Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One (21 page)

It was in the sizable Beckman dining room
that the three of them sat down to dinner.

Fresh-baked steak and oyster
pie, peas, and a green salad were served on Florence Beckman's blue
willowware china. As Jack dug in, he suddenly remembered that he
had never been allowed to eat from these plates before. He, Bill,
and Bill's younger sister, whom they called “
The Snipe”
when Mrs. Beckman
was out of earshot, ate their meals from brightly colored plastic
plates, bought at a nickel apiece from Jack's Market in Sea
View.

After complimenting Kathy on the dinner,
which was actually very good, Jack turned to Bill.

"So, tell me what I've
missed," he said. "Where's
The
Snipe
?"

Bill chuckled around a mouthful of salad as
Kathy rolled her eyes. "I think it's terrible that you two called
her that!" she rebuked them.

"Hey," said Bill, "You're not the one who
had to put up with her tagging along everywhere after you!"

"I'm telling momma, I'm telling momma…" Jack
mimicked in a high singsong voice, and Bill laughed until he
choked.

"Well," said Kathy haughtily, "I'm sure you
gave her every reason to act like that! I know what older brothers
are like!"

A shadow seemed to fall over the table and
both Kathy and Bill became silent and stared down at their plates.
Jack looked at his own meal for a moment, his gut twisting a little
as he asked, "'Nam?"

"Yeah," Bill whispered.

Kathy said nothing, and Bill reached across
the table and took her hand.

Then, as suddenly as the cloud had
descended, it lifted, and Kathy, her eyes shining with unshed
tears, looked up and smiled.

"So," she said to Jack, "Bill tells me
you're a card player?"

Jack laughed at this, "If you mean that we
played poker and he took all my money, then I guess so!"

"Well, let me get these dishes cleared away
and maybe we can play some cards."

"Sounds good to me."

"Anyway," said Bill, "to
answer your question,
The
Snipe
…"

"
Curse her hide
!" Both men
intoned together, a quip picked up from the venerable Gary Cooper
in an old western they had seen at the Bijou, and had immediately
bestowed on Bill's less-than-welcome sibling. They roared with
laughter, as Kathy shook her head, smiling in spite of
herself.

"
The Snipe
," Bill continued, wiping his eyes, "is another man's torment
now. She graduated high school a few years back, and started taking
classes at Seattle community to be a teacher." Bill shook his head.
"Instead, she fell head over heels for some flatlander
upperclassman and
BAM
; they’re married and moved
back to Pittsburgh--"

"--Chicago…" Kathy corrected with a
smile.

"Same difference," her husband replied,
distastefully, “anyhow she was happy enough to get out of here. We
get Christmas and birthday cards, and a phone call every month or
so. Kathy talks to her more than me."

"Can you blame her?" Jack laughed, ducking
the napkin that Bill threw in his direction. Kathy was laughing
too, and Jack felt the mood lighten a little more.

Later, as Kathy was packing away the
leftovers, Bill and Jack stood in the cool breeze of the porch.
Bill produced a shiny Zippo lighter, lit the end of a small cigar
and, puffing on his White Owl, he filled Jack in on the rest of the
story.

"Anyway," Bill said, "I guess the two of
them were pretty close, growing up."

"Oh, yeah?" replied Jack, leaning against
the far rail trying to avoid the advancing gray-green cloud of
cigar smoke.

"Yup. Parents got killed in
a car accident when she was about eight, her brother maybe
fourteen." Bill closed the lighter with a metallic
snick
. "They lived
with one set of relatives and then another, getting shipped from
here to there until Bobby turned twenty-one and joined the marines.
From the time their folks died, he did most of the work raising
her, then they ship him off to the war and his camp gets shelled
his second night he's there. Four guys lived, out of the forty that
were stationed there."

Bill leaned forward and spit over the porch
rail in disgust.

"Four…Geez!"

