by Daniel Black
When Lazarus heard he had a visitor, he contemplated which of the Upper Room family had come. It was probably Elisha, he guessed joyfully, smiling the while. Elisha never said much, but the young man’s loyalty assured Lazarus he’d never be alone. Of course it could be Cinderella, too. Lazarus knew how she felt and he also knew he couldn’t reciprocate. He’d not told her that, but he’d shown her, hadn’t he? And don’t actions speak louder than words? If it was Cinderella, he promised to tell her today, regardless of the consequences. She deserved to know.
Perhaps it was Legion, although Lazarus doubted it. Not because e wouldn’t come, but because e was always consumed with clandestine activities that somehow made their lives better. Legion’d disappear for days sometimes and return with clothing items or food fit for a king. They never knew what e did or how, and they never asked. But they loved the outcome, so they gave em space to roam without question. No, it wasn’t em. And it wasn’t The Comforter, either. Lazarus didn’t feel her spirit. There was no sudden shiver, no dash of electricity in his veins, no blackening of the skies. He always felt her long before he saw her, and since he felt nothing, he knew she was nowhere near. His best guess, again, was Elisha. But when Lazarus entered the visiting room and saw his only begotten son, the fourth Lazarus, his legs became weights that would not move.
Their eyes met for several tortuous seconds, then diverted. The staring, which Quad had planned meticulously, became impossible, for the longer he gazed, the more he loved the man he’d hated. Distress and fatigue shone in his father’s eyes and, in Quad’s heart, he wished he were free to kiss him and comfort his father’s troubled mind. But that would be too much. So, instead, the son looked away, at other inmates in baggy orange jumpsuits, and waited for words and phrases to come that might express what he tried hard to feel. Lazarus crumbled to his knees, wanting only to change history and provide whatever his son needed. The problem, of course, was that, given similar circumstances, Lazarus was sure he’d do exactly the same thing over again.
Quad bent and raised his father up, and together they walked to a table in the center of the room. Buttressed only by stale, smoky air and tender memories, they sat on either side and prayed for something to say.
Sighing through years of guilt, Lazarus asked, “Who sent you?”
Quad drummed the tabletop. “No one.”
“How’d you know I was here?”
“Everyone knows you’re here. It’s all over the news.”
“But why did you come?”
Quad almost mentioned the note, but that wasn’t the reason.
“Because you’re in trouble. And you’re my father.”
Lazarus reached for his hand, but Quad withdrew it.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you didn’t do it.”
“I didn’t do it. I swear.”
Quad searched his father’s eyes for truth and found it, dancing brightly, just behind the old man’s pupils.
“Why were you over there?”
As succinctly as possible, he relayed details. Now, more than ever, he was sure someone had set him up.
Quad nodded slowly. “You need a lawyer.”
“I know. They gave me one, some bullshit upstart who couldn’t care less about me. I’m thinking about representing myself.”
“Don’t!” Quad screeched. “It’ll never work. It never does. You don’t know enough to do that.”
Lazarus fought not to be insulted.
“You’re already guilty in their eyes, so anything you say wouldn’t be taken seriously. You ever heard of a black man defending himself against a white woman in court?” Quad paused. “And winning?”
Lazarus shrugged.
“Don’t do it, Dad. Your life’s on the line. We’ll figure something out. Isn’t that what you used to tell us? ‘We’ll figure something out’?”
His sarcasm made Lazarus shift in the chair. Maybe Quad was right, he thought, but he certainly wasn’t putting his life in the hands of that lame-ass lawyer.
“I’ll think about it.”
“You need to.”
With each passing second, Lazarus wondered how he could hug and hold his boy and tell him he thought of him every hour of every day. The longer Lazarus waited, the clearer it became that no such embracing would occur. He saw himself in the boy’s face—narrow eyes, raised cheekbones, wiry brows—and wondered if Quad hated resembling his father so unquestionably.
“How have you been?” Quad asked. “All these years.”
Lazarus nodded. “Okay. Surviving.”
“Is that what you left us for? To survive?”
“I never left you. Never. Your mother put me out.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, actually I don’t. ’Cause I never left you.”
“Whatever.”
