Same Kind of Different As Me (25 page)

By this time, my towering faith had crumbled. The experts had failed. I had failed. And God, it appeared, was on the verge of failing, too. The God who promised that whatever we asked for in faith would be done in heaven had not delivered.

But I also knew it was Denver who had first predicted that a thief would come for Deborah. And when the doctors said Deborah wouldn’t last another day, Denver said she would and he was right. Denver knew about the angels before anyone had told him what had happened in our bedroom. Somehow, in a way I couldn’t understand, this simple man was dialed into God. So when this time he said he had a word from the Lord, I decided I needed a witness. I bounded up the stairs and summoned Carson. As soon as we returned to the kitchen together, Denver fixed us with his eye, narrow and intense.

“Mr. Ron, I’ve been out on a hill overlookin the city all night long, and I heard from the Lord. He said Miss Debbie’s body is cryin out for paradise, but the saints here on earth still has a chain around her and won’t let her go. So the Lord told me to come and break the chain.”

I didn’t speak, but flashed back to Deborah’s violent seizures, her crying out. Was she crying out for paradise? And I wondered what “the chain” could be and who were the saints? Later, I learned that thirty of Deborah’s friends had gathered in our yard the evening before and, linking hands, encircled our home to pray that God would heal her. Denver continued: “The Lord also told me to tell Miss Debbie that she could lay down her torch, and the Lord told me to pick it up. So, Mr. Ron, out of obedience to God, I’m here to break the chain, and I gon’ ask you and Carson to pray with me to break it.”

After nineteen months of praying for a miracle, it seemed strange now to be praying for God to take Deborah. But as I began, new promises from Scripture came to my lips unbidden. “Father,” I prayed, “help us as a family to fully give Deborah over to You. Help us trust that You have ordained from the beginning the number of our days and that You won’t take Deborah until she has completed the number You have ordained for her.”

When we finished, Denver drilled me with a stare, and surprised us with words that seemed to contradict his prayer. “Still, Miss Debbie ain’t goin nowhere till her work on earth is through.”

Then tears spilled from his eyes. I had never seen him weep. His tears flowed into the lines in his face like rivers of grief, and it hit me again how much he loved Deborah. I marveled at the intricate tapestry of God’s providence. Deborah, led by God to deliver mercy and compassion, had rescued this wreck of a man who, when she fell ill, in turn became her chief intercessor. For nineteen months, he prayed through the night until dawn and delivered the word of God to our door like a kind of heavenly paperboy. I was embarrassed that I once thought myself superior to him, stooping to sprinkle my wealth and wisdom into his lowly life.

49

I
’
d
shed plenty a’ tears when I was prayin out by the Dumpster, but I hadn’t ever cried in front a’ Mr. Ron before. I couldn’t help it, though. I knowed everythin that could be done for Miss Debbie had been done. The doctors had done all they could do. Mr. Ron had done all he could do. And God had laid it on my heart that it was time for Miss Debbie to go on home to be with Him. But grief had still grabbed ahold of me and them tears spilled out ’fore I knew what hit me.

I tried to catch em with the backs of my fingers, and I could see Mr. Ron and Carson sittin there starin at me, a little bit surprised. Then they both looked down and started stirrin their coffee. That’s when I got up and headed down the hall toward Miss Debbie’s room. I didn’t plan to do that. Seemed like the Lord just tugged at me and I felt like that’s what I was s’posed to do.

The bedroom door was standin open and there Miss Debbie was, layin on her back in the middle of the big bed, thin and weak-lookin under the sheet. The curtains was open and the mornin light was gray, comin in through the rain that drizzled down the glass.

Her eyes was closed and her face had mainly wasted away till she didn’t look much like herself, ’cept for still bein beautiful. I stood there for a spell just watchin her breathe.

“How you doin, Miss Debbie?” I said after a little while. But she stayed still, her chest risin and fallin in the quiet. Now, I’d been in to see her several times, and Mr. Ron or Miss Mary Ellen or somebody’d always be there, just ’cause there wadn’t hardly ever a second when somebody wadn’t right by her side. Since we’d just prayed that prayer of lettin Miss Debbie’s soul sail on off to glory, I was kinda surprised Carson and Mr. Ron didn’t follow me back to the room. I figured they’d want to be there in case we needed to pray the same thing right here with her. But they didn’t come. Me and Miss Debbie was alone. Lookin back, I think maybe the Lord opened that little window in time to do His business.

