CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

YEAR 1987

MINNETONKA, MINNESOTA

TOM WYCLIFFE was a first-class friend. He had helped Shanan start into mining, years before, giving him two old jalopies to sell to help with expenses when he arrived in the Golden State. Shanan appreciated the charitable grubstake and, a week before he left for them thar hills, had educated Tom with lucrative tales of the domestic service industry, exciting him enough to enter the maid service business for himself. Tom was now sitting comfortably with a flourishing personal-services corporation in Minnetonka.

Shanan had not lived with the Wycliffe’s a week, when Tom’s wife, Jan, suffered a violent whiplash from a horrible automobile accident in front of their residence. Excelsior Boulevard was a wide and notably busy thoroughfare, and Tom’s house lay close to its southern edge. Jan was returning from working at their domestic service, and as she was pulling into the narrow driveway to their house, a young man accordioned the back of her Toyota. Thus, a season of neck brace lay ahead for poor Jan. Had one had seen the mishap, one would have thought surviving the mishap was a veritable miracle in itself.

“SHAN,” Tom stressed with determination that evening, “I need a favor.”

“Go ahead.”

“You do realize I’ve helped you in the past, true?”

“True.”

“Well, it’s my turn now.”

“Shoot, Tom, if you need a hand….”

“Shan, Jan’s not going to able to work like she did before the accident, and I need your help—badly. And I’m going to ask you, I’d appreciate it if you stayed with us for another month or two to help me in my business until Jan gets better. I’m sure she’ll work, also, but not nearly like she used to. Can you do this for me?”

“Yeah,” was the sum of Shanan’s words.

However, lest you should receive the wrong impression here, Shanan was not your first-pick class of hero; he was strapped for money. Other than a mission for the homeless, he had nowhere else to hang his hat. Jan’s crisis was just ready opportunity; and Shanan, as he took convenient advantage of the facilities and utilities at the couple’s house, now had a chance at a reasonable bankroll and the freedom to shoot at a mix of whimsical ventures in Minneapolis. Shanan was often a prideful and wordless man.

TOM removed everything but bed, chair, desk, lamps, and carpet from a bedroom that had accommodated a daughter who was now married; and, in under a half an hour, Shanan had moved in, lock, stock, baggage—and Amy. He helped faithfully at the maid service every workday. On many weekends, he and Tom would go metal detecting in Minnetonka’s numerous parks, searching for collectibles: coins and jewelry sub-earthed over the decades. Although the winter weather was indeed cold, snow had only fallen lightly, and acres of ground was exposed, resembling a partially frosted cookie, to the pair’s treasure hunting, often very profitably.

TOM had enjoyed a brisk house cleaning business that winter. He had quit drinking his nightly beer in trade for a daily temperance of “…fifty-nine gallons of coffee, thick as chewing gum.” In the evening, while sitting stoically before the living room television, he limited himself to “…ten hun—” I will do the writing, Shanan.

Shanan, singing Yankee Doodle had a farm, or something like that, had just finished washing and drying his supper dishes. As he was heading to his bedroom, wondering why Tom was always so impatient with people and judging those who God had placed in Tom’s way (slow drivers to and from work) to help direct his path—“You know what television is, Tom?” he quizzed, grinning, giving his target no chance to respond. “T.V. is people stopping doing things so they can sit and watch people do things.” Tom became noticeably irritated; thus, Shanan slinky-toed into his bedroom…expediently…snickering.

Tom’s snickering roomer, on the contrary, drank five or six beers nightly and rarely bothered with television, sitting in the bedroom for hours, drawing oddball cartoons or attempting to write humor for various newspapers around the country, and for newspaper syndicates. For days on end, no matter how close he put his ear to the rejection slips, their answers remained unchanged: No. In that same vein, many executives simply forgot to return Mr. Bin’s works in the self-addressed, stamped envelope—they so religiously demanded. Shanan, void of his own doctrine, would mutter judgmentally beneath his breath, “Bunch of hypocrites!”

