by Billy Coffey
It is amazing how much even poor folk can accumulate. He sits and begins slowly, separating the piles and boxes into what can be reused again and what is ill suited for even a yard sale, the reason coming not long after for why this room has never been cleaned. Though nothing here can be considered valuable in a monetary sense, everything holds a story and therefore meaning—a worth known only to him. Abel cradles a stuffed giraffe with a missing eye that saw him through too many hospital visits, runs a finger over the mud-stained Matchbox cars he once played with in the backyard. Here are cards from doctors and nurses who had become friends, telling Abel to Get Well Soon! and bidding him happy birthdays and merry Christmases. A bike with training wheels that somehow never made it to the garage. Old dishes that Abel remembers him and his momma eating from as they watched reruns of Carol Burnett, both of them laughing so hard that the sofa swallowed most of the food. Papers from school, long-ago renderings of a stick-figured mother and child holding hands and smiling in spite of the rectangle shapes of casts on Abel’s arms and legs. And pictures, so many pictures, boxes of ones of his momma and him and the two of them together, pictures of their house and the mountains, baby pictures and first-day-of-school pictures and class pictures, always with the teacher standing off to the side and Abel banished to the end of the back line, hidden but for half a cheek or a tuft of hair, a sliver of a false smile.
And somewhere in all the time that passes and all the mess he digs through, Abel comes to the realization that this is no mere room filled with wreck. It is instead a history of his life laid jumbled and dust-ridden, memories he can touch as proof they had once been real.
Perhaps it is this notion that memories are true things mostly, stained yet not colored over by time, that draws Abel’s thoughts to the night just past. The image of Reverend Johnny being hoisted from the ground is still fresh in his mind (trick or not, Abel knows he will never be free of its effectiveness) and the words that the preacher spoke, Abel’s time coming and treasure to be found, haste and dark ways.
And healing. Healing most of all. The greatest bit of magic Abel has ever fathomed.
Words wholly unlike ones Johnny Mills had offered the others until those words yielded to screams. Abel remembers his own screaming, running back through the darkness along the side of the barn without care of getting hurt or lost, so long as he got away. And now the rest, rushing back as well: Dumb Willie’s daddy spitting at the ground; Only mir’cles you get in this life’s the ones you go after on your own; that young preacher man touching Lisa’s fingers and the sad look in her eyes, like she was doing something wrong; There’s too much doubt in you, Abel Shifflett. Takes faith to be made well. What about one a those words, then? Like the ones you gave all them others. I need belief to hear one a them?
“Abel.”
He flinches at the sound—another memory, Abel knows it can be nothing more. Only this memory that seems to call out his name came not from a corner of his mind but a corner of the room, way in the back where the closet sits. His heart thrums as he stares at that spot. Breath stopped. Listening. The voice does not return.
The sound of it, though. Deeper yet softer. Music that feels like sun after a long rain.
Nothing in that part of the room presents itself in any way as different from the rest. There are more boxes piled high against the wall, along with a collection of more old clothes. Yet as Abel peers harder into that corner, he does spot something that looks out of place. A round container mostly hidden by a stack of boxes laid in front and a leaning pile of envelopes and files marked Taxes to its side. The dimensions of the cylinder remind Abel of the popcorn tins Roy always gifts Lisa for Christmas, which she in turn always brings home as a gift to Abel. This one, however, is old. He can tell by how the paper around it is faded and flaked and the dent near the bottom rusting.
“Just junk, like the rest”—him, not the voice.
But of course it isn’t junk, it’s stories, and that means whatever in this room doesn’t hold value to him is likely to hold at least some to his momma.
A section of the lid is chipped and bent. From being opened over and over, he guesses. Not all the way, since that would require a shifting of all the boxes and papers piled around it, but enough to allow something to be taken out.
Or slipped inside.
“Probably nothing in there.”
The voice, if it had been a voice, does not answer.
