The Valley of Dry Bones Page 3

  Zeke stood and switched places with Mahir at the window.

  Mahir whispered, “The dust died down.”

  And so it had. Zeke didn’t like it. If Mongers were in the area, the dust told him they were about a mile away. But no dust didn’t necessarily mean they were gone. It could mean they were closer. Or coming from another direction.

  Raoul continued, “I figured the best way to keep Katashi from doin’ somethin’ stupid was to make him tell me the whole thing again from the beginning. I told him I was sorry about calling in sick without really being sick. It wasn’t like we both hadn’t done that before, but we always told each other. Anyway, I ordered some food because I knew he needed to eat and I wanted to keep him away from the booze. Then I called Benita and told her I was going to sleep at his place.”

  “It’s a good thing he did,” Katashi said.

  “I think so too,” Raoul said, “because I was there the next day when Mrs. Meeks called and said the Thorppes wanted Katashi to come to the funeral a few days later. No way he woulda done that if I hadn’t talked him into it.”

  “For sure,” Katashi said. “And no way I would have gone if you hadn’t gone with me.”

  “I had to drag you there, dude.”

  “It meant so much to us,” Alexis said.

  “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Katashi said. “Everybody knew who I was. There’s nothing worse than a funeral with a tiny casket, but to know you’re the reason and that everyone else knows too . . . Oh, it was awful. I wanted to crawl in a hole.”

  It was hard for Zeke and Alexis too, of course, though Pastor Bob had preached a message on salvation, as they asked, including Junior’s last words that though he was scared he knew he would soon be in heaven with God, “because of Jesus.”

  “That was the first time Benita and I had ever heard anything like that,” Raoul said. “And we went to church a lot, you know? All our lives. In Mexico and when we moved to Angelino Heights. We believed something like that, but not that. It wasn’t because of Jesus, but because of us—what we were trying to do for Him. We talked about it all the way home and all week, about what we would have said if we were the ones dying. We woulda said we hoped we were going to heaven, God, because we tried really hard.”

  “I was listening too,” Katashi said, “because Elaine had explained it all to me, and Pastor Bob was making it clearer. But the whole time I was dreading going to the cemetery. I wanted out of that, because I would be standing shoulder to shoulder with all these people again, and I didn’t know if I could take another minute of it.”

  Elaine said, “You asked me if I thought the Thorppes would mind if you slipped away after the service. I told you they’d forgiven you for something much more serious than that, but that they had asked you to be there, and didn’t you think you owed them at least that much?”

  “Well, that put a new spin on things. I owed them whatever they asked. I said I would stay if Raoul and Benita went with me, but that didn’t stop people from just pushing past them and talking directly to me. It wouldn’t have surprised me to be glared at, cussed out, even spit at. Who knows, maybe someone would take a swing at me.”

  “You had no church experience,” Pastor Bob said.

  “None at all. And everybody who said anything just told me how nice it was that I came, and they told me they were praying for me. For me! It was almost too much.”

  Raoul told how the company put Katashi on desk duty during his suspension while they waited to see if they would be sued. “When they let him back in the truck, he didn’t never want to drive again. We used to trade off every day, but now I drove all the time. You never saw a guy so good at keeping kids away, man. But we never had no more trouble at that one building.

  “Anyway, I didn’t mind. I liked driving and him doin’ all the work. We got to talk all day. And then we started going to church together.”

  “I won’t lie,” Alexis said. “Zeke and I went through some very dark nights of the soul. I remember days, weeks, when I only got out of bed for Sasha. At times prayer was my only lifeline and at other times I wanted nothing to do with God. Frankly, I didn’t want to know or serve or love a God who was supposedly sovereign and yet would allow that to happen to Junior—to me.

  “And poor Zeke couldn’t win. When he couldn’t match my grief, I hated him for getting past it, though in my heart of hearts I knew he was as devastated as I was. I would hear him sobbing and want to go to him because knowing he was hurting the way I was gave a hint of a lifeline to me, yet I had nothing to offer him. I know he thought I cared only about my loss, and he had to wonder if I would ever again see him—or Sasha—through loving eyes.”

