writing from
Scars Publications

Audio/Video chapbooks cc&d magazine Down in the Dirt magazine books

 

This writing was accepted for publication
in the 84 page perfect-bound issue of
cc&d (v243) (the May / June 2013 Issue,
the 20 year anniversary issue)


You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5"
issue as an ISSN# paperback book:
order issue


cc&d magazine cover

Order this writing
in the book
Guilt by Association
cc&d 2013
collection book
Guilt by Assosiation cc&d collectoin book get the 374 page
Jan. - June 2013
cc&d magazine
issue collection
6" x 9" ISBN#
paperback book:

order ISBN# book

A Miracle of Angels

Bill Kroger

    This story has been in my gut for months, since Father Kean passed. I know you won’t believe it – it’s hard for me to believe – but the evidence was there.
    Father Kean was in the hospital, dying, and he’d asked for me. I do not like hospitals; they have foreign odors and deadly bugs lurking around, so I stay away. But Father Kean wanted to speak to me, and he was special in my life, having taken care of me when I was in high school after my dad had died and my mother was going crazy and trying to kill herself. Over the years, I was indebted to the old man, and his kindness traveled with me, but the truth be told: I really liked him. I had served as his chief acolyte for several years when he was traveling the circuit, performing mass in a number of churches in rural Oregon. During those trips we would talk about all sorts of things, and once he said he looked on me as the son he never had.
    He was wizened when I knew him and even more so in recent years, with shoulder-length white hair growing from the sides of his otherwise bald head. He was not the most kempt person, clearly letting you know he didn’t care. “Looks are for the vain,” he once told me.
    But Father Kean was the kindest man I ever knew, a man who truly cared about others, especially those facing seemingly insurmountable odds. He had served the church for decades, as rector of several parishes, but his favorite posting was as the number-two priest of a congregation in Tijuana, Mexico, just over the border from California.
    He told me he had requested the job because the church needed another priest and he’d been learning Spanish, so he was posted there. To him, it was to be the highlight of his career, a long career that was coming to an end.
    The Portland hospital was spread out over the landscape like fingers splayed on a hand, so I walked the corridors for twenty minutes looking for Father Kean’s room, trying not to breathe. The pungent smells made me very nervous. The old man was in a private room, which surprised me as the church seemed to not spend money on such luxuries. But there he was, lying propped up on a pillow, looking older and more frail than I had ever seen him. No one else was in the room, so I pulled up a stiff-backed chair next to the bed and sat down.
    He appeared to be sleeping, but as soon as I sat down he opened his eyes and smiled when he recognized me. “My son,” he said. “I’m so pleased you could come. Thank you.”
    “Of course,” was my response. “And what’s happening with you?” I hadn’t seen him for a year.
    He smiled, and in a weak voice responded: “The Lord is knocking.” He suddenly lifted himself up a short way and leaned toward me with a serious expression on his face. “My boy, I didn’t ask you here to chit-chat. I have very little time left. I have something for you to do.” He reached with some difficulty under his pillow and pulled out a cross with a chain and a folder, mumbling something before he kissed the cross, which I’d seen him do many times. He handed the folder to me. “Read that,” he directed. He fell back onto the pillow and sighed.
    I opened the folder and saw a yellowed news clipping dating back some twenty years from the Los Angeles Times with the headline: Drug Dealer Claims Priest Saved by Ghosts.
    What the heck?
    The article wasn’t long and gave credit for the story to a newspaper in Tijuana. The gist was that Father Kean, the subject of the article, had been helping parishioners lead a protest against a Tijuana drug lord and that the priest had been targeted for a serious roughing up with potentially fatal consequences. The drug lord, apparently not one of the big guys but a minor lord, subsequently was arrested on a drug charge and told the police a tale hard to believe. He said that a few days earlier he and several of his men were hiding in an alleyway waiting to attack Father Kean as he came from a night meeting of his group of parishioners. As the father approached the area, they made ready to attack. Father Kean was alone and a ripe target, and just when they were ready to pounce, three other men, all seeming of college age, suddenly appeared beside the priest, walking with him and chatting among themselves. Father Kean seemed unaware of this sudden protection, the drug lord said. He added that the strangeness continued in that the three seemed to cast a shimmering light from their bodies, as if they weren’t real. But there they were, real enough. So the assault didn’t happen. Who would dare go after someone walking with ghosts?
    The drug lord had wanted this attack to be an end-all to his local troubles and had planned ahead, bringing along a camera to get a photo of the beaten priest to send anonymously to the upstart group of parishioners to scare them into submission, but instead he had a photo taken of the priest accompanied by three men.
    “Ghosts,” he reiterated to the police. “The priest was protected by ghosts.”
    He added that as the priest passed them and continued walking down the street unaware of any danger, his trio of protectors disappeared.
    Police reported the drug lord to be greatly unnerved when he volunteered this information.
