The Prodigal: A Ragamuffin Story

  “Hey,” Tom said. He heard his father slowly getting off his stool and stepping from behind the counter. “Jackie,” he said, crossing over to him. “What’s wrong?”

  Jack had not been called “Jackie” in thirty years. It’s what his mom used to call him when he’d fallen out of a tree or been stung by bees or gotten the bad end of a tussle with Jamie Taylor.

  “Tracy hasn’t talked to me since—since I left,” Jack said, his back still to his father, tears continuing to threaten. “I can’t believe she could hate me so much. And she’s going to teach Alison to hate me.”

  “Hey,” his father said, putting a hand on his shoulder and turning him slightly. “We don’t know what she’s thinking.”

  “We know they’re gone,” Jack said. “We know she won’t call me back.” He dropped his hand, felt a tear run freely down his cheek. “And the worst thing is, I deserve it.” His shoulders slumped. “For what I did. I deserve it all.”

  “Nobody deserves to be abandoned by the ones they love,” his father said quietly, and Jack felt a sting of conscience, knew Tom could have brought forward long years of reproach, and yet didn’t.

  “It’s the worst,” Jack admitted. “It’s tearing me apart.”

  “We’ll find them,” Tom said. “Don’t you worry about that. It’s a small world, what with the Internets and all.” He patted Jack’s shoulder gently. “We’ll find them.”

  Jack laughed, wiped his face. “Sure we will,” he said. “The Internets are our friend.”

  He patted his father’s hand, which was still resting on Jack’s shoulder. He never expected that hand to feel comforting. He wondered what else he’d been wrong about.

  He stepped back. “It’s okay. It is what it is.”

  They exchanged a long look and both nodded. Then Jack picked his clipboard off the counter, shrugged on his coat, and went out to count the rest of the lumber.

  6.

  He was taking a break and sipping on a can of Dr Pepper. Heat radiated off the sun-baked wall he was seated against and his eyes were closed, when he heard footsteps again.

  “Didn’t get a good enough look the first time?” he called out, trying and failing to hide the hostility in his voice.

  “I don’t believe I got a first look,” a calm female voice said.

  He opened his eyes, stumbled awkwardly to his feet, spilling some Dr Pepper on his shoe in the process. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were—someone.”

  “I like to think I am someone,” she said, not unkindly. “Are you feeling like a zoo animal, Jack Chisholm?”

  He laughed despite himself. “Yeah, you could say that. I’m sorry. Do I know you?”

  She laughed. “Jack,” she said. “It’s Kathy. Kathy Branstetter.”

  “No,” he said. He looked more closely at her. Thirtyish, tiny, attractive, wavy blonde hair, a legal pad in one hand. She was dressed too well for Mayfield, in a skirt, knee-high boots, and a nice jacket. He remembered a dumpy gray little girl. Not this. “No. You’re not.”

  “I’m pretty sure I am,” she said mildly.

  “Sorry. It’s just—I heard you were working for the Washington Post. I’ve read your political stuff. And I haven’t seen you—”

  “I was away for a long time,” she said. “Then my dad got sick. He needed someone to help run the Courier.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I hadn’t heard. I always liked your dad. Is he—better?”

  “He died last year,” she said.

  “Oh,” Jack said. “Man.”

  “You were away for a long time too,” she said. “No worries.”

  He took a sip of what remained of his Dr Pepper. “Your dad used to cover all our games,” he said. “He made me feel like I was a media star. He’d ask such good questions about the defenses, about what I was seeing. He really knew his job.”

  “He should have been a sports reporter for a big-city paper. We used to watch football together. At the end, that was all we could do. He was too weak to even tell me what was happening.”

  Jack looked down at the brown drops on his tennis shoe, then wiped his toe on the back of his jeans. He looked up at her. “So, that was last year. Why are you still here?”

  She looked around, her eyes taking in six kinds of lumber. She took a deep breath, let it out. “Well,” she said, “there was a lot to wrap up. The estate and all. And nobody to step in and take over the paper. And I—” She worried her bottom lip with her teeth.

  He understood, or thought he did, and he let her off the hook. Sometimes you don’t know what else to do.

  “And you’re still here,” he finished for her.

  She nodded. “I think I could go back,” she said. “I want to. I miss it. Breaking the big story. Balancing on the high wire.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said.

  “But I feel like, right now, this is where I’m meant to be.”

  He smiled. He had heard this kind of language a lot as a pastor. Meant to. “Did, umm, God give you that message?”

  She sniffed. “Does God ever tell me anything?” she said, then her shoulders released a bit. “Sorry. God and I aren’t currently on speaking terms.”

  “It happens,” he said. “We seem to be on a break ourselves.”

  “Really?” she said. “The people’s pastor? I guess—I guess I just wanted to believe that maybe you were still holding on to something despite, you know. Despite everything.”

  “Kathy Branstetter,” he said, draining the can, “I don’t know you well enough to talk to you about God. In fact, I probably shouldn’t be talking to you at all. The media and I are also not on speaking terms these days.”