  She sighed. “They say time heals, but I don’t believe that anymore. God heals, and He heals through people. Loving people. I don’t believe in closure either. There’s a hole in my heart that will never close, and I don’t want it to. Even now I am overwhelmed with grief and all I have to cling to is that same blessed hope my son had at the end—because of Jesus.

  “At the end of myself and all my resources, He’s all I have, and He is enough.”

  Zeke was grateful Alexis had a way with words, because he never could have gotten that out. It warmed him to remember that Elaine Meeks’s church was dying back then and she switched to theirs, she said, because of what she saw in the people. And Katashi began coming and kept coming and brought Raoul and Benita, and they all eventually came to faith under Pastor Bob’s preaching. That was when Zeke finally knew Junior’s death was not in vain.

  From death had come life. Because of Jesus.

  4

  PASSWORD!

  “I MIGHT HAVE foregone my message, had I known how poignant that was going to be,” Pastor Bob said. “But God did put something on my mind, and I want to be sensitive to His leading. Zeke, does it appear we’re in the clear for a few minutes?”

  “It does,” Zeke said and sat with his family again. Alexis looked spent, and he wondered how—and when—he would break to her what had been happening to him. She often said she loved that he was so grounded and practical. What in the world would she make of this?

  Pastor Bob asked the group to turn to Jeremiah 1. As pages rattled, Zeke again felt a hand on his shoulder and heard, “Hear Me. This is for you.”

  Zeke closed his eyes and hung his head, and the pastor read: “Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.’

  “Then said I: ‘Ah, Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak, for I am a youth.’

  “But the Lord said to me: ‘Do not say, “I am a youth,” for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of their faces, for I am with you to deliver you,’ says the Lord.

  “Then the Lord put forth His hand and touched my mouth, and the Lord said to me: ‘Behold, I have put My words in your mouth . . .’”

  Pastor Bob closed his Bible and set it on the table. “May the Lord add His blessing to the reading of His Word.”

  That’s it? Zeke thought.

  “Now I mentioned that Jennie and I have news. I apologize that this will come as a surprise except to Doc. I have been in ministry for nearly forty years, most of them in Torrance and the last several with you all. While the sun and the fires turned to ash the beauty we once basked in, we have felt compelled to stay, doggedly determined to minister to those whom time—and America—has forgotten. I admire you and love you for that beyond what I am able to express . . .”

  Zeke, for one, would never forget the service that had birthed all this, in which the usually low-key pastor perhaps unintentionally said something so profound that it initially changed the lives of about forty families. Though the church in Torrance had gone to one Saturday evening and two Sunday morning services, for some reason Pastor Bob had called for a special Sunday evening service. He billed it as an old-fashioned, revival-type, hymn
-singing meeting with a message at the end.

  That proved an understatement, though Zeke recalled having been embarrassed for Bob when attendance proved thin. The pastor, however, seemed to take it in stride and said something good-naturedly about “finally figuring out who’s serious about getting down to business around here.”

  By that time the state had been decimated by the drought, hundreds of thousands of acres lost to the wildfires, the ecosystem turned upside down, endangered species wiped out, once-safe species endangered, industries failing, thousands of businesses leaving, virtually none coming in, millions of people moving away, the economy a hopeless morass—the state on life support and no hope in sight.

  And that was even before the worst of the earthquakes had rendered the term skyline archaic and turned even the great metropolises to rubble. Once majestic monuments of progress, oases of cityscapes breaking up the Mojave, Colorado, and Great Basin Deserts, had been lain waste. Now all of California, not just its southeast, was indistinguishable from Death Valley.

  Zeke and Mahir had seen it coming for years. As hydrologists with the California Department of Water Resources, they’d been frantically attempting every emergency measure to preserve the state’s most precious commodity—to no avail. Half their coworkers had been laid off, budgets had been slashed, and anyone with a brain in the department—including Zeke—was feverishly circulating his résumé.

