by Ron Hall
We sat down at the kitchen table and he told the tale of his trip. Finally, he said, “Mr. Ron, you got more faith than any man I ever knowed. Things got a li’l shaky, but I just couldn’t let you down.” Then he handed me a ball of wadded-up cash—about $400.
“How come there’s so much left over?” I asked.
“’Cause I slept in the truck the whole time and ate at McDonald’s and 7-Eleven.”
I hadn’t expected there would be any money left after expenses, so I said, “You keep it for doing such a good job.”
“No, sir,” he said quietly. “I ain’t for hire. I did that to bless you and your family. Money can’t buy no blessins.”
Humbled, I stood there and looked at him, not sure if I’d ever received a more gracious gift in my life. I couldn’t let him go away empty-handed, though, so I told him to take it and use it to do some good for someone else.
The trip turned out to be life-changing for both of us—for him, having proved he was trustworthy, and for me, having learned to trust. Two weeks later, I sent Denver to Baton Rouge in a Ryder truck loaded with paintings and sculptures valued at more than $1 million. According to my client there, Denver guarded the contents of that truck like it was the gold in Fort Knox.
39
Between May and November, it seemed we wore ruts in the road between the suburbs and the chemo clinic. Mercifully, surrounding Thanksgiving, Deborah had a two-week respite from all chemotherapy.
We always celebrated that holiday at Rocky Top. On Thanksgiving morning, I rose before daylight to hunt deer. Saw a nice buck, just wasn’t in the mood to kill him. Deborah, meanwhile, prepared a grand feast for about twenty-five friends and family, including Denver, who by this time fell into the latter category. The chemo was working to shrink the tumors, and during the break from it, Deborah had regained a few pounds and a flush of color. Had our guests not known her condition, they wouldn’t even have suspected she was ill.
By December, the chemotherapy had shrunk the tumors enough to make Deborah a candidate for liver surgery. On December 21, she had fourteen tumors burned off—removed by ablation—and after the four-hour operation, we had our miracle.
“Cancer free!” exclaimed her surgeon, who had scoped her entire body cavity for cancer during the procedure and could find no trace.
Deborah burst out laughing and crying at the same time, and I nearly burned up my cell phone spreading the good news. We considered it our Christmas present from God.
40
Our joy was short-lived. Like an enemy that seemed vanquished but had only been lying in wait, the cancer flanked us. By the end of January, it was back with a vengeance. By March, Deborah’s doctors were weighing another liver surgery, but felt it too risky only three months after the ablation. More chemo didn’t knock the tumors back, but instead seemed to feed them. They rose like an evil regiment, and fighting back was like throwing rocks at an advancing platoon of tanks.
By that time, Denver was spreading his wings, tooling around town in a car he called “manna” because, he said, it fell from heaven. (Actually, Alan Davenport gave it to him.) He often stopped by to visit, and every time I saw him it was like going to the bank and clipping bond coupons: I was growing richer, collecting dividends from his wisdom. Seldom was there any idle chitchat. He always got right to the point—my lesson for the day.
One day he stopped by and, as usual, got down to it. He looked straight into my eyes and said, “Mr. Ron, what did God say when He finished making the world and all that is in it?”
Knowing Denver wasn’t much for trick questions, I gave him a straight answer: “He said, ‘It is good.’”
Denver’s face lit up in a smile. “Exactly.”
Launching into a sermon, he assured me that God didn’t make cancer because cancer is not good, and he cautioned me not to blame God for something He didn’t make. The theology lesson helped, for a little while.
Spring arrived and with it the rites of Rocky Top. Ill but determined to enjoy the season, Deborah watched expectantly for the first budding of our bluebonnets, then for the birth of our longhorn calves. She named two of them Freckles and Bubbles, and I didn’t roll my eyes. We watched the eagles feast on spawning sand bass and marveled at the savage midair battles they sometimes waged over a catch. At night, stars frosted the sky like jewels and moonlight rippled on the Brazos, fish arcing in the cool glow. The only sound for miles was wind shimmering in the post oaks and the low, lonely whistle of distant trains.
