Dying Declaration

by Randy Singer

  Charles knew what had happened. Buster had turned out his posse against their collective will and probably under threat of force, and none of them were happy about it. Truth be known, even Buster probably would rather be elsewhere, but he undoubtedly saw Charles as his ticket to freedom and knew better than to alienate his lawyer. The white guy, on the other hand, was presumably here of his own volition. The only voluntary member of the bunch.

  “They’re all yours,” the guard said with as much disdain as possible. He opened the door to leave. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  Charles passed out Bibles and made some introductions. He showed the men how to find the book of Luke and had them turn to the story of the crucifixion of Christ. He turned to the white man, who said his name was Thomas, and asked him to read the story of the two thieves crucified with Christ.

  “Why don’t you start reading in chapter twenty-three, verses thirty-nine through forty-three. And the rest of you men follow along.”

  The big man grunted his approval and started in. His voice was slow and halting as he pounded out the words with great difficulty.

  “’And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him—’” railed became righ’-eld, the King’s English, mispronounced with a Southern drawl—“’saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us—’”

  “Yo . . . yo . . . hold up, man,” one of the other prisoners interrupted. “Where’s that mess in my Bible?”

  “Yeah, bro, you doggin’ us? What Bible you readin’ from?”

  A few others murmured simultaneously. The railroad picked up steam, and all the brothers jumped on the white boy’s case.

  “All right, hold on,” Charles said loudly. “Thomas is just readin’ out of a different version. He’s got the King James Version. That’s an old English language version. And I gave the rest of you the New International Version.”

  Now Thomas’s eyes went wide. “They ain’t usin’ the King James?”

  “No,” Charles replied. “I thought they’d understand the NIV better.”

  Thomas furrowed his brow and looked around the room at his errant brethren. “It ain’t authorized,” he announced to them. “Only one version’s authorized.” He held his well-worn Bible aloft. “The King James.”

  “That’s just a white man’s book,” one of the brothers said. “A cracker’s Bible.”

  “You want authorized—” another brother said the word mockingly, with a tilting of his head. Then he stood and gave Thomas an obscene gesture—“authorize this.”

  The blacks all laughed.

  “What do you know about the versions of the Bible?” Thomas asked. “The King James is the only version with no translation mistakes.”

  A collective groan went up from the others, all instant Bible critics. And thus was born the first theological debate of the Virginia Beach Jail Bible study: the King James—only debate. It blew hot and cold for about five minutes, with opinions running against the King James Version by a margin of about twelve to one. But the one was a stubborn one, and he had some information that was hard to dispute.

  “So King James sent a couple hundred scribes back to their monasteries to work independently on a translation of the Bible into English. And guess what? They all came back with exactly—I said exactly—the same translation, word for word. Now, was God in that or what?”

  “Translated it from what?” a brother asked.

  Charles just smiled and let the debate play itself out. At least the men were engaged, no longer slouched down in a picture of apathy. After a while Charles suggested a compromise. Thomas would read each verse first from the King James Version, since that was the earliest translation. Then one of the others would read from the NIV. Then Buster would translate the verse into street slang. This seemed to satisfy everyone, and he had their attention as they turned back to the story of the crucified thieves.

  Thomas performed his part with great gusto and authority, emphasizing every thee and thou in the King’s English. After another literate inmate provided a stilted reading from the NIV, Buster relished his role as the street translator and drew more than his share of laughs and critics.

  It seemed like a circus, but they all got the gist. Two thieves had been crucified, one on either side of Christ. One of the thieves blasphemed Christ—“dissed” him in the words of Buster—saying, according to the NIV, “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself and us!” The other thief was repentant, asking Christ: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus responded to him, in the translation used by Thomas: “Verily I say unto thee,” which, as translated by Buster meant, “This is straight up from yo momma,” and assured the thief that he would be with Christ in paradise, or His “crib,” that very day.

  Having survived the reading of Scripture, Charles took control to drive home some points. The boys had had their fun, now it was time to get serious. He paced and preached for twenty minutes without eliciting a single amen or even a grunt of approval. The inmates stared past him with cold and hooded eyes, slouched down in their chairs again like this was the most ridiculous stuff they’d ever heard. Occasionally, one of the men would challenge Charles.

  “What if he didn’t do it?” one man muttered, referring to the thief who cursed at Christ with his final breath.

  “Yeah, maybe he got set up.”

  “Maybe,” Charles said. “Just like maybe some of the men in this room didn’t do anything wrong to get here. It’s all your momma’s fault for the way she raised you, or the hood you grew up in, or the drugs that made you crazy . . .” He stopped, paused, and looked from one inmate to the other. “Get real.”

  A few of the men grunted and slouched lower in their chairs. Their defiant stares betrayed the hatred that ran deep behind their eyes. Charles was defending the white man’s system and making no friends. He decided to focus on the love of God that saved the repentant thief just minutes before he died.

