He Works in Mysterious Ways

Vanessa Hemingway

From Story and Storytelling

Ever since Michael had started working as an aide at Redwood Psychiatric three months ago, he had wanted to lead these poor people together in prayer. The longer he worked there, the more important it became to him. And the farther he felt from his goal. Today, he was taking the residents to the mall. 

“The mall,” Michael said, loudly enough for Dan to hear. “Even a healthy, sane person would have trouble finding Him at the mall.” 

“Almost forgot it was the mall today,” Dan said, looking up from the newspaper to the wall clock. Dan was Redwood’s most senior mental health aide—twenty years of service. The first time they’d met, Michael mistook Dan for a resident. His grey-brown hair and his T-shirt hung long and loose despite the fact that one of the things they were always working on with residents was hygiene and grooming. “We better go before the natives start getting restless,” Dan said. 

These community outings happened only once a month. Dan would move through a list of four pre-approved destinations—the mall, the bowling alley, the covered bridge park, and the downtown branch of the public library—so that each fifth month they returned to the same place. Taking residents anywhere else in the county required a written request, and Michael, though he’d applied for a trip to the Light Universal Church the first week he’d started at Redwood and each week since, hadn’t yet heard back from the off-site program director. 

Michael sighed. The mall. There was nothing for it but to step outside and help load the van. 

The July day was already warm. Only a little after nine in the morning and no sign of Jon, but there were fifteen minutes—more—before the van would leave. Mary was there waiting, hugging her down jacket tightly against her chest while an aide tried to take it from her. Michael had to smile. Mary was dressed in several layers—at least two skirts and a pair of pants on her lower body, probably there was long underwear under that, and the usual several pairs of wool socks. Michael remembered overhearing an aide say once that Mary was actually quite thin. The belly everyone thought she had was newspaper she wadded up and packed around herself. 

“God has made such a warm day, Mary. Can’t you feel it?” Michael said. Whenever he looked into Mary’s eyes he saw indigenous Californians from the eighteenth century, a small brown people with pagan practices, open-hearted and untaught. Mary’s mouth was working, her tongue tracing her mud-colored lips. Michael felt how the missionaries must have felt when they brought the Word of God: exhilarated, purposeful. “You don’t need that jacket, Mary, not when God has set the sun to shining on you.” 

Michael nodded to the aide, who dropped the down sleeve and shrugging, walked away. She was just doing her job, but Michael wasn’t worried about making friends on the staff. It was the residents he concerned himself with. They were the ones needing to be led, shepherded. And no matter what Dan said about his lack of training and experience, Michael had a knack for it. God was on his side. Nothing else could explain the way Michael was a different man around them confident, effective, self-assured—a leader. 

Mary cleared her throat, her lips still working. She told Michael, “I need a suitcase with a lock on it. Just one. One suitcase with a lock and a key and then maybe.” Mary was an obsessive-compulsive hoarder. 

Michael patted her hand. “If you pray every day, God might just give you that suitcase.” 

“With a lock on it?” She asked him. 

While Mary was thinking on that, he slid the jacket from between her fingers and tucked it under his arm. Then he helped her take the first steep step into the van. Michael hadn’t been with Redwood Psychiatric long, but he couldn’t help feeling that if he ran the place he would do it differently and better. 

“Is it time yet?” Wayne asked Michael. Wayne was dressed for the outing in his best sports pants, matching sweatshirt, and Raider’s baseball cap. The laces of his new white sneakers were trailing in the dust. Michael told him soon, soon. “She ain’t going, is she?” Wayne nodded at Irene who was craning her neck back to look at something high up in the last standing old growth redwood tree, laughing hysterically at one of the conversations going on in her head. 

Michael followed Irene’s gaze but didn’t see anything. “Remember what I told you, Wayne.” 

Wayne, of course, did not remember what Michael had told him about loving his neighbor and turning the other cheek. Ever since his motorcycle had collided with a semi-tractor-trailer and smoothed some of the folds in his grey matter, Wayne had almost no short-term memory and a very scattered recollection of the events in his past. 

“She’s doing,” Wayne said, clenching his meaty hands into fists. “Irene’s doing again.” 

