morning I noticed the grave of Paul Huxley, a friend who has been dead ten years. He came of age during the Great Depression, which indelibly marked many men and women of that generation. Along with other neighborhood children, Brother Paul used to chuck rocks at passing trains. “I had a good aim,” he once told me with a shy smile. This often provoked engineers to hurl coal in apparent retaliation. But these conductors, whizzing past children on the wrong side of the tracks, offered lasting kindness in those fleeting moments. The kids would collect the bits of fuel in order to bring them back to their families and heat their homes. Unspoken covenants are sealed in the fires of need. I have preached on that story before, though I forget what I took as my text. Sometimes I just want to keep a legacy aflame.
A little on ahead, there lies Jerry Bentley, the man who every year happily completed our taxes, free of charge. God rest his soul. Brother Jerry added and subtracted, multiplied and divided without the use of a calculator. “I have more faith up here in my round noggin’ than in any machine,” he had a habit of saying while tapping the side of his head. Admittedly, that made me a little nervous. But the IRS never knocked on my door. And I can now recognize a kind of freedom that is becoming rare in our technological era.
Dylan and I stumble across a tombstone with the name Peter Davidson, though everyone knew our brother as Buster. He once described a dream about a swarm of bees chasing him, getting closer and closer. Unable to outrun them, he turned and pelted rocks in their direction, killing some, driving the rest away. This aggressive self-defense angered a massive bear who charged, snarling in rage. Buster threw and threw, but nothing slowed the revenge-seeking beast. “There could be no escape,” he had whispered to me one quiet morning in my study at the church. Only a few weeks later, he was diagnosed with the inoperable, unstoppable brain tumor that snuffed his life much too soon.
I know without looking that Elmer Stetson is next to Buster. Though baptized Catholic, I never knew him to attend church regularly. I preached his service almost by default, as the man had no other pastor in his life. I became friendly with Brother Elmer because he would walk this very property and lob sticks into the adjoining woods, always with a sidearm throwing motion. I asked him about that once, and he explained he had shoulder problems. I got to know him a little better and he finally admitted, “I once pitched a little.” Ever modest, he shrugged off my excitement. But I practically sprinted home to consult my copy of The Baseball Encyclopedia, a colossal tome that advertises itself as all-seeing as Homer and Milton and as all-knowing as Shakespeare and Yeats. I discovered Mr. Elmer Stetson had won thirty-five games and lost only seven for our Pittsburgh Pirates from 1926 to 1928. When Nathaniel and Philip discovered his true identity, they followed the old man around like he was the Pirates mascot, Captain Jolly Roger.
I ambled behind Dylan as she dashed past these graves and many more. Seems like every year I move a little slower, not due to aging, but rather on account of my habit of pausing before the tombstones that mark people I have loved. The number goes up all the time. I add the years written in stone between birth and death. Sometimes I scratch out the math in the freshly dug dirt with a stick. Then I launch my tool into the woods using a sidearm delivery. The dead fragments of the great living trees spin counter-clockwise through the air and settle to the ground once again. The past provides the material for the future.
Maybe I should preach about that.
I lingered for so long out there that Bonnie had already left for school by the time I returned home. She is the head librarian at the middle school because she is the only librarian at the middle school. Still, I am proud of her career. In addition to offering extra assistance to the students required to enroll for the summer, Bonnie spends the “off season” ordering a few new books and repairing many damaged old ones. She is well-versed in the art of book binding. Budget cuts to the public system wear on her, but Bonnie remains faithful. She, too, tends the stories, trimming the wicks that future generations might see by their light.
Without my beloved to share a morning cup of coffee, I called my best friend. McPherson answered on the second ring. He has been divorced for so long now that he says he might as well have been a lifelong bachelor. And he is always glad to meet me at Evy’s Diner.
The Reverend Doctor Brian S. McPherson is a Presbyterian pastor and so very Presbyterian in his devotion to the original languages of the Bible. Like most of his denominational ilk, he is eager to drop this knowledge of Hebrew and Greek into every theological conversation.
“Wheeler, my good friend,” he typically begins, pausing to rub his beard. “Wonder how that verse reads in the original?”
I took the same languages while at Moravian Seminary, but have not kept them up nearly as well. I have not kept them up at all. This is one of the many reasons to be grateful that I am not Presbyterian. Another would be John Calvin.
McPherson quotes John Calvin nearly as often as that other JC, the one known as Yeshua in one of the ancient languages. I have to admit that the theological forefather of the Presbyterians offers an occasional gem. He once said that every color in the world was given to proclaim God’s glory. That is truly lovely, I readily concede. But as far as I can tell, the man spent far more time brooding and sulking.
McPherson jumps immediately to his hero’s defense. Calvin’s most infamous theory of total depravity is totally misunderstood, my friend argues nearly ad nauseam—this is especially true if you have just eaten his cooking. McPherson explains that it is not as though everything is depraved per se, but that sin touches every aspect of our lives, even our virtues. For example, Calvin insisted that total altruism is utterly impossible. Even when we try to be generous, our actions are tainted by self-centeredness and pride.
It is a wonder, then, that I offered to pick up the check for our coffees this morning.
The painter actually beat me to the church.
Due to my audience with McPherson, I arrived a little past nine and found a young man in his van, biding his time with the help of a cigarette. I led him inside and down the stairs into the fellowship hall. There, I was obliged to remain far longer than I had anticipated, as he kept picking up what might have been the tail end of our exchange of pleasantries, stringing along another question or comment to further the length of our conversation.
“So, what do you ‘Mormons’ believe, anyhow?”
I explained a little about Moravians, including our Z-man and the importance of the thirteenth of August. Perhaps we were both loitering. My schedule was clear. I thought I was going to have an easy day.
He painted as we chatted, returning his brush to the open bucket held in his other hand and then back to the wall, steadily layering fresh paint one smooth stroke at a time. Brush to bucket and back to wall, over and over again, as words passed between us. He eventually worked his way to confiding in me about his brother-in-law, a young man who died last Saturday while returning home from the second shift at the arsenal. Another driver under the influence had crossed the yellow line painted down the center of the road. Brush to bucket and back to wall—the painter told me about his sister, now a widow with a daughter set to enter kindergarten. What should he say? Did I have any advice? I watched him paint, striving to think of a sensitive response that would acknowledge his pain and perhaps point beyond it.
When Nathaniel was only two years old, he had drawn himself up to his full height and declared with righteous indignation, “I do not like words. Do not!” His mother and I were in the habit of spelling out certain terms to avoid confrontation like c-double-o-k-i-e. My son’s comment was memorable because of the nature of my vocation. Whether spelled or spoken, sung or prayed, words are my medium. People look to me to paint, however imperfectly, some vision of the mysteries of life.
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