When I answered, a friendly voice said, “Chaplain Jordan, this is Chuck in the warehouse. We have a special delivery for you and need to see you right away.”
“I’m kind of busy right now. Can I come over after lunch?”
“No, you have to personally sign for it and it’s here now.”
“Okay, I’m on my way,” I said. “Thanks.”
“I’ve got to go to the warehouse,” I said to Anna as I stood. “Can I drop by your office after lunch?”
After sending the inmates back down on the compound, Anna and I walked over to the library where Bobby Earl Caldwell’s thunderous preaching could be heard.
I wasn’t aware of it, but I must have been making my eatingbroccoli face.
“Makes you cringe, doesn’t it?” Anna asked.
“Doesn’t it you?”
“Well, yeah, but I bet it bothers you more.”
I tried to get Officer Whitfield’s attention, but his back was to us and the tape was so loud he couldn’t hear me.
As soon as Bobby Earl Caldwell brought his message to a frenzied finish, Bunny came on and made a tearful appeal for money.
I looked at Anna. She was laughing.
Whitfield jumped when I tapped him on the shoulder, stopped the tape, and spun around to face me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I’ve got to go down to the warehouse, so I need to lock up.”
“Sure,” he said. “No problem. The message is over anyway.”
As we walked out of the chapel, and I paused to lock the door, Whitfield said, “I’m ready to face the enemy on his own territory now.” He nodded toward the compound. “I’ve got my shield of faith, helmet of salvation, breastplate of righteousness… ”
When he finally finished, I said, “Well, go fight the good fight.”
It sounded more sarcastic than I intended, and, as he walked away, Anna laughed. When I was sure he was too far away to hear me, I did too.
“He should be the chaplain here,” I said. “Not me.”
The great irony for a man in my position is how little use I have for organized religion. I am essentially a member of the unchurched. Yet, since high school I’ve felt a strong sense of vocation, a paradoxical longing and belonging which somehow resulted in my becoming a nonreligious religious leader. I was on the very fringe of religion, but so far prison chaplaincy had worked for me.
Anna shot me a look. “I’m not saying he’s not a good, wellmeaning guy, but the last thing the repressed religious simpletons around here need is a repressed religious simpleton as a chaplain.”
“Thanks,” I said, and let out a small ironic laugh at the madness of it all.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t miss all this while you were in training,” she said.
I looked at her for a long moment. “I missed some things more than others.”
CHAPTER 3
Leaving Anna wasn’t easy. It had never been, and every time it got more difficult.
The first time I left her after high school, I had fled to Atlanta, trying to escape the painful and nearly sobering reflection I saw in my mother’s glazed and unfocused eyes.
It was almost two years before I came home again to visit, and having heard that Anna was married, I avoided her. But, just like the song, I ran into her in the grocery store on Christmas Eve, and we had our own bittersweet Same Old Lang Syne. I started listening to Dan Fogelberg then, and have been ever since.
On my walk over to the warehouse, I was joined by Dexter Freeman, a young black inmate with closely shaven hair, a threeinch part cut into the front of it. He was thin, but muscular, and held himself in such a way that even the biggest predators left him alone. He had recently transferred to this institution and had been attending my Bible class and weekly worship service.
“Chaplain, I’ve got a question for you,” he said, as he walked along beside me. “Can I walk with you?”
“Sure,” I said.
A loud burst of laughter erupted to my left, and I turned to see a small group of inmates seated behind the food service building, wearing soiled aprons and white plastic hair covers. The laughter came from a squat, balding black man leaning against the gray cinder block wall. I guessed he was attempting to entertain the others who were seated on over-turned plastic milk crates, but it was obvious that he found himself much more amusing than they did.
“Is the Bible true?” Dexter asked.
“How do you mean?”
“Did all those things really happen?” he asked. “The flood, the tower of Babel, Jonah and the whale?”
Unlike most of the inmates in this facility-or in any state facility-Dexter was well educated, and spoke with no discernable accent or dialect.
I knew what he was asking. It’s what most people of faith ask themselves at one time or another-are our stories true?
“The truth of a story isn’t contingent on its being a factual account of actual events,” I said. “Think about Jesus’ parables. Is there anything more true than them?”
He squinted as he thought about it for a long moment. “It doesn’t have to have happened to be true?”
“What is truth?” I said. “Is it the shallow assurance that something literally took place, or is it about something far deeper, something that is profoundly true-on all levels? Not just the literal one. It’s like poetry.”
His face lit up, his eyes brightening. “Religion as poetry,” he said. “I like that.”
“Why do you think sacred texts are filled with so much figurative language?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding his head and smiling. He got it. Then, suddenly, he began to frown. “But so many people just take it literally. They’re missing so much.”
“It’s how they can believe they have truth and everybody else has superstition.”
He looked down and shook his head.
At the end of the food service building, a rust-and-grime-covered green dumpster sat reeking of sour milk and rotting vegetables. It reminded me of grammar school. That same pungent smell had floated around the rear of the lunchroom like a tormented apparition-presumably one that died of food poisoning. From somewhere beneath the violated metal mass bled a thin milky substance, as if from an open wound.
