The Prodigal: A Ragamuffin Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

to see if that would stop the world from spinning so fast.
    At last, he opened his eyes.
    His father stood there, arms open, still waiting—as perhaps he had been waiting all this time, all these years.
    I’ve come to take you home.
    He decided.
    “Okay, then,” Jack said.
    He put an unsteady foot forward, then another.
    Then he stepped across the threshold and into the arms that had once rescued him from the angry waves.

3.
    W hen he woke early the next morning, it was to the familiar childhood smells of coffee and bacon frying. Jack thought for a moment he might be dreaming again. He sat up and looked around. Yes, he was lying in his old room in the queen-sized bed his mother had bought for when he and Tracy came to visit, lying under the flowered Laura Ashley comforter she had picked out. Jack had swept the color-coordinated blue-and-silver satin pillows onto the floor when he fell into bed the night before. They littered the ground now like satin toadstools.
    He saw his bookcase, filled with the C. S. Lewis and Tolkien books he’d consumed as a kid, plus what looked like overflow from some of the other bookcases in the house. Was that an old tax guide?
    Some of his high-school football trophies and a game ball, dusty now, still adorned the top of his dresser. He could read “Mayfield Wildcats MVP 1990” on the largest trophy and couldn’t help smiling. Those had been good times.
    Mayfield football—not to mention Mayfield itself—had gone downhill since then.
    Next to his dresser was the rocking chair his grandfather had given him when he turned thirteen. “A man’s got to have a rocking chair,” Grampa Joe had said. He’d been unable to hide his disappointment. Surely Grampa Joe made it mostly because he loved making things with his hands. But Jack spent countless hours in that chair reading, and years later, working on a sermon for his mother’s funeral while Tracy snoozed in this very bed. It had been a perfect gift after all. He had learned carpentry in the hopes of making something for his son someday.
    That is just one of the many dreams that didn’t come true.
    Over the chair was the corkboard, plastered with pictures of quarterbacks Joe Montana and Peter Gardere. “Peter the Great,” the University of Texas QB who had beaten the University of Oklahoma four times. He looked over the pictures of high-school friends, of him with his high-school girlfriend, Darla Scroggins, now Darla Taylor, long married to his former fullback, the hateful Jamie Taylor. His dad had taken this hunting picture with Jack’s best friend, Bill Hall. Jack had shot a twelve-point whitetail buck and with Bill’s help was holding the rack steady for the picture.
    He hadn’t seen Bill Hall, or Darla Scroggins, or James Taylor, may he rest in pieces, in a decade. The room was like a museum of his life, cut off years ago. There were no pictures of Grace Cathedral, no evidence of his life as “the people’s pastor,” only one small picture on the bedside table of him and Tracy, taken one Sunday after church on what was their last visit before his mother’s funeral.
    The room reminded him of an episode of
The Twilight Zone.
Or maybe that Kurt Vonnegut novel he’d read in college where aliens kept human beings in zoos for observation.
    He could hear his father listening to the morning news on KLBJ-AM as he got ready to go open up the hardware store and lumberyard that had been in their family for three generations.
    Jack threw off the covers, got to his feet, and went to the front window to look out at the world.
    It was the day after Christmas in Mayfield, Texas. Snow lay drifted inches deep in the front yard. Jack guessed that in back of the house, Live Oak Creek was frozen over, something that had happened only a few times in his memory.
    He stood at the window listening to his father move around downstairs and wondered what he must be thinking about. Although it had been a positive beginning, they had made the long trip