The Ripple Effect

chapter 1: Father Mise Major historical milestones are populated with the questions, “where were you when”…people ask each other, “where were you and what were you doing when…when John Kennedy was assassinated? … when Martin Luther King was shot?... or how about Robert Kennedy?”… “What were you doing when you first saw the planes crash into the twin towers on 9-11? Where were you when you first heard about Columbine? About Sandy Hook? About Uvalde? Where were you when you heard about Lincoln Mall?” Remember? Father Richard Mise sure does. It was the 13th of November. Shots rang out shortly prior to noon. Lincoln Township Mall. Twenty people dead. They had come to the mall to buy presents. To try on new shoes. To catch a pre-holiday sale. To have lunch with friends. Some were on a school outing, about to top off their lunch with ice cream. They were there for hundreds of reasons, and in an instant their lives were ended. And Father Mise was squarely in the middle of the carnage. Yes, it was the 13th of November, a pleasantly cool day, just before noon. If it weren’t fall, if it was in the heat of the summer, the waves of invisible radiation would be shimmering up from the blacktop roads, which stretched for miles around Grand Lake crisscrossing into and out of the oil fields and cattle ranches that make up the region– a region some call the last vestige of the Old Confederacy. The pine trees would be bent, not so much in a bow of respect, but from their desperate attempt to survive yet another year of drought in northeast Texas. The riverbanks would appear higher – taller – as the creeks and rivers recede lower and lower – the flow of the streams they cradled having lessened to a trickle. The lake itself would be showing her edges, like a woman wearing an evening gown pulled down on her shoulders. Rarely would a bird venture out from its protected shade and fly across the sweltering sky. Everybody – everything – would be moving in slow motion. Even time would seem to stand still in the oppressive heat of the summer. A lone cloud drifting over the sun in midday was cause for celebration and joy. But in October – late October – just at the beginning of November – it finally rained. Not much. But enough to renew life and spirits in Lincoln, Texas. Lincoln, Texas sits on the sandy loam of the eastern shore of Grand Lake. A great body of water created out of the dammed Sabine River, across the lake from its big sister, Kilgore and below Longview. The town is perched on a rise above the valley into which the lake grew in the late 1950’s after the Corps of Engineers impounded the river. To its northeast is an extension of what remains of the northern arm of the Piney Woods of East Texas. Just north of Lincoln lies a band of red clay out of which has been mined a rich seam of grey-black lignite coal that fuels power plants, which dot the shores of the giant lake, sending their electrical waves to population centers as far away as Dallas to the west and Houston to the south. To the southwest, are rolling sandy grasslands below which, were once home to the bountiful East Texas Woodbine oil pool; from whose deposits millions of barrels of crude and hundreds of millions of dollars were pumped to the surface making the region and some of its more fortunate inhabitants quite wealthy; while others continued to subsist as they always have, by the scrub of the parched land. In the middle of the county, sits a small, humble town – Lincoln– that at one time was proud of its rich reserves of petroleum and coal, but today was waging a battle to keep its young people from leaving for new, more exciting- more profitable jobs. Trying to keep the schools at the top of the lists in the state. It’s a town, starting to ebb downward. But just. The slide was just starting. That morning, November 13th, Father Mise pulled his small Chevy sedan up to the self-service island of Eddie McAlister’s Shell station. It was about the only one in town that had full-service mechanical bays. The station offered everything from car washes to complete engine overhauls. Eddie had won a contract from the Township of Lincoln to fuel and service the patrol cars while they were on duty. Something he did between the hours of seven in the morning until seven at night, when he turned the lights off and went home. Parked next to Father Mise’s sedan was patrol car No. 7. It was driven by Darrell Hampton, a parishioner in St. Elizabeth’s church, where Mise was the pastor. The two spoke. “Morning Father,” said Darrell as he walked around his black and white patrol car letting his hand softly stroke the smooth surface. “Moring, Darrell. Getting any more rest?” Hampton had been taking care of his sick daughter and wife for what seemed to him to be over a month. The morning was slowly getting near the lunch hour and he was getting hungry. He yawned. He would love to park the patrol car somewhere on a shady back road grab a sandwich out of the paper sack on the passenger front seat, then catch forty winks; the kid had been awake all night crying with the croup. Phyllis had been sick with the same respiratory illness the week before and missed her teaching job for five straight days; something she had never done. Even the principal Mr. McMichaels came to the house to check on her. But the bug was going about and they had as many as fifteen to twenty percent absentees from school over a ten-day period. Teachers and students even administrators were ill with it. Darrell had told her to rest. He would get up with the kid and walk her and hold her until she fell back to sleep. No sooner than he had her in the crib, she began to wail again. “It almost makes me want to give up religion and start drinking. Again.” Mise smiled. “Keep the faith, Darrell. God will grant you the strength to endure. I assure you it will pass.” “Everybody seems to be coming down with this crud,” offered McAlister as he approached the policeman and the priest in their conversation wiping his hands on a red cloth. “Wife says we’re good to go. Say about seven? Say, you might tell your chief that the city is late paying its bill again. Just saying…” “I’ll let him know. See you this evening. And bring some beer, would ya? You got it.” Darrell turned back to Father Mise. “You want to join us, padre? Some nice fishing at dusk on the big lake?” Mise shook his head. “I’m a fisher of men not of fish. But if you catch some, I’ll fry ‘em up for a fish fry. Fridays were made for that.” “I hear that.” Said Officer Hampton. With that he got into his patrol car and rolled away. “He’s good one. Darrel is.” said McAlister, as the service station manager and the Catholic priest watched the patrol car turn onto U.S. 59 then turn again onto the road leading to Grand Lake. Eddie had known the policeman ever since the third grade. They had played on the only Lincoln football team to get into the state playoffs. That year, the team lost only two games in the regular season. One to Carthage and the other to Gilmer – both of whom won state championships that very year. Carthage was becoming something of a state powerhouse on the gridiron and Gilmer was no slouch, either. So a twelve and two record with the only two losses to those schools was something to be proud of. That is, until they faced Rockdale in the state semi-finals and lost 31-13. That game is still not talked about much inside the city limits of Lincoln. It was over fifteen years past and was still a raw topic for many. Bob Armstead, who owned Angry Bob’s the best barbeque spot in East Texas, was Lincoln’s quarterback that year. He had been intercepted six times in the Rockdale game and many people believe his first restaurant in Lincoln failed because a lot of the old timers wouldn’t support him. They were still angry with him. Hence the name of the barbeque joint. “Scabs in this part of the country are slow to heal,”