Prophet (12 page)

“I couldn’t get the pipes off him,” Chuck wept. “I couldn’t get ’em to move.”

“It’s okay. You gotta calm down.”

“What happened?” John demanded.

“Johnny,” Chuck cried, “Johnny, I’m sorry. I couldn’t get the pipes off him.”

John cursed and shouted, “Chuck,
what happened?
”

“The rack of pipes fell over on him.”

Nothing would sink in. John just couldn’t fathom anything. “What do you mean, it fell over?”

Chuck let his head fall backward against the wall and cried some more.

“Chuck, what rack of pipes?”

Chuck controlled himself. “The big galvanized. Two-inch, one-inch, one and a half. I just don’t get it. I don’t know how it happened. The thing weighed a ton. We’ve never had anything fall over like that.”

“Did you see it fall?”

“No. I got here at 8 and saw it dumped over and the pipe lying all over the floor, and then . . .” He choked back his emotion, drew a deep breath. “And then I saw John underneath. I tried to get the pipes off him, but there were just too many, so I tried using the forklift, but I couldn’t get under ’em, they were all crooked. I tried to get ’em off by hand and they kept rolling back and then I busted my fingers and I cut myself up. I couldn’t do it.”

John was disoriented. He could only sit there, let things happen around him, and try to take it all in.

The police and a medical investigator had questions for everyone, and John sat in numb shock, listening to all the answers. “No, no one saw the rack fall. John was here before anyone else; he always got to
work an hour early. John was the boss . . . Chuck got here first, a little after 8, and then the rest of us, at 8:30 . . . No, we’ve never had a rack fall like that before. Maybe the pipe wasn’t stacked evenly, maybe Dad was climbing on the rack and that could have tipped it over, but we can’t say for sure . . . No, his wife doesn’t know yet. His oldest son is sitting right here . . . The company is privately insured, not state insured . . .”

“Did he have enemies?” asked a cop.

“No.”

“Maybe he did,” John answered.

“Who?”

John shook his head, sorry he’d said anything. “I don’t know.”

Two paramedics worked on Chuck’s arm while the police asked their questions. He’d broken two fingers and lacerated his knuckles. They bound the wounds, applied a temporary splint, and arranged for Jimmie to drive him to the hospital. Jimmie and Chuck left immediately.

Kevin, Jill’s husband, came and picked her up. He stayed just long enough to find out from Buddy what had happened, then away they went. Jill had to get home. Kevin would get the details later.

The police and medical investigator completed their work. Don’t disturb the site, they said—they might have to come back after the autopsy.

Then, quickly, quietly, and unobtrusively, they conveyed the shrouded form into a transport and drove away.

Only Buddy and John remained in the warehouse, sitting alone in the office, the clamor suddenly chopped off as with a knife, the shock ebbing, giving way to grief.

“Guess I’d better close up the place,” Buddy murmured just to break the silence. “We won’t be doing business today.”

“I’ve got to tell Mom,” John said.

“How’re you doing?”

John was staring at Dad’s office door, still ajar, the one marked “THE BOSS.” “That’s the last time I ever saw him alive, Buddy . . . right in there.”

The last time. And perhaps the worst time. Just one more conversation, John thought. Just one and things could have been better. He
and Dad could have ironed things out. They could have had time to make changes, adjustments, meet on some kind of middle ground.

But they never did, and now they never would. “We never finished the boat either,” John muttered.

“Hm?” said Buddy.

“Oh . . . funny . . . I just thought of the boat Dad and I worked on and couldn’t finish before I left for college, and after that we never did finish it, never got back to it. Good grief, that was years ago. It’s funny the things you remember.”

The boat. The little rowboat. They were going to build it in Dad’s shop and then take it out fishing. “I think it was the last thing we really did together.”

The last thing . . .

“STEADY NOW, NOT
too fast. Light pressure. That’s it.” They were in Dad’s shop, pushing a plane along the edge of a board, Dad’s hand on his, his body wrapped around John’s like a cloak, guiding John’s every movement.

“You start at one end, pick up the chip . . . Yeah, just pick it up, no deeper than that, and away you go, on down to the end . . . Keep her flat, keep her flat. You’re Mr. Level, the board’s counting on you . . .”

The chip curled like a blonde tress out of the planer, one clean strip, and Dad chuckled with delight. “That’s it, that’s it, all the way down. Hmm, boy, ain’t it lovely!”

John was eighteen. He knew how to use a plane, he didn’t need Dad showing him for the umpteenth time . . . but Dad sure had the touch, and he was having so much fun showing John how to do it—again—that John didn’t want to complain about it.
Okay, I’ll humor him
, he thought.

It was summer. John would be leaving for college in the fall. He had other things to do, and yet . . . when would he get the chance to do this again? It was right to be with Dad, working on something together. If only this silly project didn’t take so long!

“Well, just think, son. Jesus used a plane and a saw and a hammer, and they didn’t have power tools back then, so it was even slower than this. Guess that’s one way He learned such patience. Good thing, too,
’cause He’s working on us every day, just like we’re working on this boat, and
we
take a long time too . . .”

That boat took so long . . . so long. And they never finished it.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON.
Brother Moore, deacon, with tears in his eyes, stood amidst the congregation to give a brief tribute. “I will always remember John as a lover of life. For him, every good thing really was a gift from God, and he never neglected to give God the glory . . .”

