Doug Cooper Spencer

He asked me if I knew Oscar.  I told him no.  He said Oscar was my uncle and that he had just entered the room.

I thought about it, aware of the room we were in, small and crowded with tattered books and old newspapers.  The furniture on which we sat had seen its day.  Bishop Nickerson sat behind his desk, a large wooden one.  There was so much on his desk, but the only thing that stood out to me was a large book and a tin of smoking tobacco.

“You sure?” Bishop Nickerson asked.

Nodding my head I told him, “Yes sir.  To the best of my knowledge.”

“Well he just entered the room and he’s telling me he’s your uncle.”

I moved around a bit in the lumpy old chair I was sitting in, feeling my hands move across the cracked leather, and I glanced at the door that had been closed, then to the corner behind the bishop.  Nothing.

“Okay,” Bishop Nickerson said.  Then he turned a bit to his right and spoke to the invisible guest, “Guess you got the wrong place Oscar.”  The bishop said this with a laugh and I laughed too, more out of relief.  But I was there for a reason and I wanted results.

After all, hadn’t I been brought there by my father because of a drawing I had shown him and the story behind the drawing?  It was a sketch of a dream I had been having off and on for almost ten years since 1964.  A dream in which I awoke in my bedroom with a stranger sitting across the room from me.  I recalled looking for my older brother who shared the bed with me, but he wasn’t there, just me and the stranger, a boy, sitting in a high back wooden chair staring out the window with his back to me.  In the dream I can recall getting out of bed and walking to the boy who, by his stature, appeared to be my age at the time.

As I walked up to him I saw what held his attention.  Outside the window were brilliant lights of orange and yellow that danced against the window and filled the sky.  I stood a bit behind the boy and stared at the lights in awe.  I remember that neither I, nor the boy had been frightened by the display of lights because there was no sense of danger just fascination.  It was as if the lights were somehow connected to our being there.  But to the boy it seemed as if it was more.  He sat silently, his feet dangling from the chair, looking ahead transfixed by the lights as if the lights were relating to him, as if there was something silent going on between them.

I wanted to see who the boy was, so I leaned around to look at his face and suddenly I was snapped back to only seeing his profile.  I tried again and was back to my original position.  No matter how hard I tried to look at the front of the boy’s face I would find myself back to only seeing his profile.  It was there the dream ended.  The dream had haunted me for years recurring once or twice a year from the time I was a child to becoming a young man.  Now I was nineteen years old and needed some answers.

I had heard about Bishop Nickerson from my family and the wondrous things he could do, but I doubted them.  The only wondrous thing I had known him to do was to wean my father off booze, something none of us thought anyone could do.  To me that was the only wondrous thing about this man.

There had been times when I had been invited to meet him, but me being a young college student, a rational thinker, I had always turned the invitations down.  But that Saturday afternoon, the day after having another glimpse of the dream I went to my father with the drawing I had made.  My father felt it was time for me to meet the bishop.  So there we were, the bishop and me, sitting in the small crowded office that smelled of warmth, leather and old books.

“So tell me how things are going with school,” the bishop asked.  He asked the question partly out of interest with my life, but also to fill time until a revelation came.

I sat back and looked at him.  He was a short man, maybe five-two, with a complexion of the color of coal, a fleece of silver woolen hair cut close to his head and shocking crystal blue eyes.  “School’s alright, I guess.”

“You guess?”  He laughed and shifted himself on the old seat pillows he sat on to raise him to his desk.  “You’d better be sure!” he remarked.  “College is a good thing.  We need more of our people in college.”

“Yessir,” I remarked.  I could hear my father out in the sanctuary of the small church cleaning and setting up chairs for service the next day.

We talked a bit more about what I had been doing with my life besides school.  I told him only things I wanted him to know because I was beginning to learn to be cautious about the fact that I liked men.  I wouldn’t tell him that, of course.

After a while of talking the bishop stopped and looked across the room.  “You sure you don’t know an Oscar?  He’s still standing here and he insists he’s your uncle.”

This time I thought more about it.  Had either of my parents ever mentioned an Oscar in their stories?  I couldn’t remember that name ever being mentioned.

“Call your father in here,” Bishop Nickerson said.

I called my father who came into the office.  The bishop asked him the question and my father thought and rubbed his chin.  “Can’t say I do.”

“What about Sister Cooper?  She didn’t have a brother named Oscar?”

“No.  Nope,” my father said, shaking his head.

“Well you really got the wrong office,” Bishop said to the invisible man to his right.  We all had a laugh and my father went back out into the church.

A few minutes later, as Bishop Nickerson and I continued talking, my father tore through the door.  “Oscar!”  He stood with a bright face and his eyes were full of tears.  “I forgot about Oscar!  He was my older sister’s husband.  He died--”

Bishop Nickerson held up his hand.  “In 1932.”

“Yeah,” my father said, suddenly remembering.  “He always said I was his favorite brother-in-law.  My sister was much older than me, so Oscar was like a father to me.  My daddy died when I was real young, so I can’t recall too much about him.  But then my sister married Oscar and he became like a father to me.”

The bishop nodded with a smile.  “Oscar’s laughing.  He remembers that too.”

My father went on.  “I remember me and him used to sit on the back porch; him in his favorite rockin’ chair with me at his feet every mornin’ and watch the sun rise and we would just talk.”  My father continued with the memories coming back.  “And he always plowed the field with…”

“His left suspender unbuckled,” the bishop and my father said together.

“That’s Oscar,” my father said.  He went on to tell how Oscar had contracted cancer, and how he, my father would sit with him on the back porch knowing that Oscar would be leaving him soon.  “And one morning, while was sittin’ on the porch watchin’ the sun rise Oscar’s hand slowly dropped beside his rockin’ chair.  I got up and looked at him, and then I went in the house and woke everybody up to tell’em Oscar was gone.”

“Thanks Brother Cooper,” Bishop Nickerson said.  “That’s all we need now.”

I watched my father leave the office.  I was stunned by the revelation.  It was all there: morning, the wooden chair like Oscar’s rocking chair, the boy watching lights almost the color of a sunrise and a ten year old boy (my father would have been ten in 1932).  I looked at the door my father had just closed, my mouth open, and then I looked back at the bishop.

“Now he’s talking to me,” Bishop Nickerson said as he listened to Oscar.  “He said what happened to you that morning wasn’t a dream.  That he came into your room to visit you.”

“But why?”

“He says you remind him so much of your father that he just wanted to talk with you.”

The bishop commenced to tell me what happened that morning.  Oscar had come into my room and woke me.  He said Oscar didn’t wake the physical self, but he woke my spiritual self so the two of us could spend some time together.  I asked what Oscar had shown me, and the bishop said things that I shouldn’t remember.  It was why I can only remember flashing lights instead of what he showed me outside the window.  And in answering why the boy in the chair, who was obviously me, would never let me see his face, the bishop said whenever a person sees someone in a dream but can’t see his or her face then the person is the dreamer.  I was the boy in the chair.

Time went by as the bishop told me things that Oscar was telling him.  Things about me, and how I should not live in fear and that I would travel many places and meet many people, and to trust and have faith because things would be all right.

Then with a twinkle in his eyes, Bishop Nickerson listened more to Oscar, and then, turned to me.  “Oh, and Oscar says that thing you’re struggling with?  You’ll be okay.”

I left the bishop’s office that day stunned but feeling so happy that all I had doubted had been replaced with hope and most of all, with faith.  As my father and I drove home he didn’t ask me anything.  We simply talked about life.

(A true story, by Doug Cooper Spencer... Photo by Gregory Cooper Spencer)