The Tapes
Ormond Beach, Florida
Stories from the Pews is a collection of fictional short stories exploring the raw, honest reality of pastoral ministry and church life in America: the beauty and the brokenness, the faithfulness and the failure. These aren’t case studies or disguised sermons; they’re unflinching narratives about pastors who stay and pastors who leave, churches that thrive and churches that close, members who heal and members who wound. Some stories will encourage you. Others will upset you. All of them are designed to help you see the Church more clearly: not as an institution to manage, but as Christ’s beloved Bride stumbling toward Jesus together. Each story stands alone and reflects the messy truth that the Church is simultaneously glorious and broken; just like the congregations in Scripture. - Read the full introduction and disclaimer here
The pill cup rattled when Nurse Brenda set it on the rolling table. Two pink ones, a yellow one, and that big white horse pill that always caught in his throat. Reverend Doctor Calvin Wells, ninety-three years old, watched her with the dim patience of a man who had outlived most of his opinions about other people’s interruptions.
“You want apple juice or water today, Reverend?”
“Apple juice, please, ma’am.”
She poured it into the plastic tumbler with the bendy straw and waited while he worked through the pills one at a time. He had been a swallower of words for sixty-one years of preaching. The pills were harder than the words had ever been.
“Your son call yet?”
“Not yet.”
“He will. Daniel’s good about Sundays.”
“Today’s Tuesday, Brenda.”
She laughed, that warm tired laugh of women who worked second shift at Magnolia Gardens Assisted Living in Ormond Beach, Florida. “So it is. So it is. Well, you press that button if you need anything. You hear?”
When she was gone he listened to her sneakers squeak down the hallway and fade into the hum of the air handler. The window faced east toward a parking lot and a strip of palm trees and, beyond them, the gray edge of a sky that might be ocean or might be more sky. His eyes weren’t what they had been. The cataracts had been done twice and now there was something else. Macular something. He had stopped trying to remember the words for things that were going to take him anyway.
On the bedside table sat the little black tape recorder. A Panasonic. Slim, with the kind of buttons you could feel without seeing. He had bought it himself, somewhere around nineteen eighty-four, at a Radio Shack in a strip mall in Montgomery. He had used it for thirty-some years to dictate notes to Mrs. Patterson, his administrative assistant at the Jacksonville church, who would type them up on Mondays with her two-inch fingernails clicking across the keyboard. Sermon outlines. Hospital visit summaries. The occasional confidential counseling note, which he labeled with initials only and which she knew never to ask about. He had also used it during marriage counseling sessions, with permission, when he wanted to revisit a couple’s words later in the week to find what he had missed in the room.
After he retired in two thousand and seven, the recorder had gone in a drawer in his home office, and he had not touched it for fourteen years. Then Marlene died. He had been sorting through a box of office things one afternoon that summer, looking for a letter she had written him in nineteen sixty-five before they were married, and he had found the recorder instead. He had taken it out and pressed PLAY just to see if it still worked. There was a tape inside. His own voice, much younger, fast and confident, dictating an outline for a Mother’s Day sermon. Three things every godly woman gives her children. Number one. A picture of grace. He had clicked it off and sat in the chair in the office and cried for the first time since the funeral.
The next morning, he had driven to the Office Depot on Granada and bought a paper grocery bag full of blank cassettes. He had been on Tape One that night.
He was on Tape Forty-Six now, three years later, and he had a feeling, the kind preachers learn to trust, that he was running out of tapes for a reason.
He pressed RECORD.
“This is Calvin Wells. November the eleventh, twenty twenty-five. Veterans Day. They had little flags by the front desk this morning. I am ninety-three years old. I am tired. But there is something I have been trying to say for about eighty years now, and I have not found anybody who wants to sit still long enough to hear it. So I am going to say it to this machine and to whoever picks up these tapes after I am gone, if anybody ever does. The Lord knows. The Lord knows what I am about to say.”
He paused. Out in the hallway, someone was laughing at a television.
“I want to start at the beginning. I want to start where I started.”
The radio sat on a doily on top of the upright piano in the front room. December seventh, nineteen forty-one. He was nine years old. The piano was his mother’s piano, brought from Yazoo City when she married, and the doily had been crocheted by his grandmother who was already in the ground by then. The radio was a Philco, walnut veneer, with a glowing dial and the kind of cabinet that hummed for half a minute after you turned it on, like a living thing waking up. His daddy had bought it on time from the Sears in Jackson and had paid it off the previous Christmas.
It was a Sunday afternoon. They had come home from Bethel Baptist Church south of Carthage, where his daddy was a deacon, and Brother Tom Pickering had preached on the seventh chapter of Joshua, on Achan and the accursed thing in the camp. Brother Tom had said the sin of one man defiled the whole camp of Israel. He had pounded the pulpit when he said it. Calvin’s mama had fried a chicken for Sunday dinner with cream gravy and biscuits, and his daddy had carved it at the table the way he always did, slowly, with a deliberate ceremony that came from his own father, and they had eaten, and the dishes were soaking in the sink. His daddy was reading the Clarion-Ledger in the wing chair with his Sunday shoes off and his stocking feet up on the ottoman when his mother turned on the radio for the music program.
