Even So

by Lauren B. Davis

  “Roland, where’s Sister Eileen? She wanted to see me.”

  He pointed right. “In the lot, with some gardener guy.”

  Angela rounded the corner and saw Sister Eileen in the vacant lot talking to a tall man. He had a slightly receding hairline with a high widow’s peak. The blond hair above was tousled and revealed a gleam of gel. His face was square, sun-lined, with deep-set blue eyes. He held a wide stance, his legs set firmly, and his arms were crossed, fingers tucked beneath his biceps, thumbs tapping his chest. His eyes darted toward Angela. He smiled.

  Sister Eileen turned. “Oh, good. Angela, come here — I want to introduce you. This is Carsten Pilgaard. He’s a master gardener, owns a nursery, and he’s generously agreed to donate his time and materials so we can build the community garden.”

  He took Angela’s hand in both of his. They were calloused, strong, warm. “I am very happy to meet you, Angela. Sister tells me you are a wonderful gardener. We will do some great things here, ja?”

  His spoke as though there were a small cave in his mouth; he moved his lips very little, his tone steady, nearly monotone, but deep and full of hollows. He half-swallowed the r’s. Swedish?

  “Sister Eileen exaggerates,” said Angela. “I volunteer at the land trust, and at the governor’s mansion, and I fuss with orchids. I like to putter in my garden. A few flowers, some lettuce. Herbs.”

  “A kitchen garden. Everyone should have a kitchen garden. But you like to do this?”

  “Yes. I do. Good to get out and dig in the dirt sometimes. Good for the soul.”

  “The soul.” His grin slightly mocking. “Also, the belly.”

  Sister Eileen looped her arm through Angela’s. “Think of it. We’ll turn this no man’s land into our own tiny farm. Maybe just the first. All these zombie houses gone, and the lots turned into vegetable gardens.” She radiated delight. “I just knew God would answer our prayers. He sent Carsten.”

  “Sister tells me it is hard for people to get good vegetables.”

  “They’re expensive, and if you don’t have a car you’re not going off to a farmer’s market. Fast food is cheaper and more filling, even if it’s only technically food. Part of the initiative is education.” Sister Eileen looked up at Angela. “You’ll help Carsten with this, won’t you?”

  “Anything I can do.”

  “I hope you are good with a hammer and nails. We must build raised boxes. This soil here must be not good, maybe even very bad. We will get good organic soil and pumice for the bottom of the beds and some screening to keep out squirrels.”

  Sister Eileen said, “I’d like to put you in charge of this project, Angela. Anyone can do intake, but you have a way with people and can get volunteers to help with the heavy work, and I know you aren’t afraid of work yourself, and you have a green thumb, and, oh, it’s so wonderful!”

  Angela let Sister Eileen’s enthusiasm sweep her up. Sister Eileen saw the whole world as evidence of God’s love, saw God in every face, even the most filthy, toothless, battered, and raving street person. It was a force to be reckoned with, that love. Best to just let the wave carry you.

  Besides, working for a few months with this man? Oh, all right, if you insist.

  “Of course.” Angela smiled up at Carsten and he smiled back.

  Did their eyes lock for that slight moment that signalled mutual interest? They did. Was she glad she’d visited the salon the day before and had her hair coloured and shaped to frame her face in soft curls? She was. That she wore the teal sweater that suited her skin tone so well? Indeed. That she’d applied her favourite lip gloss? You bet.

  She licked her lower lip. “It’s going to be great,” she said.

  That fizzy feeling sparkled up through her belly, the old feeling, signalling the game was on. She told herself that’s all it was. A game. A little fun. Nothing more.

  How reckless she was with all the fragile things she held.

  Sister Eileen

  It was stuffy in the prison, and more so in the blue-walled classroom where Eileen was trying to help Taruk with his GED. It had been a difficult month. Overcrowding, no air conditioning, and an incident that resulted in the death of a young man who had unfortunately sported an Aryan Nation tattoo had put everyone on edge. Tempers flared. There were taunts and insults and tensions in the dorms and the gym and the chow hall. As a result, most of the usual volunteers had failed to show up the last couple of weeks, and so Eileen had, at Ruth’s request, stepped in. She leaned over Taruk and tried not to wrinkle her nose at the stench of sweat coming off him. He’d probably run out of money and couldn’t afford the overpriced deodorant in the commissary.

