“So you think we might have a relationship then, huh?”
“We have a relationship now, but I would say that if I don’t drive you off and if your God is not overly jealous, then we might have even more of a relationship by then.”
“She is very jealous, but she will share me with one other lover, so long as she’s good for me and she knows who’s the wife and who’s the mistress.”
We were silent again. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds and reflected off the car in front of us. I put on my shades. They improved the situation only slightly. I pulled over to the left to pass, and when I did, I noticed that Laura eased her right hand over to the door and held onto the handle. Her knuckles turned red and then white.
After we had safely passed the car and she had time to recuperate, she said, “I would like to go to the funeral with you, and I’m sorry for before.”
The clouds covered the sun again. I pulled my shades off.
“Now, will you tell me about yourself?” I asked.
“I don’t know. You seem to see way too much as it is.”
I looked at her with an expression that said, I don’t buy it.
“Well, the short version is that I’m working at FedEx while I finish up my master’s at FSU. I should finish this fall or at least by the spring. I would like to have a practice in Tallahassee, but the field is so
flooded now that it’s doubtful that I will.”
“What about family?” I asked.
“My dad lives in Tallahassee. He was a deputy with your dad at one point. He and my mother divorced when I was thirteen. My mom and my sister live in Pottersville.”
“You too, right?”
“No. I just visit on the weekends. You think I would let a strange man come to my home?”
“Strange?” I asked.
“You’re taking me to a funeral on a date.”
I gave her a small shrug, conceding the point.
“My mom teaches school, and Kim is going to attend TCC in the fall. My mom’s brother is the president of the bank in Pottersville.”
“Have you ever been married?” I asked.
“I’m not ready to discuss that yet.”
“Okay. I understand.”
“Have you?”
“Yes.”
“Kids?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
“Anything else I should know?” I asked.
“Yes. I’ve always been a sucker for compassionate men who look like Catholic priests and take me to funerals for our first date.”
“That’s good to know,” I said.
The funeral home was actually a small double-wide trailer. It was only slightly larger than my trailer, but it was way too big for the number of people who showed up for Ike Johnson’s funeral. In addition to Laura and myself, there were four other people there-two elderly black ladies, his grandma and aunt, and two young people, his sister and his friend. The funeral home was named Jack’s. It didn’t even say Jack’s Funeral Home on the sign-just Jack’s. There were an uneven number of wooden pews on the right and left sides of the chapel. They needed another couple of coats of paint. The thin red carpet had stains and smelled like old socks.
I had wrestled with what to say all week. I felt it must be something about God’s love and his ability to redeem the worst of situations and people.
I said, “God’s mercies, the Bible says, are new every morning. That means that every single morning, God’s infinite mercies are fresh and unused and waiting for us. They were waiting for Ike this morning no less than for you and me. You may say that Ike didn’t live the way he should have and so surely God’s mercies were not available for him. But I say that it is when we don’t do what we should that we need mercy most, and it is also when mercy is most available to us.
“Grace is not what we deserve, but what we need. Justice gives us what we deserve, but grace gives us what we need. If God doesn’t love Ike as much as he does you and me, then God’s love is conditional and the Bible is wrong. But if the Bible is true, if Jesus was right, then God is love, filled with compassion even for those who make themselves his enemies. God is love.
“All I ask of you today is to believe and trust in the absolute love of God. A God, who like the father in Jesus’ story of the prodigal son, welcomes us home even after we rejected him and run away to a foreign land to get as far away from him as we could. This past Tuesday, Ike closed his eyes in this world and opened them in the next. He opened them on the familiar and loving eyes of God, who, as a father, loves Ike and loves you and me, his children. Johnathan Edwards, the famous Puritan preacher, was wrong. We’re not sinners in the hands of an angry God. We’re sinners in the hands of a merciful God. Dare to believe in love, in God. For God is love.”
Throughout the entire message no one made eye contact with me except for Laura. That’s not a complaint-even from ten feet away her eyes were incredible. She looked at me the way some people do when they hear you speak for God. It was a very dangerous thing, and I could tell that she was seeing far more than was there. Or perhaps more likely, she wasn’t putting what she saw into the full context of my broken-down life. I closed with the hope for atonement that extends past the borders of this world and the few nice things that some of the inmates had said about Ike. The latter I stretched so far they almost broke.
After the funeral, the family thanked me and tried to pay me. As Laura and I were preparing to leave, the young man they had said was a friend of Ike’s asked if he could talk to me, which was funny because until that moment he hadn’t acknowledged my presence at all.
“Preacher, I loved Ike,” he said, still looking down at the floor. “I even went to see him a couple of times in prison. But then something happened to him. Drugs, I think, but something else too. He got in over his head. I think they killed him. I wanted you to know.”
“Who do you think killed him?” I asked.
“Whoever he was involved with,” he said.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Don Hall.”
“Is there a number I can reach you at if I find something out or need to ask you some questions?”
He shook his head and walked away. After taking about five steps, he stopped, nearly turned around, but then continued walking. Laura was waiting for me in the back near the door.
“Do you believe all that?” Laura asked when we were back in the car.
“Believe all what?” I asked.
“All those things that you said in your sermon, which, by the way, was excellent.”
“Yes, I do.”
“How can you believe such hopeful things when the world is such a hopeless place?”
“How can I not? Besides, the world is filled with hope as well. Grace shows up all the time; we just usually miss it when it does.”
“What grace?”
“Dancing with you last night, that was a grace. And your peach perfume, that was a grace, too. A good night’s rest is a grace, a rainy night, the weekend, the love of a parent, the loyalty of a friend. God speaks through all of these things and more. In fact, she speaks through the bad things as well-it’s just usually things we don’t want to hear.”
“But how can you know all of this has meaning?” she asked. Her voice said she wanted to believe.
“I admit that it’s wishful thinking,” I said. “But certainly it is not blind faith-there is evidence. However, the fact that I find meaning in them says something, doesn’t it?”
“I guess it does,” she said. She shook her head slowly. “I’ve never met anyone quite like you.” She reached over to the armrest where my right arm was and took my hand. “You did a good thing back there. You’re a good man.”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t have the heart to tell her how badly she was mistaken.
For the rest of the afternoon, we clung to each other, savoring every moment. I could tell that the crisis dynamic of the funeral had had a profound effect on us. We were grasping for life, hoping to find something within each other. We were moving too fast, and I knew it, but I lacked the will to do anything about it.