Faith Hope & Fiction

An Essay by
April Pickle

              I didn’t want to go to Tyler, didn’t want to attend the memorial, didn’t want someone to be dead. But the reality was Brad and I knew Alex who, tragically and senselessly, had been killed. We wanted to honor this winsome, kind-hearted and fun person and to lend support to Brad’s family members who had been Alex’s close friends. And so, off we drove down Farm to Market Road No. 121 in Grayson County, Texas, on a Thursday afternoon in a freshly washed red Honda minivan.

              Queen Anne’s lace and tall purple thistles covered the roadside, more than usual due to the rain. Springtime in Texas is beautiful, but I stopped seeing the beauty when FM 121 turned to mud in a construction zone. So much for showing up to Alex’s memorial in a neat and clean vehicle.

              Back on the asphalt, we passed Cross Trail Cowboy Church and followed two-lane roads through one town after another.  At Bailey (population 254), I remembered the character Bailey Boy in Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The scene where Bailey was taken to the woods by Hiram and Bobby Lee and shot has always rattled me, but it’s fiction. A real killing is harder to get my head around. The police had yet to name a suspect in the murder of Alex—who truly had been a good man.

              With Flannery O’Connor on my mind, I remembered she had given a speech back in 1962 at East Texas State College—now Texas A&M Commerce. Commerce was on the way to Tyler, so with a half hour to spare, Brad and I stopped to have a look at the campus. Large oaks shaded the lawn in front of Ferguson Auditorium, a red-brick structure built in the 1920s. The building was open, so we explored, climbing the stairs to the second floor and through the doors that opened to the back of the auditorium.

              It had been remodeled in recent years, but I could imagine the 37-year-old author, who kept traveling and speaking even though she suffered from lupus, in that place. Less than two years away from her own death, Flannery would have climbed the stage steps with the help of her crutches. Her speech was entitled “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” There’s a version of her remarks in Mystery and Manners. “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted,” O’Connor said that day. A student named Ralph Wood heard her say it and, years later after he became a professor, he wrote a book about O’Connor. That quote inspired the title: Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.

              The memorial for Alex would start at seven. Brad and I had to move along. In Lone Oak, population 638, a girl stood in a front yard beside a table loaded with stuffed animals and model horses and waved a cardboard sign that read “Yard Sale for Kids.”

              Texas state highways and Farm to Market roads took us through Emory, Mineola, and Lindale, each town bringing us closer to our destination. In front of a little church that I didn’t catch the name of I read words from Luke 23:42: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

              In downtown Tyler, we parked a block away from the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception because the lot was full. The service had already started. Brad and I walked in quietly and sat in the back. I could see old people, young people, children, and babies. I could see brown people, black people, and white people. I could see women with lace head coverings, a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke, and an Arab man with his head covered by a keffiyeh. It seemed the whole world had gathered to remember Alex.

              A crucifix hung in the air behind the altar and in front of a large stained-glass window. To one side there was a painting of the Virgin Mary; on the other, a photograph of Alex rested on an easel next to an arrangement of flowers. A boy chanted the psalm in Latin. A priest read the Gospel in Spanish, then English. In the choir loft behind us a guitar strummed, and children sang, sometimes off key. In the pew in front of us sat a father and a mother, a little girl, and a frail old woman. The girl looked to be about five, with big eyes and black hair in a braid that stretched down her back. She knew every song, every prayer.

              When the family knelt on the kneeler, the girl grabbed the old woman’s hands and formed them into prayer hands. She pushed the old woman’s head down into a bow. The tiny woman did not resist, seemingly content to let the little child lead her.

              After the service, folks from the college where Alex worked and folks from the church mingled at a reception. Brad and I ate roasted chicken with Spanish rice and refried beans and shared a slice of chocolate cake. From across the hall, we saw the Jewish man and the Saudi man embrace each another. We watched the young priest walk over to the table where Alex’s mother was seated. He knelt, held her hands, and prayed.

              It was dark outside by the time Brad and I left the reception. Given the lateness of the hour, we couldn’t take the wandering roads that had brought us there. Instead, we took the freeways home, passing fast-food places and gigantic gas stations, but no cowboy churches or Bible verses. We considered listening to another O’Connor story on Audible, but we were too drained to engage with her characters. Instead, I pulled out my phone and searched the music app for something to distract us from the trauma that someone we knew had actually been murdered.

              I landed on John Denver’s “Country Roads.” And as our muddy red minivan rolled through the dark down Interstate 20 through a land that was “hardly Christ centered” but “most certainly Christ haunted,” we belted out the chorus, “Country roads, take me home …”

              When we arrived home, questions swirled in my mind like the wind in a springtime thunderstorm, and I had trouble falling asleep. Scenes from the evening flashed in my memory like bolts of lightning, and I managed to catch hold of one of them: the marquee sign that read “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” It reminded me of a song we sang in church when I was the age of the little girl in the cathedral.

              Opening my eyes, I sat up in bed, turned on the lamp, found a pen and journal on the nightstand, and wrote down the lyric: “Do Lord, oh do Lord, oh do you remember me?” Ten words. That’s all I wrote. One question. One prayer. For me, for us, for Alex.

              I fell asleep after that. And I didn’t wake up until morning.

April Pickle takes care of her family of six humans and two dogs in a house that sits beside a creek that runs into the East Fork Trinity River, north of McKinney, Texas. When she was six years old, April had an elderly woman name Maude as a pen pal, and she has been writing in one form or another ever since. She holds a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin.