Part 2: A 55-Year-Old Iron Horsemen Biker Has Parked His Harley Outside a Small Georgia Church Every Sunday for 3 Years and Refused to Come Inside — When the New Pastor Looked Up His Name in the Old Church Records, He Found Something From 1993

I’m Pastor Caleb Whittaker. I’m forty-three. I have been the pastor of Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church for fourteen months. I came to Mt. Pisgah from a previous appointment at a small Methodist church in Statesboro, where I had served for nine years. I am married to a woman named Helen. We have two daughters.

The day I drove up to Mt. Pisgah for my interview with the pulpit committee in February of last year, I noticed a man on a red Harley with a dog in a sidecar parked on the gravel shoulder of the dirt road outside the church.

He was not at the interview. He was not in the parking lot. He was on the shoulder, twenty feet from the front steps, sitting on his bike.

I was inside the building for two and a half hours that day. When I left, he was still there.

I drove past him. He did not look up.

I asked the chairman of the pulpit committee — a sixty-eight-year-old man named Verlon Higgs — about him in the parking lot before I drove home.

Verlon said, “Brother. He’s been there every Sunday for three years. Through Reverend Hatfield’s last year, through the eighteen months we were between pastors. He pulls up at 10:55. He sits on his bike. The dog sits in the sidecar. They listen through the windows when we open them. He leaves at 12:05.”

I said, “Has anyone talked to him?”

Verlon said, “Reverend Hatfield went out to him in the first month. Asked him to come in. Travis told him no. Said he wasn’t worthy to come inside. Reverend Hatfield asked him every six months. Travis said the same thing every time. Reverend Hatfield retired last year. Travis kept coming.”

I said, “What’s his last name?”

Verlon said, “Brother. We don’t know. Reverend Hatfield knew him from before he came back, but the Reverend has dementia now. He’s at a nursing home in Vidalia. We never asked Travis.”

I took the position.

I started in March.

For my first year as pastor of Mt. Pisgah, I did exactly what Reverend Hatfield had done. Every Sunday at 11:55 a.m., during the closing hymn, I walked out the front doors of the sanctuary, down the gravel walkway, to the shoulder of the road. I introduced myself to Travis the first time. I asked him if he would like to come inside.

He said, “Pastor. I appreciate you. The answer is no. I’m not worthy to be in there. I just want to listen from out here.”

I said, “Brother. You are always welcome. The door is open to you the moment you want it.”

He said, “Pastor. I know.”

I went back inside.

I did not push.

I asked him every Sunday for three months.

His answer was always the same. Polite. Calm. Definite.

He always called me Pastor. He always touched the brim of his cap when I came up. He always petted Angel — who would press her old graying head into his thigh when I appeared — while he spoke to me. He always thanked me for the offer.

He never came inside.

I started, in May, opening the windows of the sanctuary wider than they had been opened before.

Mt. Pisgah is a small white-clapboard country church built in 1881. It has eight tall windows on the east and west walls of the sanctuary. They are single-pane glass. They have crank handles. For most of my first year, the deacons had been opening them about a third of the way during the summer to let air in.

I started cranking them all the way open.

I started leaving them open during the entire service, even when it was hot, even when bugs came in.

I asked our music director — a woman named Renee, sixty-two, our pianist for thirty-one years — to play the closing hymns a little louder.

I did not tell anyone why.

Renee figured it out by the third Sunday. She started picking the closing hymns more carefully. She started picking the hymns my grandmother used to call “the porch hymns” — the old ones, the ones with simple melodies that carry across distances. In the Garden. The Old Rugged Cross. It Is Well with My Soul. Just As I Am.

At 11:55, when the sound of those hymns was at its loudest, I would walk out to the shoulder of the road.

Travis would be on his bike. Angel would be in the sidecar. He would be looking at the church.

I would say, “Brother. Will you come inside this Sunday?”

He would say, “Pastor. Not yet.”

I would walk back inside.

That was the rhythm of my first eleven months at Mt. Pisgah.

In late January of this year, on a Tuesday afternoon in my office, I was going through a tall metal filing cabinet that had been moved into the church basement when Reverend Hatfield retired. The cabinet contained the church’s membership records going back to 1968.

