Almost Heaven (7 page)

“Around what?”

“Sit down!” the bus driver yelled. He was a wiry, thin man named Scarberry. Didn't weigh much, but his voice was like God's.

I arranged my books and tried to get comfortable, but I was sweating in the chill of the morning.

“You don't do well around what?” she said, her face twisted.

“People like you.”

She was clearly agitated, and at the next stop I shifted to get up and move back. She grabbed my jacket in her fist and I was surprised at her strength. “Stay.” She said it like she was ordering a dog not to go for a tree, and a boy in front of us turned around and laughed, showing teeth that looked like he'd been eating black licorice.

“What kind of people don't you do well around?” she said, staring at me with eyes the color of the ocean, though I had never seen it.

“You know. Nice people with new clothes and big houses.”

She scrunched her face up. “You're prejudiced.”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you think people with dark skin are dumber than you?”

“No.”

“Are they any less human beings?”

“No, they're the same as you and me.”

“Then why would you judge me just because I have new clothes and live in a brick house? Besides, this is not new. I got it last year.”

“I'm not judging you; I just don't know how to talk to somebody like you.”

“Well then we might have just had a breakthrough in education. You're talking, aren't you?”

I nodded. “But it's not real easy.”

“First time with anything is hard. Tell you what, I'll hold this seat open for you every day and we'll practice.”

The thought of sitting next to her each day was both exhilarating and sickening. She would be able to spot all the flaws in my wardrobe, which amounted to about three outfits. My shoes were already falling apart.

“Why are you doing this?” I said.

“See, a good question opens the conversation up to new information. You're catching on.” She put a finger to her lips. “Why am I doing this? Maybe it's because I feel sorry for you. Maybe it's because I'm madly in love with you. Maybe it's that I don't want any of those kids who get on after you do to sit here.” She turned to me. “What do you think?”

“Maybe it's all the above?” I said.

She howled. “
And
a sense of humor. I like it.” She held out her hand. “Shake on it. We'll sit together as long as we're still riding the same bus.”

I took her hand, a soft, warm thing, and was again surprised at the strength she showed in the handshake. A warmth spread through me, and from that day on, I never looked at a yellow school bus the same.

* * *

It was three years later that Mama and I talked about the day Daddy died. She was listening to a Christian radio station that we could barely pull in, the signal crackling and dropping in and out. I had put up an antenna and hooked it to the gutter on the house.

The preacher talked about Lazarus coming out of the grave and how his friends had to take the grave clothes from him and used that to explain how people can help others get through hard times. After the man gave his address and the program was over, Mama turned off the radio.

“Do you ever think about that day?” she said.

“I don't spend one day
not
thinking about it.”

“And what is it you think?”

“That if I hadn't done what he told me, he'd still be alive.”

“Oh, Billy,” she said, and she got that hangdog look. “Your daddy was a good man but he did a selfish thing. I can understand it because he was in a lot of pain, but you can't ever blame yourself. He's the one who chose.”

“But I gave him the gun.”

“If he couldn't have convinced you to bring it to him, he would have figured out some other way. What did he tell you?”

I told her we were going hunting, and she nearly broke in two. She put her head on my shoulder and the tears flowed. I just sat there, shaking on the inside, feeling like a wet leaf on the ground.

Finally she got her breath. “There were things he could never bring himself to tell people. Things he saw. You knew he was in Holden 22, didn't you?”

I shook my head.

“He worked the Holden 22 mine before we moved to Lorado. He was supposed to be on the crew that went into the mine that day, but he'd gotten hurt and the doctor said he should take the day off. He would have been in there with the rest of them that morning.”

“What happened?” I said.

“A fire. They hauled eighteen men out of there and they looked like they'd just gone to sleep. Two of them crawled out this narrow passage to see if they could get help and they survived it by the grace of God, but all those others died. It liked to break Other's heart.

“Then, a few weeks before your daddy died, he got word that one of those men who crawled out of there had died over in Boone County. He'd become the foreman on the tipple and fell in a coal crusher. I think that's part of what pushed Other over the edge. All the pain he felt inside, and feeling like he should have died several places, and what happened with Harless, it all just did him in.”

“What about Harless?”

She let go of me and sat up straight. It was like the windup of a major league pitcher. She was trying to get the momentum to let the words go from another deep hurt.

“When Harless turned eighteen, there was a good chance he would get drafted. More than good. His first thought was to run. And then he thought he'd be a conscientious objector.”

“What's that?”

“It just means you don't want to go kill people. Some people have religious objections to it. Harless didn't, but he also didn't want to go to Vietnam. But your daddy said to Harless that it was his duty to serve his country. When your country calls, you go. He always believed that.

“He and Harless fought about it a long time. And after he graduated high school, Harless took off for Myrtle Beach and stayed with some friends down there thinking about it. You probably don't remember any of this.”

“I remember how good it felt when Harless would pick me up and take me on his shoulders to the football games.”

“He loved you like ice cream and sheet cake,” she said, a twinkle of memory in her eyes. “He just marveled at how smart you were, learning to read before you ever set foot in school.”

