My Heart Goes Out To You Scot Walker   © Copyright 2026 by Scot Walker

Photo by OG Mpango at Pexels.

LeRoy had given up his credit cards in August—he just chopped them up in little pieces and sent them back with no return address, smudged a little from that sliver of soap, yet as dusty as the hell in which he now lived as he licked his lips wolfishly hungry and still all totally alone.

The week before, Wanda, his wife of twenty-two years, left him for Liam Allen, the butcher who lived down the street. Wanda said she needed more bacon and steaks in her life, but LeRoy suspected she was more interested in the size and shape of the butcher’s sausage than she was in his sirloin. Sadly, sexually, Wanda had cut off LeRoy last January, the day after he found Jesus at the R&W Root Beer Stand, which doubled as the Praise Be to God altar at the Holy Ghost Pentecostal Church every Thursday night and all day Sunday. But the moment LeRoy rose from his knees, he heard the voice of Jesus telling him he must spend the rest of his days crying in the wilderness—like John the Baptist—converting the Godless heathens and bringing them to salvation. Perhaps that’s why LeRoy lost his job, he wasn’t sure; he did know, however, that he’d spent his eight hours a day at Firehouse Number 3, witnessing for Jesus.

And now that LeRoy was born-again and complete in Jesus, he knew that God would reveal everything in His own sweet time. There’s no hurrying the Lord, he thought.

LeRoy realized from the get-go that Wanda was on the other side of the Lord—on the Devil’s side—and he tried to convert her but they just grew further and further apart, especially after that evening of prayer when all Wanda had wanted was sex—LeRoy wanted—no he needed—far more than that from a wife.

LeRoy bore up to that chastisement, though, like he had borne up to all the others, It’s God’s will—and if Jesus bore those nails, I can bear a few pins in my cushions of life Leroy thought.

Losing their mutual friends, however, was more difficult. LeRoy noticed that all of Wanda’s friends began to avoid him—it was almost as if they were afraid of Jesus—and His power.

At first, he’d find himself disconnected when he called them. Disconnected in a thousand ways, LeRoy thought, disconnected from Verizon, disconnected from life . . . disconnected from our Savior, but then when he’d see them walking toward him in the mall or along the sidewalk, he’d sense them sniffing him as if he was nothing more than a mangy dog, as he watched them turn and walk the other way. To LeRoy Fitzgerald Johnson, that was the cudgel delivering its cruelest blow; it was even worse than loosing Wanda. She was only his wife—but these men and women were his friends, for goodness sakes and now their souls were crying out to be saved by the blood of Christ. But Jesus would help him survive, LeRoy was sure of that! Jesus would help him survive—it seemed like LeRoy had survived since that first bite of the Gospel woke up his soul.

And LeRoy did survive, using up all his savings, cashing in his retirement fund, selling his furniture piece-by-piece, and doing odd jobs, but now he realized his only recourse was bankruptcy. He was a moral, ethical Christian man, a born-again Christian, so the thought of dodging bill collectors by declaring bankruptcy was anathema to him. . . yet LeRoy could see no other choice. He had prayed to Almighty Jesus for strength and for the power to get through this trial, but nothing happened yet and his prayers, as The Right Reverend Bobby Lee McNair had said, were answered in the negative! God was putting LeRoy through a special trial—a test to strengthen him in the ways of the Lord and, as a child of God, LeRoy rejoiced in his suffering. LeRoy knew the Lord would provide. LeRoy knew he would survive. LeRoy knew God had a purpose for everything.

Praying for the strength and wisdom to survive, LeRoy read his Bible starting with the book of Job. Lost my job, LeRoy thought, Might as well read Job. No matter what happened, LeRoy knew he’d never lose his sense of humor. He had lost his job, his credit cards, his furniture, his wife, his children and even his Conway Twitty rock and roll record collection, but he would never lose his sense of humor!

As LeRoy read about Job’s friends in the Bible, he giggled to himself, “I should just sit here and wait for my friends to come chastise me.” Just then the doorbell rang and when he opened the door, Elmira Utterway stood grinning at him. “Well LeRoy Fitzpatrick, just look at you. Just look at you, just look at you!” Elmira Utterway pinched each of his cheeks in mock horror.

