I drove over to Charlie’s Truck Stop this past week to fill up with gas and to pick up a few groceries. The Reverend Johnson was passing the time on one of the long benches that sits on either side of the front door to the store as I drove up and parked in front of the gas pumps. Ronnie Clayton was there with him and Hurshel Ledbedder. Jake did not come bustling out to ask if I needed to fill ‘er up as he normally does. Ronnie said he was in the back unloading a truckload of fertilizer for the spring planting. There are a good many farmers around Soagie who pick up most of their supplies from Jake. They figure why should they make the trip into Corinth or Selmer when they can get what they need from Charlie’s.

As Jake was apparently busy, I flipped the lever on the pump and began filling the car myself. I enjoy having Jake fill my tank when I drive up, but I can do it myself when I have to. Standing there running the expensive gas into my car, I overheard the Reverend telling about someone he had heard in an interview on television who had been pushing a new book he had written. It seems a lot of authors spend more time rotating from talk show to talk show pushing some book or other than they do writing. You some times come away with the suspicion these writers do not actually do the writing for which they take the credit. They hire a group of unknown word arrangers to do the work and they pass most of their time doing publicity. As a writer of sorts myself, I have an idea of the work involved in stringing words together into a pattern that presents a message in the way that has meaning to the reader. I have heard stories of authors with their names on the front cover who have gone on book tours to promote something they claim to have written. As it happened, when they were asked some question concerning the contents of the book for which they were taking the credit it became obvious they had not written the book at issue. In fact it appeared they had not even read the thing.

I finished filling the tank and shut the pump off, then wandered over to join the little group of men on the front bench. The Reverend was telling about this particular author who had been a high profile politician in Washington and who now passes his time arranging to have his name in the papers for his charity work. In the given interview the Reverend Johnson was telling about, this former politician was asked about his feelings toward his enemies. The politician made some general noises that his enemies had tried to cast a shadow over his good works, but his true admirers saw through the conspiracies and saw the motives of his enemies as the maneuverings of small minded and mean spirited men.

The Reverend said he always has second thoughts about a man who is so beset by enemies. Reverend Johnson does not think he has ever had any enemies. He admits he has not always been in agreement with everyone who has ever come into his life. But just because he does not sit in absolute agreement with everyone he has ever known does not result in the other person becoming an enemy. The Reverend read a good number of trashy books when he was growing up. He does not mean by calling them trashy to imply they were on topics that are indecent or immoral. He simply means by trashy these books were written for momentary entertainment and nothing more. They were like most shows on television today, intended only for harmless amusement. It was one of these books that made a major impression on the young mind of the Reverend.

The tale was a Western. This was back in the time when tales of the frontier western United States were very popular. There were westerns on television, in movie houses, and of course hundreds of books of western tales. This tale concerned a bad man who had done something terrible to the hero of the story when the hero was just a child. The bad man went on his way believing he had left the boy hero for dead along with his whole family. But the bad man had made a mistake and the hero survived as heroes generally do. If they do not survive, they are not heroes. They are incidental characters to some other hero. The surviving hero swore vengeance on the bad man and, recovering from his wounds, bought himself a gun and trained for years to become the best and fastest gunfighter in the West. Once the hero thought he was so good no one could beat him, he set out to track down the bad man. It took years to locate his enemy. He found the bad man in some out of the way mining camp and they had the final showdown. The hero killed the bad man, of course. He was the hero. But then the story had an unusual twist. Once the bad man was dead, the hero found he had no direction in life. He was an old man who had dedicated his life to revenge against the man who did him dirty. His single minded vendetta had left him no time for anything else. He had no wife and no family. He had made no friends. He was alone in the world with no place to go. He had wasted his time in seeking vengeance. In a sense, though the bad man was dead, he had won over the hero in that he had destroyed the hero’s life.

That story was a revelation to the Reverend. Not so long after, someone the Reverend thought was his friend did him dirty and the Reverend was tempted to even the scales. But he decided to take a lesson from the western story he had read, and he refused to waste his time in getting even. Because of the kind of person his former friend was, the man did other people dirty also and he soon came to the point where he had no real friends and the only people who would be near him were those who were the same sort as he. The former friend died drunk in a gutter, alone and unloved. The Reverend believes his former friend brought worse upon himself by his own actions than the Reverend could ever have accomplished by an active campaign to get even. In the end, this former friend was never an enemy. He was just a pathetic old man deserving of pity for the way he conducted his life. The Reverend doesn’t believe in enemies. He has more important things to do in this world than invest his time in trying to get even with someone he believes has done him wrong.

END