Recently I got interested again in a family story, the story of “the fire,” and so I did a little digging.
It was easy enough to find the article in the Spokesman Review, June 11, 1935: a house in Spokane nearly burned to the ground, the children thrown out an upstairs window and caught in the arms of a neighbor, Clyde Ralstin. My mom was four. My Aunt Lettie died of burns. The house was “a mass of flames,” the paper said.
But the surprising thing is what I found out next, when I looked up Clyde Ralstin—a name I didn’t know before—because it turns out that in September of that same year, he murdered a cop in a little town north of Spokane.
Clyde was a policeman himself, a detective on the Spokane police force, but he was also a thief, the head of a gang of thieves stealing milk and cheese from creameries all over Spokane and Pend Oreille counties to sell on the black market. This was in the middle of the Depression, and milk and cheese were scarce.
And one night that fall when a cop on the nightshift caught the gang robbing the creamery in his little town, Clyde pulled out his .32 service revolver and shot him four times, once through the heart—though no one could ever prove it, though the police in Spokane covered it up for years.
The man who made it possible for me to exist took the life of another man, a good man, a family man, The Spokesman Review said, just trying to do his job.
I wouldn’t be here without him.
That’s the mystery. That’s just how life is, and anyone who claims that God has a plan for his or her life in the sense that everything is clear cut and everything moves in a straight line from good to good is simply trying to explain away a complexity that should keep us all humble. The rain when it falls falls on the good and the bad, and the sun when it shines shines on us all. The truth is never must one thing.
God is present in our lives, God is with us always, just not in the way we like to think.
They only found Clyde’s .32 over half a century later when the Spokane River was low, caked in mud like an artifact, wedged between rocks beneath the Post Street Bridge where all those years the water surged over it towards the falls.
God is in the rocks. God is in the years. God is in the river, and the mystery of the river can be solved.