  “Okay,” she said, “let me explain it again. You’ll get it.”

  At a nearby table sat another inmate, talking with a girl about his age, a college student from Princeton who wore a green T-shirt with the name PETEY GREENE stenciled on it. The Petey Greene program was a volunteer organization that brought college students into the facility to help tutor the inmates. She was the only other volunteer who’d come in today.

  Taruk shuffled his feet and cracked his knuckles. M.O.B. was tattooed across the back of one hand. R.R.R. across the other. M.O.B. meant either “Member of Bloods” or “Money over Bitches,” and R.R.R. meant “Respect, Reputation, Revenge.”

  “Bullshit, man,” he said. “It’s all bullshit. When am I gonna use this crap?”

  “I don’t know. But if you want to pass your GED you have to learn it. Okay?”

  “Whatever.” He slumped.

  “Okay.” She put her finger to the spot on the Xeroxed page to which she wanted, desperately, to direct his attention. Voices were raised in the hall for a moment, but no bells rang, and the voices subsided. “All prime numbers can be divided only by one and itself. This means that the number has exactly two factors,” she read.

  “What’s a factor?”

  She knew this, of course she did, but … blank. Eileen scanned the page, looking for the explanation. It had to be there, didn’t it? For example, 13 is a prime number because 13 can only be divided evenly by 1 and 13. If the number has more than two factors, we say that the number is composite. “Um, I think, yes, factors are numbers we can multiply together to get a number. So, if you multiply two times three, you get six, right? So, two and three are factors of six.”

  “They’re just numbers, then. So why don’t they call them that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m a math idiot.”

  Taruk twisted his head around to look at her. “Why are you the one teaching me, then?”

  In his eyes, Eileen saw a series of emotions, much like an old flip-card animation, surprise, amusement, fuck-you, and dismissal.

  No, she thought, no, don’t. Stupid old white woman. How could she be anything but a stupid old white woman?

  “Your regular tutor will be back next week, I’m sure. But for now, ya got me. Not ideal, I agree. Listen, don’t you have a passion? I mean, my passion is literature, okay? I’d read all day long if I could. In fact, we should probably switch to the English section if I’m going to be in any way useful here, but come on, tell me, what’s your thing?”

  “My thing?” He laughed, looking away from her.

  “Yes. Something that, when you do it, it just feels right, down in your bones.” And, she prayed, Friend, make me better than I am. And in the praying came that hollow feeling again, the place where God was not.

  “My kid. That’s my thing.” He said the last word with mockery.

  “Your kid.”

  “Yeah, my kid.”

  “Girl? Boy?”

  “Daughter. She five.”

  “What’s her name?”

  He side-eyed her. “Daniella.”

  She moved around the small, metal desk and pulled up a chair. “Tell me about her.”

  “Nothing to tell. She’s five.” Taruk leaned away from her, took the hem of his scrub shirt and wiped his face with it. He stretched out his legs, crossed his a
nkles.

  “But, when you’re with her, how do you feel?”

  He looked up at her. Narrowed his eyes. “She’s everything, right? She’s my light, she and her mother.”

  “Who’s her mom?”

  “Roxane. Known her all my life. Lived next door to me, so we, like, got no secrets, you know.”

  She did know, because that’s what she had always wanted God to feel like for her. The one from whom she had no secrets, who knew her flawed self, and loved her anyway. In principle, she believed this. In experience? Like Taruk, whose beloved seemed so far away, so did hers. That silence, it could deafen you. She said, “And you love each other, knowing everything.”

  The inmate behind Taruk slammed his hand on the desk and laughed loudly. Taruk jumped and spun around. “The fuck?”

  The man held up both his hands. “Sorry, man. Sorry.”

  He turned back to Eileen. “Yeah. Like that. I guess. I just want to go home and take care of them like they deserve, you know?”

  “You need a GED for that, yes?”

  “I need money.”

  “Then you need a college degree.”

  “I need to take care of business.”

  “There are programs that can get you into college. Get a degree and a decent job.”

