The Silent Evangelist
David Denny
My father was famous. And now he’s not. He was once a sober, religious, and happy individual. Now, not. Among other things, famous people are targets. My father was one. The religious ranks attract the lunatic fringe. Often deeply religious people are mentally disturbed. It’s also true to say that mentally disturbed people are often deeply religious. I don’t know why this is, but it’s enough to keep me away from the whole business.
But not my grandmother. She’s a hymn-singer. And a hymn-hummer. Once upon a time a church organist, she knows over three hundred classic hymns by heart. Near as I can tell, this is her only fault. Or should I say it’s her only annoying trait. Aside from that, my grandmother is my favorite person in the world. Not that I know a lot of people. And not that I’ve seen much of the world.
Sixteen years ago my father was an evangelist on the mega-church circuit. He would “tour” (grandmother’s word) for about nine months of the year, going from church to church, preaching revival. One night he was somewhere near Chicago. He had just finished his sermon and his altar call under a big tent. He was backstage with my mother and older brother. I was still a baby, too young to be on tour. I was home with my grandmother.
That’s when the lunatic approached him. The gun was tucked into the lunatic’s belt, just under his jacket. First the lunatic wanted to yell at my father, and then the lunatic wanted to shoot his gun. He called my father a false prophet. He said other things, too. But that was the gist. And then he pulled out the gun. At first he pointed it at my father. He quoted a scripture about the sure and certain punishment for a false prophet And then the man turned the gun on my mother. And he shot her. And then he turned the gun on my brother. And fired again. And then the man put the gun inside his mouth. And he squeezed the trigger a third time.
At about that point my father stopped preaching and began drinking. He came home to me and grandmother. He stopped talking. He became who he is today: the silent drunk who lives in the back bedroom of grandmother’s house. And now this is how we live: father drinks, grandmother cooks and cleans and sings hymns, I go to school.
One night I discovered our neighbor Clayton sitting on our backyard fence, spying on us. Clayton fancies himself a writer. He carries a small notebook in his pocket. He goes around spying on people, looking in their windows, listening to their conversations. He jots down his observations in the pages of his notebooks, like an old school TV detective.
So this one night I happened to look out the window and see him sitting out there. He didn’t run away when I came outside. I asked him what he wanted. “I may write a book about you,” he said. “That’s what I do. I’m a writer.” But Clayton is not a real writer. He has never actually written any books. Unless you count his small pencil-scratched notebooks.
My father is a writer. Sort of. As he drinks, he writes into his journals. There are stacks and stacks of journals in his room. He has been doing this for years. My father has gray teeth and pale skin. He has very short salt and pepper hair because he buzzes it with a pair of clippers he keeps in his bathroom. And he wears the same thing every day. From bottom to top: navy blue slip-on sneakers, navy blue sweatpants, a navy-blue t-shirt topped by a navy-blue sweatshirt. He doesn’t shop, my father. He doesn’t leave the house at all during daylight hours. He wears the clothes my grandmother buys him at Walmart.
My grandmother has photos of my father in better clothes. His hair is long and wavy in those photos. His skin is tan, his teeth are white. He waves a bible in one hand. His mouth is wide open because in those days he talked and talked and talked. And people listened. If my father ever spoke to me, I would listen. I would listen as intently as he used to listen to me when I was younger and I used to stand in the doorway of his room and tell him everything I knew. Everything I had learned in school. All the things I had observed. All the thoughts that bounced around in my head.
I don’t do that anymore. What’s the point?
People often remark about how great it is to be heard. What a gift a good listener is in your life. But not always. If all somebody does is listen, really, what good is that?
Here’s an interesting thing about Clayton: he wears only black clothing. I asked him was that because of all the sneaking around in backyards. Black like the night. Camo. No. He wears black, he says, as a protest against the fashion industry, which is dependent upon sweatshops and advertising campaigns. Both, he says, are forms of slavery. The sweat shop part is obvious. But he believes that most people don’t have any critical distance when it comes to advertising. We fall for it even when we say we don’t fall for it. We’re hooked on it in the worst way, like a drug, he says. It’s basically an opioid, he says.