But as he rises from his spot across the room, walking now instead of scooching, it is as though Abel is convinced that what he is about to find won’t be nothing at all. It’s something in that old tin, not just papers or pay stubs from the diner or old report cards with Abel needs to work on his social interactions in the comments section and an I for Incomplete next to Gym. This is something more. Something important. Abel doesn’t know how he senses this. Other than the voice he heard—or thinks he heard—came right from where the popcorn tin has been hidden from his notice.
Might be so inclined as to give you a word, son. One that may well be a boon to your happiness and alter your very life.
“I shouldn’t.”
His good hand already shoving aside the boxes.
“Momma hates snooping.”
Taking the papers off the top and sides.
“Almost as much as she hates lying.”
But now Abel’s good hand has already turned the tin around to face him, and what else can he do?
He discovers two things. One is that this really is an old Christmas present. The faded paper on the front reads Harper’s Old-Fashioned Kettle Corn, and Abel shakes his head at the Closeout and the .99 stamped beneath. The other is that something is indeed inside, and it isn’t popcorn. He pries the lid with his fingers and tilts the tin forward.
The avalanche of envelopes that spills out is enough to cover Abel’s meager lap. There are dozens of them, more, each opened and then resealed with tiny sheets of folded paper inside that are covered in black ink. He holds up the envelope on top, angling it toward the sun streaming through a billion motes of dust. Reads the name and address in the center:
Abel Shifflett
PO Box 57
Mattingly, VA 24465
Now the return address:
213 Kable Street, No. 11
Fairhope, NC 28573
He knows no one in North Carolina. Abel barely knows everyone in Mattingly, much less places beyond. He looks at the pile of envelopes covering his legs, tilts the popcorn tin again to see more inside. It’s got to be a hundred.
I ain’t never seen a hundred, Dumb Willie. Not in my whole life. It scared me. I think something’s gonna happen.
He opens the envelope in his hand and unfolds the paper inside. It’s smaller than what he uses at school, what his momma would call “letter writing parchment.” The date at the top right is four weeks prior to this day. The words themselves are a mix of cursive and print, but legible. So legible, in fact, that Abel at first believes them typed rather than written. There are no smudges, no mistakes. Not a single thought has been crossed through. At the top left is Abel’s own name, followed by a comma and Things in Fairhope are the same. I won’t complain about it since it’s so pretty. I can look out my window and see blue mountains and green trees and flowers of every color I can imagine (and some I even can’t). It’s beautiful here.
Abel lays down the paper and looks at the others. All appear written by the same hand. He continues:
I wish I could enjoy things more than I do, but I try to keep busy. I wish you could see it here, Abel. How pretty it is. Sometimes I think about that happening (I can’t help it!). I think about you being here with me and that makes me smile and makes me sad too. I guess that’s what love feels like. I think if there was more of that kind of feeling, things would go a whole lot better for everybody.
I’m scared for you, Abel. I know it isn’t safe for you there. There is too much you don’t know and can’t see. I worry about you just about every day. No matter what’s going o
n with you, I can make it better. So write back, okay? I’ll write again soon. Hope you get this. Take care, kiddo.
Here, the letter ends. Abel blinks his eyes hard and quick, thinking that will keep the lock tight on the deep place inside where he’s shoved down the tears from this morning, even as those tears bang and knock to be let loose.
He reads the date and his name and stares at the comma after, how that makes him feel as though what follows is nothing less than a conversation begun long ago. But none of these things is what finally brings those tears to fall. None of that is what renders him a weeping mess upon the soiled and foul carpet of the wreck room. It is instead that Reverend Johnny speaks once more, promising a treasure to be found. And it is the two words Abel finds written at the bottom, four letters that end with another comma and then three letters beneath:
Love,
Dad
-3-
From his place behind the pulpit, Reverend Earl Thomas Keen can look past rows of pews and the four chairs in back where ushers bide each Sunday sermon, to where the open doors allow a view of the trees and road beyond. He prefers the entry unobstructed as the weather allows. Church should be an invitation, as he sees it. For the weary and the troubled, the put out, for any who wander by.
