Another Life

by Robert Haller

  It had started on Friday morning, in my bedroom, when I woke up suddenly to a horribly loud screeching. I’d been dreaming of Bethany—the kind of dream so good, it’s like winning the subconscious lottery—and then I was sitting bolt upright in my bed, breathing hard. The noise was beating against the far wall and rumbling through the floorboards. The next thing I knew, my chest was tightening and I couldn’t breathe.

  My inhaler was sitting on my dresser on the other side of the room. I jumped out of bed, tripped over the sheets my feet were tangled up in, and stumbled over to the dresser.

  As I got my breath under control, I realized what the noise was: music—really loud music. It was coming from DeShawn’s room. It wasn’t even eight o’clock.

  I went down the hall in my pajamas. DeShawn’s door was wide open. “Hey, what the hell is …” I stepped into the room and stopped short.

  My dad and DeShawn were sitting on the floor, going through a big cardboard box of vinyl records. The music was coming from a record player sitting on DeShawn’s dresser, hooked up to two giant old speakers set up on either side of the room.

  “Benjamin!” My dad looked up at me and smiled. He was still in his sweatpants and an old T-shirt. Usually by now, he had already left for work. He almost had to shout over the music. “What do you think? We set up my old sound system.”

  I nodded. I could feel the bass rumble under my feet.

  “I dug these out of the attic,” he said. “What’s left of my collection.” He pulled a record out of the box. “Check it out: Led Zeppelin Four.”

  “Is that what woke me up just now?” I asked.

  DeShawn shook his head and held another record up. “Jimi Hendrix.”

  “‘Purple Haze,’” my dad said. “One of the all-time great guitar riffs.”

  I nodded and slowly backed out of the room.

  Downstairs, I found my mom in her office, typing furiously on her laptop. She barely looked up at me. “Good morning, Ben.”

  “I’m not the one playing that music; it’s DeShawn.”

  She kept typing. “I know. Your father took the morning off and got out all his old records. I think they’re having fun up there.”

  “Well, they woke me up.”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” my mom said. She didn’t look it. “You should probably start getting ready for Bible school, anyway.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little early to be blaring music, though?”

  My mom stopped typing, sighed, and turned in her chair and looked at me. “Are you upset about something, Ben?”

  My mom had this way of throwing me off guard with her attention and the lack of it—one second, she’d be ignoring me, and the next, I’d be under intense focus. “No,” I said, “I just think it’s a little inconsiderate, that’s all.” Talking to my parents, I tried to use their words back at them whenever I could: inconsiderate, disappointed, concerned—squeezing in words like these gave your arguments more power.

  “Ben,” said my mom in her slow, almost-annoyed-but-I’m-giving-you-one-last-shot voice, “as you’re well aware, DeShawn hasn’t had the easiest time adjusting to life up here. And your dad and I have felt a little lost about what to do. I’d like to say you’ve been helping us on that front, but … well, you can speak for yourself on that.”

  I tried to, but she held up her hand. “Anyway, last night while you were upstairs playing your games, your dad and I sat down with DeShawn to see if there was anything we could do to make his time up here a little easier. You know he isn’t the biggest talker, but we finally got it out of him that he’s interested in music. Who knew, right? He thinks he’d like to learn guitar, so we’re going to look into lessons for him. And your dad had the idea of giving DeShawn his old records. I didn’t think he’d go for this, but when he heard it was rock and roll, he actually seemed interested. It was the first time I’d ever seen a look like that on DeShawn’s face. Now they’re going through them, and it seems to be a success. So, Ben, unless you have any other complaints, I think you should go upstairs and get ready for vacation Bible school.”

  I turned to leave the room. “Don’t call it a vacation,” I muttered.

  I didn’t escape Jimi Hendrix even when we got in the car. Apparently, my dad had also found his old CD collection, and driving DeShawn and me to the church, he popped in a CD. “Purple Haze” blasted from the car’s speakers.