“It’s not ‘whatever.’ I made a decision to make us better, but I couldn’t force your mother to go along. I still think it was right, though.”
“How could it have been right when it destroyed our family? Huh, Dad? How could that be right?”
“I never meant that.”
“But it happened!”
Lazarus couldn’t argue. “I just wanted you and your sister to know…”—he stumbled for words—“life and not things.”
“And what’s wrong with things, Dad?”
Lazarus huffed. “They rob you of God.”
“What? God? All of this was because you wanted us to know God? You left our family in order to know God?” Quad was shouting.
“I didn’t leave my family! I would never do that!”
“You did, Dad! You did! And you can’t blame Mom.”
“I couldn’t live like that anymore, Son! It was killing me!”
“Well, what about how your absence killed me?”
Quad hadn’t meant to say that. Or to admit it. He relaxed in the chair, frustrated that he couldn’t retrieve his words.
“Oh, Son!” Lazarus moaned. “I thought I was doing the right thing. When your mother put me out, I went because I didn’t want to make y’all’s life as miserable as mine. I took a risk.” His hands rose in surrender. “I wanted you free. At all costs. I wanted you to know that you don’t need things in order to feel good about yourself. It’s a yoke around a man’s neck.”
Quad listened. He was still angry—and wanted to be—but the sound of his father’s voice comforted like nothing else could.
“I thought your mother might come around, but she didn’t. I loved her, Quad. I swear I did. But I hated that life. I didn’t want it for you or your sister, either. I provided for y’all, but I wanted you to know life. That’s all. I didn’t care if we lived in a log cabin in the woods with no electricity! It didn’t matter to me. I wanted you to know how to live, Son! And I wanted to teach it to you myself. That’s all I was trying to do.” He paused. “But I guess I failed. Apparently I didn’t teach you anything—except how to be mad at your father a lifetime.” He paused again. “I had given you the world, Son, but really I hadn’t given you anything. Not anything that mattered.”
“We mattered, Dad!”
“No, we didn’t!” Lazarus stood. “We lived with each other, but you didn’t know me. I didn’t know you, either. The house was big enough for us to hide in and that’s what we did. We hid from each other. But I wanted you. And your sister. And your mother. I just couldn’t make y’all see that back then. I thought that standing my ground would force y’all to see what I was trying to do, but I guess it didn’t.”
“I knew what you were trying to do, Dad.”
“Did you? Did you really? If you knew, then you’d know how much it hurt every time I stood outside that house and waited like a stray dog to see my kids. You’d know how I prayed every day for forgiveness. You think I wanted things the way they turned out? That’s not what I dreamed. I had spent a lifetime working for things that didn’t really mean nothin’, and I couldn’t do it anymore! That’s what I was trying to say! That I cou
ldn’t do it anymore!”
The jail guard shouted, “Wrap it up!” Quad’s latent desire to curse and beat Lazarus subsided.
“Mom married someone else. He’s okay. Treats her well. She still loves you, though. I can tell whenever she asks about you.”
“She asks about me?”
“All the time. When she heard what happened, she begged me to come see about you, but I refused. Said I should put the past behind me, however you do that, and”—he mocked her soft, high register—“‘live in the future.’”
“She’s a good woman.”
“How would you know?”
“She’s always been a good woman. That’s why I married her. She just didn’t understand that I didn’t want to struggle anymore. I couldn’t. Not like I had been doing. It was making me crazy. That’s not the life I wanted for my family. So I tried to save you from it. Looks like I drove you deeper into it.” He examined Quad’s expensive attire and shook his head, disappointed.
“I’m doing fine all by myself,” Quad sassed. “Got my own house, pay my own bills—”
“But are you happy? Do you know why you’re alive?”
“What?”
“Do you know why you’re alive? Here. On the planet.”
Quad rolled his eyes. “I’ve made a life for myself, Dad. I’m fine.”
“That’s exactly what I mean! Life ain’t s’pose’ to be fine, Son. It’s s’pose’ to be glorious. You s’pose’ to wake up every morning excited about what God has done It’s s’pose’ to make you anxious to open your eyes. That’s living, Quad. Anything else is dying. And I wasn’t ready to die.”