THE MIDDLE OF MARCH had at last rolled its warming self (prematurely) into Minnesota, baby Grass Shoots were unfolding their tiny green heads upward toward the sun, Jan was healing rapidly, and restless Shanan was making plans to return West and perhaps find work on a gold mine or go back to the nostalgic hills for himself: Whichever pops first, he thought.

The LORD of hosts hath purposed it,

to stain the pride of all glory,

and to bring into contempt

all the honourable of the earth

Mr. Leisure was whiling away his evening, in his bedroom, nursing a cheap cigarette, guzzling a cheap beer, drawing far-out cartoons. Tom and Jan were sitting in the living room, enjoying television.

“HOLY OOFTAH!” Tom screamed. “Shanan!” he echoed his scream! “Get out here! You won’t believe your eyes…!”

Shanan launched himself from his chair and lit through the bedroom doorway and into the living room. “Yeah?” he inquired immediately.

“Sidown! That bigtime television evangelist—JIM BAKKER!” Tom screamed!

“Yes, so?”

“THEY CAUGHT HIM WITH A WOMAN!”

“Gads! They did?” Now, Shanan, but for no apparent reason to himself, seemed extremely interested.

“YAS!” Tom bellowed! “And the Assemblies of God Church is evicting him from his own ministry! I knew this would happen, had to sooner or later. This is unreal! I used to tell anyone who would listen, ‘These guys are nothing but a brand of theeeeves!’ —I wouldn’t watch their program, IF YOU PAID ME!”

Shanan took a seat on the arm of a stuffed chair and leaned forward, knuckling his chin, gluing his attention to the large screen. Sure enough, the unhallowed caldron of Atmosphere Manor was again pouring her scalding spices into the eager eyes and ears of the news-starved Earth. Two televangelists: Jim Bakker and John Wesley Fletcher (the man who had allegedly arranged the adulterous event, and was subsequently a suspected bisexual), seven years earlier in Clearwater, Florida, had supposedly raped Bakker’s secretary, Jessica Hahn—a young devotee from Babylon, New York—West Babylon, to be specific. Shanan just shook his head. He was in a form of surprise—as was half the rest of the world. The other half was not.

And the scribes and Pharisees

brought unto him

a woman taken in adultery;

and when they had set her in the midst

This is a ridiculous trip, Shanan thought: They haven’t ever caught a preacher in a lecherous act of this magnitude. Shanan, nevertheless, had no trouble remembering the occasions on which he had told his mother, “These guys don’t play fair, Mom. I saw pastor so-and-so on T.V. the other night knocking this other pastor, and I know in my own self, Mom, preachers shouldn’t slam anyone. That ain’t being Christian!” Now, Mr. Cartoonist sat glued to the screen, while Pastor Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority, Incorporated, Pastor Jimmy Swaggart of the Family Worship Center, and a host of other equally distinguished television pastors and preachers were congenially patronizing but subtly bashing Jim Bakker, resourcefully judging him like the Lord.

As the hostile news report was tapering to a close, “But we’re believing we can save Jim Bakker’s P.T.L.: the Praise the Lord Ministries, and…” Shanan stood and politely excused himself. In front of his bedroom, he turned and faced back down the hallway toward the living room. “Tom?…!”

“WHAT?” Tom yelled.

“You got a Bible? Mine’s an old Gideons with a bunch of missing pages.”

“Yeah!”

“Could I borrow it?”

“Yeah,” Tom replied, “I’ll get it for you tomorrow after work.”

Shanan retired for the night, and said his Lord’s Prayer. This night, however, after crawling into bed, as he fell asleep, he called to mind the news flash: Is this nuts? That TV evangelist Oral Roberts with his gimme-six-million-dollars-or-the-Lord’s-going-to-kill-me scheme, and now this? I can’t believe this stuff. No, I believe this stuff. A slew of them guys always did look kind’a funny to me—shady. I want Tom’s Bible. The Bible can teach me what I want to know. These TV guys ain’t truthful. I want to learn the Bible cover to cover, and I don’t ever want these guys conning me again, saying God said this and that, when He didn’t say anything like it at all. Aw, junk! I used to love their shows, sort of, when Mom and Dad were watching them. The choirs, the singing…. They even made me blubber, or was that because Mom was? Them suckers! Just a front…. A handful of them acted like good preachers to me, too. I don’t ever want them to con… … …Cometh the sandman….