  He shook his head and laughed. “Sister, what world you live in?” His voice has softened, as though he had just realized he was talking to someone who couldn’t, given her apparent brain injury, be held responsible for her idiocy.

  “I’m serious. The NJ-Step Program. Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons Consortium. They have higher education courses for all students in prison while you’re here, and then assist you in making the transition to college life when you’re released. Sister Ruth knows all about it. Do you want me to get you some of the information?”

  “I don’t know. I guess.”

  “You can do it, Taruk. You can get out, get a job, take care of Roxane and Daniella.”

  “I’m gonna do that in any case. No doubt.”

  “I believe you.”

  Did she? She believed he would try. She believed he would put every bit of effort he had into it; she could see that determination in his face, but she also understood that his chances were awful. A convicted felon? Who would hire him, without even a degree, unless a group like NJ-STEP, who boasted journalists and activists and college professors among their ranks, helped him? He’d be back on the corner, with a gun in his belt, a return to prison almost inevitable, if not a radically shortened lifespan.

  “And if you end up back here, what then?”

  “I’m not coming back here. I’m out, I’m out.” He chewed the inside of his lip.

  “Let’s just say whatever activity that got you in here isn’t what you want to spend the rest of your life doing. What, I mean other than being with your daughter, what do you like doing?”

  “I don’t know. Like what?” He paused. “I got some rhymes.”

  “You write?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Let’s start there.”

  “Nothing you’d like.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I don’t have to like it. But if you want to write it, well, at least that gives us an excuse to move from math to English, right?”

  “Yeah, well.” He looked up at the wall clock. “I’m gonna go take a shower. Thanks for coming in, Sister. Appreciate it.”

  “Hey!”

  Officer McIntyre, a lanky ginger-haired man with a long moustache and watery blue eyes, opened the door and walked into the classroom. Usually the guard, posted at the end of the education corridor, stayed behind his desk, only venturing into the classrooms if summoned by a teacher. He pointed at the young female tutor.

  “You, you’re done. Come with me.”

  The girl turned bright red and stood up. She looked at the inmate she’d been helping and said, “What’s going on?”

  “Officer?” Eileen stayed in her seat. “Is something wrong?”

  Taruk kept his eyes on the pages in front of him, tapping his pencil rapidly on the paper.

  “No physical contact,” said Officer McIntyre.

  “What? I just touched his arm. You know, like …” and she reached out to touch him again. The young man moved his shoulder away.

  “Kevin, get back to your dorm. I’ll deal with you in a minute. Miss, you’ll be leaving. Come with me.” McIntyre held his arm out, making come-here gestures with his fingers.

  Eileen was about to say something, but a small em-em from Taruk stopped her. She would talk to the administrator later. It was ridiculous.

  The girl gathered her possessions and left the room with McIntyre without another word, the student trailing behind them.

  “Really?” said Eileen. “What’s going to happen now?”

  “Yeah, that’s why I don’t get tutored by no girl who don’t know nothing, right?”

  Eileen was glad of her age at that moment.

  “Why?”

  “Because these girls, they come up in here and be all nice and touchy like they our friends and shit and look, okay, they mean well, no doubt, and we appreciate it and all, but we the ones get in trouble. Kevin going to be in seg for a couple of days now. She breaks the rules, but what they going to do to her ’cept tell her she can’t come back? No big deal, right. We the ones got to pay.”

  RUTH’S OFFICE WAS IN THE administrative corridor. It was a small cinder-block space, with a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, and a bookshelf; the sort of office a low-level bureaucrat in the 1950s Soviet Union might have enjoyed, the point of which was to reinforce the fact that whomever occupied the space was a lesser creature, there due only to the beneficence of those truly in power. Ruth had told Eileen that the point the administration wanted to make was that although God might be a good influence, they were the ultimate authority, and oversaw everything and everyone within these walls, even God’s handmaids. The air gave one the impression of a tepid petri dish.

  Eileen slumped, facing Ruth, who, phone to her ear, sat behind the desk.

  “I do understand you think he’s properly medicated, I do,” Ruth said to whomever was on the other end of the line, “and I don’t mean to be a buttinsky, but I’m telling you his depression is worsening. He needs to be reassessed.” She looked at Eileen and rolled her eyes.

