Miss Katie's Rosewood (6 page)

“So . . . you're the one they call the artist, eh, kid?” he said. “Guess you had us all fooled with that sketch pad of yours. What were you, a police informer all along?”

“No, just someone who wanted you brought to justice,” replied Robert.

“What was it to you?”

“I had my own personal stake in it.”

“What stake? Who are you anyway? What's your name, kid?”

“Robert . . . Robert Paxton. Reverend Paxton is my father.”

Teague laughed bitterly. “What do you know—a preacher's kid carrying a gun and getting the drop on me.”

He sighed and shook his head. “I can't believe it . . . caught by a preacher's kid! I should have taken care of you when I had the chance.”

He kept shaking his head in disbelief, then began to grow angry again.

“But why, kid?” he said. “Why couldn't you just leave it alone?”

“Because I watched you kill an innocent girl!” Robert shot back angrily.

“What are you talking about? I've never killed a girl in my life.”

“What were you trying to do in that church, then?”

“I was after the minister. I think I got him too. I hope his soul rots in hell.”

“What do you have against him?”

“He's a nigger lover and a traitor.”

“How dare you say such a thing! You're the traitor . . . against everything this country stands for!”

Teague jumped up from his bunk, his fist clenched, and took two quick steps forward. But then he seemed to think better of another assault and backed away.

“It's because of people like him that this country is in this mess,” he said. “Did I kill him?”

“No, but you killed his daughter, and you're going to pay.”

The news sobered the prisoner. But gradually a smile spread over Teague's lips. “Maybe that's even better,” he said. “He can suffer for the rest of his life for his treachery.”

“That was my twin sister you killed. She was my best friend. When you shot her, you killed a part of me too. That's why I came after you. That's why I couldn't leave it alone.”

Robert turned to go, then hesitated. “Did you ever stop to think,” he said, “that it's
you
who's going to rot in hell, you son of a—?”

He stopped himself, shocked at what had been on his lips.

He turned again and left the cell, wondering where such an outburst had come from.

By the time the deacon arrived at police headquarters, Robert was on his way home. Heyes asked the church leader if he would bring two or three reliable members of the congregation, in addition to himself, who would be willing to look at the prisoner and see if he was the man who had shot up their church and killed their minister's daughter.

They came the following morning. All four identified Teague with absolute certainty. Teague's volley of hateful accusations and threats confirmed the likelihood of their testimony, and his final,
I should have shot you all!
was not lost
on Heyes nor any of the rest of those listening. It did, however, unnerve the church people with concern that, if he should ever get out, he might come after them.

By the end of the second day, Heyes was ready to admit that young Robert Paxton was not the crazy kid he had taken him for.

In the weeks that followed, Robert was viewed as almost a celebrity by the people of the church and as a hero in the Baltimore papers. In the midst of the devastation of the tragedy, his heroic actions helped everyone begin the long process of getting on with life. If the terrible question of
why
remained unanswered from an eternal perspective, at least temporal justice could be carried out.

All involved began putting it behind them. All, that is, except Robert Paxton. His struggle with conscience was only beginning. He was too young and too confused by it all to be put on such a pedestal of acclaim by the boys of the church. Even Detective Heyes was singing his praises. As word spread about what had happened, that a dangerous murderer had been arrested by a seventeen-year-old minister's son, requests for newspaper interviews became regular.

In his own mind, however, Robert was far from at peace.

He did not question
what
he had done. But he now began to question
why
he had done it. Were his motives as honorable as his actions were being lauded? His very celebrity status forced him to look inward and realize that revenge and anger had driven him, not virtue or heroism. There was also the matter of his outburst in Teague's cell to contend with. From what cesspool inside him had
that
come! To talk to a man of God's creation about his soul rotting in hell . . . what a horrible thing to say! He was God's witness to the man! Yet what had come out of his mouth but hateful venom?

A gloom slowly settled upon him. He began questioning his very faith itself. How real was it anyway? He had not prayed once since the moment of the shooting. He had acted
with the base instinct of fleshly anger. He had not once thought of Damon Teague as a man, but only as a villain, an enemy, something less than human.

The incident placed a mirror in front of his soul. He saw things that disgusted him. How noble was vengeance as a motive for action? Why had such malice unexpectedly risen within him? When the moment of crisis had come, had
faith
carried him through, or the desire for revenge? He knew the answer well enough.

During his brief visit to Teague's cell, what had been the intrinsic difference between them? None. Two men had faced each other, feeling the same things, reacting in the same ways. Each despised the other. He was no different than Teague! If that was true . . . what did his faith really
mean
?

Where had such a vindictive spirit come from?

He had been preparing for a life in the ministry. Now he began to wonder if a core of evil had existed in the depths of his heart all along. How well did he really know himself? He thought himself so mature. Everyone in the church looked up to him as wise in spiritual matters beyond his years—a prodigy. Suddenly the past few years began to look like a sham. He had just been pretending at religiosity!

A great spiritual battle had begun, a battle to know himself, to know what he was made of, to know whether he had a personal faith that meant anything or not.

Meanwhile, the wheels of justice confirmed that in the matter of Damon Teague, he had been right all along.

