Spilled Milk and Broken Promises

What do you say to Jason Three Stars that could possibly make any difference? The gaudiest slice of civilization he had ever experienced, until last Monday, was a mountain village that clung more naturally to history than to life in some remote canyon of the Sangre de Cristo. The closest thing to a sky-scraper in his Apache perceptions was some man's two-story barn crowned with a rusty, corrugated tin roof. To Jason Three Stars, main street was nothing more dazzling than a tangle of shacks leaning against the wind. Above those shacks lived the somehow comforting squeak of a beer sign that rubbed a familiar chorus when the wind tugged on it, which was often.

So what do you say to Jason Three Stars? The aspen forests were second nature in his conclusions about life. The beaver, the mule deer, and the ground squirrel he counted as blood kin. On more mornings than memory could contain, Jason Three Stars had washed his sleepy face in melted snow. And ever since memories mattered to him, the bull elk's bugle was the only signal worth trusting in counting the days until the first snow blanketed the Sangre de Cristo.

That tangle of shacks in the village served an ominous purpose—it taught Jason Three Stars to swallow furiously on what few cans of beer he could afford beneath the squeaky sign. Jason's money was green enough, so it was rung up on the register until it ran out, or until Jason began to slur one of the Apache songs his grandfather had taught him 30 years ago. The singing, it seems, was always the prelude to Jason's quick exit from the tavern. He was accustomed to being dropped in the dust or the mud, depending upon the season, to stew in his own indignity until sobriety once again returned his strength. Getting bounced was to Jason Three Stars just as much a part of drinking as swallowing.

So what do you say to Jason Three Stars when he's been in Dallas less than 17 hours? Do you tell him about the mountains? Do you remind him that the Sangre de Cristo is a hallowed thing in the Apache heart? And how do you say that to city folks, to those of us who crowd living into narrow places, the mountains are merely a thing to own, and then to sub-divide into condominium plots? How could he understand that? Such is too unnatural to him to make any sense.

What do you say to Jason Three Stars as he stumbles into the soup kitchen in the wake of mixing 15 hours on a bus with at least two bottles of wine? Do you apologize for broken treaties? Are you honest enough to whisper that Apache ways are as delicate in the city as a buttercup in a Texas hailstorm?

I didn't have much choice. I had to ask him to leave. He was simply too drunk to stand up, much less to eat. I touched the crook of his elbow, and he recoiled like a proud snake. Then he flung a paper cup brimming with milk across a police officer's shoes. That was his mistake.

The officer did what was necessary. Jason Three Stars, with his smooth cheek pressed against the outside wall of the church, his hands cuffed, waited for nothing more hopeful than a squad car to deliver him to the city justice center.

So what do you say to Jason Three Stars? I don't know! But I'll never forget what he said to me between labored breaths, with those stainless steel cuffs biting into his pulse, with his face pushed against Presbyterian marble. He whispered, "Pastor, I'm sorry."

I wanted to offer some kind of apology for the ridiculous incident at the soup kitchen as well as for broken promises. There wasn't time. The squad car rolled up, brushing its black walls against the curb, interrupting my good intentions of saying something, anything to Jason Three Stars.

When this article appeared, Robert Lively was a writer and associate pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas and operated a soup kitchen and apartment house for homeless families .