LeRoy loved Elmira like a sister in the Lord, but he knew he couldn’t look at himself. It was such a silly expression, LeRoy thought.

“Just look at you!” Elmira repeated, “You’re just as skinny as a paperclip. Why aren’t you eating? Get some good red meat in you!”

Let me think, LeRoy thought, Duh, I don’t have any money. I don’t have any food. Perhaps that’s why I’m not eating. “Well, Elmira, I guess I’m just not that hungry now that Wanda left me. I just don’t know, but the fact that she ran off with the butcher sort of soured me on meat—perhaps I should become a vegan.”

“We’ll put an end to that,” Elmira Utterway said.

Elmira was always coming up with new and exciting catch phrases; LeRoy could hardly wait for the next one.

Elmira opened her bulbous pocketbook and took out a tiny tin can. “Look,” she said, “It’s Beluga caviar! I liberated it from the Cavanaughs’ anniversary party.”

“Well, the Lord doth provide,” LeRoy said. “Hallelujah.”

Elmira didn’t know if LeRoy was serious or not. She had done her best, but if LeRoy Fitzpatrick Johnson wasn’t just tickled to death that she’d taken a can of Beluga caviar from her friends’ party, well then, perhaps he could just fend for himself. Elmira was in a heavy snit; she wasn’t breathing fire. She could sense gasoline fumes spewing from her Christian loins.

Elmira Utterway tried to calm down as she walked toward the door, but her blood pressure was rising. “Well, LeRoy Fitzpatrick, I have some errands to run. My sugar’s high and I need to take my insulin and only the Good Lord knows what I’ve done with my pills.” Then, as an afterthought, Elmira mumbled, “May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His strength shine upon you and give you peace. Goodbye.” Elmira clipped her final ‘goodbye’ as she left, casting herself out of the room like an expelled member of a reality show even though it made LeRoy’s blood, or whatever there was left of it, boil.

“I’ll have to pray for LeRoy every day now,” Elmira grumbled as soon as she got out of earshot. “Damn it! Double damn it!”

LeRoy dumped the can of Beluga caviar in the trash can in the alley. Then he picked it back out, carried it to the kitchen, opened it and spread it on a plate. Cat food! Fish eggs is cat food! It makes me wanna puke! Why couldn’t Elmira bring me a hamburger or chicken wings like a normal person? LeRoy took the plate out back and placed it next to the withered geraniums and dead nasturtiums. At least the alley cats’ll have somethin’ to eat, he thought as his stomach growled mercilessly for the thirteenth time that day in veins that were azure blue rather than scarlet.

LeRoy felt depressed, so he went back to his Bible study. “There’s always strength in the Lord,” LeRoy thought, as he picked up the Holy Scriptures. “The only way to truly study God’s Word is to let God’s holy finger point the way.” He opened his Bible to Job chapter 31 and read, “I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid? For what portion of God is there from above? and what inheritance of the Almighty from on high? Is not destruction to the wicked and a strange punishment to the workers of iniquity? Doth not he see my ways, and count all my steps? If I have walked with vanity, or if my foot hath hasted to deceit; let me be weighed in an even balance, that God may know mine integrity. If my step hath turned out of the way, and mine heart walked after mine eyes, and if any blot hath cleaved to mine hands; then let me sow, and let another eat; yea, let my offspring be rooted out.”

LeRoy prayed and the strength and mercy of the Lord came upon him in shivers and quakes as his emaciated body trembled and God revealed His truth. LeRoy had lusted after Elmira Utterway and now he realized Elmira must be the maid, and maids in the Bible were virgins—and that must have meant that the Lord was warning him about Elmira. Elmira had never married and LeRoy had never even seen her with a man—so YES, yes, yes, Elmira was definitely that virgin—that maid in the book of Job.

