I never intended to become Billy Kioga’s minister. Barely thirty years old, I was the new pastor of a small church in an equally small town called Heavener, sunk in the middle of a rare range of mountains in southeast Oklahoma. I had arrived feeling tired and empty, but Heavener was good to me, and I’ve never forgotten them for that. The town was small enough that just visiting with my neighbors constituted a pastoral “call.” On days when I went down for breakfast at the Wood ‘n’ Rail Restaurant at the edge of town, I’d see half of my church dropping in for coffee or a honey bun on their way to work. We’d talk over politics or tying flies or the upcoming skeet shooting contest run by the Lions Club. In the evenings, if it was warm, I would sit out on my parsonage porch in a hanging swing I’d bought in a kit from Charlie Wilson’s lumber yard and carve on a piece of wood and listen to the news on the radio. Ministering to my flock was turning out to be as helpful for me as it was for them.

However, soon after I arrived in Heavener I was forced into an inmate visitation program that Henry Ryburn organized for the ministers in town. Henry had come to one of our Ministerial Alliance meetings one time and shamed us all into volunteering. He told us that we needed to set a good example for the community here and that we could do that by volunteering to bring the Gospel to these young kids—most of whom were about my age—who were doing time out there in Camp Hodgens, an ugly little prison in a lovely little valley on Shawnee Creek. The truth was, I wasn’t at all interested in visiting prisons, or much of anything else for that matter. I was still feeling bruised from a four-year battering ram of academics at divinity school and was learning how to slow down. It would only be once a week, Henry lied. And all we’d need to do was have a simple one-hour conversation with an inmate. And if the ministers spearheaded this thing, he said, then eventually the church members might go along too, and then we might really start doing some good.

He did finally shame me into it, but I don’t think he ever realized how little I wanted to be involved in that kind of work. Who knew what we would encounter, and what bizarre feats of pastoral counseling I would be called upon to perform? And sure enough, it was on my first day there that I met Billy Kioga, a giant Ponca American Indian who had gotten into trouble for too many alcohol-related misdemeanors. The judge didn’t know where else to send him, so he sent him to Camp Hodgens. Billy was feared and avoided by virtually everybody in the little prison. In addition to his size, he also looked horrible. He had a wide smooth scar on the left side of his face that ran down from the center of his forehead, through his jawbone, and ending at his neck. His left eye could open only slightly, and it made him look terrifying even when he didn’t intend it to. He had been caught in a house fire when he was younger and now most of the left side of his face had a fearsome, pinkish, bubbly shine to it like polished marble.

He had fallen on a lathe in shop class, slicing a huge gash up his arm and down his rib cage. It was deep and long, and no one on the grounds could get him to stop bleeding. I was out in the parking lot waiting for Henry, ready to go home, when it happened. I knew something was wrong because I heard screaming from a distant point across the prison grounds. It was a wild screeching sound, like an animal caught in a trap. No one could calm him. The guards helplessly pushed him to the clinic, wrapped him in some towels, called for the medic, and then looked around for a chaplain. It was an automatic reaction in those days. The prison’s real chaplain was a retired Southern Baptist minister, but he had already gone home, so I was the closest thing to it, and I was handy. So, waiting out by the car, I saw Henry running frantically out to the gate, waving and yelling, and I could tell something was going on. He grabbed me and pulled me back into the prison grounds, so hoarse from yelling that I could only barely understand what he was saying. When we got to the dorm building that housed the clinic, he opened the door, shoved me in, and then slammed it shut to announce my entrance.

On the other side of the room was Billy Kioga, the biggest and most fearsome-looking human being I had ever seen. The scar on his face was bright red and sweating, and his clothes and the towels around his arm were bathed in blood. Even though this was my first visit, I had already heard stories about Billy’s strength and temper. How he had broken through walls with his fists and thrown heavy machinery through the double pane glass of the metal shop. And there on the clinic floor, even wrapped with towels and writhing in pain, he looked as bad as the rumors had painted him.

I stood awkwardly at the door looking at him, waiting for the medic to show up. They didn’t really have a doctor at Camp Hodgens. Instead, they had a Vietnam vet who had been trained as a medic during the war, and who was willing to work for less pay than a real doctor. He, too, had already left that day but someone reached him on the CB in his car and he was on his way back.

