Stranger's Gift (15 page)

“I had one, until a couple days ago,” John replied, remembering now how Hester and the others had had to wade in to shore that first day after the hurricane hit.

“No worries.” Zeke guided the boat toward a fallen tree and expertly looped the rope around a branch stripped bare of its foliage.

Awkwardly John climbed out using his good arm for leverage and reminding himself that his ability to do anything useful in the next six weeks was limited. Not only had an X-ray taken at the hospital that morning confirmed that his wrist was broken, but it was his left wrist, and he was left-handed. Daily activities he had taken for granted had become all-consuming. Already he'd had to teach himself the rudiments of eating and brushing his teeth again. Wielding a hammer, never mind a saw or screwdriver, would be monumental.

“Geezle Pete,” Zeke said. The expression came out like a long-drawn-out whisper. He had made it up the bank and over the fallen pine trees and was staring at his surroundings.

John picked his way carefully over the rubble of the trees until he was standing next to Zeke. Speechless, he forced himself to scan the land. His memory of how it had looked when he'd left didn't do the scene justice. He jumped slightly when Zeke clutched his shoulder and squeezed it. Anything Zeke might have said was expressed in that single gesture of sympathy. Grateful for the man's instinct to stay silent, John did not shrug away from the contact. Instead, he drew strength from this stranger's gift of understanding. He was very glad that he had not come here alone.

“Thanks for bringing me here,” he muttered and reached down to unearth a dented teakettle that had found its resting place some fifty yards from the main house.

Zeke took a couple of tentative steps toward the house and almost tripped over a kitchen chair buried under a pile of broken palm fronds. He dug it out and examined its metal legs and vinyl seat before setting it next to the kettle that John had carefully placed on a patch of reasonably dry ground.

John watched as Zeke tested the chair for sturdiness, and again he felt a surge of gratitude toward the man. Zeke continued to prowl through the debris for other salvageable pieces to add to the chair and teakettle. “What's your plan?” Zeke asked.

“Not sure,” John replied.

That was the last the two men spoke for the next hour as they wandered the property. Collecting the bits and pieces that had once been the makings of John's life seemed as good a first step as any.

Only when they heard the rumble of heavy equipment and the whine of gas-powered saws in the distance did the two men look up from their scavenging. The noise was coming toward them from the overgrown and now completely impassable lane that led from John's house out to the main road.

“Company,” Zeke shouted above the din and added a plastic dish rack filled with a couple of unbroken glasses and cups and one plate to the growing pile of goods.

John finished digging out a No T
RESPASSING
sign, grasped it with his good arm, and stood at the end of the lane waiting. He couldn't help noticing that Zeke took this opportunity to roost on top of what was left of one wall of the packinghouse as if settling in to watch a baseball game.

The din of the heavy road equipment roared ever closer, although the foliage was so thick that John could not yet see the actual vehicles. He heard the whine of the saw and then the crackle of breaking wood, punctuated by a heavy thud as a large tree branch hit the ground. John tightened his grip on the sign and waited. Zeke leaned back on one elbow and watched.

When the bulldozer broke through the last tangle of pepper vines, scrub oak, and royal palms that had fallen like dominoes during the hurricane, the driver set the engine on idle and stared at John through mirrored sunglasses. Then he glanced back as if looking for reinforcements.

“You're on private property,” John yelled.

The bulldozer driver held up one finger and continued to look behind him.

A battered four-wheel-drive open-air Jeep rumbled over broken branches and sand dunes until it came to a stop next to the bulldozer. A man John recognized as Grady Forrest emerged from the passenger side, and then Arlen Detlef and Samuel Brubaker climbed out of the backseat. The Jeep's driver cut the engine and waited.

While Grady consulted with the bulldozer driver, Arlen and Samuel started toward John. Arlen was smiling broadly as if he had simply stopped by for a visit.

“John!
Wie geht's
?” he shouted above the low sustained drumbeat of the motorized vehicles lining the lane now.

“Pastor Detlef,” John replied respectfully, but he did not lower the sign. “Samuel.”

Undaunted, the two men continued walking toward him. “I see Zeke was able to borrow a boat so you could get here,” Arlen continued, glancing at Zeke, who raised two fingers in the peace sign but made no move to leave his position. “We looked for you at the church, but …”

John ignored this observation. “What do you want?” he asked. “More to the point, what do they want?” He jerked his arm toward the entourage of men wearing bright yellow hard hats now gathering around the bulldozer.

“Now, John, I explained all this. Samuel and I are with the Mennonite Disaster Service. Those men are with the local utility company, and Grady there is with the county. It is our job to—”

“I know who everybody is. I don't want you here.”

“We only wish to help,” Samuel said. His voice was soft, conciliatory, but his stance was every bit as unyielding as John's.

“I see you have been able to rescue several items from your home,” Arlen observed, moving closer to the pile that Zeke and John had created over the last hour. He held up a ceramic mug. “Not so much as a chip,” he observed. “And yet it flew from all the way over there.”

“Mr. Steiner?” Grady and the man who'd been driving the Jeep were picking their way across the rubble. “Do you have a few minutes?”

Perhaps because he had been expecting the county's man to dish out orders instead of asking permission, John nodded and relaxed his grip on the sign slightly.

“Great.” Grady waved a clipboard in the air. “This is Dennis Jenkins. He's an engineer with the county. I thought maybe we could make a survey of your property and see what might be the best plan for going forward.”

“What's your plan?”
Zeke had asked, and after over an hour of digging through rubble to salvage bits and pieces of his life, John had to admit to himself that he didn't have one. Surveying the damage made sense. Grady was now close enough that John could see that the paper on the clipboard was a sort of checklist. It couldn't hurt to let the engineer have a look around.

