Same Kind of Different As Me (22 page)
After church, Denver stopped by the Walkers to visit. He stayed for lunch then excused himself. “I have to go check on Mr. Ballantine,” he said. Curious, Scott asked if he could go, too.
I had known Mr. Ballantine when he stayed at the mission. Sometime before Deborah and I started serving there, Denver told us, he had watched a car screech up to the curb on East Lancaster. The driver shoved an elderly man out of the passenger-side door, pitched a beat-up Tourister suitcase out behind him, and roared away. Abandoned on the curb, the old man staggered like a drunken sailor on shore leave and fired off a salvo of slurry curses. But to Denver, he also looked . . . scared. At the time, Denver had still been an island, a stone-faced loner who didn’t poke about in other people’s business. But something—he thinks now maybe it was how help-less the man looked—plucked a string in his heart.
Denver walked up to the man and offered to help him get into the mission. In return, the man cursed him and called him a nigger.
Denver helped anyway, learning in the process that the fellow’s name was Ballantine, that he was a mean old drunk who’d earned his family’s contempt, and that he hated black people. He hated Christians even more, considered them a pack of mewling, insipid hypocrites. That’s why, free meal or not, he would rather have starved than endure a chapel sermon. Others might have let him. Instead, for about two years, Denver ordered two plates of food in the serving line and took one upstairs to Mr. Ballantine. Foul-tempered, cantankerous, and utterly remorseless, Mr. Ballantine continued to address his benefactor as “nigger.”
The next year a hoodlum jumped Mr. Ballantine outside the mission and demanded his Social Security check. Rather than give in, the old man submitted to a vicious beating that left him a cripple. Unequipped to care for an invalid, Don Shisler had no choice but to find space for Mr. Ballantine in a government-funded nursing center. There, minimum-wage orderlies tended to the basics, but the truth was Mr. Ballantine, at eighty-five, found himself hobbled, helpless, and completely alone. Except for Denver. After the old man’s relocation, Denver regularly walked the two miles through the hood to take Mr. Ballantine some non-nursing-home food or a few cigarettes.
One day, Denver asked me to drive him there. In some ways, I wish he hadn’t, since the trip stripped off my do-gooder veneer to reveal a squeamish man whose charity, at the time, had definite limits.
When we entered Mr. Ballantine’s room at the nursing home, the smell hit me first—the stench of age, dead skin, and bodily fluids. The old man lay on his bed in a puddle of urine, naked except for a neon orange ski jacket. His ghostly chicken-bone legs sprawled across a sheet that had once been white but now was dingy gray, streaked with brown and ocher stains. Around him lay strewn trash and trays of half-eaten food . . . scrambled eggs, crusted hard-yellow . . . shriveled meats . . . petrified sandwiches. On a couple of trays, school-lunch-size milk cartons, tipped over, the puddles congealed into stinking clabber.
In a single, sweeping glance, Denver sized up the room, then me, wobbling and on the verge of vomit. “Mr. Ron just come to say hi,” he told Mr. Ballantine. “He got to be goin now.”
I bolted, leaving Denver alone to clean up Mr. Ballantine and his nasty room. I didn’t offer to help, or even to stay and pray. Feeling guilty, but not guilty enough to change, I jumped in my car and wept as I drove away—for Mr. Ballantine, homeless and decrepit, who would stew in his own excrement if not for Denver; and I wept for myself, because I didn’t have the courage to stay. It was easy for someone like me to serve a few meals, write a few checks, and get my name and picture in the paper for showing up at some glitzy benefit. But Denver served invisibly, loved without fan-fare. The tables had turned, and I now feared that it was he who would catch-and-release me, a person who lacked true compassion, who perhaps wasn’t a catch worth keeping.
I gained a new and more profound respect for Denver that day, my perception of him changing like puzzle pieces slowly clicking into place. He wasn’t showing off, only sharing with me a secret part of his life. Had his secrets included pitching dice in an alley with a hoard of drunken bums, I wouldn’t have been put off. But I was shocked that they included not only praying through the night for my wife, but also nursing this man who never said thank you and continued to call him “nigger.”
For the first time, it struck me that when Denver said he’d be my friend for life, he meant it—for better or for worse. The hell of it was, Mr. Ballantine never wanted a friend, especially a black one. But once Denver committed, he stuck. It reminded me of what Jesus told His disciples: “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
When
Mr. Scott asked me could he go with me to see Mr. Ballantine after lunch that day, I said yes. But I wondered if he was gon’ do like Mr. Ron done the first time he saw the man. I was thinkin prob’ly not, ’cause I’d started goin down to the nursing home purty regular to help keep Mr. Ballantine’s room from gettin so nasty.
When me and Mr. Scott got there that day, he was real nice to Mr. Ballantine. He told the man his name and talked a li’l bit ’bout this and that, the weather, and what have you. Then he said, “Mr. Ballantine, I’d like to bless you with a few necessities. Is there anything I can bring you . . . any-thing you need?”
Mr. Ballantine said what he always said, “Yeah. I could use some cigarettes and Ensure.”
So me and Mr. Scott took off for the drugstore. But when it come time to buy Mr. Ballantine his blessins, he wanted to get the Ensure, but not the cigarettes.
“I just don’t feel right about it, Denver,” he said. “It’s like I’m helping him kill himself.”
Well, that made me have to eyeball him. “You
asked
the man how you could bless him, and he told you he wanted two things—cigarettes and Ensure. Now you tryin to judge him instead of blessin him by blessin him with only half the things he asked for. You saw the man. Now tell me the truth: How much worse you think he gon’ be after smokin? Cigarettes is the only pleasure he got left.”