“Time’s up!” the guard announced. Both Lazaruses stood.
“It’s good to see you, Son. It really is. I’m sorry it turned out this way. I tried to do the right thing. Lord knows I did.” Lazarus extended his right hand.
Quad refused it. “Take care of yourself, Dad. And get you a lawyer.”
Quad left without saying good-bye.
Back in the cell, Lazarus remembered the day he walked out. All he’d hoped for was that his family would trust him. But that never happened. Like a dazed derelict, he’d walked the streets of Atlanta, praying for God to expose to his family what he could not explain. Days turned to weeks, weeks to years, and now here he was, a middle-aged man who’d failed to keep his family together.
An hour later, he was summoned to the consultation room. Against his son’s advice, Lazarus prepared to dismiss the pro bono fucker, to tell him thanks but no thanks, and began to consider what self-representation might require. He didn’t want to evade wisdom, but he was not putting his life in that idiot’s hands.
Entering the room, Lazarus found a well-dressed stranger sitting at the table with a yellow legal pad resting before him. The man stood and introduced himself.
“Mr. Love? I’m attorney Aaron Freeman.”
They shook as Lazarus frowned and nodded.
“Please, sir, have a seat.”
Lazarus obeyed but did not understand.
“I’m your new lawyer.”
“What happened to the other guy?”
Aaron smiled. “Do you want him?”
Lazarus shook his head.
“I didn’t think so.”
Who sent you? Lazarus wondered. And who’s paying for this?
“We have a lot to discuss, Mr. Love, so let’s get right to it.”
“Who hired you? Where’d you come from?”
Aaron smiled. “Let’s just say you have angels in high places.”
Lazarus pondered. It wasn’t Quad. He knew that. Perhaps it was Lizzie. But how could she afford it?
“Now.” A nice, black pen stood proudly in his right hand. “I need you to go back, Mr. Love. All the way back to the day of the incident. No, the day before the incident. Where were you? What were you thinking? How did you happen to be at Whole Foods the same time as Mrs. Dupont?”
Rubbing his thighs, Lazarus waltzed through time, reconstructing memory and gathering details he’d obviously forgotten. They talked for over an hour.
“You said you never went in the house, right?”
“Right.”
“And she never touched you?”
“Right.”
“Not even for a second? Not to give you a glass of water or anything?”
“Right.”
“And where was her husband while you were working in the flower garden?”
“I don’t know. I never saw him.”
“Did you see another car in the garage?”
“I didn’t go in the garage.”
“Okay. Good. Good.”
He wrote feverishly, page after yellow legal page, until half the pad had been consumed. Then, he sat back and stared into Lazarus’s eyes.
“Is there anything, anything at all, you’re not telling me?”
Lazarus couldn’t bring himself to say it. Silence concerning the scarf had morphed into a deep, dark secret lingering in his consciousness. But like a well-trained police dog, Aaron smelled deception, so he leaned forward.
“I’m going to ask you one more time, Mr. Love, and you’re going to tell me the truth. Is there anything you haven’t said? Your life depends upon it.”
Sweat streaked Lazarus’s face. “Okay, okay. Yes. There is something.” He huffed, hoping he wasn’t sealing his own fate. “A scarf. She gave me a scarf.”
“Why?”
“Because I was sweating. She just handed it to me and I took it.”
“Why didn’t you give it back?”
“I forgot. And anyway, I think she was giving it to me.”
“How did she give it to you? Was she sensual? Did you feel as if she was flirting with you?”
“No. Nothing like that. She just handed it to me. So I took it.”
Aaron scowled as he wrote. “Where is it now?”
Lazarus sighed. “With a friend. I gave it to her the day police arrested me. I didn’t want them to find it.”
“You gotta get that back. It can’t be floating around in the world, waiting to incriminate you. It’s evidence.”
“Evidence? Of what? It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It could. And you don’t want it to surface, somehow, in the middle of a trial. More than anything, it would destroy your credibility.”
“How can I get it now? I’m in here!”
“Tell me where this woman lives and I’ll get it myself.”
Lazarus conceived an idea. “No, I’ll get it. Don’t worry. I’ll get it. I know how.”
