What Difference Do It Make?

by Ron Hall

  Since my book came out, I been to a lotta parties and sophisticated places, and everbody in there be talkin ’bout, “Gimme a glass a’ red wine.”

  Now, how come ain’t nobody sayin somethin ’bout them havin wine, but they got a problem with a homeless man havin wine? Ain’t you ever seen a rich alcoholic? And who you think needs the wine worse? You think anybody wants to be a drunk? You kiddin me, right? They ain’t havin no fun.

  Now you might say, “The homeless man ain’t got enough money to be spendin none on wine. That’s irresponsible. If you give money to a homeless man, he needs to be spendin it on food.”

  Maybe you right. The thing about it is, though, gifts is free. When you give a person a gift, you is also givin that person the freedom to do whatever they want with it. When you give a homeless man a dollar, you ain’t sayin, “Here. Go buy yourself a chicken.” If you really wanted him to have some food, you’d take him in the McDonald’s and buy him a Big Mac and a apple pie.

  No, when you give a homeless man a dollar, what you really sayin is, “I see you. You ain’t invisible. You is a person.” I tells folks to look at what’s written on all that money they be givin away: it says “In God We Trust.” You just be the blessin. Let God worry about the rest.

  Sometime, when you reach out to a homeless person, might seem like to you she’s throwed off in her mind. Like she ain’t got no sense. But sometimes things ain’t exactly the way they look. Like a friend a’ mine asked me one time, said she seen a homeless lady standin at a intersection. This lady was real skinny and her clothes was dirty and they didn’t match. She didn’t have no sign that said, “Will work 4 food” or “God bless!” She was lookin up at the sky, swayin back and forth, and talkin to the clouds in a voice like a little girl.

  My friend said she felt bad ’cause she was scared to give the lady any money, scared she had somethin wrong with her.

  “Wadn’t nothin wrong with her,” I told my friend. “Sound like to me she just didn’t want to be bothered.”

  But a lotta times there is somethin wrong with homeless folks. Mr. Don Shisler down at the Union Gospel Mission told me one time he thinks about six or seven outta ever ten homeless has got some kinda mental problem. At one point, they was regular folks like you that might sit around and read a book ’bout folks like them. But somethin happened to em that got em throwed off.

  Maybe a fella’s wife throwed him out, so he went to live with his cousin. Then his cousin throwed him out, so he wound up on the street. I ain’t sayin he didn’t do nothin to deserve it. Maybe he did, but that don’t mean he ain’t still one a’ God’s children.

  I remember when I rolled into Fort Worth on that freight train. It wadn’t too long after that president named Kennedy got shot dead in Dallas. I used to camp out in the hobo jungle at night and panhandle for food during the daytime.

  Some homeless fellas taught me a trick called “the hamburger drop.” That’s when you get you a little money, say about a dollar, and you go down to the McDonald’s or the Burger King and buy yourself a cheap burger. Then you go to some fancy part a’ town where everbody got on coats and ties and workin in them big glass buildins. Now, this don’t work unless you can find a buildin with a trash can out front. Once you spot it, you take a coupla bites out that burger, then—when you sure nobody’s comin—you stash that burger down in that trash can real careful.

  Now you wait till you see somebody comin, and when you do, you act like you diggin in the garbage for food, and then you pop up with that burger and start eatin it.

  Nine times outta ten, them rich folks is gon’ stop you cold and yell, “Hey, don’t eat that!” Then they gon’ give you some money and tell you to go buy yourself somethin to eat.

  When I first got to Fort Worth, I remember a lotta times wishin that instead of givin me money, somebody’d just ask me my name. But after a while, when I figured out city folks thought I wadn’t no better than a speck a’ dust, my heart began to grow a tough hide over it, like a orange that’s been left out in the sun. My heart got harder and harder. Pretty soon, all I wanted was for folks to gimme that dollar and leave me alone.