But there wasn’t music. There was a man’s voice, fast and flat, and his daddy lowered the paper.
“Hush, son.”
Calvin hushed.
The voice said Pearl Harbor. The voice said Japanese. The voice said many casualties feared. His daddy stood up, and the newspaper fell on the rug, and he didn’t pick it up. The Sears catalog page he had been looking at, with the Christmas advertisements, fluttered loose and slid under the wing chair. His daddy never picked that up either. Calvin remembered, sixty years later, finding it under the chair when his mother passed and they cleared out the house. The page had been there the whole time.
“Where is Pearl Harbor at, Daddy?”
“Hawaii.”
“Where’s Hawaii?”
“Out in the ocean, son. The Pacific.”
His mother came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on the apron with the bluebirds on it, and she stood in the doorway and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she said, “Lord, have mercy.”
The next afternoon, they walked down the road to the Pickerings’ because the Pickerings had a better radio and a bigger front room, and the President was going to speak. They walked because gas was already being talked about as something to be careful with, even before any rationing had started. The road was red dirt, and the sycamores were bare, and the sky over Leake County was that washed pale blue that December gets in central Mississippi, and the air smelled like woodsmoke and the cold, dry promise of a hard winter. Calvin’s daddy walked with his hands in his coat pockets and did not speak. His mother walked beside him with her arm through his. Calvin walked a little behind, watching their breath steam, watching the way his daddy’s shoulders stayed set like a man pulling a plow.
There were already six or seven families gathered when they got there, men in Sunday suits and women in housedresses, and Brother Tom had set the radio on the dining room table and turned the volume up. The room smelled like coffee and woodsmoke and the wet wool of coats. Mrs. Pickering had put out a plate of teacakes that nobody was eating. The grandfather clock in the corner ticked loud in the spaces between the men’s voices.
The President’s voice came through the speaker like a man speaking from underwater. Yesterday, December seventh, nineteen forty-one, a date which will live in infamy.
A woman across the room began to cry. Calvin didn’t know her well. She had a son named Earl who was nineteen and worked at the lumberyard. Earl was sitting next to her on the davenport with his arm around her shoulders, and his jaw set hard. Calvin watched him. Earl was looking at the radio like the radio was a man who had just hit his mother. Earl had a cowlick that wouldn’t stay down and a small scar on his chin from a hunting accident two summers before. Calvin had been at the supper where Earl had told the story, holding court with the younger boys, laughing about how stupid he had been with the gun. Now Earl was a man being measured for a uniform he did not yet know was waiting for him at the recruitment office in Carthage, and the boys who had laughed with him were sitting on the floor of the Pickerings’ front room watching their futures be decided by a voice in a wooden cabinet.
When it was over, and the announcer came back on, nobody moved for a minute. Then Brother Tom stood up.
“Let us pray.”
They prayed. Brother Tom asked the Lord to give the President wisdom, to give our boys courage, and to bring the wicked to swift justice. He asked for Earl by name, because Earl was going to go; everybody knew Earl was going to go. He asked the Lord to comfort the bereaved in Hawaii, and Calvin remembered being struck by the word bereaved, which was a word he didn’t know yet, and which he understood only by the weight of how Brother Tom said it. He asked the Lord to be a wall around our shores and a sword in the hands of our soldiers. He prayed for ten minutes, and Calvin’s knees hurt on the hardwood floor, and he kept his eyes squeezed shut because that was what you did, but he was listening, listening hard, the way a child listens when he can tell the grown-ups have stopped pretending.
Then Brother Tom said amen, and the men stood up and shook hands like they had just made a decision, and Calvin’s daddy put his hand on Calvin’s shoulder and squeezed once, hard, and Calvin understood without anyone saying it that the world had just been divided into two parts. There was us. And there was the enemy. And the work of a man, from this day forward, was to know the difference and to act accordingly.
That was the lesson. That was the first sermon Calvin Wells ever absorbed into the marrow of him, and it was preached not from a pulpit but from a Philco radio in a Mississippi front room, and it was preached not by a man but by a moment, and the text was infamy, and the application was that righteousness was the work of locating the enemy and pressing back. He would carry that text in his bones for the next eighty years, and he would not understand until the very end of his life that the application had been incomplete, because Jesus had said love your enemies, and nobody in that room on December the eighth, nineteen forty-one, had been able to hear that part. Including the boy on the floor.
Earl Pickering was killed on Saipan in June of nineteen forty-four. They had a memorial service at Bethel because there wasn’t a body to bury. Calvin was twelve and he remembered Mrs. Pickering had aged ten years in the time between the radio broadcast and the telegram, and he remembered the way the gold star hung in the front window of their house for the rest of the war, and he remembered thinking that loving God and hating the enemy were the same shape of feeling in his chest, and that this was probably the right way for them to be.