When Billy heard the door slam, he leered at me as though I had been the evil source of the pain he felt in his arm. He hadn’t asked anyone for a chaplain and was in no mood to talk to one. Eventually, I decided I should try and speak to him, though it probably would have been better not to.

“You Billy Kioga?” I said, and realized as soon as I spoke how stupid that sounded. Of course that was who he was.

His eyes blazed at me, and he screamed in a wordless rage, not seeing me, but seeing something evil in me.

I fell back flush against the door. When I finally peeled myself off, I tried again. “Anything I can get you?”

He roared again.

After that, I gave up on words and slid down onto the floor to wait, about fifteen feet in front of him. We sat there looking at each other, silently, like distrustful animals from competing species. There we waited for the medic, locked in the same room, but on different planets in our size, life, race, and pain.

After about half an hour, the medic did arrive with a legion of newly courageous guards and he stitched and bandaged Billy up and put him on a bed. In the bustle of their activity, I quietly stepped through the door and back out to my car. That was it. I was done and happy to get away.

Not long after that, I had another opportunity to meet Billy under less terrifying circumstances. He had been assigned to stay in his dorm room for three to five weeks to heal, which put him right down the hall from the chapel where Henry and I usually held our meetings. I ran across him the first time by accident when we were taking a break from our weekly Bible study, and I was investigating the halls looking for a bathroom. As I walked by, I peered absently into the thick glass windows in the doors along the hallway and abruptly saw in one of them the face of a giant sitting up on his bed, not six feet from the door, staring silently back at me. I jumped away and hurried down the hall, but when I returned, slowly making my way back up the same hall from the bathroom, the door was now open, and Billy was inside waiting for me.

“You!” he said, and of course I froze. “You the preacher they sent when I was in the clinic that day?”

I forced a smile, but it didn’t feel like a smile. “Yes, I think I was,” I said.

He motioned for me to come in with the hand that wasn’t in a cast, and I did, but I didn’t trust him. He was the only person in a large plain room with about fifteen bunk beds. I had heard of his reputation for violent moods, and there was nobody else there to see us if one of those moods hit him. However, though I didn’t know it at the time, he was more curious than angry.

“You were a fool,” he said, looking down on me as though talking to a child.

I nodded in agreement, but I didn’t know what he meant.

“I was crazy,” he said. “I coulda killed you. Why’d you come in there?”

“They told me you were hurt,” I said. “I don’t know, they thought we would talk.”

“I don’t talk good when I’m crazy,” he said. “I coulda killed you.”

I laughed cautiously. “Yeah, well, that thought crossed my mind. And we sure didn’t do much talking.”

He smiled and rubbed his still-bandaged shoulder. “I don’t mean to be that way, but I was hurt somethin’ awful.”

“I felt pretty stupid after it was over with.”

“Don’t do it again. Next time I’m crazy like that, just leave me alone. If they tell you to come talk to me, you tell ‘em to go to hell.”

Despite his size and his frightening appearance, what he was trying to do was apologize. I accepted it as best I could and promised to never walk in on him when he was “crazy” again.

After that first meeting I looked in on him whenever I was nearby and, when I did, he would regularly motion me in. In the middle of the day, when I was most likely there, he was always alone, and he seemed to enjoy having company. Perhaps it was because everybody else in the compound was too frightened to talk to him. Perhaps it was that, despite our present differences, there was a lot about our upbringings that had been similar.

The good fortune of his being wrapped in a cast and confined to a bed was that for about two months we got to talk for long periods of time uninterrupted and, in that position, his large size didn’t intimidate me as much. When his arm and ribs healed, and he went back to his regular schedule, he quietly signed up for the prison visitation program and put my name down as his preferred visitor. After a few weeks of these informal visits, he must have grown to count on them, because one day when Henry and I had arrived late and were still pulling things out of the back seat of the car, we heard the loudspeaker blast across the prison grounds: “If Reverend Benson McLean is on the grounds, will you please come to dorm 3C. Your two o’clock appointment is waiting to see you.” Billy knew my aversion to that name, that I preferred “Ben,” and I could almost hear his chuckling about it back in his dorm when he requested it.

