Chapter 10
Dwayne Hartman
The most important thing about Dwayne Hartman was his hands. Dwayne Hartman had been able to palm a basketball in Junior High. He could snap an apple in half with ease, even a small unripe Granny Smith, and could crack a handful of walnuts in one fist with little apparent effort. No outdoors warehouse stocked working gloves large enough to fit his hands, but that hardly mattered because these hands had been calloused and scarred beyond the need of gloves. These hands had played Chopin etudes once, and Joplin rags, and of course Rachmaninoff—something which seemed almost inconceivable to one who had not witnessed it, for how could fingers so thick press only one key at a time? These hands had worn a custom-made gold wedding band, and had carried a laughing woman from the altar, and had later signed tear-stained divorce papers. These hands had crushed a man’s throat in the steamy jungles outside of Dong Ha, Vietnam. These hands had thrown countless calves down into the bright dust and had held hot branding irons to their sides. These hands had once dragged a drowning child from an icy river. These hands had grasped innumerable bottles of whiskey, had crushed a landfill’s worth of beer cans, had worn the pages off of half a dozen cheap copies of the Holy Scriptures.
For most of his life, his hands had borne blue tattoos, now faded but still visible: the words HOLD FAST, written below the knuckles of his right and left hand so that they could be read when he held his fists together. He had bought these words in Vietnam, where he had first met God Himself. They acquired a new meaning when Dwayne Hartman entered a fistfight, for his right hand would feint in and HOLD, and the surprise left hook would come in FAST. That FAST, roughly printed in fading blue ink, was the last thing that more than a few men had seen before succumbing to sweet darkness.
His days of brawling had slipped away, as had his days of wrestling calves, playing Chopin, and squeezing the life from smaller men in dark jungles. His great hands had not weakened, but now they held empty bottles of whiskey far more often than before, and now they spent much of their time gripping a pair of wooden canes that he required to steady his emaciated legs when he walked about town. An injury sustained during a rodeo had damaged his spine, crippling him. But now he smiled more than ever, laughed more than ever, cried more than ever.
Dwayne Hartman had been a large man, and he remained so even when his legs atrophied. His handshake was renowned and dangerous, and a friendly slap on the back from Dwayne Hartman could lay an unprepared man onto the floor. He wore a battered white cowboy hat, worn leather boots, suspenders, and a wild grey beard that spread halfway down his chest. When it was cold, he wore an ancient and faded military jacket, which reliably held both a Bible and a flask of whiskey, like an angel and a demon haunting him at all times.
He drove a technically functional 1972 Ford pickup truck, the same one he’d owned for thirty years. He drove it to church every Sunday of the year, and a spot was always open for him nearest to the front door. Nobody talked or even consciously thought about leaving that space open, yet its reservation for Dwayne Hartman was inviolable. When he went to the bank, he parked in front of the fire hydrant, nearest the door, and was never towed or ticketed—a situation which had to be explained to the occasional new police officer in Pikeston. At church, he always sat in the back right corner, and no member of the congregation ever considered taking that seat, or the one next to it.
Pikeston Baptist Church didn’t always sing hymns anymore, which troubled Dwayne, but when they did, he would sing the bass line from memory and cast his voice out through the sanctuary, a voice shredded and scoured by decades of cigarettes and whiskey, awful yet somehow glorious, a voice rising up like a breaking wave above the dozens of others muttering into their hymnbooks. Newcomers could not help but crane their necks to find the source of this astonishing clarion.
But when it came time to take the Lord’s Supper, Dwayne sat quiet, small, head bowed. His powerful hands trembled when he took the body and blood of his Lord. He held them tight. Once he had accidentally crushed the tiny plastic cup, thimble-sized in his fingers, and had left a smeared handprint of grape juice on the door when he stumbled out of the church into the bright sunlight, leaving the body of his Lord lying on the forest-green carpet floor of the House of God.
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He knew about blood; he had shed plenty. He had been an evil man, as he would explain to anyone who wanted to hear, and to many who didn’t. An evil man, but in the smoke and thunder and darkness of the Vietnamese jungle, dying alone and afraid in a foreign land, he had seen God, and God had spoken to him. That vision changed his life, and the lightning that flashed that night had been like a pendulous sword swinging at the gates of Eden: no going back, no going back—only forward, and HOLD FAST. HOLD FAST, for there may be blood and death now, but there is a Promise for the future.
Dwayne Hartman spent his days in an empty house, a house as empty as a house can be, even when he was inside of it. This house contained the accumulated detritus of a lifetime of capricious passion. The peeling wallpaper was a different color in every room. None of the blades on the living room ceiling fan matched. One leg of the kitchen table had been replaced by a tall stack of books, marked-out library data adorning their spines. An old upright piano, chipped and stained but well-tuned, a chess set made of pieces from several boards, over a dozen decks of cards, maybe one of them complete, sticky notes like a scaly second skin on all the kitchen cupboards, a record player and a stack of records nearly worn through by the dull needle, photographs which left clear shadows on the wallpaper if removed, half-burned candles, half-smoked cigarettes, a stained plastic garbage bin in the garage dedicated to crushed beer cans.
Besides God, there was only one person of special note at this stage in the life of Dwayne Hartman, and this person was Isaac Milton. Dwayne Hartman gave him piano lessons, once weekly on Wednesday after school. He required no payment for this service, for Isaac would stay afterward to play chess and talk about books, about music, about God, and if he could catch Dwayne in a good mood, about the tumultuous life of Dwayne Hartman.
Dwayne Hartman loved Isaac Milton. He loved music. He loved, in a general sense, the sea of humanity seething out in the wide world beyond Pikeston. But most of all, he loved God. He read the Good Book through roughly twice a year. He read Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
His vision of his heavenly Father was like unto a storm, for he had first seen Him in a storm, in the continual thunder, the flickering flash of lightning and mortar shells, the torrential downpour. Yahweh was a great storm, a mighty and thunderous cloud that filled the skies, a dread being of excruciating reality and inconceivable intimacy. God—the thought of God, the reality of God, the presence of God—pressed in upon Dwayne Hartman like low clouds on the windy Montana plains, like the beauty of a Bach chorale, like the need for another cigarette. Here was something greater, unfathomably greater, something beyond, something terrible and good and beautiful, and most of all something really real—something the reality of which made all else seem but shadows and echoes. Here was the only one who could truly say “I AM.”
God towered over Dwayne Hartman, and Dwayne Hartman wept.