“One of the inmates from Potter,” I said.
“Do you go to all of the inmates’ funerals?” she asked. She seemed to really be trying to understand. Gone was her look of shock, replaced now with a look of curiosity.
“No. Actually, this is my first one,” I said.
“Why this one?” she asked.
“His family asked me to do it.”
“You’re doing the funeral?” she asked her eyes widening.
I nodded.
“Did you know the family from before?” she asked.
“I’ve never met them, and if I met the inmate, I don’t remember it.”
She was silent, her eye taking on the abandoned look of someone in deep thought.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m very sorry about this. You were giving me such a hard time yesterday I thought I’d pull this little surprise on you, but I shouldn’t have. It was inappropriate, and I’m sorry. However, I probably didn’t think it’s such a bizarre thing to go to a funeral because they are so much a part of what I do.”
“I’ve never thought of it that way,” she said, her expression changing from contemplation to compassion. “You must stay depressed.”
“I have my fair share of depression, but probably not too much more than most people.”
“I would think that someone in your position, whether it be a chaplain, minister, or priest, would either have to totally disassociate or vicariously feel depressed most of the time.”
“You’re right that many people in helping professions maintain a professional aloofness in order to protect themselves, but as someone whose primary job it is to follow Jesus and enter into the sufferings of others, I can’t do that. The foundation of ministry is compassion-to feel with others.”
“No, I guess you can’t disassociate,” she said, “not like us cold clinical shrinks anyway.”
“To be honest, I think the best caregivers, whether counselors, doctors, nurses, or ministers, are those WHO risk truly caring.”
“Maybe. But who can do that without eventually burning out, or worse?”
“It is a tightrope. And I fall off it quite often. But I’ve been through some pretty dark times in my life, and those who tried to help me from a safe distance out in the light were unable to.”
“So, what do you do?” she asked.
“I care. I get my heart broken. I get manipulated. I get depressed, but only occasionally. And that’s because I care for people, but I don’t adopt them. I do all I can, and if they need more, then God will send them someone else who can give them more, and if she doesn’t, well then she must not want them to be helped anymore. I try to be responsive to needs, and I try not to take responsibility for people.”
“And that works?” she asked with genuine interest.
“Not very often. No. But in theory … in theory, it’s great.”
She laughed. It was a nice laugh and the first time I heard her laugh genuinely. Every other time I had heard her laugh it was at me and had it come out forced and a little mean.
“I bet it does work for you,” she said, becoming instantly serious, “and I have a lot to learn before I begin my practice.”
“Anyone who says they have a lot to learn is someone I trust. I’m willing to be your first client and send you my referrals. And, if you ever get to the place where you feel like you don’t have a lot to learn, let me know, because I’ll need to terminate our sessions and find someone who does.”
“It’s a deal,” she said, but then seemed to reconsider. “However, if we have a relationship, won’t that be unethical, you know, dual relationships and all?”
“So you think we might have a relationship then, huh?”
“We have a relationship now, but I would say that if I don’t drive you off and if your God is not overly jealous, then we might have even more of a relationship by then.”
“She is very jealous, but she will share me with one other lover, so long as she’s good for me and she knows who’s the wife and who’s the mistress.”
We were silent again. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds and reflected off the car in front of us. I put on my shades. They improved the situation only slightly. I pulled over to the left to pass, and when I did, I noticed that Laura eased her right hand over to the door and held onto the handle. Her knuckles turned red and then white.
After we had safely passed the car and she had time to recuperate, she said, “I would like to go to the funeral with you, and I’m sorry for before.”
The clouds covered the sun again. I pulled my shades off.
“Now, will you tell me about yourself?” I asked.
“I don’t know. You seem to see way too much as it is.”
I looked at her with an expression that said, I don’t buy it.
“Well, the short version is that I’m working at FedEx while I finish up my master’s at FSU. I should finish this fall or at least by the spring. I would like to have a practice in Tallahassee, but the field is so
flooded now that it’s doubtful that I will.”
“What about family?” I asked.
“My dad lives in Tallahassee. He was a deputy with your dad at one point. He and my mother divorced when I was thirteen. My mom and my sister live in Pottersville.”
“You too, right?”
“No. I just visit on the weekends. You think I would let a strange man come to my home?”
“Strange?” I asked.
“You’re taking me to a funeral on a date.”
I gave her a small shrug, conceding the point.
“My mom teaches school, and Kim is going to attend TCC in the fall. My mom’s brother is the president of the bank in Pottersville.”
“Have you ever been married?” I asked.
“I’m not ready to discuss that yet.”
“Okay. I understand.”
“Have you?”
“Yes.”
“Kids?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
“Anything else I should know?” I asked.
“Yes. I’ve always been a sucker for compassionate men who look like Catholic priests and take me to funerals for our first date.”
“That’s good to know,” I said.
The funeral home was actually a small double-wide trailer. It was only slightly larger than my trailer, but it was way too big for the number of people who showed up for Ike Johnson’s funeral. In addition to Laura and myself, there were four other people there-two elderly black ladies, his grandma and aunt, and two young people, his sister and his friend. The funeral home was named Jack’s. It didn’t even say Jack’s Funeral Home on the sign-just Jack’s. There were an uneven number of wooden pews on the right and left sides of the chapel. They needed another couple of coats of paint. The thin red carpet had stains and smelled like old socks.
I had wrestled with what to say all week. I felt it must be something about God’s love and his ability to redeem the worst of situations and people.
I said, “God’s mercies, the Bible says, are new every morning. That means that every single morning, God’s infinite mercies are fresh and unused and waiting for us. They were waiting for Ike this morning no less than for you and me. You may say that Ike didn’t live the way he should have and so surely God’s mercies were not available for him. But I say that it is when we don’t do what we should that we need mercy most, and it is also when mercy is most available to us.
“Grace is not what we deserve, but what we need. Justice gives us what we deserve, but grace gives us what we need. If God doesn’t love Ike as much as he does you and me, then God’s love is conditional and the Bible is wrong. But if the Bible is true, if Jesus was right, then God is love, filled with compassion even for those who make themselves his enemies. God is love.
“All I ask of you today is to believe and trust in the absolute love of God. A God, who like the father in Jesus’ story of the prodigal son, welcomes us home even after we rejected him and run away to a
foreign land to get as far away from him as we could. This past Tuesday, Ike closed his eyes in this world and opened them in the next. He opened them on the familiar and loving eyes of God, who, as a father, loves Ike and loves you and me, his children. Johnathan Edwards, the famous Puritan preacher, was wrong. We’re not sinners in the hands of an angry God. We’re sinners in the hands of a merciful God. Dare to believe in love, in God. For God is love.”
Throughout the entire message no one made eye contact with me except for Laura. That’s not a complaint-even from ten feet away her eyes were incredible. She looked at me the way some people do when they hear you speak for God. It was a very dangerous thing, and I could tell that she was seeing far more than was there. Or perhaps more likely, she wasn’t putting what she saw into the full context of my broken-down life. I closed with the hope for atonement that extends past the borders of this world and the few nice things that some of the inmates had said about Ike. The latter I stretched so far they almost broke.
After the funeral, the family thanked me and tried to pay me. As Laura and I were preparing to leave, the young man they had said was a friend of Ike’s asked if he could talk to me, which was funny because until that moment he hadn’t acknowledged my presence at all.
“Preacher, I loved Ike,” he said, still looking down at the floor. “I even went to see him a couple of times in prison. But then something happened to him. Drugs, I think, but something else too. He got in over his head. I think they killed him. I wanted you to know.”
“Who do you think killed him?” I asked.
“Whoever he was involved with,” he said.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Don Hall.”
“Is there a number I can reach you at if I find something out or need to ask you some questions?”
He shook his head and walked away. After taking about five steps, he stopped, nearly turned around, but then continued walking. Laura was waiting for me in the back near the door.
“Do you believe all that?” Laura asked when we were back in the car.
“Believe all what?” I asked.
“All those things that you said in your sermon, which, by the way, was excellent.”
“Yes, I do.”
“How can you believe such hopeful things when the world is such a hopeless place?”
“How can I not? Besides, the world is filled with hope as well. Grace shows up all the time; we just usually miss it when it does.”
“What grace?”
“Dancing with you last night, that was a grace. And your peach perfume, that was a grace, too. A good night’s rest is a grace, a rainy night, the weekend, the love of a parent, the loyalty of a friend. God speaks through all of these things and more. In fact, she speaks through the bad things as well-it’s just usually things we don’t want to hear.”
“But how can you know all of this has meaning?” she asked. Her voice said she wanted to believe.
“I admit that it’s wishful thinking,” I said. “But certainly it is not blind faith-there is evidence. However, the fact that I find meaning in them says something, doesn’t it?”
“I guess it does,” she said. She shook her head slowly. “I’ve never met anyone quite like you.” She reached over to the armrest where my right arm was and took my hand. “You did a good thing back there. You’re a good man.”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t have the heart to tell her how badly she was mistaken.
For the rest of the afternoon, we clung to each other, savoring every moment. I could tell that the crisis dynamic of the funeral had had a profound effect on us. We were grasping for life, hoping to find something within each other. We were moving too fast, and I knew it, but I lacked the will to do anything about it.
Chapter 24
Under cover of a small oak grove, I parked on an old twin-path logging road in my dad’s Explorer. Dan Fogelberg sounded rich and full on compact disc played on the vehicle’s expensive stereo system. One of the few things I was left with after the divorce was a rather nice collection of CDs. Susan was never into music much, which was a downer while we were married but turned out to be most beneficial when we divorced. The only other thing that I escaped life with Susan with was my stereo system, which, combined with my CD collection, was worth more than the trailer in which I kept them.
