by Ron Hall
“These spots are a little troubling, but it’s nothing to worry about yet,” said one.
“It’s possible they’re birthmarks,” said another. “I’ve seen that before.”
But none of them looked us in the eye. The word cancer floated through my mind like a poisonous gas, but I didn’t dare utter it.
“We’ve scheduled a colonoscopy for tomorrow morning,” Craig said. They would withhold judgment until then.
At home that night, we settled into bed, and Deborah shared with me the story of Joshua and Caleb, two of twelve men Moses sent to spy out the Promised Land and bring back a report for the children of Israel.
We lay facing each other, heads on white-cased pillows. “When the spies came back, they brought good news and bad news,” Deborah said, her voice lilting softly like a storyteller. “The good news was that the land did flow with milk and honey, just as God had promised. The bad news was that the land was inhabited by giants.” The Israelites wept with fear, she went on, all except for Joshua and Caleb, who said, “If the Lord is pleased with us, He will give us the land. Do not be afraid.”
Deborah fell silent for a few minutes, then raised her eyes to mine. “Ron, I’m afraid.”
I pulled her to me and held her. We prayed about the colonoscopy. That the Lord would be pleased with us, that the doctors would bring back a good report.
Stars hung like ice in a black sky when we pulled into the All Saints parking lot the next morning. Word of Deborah’s pending diagnosis had spread among our friends, and we were surprised and touched to find about twenty of them clustered in the day surgery waiting room, praying.
As the doctors wheeled Deborah away and she made her pale face brave, we prayed for a good report. I posted myself outside the door of the endoscopy room—as close to Deborah as they’d let me get—and paced the cold tile floors. I alternated between prayer and mild panic, between “the peace of God that surpasses all understanding” and bubbling nausea. An eon ticked by, then an epoch. Sand through an hourglass a grain at a time.
Finally, through the square of wired safety glass, I saw nurses wheeling Deborah into recovery and rushed to join her. Through heavily lidded eyes, she looked up at me, her bottom lip protruding slightly in a way it did only when she was truly sad. She mouthed the word cancer, her lips attempting a half-smile to cushion the blow.
Then tiny tears appeared in the corners of her eyes and spilled down her pale cheeks and I remembered her words from the night before: giants in the Promised Land.
30
It was Miss Mary Ellen that told me about Miss Debbie. She come down to the mission alone to lead that Bible study Sister Bettie let em have, and when I seen Miss Debbie wadn’t with her, I asked her where was she at.
Miss Mary Ellen put her hand on my shoulder. “I have some bad news, Denver. Miss Debbie went to the doctor and . . . it’s serious. She has cancer.”
When Miss Mary Ellen said “cancer,” I couldn’t hardly believe it. Didn’t look like a thing in the world was wrong with Miss Debbie. Here she was, comin down to the mission two or three times ever week, feedin down at the Lot, leadin a Bible study. Seemed so perfect in her health.
The first thing I knowed was that God was gon’ heal Miss Debbie. The second thing I knowed was that I was afraid. What if He didn’t heal her? In my life, I had already lost most a’ the people that was important to me—Big Mama and Uncle James and Aunt Etha. Miss Debbie was the first person that had loved me unconditionally in over thirty years. Here I’d let her get close and, sure ’nough, looked like maybe God was gettin ready to take her, too.
I got scared my life was gon’ be changed forever. Then I started worryin how was everbody else at the mission gon’ take it when they heard?
I ain’t gon’ sugarcoat it: They took it purty hard. There’s a lot of folks come down to the mission and volunteer, but most of em was not faithful like Miss Debbie. But that wadn’t all. It was the way she treated the homeless that made them accept her as their friend. She never asked em no questions, like how come you is in here? Where you been? How many times you been in jail? How come you done all them bad things in your life? She just loved em, no strings attached.
That’s the way she loved me, too. The Word says God don’t give us credit for lovin the folks we want to love anyway. No, He gives us credit for loving the unlovable. The perfect love of God don’t come with no conditions, and that’s the kind of love Miss Debbie showed the folks at the mission.
After we heard about Miss Debbie, me and Chef Jim got to be purty tight. We never had no special prayer group before, but ever mornin me and Chef Jim would meet up in the kitchen and pray for Miss Debbie and her family. And there was other folks prayin, too.
You know, if you ain’t poor, you might think it’s the folks in them big ole fine brick churches that’s doin all the givin and the carin and the prayin. I wish you coulda seen all them little circles a’ homeless folks with their heads bowed and their eyes closed, whisperin what was on their hearts. Seemed like they didn’t have nothin to give, but they was givin what they had, takin the time to knock on God’s front door and ask Him to heal this woman that had loved them.
31
Deborah’s doctors scheduled another surgery for three days later. Deborah, Carson, Regan, and I retreated to Rocky Top to pray and think things through as a family. Maybe “retreated” isn’t the right word, at least not in my case, for the ranch became my war room.
