A Losing Hand
This happened in the summer of 1977. Past wheat harvest, so late June on a Sunday evening after church. The Gerbers invited us for supper and dominoes and prayer. The sun didn’t set til nearly ten and the long summer light lingered on everything, or in everything, it seemed, so that we never thought to turn on the kitchen light.
I held a nello hand and bid two marks, and Sara across the table laid down her dominoes and laughed. A full teeth laugh. I had in my head Solomon describing them as fresh shorn sheep up from the washing, and I said so over my hand and that got everybody laughing too so that no one could hide their teeth. We won the trick and the game.
“How’d you win with nothing?” Sara said. Then the sun was down, and the light was gone, and Gerry—Geraldine—had a funny way of winding down a conversation. “Honey,” she’d say to Harold, “Let’s let these nice people go home and get to bed.”
Good company is hard to break. We prayed and sang on their threshold. The sun was down. I started us on a hymn I knew, and our voices mingled. Hidden in pain, risen in love. There is no harvest without sowing of grain. We weren’t good singers, but human voices, even untrained, reach for harmony. In that dark little doorway, the summer air thick and hot as goose down, we all had our eyes closed. I don’t know how to jump to this next part, but the light came back on. That summer light, not the porch light. The sun was set. Just in the middle of us, the light was there. It might have been a flash or a thousand years—I mean, I guess it wasn’t a thousand years—but maybe it was because the moment seemed to crack open, like it was skin we’d outgrown and shed. And then it was gone, and we were standing in the dark doorway.
I was nineteen. Sara and I had been married that February in the Westway Fellowship church. That’s gone now, the church and the town. It doesn’t seem so long ago that a town would’ve had time to die, but I’m fifty-eight, and the years that I can call my life have passed like geese at night. We went to church there three or four times a week. Drove all the way over from Dawn, twenty miles, after I’d moved irrigation pipe and doctored calves and walked the sorghum sprouts and made love to Sara and ate a steak and a thousand other things that a nineteen-year-old can do and still gain sap by what is spent. Grass in the spring.
For our wedding, Sara’s folks gave me a calfskin King James, and I hid the words down deep in me that I think my sweat were great drops of scripture that watereth the earth. I got to where I could recite Paul’s epistle to the Romans or Jesus’ sermon to the cattle, always saying it wherever I went. I remember a time I had a Hereford cow clamped in the stock chute and set the loppers to her horns. There’s a vein that supplies the horns with blood so they grow, and soon as that horn comes off, blood sprays like a line of ink. She shook her head while I whispered in her ear blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God, and her horn came off, and that blood squiggled out into the dirt what could have been letters and then across me, right across my chest. I took it to be a message in an alphabet I couldn’t read, but I understood it all the same. No hand afire. I needed no interpreter.
I respected the fire out of Sara’s folks, Forrest and Nelda. We picked them up in Hereford and drove them to Westway three times for sure, sometimes four times a week. They were kinda Jesus hippies. Forrest grew a big beard, grey already in his forties, and Nelda wore her hair long and straight. Forrest was a preacher but not in any of the denominations. He’d fill in country pulpits when there was a need. He’d been brought up out in western New Mexico, and his daddy was killed in a potash mine, so going to school to be a preacher was a seed that died before it ever sprouted. I don’t think he had it in him to be a pastor. To organize people. He just loved to talk scripture. When thou sittest in thine house and when thou walkest by the way.
He was a printer and a typesetter by trade and was able to find paying work in most small towns at a newspaper. He had this way of pausing in a conversation. He’d raise his hand with his thumb and forefinger pinched together and tap out a line in the air then resume talking. It took me a while, but I figured he was setting his thought in invisible type before saying it, a word that he saw concerning Hereford and Westway.
Nelda was smart. She graduated high school at sixteen and hired on at the Hereford Brand. One editor fired her when she married Forrest because he thought a married woman should be at home, but he didn’t last long. The next editor hired her back the day he took over. She knew most of the families in Deaf Smith county. Her daddy ran the first gas station in Hereford. Outside of her normal reporting, she spent a few years interviewing folks and researching in the library and tax records and the newspaper printed and bound her collected history of every family that lived in Deaf Smith. That was the centennial year. They called it a yearbook like you get in high school. You could flip through and see the Ricketts, the Lawrences, the Gerbers, the Frisches, the Skypalas and at least a hundred others like if Numbers listed people you knew. Or whose grandkids you knew. Lot of people I ain’t ever heard of too and when they arrived. Which part of the county they resided. How they made their living. Nelda didn’t make much of a deal about the yearbook at the time, but the more years I’ve had to think about it, I’m not sure there ever was its like, anywhere. At one point she knew each of her neighbors.