    A faded photo was part of the article, presumably the photo taken by the drug lord, but after all these years it was impossible to recognize anything.
    I looked at Father Kean. “You never told me about this. Did this really happen?”
    Father Kean closed his eyes and spoke in a low voice, forcing me to scoot closer to the bed. “I could say I don’t know if it happened or not. I did not feel anything or hear anything. But I saw the photo the drug lord took, and there were three men with me, very clearly identified. He began to cry. “Son, they were my closest friends from college. I think the Lord blessed me at that moment, and I will be happy to see my very dear friends very soon.”
    I leaned even closer to the bed. Hospital sounds and odors were forgotten. “Tell me about it,” I asked.
    Father Kean pushed himself up a bit higher on the pillow and began a story about love among human beings, the kind of profound love that is life-changing.
    He and his friends went by nicknames. His was Father Cross because he was devout and often made the sign of the cross. Another was called Squeaky, because he squeaked when he laughed. The biggest of them all was Bull, because he was so brawny and the only one to grow up on a rural Oregon farm. The last was Brains, for the obvious reason that he was smarter than the others. They came to know each other as freshmen when they shared two dorm rooms at the University of Portland and later moved to a duplex nearby.
    Their first day of college was memorable, something they chuckled about later when reminiscing. Bull, aptly named, was the most aggressive of the foursome and, after they noticed several coeds eyeing them as they stood in line to eat at the dining commons, he tacked straight toward the girls to make a connection. The girls were city girls and not what he was used to in his small town.
    “There’s four of us, and we want you to get two friends and go out with us for a little fun and making out. What do you say?” It was abrupt and to the point. Bull never minced his words.
    The girls looked at each other, raised their eyebrows and laughed. One turned away, but the other asked: “Where are you from? The sticks?”
    Bull hadn’t expected this but thought it was a connection and smiled. “John Day,” he responded.
    “Well, honey, let me tell you something about making out. You take your sweet ass back to John Day where you belong, because you’ll get nothing here in Portland. What a hick!” She turned away.
    Bull was hurt by both the unexpected rejection and the retort and got mad. The others could tell he was starting to steam because his face turned beet red, and he clenched his muscles and fists looking around to see what he could hit.
    Brains put a hand on his arm. “Calm down, my man. She isn’t worth it. We’ll get her later. You’ll see.”
    The four entered the dining hall and spent the next forty minutes getting to know each other better. At the end, when they were walking their trays of dirty dishes to the kitchen counter, Brains purposefully veered to where the two girls were and stumbled into their table, depositing all of his dishes and some food residue onto the lap of the girl who had chastised Bull.
    “Oh, my gosh!” he exclaimed, feigning seriousness. “Please forgive me.” He reached down to the girl’s lap to retrieve his dishes and turned one over to make sure the food he had left in it spilled onto her skirt. She angrily grabbed his arm and pushed him away.
    “Get the hell away from me. Look what you did!” she screeched.
    Brains stood up straight, bowed, said he was deeply sorry and walked to the kitchen counter and then outside with Father Cross, Squeaky and Bull. En route to their dorm rooms, the four laughed until it hurt.
    And that was their lives for the next four years: fun, helping each other, always together. They grew to be like the family Father Cross and Squeaky never had and that Bull and Brains wanted, true brothers who always supported each other and were there when it was important.
    In the summers when Bull returned to the farm and the others went to their jobs, they actually would write to each other, saying how much they missed the company. And when school started again, they would return to the duplex excited to be together again.
    During the four years of school, whenever they traveled to Seattle or the Oregon coast, they would travel together, always together. The four horsemen..., they would joke.
    In their last year of college, about a week before graduation, it had been raining a lot in Portland, and Father Cross came down with pneumonia, so severe he had to be hospitalized. Father Cross complained bitterly about not wanting to miss the ceremony, so on the big day, the other three went to the hospital, put Father Cross in a wheelchair and took him to graduation, covering him with their umbrellas. He was wheeled up to the stage, and the university president came down the steps and presented him with a diploma. Everyone watching went nuts.
    Afterward, back in the hospital room, the three bid good-by to Father Cross as they were going to spend the next week at Bull’s farm in John Day. “We’ll send a postcard,” joked Brains. “We’ll miss you. You know we wouldn’t be going if you weren’t getting better. So we know you’ll be out of here in no time.”
    Bull extended the invitation to Father Cross to come the farm. “When you’re out of here, come on to the farm, and I’ll put you to work. How’s that?”
    “It sounds fantastic,” Father Cross responded, smiling and giving each a big hug.
    It was the last time he ever saw them. En route to the farm, their car was hit by a semi-truck and demolished. It was over quickly.
    “I was beside myself for weeks after that,” Father Kean told me. “It was like losing my entire family. I didn’t know what to do. Then one day I went back to church and found my answer. I could serve others. That’s why I became a priest.”
