CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF DETROIT, DETROIT, MICHIGAN

The good Reverend Liam McCardle’s morning started much the way his life had unfolded—full of contradiction and opposing sentiments. He had his worn, torn, and prolifically marked Bible open in one hand to the beloved Psalms, from which he started each morning’s meditation. Resting in the clutches of his other calloused hand, even while the clock boasted the early time of 9:13 am, was his life’s vice and soul’s curse—whiskey; Johnny Walker double black blended scotch whiskey to be precise.

Pastor Liam McCardle undoubtedly and unequivocally retained a deep, searing passion for both of the items he held in his hands. He relied almost schizophrenically on the power of each item to bring him daily pleasure, to accentuate his joys, to aid as elixirs of life and also to powerfully neutralize, clarify, and mediate his pain.

Pain was more than a familiar friend to Pastor McCardle. It was an unrelenting force that had been so normal for him that it may have well been crafted into his DNA. After years of serving in the Police force’s CTSA (Counter Terrorism Security Advisors) unit in his native Belfast, Ireland, he had learned to assimilate the pain of life quickly and efficiently. His living room wall was not big enough to host the photographs of all the fallen brothers he’d served with, nor the friends and relatives who had been unwilling participants in an ethnic fight that persisted like a never-ending virus.

Reverend Liam closed his eyes as he sipped from his glass of Johnny Walker Black. A half-melted ice cube lingered on his tongue and slowly disintegrated as his mind wandered from the provocative text of Psalm 151. Images of men he had shot in the heat of urban battle surged to the forefront of his mind. Young men. Maybe twenty or twenty-one, no older. He remembered distinctly one such man. A face he would never forget. It was in the heat of an operation when the young man had momentarily pulled up his black ski mask to wipe his brow. Liam saw and felt the intense trepidation in the young man’s eyes. The terrorist’s identity had been compromised and his position severely weakened.

Liam thought of his own son in retrospect as he downed another sip of Johnny Black. Why Lord? Why were these young men so attracted to the violence? Why this young man and not my son? He knew the reasons. He knew all about the depth of feelings, the long documented historical and cultural strains, the obstinate family ideologies and the clear, impassioned logic that hid behind, and fueled the fire for, the fighting in Ireland. His eyes circled back to the words of the Psalm as he sipped yet some more scotch whiskey prior to his 10:00 am marriage counseling session that he was quite unprepared to lead.

I went out to meet the Philistine,

and he cursed me by his idols.

But I drew his own sword;

I beheaded him, and removed reproach from

the people of Israel.

Pastor McCardle recalled how he fell to the ground that day with a bleeding, wounded shin as the young man spat in his face. The bullet had taken him down to the ground that day, leaving him vulnerable to the young IRA terrorist. Liam remembered how alert he felt at that moment with the young man hovering over him with a sense of absolute impunity and false victory. Liam’s ability to think and act quickly in the heat of an operation was by far the greatest ability the good Lord had ever bestowed upon him. He remembered the curse words that hurled from the young man’s lips as the kid spat on him. All the while, Liam’s temperament remained untouched by the mockery. Instead, his situational agility rose to a heightened state of acute observation and patience.

The lifting of the black ski mask was the boy’s fatal mistake. As the terrorist reached to wipe the sweat from his brow, Liam swiftly lurched up, and forward, to grab the kid’s gun right out of his loose hand. In one unhindered, continuous motion he stared straight into the kid’s countenance and shot him square in the head.

That recollection struck Liam McCardle with more intensity than he could handle on a Monday morning as he weighed the parallels between that memory and the last words of the 151st Psalm. He had drawn his enemy’s own gun. He had put a bullet directly in his head—a modern day beheading. His stated goal was to uphold the honor, and remove the reproach, of his people of Ireland.

He remembered when that incident hit the papers in the days of The Troubles. He’d never forget his wife’s tears as she threw a milk carton at him and screamed at him hysterically as if he had done something wrong in the ordeal. The heart of a woman, he even then knew, was a mysterious and altogether different thing than that of a man. To his wife Kathy, it was his fault. His fault that he wasn’t a bloody mailman, or a carpenter, or some pencil-pushing attorney or business executive. It was his fault, he recalled her saying, that he had to aspire to work as a police officer. It was especially his fault that he chose to train for the CTSA. This was all his fault. To Kathy, the fate of the world was not nearly as important to watch over as was the fate of her beloved husband. It seemed to Liam that not a week had passed by in his nineteen years on the force in which she didn’t beg him to quit. Stubborn as I was, she should’ve known there was no talking to me back then. An empty glass stared back at Liam as he held that regretful thought for a slight moment.

The irony of his pouring his third glass of whiskey prior to 10:00 am while reading the good book did not strike Pastor McCardle. What did occur to the good reverend was the irony of his wife worrying, for almost twenty years, that he’d become a casualty of the force, and yet in the end she was the one who died suddenly and painfully of pancreatic cancer. It was not an irony that was at all likely to shed light on, or make him cognizant of, the irony of his simultaneous drinking and praying. The reality of that irony would take an ever-distant back seat. Likely until he met his Maker.