We have a copy, and probably the library does. The Brand has since folded, so any copies they had are long gone.
We told Forrest and Nelda and the other folks at Westway Fellowship about the light we’d seen on the Gerbers’ porch. I wrestled with whether we ought to. Jesus warned a leper not to tell anyone of his cleansing, but the light arrived with no message except itself, so we told the others. Talking about it felt a little like if I’d described my honeymoon to my brother the next morning.
I don’t know how we could have kept that a secret. That Wednesday night at Westway Fellowship, after Mike Brumley gave a word, me and Sara were talking to him and Forrest and Nelda when Todd Simon came up and said, “I heard you seen God.”
“Scripture says no one’s seen God,” said Mike. Todd ignored him.
“The Gerbers said you saw God on their porch.”
I cast a glance over to the Gerbers. Harold was packing up his guitar. Gerry stacked hymnals. Todd was one of those people that nosed into conversations like a runt pig on the teat. You tried to cut short conversations with Todd. He wore a polyester suit and enough hair gel to stiffen a wet noodle.
“We saw a light,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why what?”
“Why’d y’all see it?”
Forrest lifted his hand, tapping a line with his fingers pinched. I knew Forrest well enough to stop talking when he did that, but Todd didn’t notice and kept on.
“How’d y’all get to see it?”
“Let Forrest speak,” I said.
“Did he see it?” Todd said.
Forrest dropped his hand.
“Did it speak?” Todd asked.
“It was just a light,” said Sara.
“What do you mean just a light?” I said.
“I don’t mean nothing. It was a light. It didn’t have a voice.”
The people at Westway weren’t the skeptical type. They believed. It wasn’t a question of if we saw something. They moved about their days expecting things like this to happen. Every time we met, someone would give a testimony of how they’d seen signs in the clouds or dreamed a dream. Teri Hollis once told us— from the pulpit—that she’d watched her dog Samson relieve itself and God told her that she needed to relieve herself of her sins. Then she proceeded to squeeze one out in the Spirit, grunting and squishing her face and confessing indiscretions. I almost fell over laughing and trembling on the wooden floor of the Westway sanctuary.
We weren’t skeptics, but the questions made me uneasy nonetheless. The more I answered questions, the more that moment seemed to recede, like when you have a spot in your vision, and it moves each time you try to look directly at it. Everyone wants that to happen to them, I think, and so they ask questions to see if they can get God to show up. Todd asked which hymn we were singing. I was embarrassed that it was a Catholic one I’d grown up with, so I said I didn’t remember. Mike asked what we had prayed for. Was it for the church to grow? For souls to be saved? For Jimmy Carter to overturn Roe v. Wade? More people crowded around, and Harold was called over and I could tell by his face that he felt the same way I did.
I threw my hands up and said I had cattle to check before it got dark and grabbed Sara’s hand and we left. We saw the Gerbers in the parking lot and hugged them. We acknowledged in some look we gave each other that it was true, that we’d seen what we’d seen, but we didn’t want to talk about it. I got to where I didn’t talk about it with anybody, not even Sara, for years. To tell you the truth, I chose to not even think about it.
Westway Fellowship grew and moved to Hereford, and we changed the name to Community Fellowship and bought a big yellow building and installed green carpet. It was all nice. The move was exciting and required all hands on deck. But some of that simple love was missing or buried in the conversations about budget and growing. We missed a few weeks in September while I was harvesting sorghum, and Sara got a mean phone call from Mike Brumley about our absence. We were on the fence about some of the decisions being made, and the bigger building was part of it. Then Todd roped the church into the Christian Businessmen’s Association, and we hosted a prophet from Kansas City as an outreach to the movers and shakers of Hereford. This prophet drove a Cadillac and wore a purple eyepatch and wiped his sweaty face with a purple handkerchief. He prophesied and told people in the audience information he couldn’t have possibly known. He knew the Gerbers were having trouble getting pregnant. He knew Barb Hershey worked sheep and had immigrated from Australia. He knew Steve Artho was brothers with the CEO of Hereford Grain. He said we too could have the power he had if we only believed. The whole evening crescendoed to a point where he moved his eyepatch over and revealed the puckered hole in his head. He read drivers’ licenses from the congregation out of the hole. Then he asked for money and I thought “What for?” I wasn’t sure what to think. You want these things to be true. I don’t know how he would’ve done it without some special powers, but I couldn’t figure out how him reading drivers’ licenses brought us anywhere in touch with the source of that light. You can speak with the tongues of angels and read addresses with your empty eye socket, but if you have not love. That was our last meeting.