I found out a lot about Billy in those visits. Probably more than anybody else there ever did. In the yard, he was known for his anger and terrifying rage, but bound up on his bunk, or sitting across a table in the cafeteria, he spoke with a voice that was more wounded, almost a whisper. I don’t think he talked much with others, and he enjoyed the fact that I was happy to just listen to him. Actually, I preferred that he do the talking because most of the time I couldn’t think of anything particularly wise to say. I learned in those sessions that he was a husband and a father, and a carpenter by trade. He worked too much and drank too much and wasn’t always good to his family. I also found out—though he wasn’t the one who told me—that he was listed there as an alcoholic, and probably dying from cirrhosis of the liver and a bleeding stomach. He had been sent to Camp Hodgens about a year before I met him because he had received six DUIs in a row and a judge decided to show off his considerable ignorance of the disease of alcoholism by sending Billy to prison for a couple of years to “cure” him. I guess he figured that it was Billy’s overwhelming criminal mind that caused him to drink, and that losing his job, being separated from his family, and sitting in prison for two years would stop him from being so mean.

I think in Billy’s mind we actually became friends, and maybe that was right. He said it was because we both came from dirt-farmer families and town-drunk fathers. Billy was raised just outside of Ponca City, Oklahoma, up closer to the border with Kansas. His family had received an allotment of land when the reservation was being broken up, but they hadn’t fared well with it. When his father inherited his portion, he tried to grow wheat and a little barley on it, but his temper and his drinking were too much for the task, and he eventually lost everything. For irrational reasons he took his shortcomings out on members of his family and Billy was one of the main recipients.

Early in his life Billy began doing carpentry and construction work on some of the nice homes out in the suburbs to make ends meet, and that’s where he met Cathy, who later became his wife. Her parents had hired him and a couple of other guys to expand the patio on their home and put in a built-in bar-b-que next to the pool. While he worked, Cathy spent a lot of time in that pool. It was summer, and it was hot, and they weren’t wearing much in the heat, and they were kids, and Cathy got pregnant. They eventually got married, as people often did back then, but they were a difficult match from the beginning, having little in common but a little baby girl from an unwanted pregnancy.

I could feel in his story some similarities with my own. Though the failures of my father were different than his, we both grew up fearing some of the same people. My father, Benson McLean, Sr., ran off and left us when I was about eight, so I don’t have a lot of early memories of him, but what his leaving did to us as a family stayed around a lot longer. My mother said we would be better off now because he beat her something awful while they were together and was drunk a lot of the time, but what I remember most is that when he was gone, we nearly starved. It didn’t feel better off that she was trying to be a single mother with two small boys during the fifties when women were not supposed to be making a living by earning a living.

In the beginning, my dad would come back home now and then and sleep with my mother and then leave again in the morning, with her crying after him. I asked him during one of his visits why he didn’t want to stay with us, and he said it was nothing personal. I called him a liar and he hit me with the back of his hand and knocked me to the floor and told me never to talk back like that again. I didn’t. In fact, I never talked to him again at all after that, in any form, until my Aunt Gladys called us ten years later to say he was dying of lung cancer and cirrhosis of the liver and that my brother and I should come and see him and say goodbye.

My brother didn’t go, but I did, though I probably shouldn’t have because the visit was a lie. You are supposed to say goodbye to someone who you know and love and have a history with, but by the time he died none of that was true. I loved my Aunt Gladys, so for her sake I stood in his bedroom in her house, smelled his death and said goodbye to a stranger who I knew more by reputation than relationship, and I held her hand like a good nephew and told her the lie that he was going to a better place. At least at the time I meant it to be a lie. I was eighteen. What did I know about heaven? Even though our mother had tried to be religious and take us to church and prayer meetings when I was little, I was only eighteen when my father died and at that age all religious words are lies.

Not long after that I left home too and, even though in my case it was simply to go to college, there was always something about my father’s act of leaving that stained the day of my own. I remember that when I packed my final suitcase and loaded it into my car, an old 1963 VW Beetle that I could repair myself, I smelled the same smell of death that I smelled in my aunt’s house when I said goodbye to him, and it got into my clothes and luggage, and wouldn’t come out for weeks. At the time, I didn’t think his leaving tortured me the way abandonment does to some people, though maybe I should have. In my case, I simply smelled him. Every time after that when I made a major change in my life I smelled the smell of his bedroom, when his eyes looked vacantly up through my eyes, up to the ceiling and he told me he had always loved me. 