I was standin on the left side a’ the bed, with her head by my right hand and her feet by my left hand. The sheet covering her thin body rose and fell, rose and fell, just a bare little bit. With her face turned up toward heaven the way it was, she couldn’t see me and I wadn’t even sure she could hear me. And I wanted to be sure she heard what I had come to say. So I put my right knee on the bed. Then I slipped my hand up under her head and raised it off the pillow just a little bit, and turned her head to my face.

“Miss Debbie,” I said.

She opened her eyes wide, starin straight at me.

I knowed she could hear me then, so I went right on. “I can understand how important it is to you that we keep on reachin out to the homeless. Now you done did all you could do. And God has put it on my heart to tell you that if you lay down the torch, I’ll pick it up and keep your ministry to the homeless goin.”

She didn’t move or say nothin, but her eyes started to shine up with tears. My heart started poundin, achin in my chest like it was too big for my body.

“So you can go on home now, Miss Debbie,” I said. “Go on home in peace.”

Her tears spilled over then and my heart stretched until I thought it would tear in two. I kept holdin her head up, so she could see me. Then I said the last words I ever spoke to her: “Farewell. I’ll see you on the other side.”

I laid her head back down on the pillow and she let her eyes slip closed. And I knowed that she knowed we’d never see each other again. Not in this life.

50

November 3

I no
longer slept. I lay with Deborah through the night. She lay beside me, gaunt, her eyes fixed open, mouth slack, lifted heavenward as if on the verge of a question. Her chest rose and fell sporadically, sometimes in short, quick hitches, sometimes not at all. I watched red minutes tick by on the digital clock, eating up what remained of the life we had built. As dawn crept into the room, thunder rumbled. I could hear rain showering down the eaves, streaming through the gutters.

My New York partner, Michael, had called and asked if he could come see Deborah, and was on his way down. I had tried to discourage him and others from coming during these last weeks. Deborah had wasted away so that she barely raised the sheet that covered her. Her eyes had faded and seemed cruelly suspended in sockets of protruding bone. I wanted everyone to remember her as the beautiful, elegant woman they’d always known.

But Michael pressed, and since we were godparents to his son Jack, I said yes. Jewish by birth, he was not a particularly religious man. He knew we were Christians and had witnessed our own trek of faith. We’d talked about Jesus as Messiah, but that didn’t mesh with his own religious upbringing. Ours were philosophical discussions—friendly, never heated.

When Michael pulled up to the house at around 10:00 a.m., Mary Ellen and I were in the bedroom with Deborah, singing along to a CD of Christian songs, some of Deborah’s favorites. I went out to greet Michael, then he, Carson, and I went back to the bedroom. The moment Michael stepped through the door, the song “We Are Standing on Holy Ground” began to play:
“We are standing on holy ground and I know that there are angels
all around.”

As the song washed through the room, Michael looked at Deborah, then at Mary Ellen. “We
are
on holy ground,” he whispered. Then, as though someone had kicked the backs of his legs, he fell to his knees and wept. Frozen in place, Carson, Mary Ellen, and I traded glances. In the twenty years I had known him, I had never seen Michael cry. When the song ended, he collected himself. Pulling out a picture of Jack, he moved to the edge of the bed and placed it in Deborah’s palm, gently folding her fingers around it.

“Will you watch over him from heaven?” he said. “Be his guardian angel?” The moment later became a mystery. No one ever saw that picture of Jack again.

Michael thanked Deborah for all the prayers he knew she had prayed for him. She didn’t move or speak. He stayed about twenty minutes. When I walked him down through the living room, he seemed dazed.

“There was a power or a presence in that room that was not of this world,” he said. “All the times you spoke to me about an encounter with God . . . I just had one. I don’t think I’ll ever be the same.”

That was all we said. He ran through sheets of slanting rain and ducked into his car. Michael had always held faith at arm’s distance. Denver’s words echoed in my mind: “Miss Debbie ain’t goin nowhere till her work on earth is done.”

Is it done now?
I wondered.