Forrest always had his nose in the wind to sense when God was moving, so he moved Nelda and Sara’s little sister, Celia, to Farmington, then to Lubbock for a while. Celia got married when she was eighteen, and then Forrest and Nelda moved to Dallas and joined a black church. We visited them a few times and went to church with them. They loved it there. It’s the longest they ever stayed in a church. A couple of old white folks who couldn’t clap on beat.
The print industry turned digital and Forrest couldn’t adapt. He retired to focus on prison ministry. Nelda figured out computers and got a job at a junior college in their communications office. She walked to work every day for twenty years. They made her retire when she was seventy-five. We didn’t see them much during those years. Just holidays.
When my son was seven or eight, he asked me why he couldn’t see God when he prayed. That’s a good question that I think most people decide they don’t need to answer. I told him about the time we saw the light on the Gerbers’ porch. He asked me to repeat the story every few years and I settled into a way of telling it. To my surprise, I didn’t mind telling him about it and it must have stuck because I overheard my granddaughter ask Sara about it the other day. Sara told her that she didn’t see a light, but that there had been something there. A warmth is the word she used.
I’ve thought about that a great deal. Was there a light? Was I so sure of what I’d seen that I spoke for Sara? Have I misremembered, or has Sara? I would like to call up the Gerbers and ask them, but Gerry and their son Jansen were killed by a cattle truck about ten years ago. We hugged Harold at the funeral, and I tried to look him in the eye to see if we still held some agreement there, but a lot of time had passed between us. Once we left Community Fellowship and my in-laws moved, I didn’t have much business in Hereford. It was a long-distance phone call. Anyway, you get out of the habit pretty quick. I heard Harold isn’t doing so well now. I wonder if he thinks about the light, or the warmth, or if every memory with Gerry feels like a cavern now. Sometimes I get mad at God for showing me that when I was so young. It was a big moment, and I’ve had the rest of my life to doubt that it happened. Or worse, that I’ve done something wrong, and God has taken it away from me.
Forrest fell out of their attic a few years ago. They didn’t want to admit it, but Nelda let it slip that Forrest hadn’t moved from his chair in a few days, so we pried. It took about a year, but we convinced them to move back up here. Nelda had also kept it from us that she developed diabetes in her sixties. By the time we had her settled in a place here, she’d lost most of her eyesight. Her world was glowing blobs of color. Her hearing was on its way out, too, and the circulation in her legs. She couldn’t read or watch TV or walk. The world shrank to her memories. Her mind was still sharp though. If we sat next to her, she’d tell us stories.
Forrest got pretty bad too. He had a skin cancer and they cut off his ear. Then prostate cancer that got into some of his other organs. We thought he was going to die first, and we made arrangements with a hospice service, but then Nelda’s kidneys quit and she went in a few days. The end-of-life people tried to describe the process to us, or what they know of it. When death comes like that, the body knows what’s about to happen. The brain shrinks by a quarter and systems shut down.
Since her kidneys were gone, she couldn’t really have water. A nurse would come in and wet a sponge on a stick and wipe it on Nelda’s tongue. Her tongue swelled up and her mouth hung open. They gave her a bunch of morphine to deal with the discomfort and she slept most of the time, though sometimes her eyes were open. On the last morning, I came in and held her hand. She stirred out of her morphine dreaming and spoke. Her throat was so dry that it sounded like someone was tearing paper under a pillow. The effort it must take to speak in that state. She turned to me and said, “I have a story for you. When I was passing through.” Her eyes seemed like she was drifting through space, way outside of this world. “I have a story for you,” she said. “It’s all true.” The nurses say there’s a lucid moment when death is close. Her mind mustered. It was an extraordinary kindness.
We took Forrest to her funeral in a wheelchair. He had stopped speaking. We told him that Nelda was gone, and he showed with his eyes that he knew. Before he died the next week, we sat with him in the hospice bedroom. Occasionally, he raised his hand with his fingers pinched and tapped a line in the air.