  “I did come to talk to you as a journalist,” she admitted. “I need something for the ‘Around the River’ column,” she said. “Something small.” She held up her thumb and forefinger, pinched together.

  He looked at her with some curiosity. No journalist had ever politely asked him for a quote for a column, let alone a column about the comings and goings of townspeople.

  “I can’t ignore the fact that you’re here, Jack,” she said. “Not and feel like I didn’t leave every ounce of my journalistic integrity back in DC.” She opened her notepad, took out a pen, stood ready to write. “So, I hear you’ve come back to visit your dad.”

  “Is that what you hear?” he said. Apparently his dad was not the only one in his family who could arch an eyebrow.

  “You know full well what I hear,” she said, a touch of heat in her voice. “Some of it is even true. But if you tell me that you’ve come back for a visit,” she said, pointing her pen at him, “then I publish that you’ve come back for a visit. And for now, we can leave it at that.” She wrote something down. “For now. And if TIME or the Seattle Times or whoever calls me, again, I can tell them what I have verified myself, which is that and nothing more.” She smiled. “Doesn’t mean they won’t be back down here harassing honest Texans about you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want my troubles to complicate anyone else’s life. But they have. They do.” He saw that she was still waiting.

  He took a deep breath.

  “I’ve come back to visit my father,” he said with no particular emphasis.

  “Right.” She nodded at him. They had signed a contract.

  She capped her pen, closed the legal pad, stuck out her hand, and shook his. “It’s good to see you, Jack. I’ve followed your work too. Didn’t like it. But I followed it.” She checked her watch, made a face. “And now I’ve got to go cover a junior-high basketball game.” Her eyes had a hint of regret in them. “‘Lo, how the mighty have fallen.’”

  “‘The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places,’“ he said. It was from David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel. “It’s where that phrase comes from. ‘How are the mighty fallen,’“ he explained in response to her raised eyebrows. “You know,” he said, as much to himself as to her, “I have never preached from that. It’s one of the m
ost honest expressions of grief in the Bible.”

  They stood without speaking for a moment, both of them looking at the ground between them. At last, she checked her watch and groaned. Basketball would not wait.

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said. “Tip-off is in four minutes.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “You too. Break a leg. Or something.”

  “Or something,” she said, and hurried off.

  He went inside to put his drink can in the trash. They were adding up. How come Mayfield didn’t recycle aluminum cans? How hard would that be? Everybody recycled aluminum now, right?

  After a decade in Seattle, he was green down to his bones. Maybe he could lobby the city council, encourage James to take some bids from a recycler. They weren’t that far from Kerrville, or from San Antonio, for that matter. Somebody might make a paying concern out of it.

  He suddenly realized that he was thinking about a future in Mayfield.

  “No way,” he said aloud as he opened the back door and walked into the store. “Absolutely not.”

  “Absolutely what?” his father asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “How was Meet the Press?” Tom had done a poor job of hiding the People magazine he’d been reading. Katie Whoever, who had married Tom Cruise, was peering out at Jack from under a ledger. She was getting on with her life, Jack read.

  “I didn’t remember her at all,” Jack said. He came around the counter, sat down on one of the other stools, and set his drink can in front of him to dispose of later. “Kathy Branstetter, I mean. Not your Katie person.”

  “You probably haven’t seen her since she was in junior high,” Tom said. “Maybe some Sunday in church. You wouldn’t have taken a second look at her. Nobody did. Plain little girl.” He smiled. “But so smart. Weren’t we all proud of her? That school in the East—Radcliffe?”

  “Smith,” Jack said absently. “Maybe. All those radical lesbian colleges sound alike to me.” He smiled. His congregation had been full of radical lesbians.

  He was also smiling because he had just said the word “lesbian” in front of his father, something he never expected to do.

  “Anyway,” his father said. “She want an interview?”

  Jack pursed his lips. “That’s the funny thing. She didn’t, really.” He shook his head. “It’s like she wanted to give me some breathing room. She said she’d heard I’d come for a visit. That’s all. Asked me to confirm it.”

  “You’re sitting right here,” his father said. “That seems like confirmation enough.”

  “I think she wanted me to know—” Jack shook his head again. Something. “It’s odd. Small-town people get all up in your business. And then, when you least expect it, they leave you alone.”

  “Mayfield 101.” His father laughed. “Welcome home.” He checked his watch, looked out onto the pavement to see if anyone was coming. It was five o’clock—closing time. He slid off the stool, put the Closed sign in the front door, turned the lock.

  “Manny,” he called out into the store. “Quitting time.”

  He rang up a No Sale on the cash register, counted out some bills, and gave them over to Manny, who appeared from nowhere. Manny was as thin as his father now and even more crooked, ancient, and ageless.

  Manny’s mother had known Pancho Villa. The man knew stories that could make you laugh and break your heart.

  Manny shuffled out the back door. Jack knew he would let himself out of the back of the lumberyard, then walk the seven blocks to his trailer on the east side of town. Jack began to button up his coat and turned to see why his father hadn’t moved from the register.

  “Jack,” Tom said, “do you ever think about your mother’s funeral?”

