The Sparrow Found A House (Sparrow Stories #1)

by Jason McIntire

  Chapter 13

  Aldebaran And False Morels

  By the time the sun began to sink toward the west, Chris and Ben figured that they had walked about ten miles. At least a third of that distance had been painfully unnecessary due to a lack of thoroughness and an abundance of tricky clues. The walking itself had taken about half the day; the other half they’d spent on increasingly-frequent rest breaks. “My legs hurt,” Chris announced, “from my ankle to about, um, my neck.”

  “Me too,” Ben agreed. “But the good news is, we’ve made it to the last daylight control point.”

  “We have?”

  “That’s a redbud tree,” Ben gestured, “even though it isn’t in bloom. There’s a robin’s nest in it, and a patch of elderberries growing at its base.”

  Chris collapsed on the ground in relief. “I’m so tired, I would have walked right past it. I can’t believe we actually managed to stay on the course and beat the sunset. After that rough start, I didn’t think we could do it.”

  “I really didn’t either,” Ben confided. “But remember, we haven’t done it yet. There’s still this star clue.”

  “Read it to me again.” Chris was back on his feet and starting to unpack his hammock, eager to get the task done while there was still light.

  “At five-hundred hours, the constellation Taurus will rise in the east. Look for Aldebaran in the constellation....”

  “Al who?”

  “Aldebaran. It’s the brightest star in Taurus, the bull – one of the brightest in the whole night sky. The Sergeant showed it to me the other day on a star chart. Fortunately, I was listening on that occasion. Anyway, he says, ‘Note its position on the horizon, which will be marked by a large tree. The objective is on a straight line between your current position and that tree. Starting out at sunrise, you should reach it with thirty minutes to spare. You’ll know you’re there when you see a large hole in the hillside.’”

  “Well, that sounds easy enough,” Chris said, “as long as you’re sure you know how to find Al whatever-it-is. Let’s both set our watch alarms for five, in case one doesn’t work.”

  “You mean four-thirty, don’t you?”

  “Uh, yeah, of course. But I’m afraid I’ll sleep right through, as tired as I am tonight.”

  “I’m tying my watch around my forehead,” Ben said. “We cannot fail now.”

  The boys were so bone-weary that making camp seemed like a monumental undertaking. When they finally had a fire and two hammocks, they called it a camp and sat down to eat dinner. At this point they began to regret the haste with which they had packed their food this morning. There was very little of a substantial nature in the sack, just junk snacks like candy and granola bars. Then Chris remembered his jacket pockets full of delicious morels, which he hastened to fetch. “How do you cook these?” he asked Ben.

  The other boy looked at the mushrooms for a long time, then slowly shook his head. “You don’t,” he said with resolution, “unless they’ve been checked by an experienced mushroom hunter. Remember the Sergeant’s note? He didn’t write that just to practice his all-caps penmanship skills. There are nasty little beasties out there called ‘false Morels.’ They look a lot like the real thing, but they can make you very sick – or worse. Have another granola bar.”

  “But I’m hungry, and I love fried mushrooms,” Chris grumbled. “And we’ve got a fire and a pan and nothing to cook. Aren’t you an experienced mushroom hunter?”

  “I’m not.” Ben shook his head as he munched on a handful of trail mix. “In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever been camping. All my know-how is of the Google variety, which is a world away from experience.”

  “Your dad never took you camping out here?”

  “Mom and Dad brought us out here occasionally to visit Nana – we didn’t call her Nana then; we called her Great Aunt Jessica. What a mouthful. Anyway, we mostly stuck to the little guest house or visited Nana and Uncle Leo, or helped in the garden. Dad was a lawyer, not an outdoorsman.”

  “Your dad was a lawyer? Then why...?”

  “Why are we so poor?” Ben finished for him. “Yeah, good question. When Mom and Dad died in the accident, his will made Great Aunt Jessica my guardian. Unfortunately, it also made Uncle Alex his executor, and gave him way too much discretion over distributing the assets. Dad wrote the will many years before, when he and Uncle Alex were close. After that, Uncle Alex married Aunt Tess, and he really changed, almost like he was another person.

  “By the time Dad died, Uncle Alex was barely speaking to him. I guess he never thought to change the will; he never really thought anything would happen to both him and Mom. Of course, no one does. But if something ever did, their primary concern was for what would happen to us.”

  “You keep saying us and we. Who’s us?”

  “I had a brother,” Ben said quietly. “He died in the wreck too.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, between Uncle Alex, his wife, and the other relatives, there was a sort of feeding frenzy, and all the money and stocks and interest in the law firm somehow disappeared.”

  “What about the house?”

  “Dad was upside-down in the house since the market tanked.”

  “That means he owed way more money than the house was worth, right?”

  “Right. He was still making payments faithfully just out of integrity, but Uncle Alex decided it made more business sense to seize the opportunity of walking away. So he talked the others into intentionally defaulting. Everything else, they split up. I was doing good to keep my bed, bike, and childhood mementos. Apart from that, the only thing they couldn’t wriggle out of was my college trust and a monthly support allowance of two hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “That’s a ripoff,” Chris exclaimed irately. “It stinks. Did you fight it in court?”

  “Believe me, I would have liked to, but Nana wouldn’t do it. She said that there are things more important than money.”

  “Maybe, but I’d sure like to have had the money too, if I were you. What good did it do to let a bunch of greedy relatives make off with it?”

