Calloway had been Wade's man, and Calloway had not come home. There had been an ambush near Medina Ridge. Wade had pulled three of his boys out. He had gone back for the fourth, but by the time he got to Calloway, it was too late. He had held that boy's head in his lap while the medevac came.
Calloway had looked up at him and said, "Sergeant, tell my sister. Tell my sister I tried." Wade had promised. He had kept the promise. He had driven down to Cedar Rapids 3 weeks after they came home.
He had knocked on Mrs. Calloway's door. He had told the family. He had cried with Calloway's sister on the front porch. And then he had gone home to Iowa City. And he had tried to be a preacher again.
And he had failed. Because a man who has held a 22-year-old boy's head in his lap while he died can't stand in a pulpit and talk about a loving God. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever. That had been 1991.
That had been 28 years ago. And that young man in the wheelchair on the porch of Rosa's Roadside Diner had Danny Calloway's face. Wade rode at the back of the column on the way into Ashfield. He usually rode point, but that afternoon he needed to think, and a man thinks better at the back. They pulled into the Starlight Motel, 30 rooms, six of them booked for the Angels, the rest empty this time of year.
Doc Hollister walked up to him while he was parking. Doc was 64, wire thin, gray goatee. He had been a Navy Corpsman in the first Gulf War and an ER nurse for 20 years after that. He had patched Wade up more times than either of them could count. "Preacher," Doc said, "you all right?"
"I'm all right." "You don't look all right." Wade looked at him. "Doc." "Yeah."
"I saw a ghost in that diner." Doc didn't say anything. He just waited. There was a boy in a wheelchair on the back porch, Marine Corps jacket. He looked like Calloway.
Doc's face softened. "Preacher." "I know." "30 years." "I know, Doc.
I know what I know, and I know what I saw." Doc put a hand on Wade's shoulder, squeezed once. "You want me to find out who he is?" Wade thought about it. "No," he said, "I'll find out myself.
Tomorrow I'll go back to the diner." "We're riding out day after tomorrow." "I know." Doc studied him a moment. "You need anything, Preacher, you tell me."
"I will." Doc walked off. Wade stood there in the motel parking lot. The sun was going down behind the grain elevator across the highway. The sky was the color of rust.
He reached into the inside pocket of his cut, pulled out a small wooden cross. It fit in his palm. The wood was dark from 40 years of being held. Danny Caldwell, his son, 4 years old, had carved that cross with his granddaddy's pocket knife a week before he drowned. Wade had carried it every day since.
He looked at the cross. He closed his hand around it. He looked up at the rust-colored He said quietly, "If you're still there, if you're still listening to an old sinner, I saw something today. I don't know what it was, but if you put me here for a reason." He stopped.
He couldn't finish the prayer. He hadn't finished a prayer in 30 years. Back at the diner, the Angels were gone. Dylia was wiping down the counter. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking even now.
She kept seeing it, that big man taking off his cap, bowing his head. "My mama raised me to thank her for her work." Tucker had come back in. He had apologized. He had left $50 on the counter and had not met her eyes.
She had the 200 from Wade, the 50 from Tucker, and the 350 ticket from the coffee. $246.50. More than she usually made in tips for a whole week. Roz came out of the back. She poured herself a cup of coffee. She sat down on a stool and looked at Dylia.
"You all right, child?" "I don't know, Roz. My knees are still shaking." "Come sit." Dylia came around the counter and sat next to the old woman.
"Roz, who was he, the big one?" "Wade Caldwell." "You know him?" "I know of him. Everybody around here my age knows of him."
Dylia waited. Roz took a long sip of her coffee. "30 years ago, maybe a little more, Wade Caldwell was the pastor at First Baptist over in Iowa City. People said he was the best preacher west of the Mississippi. Voice like a cello, knew his scripture, knew his people.
Folks drove an hour on Sunday mornings just to hear him." "What happened?" Roz stared into her coffee. "He had a little boy, 4 years old, named Daniel, Danny. The kind of boy who made the whole church smile when he toddled down the aisle."
Dylia felt her stomach drop. "There was an accident. The details don't matter. Wade was there. Wade lived.
Danny didn't." Dylia closed her eyes. "Wade's wife, Mary, she tried to hold on, tried to help him, but Wade started drinking, stopped preaching. They divorced 2 years after Danny died. She died of cancer about 10 years after that.
Alone. And he joined He joined the Angels. Yes, a lot of folks thought he'd lost his mind. I never thought that. I think he lost his God, and you can't stand in a pulpit with nothing in your chest, child.
So he went looking, and he found men who were as broken as he was, and they were broken together." Dylia stared at the floor. "Roz, what he said to me today I heard. It didn't sound like a man who lost his God." Roz smiled a slow smile, the kind of smile that came from living a long time and watching a lot of things come back around.
"Child," she said, "God doesn't always leave. Sometimes we just stop listening, and sometimes on some cold October evening, somebody says something we didn't expect and we start listening again." She patted Dylia's hand. "You said something he needed to hear today. I don't know what it was, but I saw his face when you said it."
"I was scared to death, Roz." "I know you were." "I almost didn't say anything." "I know." The old woman squeezed her hand, "But you did.
And sometimes that's the whole difference in a life, child, one sentence said with your hand shaking." The sun was all the way down by the time Dylia left the diner. She had $246 in her pocket, more than she had dreamed of when she had woken up that morning. Enough for rent almost, enough for Ezra's pills for a month. She walked slow in the dark.