Mr. Scott said I had a point. He bought the Ensure and a carton of Mr. Ballantine’s favorite smokes, then headed on home while I delivered the blessins. You ain’t gon’ believe what happened next.
When I went back to Mr. Ballantine’s room, he asked me who paid for the cigarettes and I told him Mr. Scott.
“How am I going to pay him back?’” he asked me.
I said, “You don’t.”
“Why would that man buy me cigarettes when he doesn’t even know me?”
“’Cause he’s a Christian.”
“Well, I still don’t understand. And anyway, you know I hate Christians.”
I didn’t say nothin for a minute, just sat there in a ole orange plastic chair and watched Mr. Ballantine lyin there in his bed. Then I said to him, “I’m a Christian.”
I wish you coulda seen the look on his face. It didn’t take but a minute for him to start apologizin for cussin Christians all the time I’d knowed him. Then I guess it hit him that while I’d been takin care of him—it was about three years by then—he’d still been callin me names.
“Denver, I’m sorry for all those times I called you a nigger,” he said.
“That’s okay.”
Then I took a chance and told Mr. Ballantine that I’d been takin care of him all that time, ’cause I knowed God loved him. “God’s got a special place prepared for you if you just confess your sins and accept the love of Jesus.
” I ain’t gon’ kid you, he was skeptical. Same time, though, he said he didn’t think I’d lie to him. “But even if you aren’t lying,” he said, “I’ve lived too long and sinned too much for God to forgive me.”
He laid there in that bed and lit up one a’ Mr. Scott’s cigarettes, starin up at the ceilin, smokin and thinkin. I just kept quiet. Then all of a sudden he piped up again. “On the other hand, I’m too damn old for much more sinning. Maybe that’ll count for something!”
Well, Mr. Ballantine stopped callin me “nigger” that day. And wadn’t too long after that I wheeled him through the doors at McKinney Bible Church—the same place Mr. Ron and Miss Debbie used to go to church at. We sat together on the back row, and it was the first time Mr. Ballantine had ever set foot inside a church. He was eighty-five years old.
After the service let out, he looked at me and smiled.
“Real nice,” he said.
A little
over a year had passed since Deborah’s anxious cell-phone call to the sushi restaurant sent our lives careening off-course. During the worst of times, doctors professed no hope, and she lay in our bed, curling her emaciated frame like a fetus, vomiting, fighting through searing pain. But the hotter the fires burned, the more beautiful she became to me. She always tried to shift the focus from herself, and when she could walk upright, found the strength to visit and pray for sick friends, particularly those she met in the cryptlike chemo lab.
If she believed she was dying, she hadn’t told me. Instead, we talked about living. About our dreams for our children, our marriage, our city. She paged through Martha Stewart magazines, cutting out pictures of wedding cakes and flower arrangements for Regan’s and Carson’s weddings. Neither was engaged, but we dreamed about it anyway, chatting over coffee, murmuring after lights-out about whom they might marry, the grandchildren we would have, the sweet patter of baby feet at Rocky Top at Christmastime. We talked about everything important in living life, but we did not talk about death, for we thought that would be giving quarter to the enemy.
The second surgery brought a fresh burst of hope. For the second time in four months, doctors pronounced Deborah “cancer free.” A month later, we jetted to New York City to fulfill a promise she’d made: to be with Carson on Mother’s Day.
Deborah still ached from the brutality of the surgery, but we planned on doing all the things we would have done had there been no pain. On Friday, we went to lunch with Carson and my partner, Michael Altman, at Bella Blue, an Italian restaurant. We ordered the house specialty,
lobster fra diavolo
, and chatted over drinks. But just as the food arrived, Deborah winced sharply and pinned me with a desperate look that said, “Get me out of here!”
Daphene’s apartment was just a few blocks away. I hustled her out of the restaurant, and we walked maybe half a block before Deborah nearly collapsed. Clutching at her belly, she couldn’t take another step. As I tried to flag down a cab, terror fell over her face like a cloud blotting out the sun: “Call the doctor!” she whispered fiercely. “Something bad is happening.”
I fumbled out my cell phone and punched wrong numbers in a panic. Finally, I managed to dial right and reached Deborah’s oncologist. “Not to worry,” he said mildly after hearing that my wife seemed near death on a New York City sidewalk. “I’ll see you when you get back on Monday.”
Not to worry?
I called a friend, a Texas surgeon, who guessed at the source of the pain: a possible hernia, caused by the latest ablation. Ride it out till Monday, he said.
Back in Texas, CAT scans and other tests revealed more cancer. In more places. The news strafed us like bullets.
Faith, said Paul the Apostle, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. I clung to faith like a ropeless climber to the side of a cliff—faith that the God who said He loved me would not rip out my heart, steal my wife, my children’s mother. Maybe this sounds stupid, arrogant even, but with all the bad press He’d been getting, I felt now might be a good time for God to buff up His reputation with a miracle—and there’s no miracle like a good healing. We’d go on
Oprah
and spread the news. I told Him so.
Deborah and I would have loved to have done nothing at this point—no chemo, no surgery, no experimental drugs. We knew and believed the Scriptures:
“All things work together for the good of them that love God . . .”
“Wait upon the Lord . . .”
“Be still and know that He is God . . .”
But I wasn’t willing to be still and wait, and I don’t think Deborah was either.