“You can’t tell anyone about it, though. At least not now. We’ll be honest in court if we have to be, but we won’t volunteer anything. Is that understood?”
“Yessir.”
“And everything we share in this room is strictly confidential. You understand that?”
“Yessir. Attorney-client privilege. I get it.”
“Good. Don’t talk to anyone except me. And I mean anyone. Private conversations have a way of becoming public.”
Aaron gathered the legal pad and pen and stuffed them into a brown leather briefcase. When he stood, Lazarus noticed he was taller than he’d assumed. Aaron’s firm demeanor eased Lazarus’s anxiety.
“I’ll be back in a day or so. Until then, talk to no one. Are we clear?”
“Yessir.”
“Absolutely no one.”
Aaron exited with Lazarus nodding. For a lawyer, he was young, Lazarus thought, like the other guy, but something about Aaron felt old, experienced, seasoned, and that’s what Lazarus liked. He couldn’t discern who’d sent the man, but he loved whoever it was. Closing his eyes, he wondered how this would end. Yet his imagination yielded no clarity, so upon being returned to the cell, Lazarus sang Granddaddy’s gospel mantra:
I shall not, I shall not be moved;
I shall not, I shall not be moved.
Just like a tree, planted by the waters,
I shall not be moved!
Lazarus, oh, Lazarus! This is not the
end, dear Lazarus!
Chapter 23
Just before midnight, he heard the crying of the lambs. It was a soft, pacifying cry, almost a plea, clearly a lament, for a man with neither balm nor shield. Lazarus stared into darkness, envisioning himself, once again, on Granddaddy’s porch, listening to the whimper of God’s troubled babies. What they knew was always a mystery to him, but Granddaddy believed they sensed things—like the energy of the universe—and bleated until something or someone was set aright. Granddaddy had said that, instead of speech, God gave them heart—to feel what they could not say—so their song was, in many ways, an announcement that the balance of the heavens had been disturbed. “What are we supposed to do?” Trey would ask. Granddaddy would rock awhile, then say, “Live right. Treat yo’ neighbor right. Help somebody who can’t pay you. Talk good about folks who gossip about you. Be like Jesus—whether there’s a heaven or not.” Trey searched his little brain but didn’t get it. Not back then. So he shrugged and rocked along, in smooth, easy four-four time, while the lambs cried.
In the dark, damp cell, Lazarus reclined with hands behind his head. The lambs’ song still confounded him, so he lay there and listened. The honeyed moan once sounded like a hodgepodge of melodies thrown together in the same score, but now, lying in the lion’s den, Lazarus began to hear distinguishable parts—alto, baritone, soprano—and to appreciate their dissonant harmonies. The melody invoked memory. He saw his mother, laboring over meals his father would never eat, and his father trembling in the battle to stay clean. He saw his son, the fourth Lazarus, drive a fist through a bedroom wall because his father would not come home while his sister searched parks and shelters for a mere glance at the only man she adored. As he listened, tears glazed his golden eyes, and suddenly he mumbled, “I give up, God. Show me what to do.” That’s when he saw, in the top of his head, The Family gathered beneath the bridge, holding hands and praying. Cinderella sniffled as The Comforter said, “Don’t trust logic, honey!,” implying that Lazarus was indeed coming home. The other two, Legion and Elisha, squeezed hands in confirmation of their hope. Somehow things would work out. They believed it. Lazarus nodded and cried harder. He wasn’t alone. He hadn’t been stupid and selfish all those years ago. He’d heeded a call to life, to living, to meaning, and in the process found God—scattered in trash bins, hiding beneath filthy, forsaken mattresses, disguised in the faces of homeless vagrants—and, consequently, discovered what he’d been missing. Like the continuity of the sunrise, the reliability of the ocean’s tide, he’d needed something consistent, something grounding, to justify his breath, and now he had it. He couldn’t name it, but he knew it in the marrow of his spirit. It refreshed like frosty ice water on a scorching day. Perhaps this was purpose revealed or worth unveiled; whatever it was, he had suffered without it. Practically died, in fact. Maybe the feeling was simply recognition of the right to be happy. He’d surrendered that, he recalled, in exchange for success. Now there was nothing he desired more.