Safe from Harm (9781101619629) (8 page)

Five

I
t started falling apart the next week.

I left the Pickersley-Smythes' that Saturday feeling somewhat better about the Phoebe/Jo situation. It suited me to have Annie be my ambassador with the girl. Even if Phoebe had decided
not
to try to convince the fellowship that I was a rapacious scoundrel, I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time with her. She was too unpredictable. Sure, Annie had Phoebe feeling all soft and mushy now, but that didn't mean she'd be feeling that way tomorrow. Still. I'd give the girl a chance, I told myself. I'd try to be fair, like Annie Laurie had said.

But I was done being fair with Phoebe Pickersley when I got the call the following Saturday night from one of our summer interns, Jonathon Reece. His was only the first call of many.

The church hires six to eight interns every summer, college students who are considering the ministry as a profession. We take the selection very seriously because not only are these young people influencing our kids, but we as a church are possibly influencing their decision about whether or not to pursue the ministry. That's a responsibility, and our vetting process goes on for months before the kids come to work for us. We have our interns chosen by early February at the latest.

Interns spend the two summer months living with local families and helping our full-time youth ministers supervise the extra service and recreational activities that we plan for our middle and high school kids during the summer. Jonathon Reece was a twenty-year-old black student from Abilene Christian University, and I don't mind telling you, I'd actively courted the boy. His grades were better than good and he was a fine speaker, thoughtful and considered. He was entertaining, but he didn't play to the crowd too much, a hazard when you're in your very early twenties and you find yourself in a position of authority over kids close to your own age.

Jonathon could easily have chosen to go to one of the large, prestigious black churches—the Fifth Ward Church of Christ had invited him, and they have more than fifteen hundred members. I understood that even the famed Figueroa Church of Christ in Los Angeles had expressed an interest. But while our church is pretty diverse for a Texas Church of Christ—which means it's more diverse than “not at all”; we do have a handful of black families—I felt honored that Jonathon had chosen us. When I asked him why he'd picked our white-bread church to spend his summer at, he told me he believed the Lord had led him to our church. He'd put a hand on my shoulder and said, “I think your rich white kids need me, Brother Wells.” He was smiling but his eyes were still and sure. He meant just what he'd said.

What had really won me over was Jonathon's essay. We ask our potential interns to put down on paper why they want to serve as youth ministers at our church. Many churches do the same, and most candidates write one essay and then tweak it a little for each church. The papers usually include generic stuff, like how much they enjoy kids, or how their own youth group had left an impression on them (not that any of them were long out of youth groups themselves), same old, same old.

But Jonathon's essay was a reflective meditation on the role of a youth minister. He acknowledged that one couldn't be a youth minister for long before inevitably growing out of the role—and that he saw an internship as the first step on the journey into the role of full-time pastor. He said his mother had always wanted her eldest son to be a minister, but Jonathon's elder brother had chosen a different road. He was in prison, serving out the last month of a three-year sentence for selling prescription drugs illegally. He'd be out by the time Jonathon was interning.

Jonathon wrote that he had spent time and prayer examining his heart—as much as he loved his mother, he didn't want to pursue the ministry as a way to compensate for her disappointment in his brother—and had come to the conclusion that he was genuinely called to the ministry.

The youth group retreat to New Braunfels was the first overnight trip for the summer.

It was June second, a few weeks before Jo would leave for New York, and school had been out for exactly two days. As was usual, the church high school youth group had made the three-hour trek to New Braunfels, to spend two days and nights tubing the spring-fed Guadalupe River. Jo and about two hundred kids from our youth group were there. It would be Phoebe's first overnighter with the youth group and Jo's last before heading off to New York City and ballet school. I had made the trip a hundred times myself, in junior high, high school and college. You would be hard-pressed to find a better way to spend a hot Texas summer day than to float along the icy waters between the limestone cliffs that line the river. There are times when the river is nearly tube to tube, it's so full. Parties will lash their tubes together to keep from being separated—some tie the tubes in a circle and stick a cooler of beer in the center so everyone has easy access, but of course we don't allow beer on church trips.