Clayton is somewhat unique. I like that about him. Here’s what I don’t like: he has horrible body odor. And I’m not wild about the way he slinks around the neighborhood, looking in on people’s private lives. I want to tell him how creepy that is, but I need to get to know him better first.
My father goes out walking at night. It’s the only time he leaves the house. At first it was to avoid the press. So says my grandmother. They used to ambush him and stick microphones and cameras in his face. They wanted to put him on the news as another sad victim of gun violence. As a fallen saint. As yet another religious wacko.
Clayton says he has followed my father on his nightly walks: three different routes to the park and back again. He rotates routes. But it’s always one of the three. He keeps his head down, Clayton says, and he has earbuds in. I know what he’s listening to. He’s obsessed with the music of Bob Dylan. He follows all pedestrian laws. Even when there is no traffic, he waits for the lights to change. For the little green walking man icon to flash.
Clayton has done research on my father. Which is also on the creepy side. But somehow I am not afraid of him, because I don’t sense danger in his presence. Confusion maybe. Morbid fascination maybe. But on the subject of Clayton my danger signal is silent.
Seeing him sitting there, atop the cinderblock wall, I felt sorry for him. So I invited him inside. The first thing to draw his eye was my father’s bible on the coffee table, where my grandmother keeps it. “Your father was famous,” he said, as if I didn’t know. “There are videos on YouTube. This is the very bible he waves in those videos.”
“Are you religious?” I asked Clayton.
“I am not,” he answered.
“Are you?” he asked.
“I am not,” I answered.
My grandmother hummed “Amazing Grace” from the kitchen. She emerged to ask, “Who’s your friend?”
Clayton spoke for himself: “I’m nobody, who are you?”
“Ah,” I said. “Emily Dickinson.”
“You’re the first person to catch that,” he said.
My grandmother was not impressed by Emily Dickinson. “Who would crack wise with somebody’s grandmother like that?” she asked later. “Only a boy who thought he was very clever. The serpent was the most clever animal in the garden.”
Next night, as grandmother and I were playing gin rummy at the kitchen table, she asked, “What do you see in him?”
“He’s unique,” I said.
“He is that,” she said. “Where does he live?”
“In this neighborhood.” I had indeed seen Clayton around for years, off and on. I was never sure which house he lived in. He was just one of the neighborhood kids. Two, maybe three years older than me.
“Don’t let him in the house when I’m not home.”
“Grandmother, I think you’re misinterpreting him.”
“Possibly. But for now he only comes inside when I’m here.” She hummed “His Eye is on the Sparrow.”
About four years ago, I snuck into my father’s room and stole one of his journals. I did this when he was out on one of his nightly walks. I read the journal under my covers with a flashlight. Kids in movies do that, so it must be a thing.
In the journal he had written a story about himself and my mother and my brother and me. We were at Disneyland. It was like reading a movie. Lots of dialogue. In the story we had a wonderful time. We rode all the best rides together. We ate lunch at one of the theme restaurants. At the end of the story, my father kissed my mother. He kissed my brother. He kissed me. We shared a group hug. Which is an unusual detail. Because there is no kissing and hugging in our house.
Next night when he went out again, I put that journal back and took another. In this journal it was Christmastime. Our four-cornered family visited Santa Claus. We exchanged gifts. We shared a feast. We sang carols that grandmother played on the piano. All in glorious detail.
And then I understood. In his journals, my father was writing the story of his life as he needed to imagine it, with all of us alive and well and happy. As if he had never been an evangelist. As if the lunatic had no occasion to stalk him. No reason to kill my mother, my brother. Therefore no survivor’s guilt. No booze. No obsessive listening to Bob Dylan and walking to the park under cover of night.