He was wrong about that. It took him eighty years to figure out he was wrong about that. But it was the soil he grew in, and a tree grows where it is planted.
He stopped the tape and rested. The light through the window had moved. Somebody down the hall was watching The Price is Right on a television cranked up loud enough for a deaf man, and the bells were ringing, and the audience was screaming, and a woman was guessing too high on a refrigerator. Calvin closed his eyes.
He thought about Marlene. He thought about Marlene every day, multiple times a day, and the missing of her had become so constant that it was like a sound he had stopped noticing because it never went away. They had been married fifty-eight years when she went, and he had preached her funeral himself, which Daniel and Sarah had both told him he didn’t have to do, and which he had insisted upon, because he had loved her and he had wanted her own preacher to send her home. He had held it together until the benediction. He still didn’t know how.
He thought about the way she used to come into his study on Saturday nights when he was still working on the sermon and stand behind his chair and put her hand on his shoulder without saying anything. She had a sense for when he was tightening up. She had a sense for when the words were not coming, and he was beginning to push them. The hand on the shoulder was her way of saying come to bed, you have done enough. Sometimes he had listened. Sometimes he had not. He wished now, with a wish that was as useless as wishes get, that he had listened more.
He pressed RECORD again.
“I went to Mississippi College in Clinton in nineteen fifty. I was eighteen years old, and I had a notion that the Lord was calling me to preach. My daddy was glad about it, and my mama cried. We had a woman named Cora who cooked and cleaned for us when I was growing up, and I loved Cora and Cora loved me and Cora went to, what was called then but now we’d just call it a church, a colored Baptist church about four miles from our house, and I never one time in my life as a boy thought it was strange that we went to one church and Cora went to another. That is what I want to tell you about. I never thought it was strange. I want you to understand that. The not-thinking-it-was-strange was the thing. That was the water I swam in.”
He paused.
“Cora’s husband was named Eli. Eli did some yard work for us. Eli was a deacon at his church. I want to say that. Eli was a deacon at his church, the same way my daddy was a deacon at our church, and Eli read the same Bible my daddy read, and Eli prayed to the same Lord my daddy prayed to. And it never once, never one single time, occurred to anybody in our county that we should sit at the same table on the Lord’s Day and break bread together. Not because I thought anybody hated anybody. We all said we loved each other. Cora was at my mama’s funeral in nineteen seventy-eight. She came to the house afterward, brought a sweet potato pie, sat in the kitchen with me, and held my hand. We loved each other. And we had spent forty years pretending the Lord wanted us to worship Him in separate buildings.”
He cleared his throat.
“In nineteen fifty-four, when the Brown decision came down, I was a junior, and I was preaching revivals on weekends in little churches all over central Mississippi. I had a fiancée. Marlene Davenport from Forest. I remember being at her parents’ kitchen table, and her daddy was reading the Jackson paper, and he slapped it down and said, ‘They are going to ruin this country.’ And I remember nodding because that is what was nodded at, at that table, in nineteen fifty-four. I want to tell you something hard. I was twenty-two years old, and I did not stop and ask myself whether the Lord Jesus Christ had any opinion about it. I assumed His opinion lined up with my future father-in-law’s opinion. Because we were the ones who went to church. We were the ones who kept the commandments. So whatever we thought, He must think too.”
He stopped. He took a long breath. The tape hissed.
“That was my first sin in the matter. There were others. I want to be honest. I must be honest now. My opinion changed during Vietnam.”
He stopped the tape. He sat for a long moment with his hand resting on the recorder. Then he pressed RECORD again.
“I want to say how. I want to say how it changed, because the how matters. I did not change my mind in a seminary classroom. I did not change my mind because somebody preached me a better sermon. The Lord did not give me my correction in a place where I could feel proud of receiving it. He gave it to me in a hole in the ground in the Central Highlands with mortars coming in, and the man next to me with his hand on my arm telling me to keep my head down was a sergeant from Mississippi named Wendell Cobb who looked exactly like a man my future father-in-law would have stepped off a sidewalk to avoid. Wendell Cobb saved my life twice that I know of, and probably more times than I don’t. He read his Bible in the evenings the same way I read mine. He prayed the same prayers. When the chaplain’s assistant got hit in November of nineteen sixty-seven, it was Wendell who held him while I worked, and Wendell who cried with me afterward, and Wendell who said the words Lord, receive him over the body before they zipped the bag. I had been taught my whole life that a man like Wendell and a man like me belonged in two different churches. I sat in that foxhole in the rain, and I understood, with a clarity I had never had before, that whoever had taught me that had been lying. Maybe not on purpose. But lying.”
He paused.