  That’s when homeless folks that ain’t drinkin or druggin already make themselves a new friend. Them half-pints and beers and little packets a’ white powder becomes their friend, their pastor, their storm shelter—a deep, dark, hummin hole they can crawl into to escape from themselves even if it’s just for a little while. They tryin to drown their problem—or burn it.

  Now whatever drove them to the streets from the get-go is a problem, and whatever they is usin to escape is a problem.

  So now they got two problems.

  11

  Ron

  That Deborah would get cancer made no more sense than a drive-by shooting. She was the most health-conscious person I had ever known. She didn’t eat junk food or smoke. She stayed fit and took vitamins. There was no history of cancer in her family. Zero risk factors.

  What Denver had said three weeks earlier haunted me: Those precious to God become important to Satan. Watch your back, Mr. Ron! Somethin bad fixin to happen to Miss Debbie.

  Just before midnight she stirred. I stood and leaned over her bed, my face pressed close to hers. Her eyes opened, drowsy with narcotics. “Is it in my liver?”

  “Yes.” I paused and looked down at her, trying vainly to drive sadness from my face. “But there’s still hope.”

  She closed her eyes again, and the moment I had dreaded for hours passed quickly without a single tear. My own dry eyes didn’t surprise me—I had never really learned how to cry. But now life had presented a reason to learn, and I yearned for a river of tears, a biblical flood. Maybe my broken heart would teach my eyes what to do.

  At age seventy-five, my daddy was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Even though the doctors said it was slow-growing and that he would probably die of something else, he called us all together to say good-byes and give him last rites, even though he wasn’t Catholic. I guess he reasoned he was entitled since he’d voted for Kennedy. My brother led him in the sinner’s prayer. Daddy repeated it after John and said he understood that he was praying Christ would forgive him of his sins.

  I was skeptical. And it made Daddy mad when I reminded him that his doctors weren’t at all worried that he was at death’s door. No doubt he was feeling his mortality and begging for the attention that I had spent a lifetime withholding.

  Four years later, in April 1999, Deborah was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of colon and liver cancer. Some doctors thought she might only live three months; others thought a year. Though her prognosis was catastrophic, we were not going down without a fight, and she began a very aggressive chemotherapy regimen, sometimes alternating different treatments within the same week. The drugs took her down swiftly, but she fought like the last warrior left standing at Troy. Deborah had a lot to live for, like seeing her dream of revival coming to our city through Denver. She also longed to see Regan and Carson get married and to be a grandmother to the grandchildren she had prayed for since our children became our own.

  On Christmas Day of that year, Deborah did something heroic. She cooked a gourmet dinner at Rocky Top, the 350acre ranch we had bought in 1990, and she decorated it in the style of the authentic Old West. Don’t ask how she did it. No one can explain that. But with her elegance and style, all Deborah’s special dinners were fit for royalty, and they usually included an invitation to Denver and to the ungrateful “Earl of Haltom,” a noble title I had bestowed on my dad as a joke. (We had moved to the Fort Worth suburb of Haltom City when I was seven.)

  As we took our places at the table, we blessed the food and praised God for the strength he had given Deborah to prepare it. And, of course, we asked for healings. I’m sure he meant no malice, but before the first bite, Dad commented, “Cancer ain’t no big deal. I’ve had prostate cancer for four years, and it don’t bother me a bit. Y’all are making a big deal about nothin!”

  Deborah left the table in tears.
Daddy was angry that she left the table. He looked at my mother and said, “Let’s go home Tommye. We’re not welcome here!”

  They left. Denver walked them to their car. The meal went into the refrigerator. Carson, Regan, and I crawled into bed with Deborah.

  Denver acted as though he was very uncomfortable but avoided taking sides. It was his second Christmas with us, and he was confused. He took a walk down by the river to gather his thoughts, then returned to the house and knocked on our door.

  “Bless him,” he told me when I answered it.

  “Who?”

