Looking back on it, with everything that’s happened since, Sammy disappearing and all, I’m not sure I did the right thing. I’ve seen many things in my life, and I’ve learned to let many things slide, but it’s not just me, you see. It’s the wife. She cares about these things. So the second time Chief brought Sammy home, drunk as a skunk, saying he’d found him passed out just inside the Andrews County line, I felt I had to speak to the boy.
“You’re making your mother look bad to the church ladies,” I said, thinking he’d have some compassion for her feelings. They’d always been close. “Those are her friends. They’ve known you since you were a small boy, a good boy.”
He sneered.
There was something in that sneer that made me think twice about what I said next. But I went ahead, glancing at Charlene to see her reaction as I spoke. She was sitting on the couch in her bathrobe, looking as anxious as the bride I married thirty-three years ago.
“Drinking is the devil’s business,” I told the boy. “Don’t bring the devil’s business back to this house again.”
He looked at me then as if I’d said something curious, and that’s when I noticed the color of his eyes in the morning light—amber from one angle, green from the other, same as my own.
Later, I got to thinking. I got to thinking how maybe I should’ve asked him why. Why he was staying out all night. Why he was drinking. But at the time, I was just so concerned with what he was doing, why didn’t even occur to me. It was only after he disappeared for a while, then came back, then disappeared again for good, that I started thinking about how he’d looked haunted toward the end. Like something—or somebody—was driving him to drink.
In my line of business, I’ve seen worse than a drunk preacher’s kid, it’s true. Over to Seminole, just thirty-odd miles north, preacher’s kid went crazy in the middle of the night, strung up his parents in their bed with purple twine—purple!—and set fire to the bed. In Odessa, just south, preacher’s kid made news when they discovered he’d been doing drug deals on church property. The state came in and seized all the church’s assets, just like that, an entire church reduced to rubble in a matter of days.
Takes my breath away sometimes, the way evil can sink its teeth in somebody, shake them hard, until it’s their own neck broken and bleeding.
That’s what worried me about the boy and wherever it is he’d gone to.
It’s not easy to drink in Andrews. We’re a dry county. To buy any kind of liquor, you have to drive elsewhere. Out toward Odessa, just across the county line, you’ll find the first liquor store, just lying in wait. I’m not one to take up causes, but there’s something wrong when a town manages to keep itself free of sin yet has to contend with the devil permanently camping out on its perimeters.
For a while after our talk, Sammy didn’t drink, or if he did, it was in secret. Then one morning he wasn’t in his bed. Charlene wanted to call Chief right away and it’s true, I made her wait. I said, “There’s no reason to involve the police when, like as not, the boy’ll come dragging his sorry self through that door in another hour, barely able to stand on the two legs God gave him.”
I saw something in Charlene give then, in the way her eyes became all dark and soft. For a moment, it looked like she was resigned. But how could she be resigned to Sammy’s drinking? Or to his disappearing act? She had something tucked away in the back of her mind but I couldn’t figure it out.
One of us called the church secretary, I don’t even remember who, said I’d be in late that day. Then I sat myself down on the living room couch with a cup of coffee, waiting for the boy to show up so I could give him a piece of my mind.
I am not a fire-’n’-brimstone kind of preacher. The good church ladies who make up my congregation say I’m a salt-’n’-pepper kind of preacher instead, mostly pepper. “Too much pepper, Preacher,” one of them told me once as she left the church one day, never to return. “Too much pepper.”
That day, however, I was in a fire-’n’-brimstone kind of mood and I planned to give it to the boy when he came home.
Only he didn’t come. Both of us waited as long as we could. Eventually, Charlene had to get on over to the hospital—we like to joke that her boss isn’t as understanding as mine—and by lunchtime, fingernails bitten off to the quick, I decided to get off to the church before I started gnawing on the flesh too. Andrews is a small town and people know where to find me. If the boy turned up in a compromising situation, the church would be the first place they’d call.