  “Actually quite a bit,” Ben told him, “if you count bringing the family together in the good column.”

  “What, together to divvy up the loot?”

  “No,” Ben laughed. “They all feel kind of bad – rightly so – about the way they ripped us off. So they come around pretty regularly to visit, and take us to dinner, and generally act like they care about us.”

  “I wouldn’t let them in the house, the creeps. What’s a few dinners against the money they stole from you?”

  “Nothing,” Ben agreed. “But as Nana says, it’s not what they can do for us. She’s glad to have them around because it gives us a chance to show them Jesus.”

  “Show them Jesus? What, a picture?”

  “Yeah, exactly – a picture. And we’re it. You know, Chris, people don’t care what you say; they care how you live, and particularly how you treat them. And Nana says that the most crucial situations for our witness are the ones that involve money. The estate case in our favor was really strong, and a high-priced lawyer actually contacted Nana and offered to litigate the whole thing for twenty percent, with no up-front cost. The relatives know this, and they also know that she turned him down. I think some of them are still wondering why, and others are beginning to understand the answer. The Bible says that it’s better to let yourself get ripped off than to get dragged into a dispute fighting for your rights. It took me a long time to accept that, and I still struggle with it, but deep down, I’m glad Nana handled it the way she did. She’s right; money is not the most important thing – obeying God is.”

  “Ben, since we’re talking about this, I’ve got something I want to ask you.”

  Ben brushed off the crumbs and sat up on his hammock, suddenly looking older in the dancing campfire shadows. “Shoot.”

  “Does there have to be a particular time,” Chris asked carefully, “when
you become a Christian, or can you just sort of slide into it?”

  Ben cocked his head curiously. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because,” Chris continued, “I’ve been reading the Bible for a lot of weeks now, and doing devotions with Mom and the Sergeant, and even praying by myself sometimes. And I’ve bought it. I believe the story of Jesus, that He rose from the dead and all, and I’ve been trying to do what the Book says. I’m just wondering, though, does that make me a Christian? Or do I need to pray some particular words?”

  “This is really a better question for the Sergeant or Nana,” Ben replied, licking his lips, “but I’ll answer you best I can. The Bible says that you ‘believe unto righteousness’ with your heart. You’ve done that, I think. You believe the story of Jesus, and you’re trying to follow Him and walk in righteousness.”

  Chris nodded.

  “But the last part of that verse says, ‘with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.’ In this case it’s talking about confessing that you believe in Jesus, not confessing your sins, but you need to do that too.”

  Chris went wide-eyed. “Like, everything I’ve ever done wrong?”

  “Just the key points, and the overall fact that you realize you’re a sinner who can’t possibly save yourself. The Holy Spirit will point out your specific sins later.”

  “What, the Holy Spirit? Like at Pentecost, with the healings and gifts and stuff?”

  “The same. But He doesn’t just give us healings and gifts. In fact, those are side benefits. The Holy Spirit’s main job is to make us holy like Jesus is. And He does this by pointing out our sins in what’s called ‘conviction.’ Then, if we confess that He’s right and we’re guilty, the Blood of Jesus washes the sins away. And the Holy Spirit helps us get victory over that sin so we don’t keep doing it over and over again.”

  “I see.” Chris gulped at the unforeseen ramifications of the Christian life. “So, back to whether or not I need to pray a particular prayer?”

  “The Bible doesn’t say you have to pray a particular prayer, but it does say that you need to ‘call on the name of the Lord’ in addition to confessing your sins and affirming your belief in Jesus.”

  “And I can do this anytime, like by myself in the woods?”

  “Sure. But it’s better to do it with somebody else, so you’ll have a witness.”

  Chris thought for a moment. “I don’t have to understand everything, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay.” He stood up, suddenly no longer feeling tired. “I want to do it now.”

  Ben gulped in slightly-veiled shock. “Okay,” he stammered. “Right now. Good. Okay, let’s kneel down, and you go ahead and pray.”

  I won’t know what to say, Chris thought to himself as they knelt. I’ll look like an idiot. Oh well, God knows I’m an idiot, so Ben might as well too. Here we go. Chris opened his mouth without even an idea of which word he should say first. “Dear God,” he began, “I want to be saved, please. I’ve done a lot of bad things. I wasn’t a good son to Dad.” Chris stopped suddenly, wondering why he had said that. Yet it was true, he realized. He had been quite a handful to his father in the few years they’d had together.

  “I’ve been rebellious against Mom too,” he admitted, “and teachers, and other people in charge. I’ve told lies, and enjoyed violent games, and just pretty much failed to take any responsibility for my own life. And more than any of that, I’ve spent my life feeling sorry for myself because I’m short and fat and unpopular, instead of being grateful to You for all the good things I have.” Chris had no idea where all these thoughts were coming from, and wondered if perhaps the Holy Spirit already had that “conviction” thing going on. “Please forgive me,” he finished, “and wash away my sins with the Blood of Jesus, and send the Holy Spirit to make me different. Thank You. In Jesus’ Name, amen.”

  “Amen,” Ben repeated. “Thank You, Lord, for drawing Chris to Yourself, and please let him feel your Presence in his life now that he has chosen to follow You.”

  After a few moments, they looked up at one another, each unsure if the other had something else to add. “How do you feel?” Ben asked.

  “About the same,” Chris said thoughtfully. “But somehow, not the same.”