  “Your daddy. He meant no wrong, and I praise God for your father and his life. He’s a good man, and he’s a part of my blessin. If it hadn’t been for your father, there wouldn’t be no Mr. Ron. And if it hadn’t been for you and Miss Debbie, I’d still be in the bushes instead of havin Christmas with you.

  “I want you to hear me real good on this, Mr. Ron. Just bless him.”

  I listened to what Denver had to say and acted as though I planned to take his advice. But the truth was, I thought his advice was ill informed at best and possibly tainted by the fact that he was used to living around all manner of addicts and alcoholics. Besides, Denver had no idea of the hell and embarrassment Earl Hall had put my family through over the years. And even if Denver had a small point—that there was more to the man than the “Earl in the bottle”—I wasn’t ready to let him out.

  12

  Ron

  I was fifty-five, graying at the temples, with half my heart lying in the ground at Rocky Top. How to survive? How to move forward? I felt trapped in a whiteout snowstorm with no guide and fresh out of supplies. The intensity of my fear surprised me.

  For weeks, I wandered through the house like a ghost in a graveyard. I haunted Deborah’s closet, opening the drawers and cabinets, touching her scarves, her stockings, burying my face in her clothes, trying to breathe in her scent. Sometimes I closed the closet door behind me and sat there in the dark, holding the last photograph ever taken of us together.

  On November 3, 2000, my wife of thirty-one years and seven days passed into eternity. Cancer took her, but I blamed God more than cancer for ripping her away from me and shredding my heart in the process.

  For a couple of weeks, a whirl of activity blunted my new reality—the private graveside service where we buried Deborah in her favorite spot at Rocky Top, the church memorial service, a getaway with my son and daughter meant to help us process our grief. But then the busyness was done, and I stood at the edge of the yawning black chasm that was a life without my wife.

  I paced the halls, crying, tears running down my face in sheets. I couldn’t stop. And nothing that anyone could say seemed to help.

  Worst of all were the expressions of Christian sympathy.

  “You know, Ron, we’ve been praying for Deborah to be healed,” some well-meaning person would say. “And now she’s healed forever.”

  Bull, I thought. She’s dead.

  In my blackest moments, I might even have said that out loud. It angered me that people might think some pat little Christian phrase would quench the inferno of my grief. At other times, I realized people meant well and, mainly, spoke wounding words because they didn’t know what else to say.

  There were just a couple of people who did know what to say: “I can’t even imagine how you must be feeling, but I just want you to know that I love you.” Those were the people who climbed down with me into the pit of my grief and stayed with me. But the grief pit is a pretty nasty, slimy place, and most people don’t want to get down in it.

  To keep them from having to, I withdrew from everyone, even my friends. I just wanted to disappear. And at times, it seemed I was disappearing—literally. Inside of three weeks, I lost twenty-five pounds. The bones of my face cut sharp angles. My clothes flapped on my frame, an empty husk where a man used to be.

  I didn’t want anyone to see me, even if I had a decent day. I felt that if I looked happy, someone would mistake that for meaning I was doing well. I did not want to do well. I wanted my time in sackcloth and ashes and did not want to be robbed of it. I would go to the grocery store at two in the morning just so I wouldn’t have to see anyone.

  Psychologists like to talk about the stages of grief: anger, bargaining, denial, depression, acceptance. For a long time after Deborah died, I stayed stuck in anger like a tractor stuck in the mud on a Texas blackland farm after a pouring rain. To call it anger seems too mild. You can be angry over a broken dish or a lost football game. This was profound rage, and it had one primary target:

  As I fired arrows of blame—at the doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, cancer researchers—clearly the bull’s-eye was God. It was He who had ripped a gaping and irreparable hole in my heart. Without a gun or mask, He robbed me of my wife and stole my children’s mother and my grandchildren’s grandmother. I had trusted Him, and He had failed me.

  I was afraid to be real about that. I knew most of my Christian friends would not understand my anger. They all wanted me to take a different path than I took, to praise God for His divine plan, to resign myself to His will.