It didn’t matter that Elmira Utterway was sixty-eight years old, stood five foot one and weighed two hundred and thirty-nine pounds or that she had a bald spot at the back of her head, or that she had lost most of her teeth, or that she had one floppy bosom that fell slightly below her navel and another that hung like a sledgehammer pendulously banging up and down on her right ribcage. If didn’t even matter that she had an assy smell that lingered in LeRoy’s house for days after she left. And no matter how many windows LeRoy opened or how much he tried to air out his house, Elmira’s smell always lingered like the smell of rancid butter in the middle of August. Yet, LeRoy knew he must be lusting after Elmira! The Bible said it, LeRoy believed it, and that settled it! LeRoy was lusting after Elmira Utterway, his spinster neighbor whom he had known for thirty-seven years. He had lusted after her and now LeRoy William Fitzpatrick, Johnson would burn in hell for all eternity—and all his children would be rooted out

LeRoy dropped to his knees and prayed like Tammy Baker on one of her better days, praying for the power to purge his lustful feelings from his loins! LeRoy knew his feelings were the reason for his suffering and he knew he had to find a way to end his lust for the short bald-headed smelly-assed melon-breasted fat woman who lived down the road. No matter what, he must purge her memory from his mind. He must remove the very taste of her from his lips.

LeRoy looked for his special magazine, the one he kept hidden in the back of his dresser. He whistled as he carried it with him to the john. He didn’t stay long, but when he returned, his lust for Elmira was gone, poof! Dried up and gone.

LeRoy sat back down at his desk and prayed to the Lord as he finished reveling in his blessings, reading and rereading the sacred passage from Job. The second part of the Scripture was too difficult for LeRoy to understand, but he knew that sooner or later the Lord would give him the wisdom to comprehend it. “God knows all about me and even counts my steps. If I’ve walked in vanity and my feet have led me toward deceit, let God weigh me in the balance. If I’ve stepped out of line, if my heart follows my eyes or if a spot sticks to my fingers, then let me sow and let another eat and let my offspring end forever.”

LeRoy prayed silently. He didn’t peek and barely breathed. He just squeezed his eyelids so tight he could feel the tears forming at the corners of his eyes. He looked nowhere. He held his face deep in his hands, praying to soften the hardness of his soul. God will reveal His message to me; I just need to listen.

LeRoy stood up and walked from the kitchen back to the alley, counting his steps as he did, One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven steps from the kitchen to the alley, LeRoy thought, God not only numbered my steps, but He’s blessed me, as well. God created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh. What could be more sacred? What could be more holy? God is blessing me by my steps. LeRoy pondered for a moment. My heart opened to the cats in the back yard and the spot that stuck to my fingers must have been those fish eggs. I sowed so another could eat. God has blessed me. God has thoroughly blessed me!

LeRoy sang a hymn of praise to the Lord for taking his job and his credit cards and his money and his wife and his children and his car and his furniture and his Conway Twitty record collection. LeRoy praised God but the last words of the Scripture still bothered him. “And let my offspring end forever,’” LeRoy read aloud, “Does that mean I won’t have any more children?” Dumbfounded, LeRoy took the same photo magazine back to the bathroom, but this time it took three times longer for him to finish.

Afterwards, LeRoy slept—he slept well into the next morning and when he awoke, he clamored downstairs and opened the Scriptures. Again, the pages opened to Job and LeRoy read from chapter 33, “He shall no longer desire meat or bread. His flesh shall be consumed and his bones shall be made bare.”

LeRoy fell to his knees and thanked God that he was redeemed now that he was starving and emaciated. LeRoy thanked God that his clothes hung loosely from his body. LeRoy thanked God that he had lost forty-seven pounds in the past eleven months. LeRoy thanked God that he ate only one meal a day. “God is gracious,” LeRoy said, “God is gracious and I am nothing but a miserable sinner saved by grace.”

LeRoy’s stomach growled, but he praised God for His mercy and kindness. When the doorbell rang, LeRoy admitted his pastor, The Right Reverend Bobby Lee McNair who greeted LeRoy with his Sunday morning passion, “Son, may the Grace of Jesus Christ be with you and may His continence shine upon you. You are a sinner saved by grace.”

“Jesus knows my heart,” LeRoy said, wondering why his pastor needed to remind him of his sins in the midst of his hard times. “Would you pray with me, reverend, and help me as I read God’s Holy Word?” LeRoy didn’t wait for an answer. He opened his Bible and almost mystically turned to the book of Job, chapter 22, “Can man be compared to God even if he is perfect? What does it profit God if you are righteous; only the innocent shall be saved.”

The Right Reverend Bobby Lee McNair and LeRoy Fitzpatrick Johnson prayed. They got down on their knees on the hard dirty bare cracked pine floors and prayed to the Almighty Father above them with the Reverend’s hairy arms wrapped tightly around LeRoy’s shoulders. “Precious God, give us the wisdom to understand Thy Holy Word,” The Right Reverend Bobby Lee prayed in a voice that ricocheted through LeRoy’s empty house. “Give us the power to understand Thy Holy Word.”

After several long moments of silence, The Reverend McNair said, “Like the Light that shines in the darkness of the morass, Jesus appeared to me! Jesus has given me the wisdom to see His Word and explain. LeRoy, you thought you were more important than our Lord. You were sanctimonious! You were too holy for your own good! You turned your back on our Savior and went down the path to perdition and strayed onto the seedy streets of sin.”

LeRoy wanted to protest. He knew he was a sinner saved by grace but he also knew he had left the seedy streets of sin on the day of his salvation and prayed all those murky days of his past would be wiped clean.

“LeRoy, you’ve made everyone around you suffer. You lost your savings, your retirement fund and your credit cards. You forced your wife to run away with a rich man in order to provide for your three teenage daughters. God has punished you, LeRoy. God has brought down his wrath upon you for your ingratitude to your family. But they are still innocent and they shall be saved. Hallelujah! You, however, are woefully, wicked, woefully, woefully—WOE-FULLY-WICKED! Evil exudes from the depths of your soul, my son; it seeps out of you like sap oozing down the side of a sugar maple tree. I feel it in your wayward spirit, I see it in your face. There is nothing you can do but pray for God’s forgiveness.”

The Right Reverend Bobby Lee McNair shook the dust off his shoes as he left LeRoy’s house. “I can have nothing more to do with you until your heart gets right with the Lord.”

LeRoy ran his fingers back through the Scriptures. This time he opened it to Job chapter 8, “How long will you speak these things and how long shall your words be filled with hot air? Does God change his judgment, even if your children have sinned against Him? If you pray and ask forgiveness, God will bless your home in the future.”

God seemed to be saying something different from Bobby Lee. LeRoy hadn’t sinned, yet everyone from Wanda to Elmira to the reverend had condemned him. LeRoy read the Scriptures over and over and when he finished, he was convinced that God would reward him anyway…so he praised God and went to bed.

At five the next morning, LeRoy was awakened by a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing. The caller was his former boss, Captain Jack Urbano, of the District of Columbia Fire Department. Jack said he was desperate. There had been another series of manhole cover explosion in historic Georgetown and fires were raging out of control. The affluent part of town was without power—the fat wealthy residents were screaming to the city leaders. The merchants were raising hell. The residents were raising hell. The Georgetown elite were ready to riot unless their problems were solved immediately. Jack said he would pay anything if LeRoy would just get his skinny ass to Wisconsin and M Street and help put out the damned fires.

Forgiving Jack for his profanity outburst, LeRoy jumped into his jeans and tugged on his work boots. He walked a mile to Metro, stuck his nearly valueless Metro card in the machine and rode to Foggy Bottom. He didn’t have enough money to pay for a bus transfer, so he walked the mile to Wisconsin Avenue passing the butcher shops filled with bloody red meats—meats LeRoy had not even seen for weeks and weeks.

Three manhole covers had exploded and everything inside them was burning. If LeRoy had ever envisioned a picture of a living hell, this was it. All the electrical wires, all the phone lines, all the viscera of the city was going up in smoke before LeRoy’s jobless eyes.

This was a tragedy greater than Job’s, LeRoy thought. The lives of the rich Georgetown residents would come to a screeching stop if they were forced to live without their computers and telephones and access to the fashionable shops and Georgetown, as LeRoy pictured it, would be out of business.