“I want to be careful here. I do not want to make myself sound better than I was. The Lord opened my eyes about race in Vietnam, and I came home and I preached integration from my pulpit in Meridian in nineteen sixty-nine, and we lost about three hundred members in eighteen months over it, and I have always been proud of that. I have told that story at preachers’ conferences. I have let men shake my hand over it. But I want to tell you something I have not told from a pulpit. The Lord only opened one window in me in that foxhole. He showed me, Wendell Cobb. He did not show me everything else. I came home, and I integrated my church, and I went right on being certain about a hundred other things I had no business being certain about. I thought because I had been corrected once, I had been corrected enough. A man can be right about one thing and use that one thing to keep himself from ever being honest about the others. That is what I did. That is what I want to confess. The Lord opened one window in Vietnam, and I treated it like He had opened the whole house, and I locked the rest of the doors and kept on preaching.”
He had served in Vietnam as a chaplain. Captain Wells, U.S. Army. He had volunteered in nineteen sixty-seven, leaving Marlene with a two-year-old son and a baby on the way, and he had spent thirteen months in I Corps, mostly around Khe Sanh and the A Shau Valley with the First Cavalry. He had buried twenty-seven men whose names he could still recite in order, like a Psalm, like the begats. He had held boys while they died of wounds you could see through. He had prayed the Lord’s Prayer in foxholes with men who had not prayed since their grandmothers made them pray, and he had baptized a private from Tennessee in a bomb crater full of monsoon water four days before the boy was killed by a sniper.
The boy’s name was Wilburn Hatcher. Eighteen years old. He was from a town called Harriman in east Tennessee, and he had a girl back home named Lou Ann, and he had played second base on his high school team, and he had not been to church since he was twelve. He had come to Calvin three nights running and they had talked under a poncho in the rain about whether God could love a boy who had killed two men he could see and probably more he couldn’t, and Calvin had told him yes, and Wilburn had wept, and on the fourth night they had walked down to the bomb crater and Calvin had said the words and put him under and brought him up and Wilburn had laughed when he came out of the water, laughed with his head thrown back, and four days later a sniper from across the valley had put a round through his throat and Calvin had held his hand while he choked. That had been Calvin’s prayer for the rest of his life, and he had never preached it in a sermon, because he did not know how to preach what had happened in that bomb crater without cheapening it. Lord, do not let me forget Wilburn Hatcher. Lord, let his laugh count for something. Lord, let his laugh count.
He had come home in the spring of nineteen sixty-eight to a country he did not recognize. The Tet Offensive had broken in January, and the war he had just returned from had become, in the space of a few weeks, a war the country had decided it did not want to win. Walter Cronkite had said so on television in February. Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not seek reelection at the end of March. Martin Luther King had been killed in April. Bobby Kennedy in June. The cities were burning. The young people in the colleges were spitting on returning soldiers and growing their hair and saying things about America that made Calvin’s hands shake.
He had taken a church in Meridian. First Baptist, downtown. Two thousand members. A pulpit committee that had sought him out because he was a war hero and a man of prayer, and they wanted somebody who would hold the line.
He had held the line. God forgive him, he had held the line.
He pressed RECORD.
“In the early seventies, the Jesus Movement came out of California, and a lot of long-haired hippie kids started showing up in churches, including mine. I want to tell you what I did. I want to tell you what I preached. I preached a sermon series in nineteen seventy-two called ‘Counterfeit Christianity.’ I told my people that you could not love Jesus and look like the world. I quoted First John two-fifteen. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. I told them the long hair, the guitars, and the talk about the Spirit without reverence for the Word were the devil dressed up in sandals. We had three young men come to the church that spring, Vietnam veterans like me, who had gotten saved at a Calvary Chapel kind of meeting in Pensacola. They came to my office, and they told me what the Lord had done for them. They wanted to start a Bible study for young people. They wanted to use guitars. I told them no. I told them our church was not that kind of church. I told them they could find a more suitable fellowship elsewhere.”
He stopped. His voice had gotten thin.
“One of those boys was named Ricky Sanderson. I want to say his name because he deserves to have his name said. Ricky was twenty-three. He had been in the Marines at Hue City during Tet. He had a sister who went to our church and a mother who had sat under my preaching for ten years. He sat in my office, and he had a King James Bible on his lap and his hands were shaking, and he was wearing a denim jacket with a patch that said JESUS IS LORD on the shoulder, and I looked at the patch and at the hair down to his collar and I made a decision in about thirty seconds that this boy was a problem and not a brother. I quoted him verses. I told him the Lord required reverence in the assembly. I told him there were churches in town that would be more welcoming to his expression of faith. I shook his hand at the door of my office, and I said I would be praying for him.”
The recording machine in his hand hissed. Calvin’s breath caught.