  In the back seat, I stuffed my earphones into my ears and leaned forward in my seat. “Dad, can you turn that down a little?”

  My dad shook his head. “Sorry, bud, Jimi doesn’t work on low volume.” He glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “Take those things out of your ears! It doesn’t get any better than Hendrix.”

  “I’m okay,” I said, and sank back in my seat.

  “You’d really rather listen to that horrible M-and-M over this?”

  No matter how many times I told him it was “Eminem,” my dad never corrected himself—he thought his pronunciation was so hysterical. In the front seat, my dad laughed and DeShawn even cracked a smile. I looked down at the floor. The book Becca had let DeShawn borrow sat at my feet. The old black man with hollow eyes stared up at me from the darkness. I grabbed the book and shoved it into my backpack. Then I closed my eyes and turned Slim Shady up so loud it hurt my ears, but I still couldn’t completely drown out the sound of that guitar.

  When my dad pulled up to the church green, I jumped out of the back seat and slammed the door. I was halfway across the field, heading toward Levi’s tent, when I stopped. All of a sudden, I was so tired. I couldn’t take Jason and Dylan’s stupid jokes, couldn’t watch Bethany giving DeShawn another one of her pretty smiles, couldn’t listen to Jon Newman tell me to put on my turban. I looked around. Kids were hurrying across the field in every direction, rushing to their tribes. There were so many of us. Ryan Fletcher with his gelled hair, wearing a tank top to show off his preteen muscles. Nine-year-old Katie Tupper, still with a blue nose and cat whiskers lining her cheeks from yesterday’s face painting. If we all rose up together as one army, one voice, we could start a revolution. We could end this tyranny! I saw Ryan tying his turban to a spear, turning it into a flag, and leading his tribe against our oppressors. Katie transformed into some wild cat-girl, hissing and growling as she clawed at some counselor’s face.

  I was standing there, caught up in my vision, when my cousin walked right past me. No smile. No hello. I paused for a second, then followed Becca across the green.

  “Hey,” I said when I had caught up with her. She was walking fast, bending over with the weight of her backpack, which looked like it was stuffed almost to bursting.

  She looked at me with suspicion for a second, like she thought I was going to play a trick on her. That’s when I remembered how I had treated her last week. I tried to smile in a way that said I was sorry. “That bag looks heavy,” I said. “What do you got in there?”

  “It’s my bag,” she almost snapped. “I have every right to put whatever I want in it.”

  I hadn’t realized how much I must have hurt her when I snubbed her in front of my friends. I wished I could just shrug and walk away without caring. I wished I could be meaner. We had reached Judah’s tent, and Becca had tossed her bag on the ground with a thud and stood glaring at me. For a second, my mouth just hung open stupidly and I couldn’t think of anything to say. Then I put down my own bag and opened it. “I just wanted to give you this,” I mumbled, pulling out the book and handing it to her. “Thought it might be due back soon.”

  “Thanks,” she said without looking at me.

  As I turned to go, I had the feeling inside me of falling faster than my stomach, though I didn’t know why. What did I care what my lame cousin thought about me? I should be glad to be rid of her.

  Then I heard Becca call my name. I turned back around. She was kneeling in front of her bag and looking at me. “Do y
ou want a protein bar?”

  She unzipped the bag. It was stuffed so full of bars in blue wrappers that a few spilled out onto the grass. They said “FUEL” on the package and weren’t a brand I recognized.

  “Where’d you get all those?”

  “It’s an initiative I’m taking part in.” Becca began picking the spilled bars up off the ground. “To raise money for orphans in Haiti. For every bar I sell, all the proceeds go to a charity that offers housing for orphans and unwanted children. It’s run by Michael Keegan—do you know him?”

