In my line of business, I’ve seen worse than a drunk preacher’s kid, it’s true. Over to Seminole, just thirty-odd miles north, preacher’s kid went crazy in the middle of the night, strung up his parents in their bed with purple twine-purple!-and set fire to the bed. In Odessa, just south, preacher’s kid made news when they discovered he’d been doing drug deals on church property. The state came in and seized all the church’s assets, just like that, an entire church reduced to rubble in a matter of days.
Takes my breath away sometimes, the way evil can sink its teeth in somebody, shake them hard, until it’s their own neck broken and bleeding.
That’s what worried me about the boy and wherever it is he’d gone to.
It’s not easy to drink in Andrews. We’re a dry county. To buy any kind of liquor, you have to drive elsewhere. Out toward Odessa, just across the county line, you’ll find the first liquor store, just lying in wait. I’m not one to take up causes, but there’s something wrong when a town manages to keep itself free of sin yet has to contend with the devil permanently camping out on its perimeters.
For a while after our talk, Sammy didn’t drink, or if he did, it was in secret. Then one morning he wasn’t in his bed. Charlene wanted to call Chief right away and it’s true, I made her wait. I said, “There’s no reason to involve the police when, like as not, the boy’ll come dragging his sorry self through that door in another hour, barely able to stand on the two legs God gave him.”
I saw something in Charlene give then, in the way her eyes became all dark and soft. For a moment, it looked like she was resigned. But how could she be resigned to Sammy’s drinking? Or to his disappearing act? She had something tucked away in the back of her mind but I couldn’t figure it out.
One of us called the church secretary, I don’t even remember who, said I’d be in late that day. Then I sat myself down on the living room couch with a cup of coffee, waiting for the boy to show up so I could give him a piece of my mind.
I am not a fire-’n’-brimstone kind of preacher. The good church ladies who make up my congregation say I’m a salt-’n’-pepper kind of preacher instead, mostly pepper. “Too much pepper, Preacher,” one of them told me once as she left the church one day, never to return. “Too much pepper.”
That day, however, I was in a fire-’n’-brimstone kind of mood and I planned to give it to the boy when he came home.
Only he didn’t come. Both of us waited as long as we could. Eventually, Charlene had to get on over to the hospital-we like to joke that her boss isn’t as understanding as mine-and by lunchtime, fingernails bitten off to the quick, I decided to get off to the church before I started gnawing on the flesh too. Andrews is a small town and people know where to find me. If the boy turned up in a compromising situation, the church would be the first place they’d call.
But he didn’t turn up that day or the next. He didn’t show up until Sunday, showed up in the back of the church, right in the middle of my sermon. I was preaching on the loaves and fishes, the miracles our Savior performs, the way He multiplies and provides. It’s hard to yell at your boy when he’s been gone so long, the only thing you want anymore is to see him walk through the door, and then he shows up right when you’re talking about the mercy of God.
So I never gave him a piece of my mind. And now I wish I had, because a few weeks later he disappeared and never came back.
I suppose that at first I thought Chief would take care of it. I suppose that I thought, It’s a small town. Chief will put this case first, he’ll realize the importance, he’ll put every resource toward finding the boy.
Until then, I hadn’t realized how different police work is from church work. Police work isn’t about saving anybody. Or, at least, it isn’t about saving a teenager who’s just gotten a little off track, a little lost, who needs somebody to find him, to help him home.
In fact, the first thing Chief brought up when we went to see him was our recent trouble. “Didn’t Sammy disappear for a few days awhile back?” he asked, scratching his stomach, drinking out of a big mug on his desk, and eyeing us over the rim. Chief had an odd tic I’d never noticed before, the eye shuddering in sudden rapid winks and the skin underneath it trembling and heaving. It was distracting.
“You know he did, Chief,” I said.
“He’s probably run off again. My guess is he’ll show up in a few days, just like last time. These things happen.” He moved some papers on his desk and looked at Charlene as he spoke. “When he comes back, you should sit down and have a long talk with him.”
The wife was so nervous, I was afraid she was going to start chewing her handkerchief. I took it from her gently and put it in my pocket.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” I asked.
“Not much,” he said. For the first time, he looked vaguely sympathetic. “He’s seventeen. As far as the law in Texas is concerned, he can leave Andrews whenever he wants. We don’t do much unless there’s some sign of foul play.”
“That’s that then,” I said, and we left the station.
On the way home, Charlene asked me what I wanted to do.
“I guess we wait,” I said.
After that day, the wife and I started fighting. We’ve always been a placid couple, but here was Charlene, snorting like an angry horse, face beet-red, screaming how this and that and the other thing didn’t make her happy or satisfied or what have you.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked her once after the screaming was over and she was sitting on the couch across from me, her hands in her lap, open and turned up toward the ceiling.
“It’s too late,” she said. She was staring at those hands, not me, when she said that.
“Do you want a divorce?” I asked, appalled and, frankly, ashamed. I spend so much of my time counseling couples on how to mend broken marriages and here I was facing it myself, no clue how it all happened. How did it happen? What had happened?
“That’s not what I meant, Charles,” she said. “That’s not what I meant at all.”
She looked up at me then and I realized, all of a sudden, Why, she and I have the same eyes, the same eyes as the boy. I broke down weeping. All these years, thirty-three years now, I was looking into a mirror when I looked in her eyes, and I’d never realized it before.
“Do you believe in miracles?” she asked.
She’d asked me this question once before, back when she was supplicating the Lord to touch her barren womb and give her a child, just like Hannah in the Old Testament. And when her belly was swollen with the boy and her eyes swollen with joy, I reminded her of her many prayers, and that is when we decided to name him Samuel, which means God heard.
“Of course,” I said. “Isn’t our boy’s life a miracle?”
“No, I mean real miracles,” she said, her voice flat, emotionless. “Do you believe that we could pray and ask God to send our boy back-my boy back-and here he’d come, walking through that door, as if he’d never gone anywhere at all?”
I didn’t know how to answer her, so I said nothing.
I couldn’t get the question Charlene asked out of my head. Many nights, I can’t even count how many, I propped myself up on my elbows and stared at her face while she slept. I counted every single wrinkle-forty-two in all, if you included the soft folds of skin on her neck. Sometimes I think we don’t pay attention to all the tiny changes, and then one day we wake up and realize we don’t recognize the person we married.
I thought about the facts of our life together-how we married when we were so young, too young, I realize now, only eighteen and nineteen years old; how we tried to have a child for so many years before she conceived; the way she always had to work, because my salary as a minister in a small Southern Baptist church could never quite pay the bills; the way she wasn’t just a good mother, she was a great mother, because she’d wanted a child for so long before Sammy came; how our life had been made up of endless church meetings and hospital rounds. Charlene was a nurse, and we made a good pair, her healing bodies and me healing souls. She’d always worked with babies, newborns, and that’d been hard for her for many years when we were struggling and struggling to get pregnant. But, as she’d always said, sometimes what doesn’t kill you makes you strong.