Turns out Clayton has been sleeping in our garage. Up in the rafters. Up where I once built a playhouse and decorated it as an alternate bedroom. I discovered this when I went into the garage to do some laundry. I put a load into the washer. And I heard a gentle snoring. I climbed the little ladder up into the loft. And there slept Clayton, atop my old mermaid sleeping bag.
I left him a mildly sarcastic note written in gel marker:
Hey Goldilocks, you’ve eaten my porridge, broken my chair, and now you’re sleeping in my bed. Not cool. Baby Bear.
Later I asked him, “What do you do for food?”
“That’s the easy part. I hang out around the alley doors of local restaurants where the dumpsters are. They all throw food away. Perfectly good food. You yourself threw away a half loaf of bread yesterday.”
“It was moldy.”
“Perfectly edible. Just eat around the mold. Easy”.
“What’s the hard part?”
“Showers and laundry. I had to sneak into the YMCA, which worked for a while. And then the early morning swimmers ratted me out. Lately I’ve been breaking into the houses of people on vacation. I’ll have to find another tactic come winter.”
“You’re very resourceful.”
“You do what you need to do. Everyone is equipped for survival. People can endure all kinds of hardship. Your dad, for instance. He has found a way to continue even though he’s lost his life’s purpose.”
“Survival is the right word for it, too.”
“Don’t knock it,” he said.
“I’m not knocking it.”
“And the story of your family is going to make a very interesting book. It’s already half written. I have three full notebooks already.”
It was at that point that my inner danger alarm may have begun to chime. And at that point that I first considered that Clayton, very like my father, lurked at night, scribbled into notebooks, and wore generic monochrome clothing. In my mind, I exchanged the word fascination to describe Clayton’s interest in my father to obsession.
One night I decided to snoop. About which I definitely felt conflicted. It was wrong, I was certain. But the danger signal was still chiming. There was that and my grandmother’s instinctive mistrust.
So when Clayton was out spying on neighbors, I climbed up into the loft. The smell was atrocious. I looked through his duffle. Mostly dirty clothes. A few bags of partially eaten food. Half a dozen small notebooks. And three (count ‘em three) very large, very heavy handguns. A big box of bullets. The chime turned to full-on alarm.
Next morning, I was sitting at the kitchen table. Grandmother was singing “Nearer My God to Thee” while she assembled my lunch box. A turkey and cheese sandwich. Celery sticks with peanut butter. A fat free pudding cup. A spoon wrapped in a paper napkin. A bottle of cranberry-flavored water.
There are moments during her hymn-singing when I close my eyes and allow myself to listen deeply. Listening, it’s like I am nowhere. Like I am not in a house with a silent drunk and a hymn-singing caretaker and an armed freeloader in the rafters. Like I am floating in some kind of cosmic isolation tank. It’s a crazy thing. I am not religious. I could give a hang about the bible or the koran or anything like that. I actually think all this Zen chatter is nonsense, I don’t care how popular it is. In those moments with eyes closed, I am beyond caring and beyond thinking.
They don’t last long. There is always school to go to. Homework to do. Chores to perform. The internet.
On this one morning grandmother finished packing my lunch, realized the state I was in, and came to stand behind me. She put both her hands on my shoulders as I came back into myself. “It’s possible,” she said, “that you have the touch.”
By which she means that I may have inherited the religious genes from her through my father. “Not a chance,” I said.
“I remember your father when he was about your age. He was a bit of a wild child. Had trouble focusing in school. Snuck out his bedroom window at night. Talked back. Somewhere he learned to swear like a sailor and spit like a hobo. More than once your grandfather and I pulled him out of the pool hall by his ears. But then one summer he sprouted, grew four inches. He began taking long walks. Alone. We found a bible on his pillow. What happened that summer is he opened his inner eyes. That’s what I call it. We all of us got eyes in our heads and eyes in our hearts. Paul writes to the Ephesians about how they should open the eyes of the heart.”
“No offense, but I have no allegiance to Paul.”
