Darby. Sending you downstate for eighteen months. You don’t succeed there, you’re on your way toward County, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see you graduate with honors from Pen State University.”

  At the medium-security prison Brady found enough mischief and dope to keep him high and in trouble—and behind bars—for the next six years. Every time Brady involved himself in a fight or a scheme, time was added to his sentence.

  By his release, Brady was a full-grown man, twenty-five years old and—he believed (along with most others)—beyond hope.

  Peter, now seventeen and a junior in high school, looked like a full-fledged hoodlum himself, and he refused to be called Petey any longer. But despite dressing the part and talking a big game, he had never been in trouble, worked at a local grocery, and had his own car.

  Brady’s mother, now working at her fourth different restaurant since he had been sent up, was heavy into alcohol and spent her off hours sleeping when and if she was home, according to Peter. There was no steady man in her life, as far as he could tell, but he told Brady, “There must be at least one somewhere, because she can’t be working all the hours she’s away.”

  Brady again moved back home. He strung his mother along for a couple of weeks, promising to find a job and pay rent. But he slept most of the time, and while Peter seemed to enjoy the novelty of sharing a room with his big brother again, he soon told Brady he didn’t want to lend him his car all the time. “I gotta keep it running good if I ever want to make something of myself and get out of here.”

  Brady told him he would pay for gas and mileage when he needed to borrow it, but he had to use it to try to find a job.

  But everywhere he went, the application asked if he had ever been convicted of a felony. When he answered honestly, he didn’t even get an interview.

  At a landscaping firm he checked the NO box and during the interview spun a story of how he and his father had had their own little nursery in Indiana before his dad died a few months before. Brady said he could do anything they asked, humbly admitting that he was “not the creative one; that was Dad. But I know what it means to do hard labor in the sun.”

  He was hired on the spot, asked to cut his hair, and issued two sets of colorful work clothes.

  This time, Brady thought. This time, for sure.

  Adamsville

  While Brady Darby was trying to turn his life around, Thomas Carey was growing old. People always said he had aged before his time anyway, and the mirror did not lie.

  In the nine years since Thomas’s crisis of faith, much had changed in his life, but not nearly enough in his heart. If he was honest with himself, he had never recovered from the disappointment the night Henry Trenton was hung. But as he ruminated about it over the years, Thomas realized—or at least felt he got closer to understanding—that it was what God’s silence had revealed to him about himself that had sent him into such a tailspin.

  Thomas remained as devout and disciplined as he had always been, but still nothing seemed to really work for him. He wondered what he was doing wrong. It was as if God had turned His back on Thomas.

  If his despair over the Henry Trenton debacle had birthed anything, it was a steeliness in Thomas that made him finally able to confront Grace about her health. As lovingly as he knew how, he had put his foot down and told her they both knew what her continuing bouts with fatigue and the return of her inexplicable bruises meant.

  Against her wishes, he drove her to the doctor. “Don’t rob me of a healthy wife. You’re the only thing I care about anymore, Gracie.”

  She lectured him about that, reminding him that there was his calling, his ministry, his daughter, his future son-in-law. “I know you care about all of that. You must. I’m as heartbroken as you over how a lot of our life has turned out, but we have many miles to go.”

  The doctor, half Thomas’s age, confirmed their fears, and Grace was put under vigorous treatment for a slow but steadily debilitating form of leukemia.

  Thomas met with the young man alone and demanded to know how badly he had erred by not forcing her to come earlier. The doctor was kind enough to phrase it gently. “Of course we always like to have as big a head start on treatment as we can. But if it makes you feel any better, early symptoms are often mild and indeterminate. The important thing now is medication and treatment.”

  “What is her prognosis?”

  “You have a difficult time ahead, sir. Her demise is not imminent, but it’s unlikely she will improve. There will be the occasional remission where she’ll feel herself again, but over the long haul, say the next decade, she will need more rest, more treatment, more medication. Eventually you will want help and perhaps a hospital bed in your home, unless you choose to institutionalize her.”

  Thomas bit the inside of his mouth to steady his lips. “Oh, never. No. I will take care of her until I am unable.”

  “Well, thankfully, that is a long way off, sir.”

  Thomas could only hope.

  It was clear Grace worried about Thomas too. He wanted to be chipper, to keep her happy and motivated. Her enthusiasm and spirituality never flagged, but her body was simply unable to keep up most of the time, and Thomas regretted having taken so long to do what he knew was right.