CAME THE PEACEFUL BUT RAINY DAWN, Shanan had just stoked away a morning supper, and before wetting and combing his hair and riding to work with Tom, he ambled into the backyard to get Amy from her morning romp in the mud. Amy was invisible, leash included! Shanan flipped into a tizzy and, in shock, ran into the house.

“Tom…!” he panicked. “Amy’s gone!”

“I gotta get to work, Shan,” Tom hollered. “You call the pound and see if they got her. I’ll drive back to get you when you’re ready. Just gimme a call.” As Tom stepped hastily through the back doorway, he called again to Shanan, “You worry more than you should! You need more control in your life….”

THE LOCAL DOGCATCHER pulled a converted panel truck into the driveway twenty minutes after Shanan’s call and opened the back gate. “Is this your dog?”

“God, yes!” Shanan exclaimed with impassioned relief.

Amy jumped instantly to the ground, with a severe case of the shivers-and-shakes, as if she were begging: “I won’t run off again, Daddy. I will not ever run off again! Please don’t put me back in that nasty ol’ truck!” She was so scared, so guilty faced, yet so completely relieved to be returned to her master, who could forever be depended upon for eventual mercy.

The officer could not have represented himself more cordially, even if he were talking with Saint Peter. He told Shanan that when the call came in, he was gathering dead dogs and cats and was “…as busy as fungi in a freshly populated crypt. I would’ve taken her straight to the pound,” he consoled, “but the dispatcher told me—”

“I sounded kind of nuts, right?”

“Oh, no! Nothing of the sort. But the dispatcher said you sounded so downhearted over the phone.

“We got a call from a woman seven or eight blocks from here,” he trailed, lowering his hand and petting smiling Amy’s head, “telling us a dog was stuck in her bushes. Your dog’s leather leash got tangled at the base of her shrubs, and she was stuck. The woman tried to get near—Well, she explained to me your dog showed all her teeth, and had scared her somethin’ fierce.”

“Jeeez!” Shanan sighed ecstatically. “Amy smiles! She has for a long time. That’s her nature. She’s not a vicious dog.”

“I know,” the officer explained. “I discovered that after I got close to her. Months ago, I saw this on another route. And when I came across that smiling dog, he scared me, too, until his owner told me about him.”

“Gosh…thank you, Officer! I don’t believe I could have lived without her. I’d have probably died of a broken heart. She means my life to me.” Shanan gave his “last two dollars” to the man, insisting he take it—the two not stuck to the inside of his pocket.

“Say—”

EVENING HAD INSPIRED THE SUN TO MOVE WESTWARD. The house cleaners three had finished their supper; cups and dishes were now being sponged spotless and rinsed by wife Jan; and husband Tom had hustled downstairs and had returned to the first floor, with a new-looking but rather large Bible. He rattled his knuckles softly against the left door casing, entered Shanan’s bedroom, and found him seated listlessly before the desk, pen in hand but engaging it not, the desktop directly in front of him barren.

“This was my mother’s, Shan. I want you to keep it. But don’t let anything happen to it; this Bible’s still pretty special to me.”

“Jeeez! Tom, thanks. And I will keep it,” Shanan confirmed. “But could I ask,” he began turning the pages: “Could I use your encyclopedia and your dictionary? I know a heap of words in here will throw a pile of questions at me.”

“I’ll do you better than that, Shan. I studied the Bible years ago and, down in my den, I got a mess of Bible reference books you can use. I’ll get them for you when I’m a little more free; gotta search through a pile of boxes. Those books will help you, Shan, they will. But don’t call God God; call him Yahweh. I hardly ever call him God.”