Emulating his hero, Dante Alighieri, LeRoy grabbed a hard hat and headed off for the hottest part of the inferno. All that day, LeRoy fought the blazes, but each time he controlled a fire, another manhole cover blew and more flames erupted, filling the streets of Georgetown with black smoke and gas.

The merchants went screaming to the mayor and dragged him to Georgetown. The mayor walked the streets with them realizing that something must be done immediately to placate his constituents and keep his job. The editor of the Washington Post, twelve US Representatives, owners of telecommunication networks and all the dowager socialites lived in Georgetown. They had always lived in Georgetown—Georgetown was their life, their spirit, their soul and Georgetowners were not used to inconveniences—not in a long shot. They weren’t used to solving problems outside their corporate offices. And God knows, exploding manhole covers were not on their agenda.

LeRoy worked all day, all night and half the next morning before he and his crew were able to control the fires, but the electric lines were destroyed, and the power was still off and the phones weren’t working and Georgetown’s computers lay idle. The residents and merchants complained to everyone, assuring everyone that this was the worst disaster they’d ever seen. It was as if hell had opened and swallowed their entire community.

LeRoy sat at a table on Wisconsin Avenue. He didn’t have enough to eat so it was something of a thrill for him to sit down in the same chair that, perhaps, senators and congressmen and kings and emperors had once sat on. And as he sat, he glanced down at the morning newspaper and saw a full-page article about the ravishing fires—in this very spot in Georgetown. He saw a photograph of M Street and Wisconsin Avenue. He saw the very restaurant in which he sat, but he didn’t see any pictures of the firemen who doused the flames. He turned the page and saw pictures of the irate merchants and the socialites. They were losing millions a day, they said. The food in their refrigerators had rotted, they said. They had to throw all the food away, they said. The fires lasted two entire days and the merchants lost all their customers, they said. They’d have to declare bankruptcy, they said. They’d have to lay off their employees and close their shops, they said. They wept and gnashed their teeth as they blamed the mayor and the power company and the fire department and the city government; their lives were over, they said. They were ruined, they said. They would never recover, they said. There was no way they could ever survive, they said.

The socialites, too, were enraged. Bette Lynn Whittimore’s life was ruined. She had been planning her wedding for the past fifteen months she boo-hooed to the Washington Post reporters. She’d planned to get married in her family’s Georgetown mansion, but now everything had changed. All her hopes for the future had gone up in a puff of smoke. Her life was over. Her daddy had spent $243,369 for her wedding and now everything was ruined. Without electricity, her rock band would be unable to hook up their speakers; they would be powerless to perform, she sobbed. Without electricity, her parents’ twenty-three-bedroom estate would be darker than the interior of the Metro tunnels at three o’clock in the morning. Without electricity, her three hundred well-fed guests would trip over each other, they’d knock over the punch bowls or into one of the three Olympic-sized swimming pools—they might even fall on her wedding cake! She could sense the catastrophe happening—she knew it was coming—she could feel it. She more than sensed it—she knew it: her life was over. It was ruined with a capital Rune. Bette Lynn wept copiously in front of the Washington Post reporters and when she told them that she had spent the entire day crying on her Barbie, there wasn’t a dry eye from 22^nd and Q Street to 24^th Street and M.

It’s time, LeRoy thought, for me to open my jaws and bite my way through that obnoxious mob. He brushed his hair and put on his suit and entered the mansion—and there in his site, without lights or power or police protection, he began to devour them one by one, ripping their guts out, spreading their entrails on the wedding cake and on the strings of the grand piano—head by head, arm by arm, he ravaged the room—the yard—and the entire corridor once known as Georgetown. Tasting their blood, biting their bones, he wrapped up his Bible, stuck a bookmark in the book of Job, inserted a brief note, and left it on the doorstep.

The note inside the Bible was smudged with smoke and covered with the ashes of the Georgetown manhole fires. It was simply written by a simple man and said, “My heart goes out to you in your time of grief.” The word “your” was underscored three times.

As the Christmas bells rang from the Washington Cathedral signaling the birth of his savior Jesus Christ and with his stomach no longer growing and his wolfish needs met, Leroy walked back home, petted the contentedly well-fed cat lingering in the alley and thanked God for his blessings.