Dexter and I both carefully stepped over the sludge that seeped across the width of the asphalt street. It puddled like some primordial pool that would soon spawn a horrific new species.
He started to say something, but hesitated, and I could tell he wanted to say more.
“What is it?” I asked.
He smiled. “Is it wrong? I mean does…,” he began, then trailed off.
“Just spit it out,” I said, “I can guarantee I’ve heard it before.”
“Does the Bible say masturbation’s a sin?” he asked quickly without looking at me. “All the brothers on the compound say it does. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not a member of the gun club.”
I smiled at Dexter’s reference to the PCI Gun Club. Gunners were inmates, usually sex offenders, who masturbated while looking at female officers in the dorms. They’d simply whip it out and get busy regardless of who was around. Each day the gun club received new members. It was getting out of hand (so to speak) and I felt sorry for the female officers who had to endure such violations.
“Actually, the Bible doesn’t say anything about masturbation,” I said, adding, “unless you count, ‘Whatever you find to do with your hand, verily I say, do it with all your might.’”
He looked perplexed.
I smiled. “It’s a joke. The Bible doesn’t say anything about it.”
“What about the dude in Genesis they keep talking about? What’s his name?”
I smiled. “Onan?”
“Yeah?”
“Not the same thing,” I said.
The sounds of young men playing drifted over from the rec yard, mixing with gunshots from the firing range, creating an auditory paradox that otherwise only existed in war and inner-city housi
ng projects.
“So it’s not a sin?”
I shrugged. “I guess it can be.”
“They act like it’s really against God-sexual impurity and all.”
I nodded as he spoke, thinking about the hypocrisy of rapists and child-molesters feeling righteous about themselves for abstaining while they were in prison, but didn’t respond when he finished.
“Well, is it?”
“What? Against God? I sure hope not.”
His face filled with relief.
“I think you’ll find that most of the ones saying how evil and sinful sex is are the very ones with the greatest sexual dysfunctions and addictions.”
He was about to respond when we reached the gate. “Well, this is my stop. They won’t let me go any further.”
I smiled. “Come up to my office when you can and we’ll talk about it some more.”
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
When Dexter was gone, I proceeded through the south gate. Emerging on the other side, I noticed a large panel van with Bobby Earl Caldwell Ministries painted on it parked near the warehouse.
I soon discovered that the truck was filled with an unsolicited shipment of Bobby Earl Caldwell preaching tapes and books for our chapel library. The tapes-both audio and video-were unedited recordings of his television program and crusades, the books, self-published transcripts of his sermons. The materials were in cardboard boxes stacked on pallets that had to be unloaded with our forklift.
As the truck was being unloaded and each box being carefully searched for contraband, Chuck, the warehouse manager, read what was printed below Bobby Earl’s logo on each of the boxes. “Man incarcerates. God liberates.”
“As Bobby Earl’s ego inflates,” I said, and we both laughed.
CHAPTER 4
After working through lunch, I had caught up enough to take a break and finish my conversation with Anna. Walking down toward the classification department, the heat of the afternoon sun bearing down on my back, I spotted Warden Stone, his nephew, and the Caldwells near the center gate. I was shocked to see that Nicole was with them.
The center gate separated the upper compound of service buildings-the library, chow hall, medical, the chapel, and classification-from the lower compound of inmate dorms and the rec yard. The majority of inmates were on the lower compound, but there were enough on the upper to be a serious threat to Nicole.
What was wrong with Stone? Had he been behind a desk outside the institution too long? Was he that out of touch? Or was it just that, unlike me, he had never heard the detailed confessions of the predators we held captive, never looked into the abyss of their dark hearts?
“Chaplain,” the warden said by way of greeting as I walked up. “We got back earlier than we expected and I was just giving the Caldwells a tour of the institution. They’re very impressed. Would you like to join us? It’d give you and Bobby Earl a chance to talk,” meaning a chance for Bobby Earl to talk and me to listen.
“What is Nicole doing on the compound? Shouldn’t she be-”
“If anyone even looks at Nicole the wrong way,” Stone said, “my nephew will put him in the hospital.”
I glanced around the compound at all the inmates who were gawking in our direction and knew that, even as appealing as many of them would find Bunny, they weren’t all looking at her.
When Paul Register, a sex offender I had been counseling, saw me, he quickly looked away.
“She’s safe, Chaplain Jordan,” Bunny said. “Mr. Stone wouldn’t let anything happen to her in his institution.”
“That’s right,” Stone said.
“You worry too much, John,” Bobby Earl said with the smarmy smile of a door-to-door Bible salesman. “You’ve got to learn to trust God more.”
“It isn’t God I don’t trust,” I said. “Why don’t I take Nicole up to the admin conference room and let her color while you finish the tour?”
“Chaplain, you’re being silly,” Stone said. “I assure you she’s-”
“Mama, I’m hot,” Nicole said. “I want to go with Chaplain JJ inside to color.”