* * *

I thought it wasn’t so much our history that brought Billy and me together as it was our misery. We both had gotten caught in worlds that neither of us quite understood, and we could each feel the other being an ally in the mystery. Certainly nothing else about us matched. He was twice my size with big heavy hands, callused from years of swinging twenty-ounce claw hammers for a living. In temperament, too, he was prone to take his anger out on things around him with those big hands like mallets. In the year that he had been at Hodgens, Billy had been confined twice and lost his comp time twice, all due to his fits of rage. The odd thing was that he never actually hit anybody. When something would set him off, he could break a table with his fist, or jam it through the sheetrock in a wall. It would scare the spit out of anybody standing near him, but they were probably never in any intentional danger. The real victims of his bouts of anger were on the inside, where both the torturer and the sufferer lived.

“What’s going on with you when you do that, Billy?” I asked him one time when we were eating lunch together in the mess hall.

“Don’t know,” he said. “It’s like I got this monster inside me that wants to get out. I won’t let it most times, but sometimes it gets out.”

To show me what he meant, he brought the palm of his right hand down hard onto the table, and everyone in the room grew still. They all feared he was about to blow up again, and no one wanted to be there if he did.

* * *

Billy wasn’t the one who told me about his being sick, though I had early on suspected something from the watery green tint in his face, especially around his eyes. Actually, I found out how grave his condition was by reading his chart in the clinic. They let me do that, though they probably shouldn’t have. But even though he never mentioned it, I think Billy knew he was dying and likely knew why. What he didn’t know was how to stop it. He had abused his body too long and too hard, like his father before him, and now the abuse was running its course. The monster in his liver had become more of a danger than his anger, though they were related, and the disease was ultimately more powerful. In the end it would bring him down, and all he could do in prison was to wait for it to happen. He asked me on occasion to pray for him, but my prayer life was pretty barren in those days, so I said religious words to him instead, and mysteriously they seemed to help. Sometimes, when people are as low as he was, even a rope without a boat feels like a rescue.

About three months before his parole, he got a letter from Cathy up in Tulsa, which said in essence that while he’d been away her feelings towards him had gone from bad to worse and that she was joining her family who had moved to Tucson, to “try out being separated for a while.” He immediately wrote her back asking her to reconsider and wait for him to get out first. Perhaps this time away had taught him something, he said. Perhaps they had grown from it and would be better for each other after his absence. But she never answered. Then just before his quit time came, he got another letter from her attorney about a divorce and laying out the terms of a settlement. It was the worst that could have happened and came at the worst time. He reacted by trying to act like it didn’t matter because that’s what men do. If anything, he grew louder and more gregarious after he got the letter. He laughed louder and talked more. But anyone who knew him knew that it broke him in half. I knew firsthand because the afternoon after he received the note, on his bunk in his dorm room, when it was just the two of us there, all three hundred pounds of him cried. Long, wailing, uncontrollable crying.

I wish I’d known exactly which day he was to get out. I would have been there to greet him and at least get him started back home again. But they wouldn’t tell me. As it happened, there was no one there at all to meet him, and no family to go home to. So, he just took the tiny bundle of money he’d received at the gate and went into Heavener to the Eagles Club and got drunk, so drunk that he went crazy again. About midnight he either lost or ran out of his government money and had the manager of the club give me a call. I think the manager thought Billy was calling me to come bringing more money, but he wasn’t. Instead, soon after he made the call, Billy went into the bathroom, broke the mirror off the wall, and drove a huge chunk of it into his chest, trying to cut out his stomach. They found him there moments later when someone heard a storm of his dying animal cries coming from the bathroom and went in to see Billy sprawled on the floor bleeding and screaming. He was irrational and crazy again, but I suspect a piece of him, in the midst of his drunkenness, was trying to dig down to one of his monsters and cut it out.

When I got there, a small crowd of frozen, ashen people were standing silently in the center of the bar. The manager grabbed me by the shoulder and pushed me down a hallway to the bathroom. In a walk that felt ominously like the walk months earlier with Henry to the prison clinic, he took me to the door, opened it and shoved me in. And there was Billy, all six-foot-four of him, lying on the floor by the sink, finally, truly, dying. He was wrapped up in towels again, and they were, again, bathed with his blood. It felt like a pattern. They had told me that someone had called the emergency room at the Indian Hospital over in Talihina, but that was at least an hour’s drive away over the mountain, and he was bleeding badly.

