by Emma Janson
Tellingly, his daughter’s favorite memory with her dad was from the summer of 1998, based in the time they’d spent fishing with Pastor Martin and his own daughter in the Sandusky River. Her dad was genuinely happy as they reeled and cast their lines between sips of Coke. Gloria, in her teens, had become bored after the first ten minutes, so the girls had sat off to the side and chatted quietly until everything was set up. When the sun cooled, and night was beginning to blanket the river, they packed up their gear and left with buckets of fish. The bounty was so plentiful that her dad spent the rest of the night and into the next morning scaling and smoking them while he sang hymnals, including his favorite, “Amazing Grace.” The next afternoon, after a couple hours of sleep, he sat on the porch relaxing with contentment and iced tea while offering the fish for free to anyone passing by.
When Gloria asked her dad why he didn’t sell the fish instead, he confidently explained himself in a short and to-the-point monologue. (He always felt that life lessons were opportunities to learn, and this was no different, but the simplicity of what he said wasn’t appreciated by the teen.) Not until she was much older did she understand the valuable message he’d been trying to convey.
“See that there?” He pointed to a thirty-something Hispanic woman who got back into her car and drove off with two smoked fish. “She lost faith in humanity when her son drowned in her backyard pool last summer. Folk feel bad around here, but don’t know what to say, for fear that they upset the poor woman. So, nobody talks to her anymore...but she talks to me. We talk about fish! Had a good laugh over stinking up the porch with them guts, you see. Smoked fish get people talking, Gloria. Sometimes people just need free fish.”
****
The first time his alternate and completely opposite personality appeared was in 2005, when he stood before the church proclaiming God was a ‘motherfucker’ and then fell asleep in the center aisle. He was out cold and had to be slapped awake by old Sister O’Dell with her moles as big as dimes on her left cheek. Months of this behavior passed before his beloved congregation felt that exorcising the devil was the answer to his unexpected possessions. For them, there was no other explanation for Mr. Jenkin’s uncontrollable and sudden outbursts of anger. After extensive physical testing, he’d been cleared by the local medical community and told that he was ‘fit as a fiddle’, and yet he continued to black out. When he came to, a colorful myriad of retold stories about the events he couldn’t remember appalled him.
Buck heard this history over and over again in the time he worked at Northern Lights. He knew that Mr. Jenkins was a good man and never judged him for becoming a different person, but instead believed that his split had begun months earlier, in the summer of 2004 when he’d saved a girl known as little Tiffany from a local house fire. This act wasn’t a surprise, considering the kind of man he was...however, it was big news in his small town. He received much praise and several interviews in local newspapers, as well as a two-minute run on the local news channel. He was humble enough to say that anyone in his situation would have done the same thing, but the truth was that no one in their right mind would have risked their life the way he had.
Mr. Jenkins was fifty-four years old when he happened by little Tiffany’s home while on an early morning search for an address nearby, where the home owners had advertised the sale of their used lawnmower. His plan was to fix it up and donate it to the church. As he drove slowly and triple-checked the numbers on the homes against the scrap piece of paper in his hand, he heard the little girl scream from her second-story bedroom.
The fire, later determined to be a result of faulty wiring, originating in the kitchen from a coffee pot programmed to brew at 8 AM. The wild current and fire burned through the walls of the first floor, where the child’s parents had fallen asleep on the couch the night before – presumably after recreational drug use, though nobody knows that for sure except the coroner. Tiffany, a very tall two-year-old, was then alarmed by heat under her mattress and the smoke seeping into her room from the space at the bottom of her bedroom door. When her normal crying wasn’t soothed by a parent’s arms, her panic changed into full-blown screams that could be heard by anyone who happened to be driving by.
Once Mr. Jenkins heard the desperate screams, he parked his car in the middle of the street and began running as best he could with his bowed legs. He tried to go through the front door, but the heat singed his arm hairs from three feet away. A stubborn welling inside of him pushed at his initial reaction, which was to go back to his car and wait for the fire department. With no time to spare, he instead tried to rush through the heat, using his body like a battering ram, but the door burned the arm he led with. The paper would later quote him as saying that “God must have directed my eyes to the neighbor’s house,” where he found an extended ladder resting against the neighboring house that was surrounded by scaffolding and painting equipment. In a burst of adrenaline-fueled strength, he grabbed the bottom of the heavy wooden ladder and ran 30 feet or more back to the fire with it, the tool fully extended 24 feet in the air. He believed God gave him the strength for that, too.
Eye witnesses who were on the phone with 911 would say Mr. Jenkins heaved the ladder forward so the top of it would fall to the burning home near the little girl. Their accounts went on to describe how, unbelievably, he seemed to be climbing the bottom steps even before the top made contact with the siding near the window. Like a predator, he fearlessly scaled the ladder. At the top, he began punching and scratching at the screen to break through to the little girl. One of his punches bent the flimsy frame enough for him to push his finger into a dent, so that he was then ripping it out of the jamb before tossing it to the ground. Hovering 24 feet above the earth, he was enraged and wildly determined to save the girl and, although his efforts were enough to clear the window, they were also enough to throw him off balance, causing the ladder to wobble and fall backward with the weight of him at the top.
