A New Beginning (18 page)

Christopher and I were in the house with the rest of the family when we heard Mr. Royce's buggy leave. A minute later Pa walked into the house.

The expression on his face was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. It was a dazed look—bewilderment, disbelief, and a sort of half smile all in one. He was just shaking his head, like he was trying to wake himself up, wondering if what had just gone on had actually been real.

We all watched him come in, waiting for him to say something, but he didn't seem to be able to get a single word out. He sat down in his favorite chair, still staring straight ahead and shaking his head back and forth.

“I just don't believe it,” he finally said. His voice was soft, like he was speaking to himself. “You can never tell who's paying attention to what you're doing, or what folks are thinking.”

We all waited again.

“I might have expected it with Alkali,” he went on, his voice still soft, “—but Franklin Royce? Never would I have figured he'd have wanted anything to do with the likes of us . . . and here all the time he's looking . . . almost envious, I reckon you'd say. How can you figure a thing like that?”

Christopher had told us a little of what had gone on before Pa had returned, though there hadn't been time to tell us every detail.

“Of all people, you shouldn't be surprised, Drummond,” said Almeda. “It's the very thing you spoke about in church that evening in March.”

“I know,” sighed Pa, still shaking his head. “But there's a difference in believing something is true and seeing it happen right before your eyes.”

“What happened after I left?” Christopher now asked Pa.

“Well, we did like you said, we prayed together. It was kinda awkward there at first, couple of grown men like we were fumbling for how to say things. Praying's not exactly the sort of thing men do too much together. The last thing I ever figured I'd be doing on this earth is praying out loud with Franklin Royce!”

The rest of us smiled. We could hardly believe what God had done.

“Anyhow, I told him that praying wasn't no different than talking regular, and that you just had to think of God as right there with you. Then I kind of started out and prayed a little myself so he'd see there wasn't nothing to be afraid of. Then I stopped and told him to go on ahead and just tell God whatever was on his mind.”

“Did he?” I asked Pa.

“Yeah, he did. He told God he was sorry for all the stuff he'd done and for the kind of man he'd been. He asked him to forgive him and said he hoped the people of the town would forgive him too, and asked God to help him be a better person. Then he stopped and said it again, but this time he said, ‘
Help me become a more Christlike person
.'”

“Hallelujah!” shouted Almeda, able to contain herself no longer. “God bless the man!”

“Then he said he wanted to be a child of God and go down God's road and be part of God's family. He asked God to help him and to show him how to be a good son. Then he stopped again and added, ‘
the son you want me to be
.' Then that was about it. I prayed again and said
amen
finally. We both stood up and stretched our legs, then shook hands, and he went back to town.”

“That's absolutely wonderful, Drum!” said Christopher. “You did just as well as I could have done myself. It will mean more to Franklin that you were the one to pray with him.”

“Praise the Lord!” added Almeda. “What wonderful things God is constantly doing in people's lives—things that we have no idea of!”

“All these years everybody thinking Franklin Royce was a skunk, and just look at what was really going on inside him,” said Pa.

“I can't help but feel bad,” I said. “I have to admit I have had some not-so-nice thoughts about him through the years.”

“So have we all,” said Almeda. “But that's over it seems. He's one of the family now!”

“I'm reminded of Paul's second letter to the Corinthians,” said Christopher, “where he speaks of Christians as living epistles that people read and see what Christ can do in a human life. All these years Franklin Royce was reading each of you, especially you, Drum, all the time being drawn closer and closer to God his Father without his even knowing it.”

Pa was gazing down at the floor and shaking his head back and forth again.

“You just never know who's watching, and what you might be telling them,” he said, softly again. The incident had obviously gone very deep into him.

All the rest of us were quiet now too, thinking to ourselves about the people we encountered all the time without hardly giving them a second thought, wondering what they might be reading from the living epistle that was being written with each one of our lives.

It was sometime in mid-July when the rumors started flying about Mr. Royce's bank.