  Another thing he was unable to forgive himself for was Ravinia. Grace continued to pray for her, and Thomas did too, of course, but he despaired over having lost her. When she and Dirk, after several years of living together while slaving in low-paying jobs after law school, finally decided to marry, Ravinia actually asked Thomas if he would conduct the wedding ceremony.

  Thomas had decided he would not
even attend, let alone be a part of it, but Grace’s cooler head prevailed. She told Ravinia it was not fair to ask her father to appear to condone this unequal yoke, but that of course they would attend so as not to cause an irreparable tear in the relationship.

  “Well, without Dad, it’s going to be a civil ceremony. I thought he might want to pray or something.”

  “Believe me, we’ll be praying.”

  “And you need to know too, Mother, that this is not an unequal yoke. I don’t mean to hurt you, but you cannot claim me for the faith.”

  Thomas and Grace had attended the tiny ceremony, held in the home of friends of the bride and groom. There Ravinia proudly announced that her new last name would be Carey-Blanc, obviously assuming this would please her parents.

  Thomas forced a smile. His name would carry on, despite his never having had a son, but he feared what kind of spiritual heritage might be passed down.

  Thomas and Grace agreed privately that the wedding was one of the most difficult ordeals of their lives, and it only exacerbated his spiritual doldrums. Would God ever again work in his life, answer a prayer, give him a victory?

  Every day he rose early to read and study and pray, and then it was off to the prison, where he slogged through the monotony of days and weeks and months and years of the same old same old. The few convicts who asked to see him had their own agendas and didn’t care about his. They were all angling for something.

  If nothing else, Thomas had changed in one regard. He was no longer a softy, a pushover. He could see the cons’ games coming a mile away. And while he was known as a gentle, devout soul, no one could work a scam on the chaplain.

  He gradually allowed himself to be drawn back into work at Village Church, especially when the little flock had to replace pastors. That happened four times in nine years, not unusual for a small church. They saved money on interim pulpit supply because Thomas was there and willing. But just as in every other area of his spiritual life, he found little to encourage his own soul.

  What was he missing? What more could he do? He had made an irrevocable commitment to spend his life—and he meant that—in the service of God. Was there to be zero payoff for that this side of heaven? If the answer was yes, so be it. It wouldn’t change his decision. But his enthusiasm for the task waned with the years and showed in his graying hair and the deep lines in his face.

  At work, too, despite the monotony of his chores, things had changed. Governor George Andreason, after serving two full terms, retired to sit on a number of corporate boards and ended up filling a vacant seat on the state’s Department of Corrections board as well. Eventually he came out of retirement to replace Frank LeRoy as head of the DOC, moving that office out of the Adamsville prison and into the nearby state capitol building.

  This had actually been Warden LeRoy’s idea, allowing him to concentrate solely on running the penitentiary. Well, Thomas thought, at least someone around here looks and acts like a new man. He decided that if he himself were in a better frame of mind, he would have been inspired by Yanno’s seeming new lease on life.

  Now Yanno was at the prison all the time, freshly committed to the task. Adamsville State Penitentiary was going to remain the jewel in the state’s DOC crown, financially strapped as it was, and Yanno kept asking Thomas if it didn’t make him proud to be part of it.

  “You bet it does,” Thomas said, coming as close to lying as he had as an adult.

  Thomas was shocked one afternoon when his daughter knocked and entered his office. He leaped to his feet.

  “Rav! What brings you here?”

  “You won’t believe it. Dirk and I are moving to Adamsville.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Dirk is working for the county, and I have just been hired as a public defender. You can guess where a lot of my caseload will come from.”

  “Here?”

  “I trust we won’t get into each other’s way too much.”

  “You could never be in my way, sweetheart. You look fantastic, by the way.”

  “Well, this suit is Penney’s, not Saks, as it would be if I were in a big firm. But I like to look the part.”

  “And you certainly do. I need to coach you on dealing with men like these, Rav.”

  “Wide open to input, but I suspect I’ll have to learn as I go.”

  “Your mother will be thrilled to have you so close. You will come visit, won’t you?”

  “Of course. I think we can all be civil.”

  Addison

  For a time it appeared Brady Darby might actually have turned a corner. It didn’t take long for his new employers to catch on that he might have exaggerated his history of landscaping experience, but he proved, at first, to be diligent and hardworking. As long as someone told him what to do and walked him through it a time or two, he found he could learn anything.