Michael took Wayne by the shoulders and gently turned his back to Irene, who was lifting her shirt to show the giant redwood her brassiere. “Mind your own self now,” Michael told Wayne, moving him steadily toward the door of the van, helping him inside. Wayne, with his soft body and goofy smile, was docile as a lamb most of the time. But before his accident he had been a rough man—gun-toting, hard-drinking, and hard-drugging. Dan had said something about how the brain injury probably made Wayne into a nicer guy to be around, except that he couldn’t remember anything and got angry sometimes. Not even Dan, a self-proclaimed atheist, had objected when Michael said out loud how He works in mysterious ways. 

Michael remembered being told that Wayne and Irene were boyfriend and girlfriend for a short period, right there at Redwood, which had shocked him. And that Dan thought it was a good thing. “Hey, if they can find a little love in their whacked-out worlds,” was what Dan had said. But Michael thought that was dangerous and might keep them from God’s love. 

And here came Scott, standing in the shadow of one of the thin, new growth redwoods planted when the old growth was cut to make deck planks. He was hunched over his guitar, his pockmarked hobgoblin face looking up from the strings now and then, leering and muttering what Michael had quickly discovered weren’t lyrics to songs but Scott expressing his consuming hatred of women and a lust for rape. He was also God’s son. 

Michael thought of all of them as his congregation, though of course he wasn’t even a minister yet. He’d come to his calling a little late—already twenty-six, with just two semesters of night school at Mount Holy Oak Christian College completed—he had only a vague idea of the work still ahead of him. But it seemed obvious to Michael. It wasn’t the mall that these people needed. Or the park or the library. Or even their medications. It was a belief in something larger and someone like Michael to believe in them. 

Michael could see Dan through the office window, patting the breast pocket of his T-shirt, reassuring himself of his cigarettes. Just yesterday Dan had told Michael the residents weren’t going to get any better. “This here, on their meds, in the routine, is better,” he’d said. “It’s their best.” Then he’d gone to the resident porch to smoke. With his feet up and his hair down, he’d read to them from the sports pages as if that was what really mattered. Was Michael the only one who could see that all these years of service without any faith of his own had worn Dan down? 

Dan let the office door slam behind him. “Load ’em up,” he said. 

There was still no sign of Jon, but Michael wasn’t worried. Jon had given Michael his word. This fellow Jon was Michael’s favorite, though of course Michael didn’t play favorites. But if he had a right-hand man—the way Jesus had Peter—Jon would have been his. He was very intelligent, a big bear of a fellow, with a slow, thoughtful, monotone voice. He’d been the chief technical officer of a computer company in Silicon Valley before he’d come to Redwood. As far as Michael could tell Jon’s real problem wasn’t schizophrenia—that was just a doctor’s diagnosis. Jon was shy, and it made him awkward, reclusive, and, therefore, very lonely. 

Several weeks ago, Jon had confided in Michael. He was being overmedicated and he’d like to take less. Jon and Michael had been praying together in the mornings. “Prayer is strong medicine,” Michael had told him. “Probably you do need less of those drugs now that you’re praying.” Of course saying so could cost him his job, but Michael couldn’t help thinking, “Maybe you don’t need those drugs at all, Jon.” 

When Jon shuffled over from the men’s dormitory, kicking the dust up around him, his chin glued to his chest, Dan looked pretty surprised to see him. “You’re coming?” Dan asked Jon. 

“That okay?” Jon mumbled. 

“You signed up?” Dan asked him doubtfully. 

Jon nodded yes, he’d signed up. 

“Well, okay then.” 

Someone in the office said, “Jon’s going?” 

Michael didn’t say anything, but secretly, he felt proud. It hadn’t been easy to persuade Jon to go. According to his file Jon hadn’t left Redwood Psychiatric since he’d been placed there over a year ago. Fear and doubt kept him there. Michael knew because he and Jon were a lot alike. Both shy, both socially awkward. And when Jon was a boy, he’d wanted to be a priest. Jon had told Michael that before he got sick—before the voices started telling him to hurt himself and others—he’d had conversations with God. The bad voices had gone with the medication but so had the conversations with God. 

They stopped the van at The Nine for coffee. Dan called it easing into the socialization process, the residents getting out into the community. 

It was a rural outpost on the winding Highway Nine into Santa Cruz, someone’s old converted shack along the side of the road. The large green sign bolted upright on the roof, fashioned after a highway billboard, had a white number nine that glowed in the dark. Michael opened the door, and they shuffled in behind Dan: Jon, Irene, Wayne, Mary, and finally, Scott, trailing his guitar behind him in the gravel and dust. One by one they ordered coffee, taking the paper cup along with fistfuls of small white sugar packets each to his own table, one of seven or eight small round tables scattered throughout the room. 

