Jill had stopped trying to figure out who these people were. Instead, she was captivated. She felt like a kid waiting for the next chapter of the storybook. “Uh huh.”
“So Friend Two asks the son to come talk to him. The son is frightened. He’s not sure if this man is a friend or an enemy, and let’s face it, he’s got a little touch of paranoia because of what happened to his family when he was a kid. But he agrees to come. And when he sees him, Friend Two tells him that he was in covenant with his father, and that he is sworn to protect him, too. So he invites him to move into his expensive home, and eat at his table, and live like one of his own sons. In one day, the son is transformed from being a poverty-stricken, crippled recluse to having all the riches that Friend Two can offer.”
Jill smiled. “That’s a beautiful story, Dan. Who are the people?”
He paused, just long enough to raise her anticipation. “They were Jonathan and David, from the Bible. And the son was Mephibosheth. Second Samuel chapter nine.”
She closed her eyes, ashamed that she hadn’t recognized it. “No wonder it sounds familiar. Jerry told me parts of the same story.”
“Really? Well, I was telling Nick about all this covenant stuff, and he showed it to me. Whoever said the Bible isn’t a great read?”
She turned to 1 Samuel in her Bible, and flipped through until she found the first passage about Jonathan and David. “It sure is. I can’t believe I haven’t been reading it.”
“But there’s more,” Dan said. “The coolest part. Nick showed me in Galatians 3 where it says we’re clothed with Christ, so when we accept Christ, we take his robe, so to speak. And we’re identified with him. His family is our family. His enemies, Satan and all who fight with him, are our enemies. Jill, we just gloss right over Jesus saying this is the new covenant in his blood. But we are in covenant with Christ. Isn’t that great?”
Tears filled her eyes. “Yes. That is great.” She swallowed. “I was just reading about the Abrahamic covenant, where God passed between the pieces of flesh…”
“Yes!” Dan was getting more excited. “Nick said that we do that when we enter into covenant with Christ. We symbolically pass between the pieces of Christ’s flesh. He showed me in Hebrews 10:20, where it says we can enter the holy place through—and I quote—the veil, that is, Jesus’ flesh. So you see? We do walk between the pieces. We are in covenant with Christ, in just that way. This is the coolest thing!”
She nodded, unable to speak. “I sure don’t live like much of a covenant partner.”
“Neither do I.” He was silent for a moment. “Listen, I just wanted to share this with you, because it seemed important to you today.”
“It is.” She wiped her tears. “But all this doesn’t explain why Jerry would still defend Frank Harper after he started killing people.” She frowned and tried to remember what Jerry had said. “He told me something about the Gideonites or somebody, who deceived the Israelites. Oh, I should have taken notes.”
“I’ll ask Nick.”
“Okay. Call me back on the cell phone if you find out.”
“Will do. Say hi to Allie for me.”
She felt a slight pang of guilt that he didn’t know where she was, but she wasn’t prepared to tell the truth and get into a long, distracting discussion. She wanted to bask in this new information she had about her savior. “I’ll talk to you later, Dan. And thanks for the story. I needed that tonight.”
She hung up and stared down at the pages of her Bible. There was so much she needed to know, so much she had never understood. How would she ever be able to absorb it all?
She had a good, repentant cry, then prayed a while before going back to the Bible. And as she read, a gentle peace fell over her, even as more questions about Jerry and Frank were raised.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Ray Ford’s kitchen was alive with the sounds of laughing children playing on the floor in the corner. His sixteen-year-old daughter Vanessa sat cross-legged on the linoleum. He came into the room and smiled down at her. He hadn’t seen her playing in years. She wouldn’t have done so now, if her mother hadn’t put her in charge of the Ingalls children while Susan and Debbie cleaned up the supper dishes, then relaxed with a cup of coffee. Vanessa still sat there with them, though she probably could have turned them back over to their mother at any time along the way. He enjoyed watching her delight in the children.