“Ricky went home that night and shot himself in his daddy’s barn. Now, I have told myself for fifty-three years that it was the war that killed Ricky Sanderson. The war and the drugs and whatever was in him before he ever walked into my office. And maybe that is true. Probably it is true. But I sent him away. I sent him away from the Body of Christ because he did not look the way I thought a Christian was supposed to look. And I have been carrying Ricky Sanderson around with me since nineteen seventy-two.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“I told myself I was keeping the commands of Jesus. That is what I told myself. I was protecting the church. I was guarding the gospel. I was contending for the faith. I was a man who kept the commandments. Ricky Sanderson had not learned to keep them yet. So I sent him away to figure it out. That is what I did. I sent him away. And I think the Lord has been waiting fifty-three years for me to say that out loud, and I have only just gotten around to it, and I am ashamed.”
Brenda came in at three with the afternoon snack. A small dish of vanilla pudding and a cup of decaf. She set them down and looked at him.
“You alright today, Reverend? You look kind of far off.”
“I am far off, Brenda. I am about as far off as a man gets and still answers when you call him.”
She laughed. “Don’t talk like that.”
“I am not afraid of it. I just want you to know I am not afraid of it.”
She straightened the blanket over his legs and checked his water pitcher. She had a way of moving around a room that did not require her to look at the patient, and Calvin appreciated it, the way she let him keep his dignity by not staring at the work of keeping him alive. He watched her instead. Forty years old, maybe forty-two. Two grown children. A husband who drove a truck for a paper company. A grandbaby on the way.
“How is Tasha doing? With the baby.”
“She’s tired. She’s seven months. The doctor wants her to take it easy but you know how she is.”
“Stubborn.”
“Like her grandmother.”
“That’s a good thing to be.”
Brenda smiled and turned to leave. At the door, she stopped.
“Reverend, you've been talking into that machine an awful lot lately. You alright? I mean, really, alright?”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“Brenda, I am ninety-three years old. There are some things a man needs to say before he goes. I have been late on saying them. I am trying to catch up.”
She nodded, didn’t answer, and pulled the door most of the way closed behind her.
He ate three spoonfuls of pudding and pushed the rest away. The decaf was lukewarm. He sat in the chair and watched the light shift on the wall, and he thought about what Brenda had said. You been talking into that machine an awful lot. He had. He had been talking into it three or four times a day for weeks now. Something was pressing. Something wanted out before it had to come out a different way.
The seventies turned into the eighties, and Calvin moved to a larger church in Montgomery, Alabama, and then to a still-larger church in Jacksonville, Florida, and somewhere in there, the country began to talk about abortion in a way it had not talked about it before. Roe had come down in nineteen seventy-three, but for the first few years after, the Southern Baptists had been all over the map on it. It was not until the late seventies, when men like Jerry Falwell and Paige Patterson began organizing, that the issue solidified into what would become a defining test of fellowship. Calvin had been there for that. He had been on the steering committee for the Alabama chapter of the Moral Majority. He had marched in Washington in nineteen eighty. He had preached sermons on Sunday mornings about how we needed to take this country back for God. Reagan was elected, and they said it was a Christian victory. Bush after him. Calvin had sat on platforms with congressmen. He had prayed at a governor’s inauguration. He had a radio program for a while in the late eighties called The Plumb Line that was syndicated on twenty-three stations across the Southeast.
He had been certain. That was the thing he wanted whoever found these tapes to understand. He had been so certain.
“There is a particular kind of certainty,” he said into the recorder one afternoon, on what was probably Tape Thirty-Eight, “that a preacher gets when his certainty is also useful to powerful men. I want to warn whoever hears this. When the politicians start standing up at your conferences and quoting you back to yourself, something has happened that you should be afraid of. I was not afraid. I should have been. I thought I was using them. They were using me. We were using each other. And the Lord Jesus Christ, who said His kingdom was not of this world, was somewhere outside the tent we had pitched. I do not know exactly when He stepped out. I just know that by the time I noticed, He was gone, and we were holding rallies without Him.”
In the nineties, his church grew to four thousand, and they built a worship center with stadium seating, and they hired a youth pastor from Dallas Theological Seminary who knew about something called seeker sensitivity. Bill Hybels was filling Willow Creek up in Illinois with people who had never been to church before, and Rick Warren was about to write a book that would be on every pastor’s desk in America, and the word “relevance” was being used in pastors’ conferences the way the word “revival” had been used in the fifties. Calvin had been suspicious of it at first. He had preached a sermon in nineteen ninety-three, pushing back on what he called the cult of relevance. But the numbers came in, and the giving came in, and the parking lot filled up, and so he had said yes to the drama team and yes to the contemporary service and yes to the felt-needs sermon series on marriage, money, and parenting. They had stopped doing midweek prayer meetings because nobody came anymore. He had told himself this was contextualization. The apostle Paul had become all things to all men. He was doing the same.