It was a Saturday night, Sunday morning really, and my phone buzzed. I groped for it and saw it was Jonathon Reece calling.

“Hey, Jonathon—Jo okay?” Next to me, Annie sat up in bed and pushed her hair off her face, looking a question at me.

“Yeah, she's fine.” Jonathon's voice was tight and strained. “Listen. I think I'm in big trouble here.”

I told Annie that Jo was fine and got out of bed and padded to the family room. Baby Bear heard me and came down to join me.

“What is it, Jonathon?” I flipped on the overhead fan in the dark room and settled into my easy chair—I've dealt with the midnight crisis of faith before.

“Man. Give me a second.” There was a long pause and then Jonathon's voice came back on. “I took a second to pray,” he said. “I want to tell it to you exactly the way it went down, that work for you?”

I said okay and thought that this might not be a crisis of faith. It might be a different kind of crisis altogether.

When Jonathon started speaking again, his voice was calm.

“Brother Wells . . .”

“You can call me ‘Bear,' Jonathon, you know that.” Baby Bear rested his chin on my knee and looked at me with sleepy eyes.

“It's not
Bear
Wells I want to talk to right now. It's
Brother
Wells—the pastor of the church I was called to minister to.”

I said, “All right . . .”

“Brick, Jason and I—” Brick and Jason were our two youth ministers. “—and all the rest of the interns, we had the kids in their tents, lights out at eleven thirty.”

I interrupted, “We're not missing a kid, are we, Jonathon?”

“It's not like that. Everyone is safe in their tents.”

“All right. Sorry. Go on.” Baby Bear was falling asleep and having trouble with his balance. His eyes would close and his chin would slip from my knee, then he'd jerk awake, resettle his chin and start again. It made me smile.

“After lights out, Brick called all of us interns together and ran over the plans for tomorr . . . for today, and Jason led us in a prayer and then we all went to our own tents. Everybody is doubled up except me because Jeff couldn't come—he had to get his wisdom teeth out. I won the draw for the single.” I could hear the sarcasm in his voice.

I said, “Go on.” I'd lost my smile. Youth ministers and interns double up in sleeping quarters on church overnighters—that's not a cost-saving measure; it's church policy. Serves the same purpose as those glass walls in the conference room.

“I wake up thirty, forty minutes ago, and I'm not alone in the tent.”

This is why it's church policy.

I said, “Go on.”

“I'm in my boxers, sleeping on top of my sleeping bag, because it's hot, you know? And I wake up and someone's . . . touching me. You know what I mean?”

I didn't say anything.

“I turn over and it's Phoebe Pickersley and she is butt naked. Starkers.”

I said, “Oh, dang.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Baby Bear had given up the effort and was stretched over my feet, sleeping the sleep of the just. I extricated my feet and stepped over him to go to the kitchen.

“Tell me what happened, Jonathon.”

“Brother Wells, even if I was going to let myself be tempted, she wouldn't be my temptation. You get what I'm saying? I yelled and got out of the tent and woke Brick up. He was in time to see a naked girl, holding my beach towel in front of her, crawl out of my tent and hurry over to the girls' side of the camp.”

“So the damage is limited? You, Brick and Phoebe?” I opened the fridge and pulled out the milk.

“I'm going to say no.”

The pantry offered me Alpha-Bits, Super Sugar Crisp, Grape-Nuts and Cheerios. I pulled out the Alpha-Bits.

“Because?”

“Because I wasn't the only one yelling.”

I didn't say “Oh, dang” again, but I was thinking it.

“Phoebe made a scene?” I asked.

“Every tent I can see is lit up with iPhone light. Tomorrow morning—”

My phone beeped to let me know I had another call. I pressed Decline.

“—you might get some phone calls.”

My phone pinged—a text from Jo: “Ya got trouble in River City.”

It almost made me laugh. It's from
The Music Man
, a favorite of hers when she was about five.