“Debbie got a contractor to come look at the repairs on the house today,” Susan told him. “It’s gonna take a lot longer to get it fixed than we thought.”
“You stay as long as you need to,” Ray said. “Don’t you worry about us. We got plenty of room here.”
Debbie smiled that humble smile that made him feel even more sympathy for her plight. “I don’t know why you’re being so kind to me, but I appreciate it.”
The phone rang before Ray could answer, and he turned around and picked it up. “Yello?”
There was a long pause, then…
“Ray Ford? Is that you?”
Ray didn’t recognize the voice. “Yeah, it’s me. Who’s this?”
“Larry. Larry Hampton.”
Ray slowly straightened from his end-of-day slump and shot Susan a look. “I been tryin’ to find you,” he said into the phone.
Again, a long pause. “My sister told me.”
“She said she didn’t know where you were,” Ray said.
“She didn’t, exactly. But she knew how she could get in touch with me.”
“Well, did she tell you why I called?”
Again, silence. When Larry spoke again, his voice was broken. “She said…that Mary…” He couldn’t finish the words. He swallowed back the emotion in his voice, and cleared his throat. “How’s Pete?”
“Well, he ain’t doin’ so good. He’s in the hospital and still on a ventilator. He got some cracks on his skull, cuts and bruises all over his body, but that ain’t the worst part. The hole in his heart is the part we’re most worried about.”
“How’s he taking it? His mom’s death…”
“How do you think he’s takin’ it?”
Larry was silent for a long moment. “I know what you must think of me, Ray. But trust me, there’s nothing you can think about me that I haven’t thought about myself.”
Ray leaned back on the counter. “I ain’t here to make judgments, man. I just want to reunite a family.”
“Maybe it’s too late for that.”
“Well, sure it is with you and Mary. It’s past too late. But you got a kid, you know. A kid who right now thinks he’s a orphan.”
Larry’s voice was full of tears and regret. “I want to come back…get him…but his grandmother…”
“You think his grammaw gon’ turn you away, when you the only parent he got left?”
“She should,” Larry said. “The way I left town. I never planned on showing my face there again.”
“Well, you need to change your plans,” Ray said. “Comes a time in life when you need to worry about your own kid more than your reputation.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Larry told him. “I’m just not sure that Pete isn’t better off with his grandma.”
“Grammaws are nice,” Ray said. “She’ll do fine, if she’s all he’s got. After a couple years, he’ll get over the pain, move on, grow up. That crack in his skull’ll heal, his bones will get strong again, them cuts and bruises’ll go back to normal, but that hole in his life, it ain’t ever gon’ go away. He needs his daddy.”
“But what will I tell him?” Larry asked.
“Tell him you love him. Tell him you won’t leave him again.”
Larry’s raspy voice came with much effort. “I don’t trust myself to keep that promise.”
Clutching the phone, Ray glanced at Susan and Debbie, then stepped into the laundry room, pulling the cord as tight as he could for privacy. “You know, all this regret is real movin’ and all, but it don’t mean nothin’ if you don’t come back and take care of your bo
y.”
“I called, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you called. But that don’t make you a man.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t make me a man? I’m thirty-five years old.”
“Only a coward would stay away when his boy needed him like this. I never took you for a coward, Larry, till you up and left your family. But it ain’t too late to change things.”
“Well, if I had been trying to be your champion, I guess I wouldn’t have left.”
“You ought to be your boy’s champion. That’s what fathers are s’posed to be.” He knew he was making Larry mad, that it was quite possible that he’d get ticked off and hang up the phone, and Ray would never be able to get in touch with him again. But it needed saying. And he didn’t have a lot of patience for tact these days. “Are you coming back, or ain’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Larry said. “Just tell me where he is. What room?”
“He’s in the Pendleton Memorial Hospital in New Orleans.” Again, that choked emotion in his voice. “Has he been asking for me?”