I stood at the door for several seconds, shaking. I wanted to leave more than anything else in the world because I knew I didn’t have anything to say to him or anything left to give him. It had been one thing to be his friend when he was well. But now he needed more than friendship and I was feeling my returning emptiness and inadequacies. As I stood there, I saw that he hadn’t yet seen me, and I realized that I could back out of the room quietly and he would never know I had betrayed him. The owner of the club didn’t know who I was and possibly wouldn’t miss me when the ambulance arrived. For a guilty, shameful moment, I stepped silently backward and slid my hand through the door and pushed it open. But then an awful smell poured through the opening, and I stopped. It was overwhelming and solid, and it smelled like death. I recognized it and remembered it. It burned my eyes and got on my skin, and I couldn’t make myself go into it. It felt like there was a physical wall of that smell out in the hallway, and I couldn’t go through it. I wiped it from my eyes like sweat, and then let the door fall closed. He heard me then, and looked up, and he smiled.

“Hey, Ben,” he said weakly, as though he expected me to be there.

“Hey, Billy,” I said, frozen, still leaning against the door and not looking at him. “Billy, why’d you do this?”

“I don’t know, Ben.” He pulled at one of the towels wrapped around him. His voice was frail, with none of the rage that filled it the first time we met. “I guess I thought they’d stop me.”

I looked around the room for the first time. It was wet and dark. Only one light was functioning over the sink, and it buzzed periodically in and out. “Can I get you anything?”

“No,” he said. “They called me an ambulance. It should be here in a sec.” I couldn’t tell if he really believed that or not. “But if you can just sit here for a while, I’d appreciate it.”

I went over and sat down next to him, my back against the door of a toilet stall and, with the familiarity of a brother, he put his huge head down in my lap. We didn’t speak for several minutes, and my eyes began to fill with tears, in part from the suffering of my friend, and in part from my own inability to help him. I thought again of leaving, but the ache of leaving felt worse than the ache of staying, so I stayed, holding his head, and after a time he was able to talk.

He talked mainly about his father again and some of his own failures and abuse. And I realized that Billy had been right. It was our fathers who had brought us together. Both of us were burdened by their presence when we were young, and we carried the weight of their absence as adults. Mine, however, at least had the decency to abandon our family when we were young so we could get on without him, but Billy’s did not. My father left us with very few memories, within which my fantasies wrote complex and dishonest pictures of what kind of man he might have been. Billy’s stayed around long enough to teach him and his sister the meaning of intentional, wrenching pain from someone standing high above them, from someone they were told loved them. It was something that haunted him forever. When a father beats a child at an early age, it’s not just a physical hurt, it’s a divine hurt. God is implicated in the crime. The universe comes to be among the accused and is forever suspect. It’s ironic, I grew up searching for a creator who had been missing in my life and Billy grew up wishing his had been. My prayers were the search for an absent God, and his were that God would someday be absent.

He also wanted to talk more about his life with Cathy and all the lies and deceit and drinking that had ruined their marriage. He told me that one time he was supposed to take care of their little girl while Cathy was shopping, but he got drunk and fell asleep on top of her and nearly smothered her. Another time he met a woman at a bar and they slept together that night, and when he lied about it later to Cathy, she knew but didn’t say anything and he hated himself for it more than if she had spoken out. He had taken her for granted at the time and now all of it was coming back on him and she could no longer stand him. He deserved what he got from her, he said. It wasn’t right, what he did, and he knew it.

His remorse was genuine, I think, but it was also too late. Now in his stupor, there seemed no other way to atone for his guilt than to gouge out the offending source of all his evil. He asked me to pray for him again and for the first time in months I may have succeeded. When two frightened friends cry together in their bewilderment, it comes close to prayer. When I finished, he said he felt better. In fact, we both felt better.

We continued to sit there for more than an hour after that, more relaxed. Sometimes talking, sometimes crying. There on the floor, wrapped in towels once again, two sons of dirt-farmer, town-drunk fathers holding on to each other, feeling lost and found for very different reasons, we finally began to feel calmed, maybe healed, perhaps forgiven; and then he died.