Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk

That’s all it was, Leslie. That’s all I intended. I asked her to take an early morning walk with me through the village, the same route I walked with you, past the home of Yves and Prudeut Estimee, where we’re building the stone cistern, and alongside the fields where the farmers from our co-op are doing their planting, and down the red dirt path toward Fermathe, where she could mingle some with the children walking to school in Pétion-Ville, and the working men making their way toward the paved roads to meet the tap-tap.

Sometime on the way back toward the mission, we passed those fields again, and I told Sheila the same story I told you, about this carpenter Rene who has a co-op plot where he grows cabbage and lettuce. I told her how Rene had a little bit of money in his pocket because he was saving to pour a foundation for a new house. His wife knew about this money and asked him to give her some, because her aunt had died, and she wanted to go to the beauty salon in Pétion-Ville and get her hair and nails done for the funeral. But Rene said no. He was firm. They had a child on the way, and he planned to build her a new house with a floor. He asked her, “Do you want our baby to sleep on dirt?” But his wife was angry anyway, and told all the women in her family that Rene had this money and he was keeping it from her, and many of these women went home and badmouthed Rene to their husbands. The next day, one of these husbands went to see Rene. He said, “I am family. I am the husband of your wife’s cousin. I know you have some money in your pocket, and I need work. I am a good roofer. You should hire me to repair your roof.” Now, Leslie, it’s true that Rene’s roof needed mending. It was one of those corrugated aluminum numbers you see all over the village, and the last few storms had loosened its moorings to the top of Rene’s tiny old one-room house, the one he had been born in, dirt floor and all. But it’s something Rene can fix himself. He needs the money for his foundation, and he’s under no obligation to this husband of his wife’s cousin. So Rene turns his back politely and replies, “I’m truly sorry, I can’t hire you today.” At this, the wife’s cousin’s husband becomes very angry. Later that day, he brings his cow down into Rene’s field and lets him loose to graze on Rene’s cabbage and Rene’s lettuce.

I didn’t even yet get to the end of the story, Leslie, where Rene asked me what to do, and I told him to do what the law allows and confiscate the cow and charge the offending man a fee for every day Rene kept him. It’s a good story. I had a head of steam, and I wanted to finish it. But all of a sudden I look over at Sheila, and two lines of tears are rolling down her cheeks. She’s not crying for attention, she’s not making a sound, but the tears are just rolling down her cheeks, and she says, “Brother Samuel, your heart for these people is so beautiful to me.”

When she said it, Leslie, I didn’t know what to do with it. It was like she reached into my chest and clawed at the scab that had been covering over the wound of my loneliness. I reached both hands to her face, and I wiped the line of tears from each cheek. By then we had been gone too long, so we started the walk back to the mission. She was still crying some, and she leaned into me. I put my arm around her, to comfort her, that’s all.

Ever since then, Leslie — ever since I brought her back to the mission in time for breakfast, ever since Henri and I took all of you to the airport, ever since I watched that American Airlines jet light out toward the water, and imagined her trajectory past La Gonave, past the eastern ridge of Cuba, past Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas, and wished her safely all the way toward Miami International — she has been with me, in my thoughts, in my prayers. Forgive me this detail, but I can still smell her apple shampoo on the shirt I was wearing when she leaned against me as we walked together toward the mission.

It is a risk to tell you these things, Leslie. I don’t have to tell you it is a risk. To a certain kind of person it might seem the slightest bit unseemly, a man of forty-two so taken with a young woman only eighteen years old, and that after only a week together. But you know me, Leslie. We are bosom friends and have been ever since we shared Room 23F in the Oldham-Betts dormitory at Apalachicola. And you know, too, that my life has borne out again and again how God’s ways are not our own. I never planned to come to this place any more than I had planned to attend Bible College in my thirties. You’ve heard me preach plenty of times about how I was engaged to be married to Marisa Holden, how I had a thriving plumbing business with my brother Frank, how I had a whole happy life planned out in High Springs — good honest work Monday through Friday, dinner every evening with Marisa, six or seven kids, at least one of them a boy I was going to name Samuel Jr., weekends out at the cold springs, jumping off those cliffs, swimming in those shallow caves, picnic blankets, cold cuts, laying out there in the cool of the evening with Marisa and the kids. .

But the Lord got ahold of me, Leslie, in a tent meeting of all places. They don’t even have tent meetings in High Springs anymore. This might for all I know have been the last of the tent meetings. And that preacher laid his hands on my head and said, “The Lord is commissioning you to bring the good news to a faraway place,” and I already knew it before he said it. Do you think it was easy, Leslie, to walk away from Marisa? To walk away from my business? To walk away from my brother? I didn’t understand it at the time, but I had faith. I had trust. I believed in the things I had not seen, and it led me to Apalachicola, to Room 23F in the Oldham-Betts dormitory, to you, to the mission board, and eventually here, to Koulèv-Ville, Haiti. My home, Leslie.

What I’m trying to say is that God works in mysterious ways, which is a thing we all say but we hardly ever believe enough to let it happen to us. I’ll admit, even here, even after everything I’ve seen and done since that tent meeting, even I am reluctant sometimes to do the strange things a person might have to do if that person is open to the word of the Lord. But, Leslie, here’s what I’m trying to tell you, strange as you and me might find it to be, strange as it certainly is: When I was walking that dirt path with Sheila Brocken, I wasn’t thinking for once about what all things I had given up for the Lord’s work. I wasn’t thinking about my loneliness. I wasn’t thinking about my past or my present, not about the mission board or the thirteen percent budget cut or money this or that. Leslie, I wasn’t even thinking how she was eighteen and I was forty-two. All I was doing was just being present in the moment, being open to the Lord and all he has for us, and in that moment what I was hearing — clear as day — was the word from the Lord: This young woman, this Sheila Brocken, is the one I’ve been keeping aside for you. This young woman, this Sheila Brocken, is the one I’ve had you waiting for.

I’ll tell you, Leslie, as you know from your own experience in the world of men and women, that this waiting has not been easy for me. Often it has been very difficult. Over the years, before Marisa and especially after, I’ve had a lot of chances to stray from the promises I’ve made to the Lord. I may not be the most handsome man in the world, Leslie, but I can’t say I’ve not had my share of admirers. I am a man like you and like every other man, and I can’t say I’ve not been tempted. But here’s something I have going for me: I’ve kept my promises, Leslie. I can stand and proudly say that I’ve kept myself pure unto the Lord for such a day as today, a day when I can sure enough sit down and write you a letter to say that my history is true, my intentions are pure, my motives are noble, and when I say that I mean to pursue Sheila Brocken, what I mean to pursue is a lifelong kind of love, the honor and cherish kind, the in sickness and in health forsaking all others as long as you both shall live kind.