I had taken Laura home after our day in Tallahassee, and now I was parked on the old logging road because it gave me a good view of the prison without being observed by Tower One. If I had been observed, the roving patrol would have driven out to investigate. If an officer had driven out, I would have been in trouble in more ways than one. There was, I discovered, a firearm in the vehicle, a fact I had just uncovered after searching underneath the seat for a flashlight. Firearms on state prison property were against the law. In addition to the Smith .38, Dad also had an expensive pair of binoculars. For the latter I was grateful. Without them, I would have seen nothing. As it turned out, because of them, I saw everything.
I sat there in the dark listening to Dan and thinking. My window was open slightly, and the woods all around me were alive. The bitter sweet smells of oak, pine, gopher apple, and honeysuckle wafted into the vehicle. I could hear a cricket symphony, the occasional bark of a dog, and the hum of mosquitoes. The last made me roll the window back up. I had done very few stakeouts in my time, but on each of them, amidst all the waiting and watching, I found myself doing a lot of thinking. I thought about my life up until this point-all the wasted time and money and all the pain, felt and inflicted. Of all the evil in all the world, addiction topped any list I would make.
The mood that my thoughts led me into was in sync with the music that was playing. Dan’s album of lost love and deep wounds, Exiles, played softly in the background. I was usually thoroughly depressed when I finished listening to it, but it was a comfortable, soothing depression that never lasted too long-or long enough. I couldn’t listen to it without thinking of Susan.
I thought of Laura, too. At times she tired me out, making me feel as if I were swimming upstream. At times she refreshed me like floating down that same stream on a soft inner tube. My thoughts turned to Anna, the woman by whom all women in my life were judged. It was not fair to compare other women to Anna, but, then, who said life was fair? Besides, Laura didn’t do too badly against her.
Dan was depressing the hell out of me when I saw Captain Skipper near the front of the institution.
I could see Skipper walking an inmate into the sally port and getting into a van. Totally contrary to DOC policy, the inmate was not cuffed or shackled, and there was no armed officer accompanying them. The van pulled out of the institution heading down the two-mile county road to the main highway into town.
I followed.
Following someone was always very tricky for me, even if they didn’t expect it. If they expected it, it was impossible. This was true anywhere, but especially in Pottersville, where there was very little traffic most of the time, and virtually no traffic at one in the morning. However, I had the advantage of being in my dad’s vehicle, which would be unknown to the captain.
Nevertheless, I kept a safe distance.
The night, several degrees cooler than the day, was pleasant. The moon was nearly full, the sky clear, and the stars out. Dan continued to sing to me as I followed a full mile behind the van with my lights off. When the van reached the main highway, it turned toward town. About a quarter mile before I reached it, I turned my headlights on. As I came to a stop at the intersection, a car passed me. I followed closely behind the car that had fallen in right behind the van.
At the next intersection, which was two miles from Pottersville, the van turned left and the car between us continued straight.
When the van had a sufficient lead again, I turned and followed. The highway was desolate, with only the occasional house or trailer, most of which sat a good distance off the road under the cover of pine trees.
Unlike most places, there were no zoning law
s in Pottersville, which meant that houses and trailers and even businesses were often side by side. On some streets, you would pass a hundred-and-fiftythousand-dollar brick home with a fifteen-thousand-dollar single-wide house trailer next door. This road was such a place.
I gave the van as much of a lead as I possibly could, which forced me to use the binoculars. Maybe a mile and a half up on the right, the van signaled and then turned. It was a residence, and from the road only the mailbox and the first thirty feet of the driveway could be seen. However, this was Pottersville, and I knew who lived there, and it didn’t make me happy.
The mailbox had small, neat letters reflecting in my headlights the name R. Maddox. The home belonged to Russ Maddox, the president of Potter State Bank and the wealthiest man in Potter County. He was also Laura’s uncle.
Russ Maddox, as far as I knew, was a finicky, middle-aged bachelor. He had lived alone for as long as I had lived in Pottersville. He had more dollars than sense and a slightly feminine way about him, which certainly gave rise to more than one small-town rumor. He was rich, though, and from what I remembered, a pretty fair banker, as bankers go.
By the time I reached the driveway, the van had disappeared into the woods that served as Russ’s front yard. I pulled the Explorer off the road about a half mile down from the driveway and moved through the woods towards the Maddox mansion, as it was known.
The light from the moon and the stars shown down so brightly that the pines almost cast shadows. There was no breeze, no visible movement of any kind. Moss hung still from the few tall cypress trees standing in the midst of the pines. The wire grass and weed undergrowth was thick and green in its summer prime. It came to just below my knees and made a swooshing sound as I trudged through it.
The undergrowth was so thick, in fact, that it camouflaged a fallen scrub oak tree. My right shin struck the tree full on, and I fell over it, suppressing a yelp of pain as I did. The ground was damp and the grass moist and much cooler than I had expected it to be.
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