“You’ve got an odd way about you, sister-girl. It’s not a matter of allegiance. Once those eyes are opened, they don’t close. You know why your father drinks the way he does? Because it’s a painful thing to see the world through those eyes. You feel the pain of living in a way that most folks don’t. And you feel the love that’s vibrating through every living thing. It’s a gift, I’ll say that. It’s a blessing. But on certain days it can look and feel like a curse. If you can’t put it to use, then you got to numb it, like a tender spot that won’t heal. I keep praying for this darkness to be lifted from your father. I’d take it on myself, if I could. But these things are beyond our choosing.”
“Grandmother, you know I love you more than anyone. But what you’re talking about now has nothing to do with me. I was just sitting here resting my eyes.”
“All right, sister-girl. I won’t say anymore. What’s happening at school today? Have you chosen your senior project yet?”
“I submitted my proposal. They are going to call us in, one by one, for conferences next week to finalize it. Then we begin our research.”
“Did you propose your French artist? Emile What’s-his-name?”
“I did not.”
“You were so passionate about him. What happened?”
“They made it clear that our topic must be controversial, so that we could argue for a certain side against the other. ‘Bernard, Gaugin, and Van Gogh: The Art of the Selfie’ was not going to fly with the faculty committee.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not socially relevant.”
“Says who?”
“Grandmother, everybody knows what kinds of topics they accept and what they reject. There’s no point in submitting a proposal that will only be rejected.”
“But you’re giving up before you try. You’re censoring yourself.”
“I’m trying to get through high school.”
“All right, sister-girl. Maybe you know best. But I say let them reject you, don’t reject yourself.”
“Things have changed since you were in high school.”
“That they have. The whole world has changed in some ways, I grant you that. But in other ways, not at all. People still got to make choices about what’s best for themselves. People still got to stand up for what they believe. Martin Luther said ‘to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other.’”
“Martin Luther didn’t need to pass his senior thesis in order to graduate.”
“All right, my girl. You’ve been calling your own shots for some time now. You’re the smartest child I’ve ever seen. What did you propose to research?”
“Shooters.”
“As in . . . folks that shoot people?”
“The psychology of shooters. It’s the kind of thing they want. And it’s a topic I may have something to say about.”
Grandmother stood frozen. I knew my topic would hit a nerve. I was sorry to just blurt it out like that. I might’ve made up some topic. She’d have never checked. But I have this habit of telling the truth no matter what. Or trying to. There’s so much deception in the world already. Why add to it?
That afternoon while grandmother was grocery shopping, Clayton sat atop our cinder block wall again. “Hey,” he said, “can I use your shower while your grandma is gone?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “She told me not to let you inside when she wasn’t here.”
“OK,” he said.
“I would,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “She’s not the first grandma to forbid me entry.”
“Those people three houses down have a swimming pool with an outdoor showerhead,” I said. “I believe they’re on vacation.”
“They have security cameras under the eaves.”
“I know it’s not my business. Is there a reason you can’t go home?”
“My mother would be that reason. She’s an alcoholic. Actually, she’s an alcoholic’s alcoholic. If there were an alcoholic’s Olympics, she would be a gold medalist. The social worker removed me because it was ‘not a safe place’ for a child. Then I turned eighteen. The social worker said I was emancipated. I tried moving back inside. Thinking maybe I could stake out a small corner of the house to live in peace. I had conveniently forgotten what ‘not a safe place’ means. Believe me, things are better for me outside. Be glad your father is not that kind of alcoholic.”
I have never used that word to describe my father. Neither has grandmother. Ever since I’ve known him, he has been a silent drunk. But a ‘safe’ drunk. What would I do if he spoke sober words to me? And I think grandmother has always assumed that when he was finished grieving, he would stop. He would recover his life. In health class, I learned that grandmother is an enabler. I guess I am too. The thing to do, said my health teacher, is to have an intervention. I looked it up. And it’s a thing. There are even directions on how to do it.
I decided to practice on Clayton.