But he didn’t turn up that day or the next. He didn’t show up until Sunday, showed up in the back of the church, right in the middle of my sermon. I was preaching on the loaves and fishes, the miracles our Savior performs, the way He multiplies and provides. It’s hard to yell at your boy when he’s been gone so long, the only thing you want anymore is to see him walk through the door, and then he shows up right when you’re talking about the mercy of God.
So I never gave him a piece of my mind. And now I wish I had, because a few weeks later he disappeared and never came back.
I suppose that at first I thought Chief would take care of it. I suppose that I thought, It’s a small town. Chief will put this case first, he’ll realize the importance, he’ll put every resource toward finding the boy.
Until then, I hadn’t realized how different police work is from church work. Police work isn’t about saving anybody. Or, at least, it isn’t about saving a teenager who’s just gotten a little off track, a little lost, who needs somebody to find him, to help him home.
In fact, the first thing Chief brought up when we went to see him was our recent trouble. “Didn’t Sammy disappear for a few days awhile back?” he asked, scratching his stomach, drinking out of a big mug on his desk, and eyeing us over the rim. Chief had an odd tic I’d never noticed before, the eye shuddering in sudden rapid winks and the skin underneath it trembling and heaving. It was distracting.
“You know he did, Chief,” I said.
“He’s probably run off again. My guess is he’ll show up in a few days, just like last time. These things happen.” He moved some papers on his desk and looked at Charlene as he spoke. “When he comes back, you should sit down and have a long talk with him.”
The wife was so nervous, I was afraid she was going to start chewing her handkerchief. I took it from her gently and put it in my pocket.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” I asked.
“Not much,” he said. For the first time, he looked vaguely sympathetic. “He’s seventeen. As far as the law in Texas is concerned, he can leave Andrews whenever he wants. We don’t do much unless there’s some sign of foul play.”
“That’s that then,” I said, and we left the station.
On the way home, Charlene asked me what I wanted to do.
“I guess we wait,” I said.
After that day, the wife and I started fighting. We’ve always been a placid couple, but here was Charlene, snorting like an angry horse, face beet-red, screaming how this and that and the other thing didn’t make her happy or satisfied or what have you.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked her once after the screaming was over and she was sitting on the couch across from me, her hands in her lap, open and turned up toward the ceiling.
“It’s too late,” she said. She was staring at those hands, not me, when she said that.
“Do you want a divorce?” I asked, appalled and, frankly, ashamed. I spend so much of my time counseling couples on how to mend broken marriages and here I was facing it myself, no clue how it all happened. How did it happen? What had happened?
“That’s not what I meant, Charles,” she said. “That’s not what I meant at all.”
She looked up at me then and I realized, all of a sudden, Why, she and I have the same eyes, the same eyes as the boy. I broke down weeping. All these years, thirty-three years now, I was looking into a mirror when I looked in her eyes, and I’d never realized it before.
“Do you believe in miracles?” she asked.
She’d asked me this question once before, back when she was supplicating the Lord to touch her barren womb and give her a child, just like Hannah in the Old Testament. And when her belly was swollen with the boy and her eyes swollen with joy, I reminded her of her many prayers, and that is when we decided to name him Samuel, which means God heard.
“Of course,” I said. “Isn’t our boy’s life a miracle?”
“No, I mean real miracles,” she said, her voice flat, emotionless. “Do you believe that we could pray and ask God to send our boy back—my boy back—and here he’d come, walking through that door, as if he’d never gone anywhere at all?”
I didn’t know how to answer her, so I said nothing.
I couldn’t get the question Charlene asked out of my head. Many nights, I can’t even count how many, I propped myself up on my elbows and stared at her face while she slept. I counted every single wrinkle—forty-two in all, if you included the soft folds of skin on her neck. Sometimes I think we don’t pay attention to all the tiny changes, and then one day we wake up and realize we don’t recognize the person we married.
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.