Tom Wycliffe was a serious, sincere, and trustworthy man, particularly when giving his word. Regardless the size of his promise, if Tom Wycliffe committed himself to you, Tom Wycliffe performed. That was the adamant law of his mouth, unsusceptible and actually cynical toward excuses to the contrary: “…the lost integrity of others.” No device on Earth, other than calamity or death, could bend, crack, or tempt Tom to desert his utterance of honor, and many there were in the suburb of Minnetonka, who knew it and admired him for this priceless quality.

When Tom had exited the bedroom, Shanan, though he respected his host, considered his words, for a spell: If you call God Yahweh, it doesn’t matter. If you call a rose a rose, it doesn’t matter, as long as you treat the rose of God respectfully and keep your fingers away from the thorns.

He hurriedly grabbed his multitude of cartoons, his humorous writings, an insignificant assortment of related items, and threw all of them into the bedroom wastebasket: Things come; things go; everything’s temporary…except, maybe, Amy.

A brief but concluding evaluation of his approaching activity effected, he arranged the reference books neatly along the back edge of the desk and on the floor beside the chair. He seated himself comfortably, carefully set the Bible onto the desk, and decided to try something quite unusual, which, by the way, was normal for Shanan. He raised himself off his seat, stretched forth his right hand with resolve, and deliberately powered the black-and-white portable television, and, to his left, his radio, allowing both of them to blare simultaneously and loudly into his ears. Satisfied with this eccentric methodology, he took his seat and began to read.

THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW

The book of the generations of

Jesus Christ, the son of David,

the son of Abraham.

Shanan decided he would read the entire New Testament, with television and radio blasting into his ears, and attempt to rivet the highest level of his concentration into the Scriptures, after which, he would read its pages again. The second reading would be in silence, no television flashing and growling peripherally, and no radio blaring its inconsistent intelligence. He had convinced himself that if he proceeded in this fashion, he would magnify his perceptions, hone them sharp as a bowie knife in mint condition. From these vanguard days into the Holy Word, he would be able to read under circumstances far beyond the mundane. He wanted to scrutinize the Bible; and, as with every other project he had ever delved into, he would slave himself to the core of the effort, harvesting and gleaning thoroughly whatever the literary fields of God brought forth, whatever God allowed. As with his diligent studies on gold mining, so in like relentless manner—the Bible, but far more relentlessly—intensely more relentlessly.

Pushing Evening swiftly westward, Eleven O’clock came as if powered by the wings of an unworldly eagle. Shanan had read— no—to put this mildly, he had crammed the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Mark, and half the Gospel of Luke into himself and was exhausted, practically.

Now, Amy had to be fetched from the backyard. A chair shoved backward, the soles of two black shoes strolled over the living room carpet, wearily through the kitchen, through the back doorway. “Amy!” She heard her love. She scampered smilingly to the end of her leather leash, which Shanan had connected to a long rope leash. “C’mere, you sneaky lil phubby, youuuu!” he whispered, but somewhat loudly. “How’d you get them furries stuck all over your sneaky lil nosey?”

Amy smiled with an expressive stare. “Bark!” she exclaimed, wagging her curly tail like the pendulum of an upside-down grandfather clock on industrial-strength mood enhancers.

Shanan laughed. “What’s youze lil youze doing out here…? You sneeeeky lil self—” Amy again barked with a resounding joy, happily allowing him to unsnap her pretty leash from the rope, wagging her little tail another hundred-zillion times.

He and Amy were dancing and prancing playfully back to the house, when a random glimpse from beneath Shanan’s tired lids led his vision quickly upward toward the star-dotted ceiling.

“Holy God…!”

Shanan doubted his eyes, rubbed them, and looked up again. “Th’ heck is this?” When he had focused his attention studiously, panoramically, but briefly into the incredible heavens, with open-mouthed unbelief, he flew to the back door, swung it open wide, and shouted into the house.

“Tom!”

“YEAH…?” Tom yelled toward the rear of his home.