“Are you kiddin’ me?” Ray asked. “He don’t know to ask for you. He don’t know where you are. All he knows is you took off and left him one day. And it was just him and his mama, and now his mama took off and left him. Now it’s just him and his grammaw.”
“I can’t take care of him. I can’t raise him. Not by myself. My life is a mess right now, Ray. It’s upside down.”
“You don’t think his life is upside down?” Ray asked. “All I’m askin’ you to do is come back here and show that boy that he ain’t a orphan. Let him know you didn’t leave him without lookin’ back. Let him know he’s still got one parent alive on this earth who loves him.”
Silence on the phone line was almost audible. Ray thought back over his history with Larry. They’d never been close friends, but they’d played Little League baseball on the worst team in the league. They’d both played in the band in high school. They’d been in the same vacation Bible school class year after year. They knew much of the same Scripture. “Man, I know the guilt is eatin’ you up. I know you think it’s too late to ever make things right with your boy. But you remember all the Scripture they taught us way back in Bible school? You remember that verse they taught us in fourth grade? Romans 5:8? They hammered it into us so we’d never forget it. It was practically tattooed on our foreheads.”
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this,” Larry whispered. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” His voice broke off, and Ray heard him weeping.
“You remember the way home,” Ray said. “Come on home, Larry. People need you here.”
Finally, Ray heard a barely discernible click, followed by a dial tone. Larry had hung up.
Ray breathed a deep sigh and closed his eyes, wishing he hadn’t been so hard on him. Maybe a little gentleness, instead of anger, could have lured him back. He went back into the kitchen to hang up the phone.
Susan was waiting. “Was that Larry Hampton?”
Ray stared down at the cord still swinging against the wall. “Yeah, that was him, all right.”
“What did he say? Is he coming back to see Pete?”
He stared down at the floor between his feet. “Got me. I did my best.”
“Pete Hampton,” Debbie said. “Is that the little boy who was in the explosion?”
“That’s right,” Ray said, looking down at her. He started to add that it was the explosion her husband was probably a part of. The one they had spent hours fighting. The one that had killed three of their friends. But he knew it wasn’t Debbie’s fault. When they had taken her in, he and Susan had made a decision to minister to her and the kids without any condemnation. He wasn’t going to start condemning now.
“His daddy left him a couple of years ago,” Susan explained. “We’ve been tryin’ to find him.”
“How sad.”
“Yeah, it’s awful,” Susan agreed.
“Susan, I don’t know if he might call back,” Ray said. “But if he does, and I ain’t here, you get a number, if you can. I need to be able to call him back.”
“He didn’t give you one this time?”
Ray shook his head. “There’s no tellin’ how I might get in touch with him again. At least he’s been told.”
“So you don’t think he’ll come back?”
“It depends,” Ray said, “on how much a coward he’s come to be.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Dan couldn’t sleep that night as thoughts of his conversations with Nick and Jill about covenant kept reeling through his mind. Finally, he quit trying to sleep, got up and dressed again, then went into the workout room and began to lift weights with his good arm. It was how he always worked out his frustrations and his anxieties; he tried some form of self-improvement. But he didn’t understand why the subject of covenants, while it brought such joy, also brought such anxiety. Was there something in him that needed repentance?
Then his mind drifted back to Jill. Covenant. Wasn’t that what people entered when they married? Was that why this subject inspired such anxiety? Was it the fear that someday he might enter into a covenant with Jill, or the fear that he wouldn’t? Was it the fear that he wouldn’t have the guts, or the fear that he couldn’t keep the promise?
He saw a light come on in the kitchen. He put the weights back in their places, then stepped into the doorway to see who was there. He saw Nick sitting at the table with his Bible and papers spread out in front of him. He was, no doubt, working on his sermon for next Sunday.
Nick looked up and saw Dan standing in the doorway. “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.
“Nope,” Dan said. “I’ve got a lot of things on my mind.”
“The stuff we talked about?” Nick asked.