  “This thief shows that you can’t work your way into heaven—that you don’t need to work your way into heaven,” Charles exhorted. “This thief confesses to Christ one minute, and a few minutes later he’s with Christ in paradise. Now I guarantee that man didn’t have much chance to climb down from the cross and do good works.”

  From the looks on their faces, his point was lost on these men. Not many of them were apparently planning on working their way to heaven anyway. The mercy of God, the good works of men, it was all one huge yawn to this gang. They were apparently present only because their shot caller, for some reason unfathomable to them, made everybody come.

  Charles glanced at his watch and decided to wrap it up.

  “There is a concept in the law called a ‘dying declaration.’ It’s a statement made just before you die, when you know that you’re drawing your last breath. It works as a corollary to the hearsay rule. Any of you jailhouse lawyers know how this concept of a dying declaration works?”

  He looked around the room at the blank and scowling faces. Some of these guys probably spent a lot of time in the law library, trying to figure out new angles for their cases. Some of them would know more about the law than the lawyers who would be charged to defend them. But not one of them claimed to know anything about a dying declaration.

  “You know what hearsay is, right?”

  A few inmates nodded; the rest stubbornly refused to acknowledge the question. Charles the professor had some teaching to do.

  “A statement made by somebody else outside of court cannot be repeated by somebody in court, even if they heard the statement. In other words—no gossip. A witness on the stand has to testify about what he saw, not about what someone else told him. Does that make sense?”

  The same few heads nodded.

  “And hearsay is not admissible because the person who made the statement is not in court and cannot be cross-examined to test the reliability of the statement. But there is one type of hearsay that is always admissible—anybody care to guess what it is?”

  “A
dying declaration?” Thomas guessed.

  “This man’s a genius,” the professor responded, trying to encourage a little more class participation. “A dying declaration is admissible into evidence—and here’s why. People don’t usually lie when they know they are going to die the next moment. They are getting ready to meet their Maker and generally have very little incentive to shade the truth. So if you hear somebody make a statement just before he dies, you can come into court and testify about what that person said even though technically it might be hearsay.

  “Which brings us back to these two thieves,” Charles continued. “These two thieves each made a dying declaration. One accepted Christ as Savior and Lord, and when God the Father judges this man in the courts of heaven, that dying declaration will save him. The other rejected Christ. And when the Father opens the books of judgment in heaven, that dying declaration will damn him to eternity separated from God.”

  Charles paused for dramatic effect, stopped pacing, and lowered his voice. “Now,” he asked, “which thief are you? Because we’re all thieves, brothers. The only question is what type.”

  He let the accusation linger. Then, as if on cue, a guard came busting through the door. “It’s time,” he said gruffly.

  “We’re about done. Can we finish?” Charles asked. “You might want to stick around for this part yourself.”

  “I said it’s time,” the guard responded with terse authority, staring at Charles with an air of cockiness that comes from never being challenged. “Something about that you don’t understand?”

  The eyes of the inmates, which just a few minutes earlier had been glued to the floor or some distant spot on the wall, were now focused on Charles. The boys hated the guards, and they longed for someone to put the guards in their place, someone who the guards could not retaliate against. Charles felt the dynamics, the men coming psychologically to his side, but he also knew that he needed to be a role model, to preserve his integrity.

  “Oh, I understand it just fine,” Charles said. “So I guess the men and I better close out in prayer.”

  “Just make it quick.”

  Charles immediately began a lengthy and solemn prayer. He knew the guard probably had his eyes open, as would most of the inmates, but this did not stop Charles from praying for the souls of the men in the room with great passion. He prayed for their salvation, he prayed for justice in their cases, and he prayed for changed lifestyles once they were released. In a part of the prayer that probably infuriated the guard but greatly pleased the inmates, he also prayed for the souls of the guards. He prayed that God would help them understand that they were sinners too, just like these inmates, that there was no difference in God’s eyes and that they also needed to repent. He ended his prayer by praying that the guards would be merciful and just and that God would cause revival in the jail.

  When Charles concluded his prayer, it was punctuated by more than a few amens from the prisoners. Despite the growing impatience of the guard, Charles went around the room and shook hands with each man before leaving. Many of them promised to be back next week or said a simple, “Thanks, Rev.”

  When he reached the back of the room where Buster stood, the big man put his arm around Charles’s shoulder and turned his body so they were both facing the wall away from the other inmates. Charles felt Buster’s enormous bicep and forearm resting across his neck, and the steel grip of Buster’s fingers on the outside of his shoulder. He was glad this man was his friend.

  “Straight up,” Buster whispered. “How’s it look?”

  “We’ve got a motion to suppress hearing a week from Wednesday,” Charles said in hushed tones. “I won’t lie. It’s gonna be a tough one.”

  “Okay, bro.” Buster squeezed the shoulder. It hurt.

  “Let’s go,” the guard barked. “Or this will be the last one of these things you have.”

  This set off a round of critiques from the brothers.

  “Loosen up.”