“I wish we still had his picture,” I said.

She nodded. “I still have him here.” She put her hand over her heart.

“What happened to him after that?”

“He came back from the beach all tanned and ready to enlist. Said he wasn't going to wait for them to come and get him; he was going to go on his own terms. And it made your daddy proud.

“Harless did well in basic training and they said he might be officer material. They sent him over there to Viet Rock, as he called it, and he would send us pictures of himself holding a machine gun and smiling with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Your daddy would smile when I'd read him one of those letters where Harless would make sport of the things he was doing. He would never admit how hard it was; he just attacked it like your daddy did the mines.”

We sat there awhile. It was good to hear my mother's voice talk about the past. I don't know how she got the strength to do it, and that strength wasn't there much after that.

“I remember the day the man came to our door and you cried,” I said.

She closed her eyes and I could tell that memory hurt the worst. “He was coming home in another week. He'd almost made it through his first tour when a sniper fired from the trees. Hit him in the head. They tried to get him to the hospital, but the man said he was killed instantly. Just there one minute and gone the next.”

“And Daddy felt like it was his fault?”

“He bawled like a baby at the funeral and just couldn't shake the fact that he'd been the one to push him. He was like a zombie for weeks.”

“What brought him out of it?”

She looked at me and smiled. “You did.”

“Me? How?”

“The mandolin. He came in one day from work, all covered up with the coal dust, and took a shower. And he was headed to bed without eating a bite when he heard you playing the mandolin in your room. Just picking out some song they had played in their group. He hadn't been with his friends since Harless died, even though I told him he should invite them over. He stood there listening, and then his shoulders shook and I thought he was having a nervous breakdown.

“‘I'm sorry; I'm sorry,' he kept saying. I told him it was all right, that everything was going to be okay. And the next week he had his friends back over and there was music in the house. You were sitting right there in the middle of them. That's what pulled him out of it. You and the music.”

Mama put her arm around me and snuggled close. “Your daddy always said that God had given you a great gift. He said he could hear the Lord pass just listening to the sounds that instrument could make.”

“Is that what you think?” I said.

“More than ever,” she said. “The Lord has given you something special, Billy. But it's not really your talent.”

“What do you mean?”

“The people you read about in the Bible who are the special people aren't really all that special. They're just sinful people like you and me. What makes them special is the Lord himself. He delights in using the weak things and the despised things and things the world doesn't have much time to notice.”

“Like coal miners and their families.”

She hugged me tighter. “Especially coal miners and their families. I think God has something special in mind for you. I don't know what it is. I don't know where he's going to lead you, but I know God is going to work in you and through you.”

I wanted to tell her about the day of the flood and how I hadn't jumped, but I just said, “What makes you so sure?”

“Because I don't think God trusts just anybody with so much heartache. The world has not yet seen what God can do with a man who gives both halves of a broken heart to him. And I don't doubt that a man like that can change the world . . . or at least a little part of it.”

Mama and I never talked much about Harless and Daddy after that, except in her final days that were even more of a heartache. But after that day, I was determined to be the man she was talking about. I wanted to be the one with the broken heart God would use. I didn't have any idea how he would do that, of course. It took me a long time to realize what was right in front of me.

5

Time hinders the human condition, but it does not touch me. With our Creator, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years a day. We feel the onslaught of time only as it is experienced by those in our charge. To us it is only a discipline. Time holds no sway, has no bearing on our resolve to achieve our assigned duties.

However, I will admit that at the beginning of my sojourn with Billy Allman, I began to count the days and spend the hours of his slumber in contemplation of his life's unfolding events. There was something about him that caused me to ponder time in a new way.

Time hinders the humans because their lives are lived on two slopes. Their early lives consist of the upward climb to what they are trying to attain. They press on through education and strive to reach a point where they feel satisfied, where they have “enough,” always just beyond their grasp. They neglect what they say is important and strive for sand that so easily slips through their fingers.

The crest of the hill is always unseen. And as the descent begins—indeed, even at the end of days when the eyes give way and the hearing diminishes—humans continue to grasp for what they cannot have.
“If You were a just God, You would give me what I ask.”
In that cry, they show that it is not the glory of God they desire, but the want and need in their own heart.

In the mind of the enemy, if they can push a human away from Truth, whatever the means, then they succeed in the continued separation of the created from the Creator. If that human is a follower of the Way, if he possesses a real faith that casts his entire being on the goodness and mercy of God, the evil one will make every attempt to thwart that life and bring it to naught. To discourage and keep that person disconnected from Life. Get him to settle for much less than what the Creator desires for each of His children.

It was along this striving, undulating path that Billy's father was brought, both by physical and emotional turmoil, to the end. I heard his hacking cough during the day, when I would occasionally observe him sitting alone in the front room, the gas heater turned on high in hope of getting warmth to the bone. Nothing warmed him. He brooded over the past and choices made, speaking to no one.

I did not notice the enemy's approach at first, for I was focused on Billy. Call it complacency if you must.