“Brother Wells?”

“I'm thinking,” I said. The house phone rang three times and I heard Annie answer it.

•   •   •

By six thirty Sunday morning, Annie and I had gotten twenty-four calls, and I learned that one of the callers, whom up to then I had deeply respected, was a rampant racist.

Peter Martinez and Morse Mealey, both church elders, came to the house when they couldn't get through on the phone, and, when I couldn't get off the phone right away to talk to them, had bowls of Grape-Nuts with Baby Bear who was excited at the unusual predawn activity. Baby Bear stole Morse's loafer twice. Morse was a good sport about it. Peter put on a pot of coffee, blessings on his head.

I may be the church minister, but I can't make decisions for the church—that's the elders' responsibility. Some ministers run their churches like a fiefdom—I don't think many of those churches are in the Church of Christ.

Here's what we were faced with.

Judging by the phone calls we'd had so far, a good portion of the church would walk into services that morning knowing something had happened. Shortly thereafter, the people who hadn't heard anything yet, would. Rumors would multiply like bacteria, and most of those rumors would be wrong. We wanted to nip those rumors in the butt, as my brother-in-law would say, but we couldn't. We didn't know enough.

I didn't have any doubt about Jonathon's truthfulness. I believed him absolutely.

The elders' decision was not to say or do anything until there could be a meeting between themselves, the youth ministers, Jonathon, Phoebe and the Pickersley-Smythes. Until then, our answer to any questions was to be, “Everything is in hand; we're looking into it.”

Which was guaranteed to satisfy nobody.

From:
Merrie Wells

To:
Walker Wells

WHAT is going on in Sugar Land, Dad? I'm hearing strange things from my homeboys. LOL

From:
Walker Wells

To:
Merrie Wells

Not LOLing over here, I can tell you. Give me a call later tonight. I'll fill you in.

•   •   •

To avoid more phone calls from people asking questions I didn't have the answer to, after church Annie Laurie and I both turned off our phones and went to Houston to have lunch at our favorite barbeque restaurant, Goode Company, and stroll around the Museum of Fine Arts. It took my mind off the mess Phoebe had stirred up.

We returned to the church parking lot at three forty-five to pick up our daughter. The youth group was due at four. We had barely pulled into a parking place before a small crowd converged on our car.

Annie put her hand over mine. “Loins girded?”

I said they were and we got out of the car.

No, I said, no one had been raped, no one was hurt, yes, there had been an incident, but we didn't want to make too much of it and we didn't have all the facts in, so this was not the time to discuss it.

Then the Pickersley-Smythes pulled into the parking lot in Mark's dark-blue Range Rover.

Mark got out of the passenger seat wearing white linen slacks and an open-neck shirt, and set to releasing the twins from the backseat. Liz emerged into the heat looking cool and chic in a linen dress and toweringly high sandals. Mark and Liz looked like they were probably headed out somewhere after the pickup. Most of the other parents were dressed in shorts and tees—it was hot.

When Mark turned, a twin on each hip, I got a big smile from him and an equally friendly greeting from Liz. I thought they were taking things really well, which was encouraging.

I shook their hands, the twins' hands, too, as they'd stuck them out, and said, “Hey, Mark, hey Liz! Listen, as soon as the kids get back from the trip, the elders and I thought we'd all gather in the meeting room and talk this whole thing out and try to get an understanding about exactly what happened, would that work for you? Annie can watch the twins. She'll keep them in the playground until the heat gets too much, then she'll entertain them in the nursery. We're eager to get to the bottom of this.”

Mark set the twins on their feet and grabbed their hands before they could race across the parking lot.

“Bottom of what?” He had mirrored sunglasses on so I couldn't see his eyes, but the smile was gone. Liz moved up to stand by her husband and put a hand on his arm. The stone on her wedding ring was big enough to choke a goat.

I faltered. “Didn't Phoebe call you? Were you at church this morning?” Because they would have had to have heard something.