Neely was looking at her from the corner of his eyes, as if he was afraid he would startle her if he looked directly at her. “Is that so?” he said. “And do you? Give in to it?”
“No,” she said. She smiled. “Okay,” she said. “One time. But only once.”
When she said that, I looked away, down the street, to the end of the block, where cement dribbles out until it becomes the flat, dry brown of west Texas, stretching to the place where land meets clear blue sky, as far as the eyes see, just a hazy line on the horizon separating heaven from earth.
The smell of Neely’s tobacco soured in my stomach.
I thought of the Beatitudes. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. That had been the hunger in my life. What was hers?
For the first time, doubts about the wife crawled right into my head.
Charlene continued. “Do you know what I’m talking about when I say the word hunger, Mr. Neely? Have you ever felt like you’re starving? Have you ever looked in the mirror and all you see is a skeleton—that’s all that’s left of you, somebody you don’t even recognize because you’re so very, very hungry?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, courteous but firm. “Can’t say that I have.”
“Well,” she said.
We waited for more. But she was done.
My hands were shaking. I’m a preacher, so I know what sin is, the tragedy of it, the way it corrupts a person and turns everything they love to dust. But still I was surprised how calm Neely was. Like he’d seen everything under the sun already.
I paid him for a week in advance, gave him Sammy’s Social Security number, and watched as he drove away. I wanted him to find something, and at the same time I was hoping he would not. The wife had scared me.
I went inside, ready to ask Charlene about all that she’d said, but she was hunched up in bed, blankets over her head.
“Charlene?” I said softly.
She didn’t respond. So I went away.
Neely returned two days later, with Chief, which surprised me. They came to the church. I saw them from the office window, and went outside to greet them, to invite them inside. Neely cleared his throat. He spit out the remainder of his tobacco juice before entering the building, left the cup outside on the sidewalk. I appreciated that.
“Have you already found him?” I asked as soon as we were inside my office. I had closed the door. Stacey’s a good church secretary, but there are things she doesn’t need to know.
It was Chief who answered. “We found him all right.” He had a stern expression on his face, which seemed to have calmed the winking-blinking facial tic.
“Well, where is he?” I demanded. “How is he? Is he okay? Is he in trouble? Did you bring him back to Andrews?”
“He was in Amarillo,” Neely said. “But he’s here now.”
We were still standing and I made a gesture to open the door. “Take me to him.”
“We have a warrant, Preacher,” Chief interrupted.
My hand paused on the doorknob. “What has he done?” I asked, so quick, my mind going to a thousand scenarios, knowing how it’s possible to get going downhill so fast, you can’t stop yourself even when you want to.
“It’s not what he’s done,” Neely said.
“Then what? Who? Me?”
“Your wife, it’s what your wife’s done.”
“What’s she done?” My preacher’s voice—usually sonorous and controlled—was soaring. “You have a warrant to arrest Charlene?”
“No, we have a warrant for your DNA,” Chief said.
“What? Why?”
“We can do it here,” Chief said, “or you can come on down to the station.”
“Let me see the warrant.” My heart was racing. I scanned the paper quickly, but it didn’t tell me anything that they hadn’t already said. “What exactly is going on?”
“Do you mind coming down to the station?” Chief asked, only he didn’t really ask, it was more like a statement. His mouth was bunched up, the lips pressed firmly together.
Neely’s face had never been expressive, but now it was a blank slate.
“Okay,” I said.
We stepped outside my office, the two men following me.
“I’m gone for the day,” I told Stacey. I could barely think for the questions swirling around like dust devils in my head.
There were four cars in the parking lot—mine, Stacey’s, Chief’s, and Neely’s.
“You’ll come with me,” Chief said.
“Front or back?” I asked, still wondering how much trouble I was in.
“Your choice,” he said.
I sat in front.
As we drove out of the parking lot, tires spinning in the gravel, I looked back at the small redbrick building with its white steeple and the wooden cross hanging over the door frame. Neely’s spittoon sat on the sidewalk, right in front of the sanctuary door.