Dan brought his coffee over to sit with Wayne, pulling his chair into the aisle a little—probably so he could reach Scott if he needed to—and started working on his sugar packets, tearing them open two at a time, smiling as Wayne tried to do the same thing and spilled the sugar onto his pants and the floor, cursing loudly. Michael saw it coming too late— Wayne standing up, nicking his cup with an elbow so the coffee spilled onto the table and then to the floor. Characteristically, Wayne started knocking on his head with his fist, softly at first, like he knew the guy behind the door was home even if he wasn’t answering. 

“It’s fine with me if they come in here,” the man, who was thin and grey and wore a white apron with a green nine on it, said. “I bet you can’t take them just anywhere. One look and you know they’re not normal, but I’ll tell you, looks aren’t everything. I had two guys in here a month back, good looking fellas, young, groomed, didn’t look like they were wanting for anything, that held me up at gunpoint. I gave them everything in the register and that wasn’t enough. One cracked me here at the back of my head, and they left me lying unconscious. Didn’t know, didn’t care whether I was alive or dead.” He rubbed his neck where the apron hung like it was still sore. 

Out of the corner of his eye Michael could see Mary taking items from the coffee island—sugar packets, thimble-sized creamers, striped stir sticks—and putting them in the small sack Michael had given her for her bible, and he suddenly felt filled with love. Mary might be a hoarder, she might have a confused sense of what she needed to survive, but she was one of God’s gentle lambs. “You’re a good man,” Michael told the aproned man. “They can sense it, so they’re comfortable here.” 

The man behind the counter smiled when he heard that. “They can feel that?” 

“In England they didn’t used to call them crazy,” Michael said. “They called them innocents. Touched by God. Like children.” 

“Well, those fellas in here last month weren’t innocent. I’ll tell you that much,” the man said. “So I got me one of these.” He pulled open the drawer at his waist and lifted the handgun enough into the air so Michael could see it. “Smith &. Wesson. It’s new, but they’ve made it to look like the kind Jesse James had in those old-time shoot outs. God’s will, I’ll never have to use it,” he said. “My wife won’t touch it. She says, you have one of those and you get around to using it. Or your child does, or your grandchild. I told her it’s the opposite. You get yourself one and you never have to use it.” The man leaned over toward Michael and said in a low voice, “That one’s watching me pretty close. He like guns?” 

“Jon?” Michael said. “No, no, he’s alright. The best of the bunch.” 

But Michael was still thinking about what he’d said to the man behind the counter—about how the residents were innocents. Like Adam and Eve before sin. In his mind’s eye he could see each of them, naked and in the Garden. The first church, the place where God first spoke to man, wasn’t a church at all. And so it followed, Michael thought to himself, that where he needed to take them wasn’t church. It was a garden. A wild place—a forest with trees and grass and maybe a stream. A place so filled with God’s presence they couldn’t help but hear Him, and hear Him through Michael, who would take them there. 

It seemed so simple and so imminently possible. Michael wondered how he hadn’t thought of it before. 

"We better go,” Michael said. 

Scott was muttering as he picked at his guitar, the stream of four- letter expletives a low and steady flow. Irene wanted another coffee, and Dan told her she’d have to use her own money—Redwood paid for only one coffee. She didn’t have any more money. 

Jon spoke up in his deep monotone, "Why don’t you just buy her another one? You have the money. I saw it.” 

Dan told him it was for other things, things they’d need at the mall. Scott lit up a cigarette, and the man behind the counter with the gun in his drawer told him he couldn’t do that here. Finally, Dan said, “Let’s go.” 

"Yes,” Michael said, "let’s go.” 

They piled into the van again, waited while first Irene and then Jon went back in to use the bathroom, and then, after what seemed to Michael like an interminable amount of time, drove out of the cafe lot and into the hot morning. 

"It’s too glorious a day to spend indoors,” Michael said, a little surprised by the authority in his voice. "Today’s a day to be outside. On a bank by the side of a small creek. Did you know it was right around here when I was a lot younger that I had my first talk with God? Yes,” Michael said, remembering it as if it had really happened. "The water had pulled away and left just enough white sand beach and some large smooth rocks. The green bushes and scotch broom that grew around the spot were there to protect it. When I sat on that white sand I was alone to all eyes and ears. It was a peaceful place,” Michael told them. “Maybe the only truly peaceful place outside of church I’ve ever been. It’s not so far from here.” 