I bounded down the hall and told Deborah about Michael. Though she remained silent, I knew that she knew. Her pulse had dropped to a whisper, and her breathing to an irregular series of shallow gasps. I lay down, wrapped my arms around her, and waited for the angels.

51

“
Come
quick! She’s stopped breathing!”

It was Daphene. She’d come running upstairs in a panic. I had left Deborah’s room less than fifteen minutes earlier, ushered away by Carson and Regan, who insisted that I get a couple of hours of sleep. At about 10:00 p.m., I had traced Deborah’s face with my fingertips and kissed her forehead, afraid to leave for fear I’d never see her alive again, and gone upstairs.

Daphene took my place, prepared to keep watch all night. But at 10:15, she burst into the guest room where I had lain down. For nineteen months I had hardly let Deborah out of my sight. For the previous three weeks, I had seldom left her side. I had been there for thirty-one years and seven days of living. But it was Daphene, who had entered the world with her fifty-five years before, who saw her sister safely home.

The hospice nurse was standing over Deborah when I entered the room. I crawled up on the bed beside my wife. Her eyes were still open. I closed them. Quietly, I asked the nurse to remove the tubes and IVs that had bound her for a month. Then I asked the nurse to give us a few minutes alone, during which I held my dead wife and wept, begging God to raise her as Christ had raised Lazarus.

When He didn’t—and I truly believed He could—my heart exploded.

Within minutes, a nondescript-looking man who introduced himself as the medical examiner appeared in our bedroom to pronounce her dead, as if I didn’t know. Then, two men who had arrived in an unmarked white cargo van appeared to take her body away. Dressed in navy blue shirts and trousers, they looked for all the world like washing-machine repairmen. I had hoped they would look like angels, but they didn’t. And I’d hoped they wouldn’t look like morticians, but they did.

That night, Daphene brought two tiny white pills that Alan said would help me sleep. As I lay in bed, my mind drifted to Rocky Top, and questions needled my heart. Silly things, like who would give our baby longhorns their names? And who would pick the peaches in July and make the cobbler that scented the house with cinnamon? The last thoughts to cross my mind caused me to cry myself to sleep: that Deborah would not see Carson and Regan get married, that she would not meet our grandchildren, or watch them ride calves at Rocky Top after I roped them on Christmas morning like my granddaddy had done for me.

I guessed I could still do it. Maybe God would let her see.

52

Three
days later, we buried Deborah in a simple pine casket on a lonely hill at Rocky Top—just the way she wanted it. The weather, though, at first seemed a slap in the face. The kids and I had driven out to the ranch that morning in a flashing thunderstorm. As winds from the cusp of winter blew cold sheets of rain across the highway, bitterness seethed in my heart. Maybe I was under some kind of divine punishment, but Deborah certainly didn’t deserve this.

The burial site was the highest point on Rocky Top. A small clearing guarded by wizened oaks, it had always been one of Deborah’s favorite nooks on the ranch. She especially loved the spot where an enormous flat boulder rested like a bench in the shade of a leaning oak, forming a natural gazebo perfect for prayer or simple solitude.

When Carson, Regan, and I drove up the hill, Roy Gene, Pame, and other friends were spreading hay to soak up the huge puddles that formed in the drenching rain. They had also uncovered the grave, a sight that unnerved me. I don’t know what I had been expecting. I knew we weren’t burying Deborah in a traditional cemetery, where headstones and epitaphs somehow affirm the civility of the final rite. But with cruel clarity, it hit me that her final resting place was nothing but a dark hole in desolate ground where wild animals foraged at night. A wave of nausea rolled through my guts, and I nearly collapsed under the reality of what we were about to do.

Mercifully, the weather broke. Like a minor miracle, the skies cleared and the cold north bluster reversed itself, replaced with a warm southern breeze that breathed over the hilltop, drying out the ground in less than an hour.

Denver arrived, along with about a hundred friends and family. Like country folks, we sat around Deborah’s grave on hay bales. Someone had saddled Rocky, her palomino, and left him tied nearby. For the next hour and a half, we honored my wife. We sang old-time spirituals and country hymns, accompanied by two cowboy friends playing acoustic guitars. Warm sunlight filtered through the oaks, casting circles of gold on Deborah’s pine casket, so that the simple box she’d asked for appeared covered in shimmering medallions.