The sky was Texas-style blue, expansive and deep, clouds scudding across its face. Usually, that sky reminds me of the wide, wide mercy of God. Today, it made me feel like anything could happen, anything at all.
As we walked through the station, I caught a glimpse of Charlene sitting in a small room as a police officer went inside. Another officer was sitting across from her, a tape recorder in his hand.
“… there was the cord wrapped around his neck …” I heard her saying.
The door closed and I lost sight of her.
And then there was Sammy, sitting in the hallway, his big frame impossible to ignore. He looked tired and dirty. He hadn’t had a haircut or a shave since he’d disappeared, and the beard and scruffy hair made him look like a man and a stranger.
Oh Sammy. My Sammy.
The breath caught in my throat.
“Sammy,” I called, my voice high and unnatural and cracking.
He looked up and our eyes met and again I was startled by their amber-green, so like his mother’s, so like mine. Samuel. My boy. The Lord heard.
Neely pushed gently from behind, and we stumbled into a small room. Chief hustled inside behind us.
“You really did find him,” I babbled. “And he looks all right, doesn’t he? Isn’t he all right?”
“He’s fine,” Neely said.
“Thank you, Lord,” I breathed. “Thank you.”
The last thank you was directed at Neely, who nodded in acknowledgment. He seemed like a decent man, even if he wasn’t explaining to me what was going on.
After they swabbed my cheek to get their DNA sample, Chief gestured to a chair, and I sat.
“When can I see my boy?” I asked. I felt like a small child, petitioning an arbitrary adult.
“Actually, we have some questions to ask you, if you don’t mind,” Chief said. The tic was back. It looked like a worm moving beneath the skin.
“Sure,” I said, “anything I can do to help. What are you looking for, anyway? Why did you need my DNA sample?”
“We don’t think Sammy is yours,” Neely said.
I stood then, leapt to my feet. “No,” I said. “No, no, no! Sammy is mine, has always been mine.”
Had Charlene? Could Charlene?
I have a hunger, she’d said. Sometimes it’s all I can do not to give in to it.
And do you? Give in to it? Neely’d asked.
One time, she’d said. But only once.
“Charlene is a good woman,” I insisted. “A faithful woman, 100 percent. It’s not even possible, what you’re saying, that she would’ve—” I choked on the words.
And then I grew spitfire angry.
“All right,” I snapped. “Fine. It happens all the time. Maybe he’s my son, maybe he isn’t.” My face was growing red. “But even if he isn’t my son, adultery is a matter for the church, not the police. Sin is the Lord’s work.” It would have been a comfort to stand behind a pulpit and shout down the voices that whispered evil all around me. But here I was, weak and vulnerable in the face of something I didn’t expect. “I don’t see how this is any of your business,” I said.
I glared at the two silent men standing in front of me.
And suddenly, they both looked uncomfortable.
Neely cleared his throat.
“We don’t think he’s Charlene’s son, either,” Chief said.
It felt like a hammer to the spine, to the throat, to the chest, everywhere, my whole body beaten. “What?” And my voice didn’t sound like my own, it sounded like an old man’s.
Neely slapped a newspaper story down on the table in front of me. It was the Amarillo Globe-News, dated seventeen years back, July, the week or so after we’d left there to move here.
I scanned it, heart beating beating beating.
DEAD BABY SWAPPED
Parents in a Panic to Find their Missing Newborn AMARILLO, TX—Police are investigating a possible kidnapping at Amarillo General Hospital. On June 13, Rachel Smith, 26, gave birth to a healthy baby boy that appeared to have died during the night. In the course of a routine autopsy, hospital officials discovered that the dead baby was not related to Smith. Police are currently searching for both the Smith baby and for the parents of the dead baby.
I looked at the two men who stood before me. “What are you saying?”
“You know what we’re saying,” Neely replied.