  “Give the rev a break.”

  “Chill.”

  Charles locked on Buster’s eyes. “See you next week?” Charles asked.

  Buster stuck out his lips and gave a slight nod of approval. “Ain’t goin’ nowhere else,” he said, “till a week from Wednesday.” He patted Charles on the shoulder, hard enough to get his point across, then donned the dangerous smile of an organized crime boss.

  Charles left with the uneasy feeling that he had just been delivered an ultimatum. It would be hard to forget the hooded eyes and the gold-toothed smile of the shot caller for the Ebony Sopranos.

  28

  CHARLES STOPPED at a restaurant on the way home from the Bible study. He was still trying to shake his vision of Buster.

  “Table for one?” the hostess asked.

  “Yeah.”

  She led him to a table with two seats surrounded by tables occupied by families, couples, and friends. As far as Charles could tell, he was the only person eating alone.

  The place smelled of day-old grease and too-strong coffee. The table was sticky, so he kept his elbows in his lap.

  His concerns about Buster soon faded. After all, the man was safely behind bars. He would only be getting out if Charles sprang him, in which case Buster would be totally indebted to Charles. The more important thing was the spiritual state of those men he had left behind. Hopeless. Dangerous. Lost.

  Nearly ten minutes passed before a waitress with a pierced tongue finally ventured by to take his order. He ordered a pile of strawberry French toast with a side of hash browns. A Mountain Dew to drink. Then he pulled out his iPod, donned his earbuds, and waited for his meal.

  Somewhere between two Kirk Franklin songs, just about the time Charles drained the last few drops of his first Dew, he totally lost his appetite. It wasn’t the music—Denita would never listen to Christian songs. And it certainly wasn’t the restaurant. To his knowledge, Denita had never set foot in this kind of restaurant. But suddenly her memory came back so powerfully that he didn’t quite dare reach out his hand and see if she might be real.

  It was as if Denita came and sat down across from him, just as she did four years ago, in a different restaurant, a month after the big fight, a month after he had left their home for good. He wondered now, as he wondered then, how she had ever found him.

  Her mournful eyes, brimming with tears, still drew him in. Though she had wounded him so deeply he could never heal, she still held sway over him. She had him four years ago. She had him tonight.

  “There’s no easy way to say this.” Her words came out velvety soft, almost like a song. He didn’t respond, just waited an eternity while she drew her next breath. “There’s someone else, Charles.” The air left his lungs again tonight, the same way it had four years ago. “He understands me. Loves me. We’re going to spend our lives together. I’m filing for divorce.”

  Charles rubbed his face as Denita laid the papers on the table. He remembered four years ago how he had tried to talk her out of it. Though he had walked out on her the previous month, he still wasn’t ready to give up on them. They just needed more time to think . . . counseling . . . anything. She had listened patiently, said she didn’t want to hurt him, but this was the only way. He remembered vividly how painful it was to stare at her back as she walked out the door, the feeling of loneliness descending like a fog.

  And even now, at unpredictable times, the fog would descend again, bringing a ghost of Denita back into his life and reopening painful wounds. But this night he would have no chance to talk Denita out of it. For when he blinked, she was gone, the fog slowly clearing again, and the beautiful face of his wife replaced by the chubby smile of the waitress with the pierced tongue.

  “You want another Dew?” she asked.

  “No. I’m fine,” Charles lied. “I’ll just drink water.” Then he stared at the back of the waitress as she turned and walked away.

  It was nearly eight o’clock on Saturday night, and Erica Armistead had been sleeping most of the day. She had plann
ed on getting outside, planting a few flowers, and running to the grocery store. But the Parkinson’s had not cooperated. The disease seemed to know when she had plans and would strike with unrelenting fury on those days.

  She had gotten up early, but the disease put her back down. The tremors and stiffness had been particularly bad today, probably because she was so stressed out. On her good days she would try to walk off the stiffness. On her bad days she would shuffle from one prop to the next, leaning on furniture, against the wall, or sometimes on the arm of a friend. It had been that kind of day. She felt like she was shriveling up, like a super slow-motion replica of the witch in The Wizard of Oz—doused with water and shrinking into nothingness.

  Sean had left for work today without saying good-bye. He had left her in the family room, dozing in and out while watching another movie on the Lifetime channel. The medication she took—levodopa—made her incredibly sleepy and would sometimes create a sudden freezing, a brief inability to move at all. She wondered if the side effects of the medication were worse than just letting the disease progress.

  She was determined that the disease would not steal her entire day. She would carry through on the plans she had made for the evening. She had rested, watched television, and eaten this afternoon. Sean had called and said he would be working a “double”—a second shift immediately following his first one. The second shift would start at eleven, and Erica would surprise him. She would take him something to eat, nothing fancy or heavy, just something special to get him through the night. It would be a show of her appreciation, her love for the long hours he consistently put in for the two of them. It would be a statement that not even the disease, on one of its most horrific days, could keep her from thinking about him.