I, Saul (14 page)

Luke sat back and rubbed his eyes, imagining what was to come in the manuscripts. He had so many questions for Paul, but he was also exhausted and knew he had to rest before a busy morrow. As he lay on his pallet he imagined the young boy and his father on the adventure of a lifetime, and while at first the visions kept him awake, soon he was drifting, his mind carrying him across the rugged terrain that led from Tarsus all the way to Jerusalem.

As Augie drove his mother home from Arlington Memorial, all he could think of was Roger, desperate for his help. He had to force himself to concentrate on his mother's question.

“Have you ever regretted not taking Sofia's father up on his offer?”

He shook his head. “I started imagining what I could do with all that money, living in a beautiful city, giving Sofia the kind of life she grew up with, still leading tours, plus evaluating antiquities, using all my training. But nothing could compare with multiplying myself every year by dozens of students serving churches all over the world. I tried to explain it. Malfees claims to be a fellow believer. I thought he would get it, but he was not happy.”

Augie's cell chirped. A text from Roger. “I need to check this out, Mom. Sorry.” He pulled off at the next exit and parked on the shoulder.

“hope Sat soon enuf. have 9mm S&W 4 u. Time 2 get familiar w/1 b4 dep?”

Augie texted back: “Smith & Wesson? Haven't shot in 20 years. Why do I need a gun? And why're you up? 3 a.m. there. Call me.”

“no more calls. b sure 9 is a parabellum. text when u get here.”

Augie pulled back onto the expressway. “What is it?” his mother said.

“Roger's in trouble. I've got to get to Rome by Saturday and I have no idea how I'm going to do it.”

“If it's that dire, you'll get there, that's all.”

“It's going to take a lot of money I don't have.”

As he walked his mother into her house, he suggested they talk about it in the morning when he came to pick her up.

“Nothing doing, August. You're going to tell me what's going on with Roger or I won't sleep.”

“You look asleep on your feet now.”

She waved him off and disappeared, emerging a few minutes later in robe and slippers and carrying a large wooden box. Augie leaped off the couch to help her, amazed at how heavy it was as he set it on the coffee table. “What's this?”

“All in good time,” she said, sitting next to him. “Now out with it.”

Augie told her he didn't know much beyond the cryptic texts and one urgent phone conversation. He did not tell her about Roger's mention of the gun.

“Whatever could be wrong?” she said.

“No idea, but if he needs me, I have to get there. I've got to sneak in a trip to the bank tomorrow, I guess.” “I have money.”

“You do not.”

“I do, August. For such a time as this. Your dad put me in charge of the checkbook, and I have saved a little from every bit of income he's had for more than forty years.”

“Does he know this?”

“He never asked. Thank the Lord, we've never needed to touch it. It's in one of those interest-bearing accounts connected to a credit card I have never used.” She leaned over and rapped on the box. “It's right in here.”

“How much are we talking about, Mom?”

“Just a tick under forty thousand dollars.”

Augie sat speechless as she beamed.

“And you'd lend me—.”

“Nonsense! You will take the credit card and use what you need.” “Mom, I couldn't—.”

“Don't you dare deny me the freedom to do what I want with my money.”

Augie was reminded of his own conversation with Rajiv that afternoon. What's fair was fair.

“You're a lifesaver, Mom.”

“You're my life, August. Now I'm going to entrust this box to you. Guard it with your life. It's full of my klediments.”

“Your what?”

“June Carter Cash said klediments were anything you hold near and dear to your heart. Your father has never seen most of these, August. I need to warn you, though. Things in there will shock you, some will break your heart. But do me a favor, get to this before you leave.”

“Mom, there's so much I have to do before I go, but if it's that important to you ….”

“It is.”

Curious as Augie was, he was also exhausted, pulling into his tiny bungalow just before 10:00 p.m. He opened his mother's box of treasures and, after digging through a three-inch layer of keepsakes and bank statements that would have discouraged his father from pawing any deeper, found the credit card, still gum-stuck to the letter it had come with. Online, he booked the Friday flight that would get him into Rome the following morning, still unable to find a seat other than in first class.

He Googled pistol ranges and found the Wildfire Gun Shop about ten miles south of the seminary. He added “firearm training” to the end of his to-do list for the next day, then opened his mother's klediments. Deep in the bottom of the box lay a thick, oversized manila envelope secured with twine and also heavily taped shut.