“I thought you were bringing in a team of volunteers, an RV team,” John said to Arlen.

“Ja, well, we could hardly drive RVs in here with the lane impassable,” Arlen reasoned. “Let the engineer do his job, John.”

“Very well,” John said, “but those guys stay put. And cut off those motors,” he added, glaring at the cluster of workers in hard hats.

“Done.” Grady gave a signal, and the rumble of machinery wheezed to silence.

As he walked the property with Grady and the engineer, John noticed that Arlen and Samuel followed along. Every once in a while Arlen would murmur something to Samuel, and the younger man would nod and make a notation on a folded sheet of paper with a stub of a pencil. In spite of his fluency in the German dialect common to both the Amish and Mennonite faiths, John could not decipher these exchanges, but he could certainly appreciate that it was far more important to give his full attention to Grady and the engineer. For in the midst of what appeared to be casual and sympathetic comments about the outbuildings, the house and the plantings, Grady was eliciting other information.

“Do you have insurance?” he asked.

The question stopped John cold in his tracks. Of course he didn't have insurance. In his world, neighbors took care of neighbors. There was a fund within the church congregation for helping people in his situation. But he was no longer part of that community, the one that had rebuilt his neighbor's house after a fire. The one that had provided a young mother and her seven children with the funds to keep going after her husband was badly injured in a farming accident.

“I have money,” he growled even as he mentally calculated just how little money was left from the sale of his farm after he had paid for the property, the renovations, and the plants he'd had to buy here in Florida. Even before the hurricane, he'd been grudgingly considering the prospect that he would need to find ways to supplement his meager funds by fall. “I have tools,” he added. “I can rebuild.”

“In time perhaps,” Grady said with a barely concealed glance at John's injured arm. “Why don't you wait here while we poke around the foundation of the house?”

The suggestion didn't deserve an answer, and John doggedly followed Grady and the engineer over a mound of wet sand and rubble to what had been the front door of his house.

“Arlen?” Grady shouted, and the minister turned away from the chicken coop that he and Samuel had been inspecting. “Wanna come have a look at this?” John waited while the three men slowly worked their way to the interior of the house. He was aware that Zeke had come to stand with him. The two of them watched as Samuel scrambled up a pile of broken bricks and chunks of concrete to get a closer look at the chimney. He turned to Arlen and shook his head, and Grady made a note on his clipboard. This pantomime was repeated at least three other times before Grady came back to where John waited.

“The good news is that there's no reason you can't rebuild,” Grady said slowly, not meeting John's eyes.

“And the bad news?”

“You'll have to start from scratch. This stuff—” Grady waved a hand over the remains of the packinghouse and outbuildings and shook his head. “You'll need permits. I can help you get the survey and flood certification documents, but you're going to need permits for the building, plumbing, electrical—if you decide to put that in—and when it's all up again, you'll need a final inspection and occupancy permit before you can move in.”

“It's my land,” John argued. “I don't need anyone's permission to live on my own land.”

“You're right,” Grady agreed. “But unless you plan to live in a tent here, you're going to need those permits.”

“And if I refuse?”

“There will be fines, hefty fines that will make the cost of the permit look like peanuts. And you could go to jail.”

John felt a sense of overwhelming grief rise up into his throat. He had worked so very hard, and he had come so close. Why would God test him in such a way?

“I'll start over,” he said and only realized he had spoken aloud when Zeke grinned.

“That's the spirit,” the homeless man said as he clapped John on the back.

John couldn't help noticing that neither Grady, Arlen, nor Samuel seemed to share Zeke's enthusiasm. And their obvious doubt only strengthened John's will to succeed.

“You'll still need those permits,” Grady warned.

John did not acknowledge this comment. Instead, he held out his right hand to Grady. “Thanks for coming,” he said as in turn he shook hands with Grady, Arlen, and Samuel. He even shook hands with the engineer. “Now, if you don't mind, I've got work to do.”

“As long as they're here,” Arlen said with a nod toward the men in hard hats and the bulldozer, “why don't we clear away those fallen trees by your beach?”

John weighed his answer against what was most likely to get these people to leave as soon as possible and decided that since the bulldozer and other equipment had to turn around, they might as well move the fallen trees. “I'd appreciate that,” he told Arlen and could not deny that it felt good to see the older man's smile. It was not a smile of victory. Rather, it was one of appreciation. Arlen was grateful for John's willingness to allow him to do at least a part of the work he no doubt believed that he had been sent by God to accomplish.

True to their word, Grady, Arlen, and Samuel climbed back into the Jeep driven by the engineer and followed the heavy machinery back down the lane as soon as the trees were moved out of the way and the path from the house to where the pier had once stood had been cleared.

“You're going to need some help,” Zeke commented as he watched them go. “Those MDS crews can get a lot done in a short time if you give them half a chance.”

“I expect you're right,” John replied, “but I just need time to think it all through. Can you understand that?”

“Yep.” Zeke headed back to where he'd left the boat. “You ready?”

It was just past noon, and there was so much to do. Surely Zeke wasn't planning to—

“I gotta get the boat back,” Zeke called as he unleashed the boat from the tree and waited. “You coming?”

John wasn't ready to go. Not yet. But then, the boat was the only way in or out. He let out a sigh. “Be right there,” he called and turned to take one more look around, memorizing every detail. And that was when he remembered that the lane was open. He could stay and walk out to the road.

“You go on,” he shouted. “I'm going to stay awhile longer.”

“No worries,” Zeke replied as he pulled the starter rope and eased the boat back out into the calm waters of the bay.