As such, Trinity Gospel Assembly of the Redeemer is wide and welcoming more days than not. Those belonging to his congregation know this place as Earl Thomas’s second home (or first, should you hear Lori Keen say it, though she will gladly add it was Earl Thomas’s passion for the lost and discarded that drew her to marry him). He is here most days but Thursdays, which are set aside for the hill country’s sick and homebound. And he is here this Saturday as he is all others, at the pulpit he has claimed for the last quarter century, polishing his sermon. The robins and mockingbirds, the lowly sparrows, sing beyond the foyer. Earl Thomas greets them as an audience not so demanding as the one that will gather on the morrow in the plain wood pews laid before him. He wipes his brow, sips from the bottle of water beside him, and begins again.
A good preacher will say every sermon is vital; Earl Thomas is no different. Each Sunday is an opportunity for the Lord to use him as a cord woven in strands of grace and mercy to pull the damned into a life of beauty and forgiveness. Still, there have been weeks when the world gets the better of this hilltop revelator, when acedia takes hold and Earl Thomas is left at the end of Sunday service to shake feeble hands and gaze into tired eyes as proof he has just delivered a clunker.
That cannot happen tomorrow. Tomorrow must be special.
Electricity still courses through him, carryover from the blessing of last night. There had been much talk of the traveling healer known as Reverend Johnny Mills in this part of the Blue Ridge. Stories—grand ones—of the wonders he could perform. When a few of the hill country brethren approached Earl Thomas with the idea of extending their own invitation, the vote had been near unanimous. Near, but for a single exception. Earl Thomas had seen healers before, scores of charlatans who preyed upon the needy and pretended to speak for a God they rebelled against in the secrecy of their own hearts. He had cast his no with that in mind, a notion that Johnny Mills dispelled in short order. The strange man from nowhere truly had power. Never in his life had Earl Thomas witnessed such miracles as took place inside that barn, and he knows his pews will be full tomorrow because of it. That is cause enough to have kept him here since this morning. And though it is nigh lunchtime and Lori will be expecting him, that is what keeps him here still.
His finger remains upon the verse in his old leather Bible, one hand raised high to emphasize a particular word:
“Faith, good people. Faith is what we need. That greater power to see beyond our temporary troubles and know the loving hand that guides them. We say, ‘Lord, why must I suffer?’ and cry out, ‘Father, why must I go without?’ But, friends—”
He pauses here, looking up, just as he will pause here and look up tomorrow. Earl Thomas must stare his flock in the eye because it is a true thing he will say, and hard like all true things are.
“I say the Lord seeks not happiness for any of us, nor comfort. They are good things, but not His aim. What He wants most, cares for most, seeks to foster most . . .”
A shadow passes by the doors and lingers, robbing Earl Thomas of his thought. He stares at the black shape edging up the steps.
“Is our souls. It is eternity that sets in His mind, not our fleeting trials, and that is why our eyes must be upon Him, upon others, rather than ourselves. For it is as the writer of Hebrews says, ‘Without faith it is impossible to please him—’ ”
That shadow growing now, easing into solid form.
“ ‘—for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently—’ ”
And now to the edge of the farthest pew. Earl Thomas stops, trying to understand what it is he sees. Finishing barely above a whisper—“ ‘seek him.’ ”
His first instinct is to laugh. Earl Thomas counts it to the Lord that he doesn’t, as only the holiest of powers could stanch his reaction to such a sight. The child is done up in the way of the trick-or-treaters who knock at his and Lori’s door, children from families too poor for proper costumes and so who throw on anything and everything in order to look as ridiculous as possible. The child’s face is hidden by an old football helmet, the face guard stained brown, the strap at the chin cinched tight. The wide girth is an illusion; he (or is it a she?) is not a heavy child, merely one adorned in layer upon layer of clothing. Earl Thomas counts three shirts beneath the catcher’s chest protector, along with what appear to be two pairs of shorts under a thick pair of winter sweatpants. Shin guards are strapped to the child’s legs. Part of the same catcher’s gear, he supposes. An orange gardening glove rests on the child’s left hand. On the right, beginning from the wrist and disappearing beneath a sleeve, is what looks like a bright yellow cast.
“Say there,” Earl Thomas says. “I help you with something?”
A tiny throat clearing, followed by a voice like one of the frogs in the creek out back:
“Sorry to bother you, sir. My name is . . .”
Earl Thomas leans over the pulpit, trying to hear. He thinks first the child spoke so weakly that the name melted halfway up the aisle. Now he thinks the child reconsidered and didn’t offer his name at all.
“I was at your show last night. Up at the barn?”
“I see.”
Earl Thomas, known through these hills as a wise man gifted in tongue, can manage only these two words. He has welcomed many a passerby into his sanctuary, once even chased a hungry deer that wandered through those wide doors, but he has never been confronted by such a mystery as this. The boy doesn’t budge from his spot at the edge of the foyer. His gloved hand reaches for the pew in front of him as he begins to wobble.
“I’d ask you to come up here, son, have us a word. But from the look of you maybe I oughta come there.”
Earl Thomas reaches for the bottle of water and makes his way up the middle aisle. The boy sits at the end of the last pew and proceeds to unsnap the helmet and lift it away, heaving a sigh. Sweat drenches his forehead. His cheeks are slick and the color of an apple. He takes the bottle of water Earl Thomas offers and drinks half in two large swallows, pouring the remainder over his head. It is at this point that Preacher Earl Thomas Keen believes himself in the presence of one who has never stepped foot inside a church.
“What in the world you all dressed up like that for?” he asks, taking a seat on the pew in front of the boy. “Hot as sin outside.”
The boy says, “I had a long way to go. Wasn’t safe.”
“They a zombie horde out there or something?”
“Nosir. It was just a long ways. And I had to go by the Jones place. You know the Joneses? Their boy Chris wants me dead. I had to sneak through the woods when I went past.”
“Am acquainted with Royce. Chris too. You look awful hot, son. How about some more water? Got a fountain in b
ack. Plenty cold.”
“I appreciate that, sir,” he squeaks, “but no. I’d rather just get on with what brought me here. It’s an issue of time.”
“I accept that,” Earl Thomas says, trying not to grin. “Time’s a funny thing. We always think we ain’t got enough of it, but we can usually scrounge up enough to waste. Don’t recall seeing you out this way before. You from around here?”
“Nosir. Like I said, it’s a long way. I had to ride my bike. I ain’t done that in a long time on account of I got a condition.” He nearly spits the word. “But I had to come, because something’s happened. I thought I might fall off or get run over, so that’s why I wore all this stuff. And because of Chris. This all comes from my friend Dumb Willie,” he says, patting the chest protector, the helmet, the shin guards. “He finds it left over from school sometimes. Nobody claims it, he gives it all to me. I’m not sure why since I can never use it because of how I am. They call him Dumb Willie for a reason, but he’s my friend.”
He pauses. To breathe, Earl Thomas thinks, since all of that has come out in what seems one long statement of fact. The boy stares at the room around him.
“I ain’t never been in a church.”
“Well, ain’t nobody perfect, son. That what brought you all this way? You in some trouble?”
“Nosir, not exactly. I been upended.”
“Sounds serious.”
“More than I can say. I found something.”
Earl Thomas cocks his eye. “What’d you find?”
“Reverend Johnny here?”
“No, afraid he’s gone. Snuck out last night before I could say good-bye and give’m my thanks. People like him, they don’t want attention. They’re happy doing the Lord’s work.”
“But you’re sure he’s gone?” the boy asks.