  I shook my head as I helped her pick up the last of the protein bars. Becca unzipped another compartment of her bag and pulled out a flyer, handing it to me. On the front was a good-looking white dude with blond hair and tan skin, surrounded by a bunch of cute, smiling black kids. “A better tomorrow for Haiti,” it said. On the back was another picture of the man (without the kids), and some information:

  Since 2006, Michael Keegan’s organization has provided food, housing, education, and health care for over five hundred Haitian children in need. In addition to physical nourishment, the children are also given the spiritual tools and guidance they need to prosper in this life and the next. Along with his charity work, Keegan is a bestselling author and motivational speaker on the topics of spirituality, health, fitness, and achieving your goals. Visit his website at www.KeeganMinistries.com and follow him on Facebook.

  I looked up at Becca. “Isn’t that great?” she said. “I want to work for his organization one day.” She held out a protein bar. “They’re four dollars each.”

  I felt a little like I’d been trapped. I wasn’t hungry, and four dollars seemed high for something that would probably taste like crap. But I thought it would be nice to help the orphans, and I still felt guilty about how I had treated Becca earlier. I took out my wallet and handed her the money. She smiled and handed me the bar. “Tell all your friends,” she said. “I’ll be selling these things all summer.”

  “Does Ms. Swanson know you’re doing this?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Why should she care? It’s for a good cause.”

  I didn’t know, except that adults always seemed to have weird rules when it came to money. The whistle blew in the middle of the field. Everyone had to be at their tent for the beginning of the program.

  I thanked Becca for the bar and headed toward Levi’s tent. As I walked across the field, I unwrapped the FUEL bar and took a bite. I was right: it tasted like a stale glob of sawdust and wax. But I thought about the smiling kids on the flyer and made myself swallow.

  A few hours later, I was sitting in the grass under the Cross of Repentance, listening to Jon Newman talk about sin and grace and feeling like I might throw up. I wasn’t sure if it was the protein bar or the sloppy joes we’d had for lunch. You know how they tell you to wait two hours after you eat before swimming? I think the same should go for stuff like this. As Jon had our tribe gather in a semicircle around the cross, the sun glaring down on us, my stomach felt weird and queasy.

  “Today I want to tell you the story behind a song,” Jon said, standing in front of the cross. “How many of you guys know the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’?”

  We all raised our hands except for DeShawn—maybe because he really didn’t know the song, maybe because he just didn’t care. Jon seemed happy for the excuse to sing.

  “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see. Pretty familiar words, right? But I think most of you will be surprised to find out the story behind that song, behind the man who wrote it, John Newton. I know, the name sounds a little bit like somebody else you know, right?” He clicked his tongue and winked, and some of the girls giggled weakly.

  Jon smiled, looking satisfied. He probably wished Bethany were here to see him in his glory. But she and Nola were manning the face-painting station at the other end of the field. Ever since that Nola girl started coming around, they found reasons to leave the rest of the tribe and do things together. I had noticed them earlier, giggling as they gave each other cats’ eyes and bunny noses.

  “So,” Jon was saying, “John Newton lived in the seventeen hundreds, and guess what? He wasn’t a good man. He did bad things. Really bad things. John was a slave trader. He sailed on a big ship from England to Africa, where he took African people that had been captured and imprisoned, and brought them to Europe or the Americas, to be sold as slaves.

  “Now, we probably all know from history class how bad the conditions on the slave ships were. How they were packed tight together in the ship’s hold, and it was hot and awful down there and they got only a few spoonfuls of slop every day.”

  Jon stopped. DeShawn had raised his hand. I’d never seen him do this before, and Jon looked a little nervous.

  “Yes, DeShawn?”

  “Yeah,” DeShawn said, “they actually let a lot of them starve if they didn’t think they’d get enough money for them. They’d let them starve and then throw them overboard. Sometimes even before they were dead, so they’d drown because they were still tied together with chains.”

  Everybody was quiet. I saw a lot of the girls looking at DeShawn sadly. Most of the boys looked down at the grass or out across the field, embarrassed.