At first we just began to hear about a few people who said they were renegotiating their loans. But then it started to seem like everyone we saw was talking about something to do with the bank. At first I didn't pay too much attention. But then Christopher brought it up, wondering if maybe the people of the community were experiencing some kind of financial problems. Yet we hadn't heard of anything. As far as we knew, crops this summer were growing as well as usual, and there'd been no great downturn in the price of beef or mutton. Business at the freight company seemed normal.

“I'll ask around,” said Pa one evening when we were all together after supper and had gotten to talking about it.

The next day both Pa and Christopher came home with the same news, which they'd got from talking to two different people, and it explained in a second why everyone was talking: Mr. Royce had put up a notice in his bank that all
new
loans would be written for a whole percentage point lower than the existing interest rate, and that this would also apply to any
existing
loans the bank presently held for any who wanted to redraw the terms of their agreements.

Naturally everyone did!

A whole percentage point lower would make everyone's monthly payments far less than they were and would give a boost to the economy of the whole region. There was only one person, it seemed, who would possibly
not
benefit from such a change, and that was Franklin Royce himself. The next day Pa went to talk to him.

“Franklin,” he said after the banker had invited him into his office and closed the door, “what's all this about the lower interest rates? Why, the whole town's talking about nothing else.”

“Nothing more than it seems. I'm simply lowering my rates.”

“At first I thought there was some kind of financial crisis,” added Pa, “with everyone running in and out of the bank!”

Mr. Royce laughed.

“No crisis, just a normal banking procedure,” he said. “Changes of interest rate aren't so unusual.”

“A
lower
rate is a mite out of the ordinary!”

“Perhaps, but not unheard of.”

“But a whole point—that's a huge drop. What in tarnation are you doing it for?”

“I think it's the right thing to do.”

“Are the big city banks lowering their rates?”

“No,” laughed Mr. Royce. “Last I heard they were up a quarter point.”

“Then what if you have to borrow? It'll cost
you
more.”

“Probably so.”

“You've got to make a profit too.”

“Don't worry, I will—albeit a somewhat slimmer one.”

“We need your bank, Franklin. Where would Miracle Springs be if you go out of business?”

Again Mr. Royce laughed, delighted with Pa's concern.

“I'm not planning to go out of business anytime soon, believe me, Drum.”

“Well, just tell me then what brought all this on,” said Pa.

“You should know. It was something Christopher said about reading in the Gospels to find our instructions about what we're supposed to do.”

“You read something like that?”

Mr. Royce nodded, but said nothing.

“Well, you gonna tell me about it?” asked Pa impatiently.

“Surely you know the story of the man called Zacchaeus?”

“I've heard the name,” replied Pa.

“Well I never had,” said Mr. Royce, “until I was reading a couple of weeks ago and found myself reading about him. All of a sudden I was stopped cold by the words ‘and he was rich.' Suddenly something struck me I'd never thought of before—that Jesus could be the Lord of a rich man as well as a poor man.”

Pa stared back at him, not realizing at first what the huge revelation was.

“I know it may not sound like much to you,” Mr. Royce went on, “but I realized in that moment that I'd always thought of Christianity as more or less a religion that had more meaning the poorer you happened to be. Like I told you and Christopher, I'd gone to church for years, but I never really thought that it had much to do with
me
—after all, I was rich. I had everything I needed and more. What could God possibly do for me?”

“Reading about that Zacchaeus fellow changed your point of view, eh?” asked Pa.

“You can't imagine what the rest of that day was like for me,” answered Mr. Royce. “Even after I'd talked with you and Christopher and Christopher'd said, ‘You have to find out what your Father wants you to do,' I suppose I was a little skeptical. I didn't
really
think God would show
me
anything to do. I mean, I meant it when I prayed—you remember, when you and I were together, and I prayed that God would help me be a better person and know what to do. I meant it. It wasn't a phony prayer. But still, like I say, I don't know that I really expected him actually to speak to me.”

“I reckon I know what you mean,” said Pa. “I gotta admit I still sometimes feel that myself when I'm listening to Christopher.”