  He planted trees, laid sod, moved trees and shrubs. He mowed, weeded, edged, fertilized, even created rock formations.

  Brady found the work—the first he had really done in ages—exhausting and painful for the first few weeks. And when Peter could not drop him off or pick him up, he had to hitchhike several miles to the office, where he rode with a crew to the various job sites.

  He loved his uniform and found reasons to delay removing it at the end of the day. Brady liked to be seen in it here and there, especially around the trailer park. The old Laundromat had been replaced by a filling station, where he bought his smokes and snacks and dreamed of someday again having a car he could pull into there for gas.

  With his history, Brady had zero credit and could get neither a credit nor even a debit card and thus had to run his entire personal financial life on cash. His expenses consisted of only a stipend to his mother for rent—they barely spoke and when they did were rarely cordial—and the occasional five or ten to Peter for the use of his car, which was infrequent.

  Poor Peter was charged with making sure Brady got up in time to get to work every morning, and that became more difficult all the time. Brady was proud of his job and his steady, if not generous, income, but he had come to reward himself every evening by going to the movies, smoking some dope, trying to find a one-night—or more likely a few-hour—stand, then lounging in front of the TV until the wee hours.

  He knew if his parole officer knew he was even associating with people who sold grass, he’d be right back in the joint. But at least he didn’t drink or do the harder stuff anymore. Life was boring, no question, and Hollywood was a forgotten dream. But this was better than doing time.

  The only person in the world Brady cared about was Peter, but the kid was not blind to Brady’s weaknesses. That left him with little basis to teach or counsel his brother, but for sure he had enough experience to warn him. He told Peter to stay away from cigarettes, let alone grass and coke and booze. He praised him for holding down a steady job and keeping up with his car payments. He urged him to stay in school and graduate.

  “You know the old line about doing what I say and not what I do?” Brady said.

  Peter nodded.

  “That’s what I’m saying. I know I’ve screwed up. You don’t have to. Promise me.”

  Peter shrugged. “Aunt Lois has been asking about you, Brady. Wants you to come see them if you want.”

  “What have you told her?”

  “The truth, mostly. I told her you’re doing good, working, making a little money, behaving yourself.”

  “So not the whole truth.”

  “Well, I didn’t think it would make her day to know you like the occasional joint and that you sleep around, no.”

  “Good man.”

  “She wants to know where we’re going to church.”

  “There’s a surprise. Did you tell her Church of the Inner Spring with Pastor Blanket and Deacon Sheets?”

  Peter roared. “I’ll tell her that next time. I told her we’ve both been real busy.”

  Brady nodded. “And she told you that if we’re too busy for God, we’re too busy.”r />
  “Exactly.”

  40

  Late September | Adamsville

  Having Ravinia Carey-Blanc and Dirk over for the first time was about as nerve-racking a proposition as Thomas could imagine. He and Grace agreed that despite their discomfort over their daughter’s marriage, it was unconscionable that they had never hosted the couple.

  “Should I say that?” Thomas said. “Just confess it and ask their forgiveness?”

  “I don’t know,” Grace said. “I’d leave it alone. Let’s just be as gracious and warm as we know how. Make it clear we’re finally recognizing them as a couple. She’ll always be our daughter, regardless, and it’s time we started treating her like an adult free to make her own decisions.”

  Thomas was as nervous as he had been in ages. Worry about Grace’s stamina niggled at him, but mostly he was trying to frame his meal prayer. He always prayed; they would expect that. But he didn’t want to offend them either.

  What was the point of this? He would be talking to God, not to them. He questioned his own motive for wanting to mention them, and he knew it would be wrong to hint what he really wanted God to do for them.

  This was all too disconcerting, and as their arrival approached, he and Grace seemed nearly frozen from anxiety.

  “Let’s just be good hosts and let it play out as it plays out,” Grace said.

  With everything ready and dinner cooking, Grace sat on the couch, looking as if she could use some sleep. Thomas sat in his easy chair, trying to read the paper but unable to concentrate. He couldn’t sit still and began to pace.

  “You’re making me more nervous,” Grace said. “Just relax.”

  “Sorry. I can’t. Has it been getting dark this early already?”

  She looked at her watch, then out the window. “Storm brewing?”