“Get out here,” Shanan shot back excitedly, “and get a load of this, man! This’ll blow your mind!”

Tom set his cup of coffee carefully onto a wobbly chair-side table, rushed through the living room, the kitchen, and into the backyard. Shanan raised and circled his hand and a pointing finger nervously toward the sky and, as he did, Tom raised his inquiring eyes, and froze, astonished. For an indefinite moment remembered only by time, space, and the inhabitants therein, all Tom could do was gape skyward in stark amazement at the mind-boggling fantasia unfolding above his head. “Gohhd!” he breathed timidly but in a fearful tone, and split instantaneously for the house. Slinging the back door apprehensively to the side—“PAM! PAM!” he screamed impatiently and at the top of his awed lungs. “Drop what you’re doing, and get out here!”

Jan responded as promptly as possible; and, as she stepped into the cold yard, Tom commanded her to direct her eyes to the stars. Jan, tediously arching her back, tilting her head back, wary of her neck brace, became captivated immediately, lost in the unreal. The night’s clear sky was stuffing itself with a massive presentation of an aurora borealis unlike anything she or Tom had ever seen in their entire lives, and they had resided in Minnesota— from the womb.

The aurora borealis is a common sight in the northern parts of the country and customarily materializes without notice. She shines her majesty from the northern horizons of the northern continents of the world, as the winter sun beams through the great polar cap covering the North Pole. This throwing-off of energized particles into the magnetic field of the Earth is, in addition, referred to as the northern lights. The phenomenon’s customary behavior is limited to emitting a dramatic parade of shimmering, colored vertical bands of light into the northern skies, giving off the vibrant specter of a living hand-held fan miles high and wide and ascending into the very ionosphere. This night, however, this solitary and star-embellished night, the borealis was performing a celestial pageant not exhibited nor recorded since man began to write of history. —This, historically, was a first; let nobody tell you otherwise.

As if shot consecutively from a vast cosmic cannon, huge balls of light ascended with lightning speed from behind the tops of a wide range of trees nestled about a hundred yards north of Excelsior Boulevard, north of Tom’s house. From the back end of the driveway, the astonished trio stood watching the enormous balls of light shoot straight into the upper atmospheres—whether terrestrial, ionospheric, or celestial, bursting into bright cloudy images in spans of miles, directly over Tom’s house.

“Man!” Shanan cheered wildly. “A giant angel!”

“Yeah!” Tom exclaimed. “And look, there goes a horse,” and a blink behind the horse—a majestic chariot.

Each bright shot of light pursued its predecessor rapidly into the skies above, inflating into cloud-like blazing gazelles or fiery eagles or fiery stars. Shapes they were, every one a shape, each shape dissolving as abruptly as the next silent flare raced to take its place in the heavens, and each shape as different as two different snowflakes in two different snowfalls in two different worlds. Beautiful beyond compare: radiating, inflating fiery phantoms of the North—born in a moment, winged in the wink of an eye to another dominion, to be hung fleetingly but gracefully from the eternal vault of Paradise.

Three or four of the cloudscape projectiles actually shot as far as into the southern skies. The spectacle could have gone on forever or at least through the entire night. Tom, Jan, and Shanan, and Amy, stood fast, gaping at the hypnotic manifestation that was moving their inward emotions into an entire realm of new memories.

“They’re a sign!” Tom finally hushed in a noticeably uneasy exclamation. “A sign…!”

THAT EVENING

SHANAN PRAYED HIS LORD’S PRAYER, on his knees at the side of his bed, but this night, he added a somewhat exceptional afterthought. He begged tearfully for forgiveness for every sin he had ever executed during his entire life and told God, he held no grudges whatsoever against anyone who had ever wronged him; for, when he had returned to his bedroom, he recalled a verse he had turned back to during the evening’s reading and read it again before going to retrieve Amy, and read it a third time before praying his Lord’s Prayer, which prayer had already included forgiveness toward those who had ever wronged him.