“Sammy is my son,” I whispered.
“Correction: Sammy is Rachel Smith’s son.” Chief smirked. “Your son was buried by the city of Amarillo.”
My knees buckled and I had to sit.
“You gonna make it?” Neely asked.
“I don’t know how to make any sense of this,” I said.
“You really didn’t know?” he asked.
“Know what?”
“Your wife was alone when she went into labor,” Neely said, “and the baby was born dead. She went to the hospital where she worked and switched the dead baby with the Smith baby.”
There was a picture in my head, a picture of Charlene, alone, holding the dead body of our son close to her chest, weeping and cursing God for taking her miracle away.
“Charlene told you this?” I asked. “She’s talking about it?”
“Oh, she’s talking,” Chief said. He shook his head. “She won’t shut up. It seems she started feeling guilty about what she’d done after all these years. Apparently, a few months ago she told your son—excuse me, Rachel Smith’s son—the truth.”
A bitter laugh escaped my lips. “‘What is truth?’” I quoted Pontius Pilate, unsure who I expected to answer that question, the fallen men standing before me or the God I’ve served all my life. It felt like I’d been robbed of my very life. Something evil had slept right next to me for years, and I’d never known how close it was to me, how I’d loved it, how I’d nurtured it, how I’d been blind to it.
“When we found Sammy, he was in Amarillo looking for his real parents,” Neely said.
“We’ve contacted Amarillo police,” said Chief. “They’re trying to locate the Smith family. Once they have all the samples, it’s just a matter of waiting for the DNA results to confirm what we already suspect.”
“How long will that take?” I asked, throat dry.
“It depends on how long the forensics lab is backed up,” Chief said. “A few weeks. Possibly a month.”
I swallowed. Then I swallowed again. It could take a month to find out if my boy was really my boy? Because suddenly, that was all that mattered to me. Although deep down, I already knew. Maybe I always had.
“Can I bring you some water?” Neely asked.
“Sure.” I was parched, thirstier than I’d been all my life. If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink.
Chief opened the door to let Neely through. I looked out at the busy police department. It wasn’t a big place, so I could see everything there was to see. Sammy was just outside, leaning his head against the wall, eyes closed, like he was tired beyond belief, a tired that went beyond the body, a tired that bit its sharp teeth into a soul and wouldn’t let go. And I wanted so badly to say to him, Come. Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
But I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to speak to him, not yet, maybe not for a long time, maybe not ever. Perhaps he would never want to talk to me, and with a clarity that comes with revelation, I realized I had no right to ask him to.
I had lost my boy.
The door to the interrogation room opened and for just a few seconds, I could see Charlene inside, talking to somebody, a police officer. She was talking to him the way one might talk to a pastor, I saw. She was saying everything, leaving nothing aside, confessing her sin, hoping for forgiveness, for salvation.
But police are not in the salvation business. That would be me, picking up the pieces after the trial. I didn’t want to lose her too.
Like Sammy, I closed my eyes and leaned my head back until it touched the wall. Images of the boy and the wife flooded the black space between my eyes and my eyelids. There was Sammy, just a boy, hefty and athletic, running down the sidewalk in front of our home after a football. There was Charlene, standing at the door, calling after him not to go too far, calling after him to come home. There they were, sitting in a church pew while I preached a sermon, Sammy fiddling until Charlene handed him a piece of paper and a crayon, her expression serene as she turned her face back toward mine. I saw her in her nurse’s uniform, kissing Sammy goodbye at the door as she headed out to work the night shift at the hospital, headed out to heal the bodies of sick babies and their mothers.
And I could not—I could not—believe he was somebody else’s boy.
I turned my thoughts toward the flatland surrounding the small town of Andrews, where I’d been a preacher of the Word for the past seventeen years.
I’d always said that land was like God, endless and encompassing everything.
I thought about how a man could just walk out into that land and keep going for miles.
I thought about how a man might never come to the end of it.