Jack shook his head, looking out over the
peaceful sunset and shadows of the bay. Beneath the whisper of the
wind in the long grass, he could hear the screams of wounded boys
being dragged from smoking, bullet-ridden helicopters. Those
chopper pilots, Jack often thought, were the real heroes over
there, flying into the death-zone day after day, saving their
fellow soldiers.

He had ridden along on only two rescue
flights; it had been like flying into hell.

His nose twitched, remembering the cloying,
overripe smell of the jungle, the chemical fires, and acrid taste
of gunpowder, and he closed his eyes for a moment; drawing a deep,
welcome breath of the salt-sea air. Bill was watching him, his head
cocked to one side, the cheap, machine-rolled cigar hanging from
his lip.

"You see a lot of that?" he asked.

"Enough," Jack replied, watching a heron
sweep low over the darkening bay. "More than enough."

"I'd have been there ya know," Bill
muttered, his eyes downcast. "If they'd have let me go, I'd have
been right there with ya."

Jack suddenly remembered the day, dark cool
and overcast, that he and Bill had marched into the recruitment
office together to enlist. Three weeks later, Jack was on a
military plane to Mississippi and Bill was alone at his father's
kitchen table with a 4-F letter in front of him. A two-inch steel
pin in his right ankle had kept him far away from the horror in
Southeast Asia.

"I know that, Billy," Jack said softly,
reverting to his best friend's childhood name. "You know that I
know that."

Bill pulled a flask from his hip pocket,
still staring at the weathered boards beneath his feet. After
taking a long draw, he looked up and offered it to Jack.

"Whiskey?"

"Nah," Jack shook his head, "Gave it up when
I started at Clear Creek; I guess I'm off it for good now."

"Oh yeah," Bill grinned, "I almost forgot,
you're a full-blown preacher."

"Hopefully, I'm a preacher." Jack replied,
"Karl Ferguson hasn't promised me the assistant pastor's job at
Long Beach Community. In fact, I should be bedding down before it
gets too late; I have an interview with him at nine."

"You'll get the job," Bill nodded, flipping
his cigar butt into a rusty coffee can at the foot of the
steps.

"Me and Kathy'll be there next Sunday, too."
He said, "We've been going to the Baptist church here in town, but
it's a little slow for us. I hear your church has a hot little band
going."

"It's not my church yet,"
Jack laughed, "In fact, it won't be
my
church even if I do get the
job. I'm just the assistant pastor, that means I preach twice a
year and sweep twice a week. But now, I sure didn't figure you for
church…"

"Oh sure," Bill grinned, "Kathy won't miss a week, and I'm
right there with her. I got baptized and everything! As long as
they don't ask me to pick up snakes or wash someone's feet, I guess
there are worse ways to spend your Sunday mornings."

Jack took a long look at his old friend,
concerned with the glib reply and lack of sincerity.

"Well," he said, "We'll have to sit down and
talk about that sometime."

"Yeah, I s'pose we will," laughed Bill,
taking another long slug from his flask before stowing it back in
his pocket of his jeans.

"Hey," he whispered, "Don't mention the
hooch to Kathy, will ya? She has this thing about drinking, and you
don't want to get her started."

"Bill…" Jack began to protest.

"Ah, just a little secret," Bill said,
flinging his arm across Jack's shoulders and steering him back into
the house, "let's go play some cards, Kathy's getting pretty good.
Keep an eye on her, though, she’s a bluffer!"

Jack let the subject of Bill's drinking
pass, deciding that if asked, he would tell the truth, but he
wouldn't volunteer any information until then. Somewhere in the
back of his mind, a soft, guilty voice sang to him about
compromise.

Kathy Beckman turned out to be a better card
player than Bill had let on, and Jack wondered, briefly, if he was
being had.

Bill, however, played as fast and wild as he
had when they were kids. Every nickel that Jack lost to Kathy, he
seemed to win back from her husband. Finally, Jack had his original
stack of change in front of him, Kathy had a stack twice that size,
and Bill's hands rested on an empty patch of table where his money
had sat two hours before.