I smiled. Not very many people called me JJ anymore, and I wondered who she had heard refer to me by my initials. Adding chaplain to them was purely her own invention. No one had ever called me Chaplain JJ before, but coming from her it sounded cute, and hinted at what I suspected was a delightful personality.
Bunny looked at me. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”
“Not at all.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Have her quote Scripture for you,” Bobby Earl said. “I guarantee she knows it better than you. I’ll put hard-earned money on it.”
Not pointing out that quoting and knowing aren’t the same things or the fact that, though he had plenty of money, none of it was hard-earned-not by him anyway-I took Nicole’s hand and we walked as quickly as we could off the compound, through the front gate, and into the admin building.
“You’re a preacher like my daddy?” she asked.
I smiled. “Not exactly like him.”
“Are you on TV?” she asked.
“That would be one of the ways I’m not like him.”
The cool air and shelter from the sun felt refreshing, but couldn’t compare to the relief I felt at having Nicole on this side of the chainlink and razor wire. I still couldn’t believe they had taken her down on the compound. Perhaps the Caldwells were just naive. Not everyone was as sensitized as I was to the danger the concrete and steel held, but it was unimaginable they could put her on display like that, parading her around for all the molesters to see, and Edward Stone should have known better.
“Are you saved, sanctified, and filled with the Holy Ghost?” she asked.
“Not so much,” I said.
She looked puzzled, but let out a small laugh. “You’re silly.”
Once we had retrieved her coloring book and crayons from Stone’s office, she settled in the head chair at the conference table with them and got right to work.
For a long moment, I just sat and watched her, finding her intensity and concentration fascinating. As she worked, she narrowed her eyes, furrowed her brow, and talked very softly to herself about what she was doing.
“Would you like a Coke or a candy bar?” I asked.
Without looking up, she said, “Mom says caffeine and chocolate make me hyper.”
I was struck again by the way she spoke. Like her straightened hair and preppy dress, the only thing about her that was black was her skin-and it was very light. Was it just the inevitable byproduct of being adopted by Caucasian parents, or were Bobby Earl and Bunny consciously raising her to be white?
“CHAPLAIN,” one of the ladies from the business office yelled from down the hall. “THERE’S A CALL FOR YOU. ARE YOU UP HERE?”
“TRANSFER IT TO THE CONFERENCE ROOM, PLEASE,” I called. “THANKS.”
I picked up the phone almost the moment it rang.
“I thought you were gonna come see me this afternoon,” Anna said.
“I got a better offer,” I said.
Watching Nicole color so intently, I realized again just how stunning she was and how wrong it was for her to be here.
“Rumor has it you’re with another woman,” she said.
“Why don’t you come see for yourself?”
Though she never looked up, Nicole leaned toward me slightly, turning her ear in my direction, and began to color with less enthusiasm, and I could tell she was listening to our conversation.
“I think I will,” Anna said, and hung up.
When she arrived a few minutes later, I made the proper introductions.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Nicole said to Anna, then turning to me, asked, “Is she your girlfriend?”
“Only in my dreams,” I said.
“You’re silly,” she said again.
“May we color with you?” Anna asked.
“Sure,” Nicole said. “I have a whole book of pictures.”
&nb
sp; She let each of us tear a page from her book and told us to help ourselves to her crayons.
“Thanks for being so generous,” Anna said.
“It’s more blessed to give than receive,” she said.
“So I’ve heard,” Anna said, smiling at me.
“Sprite doesn’t have caffeine,” Nicole said.
Unaware of my previous offer and Nicole’s response, Anna smiled at what she thought was the typical non sequitur of a small child. “No, it doesn’t,” she said.
“A Sprite it is then,” I said. “Anna?”
“No, thank you,” Anna said, continuing to color, “I’m starving for my art.”
As I was walking from the room, Nicole said, “Chips don’t have chocolate.”
When I returned with the Sprite and chips from the vending machine, seeing Anna and Nicole together, I wondered what it would be like to have children with such a woman. Though aware of and attentive to Nicole like I had yet to see Bunny be, she had thrown herself into coloring her masterpiece with the same childlike abandon Nicole had.
“Thank you, Chaplain JJ,” Nicole said, as I popped the top and opened the bag for her.
“My pleasure,” I said.
After a few chips and sips, she looked up at Anna and said, “You should marry him. I’m gonna marry a preacher.”
“If she were my wife,” I said, “I might just get my own TV show.”
“My mom’s pretty,” she said.
“She sure is,” Anna said.
Before I could say anything, the phone rang again and I picked it up.
“Chaplain Jordan, this is Kate at the switchboard. An inmate in A-dorm just tried to commit suicide and they need you down there right away.”
I stood as I placed the receiver back in the cradle.
“I’ve gotta go to A-dorm,” I said. “Can you stay with Nicole until her parents get back?”
“Sure,” she said. “What is it?”
“Attempted suicide.”
She nodded.
“Call me if you need anything.”
Without looking up from her work, Nicole said, “We’ll pray for you, Chaplain JJ.”
They were the last words she ever said to me, and their simplicity and sincerity would haunt me long after she was dead.
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