“Looking back,” he said into the recorder, “I cannot tell you when I stopped praying. I do not mean stopped praying out loud. I prayed out loud constantly. I mean, I cannot tell you when I stopped praying the way I prayed in Vietnam. The way I prayed when I was twenty years old and afraid of the Lord and afraid for my soul. Sometime in the middle of all that growing and building and platforming, the prayer went out of me. I was running on memory. I was running on technique. I was a man who knew what to say. I had become a professional at the thing I had once stayed up all night begging the Lord to teach me to do. And the difference between those two men, the boy in the foxhole and the doctor of divinity in the corner office, was a difference I could not see at the time and cannot now stop seeing.”
He retired in two thousand and seven. He was seventy-five. The church gave him a watch, a love offering of forty thousand dollars, and a video tribute that the staff had spent three months on. Marlene cried through the whole service. He cried too, but he was crying about something he could not have explained then. He was crying because he had a feeling, way down underneath the applause, that he had spent his life building something that was not, in the end, what the Lord Jesus Christ had asked him to build.
He and Marlene moved to Ormond Beach because Marlene’s sister was there, because the doctors were good, and because they wanted to walk on the beach in the mornings. They joined a smaller church, two hundred members, and the pastor was a kind man named Ben Tolliver, who had asked Calvin to lunch the first Tuesday after they joined and had told him over a club sandwich at the Cracker Barrel that the church was honored to have him but that he wanted Calvin to be a member, not a former pastor, and Calvin had appreciated that. He had needed that. He had not always known how to be in a pew.
He preached occasionally as a guest. He led a men’s Bible study on Wednesdays for a few years until his hearing started to go and the back-and-forth got hard. He watched, from the back pew, as the country he had tried to help save began, in the years after twenty sixteen, to come apart at every seam he had not noticed had stitches in it. He watched pastors he had mentored go on the cable news and say things he could not believe a Christian man would say. He watched churches split over masks and over flags and over which candidate the preacher had voted for. He watched young people leave the church in numbers nobody had ever seen before, the studies all said the same thing, and he watched the old people he had pastored circle the wagons tighter and tighter around a Jesus who looked, the more Calvin squinted, less and less like the Jesus he had met in Vietnam in a foxhole in the rain.
In twenty twenty, during the first summer of the pandemic, he had watched a man he had ordained in nineteen ninety-six stand in his pulpit in Tampa and call the governor of Florida a man of God for refusing to close the churches, and three weeks later that same pastor had buried two of his own deacons who had caught the virus from each other at a board meeting, and Calvin had wanted to call him and had not known what to say that would not sound like an old man trying to be right. He had not called. He regretted that. Among the many things he regretted as a man approaching the end, he regretted the phone calls he had not made because he could not figure out how to make them without making them about himself.
Marlene died in February of twenty twenty-two. Heart attack. She was making coffee. He found her on the kitchen floor with the filter still in her hand.
He had been talking into the tape recorder ever since.
He pressed RECORD on what would be the last side of Tape Forty-Six. It was after supper. The hall was quiet. Somebody was playing a hymn on a piano in the activity room down on the first floor, and it floated up through the vents, faint, Great Is Thy Faithfulness, and he could hear it, and he could not hear it, the way you can hear something you have known since you were a child, even when your ears no longer want to do their work.
“I have been thinking,” he said, “about a verse. Jesus said it the night before He died. John fourteen, fifteen. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. I have preached on that verse, I would estimate, more than a hundred times in my life. I have preached it as a verse about obedience. I have preached it to teenagers about staying pure. I have preached it to congregations about tithing. I have preached it to denominations about doctrinal fidelity. I have preached it to a country about righteousness. I have built a ministry on the back half of that verse.”
He stopped. He could feel his breath getting shorter. He had felt it since lunch. He had not pressed the button for Brenda. He did not want to be interrupted.
“It just struck me, sitting here. That verse has two parts. If you love me. That part comes first. Jesus did not say, ‘Keep my commandments and that is how you will love me.’ He said it the other way. He said the love comes first. He said the love is the spring and the obedience is the river. I have spent my life trying to make people drink from a dry riverbed. I have spent my life telling people to keep the commandments because that is how you prove you are on the right side. I missed it. I missed the whole thing.”
His eyes were wet. He had not cried in a long time. He thought he had cried himself out when Marlene died. Apparently he had not.
“I loved the rules. I loved the rightness. I loved being on the side that was keeping the commandments. I do not know if I loved Him. I hope I did. I hope at the bottom of all of it, underneath the certainty and the platforms and the sermons and the standing up for what was right, I hope there was a man who loved Him. But I have to tell you, brother, sister, whoever is listening to this, I cannot say for sure. I cannot say for sure I loved Him the way He asked to be loved. I kept His commands. I kept them like a watchman keeps a wall. But agape. The love that lays itself down. The love that does not need to be right. The love that would have sat down with Ricky Sanderson and listened to his guitar. The love that would have eaten supper with Cora and Eli on a Sunday afternoon in nineteen forty-eight. The love that would have called my brother in Tampa in twenty twenty and said, ‘Son, what are you doing.’ I do not know. I do not know.”
He was quiet a long time. The piano downstairs had moved on to In the Garden.