  But in the special service that night eight years before, the usually measured and almost taciturn Pastor Bob—whom his congregation loved for just that reason—was particularly animated. He wasn’t loud or demonstrative but rather emotional and impassioned. He seemed to speak from the heart as never before. He told of his and his wife’s calling as young people specifically to the state of California.

  He talked, rather eloquently as Zeke remembered it, of the unique personalities and philosophical bents that made up the California ethos. Zeke thought back on how he had caught Alexis’s eye at that point, particularly when Pastor Bob so poignantly described the typical Californian. Five-year-old Sasha had been asleep in the pew, her head in her mother’s lap, and the moment somehow resonated with Zeke. He and Alexis had often talked about the fact that while many made fun of the quirkiness of the people of California, the two of them found such people fascinating—and needy.

  Pastor Bob had gone on to speak of the sacredness of one’s calling, the biblical basis for it, and how to know when it was genuinely of God. He concluded that evening with an earnest challenge. He said normally he would reference Isaiah’s declaration from the Old Testament, “Here am I, send me,” and ask, “Who will go?”

  But that night, he said, in light of the rumored death sentence soon to be pronounced on the state and the mass exodus that had already begun, “rather I’m asking, ‘Who will stay? Who will be here for those who cannot leave? What about the impoverished, the infirm, the disenfranchised? What about the indigenous tribes, the Native Americans, those who were here centuries before we were, those who consider this their sacred ground, the land their birthright? Who will be here for them? Who will stay?’”

  Zeke recalled being so stirred, so moved, so overcome, so certain that God was urging him to stay, that he wanted to leap to his feet. His only fear was getting ahead of Alexis. Was it too much to ask of a mother who had but two years before buried her firstborn child?

  But when Pastor Bob closed by simply whispering what he would later admit was meant only rhetorically, “Who will stay?” Alexis gathered Sasha into her arms, stood, and called out, “I will!”

  Zeke rose and did the same.

  Sasha, rousing with a start, squealed, “I will too! What’re we doing?”

  Several others all over the Torrance sanctuary stood to respond, clearly startling Pastor Bob.

  After the service he met with forty who had expressed their commitment, and he soberly warned them of the cost. “It won’t be long before we’ll be on our own, ministering to the stranded and the abandoned, those here only because they have no choice.”

  All claimed they were willing, but two years later, when the president declared California verboten, the attrition among the committed began. By the time the church itself was abandoned, Pastor Bob’s holdouts numbered just two dozen. “Now we’re entirely self-sufficient, depending wholly on the Lord and the scientists among us to somehow produce everything we need.”

  Now, ten years since losing Junior, eight years since Zeke and Alexis had answered the call, six years since Washington, D.C. had pronounced California dead to civilians, and seventeen years into the most devastating drought the world had ever seen, Pastor Bob finished his last message to what was left of the original Torrance holdouts . . .

  “Sadly, the day has come when Jennie and I must bid our farewells also and return to the land of the living. It is not by choice, as Dr. Xavier has diagnosed her with stage-four pancreatic cancer.”

  The expression of emotion seemed to come involuntarily as Zeke and the group moved as one to lay hands on Jennie and weep over her. “It should not surprise you that I have made this decision over Jennie’s protest. Our children and grandchildren want her close and under acute care, and I have come to the painful conclusion that this is only fair. Bless her, she believed the Lord had called her to stay here to the end and was willing, but He has given me peace about the move. We will leave in three days, pulling out Wednesday night so we can make the first leg of the journey after dark.

  “I trust God will anoint another leader, and we look forward to hearing who that is and what is in store for you all. Zeke, could I ask you to pray for us?”

  Zeke raised a hand for the rest to bow their heads, but for a few eternal seconds he was speechless. Lord, give me the words, he said silently.

