Have a Little Faith - Mitch Albom [31]
“Ahhhh,” he exhaled. “Old, old, old.”
I bet you could still do a helluva sermon.
He grabbed the walker’s handles. He paused.
“You think so?” he asked, softly.
Yeah, I said. No question.
In the basement of his house there are old film reels of the Reb, Sarah, and their family:
Here they are in the early 1950s, bouncing their first child, Shalom.
Here they are a few years later with their twin girls, Orah and Rinah.
Here they are in 1960, pushing Gilah, their youngest, in her baby carriage.
Although the footage is grainy, the expressions of delight on the Reb’s face—holding, hugging, and kissing his children—are unmistakable. He seems predestined to raise a family. He never hits his kids. He rarely raises his voice. He makes memories in small, loving bites: slow afternoon walks home from temple, nights doing homework with his daughters, long Sabbath dinners of family conversation, summer days throwing a baseball backward over his head to his son.
Once, he drives Shalom and a few of his young friends over the bridge from Philadelphia. As they approach the toll booth, he asks if the boys have their passports.
“Passports?” they say.
“You mean you don’t have your passports—and you expect to get into New Jersey?” he cries. “Quick! Hide under that blanket! Don’t breathe! Don’t make a sound!”
Later, he teases them about the whole thing. But under that blanket, in the back of a car, another family story is forged, one that father and son will laugh about for decades. This is how a legacy is built. One memory at a time.
His kids are grown now. His son is an established rabbi. His oldest daughter is a library director; his youngest, a teacher. They each have children of their own.
“We have this photograph, all of us together,” the Reb says. “Whenever I feel the spirit of death hovering, I look at that picture, the whole family smiling at the camera. And I say, ‘Al, you done okay.
“This is your immortality.’”
Church
As I entered the church, a thin man with a high forehead nodded and gave me a small white envelope in case I wished to make a donation. He motioned for me to take a seat anywhere. The weather had turned to a blowing rain, and the hole in the ceiling loomed overhead, dark and dripping, the red buckets on plywood planks to catch the incoming water.
The pews were mostly empty. Up front, near the altar, a man sat behind a portable organ and occasionally hit a chord, which was punctuated with a rim shot—pwock!—by a drummer. Their small music echoed in the big room.
Standing to the side was Pastor Henry, in a long blue robe, swaying back and forth. After several of his entreaties, I had come to a service. I’m not sure why. Maybe curiosity. Maybe, to be blunt, to see if I trusted him for the charity contribution. We had spoken several times now. He had spared no detail of his criminal history—the drugs, the guns, the jail time—and while it was nice that he was honest, if you went strictly on his past, there might be no reason to invest in his future.
But there was also something sad and confessional in his face, something weary in his voice, as if he’d had enough of the world, or at least certain parts of it. And while I couldn’t help but think of that old expression “Never trust a fat preacher,” I had little concern that Henry Covington was siphoning profits from his congregation. There were none to be had.
He looked up from his meditation and saw me. Then he continued praying.
Henry Covington was sent to Detroit in 1992 by Bishop Roy Brown of the Pilgrim Assemblies International in New York. Brown had discovered Henry in his church, had heard his testimony, and had taken him to prisons and watched the way inmates reacted to his story. Eventually, after training him, teaching him, and ordaining him a deacon, he asked Henry to go to the Motor City.
Henry would have done anything for Brown. He moved his family