Just before midnight, Jack crawled into the
old feather bed in the Beckman guestroom. He read his Bible until
he couldn't keep the fine print from blurring on the page. After a
quick, but heartfelt prayer for the morning, he fell asleep.

*

Eight and a half hours later Jack was
yawning and rubbing his eyes as he walked out of the coffee shop
and down the street to the front door of the Long Beach Community
Church.

A sandblasted wooden sign
hung above the front lawn of the church, proudly displaying its
name, Pastor Karl Ferguson's name, and the proclamation that LBCC
was
A
Spirit Filled Fellowship.

Jack smiled at this.

If the sign didn't give it away, the sound
of amplified guitars and drums pouring out the open windows, every
Sunday morning, would have made it clear to anyone passing within a
block (or two) of the building.

Karl Ferguson shook Jack's hand with a wide
grin and a twinkle in his eyes. It was no surprise to anyone that
Pastor Ferguson had been elected to wear the Santa suit in the
Christmas parade every year for the last decade. Vivid sky blue
eyes did little to draw the on-lookers attention away from a large
bulbous nose, bushy beard, and the unruly shock of white hair that
framed both sides of his shiny, bald head.

At sixty-one, a lifetime of sea winds and
smiles had etched deep lines into his face, and the stocky,
athletic build he had sported as a young soldier had softened and
spread over the years. He still walked with the limp caused by
German rifle fire on the beach at Normandy in June of 1944.

World War II had lasted only a month for
Karl Ferguson, but his eighteen hours on the French sands of Omaha
Beach would be carried with him, like with the shrapnel in his
knee, for the rest of his life.

The two men sat at the Pastor's worn,
pinewood desk and covered the preliminaries over cups of strong
black tea.

Jack told about his youth, growing up on the
peninsula and working with his boyhood friends at the Beckman
Oyster Farm. His mug was refilled from a steaming copper pot as he
spoke briefly about his time in Vietnam, and finding God as a
lonely, frightened soldier.

Karl Ferguson listened closely, interrupted
occasionally, and nodded often and knowingly. Jack talked about his
years at Bible College, covering the basics: grades, classes, and
the like. This led to a brief review of his year as a missionary in
Africa, which led back to Long Beach.

After twenty minutes, Jack ran out of words, having covered
his personal biography from birth to their present meeting in less
than half an hour.

The moment of silence stretched into two as
Karl poured himself a second cup of tea and settled his girth back
into his groaning chair. Blue eyes studied Jack from beneath an
explosion of bushy white eyebrows, as the older man stirred his tea
and formed the only question he would ask his applicant.

"Tell me Jack," he asked finally, setting
his cup down, "What is God's will for your life?"

Jack paused, taken aback by
the directness of the question.
God's
will for his life?
He had expected to
be asked about his education, his philosophy of ministry, maybe
even why he felt called to Long Beach Community Church.
But...
God's will for his
life?
How could he communicate that, did
he even know the answer? Suddenly Jack realized that he was
speaking, the words pouring out almost unconsciously.

"I know that God wants me to teach," he
said, starting slowly and gaining speed. "I know that he has given
me such a heart to teach others, and that even if I wasn't a
Christian, I would still be teaching somebody somewhere, something.
I think that many people have serious questions, fair questions
about why the world is the way it is, and how God fits into
it--"

"--And do you feel that you have answers to
those questions?" Karl interrupted, leaning forward intently.

"No, not me," Jack smiled, relaxing a bit,
"but I know where the answers are."

He reached forward and tapped the Bible that
lay on the corner of Karl Ferguson's desk. "I've learned a little
about how to find those answers, and how to teach other folks to
find them for themselves. I guess that’s God's calling on my life,
to point people to where they can find the answers."

Another long silence filled the air as Karl
lifted his cup to his lips and took a sip of the steaming liquid, a
strangely dainty gesture for a man of his size.

"Well," he said at last, standing and
extending his hand, "I don’t think I can ask for a better answer
than that. Let me show you your office…"

As quickly as that, Jack
Leland became the Assistant Pastor of the Long Beach Community
Church,
A
Spirit Filled Fellowship
.