Denver went with us to the ranch. I had invited him to the Cowboy Spring Gathering, an annual event where about two hundred people camped together at the Rio Vista, our friends Rob and Holly Farrell’s ranch, right across the river from Rocky Top. We’d met there for more than twenty years to pitch teepees, ride and rope, enjoy chuckwagon cooking, and read cowboy poetry around campfires.
“I heard cowboys don’t like black folks,” Denver said when I invited him. “You sure you want me to go?”
“Of course I want you to go,” I said, but I still practically had to rope and drag him.
Denver pitched his teepee reluctantly that first night, and the next morning I found him sleeping in the backseat of a car. It wasn’t that he minded sleeping outdoors having done so for decades in downtown Fort Worth. But there weren’t many rattlesnakes there.
Soon, though, he found his cowboy legs and began feeling comfortable among us all. He didn’t ride, but he did want to have his picture taken on a horse so he could show his buddies in the hood. If we had had one, we could’ve used a forklift to get his 230-pound butt in the saddle.
The campfires and camaraderie worked magic on Denver as he began to know what it was like to be accepted and loved by a group of white guys on horseback with ropes in their hands. Exactly the kind of people he had feared all his life.
Back in Fort Worth, Deborah continued to shed pounds, her skin growing slack on her tiny frame. Still, she fought.
“Do you know what I’m going to do today?” she asked me brightly one March morning. “I’m going shopping.”
She felt like her old self, she said. I suspected she just ached to feel normal again, but I didn’t say so. She hadn’t driven a car in a year. I stood by the window, watched her pull away in her Land Cruiser, and worried the whole time she was gone—burned to follow her, actually, but stayed put. When I heard her purr back into the garage about an hour later, I scrambled outside to help her unload.
But there were no packages. Eyes red and swollen, tears streaming down her cheeks, she looked at me, her throat working.
“Am I ‘terminal’?” she asked finally, seeming to hold the word at a distance like a distasteful science specimen.
Terminal is a harsh word when used in the context of death and not one we’d ever uttered aloud. But according to Webster’s, it’s also a place people pass through on their way to somewhere else. Deborah knew her “somewhere else” was heaven. She was just hoping the train was delayed.
I scooped a tear off her cheek and tried to slip around her question. “We’re all terminal,” I said, smiling gently. “None of us makes it out of here alive.”
“No, tell me straight up. Am I terminal? Is that what people are saying?”
At the mall, she told me, she had run into an old college friend who’d heard about the cancer. Very sweet and concerned, not meaning to upset Deborah, the friend had said, “I just heard you were terminal.”
Unwilling to appear shaken, Deborah replied, “No one has told me that.”
Then, fighting to remain calm, she made a dignified escape, only collapsing when she reached the safety of her car. She cried out loud all the way home, she told me. It was the last time she ever left the house alone.
In April, doctors performed a second surgery on Deborah’s liver and warned that her body couldn’t take another such invasion for at least nine months to a year. Still, the following Sunday, she insisted on going to church, where we met Denver. But during the prayer time before the servic
e, she fell ill and asked me to take her to the home of our friends Scott and Janina Walker. Janina was home recovering from surgery of her own; maybe they could do each other some good.
After church, Denver stopped by the Walkers to visit. He stayed for lunch then excused himself. “I have to go check on Mr. Ballantine,” he said. Curious, Scott asked if he could go, too.
I had known Mr. Ballantine when he stayed at the mission. Sometime before Deborah and I started serving there, Denver told us, he had watched a car screech up to the curb on East Lancaster. The driver shoved an elderly man out of the passenger-side door, pitched a beat-up Tourister suitcase out behind him, and roared away. Abandoned on the curb, the old man staggered like a drunken sailor on shore leave and fired off a salvo of slurry curses. But to Denver, he also looked . . . scared. At the time, Denver had still been an island, a stone-faced loner who didn’t poke about in other people’s business. But something—he thinks now maybe it was how help-less the man looked—plucked a string in his heart.
Denver walked up to the man and offered to help him get into the mission. In return, the man cursed him and called him a nigger.