I was looking, that afternoon, for a baptism record for a woman in our current congregation who needed it for a passport application.

I was in the 1990s drawer when I saw it.

A folder labeled MAYS, TRAVIS L. — member 1990-1993.

I pulled it out.

I sat at the small desk in the basement and read it.

The folder contained Travis’s membership card, signed in his own handwriting in 1990 when he was twenty-two. His baptism record, dated July 8th, 1990, performed by Reverend Hatfield. A wedding certificate from October of 1991, for the marriage of Travis L. Mays to Brenda Anne Carlton, performed by Reverend Hatfield.

There was a baptism record for a child named Daniel Wilbur Mays — Wilbur after Reverend Hatfield himself, who Travis and Brenda had named their son after — performed on April 12th, 1989.

There was a death certificate for Daniel Wilbur Mays, dated November 23rd, 1993. Cause of death: complications of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Age at death: seven years, six months, fourteen days.

There was a small handwritten note, in Reverend Hatfield’s careful pastoral handwriting, dated December 12th, 1993, paper-clipped to the inside of the folder.

The note said:

Travis Mays stood up in the middle of service this morning, walked to the pulpit, and screamed at me — If your God is real, why did He take my boy. He left the building. Brenda did not follow. I went to their house in the afternoon. He had already packed his clothes and tools and gone. Brenda is at her sister’s. Lord, please bring this man home one day. He buried his son in our cemetery on November 26th. He has not been back. He was a good man. Watch over him.

I closed the folder.

I walked up the basement stairs.

I walked into the sanctuary.

I walked to the east window — the third one, the one closest to where Travis parks his bike on the shoulder of the road.

I cranked the window all the way open. Then I went to find a screwdriver, and I removed the screen.

I went back to my office.

I sat in my chair for a long time.

I had, sitting on a gravel shoulder twenty feet from my church every Sunday for three years, a member who had buried his seven-year-old son in my cemetery on a Sunday in November of 1993 and had not stopped grieving him.

I had been asking him to come inside for eleven months.

I had not asked him about his son.

I drove out to the cemetery behind the church that same Tuesday afternoon.

The cemetery is small. About one hundred and fifty plots. I knew most of them by family name from doing graveside services over fourteen months.

I walked the rows. I found him in the third row, near the back.

A small simple granite stone, weathered now to a soft grey.

It said: DANIEL WILBUR MAYS — APRIL 1986 — NOVEMBER 1993 — BELOVED SON.

There was a small bouquet of plastic forget-me-nots on the stone. They were faded but recent. Within the last two months. Somebody was tending it.

I knelt down. I cleaned a few leaves off the top of the stone.

I noticed something I had not seen at first. Behind the stone, in the grass, was a small object. About the size of a child’s fist.

I picked it up.

It was a small angel figurine. Cheap white ceramic. A child’s angel — the kind sold at small Christian gift shops. One wing had been broken and glued back. The face had been worn nearly smooth. It had been outside, on the back of the stone, for a long time.

I knew, before I turned it over, what was going to be on the bottom.

On the bottom of the angel, in faded purple Sharpie, was a child’s careful printing.

It said: FOR DAD AND MOMMY — FROM DANNY — ANGEL.

The handwriting of a seven-year-old.

I sat in the cemetery grass next to that stone and cried.

I did not see Travis the following Sunday. He was there. I saw him from the window. But I did not go out to him at the closing hymn.

I went out to him on Wednesday morning.

I drove to his shop in Lyons. I asked the owner — a man named Ronnie — if Travis was in. Ronnie pointed to a back bay where Travis was bent over the engine of an old Yamaha.

I walked back. Travis looked up.

He said, “Pastor. Everything okay?”

I said, “Travis. Can we talk? Privately. Outside?”

He set his wrench down. We walked to the parking lot. Angel was in the back seat of his work truck — Travis took her with him to work every day. She lifted her head and watched us through the back window.

I said, “Travis. I read the church records. I know about Daniel.”

He went very still.

He said, “Pastor.”

