The Angel from Arkansas

     When we came back from Spain in 1973 we landed at McGuire Air Force Base and went directly to Ohio to visit Ted's family.  It was June 7, my thirty-fifth birthday.  The New Jersey summer was extremely hot!
     When we reached Ohio, we spent several days shopping for a camper.  We had decided in Spain that this would be our next big purchase.  Our car was big,  so we knew it would pull a camper.  While in Europe we became fans of loading up the kids and taking off for the outer limits of our finances.  It was a great way for a middle class family to vacation.
      We bought a good used one and parked it in Mom Gehrke's back yard.  Ted and I slept in it while we were in Ohio and I sneezed and wheezed  from the surrounding farm fields the whole time!
     After a couple of weeks in Ohio, we packed up, hitched up and  and headed for Texas to visit my dad and his new wife.  Mother had died two years before while we were still in Spain and Daddy had remarried a lady who had been my mother's Sunday School teacher.  I barely remembered her so I was looking forward to seeing him and getting acquainted with my new step-mother.  Also, they had never seen their new granddaughter, our three year old, Jennifer.  I could hardly wait to get there.  I called them two or three times from Ohio eagerly anticipating the second half of our leave.
     We started south, humming right along with our camper in tow.  The first night, we parked it beside and all night gas station and went to bed early.  We were so pleased with the free accommodations and lunches in our camper, except for one thing.  We were burning up from the heat and the farther south we went the worse it became.
     The second day out, Ted announced that the car was overheating from pulling the heavy load and we would have to turn off the air conditioner to protect it.  We rolled the windows down and panted like dogs from the hot wind that hit us in the face.  After suffering for several miles, we stopped to go to the bathroom, spend a few minutes in a cool gas station and grab a snack.  Afterward, we reluctantly returned to the hot car.
     The kids were whining, crying and fighting each other.  It was miserable!  Ted pulled the car back onto the highway and said, "Tell you what kids, if you will settle down, Mom will read to us and when lunch time comes we'll stop, go into a restaurant and eat a hamburger instead of eating in the hot camper."  They all cheered and settled down for the promised story.
     I really didn't have anything to read them  except The Daily Bread, a little devotional book that I read every day.  So I dug it out along with a Bible from under my car seat and began to read the day's assignment.  The assigned passage was "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints."  Psalm 116:15.  I was reading from one of the kid's Bibles which happened to be The Living Translation .  The verse following said, "He does not lightly let them die".  
     The story in The Daily Bread, was about a young mother who had gotten up one night to feed her crying baby and in her sleepy stupor had mistakenly grabbed a can of rat poison instead of powdered formula. She mixed it with water and filled the bottle.  The infant died of course, and the mother almost lost her mind.  The thing that saved her sanity was this verse from the psalm.  It gave her comfort and assurance that God loved her and her baby and that He was in control of their lives and their deaths and that He does not lightly allow anyone to suffer death.  It seemed a strange and terrible thing for me to be reading to my children and I wondered when I closed the books if I had done the right thing.  "Well!  That was cheery!  said Ted, echoing my thoughts.
     Timmy had fallen asleep.  Joel and Kelly were discussing how it was too hot to be touching each other.  "Don't touch me with your sweaty arm!" was their response to the gruesome story.  So I decided that it hadn't made much of an impression on them.
     Jennifer was trying to sleep between Ted and I. She kept waking up because of the heat.  I bathed her arms and legs constantly with a wet wash cloth.  It was the only thing that kept her skin from turning red.  We were all extremely uncomfortable.
     It was just after noon when we approached the outskirts of Texarkana, Arkansas..  Another half hour and we would be in Texas.
     Suddenly Ted turned off the highway and headed for a truck stop.  There was a small gas station attached to a roadside restaurant.  The buildings were old .  The gas station pumps had the old fashioned round tops .  We pulled up to the pump and I sighed lethargically.  In the window of the restaurant we could see truckers eating big, fat hamburgers.  The truckers looked cool and comfortable.  "Let's go eat first!" yelled Kelly and Joel together.
     "No, you kids keep your seats.  I'll just take a minute here then we'll go in and have lunch.  Wash your hands, comb your hair and I'll be back as quick as I can."  said their dad.  They complained a little but settled back to wait.
     An old man came out of the station.  He had the distinctive loping gait that marked him as a man who had followed a mule in the fields for a good part of his life.  He stopped before he reached us, took his hat off and raked his fingers through a mop of thick, black hair then stuck the hat back on his head and pulled it down to his eyes.  For some reason the gesture reminded me of my daddy.   Daddy also had thick, black hair and wore a Stetson hat.  His hat had the same sweat ring around the band and the habit of removing it and running his fingers through his hair was familiar to me.  I felt a pang of homesickness and a sudden urgency to get back on the road.