We would probably spend a year in this battle, I told Deborah, then celebrate our victory, maybe even with a parade like soldiers returning from war, or the Apollo 13 astronauts rumbling safely back to earth after a space flight that seemed doomed. On the road from here to there, we knew that pain, tears, and fear waited like assassins. But pain makes life fuller, richer. And I remembered what Denver’s aunt Etha told him: “Good medicine always tastes bad.”
I was confident that the right medicine was out there, and it became my mission to find it. As of that day, supported by my partners, I basically hung an out-of-business sign on my Dallas gallery. It was only days before hired crews were to sweep into Fort Worth to remove the Calder sculpture in the most lucrative coup of my career. But my partners agreed to handle the final operation, and I asked them not to fill me in on the details. It meant nothing now. I was in the army again, this time a field general in the war on cancer.
Our friends Roy Gene and Pame Evans joined us at Rocky Top. An investor, horseman, and the scion of a prominent Dallas family, Roy Gene had built his ranch house one bluff over from ours, overlooking the same crescent of the Brazos and the green valley beyond. We had spent nearly every weekend at the ranch with them for the past eight years.
They hadn’t planned to come down that weekend, but drove the one hundred miles just to come and love on Deborah for a while and encourage her to fight hard. Roy Gene, as another friend once described him, is a little like John Wayne: a big, comforting presence who speaks slowly, softly, and uses few words, but always good ones. Pame is a cancer survivor, a woman of many words who uses them to heal, like salve on a wound.
Conflicting emotions layered those days at Rocky Top. Our optimism and confident prayers for healing were real. But like rain falling from a sunny sky, Deborah and I sensed without discussing it aloud that her prospects for a long life were grim. A few years earlier, we had lost our friend John Truleson to colon cancer of the liver. After multiple rounds of debilitating chemotherapy, he died, withered to a shadow and racked with pain.
Those memories were fresh on both our minds. “Ron, if the cancer has spread outside my colon and those spots we saw aren’t birthmarks, I don’t want to fight it,” she told me on our second day at Rocky Top.
“We don’t have to make that decision now,” I said.
But in fact, the decision had already been made. This was the woman who feared nothing but rattlesnakes and yellow jackets. Who had stared a dead marriage and another woman in the eye and fought to keep her man. Who tamed Denver Moo
re, the meanest junkyard dog in one of the nastiest ghettos in Texas.
She would fight. She just didn’t know it yet.
And yet for all the courage I knew she had, she had shown this glimmer of fear. Oh, how I loved her then. Fiercely. The passion you feel down in your guts where no one else can see and only you know its frightening force. I could remember that there were times in our nearly three decades of marriage that I had loved her less than at that moment, and guilt pierced my heart like a spike. Though she had always given unconditionally, I had often not been willing to do so in return. She has deserved better than she’s gotten from me, I thought, and nearly drowned in a wave of regret thirty years deep.
Then I resolved to love her as she had never been loved before.
On the day of the surgery, we drove to All Saints Hospital unsure of our future but with a full tank of faith. A team of surgeons, led by Dr. Paul Senter, planned to remove most of her colon and any other cancer they found that they deemed safe to remove. During the five-hour surgery, about fifty friends gathered in the waiting room.
Five hours after surgical technicians wheeled my wife away, Dr. Senter returned. Unsmiling and battle-weary, he asked to speak to me and the children, alone.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said, after we’d moved to a small office. “It’s not good.”
The cancer had pushed outward from her colon, invading her entire abdominal cavity, wrapping itself around her liver like a shroud.
“She needs more surgery,” he said.
I asked for no prognosis, no time-left-to-live, as only God knows the number of our days. Still, God had apparently been busy with other matters. Our most passionate prayers had not triggered a good report after the colonoscopy. Our prayers for healing at Rocky Top had not beaten back the lethal invader doctors had discovered inside my wife. Wounded and nearly blind with fear, I clung to the Scriptures:
“Ask and you shall receive . . .”
“Pray without ceasing . . .”
“I will do whatever you ask for in My name . . .”
Grimly, I shut out another verse, this one from the book of Job: “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”
After the surgery, I sat shell-shocked beside Deborah’s bed. Tubes bristled from her face and arms, probing her sleep, snaking back to boxes that blinked a maddening medical code I couldn’t understand. My insides felt crushed, as though we’d been injured in some apocalyptic accident. Numb and silent, I waited for her to wake. I did not move my eyes from hers. I wondered what she might be feeling. I wondered if either of us would survive.
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 bro-ken heart would teach my eyes what to do.
32
After four days, Deborah’s hospital room looked like a florist’s shop. But when mountains of roses, daisies, and bluebonnets began spilling into the hallway, the hospital administrator decreed they would have to go. Deborah insisted we take them to the mission. We already had a little experience with this. Earlier that year, she had taken bouquets there to decorate the tables in the dining hall. But Don Shisler and Chef Jim nixed the idea, concerned that some parts of the arrangements, like the wires holding the flowers erect, could be used as weapons.
