FRONT-PORCH GOSPEL: This life story begins in 1973 (kind of) part 57
“Did you ever tell Corrina Chase Freeman’s back story?” Cheyenne asked.
“We talked about it a little later,” I answered and went on to tell how Corrina brought it up again on one of the evenings when I stayed over after work, as I would do, and we walked down by the creek that ran below her new house.
“It’s a good hundred and fifty feet from the chimney in the back of the house to the hill,” I said, “and the backyard is full of pine trees, pine straw coverin’ much of the ground, and it’s like walkin’ through the woods once you get thirty feet from the house. It’s a good ways through the trees before you get to a hill that leads down to the creek. After a good rain, such as one we had a day or two before, the creek would rise fast, kind of like Mud Creek. We walked down there and stood near the edge of the water, talkin’ and watchin’ the fast stream fight the rocks and twigs as if they were in a great war. Lookin’ out over the creek after the rain must have reminded Corrina of the Mud Creek story.”
“Pup,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about how you almost drowned and how your cousin saved you.”
We found the creek to be a good place to explore some of our relationship’s deep, enigmatic parts – there were plenty of them and more to come, too – so I was glad she brought it up.
“When Corrina and I had explored life to our satisfaction, she would slip off her sandals, and I’d sit on the bank and take off my mud-stained work boots, and we’d wade in the cold water, which really was soothing to sore feet after the full day of abuse of pushing wheelbarrows and toting heavy scaffolding and walk boards. One day, I slipped on one of those moss-covered rocks that was out in the middle of the creek and just about broke my toe. I was glad I had Miss Belle’s hand, because she helped steady me. I played it off heroically, but it turned dark blue by the time I got home. At work the next day, if I weren’t thinking, I would start to limp a little, and Doocy, who never missed a whit, caught it right off.”
“What cha done gone and done to yore foot, Pup?” he said.
“Aw, jus’ stumped it on a rock down yonder at the creek last night, it’s nothin’.”
He just said “Hmm” and shook his head, and I could tell he had more to say but held off. First chance he got, he came back around to it and said, “Pups, yuh knows you can’t make no money down by thet creek yonder.” I pretended to ignore it and just kept working, so he said it again. Knowing he wouldn’t let up, I succumbed and told him he was right, which, in this case, he really was.
“Jus’ta carryin’ on with thet lil’ dark-haired lady and such like don’t puts no brick in the wall o’er yonder,” Doocy said, pointing toward the house. That happened to be one sentiment with which Red concurred, and he never failed to take every opportunity possible to preach a sermon on it, either.
“Pup, if you’n quit thankin’ about that girl you might get some work done out here on this job, don’t ya think?” he’d say.
I’d reply “Yes sir” and try to pick it up and not even look up. I’d sass Doocy sometimes, as you know, but there was no sassing Red. Red was different.
Broken toe or not, Corrina and I would get so lost in conversation on those evenings that we could look up and find that the sun was already bowing beneath the tall pines. On such evenings I was always amazed at how different the brick job looked at that time – “kind of like how different everythin’ looks now lookin’ back than how it did fifty years ago” I told Cheyenne.
The whole job site sat so still when the shadows fell over it. It would have looked almost peaceful if I could’ve wedged all the hoopla out of my mind. It was so quiet when Doocy and the boys and their unparalleled drama were long gone, having rolled down the hill headed for home in the beat-up old red truck hours before, and all the carpenters’ hammering and the ringing of their skill saws had been laid to rest for another day. But the peace of evening shadows would revert back to grim reality by seven a.m. the next morning; you can rest assured of that. That chaos was one constant you could count on in the summer of ’73. That, I guess, and that certain young lady who’d wade the creek with me as if we didn’t have a care in the world, which we didn’t in those moments.
In the quiet of such an evening, I went on to tell Corrina about Chase’s being a criminal, how it started when he was fourteen, and he couldn’t seem to find a stopping place, although, to my knowledge, he never hurt anybody.
“Right now,” I said, “he’s on the run, and I think he is hiding out somewhere in northern Alabama.
“But, you know Corrina,” I added, “the Lord specializes in breakin’ bad patterns, and He can perform miracles with the Chase’s of the world, jus’ like he can with us.
“Regardless of where Chase ends up, jus’ think that if he didn’t do another good thing the rest of his life, that what he did that day at Mud Creek was one of the best things he ever did, at least in my book.”
Corrina always smiled when I said something, then qualified it with “in my book.”
She stood soaking it in, and I noted that the evening breeze blowing through her hair made it shine with a slight red tint, a little red I think she got from her daddy. But she was gazing past me as I spoke as if she were trying to grasp something that was slipping through her fingers. It seemed she was always trying to make sense of things. We were the same in that way, but in other ways, we were different, too. At sixteen-and-a-half, I tended to take life in stride, was kind of “happy-go-lucky,” as she said one day. I figured every day was enough of a hill to climb and had enough challenges – many of them just a couple hundred feet up from the creek, and bigger ones just across the Georgia line – that I didn’t see the need to try to borrow trouble for the next day. As Grandma Belle always said, “There’s enough trouble for today; you don’t need to borrow any of tomorrow’s.”
The more natural way for the ‘other’ Miss Belle and me would have been for me to be the bigger worrier, with uncertainty hanging over our life like one of the dark clouds that would blow in on the job in a heartbeat and rest almost on the top of the house ready to burst. Perhaps the Lord gave me the mechanism I needed not to look too far ahead, just glance occasionally at the clouds gathering in the distance but still keep my eyes on the rough job at hand, and it was plenty rough. I think also I may have had the ability to hide things way back in the archives of the mind. Still do, I guess.
I told Cheyenne once, “I hope when the world reads our story, it will occur to them that we likely all keep things hidden away in the archives.”
Corrina sensed me looking at her, waiting for her response. She glanced at me but quickly looked back over the creek. A red bird came out of nowhere and flew across from one of the pine trees on the other side of the creek to the next, and her eyes followed it as if her thoughts went with it, too. After a minute, she seemed satisfied and turned back.
“Billy Ray, I really love your faith,” she said matter-of-factly. It was abrupt enough that it made me look down at the ground and blush a little, although you couldn’t have seen it for the sunburn. She turned back to study the red bird again, its little heartbeat throbbing as it perched courageously on a slick mossy rock in the middle of a white, twirling current.
“That’s one of the things I love most,” she continued. “I’ve never really seen anything like it. I’ve been sheltered so much in my life, and nothing has come along to shake the foundation, unlike yours. Then out of nowhere, I meet this Billy Ray, and I find somebody who looks back at being an inch from drowning when he was eight years old, and says, ‘I think the Lord put that person in my life right for that moment in time because He needed somebody who would dive in that water and risk his own life to save me,’ and then to conclude that Chase that was one of the Lord’s purposes for him. That’s a great faith,” she said, turning back toward me.
Then, smiling, she added, “in my book.”
Coach Steven Bowen, a long-time Red Oak teacher and coach, now enjoys his time as a writer and preacher of the gospel. And, after a ten-year hiatus, he’s also returned to work with students at Ferris High School as well.
In addition to his evangelistic travels, he works and writes for the Church of Christ of Red Oak at Uhl Road and Ovilla. Their worship times are 10 a.m. Sundays and 7:30 pm. Wednesdays. Email coachbowen1984@gmail.com or call or text (972) 824-5197.