“But then I remembered too,” Mr. Royce said, “what Christopher said about my doing
my
part and reading in the Gospels and asking God to show me how his people are to live. So I did start reading in my Bible—for the first time, I'm ashamed to say—and I tried to look as I read for what there might be for me personally that would show me what I might be supposed to do. And then all of a sudden as I was going along in the Gospel by the man named Luke, there were those words, ‘And he was rich' . . . and all at once everything changed. It was as if in an instant my whole perspective on the Bible became new—because there in its very pages was a man just like me! Do you see what I am saying, Drum?”

“I think so, Franklin,” replied Pa.

“Now suddenly I could look for something to
do
—just like Christopher said—because there I was in the pages of the Book. Me—a rich man—right there talking to Jesus himself. When I had recovered my initial surprise, I read on, and the account became all the more shocking, especially when Zacchaeus said, ‘I will give half of my goods to the poor, and if I have taken from anybody wrongly, I will give it back to him fourfold.' Imagine, Drum, me looking in the Gospels for something to do about my faith, and then to run across
those
words. I don't mind telling you, I could hardly sleep that night.”

Pa laughed. “I reckon I'm beginning to see your problem, Franklin!”

“Over and over they repeated themselves in my brain. I had doubted whether God could speak to such a one as me . . . well, by morning I knew he
had
spoken to me. It was like nothing I'd ever experienced in my life. I had prayed a simple enough prayer . . . and here was a specific and practical answer! I'd asked to be shown something to do . . . and here was a
do
so simple and straightforward there could be no mistaking it. Here was a
do
right out of the Gospels that had to do with the very focus of my entire life—money.”

Mr. Royce paused and drew in a deep breath.

“I was on my way into the bank that very next morning when something else from one of Christopher's sermons suddenly came back to me. Do you remember that day he said, ‘We mustn't delay doing what we are supposed to do. Obedience postponed is disobedience.'”

“I remember,” replied Pa.

“That's when I said to myself, ‘Franklin Royce, it's time to see what kind of fiber you're made of, what kind of man you are. Are you going to pretend nothing happened last night? Are you going to try to talk yourself into believing God wasn't speaking to you and that all those thoughts were just nighttime fancies you can ignore now that the sun is shining and you are thinking straight again? Or are you going to
do
what you know in your heart you are supposed to do?' What it boiled down to was the question I knew I was asking myself: Are you man enough to obey?”

“Judging from what's been going on around here,” said Pa with a smile, “I think I know how you answered the question.”

“That very morning I put up the sign on my wall announcing that interest rates at the Royce Miners' Bank were being lowered to four-and-one-quarter percent,” rejoined the banker. “It was the quickest and easiest way I could think of to return to the bank's customers anything I may have inadvertently overcharged them in the past.”

“You haven't overcharged, have you, Franklin?”

“I have always tried to be fair with my interest rates,” replied the banker, “but you know as well as anyone that I interpreted fair on the high side from time to time. I hope this will make up for it.”

“I'm sure it will, Franklin,” said Pa, “but can you afford to do so?”

“It may cause a bit of a pinch in the cash flow of the bank, but I've already been to Sacramento to secure additional funds.”

“You mean to tell me you are going to have to borrow yourself in order to give back this money to the community?”

“I suppose that is the long and the short of it,” said Mr. Royce, smiling.

Pa shook his head in disbelief. “Just wait till the people hear about that,” he said.

“No, no, Drum, you mustn't tell them. I want no one to know why I went to Sacramento.”

“But they—”

“I insist. You must promise me that word of this will not leak out. I do not want the windfall from lower interest payments and whatever else I may decide to do to be spoiled for them by sympathy for me. I would have it be a boon without any strings attached.”

“What do you mean, whatever else you decide to do?” asked Pa.

“Well, there is the rest of what Zacchaeus did,” replied Mr. Royce, “—giving half his possessions to the poor and restoring any wrong done four times over. I am still asking the Lord what he might want me to do in the way of those things.”