Dan nodded and took the seat across from Nick at the table.
“Did something I said bother you?” Nick asked. “Anything you didn’t understand?”
“No, I understand it all,” Dan said. “I passed it on to Jill. It’s really pretty exciting stuff.”
“Sure is,” Nick said. “But most of us preachers don’t talk about it much from the pulpit. I guess we feel like it’s too much stuff to fit into a thirty-minute sermon.”
“Maybe you need to go overtime.”
“Right,” Nick said. “They’d be nodding off all over the room. No, in this sound bite culture, I can’t hold them that long.”
“Maybe you could do a series on it.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Nick said. “That’s why I decided to get up and work. It was fresh on my mind. I’m working on a covenant series right now.”
“Good,” Dan said. “I think I need to hear that.” He regarded Nick for a moment, wondering if he should tell him what was on his mind about covenants and Jill…and the fear he had of failing. But suddenly the door opened, and Issie Mattreaux, one of the paramedics who got off at eleven, came in and headed for the refrigerator.
She started when she saw them. “Oh, hey. I didn’t think anybody was in here.”
Nick seemed to sit straighter, and smiled up at her. “You just get off?”
Dan noticed something between them—a tension in the way they avoided each other’s eyes and spoke in short phrases.
“Yeah. I just needed to get something out of the fridge.”
Dan looked up at her. She was a beautiful woman with silky black hair, tanned skin, and the build of a teenager. She probably wore a little too much makeup, more than Dan’s taste, but she certainly stood out in a crowd.
He watched Nick’s eyes following her across the room.
“So what are you guys doing?” Issie asked as she pulled her drink out of the fridge.
“I’m working on a sermon,” Nick said. “You should come hear it.”
She grinned. “You know I don’t do church.” She took a drink, then headed back to the door. “Well, I guess I’ll go home.”
“You gotta be somewhere?” he asked.
Sh
e turned around. “No, I just thought I’d go get some sleep.”
“Why don’t you pull up a chair and talk for a while?”
Dan knew right away that something was up. It wasn’t like Nick to waylay a beautiful woman unless he had an agenda. He suspected the agenda had more to do with his heart than his head. Issie Mattreaux was bad news.
Instead of sitting beside Nick, she sat next to Dan. “So, Dan, what’s up with you? Anybody tried to run you off a bridge lately?”
Dan didn’t find that amusing. “Been a couple of days.”
“So what did you do about your car?”
“They totaled it. The insurance is giving me a check tomorrow. Guess I’ll be shopping for a new one.”
Nick kept looking from Dan to Issie, as if there was something he wanted to say, and suddenly Dan felt as if he was in the way. He slapped his hands down on the table and stood up slowly. “Well, guess I’ll hit the sack.”
Issie sprang to her feet, as if she didn’t want to be left alone with Nick. “Me, too. I gotta go. See you both later.”
She headed out as quickly as she’d come in, and Nick’s eyes followed her to the door. “She’s not going home,” he said when the door had closed. “She’s going to Joe’s Place.”
Dan sat back down. “Why do you say that?”
“Because that’s what she does. That’s where she goes every night when she gets off at eleven.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve seen her go there.”
Dan stared at him, trying to evaluate why that would matter to him so. “She’s a big girl. Makes her own choices.”
“Yeah, I know,” Nick said. “But I wish she wouldn’t, because they hurt her.”
Now, Dan’s eyes narrowed, and he half-grinned at his preacher. “Nick, you’re not interested in her, are you?”
Nick looked down at his Bible again, and stared at the words as if he was reading, but Dan knew better. The question was probably circling around in his mind, and he was framing it, trying to figure out how to answer…probably searching his soul for the truth, because he didn’t know, himself. Finally, Nick looked up at him. “I can’t be interested in her, Dan. But I do have a real burden for her. She’s lost and unhappy, and she constantly gets herself into situations that get her into trouble. I worry about her.”