    Tears were flowing from his eyes, and the old man coughed and asked for a napkin. He wiped his mouth, and a red spot appeared on the cloth where he’d spit up some blood. I asked if I should get a nurse, but he waved me off.
    He then reached out, took my arm and pulled me closer. “You’ve got to help me!” he demanded, in a desperate way. I started to say something, but he held up his hand and continued speaking. His voice was raspy now.
    “On my desk is another folder, and in it are photographs, including the one from the drug lord. Please do what you have to. Research this so you can tell the world how God came to me that day, how he sent my friends, my angels. It was a miracle, and I want the world to know. I owe it to Squeaky, Bull and Brains. It was the most important thing in my life. The world must know!” His grip on my arm was fierce, and he squeezed even harder, so I nodded my head yes and told him I would take a look. He loosened his grip and fell back on the bed, exhausted.
    I had been a journalist and guessed that was why Father Kean had called on me. Besides, he knew me. I took the folder with the Los Angeles Times article in it, said good-by to the old man and left the hospital with its acrid odors and muted loudspeakers, again trying not to breathe.
    His small apartment wasn’t far from the university in North Portland, and I knew that he kept his key above the doorjamb. I had told him repeatedly not to be so lax about security, but he never listened. “If someone needs my meager things that badly, they can have them,” he would reply.
    Inside, the two rooms and small kitchen were as I remembered, redolent of stale smoke from his cigarette-smoking days. The furniture was sparse, a love seat, a chair, a kitchen table and three chairs around it. In a corner by the one window was his old desk, a scroll-top he’d purchased from a junk dealer years ago. I figured the desk was older then I was.
    I went to it and unrolled the accordion top, and sitting right in the middle of the desk was the folder. I opened it and saw several photos and news clips. The photo sitting on top was of Father Kean and who I guessed were his friends, Squeaky, Bull and Brains, back in their college days. I recognized Father Kean immediately. He actually looked the same now, but much older.
    To his left must have been Bull, a gawky, muscular and very big man with very dark hair. The next one, I thought, would be squeaky, a skinny guy with a big Adam’s apple and a beak-like nose. The last had to be Brains, an Ivy-league-looking, attractive young man with a lewd smile on his face. All were enjoying themselves, from their expressions, eyebrows arched and devilish looks on their faces. Across the bottom of the photo, someone had written: The Four Horsemen.
    I turned the photo over, but there was nothing on the back. On the pile in the folder was the next photo, and this one caught my eye. It was the one taken by the drug lord, and it showed Father Kean as a much older man, skinny and balding with a serious look on his face. The setting was not in the U.S. but in a foreign land as the street was cobblestone and the weathered buildings behind looked like they were constructed of plaster or adobe a long time ago. Walking with Father Kean were his three friends, Bull on the left, Squeaky in the middle and Brains on the right, looking much as they had looked in the other picture. The photo, a black and white, looked as if a light was radiating from the three friends, but their images seemed to fade a bit instead of glow.
    Wow, what a shot. Was I really seeing angels, or were they ghosts, or were they even real? The journalist in me made me question what was before my eyes. I surely had a nagging sense that the photo must be doctored. But why would the drug lord even bring it up if he hadn’t seen something that frightened the daylights out of him? Do drug lords get scared?
    I turned the photo over, and stamped on it was the name of a photo shop in Tijuana and the year 1993. Under the photo in the folder were a few news articles, mostly a rehash of the one from the Los Angeles Times, but one was from the Oregonian, the main newspaper in the state, dated 1963. It was about the car wreck that killed Bull, Squeaky and Brains and corroborated what Father Kean had told me. A photo of the wreck showed a semi-truck with a tire torn off and sitting on top of a car that was demolished. One look would tell you that no one in that car would have survived. How sad. The article also had mug shots of the three dead men, so I was able to identify who was Squeaky and who was Brains. I had guessed correctly.
    I stood in Father Kean’s apartment for some time, feeling very skeptical about the angel story — not about Father Kean’s belief in the story but how could it possibly have happened. I also was very anxious about what I could say to the old man, especially when he seemed to count on me to believe and to tell the world about the angels. I had a sense that he couldn’t die peacefully if I didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. Could I lie to him, this man who was more my father than any other man? I didn’t know what to do.
    I took the folder and locked his apartment, putting the key back on the top of the doorjamb. I knew a professor of fine arts at the University of Portland who was an expert in photography and made an appointment to see him tomorrow.
    I hadn’t seen him for some time, and when I entered his office he still looked middle-aged, was graying slightly and was every bit the professor I remembered. He welcomed me.
    En route, I had thought about what I would tell him about the photo and decided not to alter Father Kean’s tale. Truth was the best approach, I always believed, so I told him the whole story.