Denver helped anyway, learning in the process that the fellow’s name was Ballantine, that he was a mean old drunk who’d earned his family’s contempt, and that he hated black people. He hated Christians even more, considered them a pack of mewling, insipid hypocrites. That’s why, free meal or not, he would rather have starved than endure a chapel sermon. Others might have let him. Instead, for about two years, Denver ordered two plates of food in the serving line and took one upstairs to Mr. Ballantine. Foul-tempered, cantankerous, and utterly remorseless, Mr. Ballantine continued to address his benefactor as “nigger.”
The next year a hoodlum jumped Mr. Ballantine outside the mission and demanded his Social Security check. Rather than give in, the old man submitted to a vicious beating that left him a cripple. Unequipped to care for an invalid, Don Shisler had no choice but to find space for Mr. Ballantine in a government-funded nursing center. There, minimum-wage orderlies tended to the basics, but the truth was Mr. Ballantine, at eighty-five, found himself hobbled, helpless, and completely alone. Except for Denver. After the old man’s relocation, Denver regularly walked the two miles through the hood to take Mr. Ballantine some non-nursing-home food or a few cigarettes.
One day, Denver asked me to drive him there. In some ways, I wish he hadn’t, since the trip stripped off my do-gooder veneer to reveal a squeamish man whose charity, at the time, had definite limits.
When we entered Mr. Ballantine’s room at the nursing home, the smell hit me first—the stench of age, dead skin, and bodily fluids. The old man lay on his bed in a puddle of urine, naked except for a neon orange ski jacket. His ghostly chicken-bone legs sprawled across a sheet that had once been white but now was dingy gray, streaked with brown and ocher stains. Around him lay strewn trash and trays of half-eaten food . . . scrambled eggs, crusted hard-yellow . . . shriveled meats . . . petrified sandwiches. On a couple of trays, school-lunch-size milk cartons, tipped over, the puddles congealed into stinking clabber.
In a single, sweeping glance, Denver sized up the room, then me, wobbling and on the verge of vomit. “Mr. Ron just come to say hi,” he told Mr. Ballantine. “He got to be goin now.”
I bolted, leaving Denver alone to clean up Mr. Ballantine and his nasty room. I didn’t offer to help, or even to stay and pray. Feeling guilty, but not guilty enough to change, I jumped in my car and wept as I drove away—for Mr. Ballantine, homeless and decrepit, who would stew in his own excrement if not for Denver; and I wept for myself, because I didn’t have the courage to stay. It was easy for someone like me to serve a few meals, write a few checks, and get my name and picture in the paper for showing up at some glitzy benefit. But Denver served invisibly, loved without fan-fare. The tables had turned, and I now feared that it was he who would catch-and-release me, a person who lacked true compassion, who perhaps wasn’t a catch worth keeping.
I gained a new and more profound respect for Denver that day, my perception of him changing like puzzle pieces slowly clicking into place. He wasn’t showing off, only sharing with me a secret part of his life. Had his secrets included pitching dice in an alley with a hoard of drunken bums, I wouldn’t have been put off. But I was shocked that they included not only praying through the night for my wife, but also nursing this man who never said thank you and continued to call him “nigger.”
For the first time, it struck me that when Denver said he’d be my friend for life, he meant it—for better or for worse. The hell of it was, Mr. Ballantine never wanted a friend, especially a black one. But once Denver committed, he stuck. It reminded me of what Jesus told His disciples: “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
41
When Mr. Scott asked me could he go with me to see Mr. Ballantine after lunch that day, I said yes. But I wondered if he was gon’ do like Mr. Ron done the first time he saw the man. I was thinkin prob’ly not, ’cause I’d started goin down to the nursing home purty regular to help keep Mr. Ballantine’s room from gettin so nasty.
When me and Mr. Scott got there that day, he was real nice to Mr. Ballantine. He told the man his name and talked a li’l bit ’bout this and that, the weather, and what have you. Then he said, “Mr. Ballantine, I’d like to bless you with a few necessities. Is there anything I can bring you . . . any-thing you need?”