It was Scott who said, “Let’s go there. Can we go there, Dan?” 

Dan kept his eye on the road. “No,” he said. 

“It’s not so out of the way. Back a few miles. We could probably still get to the mall after,” Michael said. 

Jon, his low steady voice a little higher, a little faster than it normally was, said, “Let’s go to the peaceful place.” 

Then Irene started in, and Mary, too, until everyone in the van was speaking, and Michael thought again of his congregation. Dan pulled the van to the side of the road, the old brakes screeching, punctuating the stop. 

“Everyone has to settle down or we’re going straight back to Redwood,” Dan said. “Now.” 

“It would just be a stop,” Michael said. “Along the way.” 

“You said yourself it’s in the other direction,” Dan said. “We’re signed out to the mall, and we’re going to the mall. If everyone settles down.” 

Then Scott said he’d like to go to the peaceful place and he didn’t care about the mall. Jon started to insist that Dan take them, in a voice Michael wouldn’t have recognized as his except he saw it coming from Jon’s lips. It was gravelly, and he kept swallowing so the words sounded like they were being gargled. 

Dan interrupted him. “Some of us have lists of things to get. This is a shopping trip. I need a couple of things myself. The mall’s where we’re signed out to go, and that is the end of it.” 

But it was Wayne, who stuttered whenever he said anything with feeling, who after a few tries—starting and stopping like an engine that wouldn’t turn over—finally spit out he’d like to take Irene to meet God. Dan turned around in his seat to get a look at him. Wayne had Irene’s hand in his, his arm twisted awkwardly to reach hers in the backseat. 

“How far is it?” Dan asked, and Michael knew that he had won. 

“Fifteen minutes down the dirt road. Maybe twenty. Not far.” Michael didn’t feel bad for his lie. Nature was the easiest place for the lost to become found. So many country roads had a creek running alongside—why not the one they’d passed a few road signs back? And if there was no creek, there’d be redwoods and pines and great old oak trees and grass and quiet. Whatever was there, his first true sermon with his first real congregation wasn’t going to be at the mall. 

“Okay,” Dan said. “But listen really well. This is the one and only time. From here on out whenever there’s an outing we go where the clipboard says, no matter what about God or anything else.” 

Everyone except Mary clapped hands. 

“It’s the dirt road we passed a half-a-mile back,” Michael told him, and Dan groaned about the u-turn and having to go back down the same road, how he’d catch hell from the director for this and Michael didn’t have to worry because Dan was the one who was supposed to know better. Michael started talking about the place. “It’s going to feel so good to get into that cool water.” 

“I can’t swim,” Scott said. 

“Just put your toes in,” Michael said. “Start with your toes.” 

They turned onto the country road, and it began to descend steeply. The van’s gears ground a little when Dan switched it into low, and the wheels spun in the gravel that thinned to dirt within a mile or so. It started to look like no one had driven down this road in a very long time. There were tight corners, the kind that if they had met another car going the other way one vehicle would have had to back up blind for half a mile or more to find a pull-out for the other to pass. 

“I think it’s the next bend,” Michael said, trusting that God would make it so. 

And there it was—just the way Michael had told it to them though possibly with less white beach and more rock, less bush and less shade. 

Dan pulled the van onto the bit of soft shoulder and wondered aloud how he’d turn around when the time came, but after a long, drawn-out sigh he said, “Okay. Everybody out.” 

And for a moment Michael thought it was going to be like he’d envisioned—all of them sitting around while he talked about God’s love and how they were all God’s children. Not forsaken. Not less for being flawed. Until Dan realized the shoulder wasn’t soft—the van had a flat. Hadn’t it been weaving and fishtailing, bucking the road more than it should? Wayne used to work on engines, and he got excited by the idea of helping Dan. Righty tighty, lefty loosey, he muttered over and over happily—he still remembered a few things from his days under the hoods of cars. 

“Watch them, will you?” Dan said to Michael as he slid himself beneath the truck to get the spare from where it was bolted to the chassis, while Wayne stomped on the foot jack, leveraging the van up in small jerks. 

Irene wondered aloud if anyone had brought potato chips, while Scott, who was sitting near her, fingering chords to his expletives, looked at her and leered. Mary was busy filling her pockets with small stones and sand. Even Jon seemed to have forgotten why they came. He looked hot and irritated, swatting his large hands at small flies Michael couldn’t see. 