MARK 11

25 And when ye stand praying,

forgive, if ye have ought against

any: that your Father also which

is in heaven may forgive you your

trespasses.

26 But if ye do not forgive, nei-

ther will your Father which is in

heaven forgive your trespasses.

Although Shanan was not fully positive of what he was doing, viewing these inspiring yet commanding words seemed nothing less than mandatory, and unequivocally essential to his salvation, whatever that was. He assumed if he did not completely forgive those who had sinned against him (encased forgivingly in his prayer), the Father would not be in a very giving mood, and the newborn in the Faith had a very serious favor to petition, as he meekly added this unselfish supplication to his prayer.

“Please, dear Lord and dear God, please show me the truth to your words, and your mysteries. Please show me your word, Lord Jesus. All the world should be able to hear all your truths. The people you created shouldn’t have to be conned by those men on radio and T.V., inventing religious stuff from their imagination, making up words and telling people you said them, when you didn’t. Not ’cause I’m so perfect, and not ’cause I’m looking for glory, God; it’s just I really want to understand your word. Thank you, dear Lord and dear God. Thank you. Amen and amen. And I love you.”

Satisfied with his heartfelt requests, and ending his prayer for saints and sinners, he climbed noiselessly into bed. Amy hopped in behind him and quietly laid her soft neck across his. Amy was his baby, and she truly loved him.

Motivated more and more at every thought of the evening’s fiery donation to the senses of witness, he reflected adoringly on the magnificence that had so impressively showered its glory: I saw it, he pondered. I saw it happen. God did it with his hands…. He did. Those lights had to come from him. They were too awesome a sight…. I wonder if anybody else saw this thing?

Now, as if those heavenly bursts were exploding within his mind, he was hit by this startling conclusion: He had walked his whole life in a virtual cloud of ignorance. A living cloud he knew he had to penetrate—to find the truth of where he was and the part he was supposed to be playing: God doesn’t put anything anywhere he doesn’t have a purpose for, including me, he reasoned. Moreover, if mysteries were lying between the pages of his Bible—to be unraveled—Shanan now contained a burning passion deep inside to learn their every secret. He was not going to argue the content; the only thing he felt was he needed to know the Bible. The voice inside told him a bounteous wealth was available to he who garnered, and he believed. He believed. This cloud, however, this cloud felt mortal. He had to shake this mortal cloud….

Call unto me, and I will answer thee,

and shew thee great and mighty things,

which thou knowest not

SUNDAY, MAY 24

PASTOR JERRY FALWELL had taken full command of the P.T.L., and the Assemblies of God congregations were praying nationally for the embarrassing Jim-Bakker problem to smooth and heal itself (Just disappear!). Shanan, in his own territory, was still a highly active, young-looking, young-thinking forty-four years old, and his main zeal in life was now his Holy Bible and unraveling its mysteries. At first sight, preachers’ and his were two contrasting worlds. At second sight, at least in those days of Shanan’s apprentice penitence, he still had two lingering, semiconscious dwells: “Oh, maybe a tad bit of gold mining on rare occasions. And, definitely—my Amy!”

Where there is no vision,

the people perish

FROSTY MINNESOTA WEATHER was warming the tips of her fingers each day a little closer to the sun, Tom’s loyal wife was far better now, her neck brace was gone, and Shanan was surely anxious to leave. He repacked his station wagon, and could not wait to get himself onto the endless road to resume his world of adventuring.

As Tom and Jan stood patiently by, Amy and Shanan stuck their head through the driver’s window. “I’m going south, Tom, and maybe I’ll head west from wherever and try to land a mining job. I’m just going to feel my way.” The excitement in Amy produced more teeth in her smile than she was born with; and she, now mid-seated, with whirling tail dusted the passenger-side window in a fervent testimony of approval.

Shanan thanked his hosts warmly for their generous hospitalities and backed onto Excelsior Boulevard, cautiously, very cautiously. “I love you both!” he exuberated as he shifted his car into forward.

I say unto you, that likewise

joy shall be in heaven

over one sinner that repenteth

†