I said, “Travis. I know you buried him in our cemetery in November of 1993. I know what you said in the sanctuary that morning in December. I know why you have been sitting outside my church for three years.”

He turned his face away.

I said, “Travis. I drove out to the cemetery on Tuesday. I found the angel.”

He turned back to me. His eyes had filled.

I said, “Travis. He named her, didn’t he. Your dog. Your son named her before he died.”

Travis said, “Pastor.”

He could not get the words out.

I said, “Travis. I am not here to ask you to come inside this Sunday. I am here to ask you something different.”

He said, “Yes, sir.”

I said, “Travis. Will you let me bring the service out to you. Just one Sunday. The whole congregation. We’ll bring chairs out to the side yard. We’ll worship in the grass. You don’t have to come anywhere. We will come to where you already are.”

He stood there in the parking lot with his crooked nose and his grey beard and his Iron Horsemen vest and the grease on his hands and he cried in front of his pastor for the first time in thirty years.

He said, “Pastor. You’d do that for me?”

I said, “Brother. The church has been chasing you for thirty years. The least it can do is meet you on the road for one Sunday.”

He said, “I’d be in your debt, Pastor.”

I said, “Travis. You have never been in our debt. You buried a seven-year-old in our cemetery. You have been our brother since the day you walked back.”

He covered his eyes with one big greasy hand.

Angel watched us from the back of the truck.

We held the service outside on the second Sunday of February.

The deacons set up forty folding chairs in a half-circle in the grass on the side of the church facing the road. Renee brought the small electric piano out on an extension cord. Volunteers brought blankets and lawn chairs and Thermoses of coffee. The whole congregation came outside.

Travis pulled up at 10:55 in his usual spot on the shoulder.

He saw the chairs.

He saw the piano.

He saw forty people in coats and Sunday clothes facing toward him in the grass.

He sat on his bike for a long minute.

Then he killed the engine.

He got off.

He lifted Angel out of the sidecar. She was old and stiff but she walked beside him.

He walked, very slowly, the twenty feet from his bike to the side yard of the church.

I met him at the edge of the grass.

I said, “Brother. Welcome back.”

He said, “Pastor. I haven’t earned this.”

I said, “Brother. Nobody earns this. That’s the whole gospel.”

He sat down in a folding chair in the back row. Angel lay down at his feet.

We sang In the Garden.

He cried through the whole hymn.

Angel never moved from his feet.

That was eight months ago.

Travis is now an active member of Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church.

He sits in the back row.

He brings Angel.

She lies at his feet through every service. The deacons bring her water in a small plastic dish. Renee gives her a piece of biscuit at the door every Sunday.

Travis still wears his Iron Horsemen vest to church. Nobody has asked him to take it off. Nobody is going to.

He has not stopped riding with the club. He has stopped riding on Sunday mornings. He told me, in my office one Wednesday, that the club had voted unanimously to support his Sunday absence as long as he showed up for Saturday-night meetings.

He still goes to Daniel’s grave every Friday afternoon.

He has started bringing fresh flowers instead of plastic ones.

The angel figurine still sits behind the headstone.

Last Sunday, after the service, Travis stayed late.

I was locking up the front doors. He was standing at the bottom of the steps with Angel.

He said, “Pastor. Can I ask you something?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Pastor. The pew where I sit. The back row, third from the aisle.”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “I sat in that exact pew with Brenda and Danny every Sunday for three years.”

I said, “I know, brother.”

He said, “How do you know.”

I said, “I asked Verlon. He remembered.”

Travis’s eyes filled.

He said, “Pastor. I came back to the same pew. I didn’t even mean to.”

I said, “Brother. The pew was waiting for you.”

Angel pressed her old graying head against his thigh.

He put one big greasy hand on her head.

He looked up at the sky over Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church.

He said, “Danny. Daddy’s home, son.”

I did not say anything.

I did not need to.

If you want to see Angel now — the way she still rides in the sidecar of Travis’s Harley to church every Sunday morning, the way she lies at his feet in the back pew through every service, the small life she has been keeping for thirty years for a seven-year-old boy who picked out her name a week before he died — I’ve shared her most recent video in the comments.