    His name was Jim, and he read the article and looked at me. “This is very strange,” he said. “But being Christian, I would want to believe it was true, that angels came to protect the priest.”
    I handed him the photo, and he looked at it for quite some time, turning it over and feeling the quality of the paper. “Let me keep this for a few hours, if you can. I want to run some tests. And can I keep the news clip?”
    I left both with him and returned to the hospital. Father Kean was sleeping, so I just sat by his bed for three hours, reading magazines people had brought to him. He did not waken the entire time.
    At two o’clock, I returned to Jim’s office at the university. Another man was with him, a friend of his whom he said was a forensic specialist at the Portland Bureau of the F.B.I.
    After saying hello, we cut to the chase. Jim said: “The photo is real and probably from the early 1990s, the time stamped on the back. And I don’t think it has been altered. I think this is a true depiction of what was taken that day.”
    The F.B.I. man nodded his head in agreement. “I ran a few tests, and if this was doctored, an expert would have to have done it. I don’t think that drug lord was that sophisticated or would have thought about faking a photo. For what purpose? Why would he tell the authorities in Tijuana about a crime he didn’t commit? Just to gain a newspaper headline? No, I think this is a true photo.”
    I stood there for a moment looking at them both. Then, I spoke: “This means there are angels. It sounds weird, as I’ve heard about angels for years. But this is evidence that they’re real, truly real.”
    Jim chuckled nervously. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. And it is weird.”
    The forensic expert said: “I’m not religious, but I’d have to say that looking at the articles of the dead men who died in the 1960s and then of this photo in Tijuana thirty years later, with them in the picture alive as can be, something was there, whether it be angels or ghosts or who knows what. I think the drug lord was right. If I’d been him, I’d have been scared, too. It’s quite a freaky story.”
    Jim looked at me: “So, what are you going to do?”
    I laughed. “Hell, I don’t know. I have to think about this. It’s my neck on the line if I try to make this public.” Both men wished me luck, and I thanked them and left the office.
    Angels were nothing new to me. I’d heard about them all my life, stories from priests and missionaries, and I had read biblical writings that talked about them. Didn’t angels come to the shepherds tending their flocks about the birth of Jesus? Didn’t angels tell the Magi, the wise men, in a dream not to tell King Herod where the Christ child was, as he had asked when they visited him?
    Suddenly, I remembered a time in my high school years when I was living with Father Kean and we were performing Mass at a small church in a small Oregon town. Perhaps fifty people showed up, and we were going through the rituals. At one point, we both were kneeling down and bowing our heads deeply before the cross when Father Kean turned slightly toward me and whispered earnestly: “He’s here.”
    Immediately, my skin crawled in a nervous reaction and, fearful of the answer, I asked him: “Who’s here?”
    “The Lord! He’s here, up there on the alter. Can’t you feel his presence?”
    He was serious. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be anywhere Jesus actually would appear, even though it probably would be wonderful. But it was a scary moment for me. I started to look at the alter, but Father Kean warned me not to look directly into the eyes of God’s son. I looked anyway in the general direction, didn’t see anything and felt much calmer.
    Had something been there? I don’t know, but I know Father Kean certainly thought something was there.
    So now I was faced with going to the father and telling him what he wanted to hear, or not. If not, I knew it would kill him.
    En route to the hospital, I made a decision to lie. But it wouldn’t be a big lie as I truly wanted to believe in angels, and the evidence certainly pointed in the direction that the story was true.
    I walked into Father Kean’s room, and he appeared to be sleeping, so I sat down in the chair by his bed again to wait. I nodded off. Then, sometime later, I felt a wonderful, warm feeling come over me and opened my eyes.
    The room was so bright I could barely see, and standing next to Father Kean were three of the four horseman: Bull, Squeaky and Brains. They were smiling and excitedly putting their hands on Father Kean, and then they seemed to be reaching out to shake hands with him. I can’t say how long this all went on, but as quickly as they had come, they were gone.
    The light returned to normal, and I jumped up and felt for Father Kean’s pulse, but it wasn’t there. I ran into the hallway and called for the nurse. She checked his pulse and listened to his chest with a stethoscope and sadly turned to me and shook her head no. Father Kean was gone.
    I couldn’t help but cry. Even in dying the old man had saved me from having to lie. But now that I saw his three cronies for myself, I knew it was true, that angels are real.
    Since that time, I have made speeches around the country and written articles about the existence of angels, but I feel my efforts fail for the large, skeptical part of our society. Many of my speeches are to religious groups, and those in the audience already believe, but I want to reach those who question the existence of angels.
    What I can say is that I, too, was leery of angels being real, but now I know they are out there. And I know that when you’re down on your luck, afraid and having seemingly insurmountable problems, you can ask for an angel — or three. They’ll come. I promise.



Scars Publications


Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.




Problems with this page? Then deal with it...