     The elderly attendant stuck the nozzle into our gas tank and went to the front of the car to lift the hood.  As he struggled with the latch, he looked up at us and smiled.  Joel said, "Hey!  That man looks like Grandpa Stanley!"  I looked at him closely and said, "Yes, he does."
     After checking the oil and water, he closed the hood and walked to the water barrel to pick up the squeegee for the windshield.  As he cleaned it, he nodded to the kids in the back seat, flashing another big smile at them..  Jennifer crawled into my lap and stuck her head out the window.  She reached  a chubby hand toward him and started jabbering.  He stopped, took her hand and kissed it and made funny noises with his mouth on the back of it.  She giggled and Timmy said, "Sir, you look just like our Grandpa!"  Kelly chimed in to tell him that Grandpa lived near Waco, Texas and we hadn't seen him in two years and we were on our way to see him.  I explained a little more before he moved to the other side with the squeegee.  The kids and I were having a good time talking to this familiar stranger when Ted returned to pay him.  We heard Ted ask, "How's the food next door?"  "Best hamburgers in Arkansas!" he replied.
     Ted got into the car and started the engine.  The old man smiled and waved at the kids in the back seat and tipped his hat to me.
     As we stopped in front of the restaurant Ted asked, "Did you notice how much that man looked like your Dad?"
     "Yes." I said, "and he even smelled like him."  Daddy had worked in the oil fields of New Mexico for most of my life so the smell of gasoline and oil were odors that I associated with him.
     "Let's hurry up and get back on the road, Ted.  For some reason I feel like we're late" I added.
     We did hurry.  We both felt a sudden urgency to get home.  We stopped about fifty miles away to call them.  Myrtle, Daddy's new wife, answered the phone and said that he had gone to Waco for a doctor's appointment and would probably be home by the time we arrived.  I knew he took a bus into the city for those occasions so I had no reason to think that she may not be right.
     We arrived just before sundown to find her walking the floor, wringing her hands and fretting.  The temperature was still well over a hundred degrees.  Daddy hadn't come home with the last bus from Waco and she was frantic.  She knew that he was eager to see us and she couldn't imagine why he wouldn't be home.
     Their air conditioner had broken and the house was very hot.  Myrtle's face was red and she wasn't making sense.  We realized right away that something wasn't adding up, so we decided to look for him.  We began the search by calling his doctor's office, then their neighbors and relatives, but no one had seen him.  The doctor's secretary said that he hadn't even had an appointment that day.  The man at the bus station said that he hadn't gotten on the bus that morning.  We knew then that Myrtle wasn't remembering anything right.
     Ted unhooked the camper and we got in the car and went to the police station in Waco and reported him missing. They got his picture out on the late news.  We then decided to conduct our own search through the streets of Waco and up and down the highway in between.  By then it was very dark and hard to see anything.
     I was almost overcome with worry..crying incessantly and praying aloud.  I envisioned his body lying in a ditch.  Finally we fell into bed about three a.m. and fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. We were up by six to began the search again.  We canvased the neighborhood and the neighbor across the street said that he remembered seeing Daddy walk past his house with a bucket about ten a.m. the morning before.  He seemed to be headed for the Baptist Church a block away.  Daddy sometimes cleaned the church so that wasn't unusual but it didn't jibe with Myrtle's memory.  By then people were arriving to help.
     About noon we heard a helicopter.  It was the police chopper and Ted was aboard it.  They were searching the little town from the air.  Joel and I ran into the yard to watch as it flew over us.  After a few minutes we saw it land in a field behind the church so we ran for the car and drove to the field.  By the time we arrived they had found his body.  He was lying face down by a barbed wire fence.  He had fallen there with his bucket and died of a heat stroke.
     There were bee hives a short distance away.  The police surmised that Daddy was going there to collect honey.  Bees had never stung Daddy for some reason and the man who owned the bee hives had given him permission to rob them anytime he wanted.  He was expecting us so he probably went to get fresh honey for us.
     They wouldn't allow me to get close to him because the body had deteriorated in the heat.  We buried him that week in a closed coffin.
     I have wondered since that day about the events surrounding his death.  I had a hard time for a while with the thought that we had been cheated.  Jennifer never met her Grandpa.  He died just a few hours before we arrived home.  It was hard not to ask, why.  But I was comforted by the words of Psalms 116:15 and the story of that pitiful mother.  I was able to say to my children.  "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.  He does not lightly let them die." I could tell them that God had planned it carefully even if we didn't understand it and we could trust Him with Grandpa.
     I've wondered too about the old man in Texarkana.  The Bible says that sometimes we "entertain angels unaware."
     Now granted, it's hard for me to believe that I met an angel in Arkansas but I had to ask myself if he was just a friendly old man exchanging pleasantries with a travel weary family or could he have been sent there for a heavenly purpose...to smile at three hot children, kiss a baby's hand and tip his hat to their mother.  Only God knows for sure, but the encounter with that stranger has comforted us all, since that day.
    

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