Neighbors said he violently thrashed and grabbed for the window frame. By the Grace of God, he caught the ledge and latched onto it with a claw-like grip before throwing his burnt arm inside the room. The ladder fell on the children’s toys below as Mr. Jenkins hung from the window. He was rejuvenated by the screams of Tiffany, now close to his ears. He swung his body, then heaved himself up and into the room as his orthopedic shoes frantically tried to grip the siding. Recorded 911 calls replayed a scream on the ten o’clock news: My God, I think he’s going to make it!
By the time Mr. Jenkins pulled himself into the burning home, three men from the neighborhood were already in the yard and trying to push the ladder back into place, but the three of them stumbled through it as he stood in the window, trying to catch his breath while holding the crying child. He coughed a few times, then disappeared into the smoke-filled room with the baby. The men at the bottom pushed the ladder against the house, but when they finally reached it into the smoke billowing from the window to rescue them, the screams had stopped.
The sound of the fire and rescue truck sirens grew louder in the neighborhood, the closer they got, but witnesses said they heard glass breaking through the whir of noises in the area and, moments later, Mr. Jenkins stumbled toward the crowd with little Tiffany wrapped in a wet towel. A woman from the crowd grabbed the child and ran her across the street to safety; Mr. Jenkins followed and finally collapsed with broken glass imbedded in his arms and legs.
The reporter on the ten o’clock news explained that the hero had soaked the towel the best he could in the bathroom in order to prevent burns to the child. He also reported that the man had run into a nearby bedroom, which happened to be the master room with a bay window overlooking the backyard. Having no knowledge of bay windows, he searched for a way to open it. When the heat on the floor began to melt his orthopedic shoes, he gave up on that idea and looked for anything to break the glass.
What he grabbed was a painted rock that had been on the nightstand. It had been found and painted by the litt
le girl a mere two weeks prior to the fire. It was about the size of a softball, painted blue and gray with ‘Tiff’ written in her mother’s hot pink, puff-paint handwriting on the front. Little Tiffany had finished the masterpiece by decorating it with glitter glue and stickers.
An unsuspecting, dispensable memento suddenly became the most valuable item in the world as it transformed into the object that would save two lives and be the last remaining reminder of a mother’s love.
The ten o’clock news reduced the significance of the rock to an item the hero had used to get the girl out of the house, but it was so much more than this alone, and Mr. Jenkins couldn’t stop thinking about it afterward. His mind was plagued with its potential significance. He rubbed at his ear as the image of it flashed in his mind, going beyond visual explanations to short blackouts he never told anyone about. Obsessed over the rock, he returned to the burnt remains of the home. It was taped off with posted warning signs, but the treasured rock that had saved their lives had to be found – for Tiffany. At first, he timidly and delicately sifted over the area. Then his actions became angry shoveling with his bare hands before a sudden massive headache dropped him to his knees in a pool of sooty water. He wanted to give up. He wanted to be in his favorite chair at home – a home he still had the luxury of going back to. He shook his head as he rubbed his hands over his eyes to stop the floating colored lights. Mr. Jenkins knew he needed to rest, but he couldn’t. He never said the words out loud, but an inner strength screamed for him to get the fuck up as a terrible pain surged through his inner ear.
Determined, he pushed through his pain and found the rock. With his thumb, he wiped away the black water from the painted memories. Now he could see his purpose as blood oozed from the dip in his ear.
Mr. Jenkins salvaged the rock and anything else he could. By noon, his cargo pockets were full of charred trinkets and his polo shirt was drenched in sweat. He returned to his home to clean – everything, including the red stains he had not noticed on the shoulder of his shirt.
You could ask anyone, young and old, about Mr. Jenkins, the piano player at El Bethel Church. They would agree that the fire changed the man. He became angry, and an altogether different person.
It was Christmas, five months after his act of heroism, when his alter, Samuel, appeared for the first time in church. Mr. Jenkins, who had to hear about it from Sister O’Dell, was mortified with what he had done...but he held no memory of it. All the respect he had earned over the years slowly began to crumble apart as this behavior continued and he became the joke of the town. He learned the hard way that it takes years to build trust in a community, but only seconds to take it away. Eventually, the community began to ignore “Cray-Bo on Avenue Fo.” Even the owner of the camp politely explained that his outbursts were scaring the children and that he could no longer be allowed to direct choir. The phone calls for piano lessons stopped, too, as did the welcomes from his aunt’s assisted living home. His fellow brothers and sisters within his congregation were willing to help with an exorcism, which they could claim later to be a part of, but not to sit and lend him an ear. Other than Gloria and Pastor Martin, the only people who continued to visit him was the Hispanic woman with her new tattoo of an angel fish on her shoulder. His best friends of forty years and his neighbors, some of whom he’d babysat when they’d been in diapers, began to whisper about his offensive episodes, but offered no consultation or compassion. A once local hero who’d saved little Tiffany’s life from a house fire was cast out of the circles of support he so desperately needed.