When Brother Moore had finished, Sister Larson, now in her eighties, rose to her feet and spoke. “I guess I knew John longer than anybody, and I can remember when he was a little fellow in my Sunday school class. He was a cut-up, like kids are, but you know, there was never any doubt about his commitment to the Lord . . .”

Betty Pierson, a young single mother, rose to her feet and spoke through great emotion. “He was Jesus to me. The kids and I were living in that old place on 32nd, behind the apple orchard . . .” There were some hmmm’s and nods from some who were familiar with the place. “. . . and the plumbing was just shot, and John found out about it, and I think it was that very week, he was there with a sink and a toilet and all new things, and he put it all in for nothing, and it wasn’t even my house . . .”

The Rainier Gospel Tabernacle was a different place now. It had a new sanctuary with a high, arched ceiling and large windows to let in light and fresh air, and it had a new name, the Rainier Christian Center. For Dad’s memorial service, every pew, every folding chair, every seat in the choir loft was filled, and John recognized many faces, some a lot older, some pretty much the same. They’d sung some of Dad’s favorite hymns—“It Is Well with My Soul,” “And Can It Be That I Should Gain?,” and “Amazing Grace.” Young, bearded Pastor Phillips—this was his fourth year at the church—gave a well-worded eulogy, full of hope and assurance, just the way Dad would have wanted it.

And then the floor was opened for fond memories, meaningful recollections, and there were plenty.

“An honorable man, who wanted to leave his children an honorable world.”

“He had such patience. He could listen to your problems for
hours . . .”

“I think he was a modern-day prophet. He spoke in love, but he always spoke the Truth.”

John was sitting in the front pew with his mother. Sitting near him, as well as interspersed throughout the room, was the rest of the Barrett family. Uncle Roger, Dad’s younger brother, was there with his wife Marie and their four children, all grown, with their own families taking up several pews. Dad’s sister Alice was there with her husband, Robert, and their three children and their families. Mom’s siblings, Doris, Elizabeth, and Forrester, occupied some more pews with their spouses and families. The whole church sanctuary seemed interlaced with Barretts, Barretts-in-law, and shirt-tail Barretts.

Seated right next to John was Mom Barrett, Lillian Eve, Dad Barrett’s sweetheart for forty-six years, John’s ever-present, ever-patient friend and counselor throughout his childhood and, to be honest, ever since as well. She was grieving, of course, but John knew she’d done her weeping at home over the past few days so she could be strong today, for her family. Now, in a pastel blue dress—not black—her face angelic under hair of spun glass, she silently journeyed through years and years of her own precious memories, her visage hauntingly serene.

The tears kept recurring in John’s eyes until finally, in a delayed decision, he let them come, let them spill over and run down his face. He pulled out his handkerchief to dab them away.
Dad, I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry.

He felt—he couldn’t think it clearly yet—that for the past twenty-plus years he had missed something. These friends, this precious family, knew his father better than he had. Their memories were a rich, enduring treasure of joy, admiration, and love. They really knew the man.

His own recollections? The rowboat project was his most recent fond memory. His most vivid memory? His “lunch” with Dad, where pleasant words were few and lunch stayed in the paper bags uneaten—that and his bitter words, “My worst enemy, my greatest liability, is my own father . . . They slapped me in the face with you. If anyone didn’t know you were my father before this, they probably know now.”

It was like being impoverished in the midst of great wealth. The lives and circumstances of these relatives, friends, and strangers were not ideal. None of them were rich in a material sense. None of them
“had it all” or ever would, but wealth was here: families, children, love, faith, an enduring spiritual heritage, and because of these, the ability to express deep joy and steadfast hope, even through tears of sorrow.

In the center of them all, John sat alone. Separate. Disconnected.

He glanced across the room and a few pews back. Yes, he had a family too . . . once. A wife and a son. They were sitting over there right now, on the other side of the church, apart from him, from the family, far away, a sort of monument to the missing side of his life, to the great failure the vast viewing public never saw, never knew about. Ruth was as gorgeous as ever, once a fashion model and now a fashion designer in Los Angeles. That beautiful face still had the same radiance, but like the radiance from a distant star, it had no warmth.

And then there was Carl, John’s nineteen-year-old son, a stranger who’d grown up with his mother and hardly known his father. John had to use some imagination to even recognize him. He’d changed, and that was an understatement. His face was ghostly pale, and his hair, jet black, was shaggy atop his head with an unruly lock falling across his forehead and sometimes over one eye, then cut in sharp stair steps down the sides and back. A gold chain linked a ring in his ear with a ring in his nostril. Everything he wore was black.

Even as John looked, he didn’t want to look. The sight hurt him. Their even being here hurt him. Why had they come? Just so they could sit far across the room from him? And how could he proudly introduce them to his family—“Hi, I’d like you to meet my pride and joy, my son, whom I haven’t seen in years, don’t know, and whose appearance I have no explanation for”?

But Carl was
weeping.
John had to look almost to the point of staring at the contradictory image. Here was what appeared to be a bizarre, defiant rebel, an almost gruesome, morally lost character with a heart of stone, and yet Carl was weeping openly, unabashedly. The kid was heartbroken, and John had to wonder why. Carl hardly knew his own father; why would he be so grieved over his grandfather?