“I think about Pearl Harbor sometimes. I think about being nine years old in that front room. I think about how that day taught me that the work of a righteous man is to find the enemy and press back. And I think about how I spent the rest of my life finding enemies. The hippies. The liberals. The Catholics, for a while. The other denominations. The sinners outside the camp. The compromisers inside the camp. I was good at finding enemies. I had a gift for it. I built my ministry on it. And the whole time, the primary enemy Jesus warned me to worry about was the one inside me, my own flesh, the one who loved being right more than he loved the people he was being right at.”
He coughed. The cough did not stop quickly. When it did, he sat for a while breathing carefully.
“Lord Jesus, if you are listening, and I know you are. I am sorry. I am sorry, I was so sure. I am sorry I made loving you so small. Receive me anyway. Receive me anyway.”
He stopped the tape. He set the recorder down on the bedside table. His chest felt heavy in a way it had not felt before. He thought he might lie down for a little while. He thought he might close his eyes.
He thought about Marlene’s hand on his shoulder on Saturday nights. He thought about Wilburn Hatcher laughing as he came up out of the bomb crater. He thought about Cora’s sweet potato pie and Earl Pickering’s cowlick and his daddy’s hand squeezing his shoulder once, hard, on December the eighth, nineteen forty-one. He thought about the boy he had been and the man he had become and the distance between the two, and he thought about how the Lord Jesus had been there at the start and was here, somehow, at the end, and had been patient with him for ninety-three years, and he thought, Lord, that is a long patience. Lord, that is a love I do not yet fully understand, but I look forward to experiencing fully.
The old man closed his eyes and did not open them again. The tape recorder sat on the bedside table beside the lamp, and the King James Bible his mother had given him in nineteen forty-six, the one with his name embossed in gold on the cover, the gold mostly worn off now from eighty years of his thumb finding the edge of it. The window faced east. The piano downstairs finished the hymn, and the dayshift went home, and the nightshift came on, and the air handler hummed. Sometime between two and four in the morning, his breathing slowed and then stopped, and he was not in the room anymore, and what remained on the bed was a body that had carried him for ninety-three years and was now, finally, finished with its work.
When Brenda came in at four-fifteen on her round, she knew before she touched him. She had worked at Magnolia Gardens for eleven years, and a person learns, after the first dozen times, what it looks like when a soul has gone. She stood at the foot of the bed for a long minute. Then she pulled the sheet up to his chin, the way she would have wanted somebody to do for her own father, and she went to the desk, and she made the call.
Daniel and Sarah flew in on Wednesday. The funeral was on Friday at the small church in Ormond. There were maybe sixty people. Most of the men Calvin had pastored in his prime were dead. Ben Tolliver had retired four years before but had come back to preach the service, and he had preached well, from Second Timothy four, the good fight passage, with his hand on the casket the whole time. Daniel cried through the eulogy he had written and could not quite finish. Sarah held her brother’s hand. They sang It Is Well and Great Is Thy Faithfulness and they put their father in the ground beside their mother in the cemetery off Nova Road, and the November sun was bright, and the wind came off the ocean, and Daniel stood at the grave a long time after everyone else had walked back to the cars.
On Saturday morning, they went back to Magnolia Gardens to clear out the room. Brenda was there, working a double, and she hugged them both, and she told them their father had been a kind man, and she told them about the last conversation she had with him, I am about as far off as a man gets and still answers when you call him, and Daniel laughed and cried at the same time because that was his father, that was exactly his father.
The room had been mostly emptied already by the staff. The clothes were in two suitcases by the door. The Bible was on the bedside table. A few framed photographs of Marlene and the grandkids. The watch from the church in two thousand and seven. And, in the bedside table drawer, the tape recorder and the tapes.
Daniel pulled the drawer open, looked at them, and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Sarah.”
“What?”
“Come here.”
She came. She looked.
Forty-six tapes. Numbered in black Sharpie. Tape One. Tape Two. All the way through Tape Forty-Six.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, Dad.”
Daniel picked up the recorder. He had not seen it in years. He had a clear memory of it from his childhood, sitting on the corner of his father’s desk in the home office, and he had a clearer memory of it from Mrs. Patterson’s typing area at the Jacksonville church, where she would slide the cassette into a transcription machine with a foot pedal and produce, by the end of every Monday, a stack of typed sermon outlines that she would slide back under his father’s office door. She had retired in two thousand and three. She had died in two thousand and twelve. Daniel had gone to her funeral with his father, and his father had cried, and Daniel had not understood at the time that his father was crying for more than the woman.
He turned the recorder over in his hand. The buttons were worn down where his father’s thumb had pressed them. There was a faint dark smudge by the RECORD button where the plastic had taken on the oil of his hand over the decades.
“I didn’t know he was using it again.”
“Me neither.”
Daniel picked up Tape Forty-Six. There was no label except the number. He looked at the recorder. He hesitated. Then he opened the deck, slid the tape in, and pressed PLAY.