“Can I ask you please to remove your guns from our house?”
“You went through my stuff?”
“You mean the stuff you put in there without our knowledge or permission?”
“Are you going to get bossy with me?”
“What do you need with those?”
He shrugged. “A dude on his own needs protection.”
“One. Maybe you need one gun for protection. Which is debatable.”
“Depends. Sometimes it’s the best way to settle scores.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You’re twenty years old. What scores need settling?”
“People have done dirt to me. People who are supposed to look out for kids. Wouldn’t you like to see the dude who shot your family pay for his crime?”
“He offed himself. If there’s a hell, he’s roasting in it.”
“Yeah, OK, but if he had lived. Come on, you never heard of an eye for an eye?”
“Who are you, Hammurabi? It’s the 21st century.”
“People like us—we need to strike back.”
“Just what kind of strike are you planning?”
“You’ll see.”
“Here’s the deal. I need you to get those guns out by morning.”
“Maggie, I thought we were friends.”
“Clayton, I want you to know I’m certain about this. I want to be your friend. But I can’t be your friend if you store guns in my house.”
Sometime during the night he moved his stuff out of the garage rafters. When I poked my head up there the next morning, he had cleaned up the space and rolled up my old mermaid sleeping bag. On the other side of the note I had left him, he wrote in the same gel pen:
Baby Bear, today is the day the world pays for its dirty deeds. Take a sick day. Whatever you do, don’t show at school. Goldilocks.
I called the cops. I told them what I know. I showed them the note. They went to his mother’s house. Then they closed the high school, sent everybody home. Then they searched yard by yard through the neighborhood. You’ve never seen such a swarm of cops. And helicopters. It was Hectic City.
They pulled him from another garage about three houses down. I was standing out front when they brought him out to the cruiser in handcuffs. He did not look in my direction. They ducked him into the back seat. One of the cops had his duffel. He put it in the trunk. A news truck pulled up behind the cop car.
How did I feel? Sick. Not like I was going to puke. But how you feel when you’ve been down with something awful and in bed for a week. Exhausted. Frail. Thirsty.
Grandmother wanted to talk. I walked past her. I walked past my bedroom. I walked to the end of the hall and opened my father’s door. He was lying in bed watching television.
I went inside his room. Which I never do. I turned off his television. Which I’ve never done. I spoke to him: “Here’s the deal. I need a parent. I’ve been doing pretty good with a grandparent. I’m not ungrateful. Grandmother says I’m smart and resilient. It’s true. But I’m still a kid. I can’t tackle the world without some help. First, I want you to get help. I want you to quit drinking. I want you to get a life. Then, I want to share in that life. I’m using the word ‘want.’ But it’s a need. It’s a deep-down desperate need. I’m about to face a crazy level of media attention. I understand you have some experience with that.” My father was frozen, but I saw a light flicker in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before. “Here I stand,” I said, “I can do no other.”
He lay there with his arm cocked behind his head. I wasn’t expecting a miracle. I had said my piece. He sat up and put his feet on the floor. He went into his bathroom. I heard him splashing water onto his face.
I went to the garage and got a big plastic garbage bag. I came back into his room and began loading his journals into the bag. Suddenly grandmother stood in his doorway with more garbage bags in her fist.
Father helped me. Helped us. We loaded all of his journals, his entire imaginary life, into three big bags. We stored them up above the washer and dryer, in the newly available loft space. We covered them with my old mermaid sleeping bag.
Next morning the network satellite vans would roll up to the curb. Television reporters would set up their gear. They would expect me to speak into the mics, to look into the camera. This night would be our last chance at peace and quiet. At least for a while.
As father prepared for his walk, I also prepared. I put on my sneakers and a sweatshirt. I inserted my earbuds into my phone and clicked on my favorite playlist. Not Bob Dylan. I waited for him on the front porch. The moon was hiding in the big oak tree in our front yard. As its light peered through the leaves, I may have said my first prayer.
