show for thirty years service in your ministry. Lord, I need them for my record, and I expect You know it.
Sit them down this time. Maybe that would help. Mr. Manly turned from the window and told them to take chairs. “Over there,” he said. “Bring them up close to the desk.”
They hesitated, looking around. It seemed to take them forever to carry the chairs over, their leg chains clinking on the wooden floor. He waited until they were settled, both of them looking past him, seeing what there was to see at this lower angle than yesterday.
“I’m going to tell you something. I know you both had humble beginnings. You were poor, you’ve been hungry, you’ve experienced all kinds of hardships and you’ve spent time in jail. Well, I never been to jail before I got sent here by the Bureau”—Mr. Manly paused as he grinned; neither of them noticing it—“I’ll tell you though, I’ll bet you I didn’t begin any better off than you boys did. I was born in Clayburn County, Tennessee—either of you been there?”
Raymond shook his head. Harold said nothing.
“Well, it’s in the mountains. I didn’t visit Knoxville till I was fifteen years old, and it wasn’t forty miles from home. I could’ve stayed there and farmed, or I could have run off and got into trouble. But you know what I did? I joined the Holy Word Pentacostal Youth Crusade and pledged myself to the service of the Lord Jesus. I preached over twenty years in Tennessee and Kentucky before coming out here to devote the rest of my life to mission work—the rest of it, five years, ten years. You know when your time is up and the Lord’s going to call you?”
Harold Jackson’s eyes were closed.
“Harold”—the eyes came open—“you don’t know when you’re going to die, do you?”
“No-suh, captain.”
“Are you ready to die?”
“No-suh, captain. I don’t think I ever be ready.”
“St. Paul was ready.”
“Yes-suh.”
“Not at first he wasn’t. Not until the Lord knocked him smack off his horse with a bolt of lightning and said, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecuteth me?’ Paul was a Jew-boy at that time and he was persecuting the Christians. Did you know that, Raymond?”
“No, I never knew that.”
“Yes, sir, before he became Paul he was a Jew-boy name of Saul, used to put Christians to death, kill them in terrible ways. But once he become a Christian himself he made up for all the bad things he’d done by his own suffering. Raymond, you ever been stoned?”
“Like with rocks?”
“Hit with big rocks.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Harold, you ever been shipwrecked?”
“I don’t recall, captain.”
Mr. Manly opened his Bible. “You boys think you’ve experienced hardships, listen, I’m going to read you something. From two Corinthians. ‘Brethren, gladly you put up with fools, because you are wise…’ Let me skip down. ‘But whereas any man is bold…Are they ministers of Christ?’ Here it is ‘…in many more labors, in lashes above measure, often exposed to death. From the Jews’—listen to this—‘five times I received forty lashes less one. Thrice I was scourged, once I was stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I was adrift on the sea; on journeyings often, in perils from floods, in perils from robbers, in perils from my own nation…in labor and hardships, in many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.’ ”
Mr. Manly looked up. “Here’s the thing, boys. St. Paul asked God three times to let him up from all these hardships. And you know what God said to him?” Mr. Manly’s gaze dropped to the book. “He said, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee, for strength is made perfect in weakness.’ ”
Now Mr. Manly sat back, just barely smiling, looking expectantly from Raymond to Harold, waiting for one of them to speak. Either one, he didn’t care.
He didn’t even care what they said, as long as one of them spoke.
Raymond was looking down at his hands, fooling with one of his fingernails. Harold was looking down too, his head bent low, and his eyes could have been open or closed.
“Strength—did you hear that, boys?—is made perfect in weakness.”
He waited.
He could ask them what it meant.
He began thinking about the words. If you’re weak the Lord helps you. Or strength stands out more in a weak person. Like it’s more perfect, more complete, when a weak person gets strong.
No, that wasn’t what it meant.
It meant no matter how weak you were you could get strong if you wanted.
Maybe. Or else it was the part just before which was the important part. God saying My grace is sufficient for thee. That’s right, no matter what the temptaion was.
Norma Davis could come in here and show herself and do all kinds of terrible things—God’s grace would be sufficient. That was good to know.
It wasn’t helping those two boys any, though. He had to watch that, thinking of himself more than them. They were the ones had to be saved. They had wandered from the truth and it was up to him to bring them back. For…‘whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his ways will save his own soul from death’—James, five- something—‘and it will cover a multitude of sins.’ ”
That was the whole thing. If he could save these two boys he’d have nothing to worry about the rest of his life. He could maybe even slip once in a while—give in to temptation—without fear of his soul getting sent to hell. He wouldn’t give in on purpose. You couldn’t do that. But if somebody dragged you in and you went in scrapping, that was different.
“Boys,” Mr. Manly said, “whoever brings back a sinner saves his own soul from death and it will cover a multitude of sins. Now do you want your souls to be saved, or don’t you?”
Mr. Manly spent two days reading and studying before he called Raymond and Harold into the office again.
While they were standing by the desk he asked them how they were getting along. Neither of them wanted to answer that. He asked if there had been any trouble between them since the last time they were here. They both said no, sir. He asked if there had been any mean words between them. They said no, sir. Then it looked like they were getting somewhere, Mr. Manly said, and told them to bring the chairs over and sit down.
“ ‘We know,’ ” he said to Raymond, “ ‘that we have passed from death unto life because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brethren abideth in death.’ ” Mr. Manly looked at Harold Jackson. “ ‘Whoever hateth his brother is a murderer, and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.’ James, chapter three, the fourteenth and fifteenth verses.”
They were looking at him. That was good. They weren’t squinting or frowning, as if they were trying to figure out the words, or nodding agreement; but by golly they were looking at him and not out the window.
“Brethren means brother,” he said. “You know that. It doesn’t mean just your real brother, if you happen to have any brothers. It means everybody’s your brethren. You two are brethren and I’m your brethren, everybody here at Yuma and everybody in the whole world, we are all brethren of Jesus Christ and sons of Almighty God. Even women. What I’m talking about, even women are your brethren, but we don’t have to get into that. I’m saying we are all related by blood and I’ll tell you why. You listening?”
Raymond’s gaze came away from the window, his eyes opening wide with interest.
Harold said, “Yes-suh, captain.”
“We are all related,” Mr. Manly said, watching them, “because we all come from the first two people in the world, old Adam and Eve, who started the human race. They had children and their children had children and the children’s children had some more, and it kept going that way until the whole world become populated.”
Harold Jackson said, “Who did the children marry?”
“They married each other.”
“I mean children in the same family.”
Mr. Manly nodded. “Each other. They married among theirselves.”
“You mean a boy did it with his sister?”