  On the wall behind Ruth hung an icon of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. He was portrayed holding a scroll that said, in French, “Be a man. Do not be ashamed of your convictions.” Sois homme. Ne rougis pas de tes convictions. A blue-and-white-striped Auschwitz prison’s uniform was draped over his left shoulder, the red triangle identifying him as a political prisoner, and his identification number lay over his heart. Saint Maximilian, patron saint of, among others, drug addicts, journalists, and prisoners. He had been a Polish Franciscan friar sent to Auschwitz for hiding Jews during the Second World War. When the Nazi guards selected ten people to be starved to death in an underground bunker as punishment for one thing or another, Saint Maximillian volunteered to die in place of a man he didn’t know, who had called out for the sake of his wife and children. Imagine that, Eileen thought. The moment. One hears a man cry out and doesn’t hesitate but to step forward. Would she have done it? She doesn’t know. Kolbe hadn’t died fast enough to please the Nazi guards. He was, in fact, the last of the ten alive. Two weeks. Everyone else died as they ought to have. It annoyed the guards, and so they injected carbolic acid into his veins, which did the trick, albeit in grisly fashion. He was said to have raised his arm calmly to meet the needle. Well, she thought, I might have done that. Two weeks without food or water in an underground bunker. Just kill me. A dreadful thought. She imagined the burning, the convulsions, the foaming … no … she was no martyr.

  She had asked Ruth once why she had chosen St. Maximilian. Ruth told her that although the saint hadn’t been imprisoned for doing anything criminal, but was an innocent, as in fact some of the men here might well be, given what plea-bargaining and an ill-na
med justice system led to these days, what was most significant was the way St. Maximilian had comported himself while held in Auschwitz. Right up to the end, regardless of how the Nazis tried to dehumanize him, he held on to those things that made him human — his kindness, his sense of justice and of mercy, and his faith. It was an example she hoped the men who lived here could learn from. Like Viktor Frankl, whose book Man’s Search for Meaning she handed out willy-nilly, Kolbe’s life was testament to the fact one need not be defined by one’s surroundings.

  Ruth was still on the phone. “Do you think maybe he doesn’t talk to you the way he talks to me? I’m not breeching any confidentiality when I tell you he exhibits signs of suicidal ideation and if anything happens to him, I am going to wonder if you won’t consider yourself at least partially responsible.” A pause, and then. “Oh, I don’t think it will come to that. Not at all. Why would I talk to his family about this when I’m sure you’ll do the right thing? What’s the big deal? Just change the script.” Another pause. “Well, actually, I am a trained psychologist, you know, the PhD kind.” She chuckled. “You can call me Doctor if it makes you feel better. We shouldn’t quibble, being colleagues, am I right? You have such a good heart, Doctor, and I know how difficult it is for you to spend the amount of time you’d like to with all your patients. Can’t you believe I’m merely trying to be of assistance and to save everyone, including Derek, from having something awful happen, something that, apart from possibly causing Derek harm, would reflect so badly on us all? You will? Oh, I knew I could count on you. Do you think you’ll be able to do that soon? I’m going to see Derek this afternoon and I’d like to give him some hope.” She listened. “Hello? Dr. Barnes? Hello?” She put the phone back in its cradle. “Pompous power-mad old poop.” She lay her hands flat on the desk, spreading out her fingers, and smiled at Eileen. “How’s your day going?”

  Eileen told her what had happened in the classroom. “I don’t know how you manage not to be furious all the time,” she said.

  “Oh, you know how we are. I get plenty mad, and when I do, I wrap that anger up in a big red bow and I bring it to God and I tell God to hold it while I get on with the job he’s given me to do, and then, at the end of the day, sometimes I go home and I chop up all the onions and carrots and potatoes we have in the house. It does wonders, I find, for getting the mad out. When I was younger, I played tennis. Then my knees gave out.” She chuckled. “If I’d been less angry, maybe I’d have better knees now. Mind you, sometimes I wonder if Sister Brigid’s gig at Edna Mahan,” she said, meaning the only prison for women in New Jersey, “doesn’t have it easier.”