There was a pause. A breath. Then his father’s voice, frail and clear.
I have been thinking, about a verse. Jesus said it the night before He died.
Sarah sat down on the edge of the stripped bed.
John fourteen, fifteen. If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
Daniel pressed STOP.
“I can’t,” he said. His voice cracked. “Not right now. I can’t right now.”
“No. No, me either.”
They sat in the empty room for a minute. Outside, a leaf blower started up somewhere on the property. Daniel’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out. A text from his oldest. Coach said practice is moved to 5. He thumbed a reply. He put the phone away.
Sarah was crying quietly.
“What do we do with them?”
Daniel looked at the stack of tapes on the bedside table. Forty-six small black rectangles of his father’s voice. Forty-six tapes of a man trying, at the end of his life, to say something he could not say while he was busy being a pastor.
“I don’t know. I don’t have anything that plays them. I mean, there’s the recorder. But I don’t have time. Not right now. Not this week.”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll find time.”
“Yeah.”
They didn’t, then. They put the tapes in a cardboard box that had held a humidifier the staff had brought up the previous winter and never returned. Daniel wrote DAD on the side with the same Sharpie that had numbered the tapes. He found it on the bedside table next to the lamp, and he stood holding it for a moment, the small black plastic thing, the cap chewed slightly, his father’s pen, and then he wrote the three letters and capped it and put it in his pocket without thinking about why. They loaded the box into the rental car along with the King James Bible, the framed photographs, and the watch. They flew home on Sunday.
The box went into the attic. Daniel meant to deal with it. He meant to sit down some weekend with a pot of coffee and the recorder and listen, all the way through, to whatever it was his father had wanted to say.
But the spring came, and there was a kitchen remodel, and the summer came, and the kids had travel ball, and the fall came, and his oldest started looking at colleges, and in the long flat ordinary press of a life that was still being lived in the front of the house, the box stayed in the attic. He thought about it every few months. He would be reaching for the Christmas decorations or the suitcases for a trip, and he would see the box, and he would think, I need to do that, and then he would carry whatever he had come up for back down the pull-down stairs, and he would not do it.
It sat there. Forty-six numbered tapes. A man’s last accounting of what he had done with what he had been given. The voice of an old preacher, faint and clear, saying he had loved the commandments and was not sure he had loved the Lord, asking to be received anyway.
The box waited. It is still waiting. Maybe somebody will come up there one day, a grandchild, a great-grandchild, somebody cleaning out the house after Daniel himself is gone, and they will lift the lid and see the tapes and wonder. Maybe they will have a tape player. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they will find a way. Maybe one of them will be a girl of seventeen, restless on a summer afternoon, helping her mother sort her grandfather’s things, and she will press PLAY and hear a voice she has never heard, her great-grandfather’s voice, and she will sit on the attic floor and listen to a man tell her that he is sorry he was so sure, and something in her will shift, and a long arc of mercy that began in a foxhole in nineteen sixty-seven will reach into a Tuesday afternoon in some year not yet on any calendar, and the Lord Jesus, who is patient, will have done His work.
Or maybe the tapes will go to the curb in a Hefty bag, on a Tuesday morning, and the truck will come, and that will be that.
The Lord knows. The Lord knows what Calvin Wells said. He said it to Him first, after all. The recorder was just a witness.
Outside, somewhere, a piano was playing a hymn. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just the wind in the palm trees, and a man’s memory, and the long faithfulness of a God who hears even what no one else ever plays.
Reflection Points
Calvin grew up in a world that had clear lines between “us” and “the enemy,” and he carried that framework into his pastoral ministry without ever quite examining it. What inherited frameworks shape how you see your church, your community, or the people you disagree with? When was the last time you held one of those frameworks up to the light?
Ricky Sanderson came to Calvin’s office wanting to belong, and Calvin sent him away because he did not look like what Calvin thought a Christian should look like. Who in your life or your church right now might be a Ricky Sanderson? What would it cost you to receive them instead of redirecting them?
Calvin spent decades certain he was keeping Jesus’ commands and only realized at the end that he had built his ministry on the back half of a verse that began with love. Where in your own faith do you find yourself emphasizing the keeping more than the loving? What do you think is at stake in that ordering?
Daniel could not bring himself to listen to the tape, and then life pressed in, and the box went in the attic. What truths from the older people in your life are sitting in a box somewhere, waiting for you to have time? Who might still be alive long enough for you to actually sit down and listen?
Calvin’s loneliness in the nursing home is partly the loneliness of an old man whose wife is gone, but it is also the loneliness of a generation whose hard-won wisdom no one has the bandwidth to receive. What does it look like, practically, to make space in your life for the slow, inconvenient, non-urgent work of listening to someone who has already lived through what you are still trying to figure out?
If you were recording your own Tape Forty-Six tonight, knowing it might never be played, what would you most need to say? And to whom?