Mr. Ballantine said what he always said, “Yeah. I could use some cigarettes and Ensure.”
So me and Mr. Scott took off for the drugstore. But when it come time to buy Mr. Ballantine his blessins, he wanted to get the Ensure, but not the cigarettes.
“I just don’t feel right about it, Denver,” he said. “It’s like I’m helping him kill himself.”
Well, that made me have to eyeball him. “You asked the man how you could bless him, and he told you he wanted two things—cigarettes and Ensure. Now you tryin to judge him instead of blessin him by blessin him with only half the things he asked for. You saw the man. Now tell me the truth: How much worse you think he gon’ be after smokin? Cigarettes is the only pleasure he got left.”
Mr. Scott said I had a point. He bought the Ensure and a carton of Mr. Ballantine’s favorite smokes, then headed on home while I delivered the blessins. You ain’t gon’ believe what happened next.
When I went back to Mr. Ballantine’s room, he asked me who paid for the cigarettes and I told him Mr. Scott.
“How am I going to pay him back?’” he asked me.
I said, “You don’t.”
“Why would that man buy me cigarettes when he doesn’t even know me?”
“’Cause he’s a Christian.”
“Well, I still don’t understand. And anyway, you know I hate Christians.”
I didn’t say nothin for a minute, just sat there in a ole orange plastic chair and watched Mr. Ballantine lyin there in his bed. Then I said to him, “I’m a Christian.”
I wish you coulda seen the look on his face. It didn’t take but a minute for him to start apologizin for cussin Christians all the time I’d knowed him. Then I guess it hit him that while I’d been takin care of him—it was about three years by then—he’d still been callin me names.
“Denver, I’m sorry for all those times I called you a nigger,” he said.
“That’s okay.”
Then I took a chance and told Mr. Ballantine that I’d been takin care of him all that time, ’cause I knowed God loved him. “God’s got a special place prepared for you if you just confess your sins and accept the love of Jesus.
” I ain’t gon’ kid you, he was skeptical. Same time, though, he said he didn’t think I’d lie to him. “But even if you aren’t lying,” he said, “I’ve lived too long and sinned too much for God to forgive me.”
He laid there in that bed and lit up one a’ Mr. Scott’s cigarettes, starin up at the ceilin, smokin and thinkin. I just kept quiet. Then all of a sudden he pip
ed up again. “On the other hand, I’m too damn old for much more sinning. Maybe that’ll count for something!”
Well, Mr. Ballantine stopped callin me “nigger” that day. And wadn’t too long after that I wheeled him through the doors at McKinney Bible Church—the same place Mr. Ron and Miss Debbie used to go to church at. We sat together on the back row, and it was the first time Mr. Ballantine had ever set foot inside a church. He was eighty-five years old.
After the service let out, he looked at me and smiled.
“Real nice,” he said.
42
A little over a year had passed since Deborah’s anxious cell-phone call to the sushi restaurant sent our lives careening off-course. During the worst of times, doctors professed no hope, and she lay in our bed, curling her emaciated frame like a fetus, vomiting, fighting through searing pain. But the hotter the fires burned, the more beautiful she became to me. She always tried to shift the focus from herself, and when she could walk upright, found the strength to visit and pray for sick friends, particularly those she met in the cryptlike chemo lab.
If she believed she was dying, she hadn’t told me. Instead, we talked about living. About our dreams for our children, our marriage, our city. She paged through Martha Stewart magazines, cutting out pictures of wedding cakes and flower arrangements for Regan’s and Carson’s weddings. Neither was engaged, but we dreamed about it anyway, chatting over coffee, murmuring after lights-out about whom they might marry, the grandchildren we would have, the sweet patter of baby feet at Rocky Top at Christmastime. We talked about everything important in living life, but we did not talk about death, for we thought that would be giving quarter to the enemy.
The second surgery brought a fresh burst of hope. For the second time in four months, doctors pronounced Deborah “cancer free.” A month later, we jetted to New York City to fulfill a promise she’d made: to be with Carson on Mother’s Day.
