Bobby Byrd - Lone Star Noir

I thought about the facts of our life together-how we married when we were so young, too young, I realize now, only eighteen and nineteen years old; how we tried to have a child for so many years before she conceived; the way she always had to work, because my salary as a minister in a small Southern Baptist church could never quite pay the bills; the way she wasn’t just a good mother, she was a great mother, because she’d wanted a child for so long before Sammy came; how our life had been made up of endless church meetings and hospital rounds. Charlene was a nurse, and we made a good pair, her healing bodies and me healing souls. She’d always worked with babies, newborns, and that’d been hard for her for many years when we were struggling and struggling to get pregnant. But, as she’d always said, sometimes what doesn’t kill you makes you strong.

Still, as I thought about all our years together, I realized more than ever how facts about a person can’t even come close to explaining them.

Sometimes when I counsel young couples about to get married, I like to tell them that the amazing thing about marriage is the way your spouse remains a mystery, even after decades of living together. After more than three decades, there are moments when I realize I don’t really know Charlene. Who she was. Who she is. Who she’s going to become.

Night after night, while Charlene slept, I sat in my study and remembered our lives together. The years before the boy were a haze made up only of Charlene’s desperate prayers. His birth, seventeen years ago, marked a complete transformation in our lives. It felt like we’d been wandering in the wilderness for years and the Lord had suddenly flung open the door to the Promised Land, the land of milk and honey.

My biggest regret in life is the fact that I was out of town on the day of his birth. We were living in Amarillo at the time and I happened to be attending the annual Southern Baptist Convention on the day he arrived, early but healthy. I rushed home as soon as I could, and when I walked through the door Charlene was nursing him in the big rocking chair we’d bought when she found out she was pregnant.

I went and knelt beside them to kiss and welcome my baby boy, the one we’d been waiting for-all our lives, it seemed, now that he was here.

Sometimes-and it feels like a sin to say this-the day I was saved by the Lord and the day I knelt by their feet, the first time I saw Sammy, blur together as if they were the same day.

Still, I’ll admit I was surprised by the look of him. Charlene and I are both slight, and even as a baby he was big-boned and long, with ears and a nose I didn’t recognize. Some men might have wondered but I did not. I knew he was my son. I knew the way I knew Charlene would be my wife the day I met her.

We were never happier than after he’d come into our lives. It had been Charlene’s biggest heartache, the wait.

Around that time, there was a need for a pastor here in Andrews. I’d applied before the Convention and when the call came just days after Sammy’s birth, she begged me to take it. She wanted to raise Sammy in a small town, with small town values, she said. So we left Amarillo and made ourselves a home here.

Sammy was the darling of the church, a good student, and an excellent football player. I suppose there were girls that liked him, but we never talked about it. I warned him that carnal desires can ruin a man’s life and we left it at that.

Andrews had been a good place to raise a son, I thought, though when he started driving to the county line to drink, I was reminded of what the Lord said after He discovered that Cain had murdered his brother Abel, how sin is always crouching at your door, how it desires to have you, but you must learn to master it. No matter where you go, you cannot escape what is lurking in your heart.

A few weeks after the boy disappeared, Charlene stopped coming to church, not even bothering to explain why. The good church ladies-her friends, my congregation-they all asked after her. I said she wasn’t feeling well.

That’s when I hired Guy Neely, P.I. Asked him to find the boy, wherever he was, whatever he was doing, it didn’t matter.

“Just ask him to please come home,” I said. “Tell him his mother’s soul hangs in the balance. If he doesn’t care about his own soul, maybe he’ll care about hers. They were always close.”

Neely was a tall man, and his snakeskin cowboy boots only added to his height. He towered over me, the way the boy always had. He was the sort of man who chews gum and tobacco at the same time. While I talked, he was chewing gum so fast I wondered if his jaw would come unhinged.

He spat dark juice into a small cup. “You’ll excuse me for being blunt,” he said. “But what if your son is dead?”

“Then bring his remains home so his mother can have some peace.”

I had high hopes, even if the trail was a few weeks old. I was pretty sure the boy wasn’t dead. He was just hiding-from us, from God.

Or maybe he was seeking something he would never find.

Neely came to the house on a Monday.

He looked over the boy’s things, what little he’d had: the bookshelves with only one book, a Bible; some T-shirts; a pair of boots. He sat at the foot of Sammy’s bed, looking around. Then he hung around in front of the garage, observing the neighborhood where our son had grown up, where we’d spent most of our adult lives, right after Sammy came along. He was chewing tobacco and occasionally spitting on the sidewalk.

I thought about asking him not to spit. But I didn’t.

Neely regarded the two of us. “What was the first hint that something might be wrong?” he asked.

I looked at Charlene. She looked at the traces of tobacco juice staining the sidewalk.

“There’s always been something wrong,” she said, “since the first day I brought him home from the hospital. I always knew he wouldn’t stay, he was too perfect, too good, too right for us.”

She’d said things like that before during the years Sammy was growing. Charlene had been a fearful mother, possessive in the way she watched over him, as if afraid someone was going to come along and snatch him away. It had sometimes seemed like the fear would devour her.

“And more recently?” Neely asked.

“And more recently…” She stopped.

“He started to drink recently,” I said, to fill in the blanks. “He’d drive off down toward Odessa, get drunk. Chief brought him home a few times.”

“Kids his age will do that,” Neely agreed.

“No,” I said. “This was different. He was upset about something. Angry.” I thought back on the day he’d sneered at me. Come to think of it, the way he’d sneered, it was almost as if he thought it was funny that I didn’t want him bringing the devil’s drink home. Like there was something of Satan already here.

“Any idea what upset him?”

I shook my head. Charlene mumbled something.

“What?” I asked.

“Did you say something?” Neely asked.

“ I upset him,” she said, louder this time.

“Are you a difficult person to get along with?” he asked.

“Not especially,” I answered for her. “Charlene has always been a good wife and a good mother. They’ve always gotten along.”

“Then why do you think you upset him?” His tone was gentle.

“He was upset by who I am,” she answered.

Neely nodded, like he’d heard all this before. “And who are you, exactly?”

She started to talk then. She had a hunger, she said. She’d had it for years. All her life, maybe, she said. It went deep. It had sharp teeth and bit her insides. Sometimes it felt as though the hunger was consuming her altogether. Sometimes it was all she could do, she said, not to give in to it.