  And immediately he was back there, the shame, the anger. It was instantaneous. When did he not think about the funeral? Jack could remember every detail—the floral spray on top of the gunmetal-gray coffin, the packed church, his father, thin and wan in his only dark suit.

  He remembered stepping up to preach, launching into how we were not good enough, how we needed to remember that our lives could end while we were far from God, how we all needed to do better.

  Above all, he remembered his father slowly pushing his way to his feet in the middle of his sermon, standing like a silent accuser. Jack had lost all momentum and stopped preaching. His father had said, in a voice that echoed in the silent sanctuary, “Jack. Please. Sit down.”

  And he remembered how his face boiled with shame. He had stood there for a long moment in the pulpit, felt the tension spread outward like ripples in a pond. There, on this most public and personal of stages, his father was once again telling him he was not good enough.

  It was his whole childhood delivered up in a moment.

  Jack had stepped back from the pulpit.

  He dropped his hands to his sides.

  He nodded once to himself, as he made a decision that would have consequences from that moment forward.

  He walked down the steps of the dais, laid a hand on his mother’s casket as he passed, and then he had passed out of that church, out of his family’s life, out of Mayfield forever.

  No more shame from his father. No more regrets. No more wishing he could be better, do better.

  Or so he thought.

  Now it was happening again.

  “Really?” he said, his face flushing. “I’ve got nowhere to go, I am at your mercy—literally at your mercy, Tom—and this is what you want to talk about?”

  “We’ve never talked about it,” his father said, settling himself back onto the stool. “And while I don’t want to hurt you, this story now has a clock ticking in the background.” He paused, fixed Jack with his eyes. “I know your sister has already told you that I am not only ailing, but laboring under a death sentence.” He smiled. “That sounded very melodramatic. Like bad TV dialogue. I apologize.”

  “I—” Jack began, and couldn’t figure out what came next. “How did you know?”

  “Because I know Mary,” Tom said. “And I know your sister has had at least three opportunities to beat you over the head with this news since you returned.” He shrugged, raised his hands, palms up. “And being Mary, she has clubbed you with it at least once. I love her. As I love you. But she is still very angry.”

  Jack nodded. She was, deservedly. “I’m sorry. Really. I don’t know what to say. But why—”

  “The reason I bring up that hard thing from the past is this,” Tom said. “I don’t have much time. I am trying to be gentle with you, Jack. I know what a hard spot you are in, and life has finally taught me to be kind to people who are in a bad way. I am not trying to shame you. Please believe me.”

  He nodded, bit his lip, then nodded again before repeating, “But I don’t have much time. I want to meet my only grandchild before I die. I want you to understand that I have never stopped loving you.” He shook his head. “And I want to understand—” He sighed deeply, as though the thought still pained him. Perhaps it did. “I want to understand why you chose at your mother’s funeral to tell us grieving souls what horrible sinners we were.”

  “I was concerned about your grieving souls,” Jack said heatedly, before realizing it was a stock answer he’d given a thousand times in the past. He wasn’t even sure now why he had done it, except that was how he had always done things.

  “What about our hearts?” his father asked. “What about some understanding of your mother’s very difficult life? What about an honest expression of grief?”

  “I—”

  “Surely, Jack,” his father said, “being a man of God is about more than shaming people for their imperfection. Especially at such a time.”

  Again, he had nothing. He had preached a thousand funerals, given that same we-have-got-to-do-better sermon, been thanked by people for being concerned for the souls of those in attendance.

  Never once, he suddenly realized, had a loved one thanked him for bringing them comfort, for soothing their
pain. It prompted something that he couldn’t help but say aloud, the verse from 2 Samuel again: “‘The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!’”

  Jack shook his head, more filled with shame than before.

  What had he done?

  Those words from 2 Samuel had floated out into the store and remained there.

  His father inclined his head, took a deep breath, looked up at him. “Jack, I don’t know if I have a week, a month, three months. I have to be honest with you now. We have to be honest with each other. And we haven’t been honest with each other. We haven’t had to.”

  Jack started to say something and his father raised a hand—it was neither the time to protest or explain. “However much it is, it’s not enough time for me to pretend. You’ve accomplished great things by every measure we hold dear. But where are those great things now? You’ve stood in front of tens of thousands of people. Where are those people now? You’ve proclaimed that we are sinful to anyone who would listen. Who was willing to stand by your side and love you when you proved the truth of that?”

  Jack felt his stomach clench. He had asked that same question a hundred times since that first trip to Mexico. But he couldn’t acknowledge it. It was easier to pick a different fight, not to talk about his own failures, but instead imagine someone else’s.

  “You are always judging me,” Jack said, crossing his arms.

  He sighed. Even to himself, he sounded fifteen years old again.

  Tom looked Jack in the eyes. “I have been guilty of that, yes. I’m sorry. But I was always loving you. I hope that counts for something, son. Here at the end.”

  They looked at each other now and said nothing. A pickup truck with dual exhausts rumbled down the street. Jack wondered if it was Dennis, on his way home to check on the ribs.

  Perhaps his father wondered the same thing. He nodded, let out his breath, let the matter drop.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get cleaned up before dinner. You’ve been working outside all day.”