“Come on,” Michael said. “Follow me. Each one of you.” He beckoned with his arms. “Come to the river with me.” 

He wasn’t really thinking to baptize them, but when he got to the water’s edge and it was only Jon who had followed, Michael cupped his hands and allowed them to fill. “You are a son of God, Jon,” he said, pouring the cool water over Jon’s bent head. It felt wonderful to Michael—the simple sacrament spilling from his very own hands. The sun shining down on them came direct from God. The water around Michael was glowing with it, and for a moment he closed his eyes and thought, I am indeed a chosen one. 

When he opened his eyes, it was to see Jon holding the polished gray Smith & Wesson look-alike pointed right at Michael’s chest. 

“What are you doing, Jon,” he said softly, ignoring the funny tickling sensation like ants crawling along his spine. 

“I’m hearing a lot of voices right now,” Jon said, his voice tight and in the upper part of his range. 

“What are they saying?” Michael kept his tone steady and even as he could. 

“Pull the trigger.” 

“I don’t think that’s God talking, Jon,” Michael said. “Give me the gun now, Jon, and we’ll sort out who’s saying what. Just give me the gun, Jon.” Oh God, thought Michael. I have not been chosen for this. 

Not this, Lord. “For Christ’s sake, Jon, give me the goddamn gun.” Michael was surprised to hear his father’s voice coming out of his own mouth—hard and clear and stripped of any trace of human goodness. 

And Jon did. He handed Michael the gun. The metal felt hard and smooth, and the handle was hot where Jon had been holding it. 

“Jon,” Michael said. “Jon.” Michael felt flooded with so much love—love of Jon and of God and of life. Oh, of life, precious life. “We can pray now, Jon. Let’s pray.” Michael held the gun in one hand and he reached for John’s hand with the other. 

“I hear voices,” Jon said. 

“Is it God, Jon?” Michael asked him. 

“I think it’s Dan,” Jon said. 

Michael could hear the voices now, too. Dan yelling. And the others— Scott’s nervous, high-pitched hyena’s cry, Wayne’s bellow. Irene? Mary? 

Michael started to walk in the direction of the van, and then to run. The river was only a few yards away, but the scotch broom was thick and pulled and scratched at him as he pushed blindly through to get to the van. 

Michael saw Irene first, her shirt lifted to just below her chin, exposing her brassiere to Scott, while he howled and strummed. Red-faced, Wayne stood stock still, sputtering, ready to pulverize one or the other of them if only he could decide who first. Just a few feet away Mary sat ripping the pages from Michael’s bible, stuffing her sleeves with Psalms. And Dan? Where was Dan? 

The metal foot jack lay in the dirt beside the van. It was Dan’s barrel chest supporting the chassis now, the vehicle oddly slumped, one chrome bumper sunk into Dan’s legs as if they were all flesh, no bone. There was no breeze, just harsh sun. Hot. Michael could feel the sweat on his back, the tickling sensation—the ants, still crawling. 

“Dan?” Michael said. “Dan?” 

But of course Dan couldn’t hear him. Sweat poured off Michael now, the ants moving, covering his whole body, a host, a multitude effusing outward from within him. 

“Dan?” 

Dan would have taken them to the mall today. Next month the covered bridge park. Then the library. Michael tried to remember. There was somewhere else. Not church, not the Garden, not to meet God. It was the bowling alley, the Ten Pin. 

“Watch them, will you?” Michael heard Dan’s voice clearly. 

Michael had them all within his sights now. Even when his eyes closed, he couldn’t help but see them: Scott, Irene, Wayne, Mary, Jon. And Dan. 

“Should we pray, Mike?” Jon asked. His hair was still damp with the river water. 

Michael’s chin dropped to his chest. The weight of his own head—he’d never known to mind it before—was suddenly too much to carry. 

Jon, mistaking the gesture, began to pray. 

Michael still held the gun in his hand, and it occurred to him to take his own life. Instead, he dropped to his knees and listened while Jon led them in prayer. 

Image © Europeana

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Vanessa Hemingway is the youngest grandchild of Ernest Hemingway. She holds a bachelor’s degree in literature and a master’s in occupational therapy. She lives with her family in Santa Cruz, California. Her short stories can be found in Minnetonka Review and Zone Three.