Hard for us to imagine, but then we were naive when it came to flower weapons. Anyway, thinking mission management might make an exception this time, Carson and I hauled two truckloads of concealed pistils down to East Lancaster Street. When we walked in the front door, an unusual sight struck me: six or seven men holding hands in a circle.
Tino, a bald-headed Telly Savalas look-alike, caught my eye. “We’re praying for Miss Debbie. We love her and we want her back.”
Overwhelmed, Carson and I joined the circle and prayed with these men who seemed on the outside to have nothing to give but had been giving, without our knowing it, the most precious gift of all: compassion.
Afterward, we scattered flowers everywhere—the chapel, the dining hall, the ladies’ dorm—an explosion of color brightening cinder block and institutional tile. It reminded me of that first day we pulled up to the mission, and Deborah had daydreamed about daisies and picket fences.
We hadn’t seen Denver since the cancer diagnosis, and I was concerned he might be feeling he’d been caught and released. In the hallway to the kitchen, we ran into Chef Jim. I asked him if he’d seen Denver that day.
“He’s probably sleeping,” he said.
“Sleeping!” I blurted. Lazy, I thought. It was already midafternoon.
Jim raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Well, when Denver heard about Miss Debbie, he told me she had a lot of friends that would be praying for her all day. But he figured she needed someone to pray all night, and he would be the one to do it.”
My eyes widened as he went on. “So he goes outside at midnight, sits down next to the Dumpster, and prays for Miss Debbie and your family. When I get up and come down here at three in the morning to get breakfast going, he comes in for a cup of coffee and we pray here in the kitchen for her until about four. Then he goes back outside and prays till sunup.”
Ashamed, I realized again how deep grew the roots of my own prejudice, of my arrogant snap judgments of the poor.
33
I guess I coulda prayed in my bed, but I felt like I was keepin watch, and I didn’t want to fall asleep like Jesus’s disciples in the garden. And I coulda prayed in the chapel, but I didn’t want nobody comin round breakin my concentration. I knowed wadn’t nobody gon’ come around the Dumpster, so that’s where I kept watch over Miss Debbie ever night, what they call a “vigil.”
I sat on the ground with my back propped up against the brick wall of an old building where the Dumpster was at and looked up into the dark sky and talked to God about her. I asked Him a lot to heal her, and I also asked Him why. Why have You afflicted this woman who has been nothin but a faithful servant to You? Someone who is doin what You said, visitin the sick, feedin the hungry, invitin the stranger in? How come You bring this heartache to her family and cut off the love she be givin to the homeless?
It didn’t make no sense to me. But after a while, God explained it. A lotta times while I was out there, I’d see a shootin star burn across the black sky, bright one minute and gone the next. Ever time I seen one, seemed like it was gon’ fall all the way to the ground, and I couldn’t understand why I never could see where it went. After I seen a lot of em act that way, I felt like God was givin me a message ’bout Miss Debbie.
The Word says God put ever star in the heavens and even give ever one of em a name. If one of em was gon’ fall out the sky, that was up to Him, too. Maybe we can’t see where it’s gon’ wind up, but He can.
That’s when I knew that even though it didn’t make no sense to me, God had put Miss Debbie in my life like a bright star, and God knew where she was gon’ wind up. And I found out that sometimes we just have to accept the things we don’t understand. So I just tried to accept that Miss Debbie was sick and kept on prayin out there by that Dumpster. I f
elt like it was the most important job I ever had, and I wadn’t gon’ quit.
34
Deborah’s hospital stay lasted a week. Seven days after that, the rental house we’d been staying in sold, but our new home on the Trinity River wouldn’t be ready for several more weeks. A month earlier, that might have thrown Deborah. But she was way past worrying about something as mundane as a roof over our heads. If she couldn’t beat the cancer, there would be no need for a house here on earth.
Still, we needed one for the meantime, so the Davenports opened their home to us. For the next two months, nine of us lived together—the four adults, the Davenports’ four kids, and Deborah’s sister Daphene, who became her near-constant companion. Mary Ellen and Alan had been our best friends for nineteen years, but while we lived with them we grew even closer—so close we even washed our underwear in the same load.
Meanwhile, their home came to resemble the world headquarters for Meals on Wheels. Church friends brought home-cooked meals every day, sometimes for as many as seventeen people, when Carson, Regan, and all the kids’ boyfriends and girlfriends were factored in. Many who wanted to bring food never got to—the line was too long.
Less than a month had passed since Dr. Dearden first found lumps in Deborah’s abdomen. But already pain had become a formidable enemy. It raged like wildfire through her belly, forcing her out of bed at night to pace, sit upright, soak in a hot bath, anything to change her focus. It seemed surreal to us: How could the pain flare from being nonexistent to a bonfire in so short a time?
We asked Alan, who had treated cancer patients. He compared cancer to hornets. “You can stand next to a hive, even get hornets all over you and not get stung. But poke a stick in the hive and stir it up, and the hornets can fly into a rage and kill you.”