He sliced it open on his kitchen table and tipped out a couple of inches worth of smaller envelopes and documents. Augie was surprised to see more than a dozen business-sized envelopes from both Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Dallas Theological Seminary. He finally found the one his mother had mentioned. It contained an evaluation of his father's teaching by an anonymous auditing student who had been surreptitiously sponsored by Dallas.

The form called for the evaluator to rate the professor 1 through 10 in the following areas:

Knowledge of subject

Ability to explain information

Delivery

Engaging of students

Finally came an assessment of the suitability for the candidate to teach at Dallas.

The evaluator had awarded Augie's father 10s in each of the first two categories, notes stating that “It's clear Dr. Knox possesses as exhaustive
a mastery of his subject as a lifetime student of the Bible could. And he articulates this precisely and completely so that any student listening and taking notes could learn it thoroughly.”

For the second two categories, however, notes next to the zeros included, “Dr. Knox's recitation of facts is so monotonous that it's amazing even
he
can stay awake through it. No inflection, no passion, nary an indication that the material even interests him.”

No surprise, the essay on the candidate's suitability to teach at Dallas was brief: “I'd rather be tortured than be forced to sit one more minute in a class taught by Dr. Edsel Knox.”

Augie was stunned that someone at Dallas thought it necessary to include such a biting review. This must have come after years of having turned down his father's applications.

Augie sat with his head in his hands, hurting for his father, despite the rigid lack of emotion the man had shown his whole life. What made him so grim and yet so deluded that he apparently did not see himself that way?

As he began to put things back into the box, Augie noticed an envelope from a urologist's office postmarked forty years before.

Augie was suddenly overwhelmed with anger. How dare his father insinuate to him—and to many others over the years—that adoption proved
their only option because his mother was too fragile to bear children?

It was one thing for a man to be negative and nasty, but what could make him so small and insecure that he would blame his own infertility on his wife?

Augie dug to the bottom of the stack he had slid from the envelope, only to find a manila folder on which his mother had written “Private and Confidential.”

Augie tore it open and out fell a pile of yellowing newspaper articles more than sixty years old. A handwritten note had been penned in shaky script and signed by his late Great-Aunt Gladys: “Marie, Ed must never know I sent these. Please.”

The headlines, the pictures, the captions assaulted Augie, making him hold his breath, his heart jackhammering. He quickly stepped back from the table, as if to separate himself from the poison of this history. Here was something he wished he had not opened, not seen, not been exposed to.

This was a game changer that would affect everything he thought he knew about his father.

All Augie Knox knew about his extended family was that his mother had a brother and a sister, both married, both with families, and so he had the normal complement of aunts, uncles, and cousins on her side.

Dr. Edsel Knox had spoken only occasionally about the fact that his father had been an itinerant evangelist and then a pastor in Florida before dying when Edsel was not yet two years old. “Needless to say,” he had told Augie once, “I remember nothing of him and know only what my mother told me. My mother's sister Gladys said he was quiet and humble.”

Augie could not forget his father's faraway look and the slight shake
of his head when as a youngster he had said, “So Grandma never got married again? You didn't get another dad?”

Augie was puzzled by his father's silence and his mother's quick change of the subject. Augie's grandmother died before he was ten, and his memories of her two visits and their one visit to her home in Florida were fading. One thing was clear, however. Whenever they were in her presence, the only person who smiled was Augie's own mother— who seemed to scurry about trying to keep everything civil. His father and his grandmother barely spoke and rarely looked at each other, and strangely, she seemed to take little interest in Augie either. At her funeral, his father neither wept nor spoke.

The few times Great-Aunt Gladys had visited, she doted on Augie, seemed to get along famously with his mother, and was cordial with his dad. Augie had a vague recollection of a tense conversation in which Aunt Gladys suggested that his father could be more attentive to her sister, Dr. Knox's own mother. “She lives with regret every day of her life,” his great-aunt had said.

Over the years, Augie began to see his dad as almost an orphan. Aunt Gladys passed when Augie was a young teenager, and it seemed his father now had no connection to any family but his own wife and adopted son.

Now Augie knew why. Though his father was not named in any of the newspaper articles, it was clear he was the child in question—protected by a quaint journalistic convention that would not be practiced today. “The lad, 9,” one article intoned, “has been awarded to the custody of his aunt, the court determining his mother failed to protect her own son, despite obvious wounds and scars.” Edsel's mother had been sentenced to a year in prison, five years' probation, permanent loss of custody, and limited visitation rights.