An unsolved murder in Mississippi coincided with his transfer to General Early's regiment. Another killing in Chattanooga had taken place during the week he had been there.

When Heyes came to see Robert and his father at the parsonage two weeks after the arrest, the news, though answering many questions, was bittersweet.

“The man has been on his own personal vendetta for several years,” Heyes said. “It looks like I owe you an apology,”
he said, turning to Robert, “for not taking you more seriously. Now that he's behind bars and we know a little more, it looks like he may be linked to up to half a dozen killings. New evidence is coming in every day. I don't think we're going to have any trouble getting a conviction.”

“What will happen to him, Detective?” asked the minister.

“He will stand trial,” Heyes replied. “The way it looks now, with what's piling up against him, even from some of his fellow soldiers, he will probably hang.”

The word stung Robert's heart. Even if the man was guilty, he could not help feeling responsible.

When Heyes left, Robert went out for a long walk filled with self-recrimination and despair. A deep sense of his own hypocrisy and sin began to haunt him. He taught Sunday school classes in his father's church about how to be born again, about leading the unsaved to the Lord. He was looked up to by most in the church as a paragon of virtue and sure to be a minister of widespread influence one day.

But they did not know what ugliness festered inside him.

Sure, he thought, in the world's eyes he was a “good” young man. He had never killed, never stolen, never uttered a harsh word to father or mother, never done anything counted by the world as sinful. Yet now the Lord's words probed his conscience with a finger of illuminating fire—
But I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of hell
. And John's shocking words—
Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer
.

According to the Bible, hate and murder were one. They grew from the same root cause. The stunning conclusion was that Teague was no more a sinner than he was himself. They were
equally
sinners.

The worst of it was . . . he had believed the idea of himself as good and pure and virtuous. He too had considered himself a model young Christian man preparing for a life of service to God. But what was his seeming goodness but the
self-righteousness of Isaiah's filthy rags! He was nothing but a self-righteous hypocrite on the inside, a whitewashed tomb full of the dead bones of his own conceit.

He had hated Damon Teague. He had not just hated what he had done . . . he had hated
him
. According to John, he too was a murderer!

He knew he could not hide behind the old adage about hating the sin but loving the sinner—he had hated the sinner too.

Because of him, the man was going to face trial and probably the gallows. All the while everyone was treating
him
like a hero.

He was no hero. What he had done was despicable. He wasn't some knight in armor fighting for justice—he was an angry brother seeking revenge. Lashing out at the man, telling him he was going to rot in hell! The memory of his own words stung him with remorse and guilt. But worse than the words themselves was what they said about his own heart!

At last he went to his father and told him that he needed to go away, that he needed time to think.

“What is it, Robert?” asked his father. “Is it about Jane?”

“Indirectly, I suppose,” he replied. “This has been hard on me, Dad. More my involvement with Teague than Jane's death. I'm full of doubts right now. I need some time to sort things out. I'm confused about it all.”

“Jane's death has tested us all,” said Reverend Paxton.

Robert nodded. It was testing him in deeper ways than his father had any idea.

“Why don't you go visit your aunt Ruth in Ohio?” suggested his father. “It's peaceful there, away from the war. I'm sure she would love to have you.”

“That's a good idea, Dad. Some time in the country sounds good. I'll write to her today.”

I
N THE
C
OUNTRY

8

R
OBERT LEFT BY TRAIN FOR
C
LEVELAND TEN DAYS
later.

He spent two months on his aunt's farm south of the city. He worked hard, took long walks, and in solitude and prayer began slowly to rebuild his spiritual foundations.

Now he built them, however, on the solid foundation of metal tested in the fiery crucible of trial, doubt, and suffering where all God's true men and women are made strong.

But he did not simply resume his system of belief in the former mold after his sojourn in the country. Instead he discovered new foundations for life based on a deeper sense of God's being. All his previous study had been concerned with doctrines
about
God and His work. Now he sought to understand God
himself
, what He was like, how He thought about His creatures, and what the Fatherhood toward which Jesus continually pointed must suggest about God's work among men. He now sought to discover the character of God's being.

For the first time in his life he worked through his entire belief system from the ground up—not because of what he had been taught, not because of what he had heard his father preach, not because of what evangelical theology said was the correct interpretation of its prized doctrines . . . but because
of what, after further prayerful reading of Scripture, he was discovering for
himself
. It was a long, slow process whose foundations had to be newly anchored in the bedrock of his brain and heart and spirit as he became convinced of what the Bible was saying to him, stone by stone, precept upon precept.

As he walked one day among the fields planted in green-ripening wheat, the silence of the land grew upon him. In the midst of that quiet arose the words
God is good
.

They were words whose general sense he had known from earliest memory. There was nothing strange in them. He had heard them, or words that expressed the same general idea, from very infancy, in childhood, in boyhood. But now in the season of his dawning manhood but still questioning youth, it flashed upon him, almost as if for the first time, that God truly was
good
.

It was a revelation as powerful as it was simple.

Suddenly he wondered what the “goodness” of God was. What was God really
like
? What was His personality? What would it be like to actually sit down and talk with Him?