  God reminded him, “Whatever I command you, you shall speak. Behold, I have put My words in your mouth.”

  The longer he waited the more Zeke became aware of the uneasy silence. All he heard from the Lord was, “Have you no faith? Open your mouth.” And so he did.

  “I am the Lord your God, who is and always will be. Fear not, for I am your shield and your exceedingly great reward. I have created you and formed you. I have called you by name, and you are Mine. I am God and beside Me there is no other. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned. I am the true and living God, the everlasting King, and at My wrath the earth shall tremble.

  “I made the earth by My power, established the world by My wisdom, and stretched out the heavens at My discretion. At My voice a multitude of waters in the heavens causes the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth. I make lightning for the rain and bring the wind out of my treasuries.”

  God seemed to fall silent again, and thus so did Zeke. He felt a nudge and peeked up at Dr. Adam Xavier’s scowl. The man’s shaved head ran with sweat. “Pray for Jennie, man,” he whispered, but of course everyone could hear him and Zeke felt obligated to defend himself.

  “I’m trying to follow the leading of the Spirit, Brother.”

  “Just do what Pastor Bob asked, would you? Nobody expects you to speak for God Himself.”

  “Well, that’s what He impressed upon me to—”

  “Please, just pray for Jennie and thank the Lord for all she and Pastor have meant to us!”

  “Gentlemen, please!” Pastor Bob said. “We’ve always been known for unity. Now, after one the most special times we’ve ever had—”

  “Right,” Doc said. “Sorry.”

  “Me too,” Zeke said. “Let’s pray. Father, I confess it’s at times like this when it’s hardest to trust You. But we do. You’ve proved Yourself faithful. You alone sit high above the heavens, and there is no other God like You.

  “We praise You because You’re a sin-forgiving God, and how we need that. In You there is neither change nor shadow of turning, and that’s a good thing, because we admit we don’t understand and we don’t like what we’ve heard today. We love Jennie and if we could have our way, we would ask You to make her a
s good as new, healthy and whole.

  “We say we want Your will, but the truth is we want our will and we want Yours only if that means she gets better. We can’t imagine this place without her, ourselves without her, life without her. She’s taught us, she’s prayed with us, she’s prayed for us. She’s been an example to us. And what a rock she’s been to our pastor!

  “So, we beg for a miracle. Short of that we ask for comfort and peace. And finally, we ask for forgiveness for our own lack of faith and understanding. Help us trust in Your sovereignty. Most of all, thank You for the gift of the years we had with Jennie, we pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.”

  Bob took a moment, seeming to gather himself. “Before I ask Sasha to lead us in ‘Blest Be the Tie That Binds,’” he said, “let me suggest that sometime soon you elect an elder to join Zeke and Doc in place of me, and then the three of you decide who will be your new spiritual leader.”

  “Well,” Doc said, “I’ve been studying and doing a good bit of teaching, and Zeke’s busy with the logistics—”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Pastor Bob said. “Let the Spirit lead, as He always does.” He nodded to Sasha, who breathed into her pitch pipe again.

  Blest be the tie that binds

  Our hearts in Christian love;

  The fellowship of Christian minds

  Is like to that above . . .

  Zeke suggested they save their good-byes for an appropriate send-off a few days later. “We need to start heading for our vehicles. Keep an eye out. Save one more swallow of water for the trip back, and as soon as you get there, check your traps. Lunch is on your own, but let’s have dinner together in the commons tonight. I’m tired of snake and lizard, so any kind of fowl or mammal would be nice. And pray about that third elder. We’ll vote Wednesday night after we see the Gills off.”

  The sixteen broke quickly into the four groups in which they had arrived. Mahir Sy had come with the newest members, a young Haitian couple named Danley and Cristelle Muscadin, who had found themselves out of work when the mass exodus began. They had been scavenging for food when Mahir had come upon them, led them to faith, and brought them into the fold. They left first, and soon the high-pitched whine of their single-cylinder dirt bikes faded.