  Instead, I sat in my room alone, screaming at Him, “If that’s what You do to the people who love You most, I don’t want to love You!”

  Sometimes I wished one of my Christian friends would just be real with me. That one of them would say something like, “Can you believe what God did? It doesn’t seem fair!”

  It might have comforted me if they’d said that. Since Deborah’s death, I try never to mute another person’s grief with some kind of verbal anesthetic. Instead, I try to just cry with them and sometimes even to simply say, “Yeah, that stinks.”

  But even as I wished someone would be that real with me in my grief, a truth nagged at the back of my mind. It percolated way down in the blue pool of my soul, where there lay a small inlet somehow unfouled by rage: God did the same thing to His own son—ordained for him an excruciatingly painful death.

  And Jesus said, “No servant is better than his Master.”

  If anyone I had ever known was a servant of God, it was my wife. She did not want to die, but she did want to serve God. And she had, serving Him—through serving the homeless—right up until the moment when her body would no longer allow it.

  Shortly after Deborah died, her best friend, Mary Ellen, shared with me that verse from the gospel of John that I mentioned ear-lier: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

  Within weeks of Deborah’s death, more than half a million dollars had poured into the Union Gospel Mission—money designated to build a chapel and state-of-the-art facility that would help homeless men, women, and children in Deborah’s name. By 2009, Deborah’s story had raised more than thirty million dollars for homeless shelters around America.

  Do I wish God could’ve managed to help the homeless without taking my wife?

  Absolutely.

  Do I believe Deborah, if she could now see the fruit, would want to come back?

  Absolutely not.

  The pain of losing her still brings tears, especially when I play with my three granddaughters—granddaughters Deborah never got to meet. But Denver met them for her. Griffin, my daughter Regan’s girl, is now three and a half. When she was born in 2005, she was the first white baby Denver ever held.

  Daddy cried at Deborah’s funeral, said she always treated him with respect. A year later, we broke ground for the new homeless mission and chapel to be named after her down on East Lancaster. Mama came, as well as the mayor and several state legislators.

  Dad stayed home.

  “What’s all the big deal raising money and building buildings for the homeless?” he groused. “They ain’t nothin but a bunch of drunks and addicts. They got themselves in the mess. Let ’em get out on their own.”

  He endeared himself to me further with this addition: “If you wanna give a bunch of money to someone, why do
n’t you give it to me?”

  ”What would you spend it on?” I asked.

  “I’d buy better whiskey—Jack Daniels instead of Jim Beam!”

  It irritated Dad to no end that I spent far more time with Denver than with him. And even worse, every time I visited him, Denver was with me. Earl Hall had definitely been a racist. He claimed to have taken a cure and gotten over it, but I didn’t believe him.

  Dad told me it wasn’t right for a man to live alone and that a very beautiful person was going to move in with me—him. I actually thought that was funny, and for the first time I caught a glimpse of his humor with fresh vision. But a couple of months later, it dang near killed him when I moved Denver in with me instead of him.

  Lupe Murchison, John D.’s fabulously wealthy widow, had followed her husband into glory, leaving two hundred million dollars to charity. The Murchison family asked me to move into the estate and sell off the Murchison art collection, which was valued at around ten million dollars. I invited Denver to move in with me and help me guard the place. That meant Daddy had to stay in Haltom City. When it came to sowing and reaping, I tallied that as a fair deal.

  CARINA

  Rearview Mirror

  As the mother of four boys, from toddler to age eight, Carina Delacanal had very little time to herself. In 2007, she learned she might not have much time left at all.

  Carina, then twenty-nine, had just given birth to her youngest son, Joshua. And while three boys plus a new baby could drive any woman to distraction, Carina began to think that something might actually be wrong with her. “I noticed I was more forgetful than usual,” Carina remembers. “Just for peace of mind, I went to see my doctor.”

  Peace was not what she found.

  “The news isn’t as good as I’d hoped,” the doctor told Carina when the results of a CAT scan came back. “You have what we call an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) on the right side of your brain.”