Once committed to Northern Lights, Mr. Jenkins became a forgotten neighbor, father, and friend; no one came around to visit the person he’d once been, and this included his only daughter – who had also forgotten that, sometimes, even fishermen needed free fish.
Buck’s heart bled for people like Mr. Jenkins, who protected his mental fragility by assuming another identity. The other staff members called it good versus evil, but Buck never saw it that way. So, as Buck made his way to the craft room where he’d been called to break up a disturbance, he thought about the gentle man who’d broken down and accepted an alternate personality other than his own. He thought about Mr. Jenkins’ ten years at Northern Lights, and wanted nothing more than for the two men to live as harmoniously as they could in the same body.
MEET SAMUEL
When Gloria arrived at his doorstep in the Buckeye State, it was a typical, quiet May evening for her father. He answered the door in a fake silk pajama set with his reading glasses on top of his head. She already knew that, before he’d been interrupted by the doorbell, he’d been comfortably reading his paper and watching the nightly news with his cup of decaffeinated coffee next to him. This had been the routine for years and would probably continue to be his routine until he was eighty because that’s just the kind of man he was – predictable. It was also the reason his wife had left, but some people just preferred their routine, and that was okay by her. After they hugged in the foyer, she followed behind him as he walked the best he could with his slightly bowed legs to his favorite recliner in the living room. The surface chat was light and wonderful, but they skirted around the reason she was there until she specifically brought it up. It changed the mood in the house completely as Mr. Jenkins cleared his throat and got up – without saying a word – to refill his coffee cup.
When he returned to the living room, he had a steaming cup for each of them. Once he resettled in his recliner, Gloria could tell that he’d been crying, as was evidenced by a red hue in the whites of his eyes and a puffiness that hadn’t been there before.
“Dad, I know you don’t want to face this, but we can do this together. That’s why I’m here. We just need to talk about what’s going on...with the outbursts. I’m hearing the rumors even where I am in college, Dad, and if you need help – I want to help.” She nervously scratched at the skin on the back of her neck and carefully sipped the coffee that she didn’t want.
“I know. I know. That’s why you’re here. Appreciate that, Gloria. Really do. You know, I’m a grown man…” He trailed off as he choked back tears and bit at his lip, which was beginning to quiver. He removed the reading glasses from the top of his head to set them aside, allowing himself a moment to clear his throat before he began again. “I’m a grown man who is healthy and has lived a good, honest life. Worked hard. Prayed hard. Did what I could to make people around me happy, but I don’t know what’s happening. I black out, do bad things that I don’t remember and hurt people that I love with my words. Almost scared of myself, you know?”
He tugged at his ear as if he was relieving an itch deep within then pulled a brush from an end table drawer and began to nervously brush forward the top and sides of his graying hair. “Sister O’Dell at the church – you remember her, she has the big goiter on her neck and the hairy moles on her face. Well, she told me that I stood before God and everyone in the middle of Pastor Martin’s sermon to curse the Lord Almighty himself. Got so heated my partials flew out of my mouth onto the center aisle.” He gingerly set the brush down and sipped at his coffee to give his daughter a moment to take it all in.
Gloria’s hands covered her mouth as she sat in shock, not knowing if she should giggle at the story or be horrified.
He dug his free index finger deep into his chest for emphasis. “Go ahead. Laugh if you want to, but I believe the Father is not happy with me right now. No, sir.”
Gloria asked if it could possibly be dementia or Alzheimer’s. Mr. Jenkins scrunched his face up, appalled that such a question should cross her mind. “Your Great Nanna Jenkins was one-hundred-and-three...still spanking me at chess and debating politics before she passed. We don’t have old-timers’ disease runnin’ through our family tree.” From the table, he picked up the brush again and tossed it back into the drawer, then grabbed his cup and muted the news report on the television. “Something is going on. Made God mad. Made somebody mad. Him or Zeus or Allah. What’s that one woman..
.from the people with the red polka dots on their foreheads? Shiva! Yeah, that one. Musta pissed her off, too. Ain’t nothin’ like a woman’s scorn.”
Gloria shook her head, but laughed as she informed him that the polka dot people were Hindus. They both laughed, and then she got up to investigate the burning smell that was coming from the kitchen. The coffee pot had been left on without anything in it, so she turned the machine off, pulled the pot from the heating element, and set it in the sink to cool before she checked the refrigerator for something to snack on. As she bent down to investigate the bottom drawers, though, her dad suddenly appeared in the doorway, leaning with his left shoulder against the door jam and with one bow-leg crossed over the other.
“Got fired, you know,” he said.
Gloria jumped at his unexpected presence, but then she returned to the drawer without looking carefully in his direction. “Who got fired, Dad?” she asked into the refrigerator.
“Sam. I told that nigga to quit being a nigga, and let that motha-fuckin’ boss know that he ain’t working in a motherfuckin’ sugar mill his whole life.”
Gloria whipped around to see who was speaking to her in such a manner. Surely, it wasn’t her God-fearing father saying that word. When she turned, though, she saw that it was in fact her dad standing relaxed and yet confidently in the doorway with a grin across his face. “Dad! Jesus Christ! What did you say?” Her heart exploded with shock as her hand grabbed at her chest.
