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Reginald’s a quiet man. Doesn’t offer advice unless you come straight out and ask for it, and even then he usually teaches you in stories instead of sermons. Maybe that’s why I love him so much. Why I miss him.
I’m sitting in his back office, reminiscing. “Do you remember the story you told me about Julie?” I ask.
The memories are heavy and bittersweet. Reginald’s daughter was raped by a high-school boyfriend. She’s middle-aged now, so of course back then it was quite a scandal. I know a lot of families, folks like the old apple farmers at Orchard Grove, who would kick a daughter out for less, but Reginald stood by her.
“Marta and I had separated by then,” he told me, “and sometimes the kids would come live with me, and sometimes they’d go live with her, and it was constantly changing. But Julie was always with me, never with her mother. To her dying day I think Marta blamed me for what happened to our daughter. And I let her go ahead and think that. Better her mom blame me for being a lousy father who wasn’t paying any attention than for her to go and make Julie feel even more ashamed than she already was for something that wasn’t her fault.
“I told her, the day she came and confessed she was pregnant, I told her that I had always asked the Almighty to let me live long enough to become a grandfather. Well, it was happening a littler earlier than I might have expected, but who was I to balk at God’s timing?
“I didn’t know the father had raped her. Not at first. You know, parents didn’t talk about that sort of thing back then. If a girl got herself pregnant, that was just her fault. Boys had it easy, you know. Their dads might give them a lecture, the moms in town might not want them hanging around their daughters anymore, but that’s about the worst of it. But Julie, she went through a hell like you wouldn’t believe. You think Scarlet Letter’s rough, you should have seen how those kids at Orchard Grove treated her. But she finished up her senior year. I was adamant about that. Talked to the principal so she could take some of her classes at home with me because she was so ashamed of herself, especially as she started to get bigger.
“It wasn’t until she was round as a beach ball and due to pop that baby out any day when she told me what that boyfriend of hers had done. You should have seen me. I was younger then, you know. Wasn’t so frail. And it took her a lot of convincing to keep me from heading right over and teaching Mr. Loose Zipper a lesson for what he’d done.”
“But she stopped me. I was the only one at the baby’s delivery. Her mom wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Kept up that animosity until her dying day. But I was there. And I’d watched my little girl struggle with so much hurt and confusion and sorrow and shame — not to mention how traumatic it is for a girl that young to have to deliver a child in a room with those doctors and nurses and her old man right there. But they laid that little baby in her arms, and you could see the change in her. It was as if the Almighty himself reached down from heaven and breathed comfort and healing into her soul.
“You think Hester Prynne went through a renewal in that Hawthorne book? That wasn’t even close to the way that precious baby transformed Julie’s life. And in a day, my daughter went from a broken, torn-up little girl to a woman full of grace and love and forgiveness. Eventually found herself a nice Catholic boy who loved her little baby like his own. They’re living over in Cape Cod now. Got six kids altogether. A beautiful, loving family.”
I didn’t know what to say.
And with someone like Reginald, that was just fine.