  Jon nodded slowly. “DeShawn is right. It really was one of the most terrible times in man’s history. Once the ships finally reached Europe or the New World, families were split apart, the younger, stronger slaves usually sold to plantations, and others were taken to work inside the houses and mansions of their owners, as servants.”

  DeShawn had his hand up again. “They weren’t just servants there. Most of the plantation owners picked the young, hot slave girls so they could have sex with them.”

  Jon raised up his hands. “Okay, DeShawn, thank you, but we don’t have a lot of time left, so we can’t get into all the specifics. But you’re totally right; a lot of horrible things were done.”

  I looked at DeShawn, who was nodding, and that was when I realized he must’ve gotten all this from that book Becca had given him.

  “So, this was John Newton’s job,” Jon was saying, “making it possible for all these horrible things to happen to thousands of innocent people. And he didn’t feel bad about it. He didn’t question it. It was just how he made his living. Now, one night, crossing the Atlantic, John’s ship runs into a terrible storm. High winds, thunder and lightning, waves that tower over the sails—there doesn’t seem to be any chance that anyone on board will survive. John’s scared. He thinks he’s going to die, and suddenly all his life catches up with him. He understands that there’s a creator out there, he understands he’s going to be judged for all the countless sins and horrible things he’s done, and you know what he does? In desperation, John calls out to Jesus to save him. This man, who spent his whole life in sin, calls out to the Lord. And you know what happened? The Lord hears his prayer. The Lord answers. The ship doesn’t capsize, the storm dies away, and the crew survives. And right then and there, John Newton gives his life to Jesus Christ. And he writes this song, ‘Amazing Grace.’ John Newton becomes an abolitionist, somebody who devoted their life to ending slavery.” Jon paused. DeShawn had raised his hand again.

  “So what happened to the people on the boat—the slaves?” DeShawn asked. “Did he let them go?”

  Jon smiled and nodded, then stopped nodding and frowned. “Well, actually, I’m not sure of the exact time frame, but yeah, soon after that storm, he stopped slave trading and joined the abolitionist movement.”

  “Yeah, but the people on that ship—he didn’t set them free?”

  “I’ll have to look that up for you later, DeShawn. It’s a good question.”

  Jason was sitting next to DeShawn. He pulled out his phone. “I can google it.”

  Jon smiled. “I don’t know if we need to do that now, Jason. The point is, after John called out to the
Lord, he had a heart transformation. He found Christ’s love and grace, and his entire life was changed because of it.”

  Jason had his eyes on his phone. “It says on Wikipedia that the storm happened in 1748, and John Newton didn’t stop slave trading till 1754. So … six more years.”

  DeShawn’s mouth fell open. Kids started whispering.

  “Okay, guys,” Jon held up his hand again, “we don’t have to analyze this too much. Maybe there was a more gradual conversion. Maybe the storm started something in his heart that didn’t completely take effect until later on. What I want you to take away from this is the idea of Christ’s grace—how we all need it, how we are all wretches like the ones in Newton’s song.”

  DeShawn snorted. “Not me.”

  Jon looked like he would just as soon ignore DeShawn and continue, but we all had heard him, so that wasn’t an option. “What’s that, DeShawn?”

  “I said I’m not a wretch like him. I never done anything that bad, like straight-up evil.”

  Jon smiled. “Well, no, of course none of us here have done anything like that, but the Bible tells us we all have sinned and fallen short, DeShawn, so in one sense, we need Christ’s grace just as much as John Newton does.”

  DeShawn looked confused. “Why would I need it as much as he does? What that guy did to all those people was off the chain, and then he gets scared he’s gonna die and go to hell, so he just prays and writes a song and God forgives him? Musta’ been a pretty kick-ass song, for God to forgive him for that.”

  A few kids laughed, and Jon looked around quickly. “It’s not about the song, DeShawn. It’s about—”

  “And he didn’t even let those slaves go free! Even though you said he was the captain! God saved him, but he didn’t save them. Why wouldn’t he set them free if he could?”