The Reckonings

by Lacy M. Johnson

  Thoughts and prayers: that is what people offer. Prayers, and nothing more. Prayer is a word that comes to us from Old French, for “petition, request,” but it also has roots in Medieval Latin, precaria, from which we get “precarious,” a very different word that makes us think of a state of uncertainty, unpredictability, or risk, but which also means a state of being dependent on the will of another. “The function of prayer is not to influence God,” Søren Kierkegaard writes, “but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”

  Not a single day passes that I don’t think of my own children being shot at their school or imagine having to go to the morgue to identify their bodies. Every day I pray that they come home safe. A man killed twelve people in a movie theater, and now each time we go to see a movie, I plan our escape while my children eat popcorn, plan how I will use my body to shield them and how we will all die anyway. Each time I fly across the country, I remember how a man shot five people in an airport baggage claim. Five months later, a man entered a church during an evening Bible study and killed nine of the men and women gathered there while they bowed their heads to pray. A man killed forty-nine people in a nightclub, and we called it an atrocity. A month after the shooter in Las Vegas killed fifty-eight concert-goers and injured hundreds, a man in Texas entered a church and killed twenty-six people. Witnesses say he walked up and down the aisles, looking for the crying babies. These men prey on the ways we offer our vulnerability to one another because they cannot face the vulnerability in themselves.

  Just yesterday a man entered a high school and killed fourteen children and three of their teachers in Florida. In one photograph, two girls embrace, both sobbing, both covering their open mouths. One has braces; the other has painted her fingernails sky blue. They’ll never see the world the same again.

  * * *

  On that day I went quail hunting with my father, the dog rushed in, and the birds exploded in every direction, their wings frantic against the winter air. Faster and faster, their wings carried them away from the harm I intended, away from the barrel of my gun and toward survival, toward safety. I never went hunting with my father again, never even saw the two guns I had learned to shoot sort of well, not until I returned to my new apartment after having been kidnapped and raped by the man I had loved. My father met me there, the shotgun in his outstretched hand. I didn’t want it, didn’t want to be responsible for it. Guns weren’t even allowed on the property, were against the terms of the lease, and I was terrified of being evicted and having nowhere to go. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He said I wouldn’t even have to shoot it; if someone came to my door, all I would have to do is pump the barrel—make that unmistakable sound—and that would tell anyone on the other side of the door that I am armed. He brought it inside and gave me a box of ammunition. I put the gun in my closet, zippered into its brown leather case. It made me feel weaker, not stronger. More vulnerable, not less. I couldn’t sleep with it there, with all the ways it made me feel afraid. Two weeks later, my father returned, and I handed the gun back.

  * * *

  The memory of that moment returned to me when I was running on the trail near my house recently. A few days earlier, a man had pulled an assault rifle out of a duffel bag at a gas station up the street from my house and began shooting at random: he shot the gas station attendant and his wife; he shot cars and the people inside them; he shot retaining walls and houses across the street. He was eventually killed in a standoff with police. He was a combat veteran, had been deployed multiple times to war, and each time he came back changed, more and more like a weapon, less and less like himself.

  The street was closed, and when it reopened I ran with my dog along that street and entered the trail near my house. It was late in the morning, and the trail was mostly empty. I turned a corner and saw a man approaching. He reached across his chest into the inner pocket of his jacket. He has a gun, I thought, and my blood ran ice cold. There is only one kind of terror, and it feels like a terrible loneliness. But not as lonely as the man who fails to recognize the humanity of others, who believes his life is the only one that matters.

  His hand reeemerged from his jacket, empty. He walked past me along the trail.

  I ran home: faster and faster. That shut place inside me taking flight.

  ON MERCY

  Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.

  —Robert Frost, A Masque of Mercy

  The sight of the children rattles me every time. They sit around a tiny table in a too-small classroom, the walls stacked high with textbooks and technologies they will never use. The frailest ones wear hospital blankets draped over their shoulders. IV trolleys trail and beep behind them. Chest catheters peek out from under their clothes. One of the older girls wears a loose hijab. Her eyes are dark and bruised, her skin faintly gray. She lives in this hospital, in a private room down the hall. The healthy-looking children tend to live in nearby apartments and attend this hospital-school because they are just beginning their treatments and must be hooked to an IV trolley too often to attend a traditional school in the district. They are bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked, dressed in the fresh first-day clothes any healthy child might choose for herself. One girl wears platform sandals and a bright neon wig.

  My teaching partner, a ten-year veteran of this placement, spreads supplies on the table—construction paper and markers—and together we all begin to draw and to chat, to tell jokes and ask silly questions. Soon the children leave their seats and crowd together. They write or scribble or dictate to one another or to us. Torn paper and marker caps are strewn on the table, the chairs, and the floor. The girl in the neon wig asks to sit on my lap and doesn’t wait for me to answer before climbing aboard. I’m uncomfortable with this. I dislike being touched by anyone, most of all strangers, and have not forgotten the prohibition against physical contact with children who are not my own. But the child on my lap leans over the table. Her right hand holds down the paper while she scribbles furiously with her left. I place my hand on her back. A tumor bulges on her shoulder underneath her shirt. Within the year, the cancer in this tumor will spread: into her bones, her blood, her lungs, and head. In the end, she’ll be in so much pain that whatever kills her is a mercy.

  * * *

  “To have great pain is to have certainty,” philosopher Elaine Scarry writes. “To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” Scarry must mean a different kind of pain from the one I witness in the pediatric cancer ward. Here pain is sometimes experienced as fear, or bewilderment, or the ghost of future grief, depending on whether the pain is your own or that of a child who sits on your lap, only briefly; who enters your life, only briefly. What makes pain subject to doubt, Scarry suggests, is the difficulty of expressing it: “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” It is telling, I think, that the word pain finds its root in the Latin poena, or “punishment, penalty, retribution.” To bestow pain on another is cruelty. To relieve it is mercy. Even those sentenced to death by execution have a constitutional right to an instantaneous and painless death, though their constitutional rights extend to little else.

  “The act of verbally expressing pain,” Scarry continues, “is a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain.” I have no illusions that teaching dying children to write poetry will cure them, but that’s not to say the task isn’t, in so many small ways, profoundly healing.

  * * *

  I meet my teaching partner at the coffee shop to ride together in the elevator to the seventh floor. As she opens the door to the classroom, she tells me that one of her students has died. She heard just this morning. She turns and walks into the classroom, leaving this news with me in the hall. The boy was never my student; he was too ill to write with us in class long before I arrived.

  With the young writers at the hospital, we cut or tear paper into tiny little squares and look up synonyms for all the colors: azure, cobalt, sapphire, olive, emerald, virescent. We arrange the sc
raps on sheets of white paper. Some collages are made entirely of variations on a single color—arranging them is a tranquil, meditative act—and others burst and explode with patterns that do not cohere. We hang them on the walls with strips of tape.

  Back in the car, I ask my teaching partner about the student who has died. She tells me about the kind of boy he was by recalling the tiny details of his manner with the other children, a metaphor in a poem he wrote one day during the many years she knew him. There is a pause during which I can think of nothing useful to say. We’re sitting at the stoplight waiting for the passengers to board the light-rail.

  I’ve never been good at compassion, which might be one reason I’m here. I teach writing in a pediatric cancer ward because I get paid to do it and because compassion challenges me in ways I wish I could rise to meet. When my friend’s brother fell ill from brain cancer years ago, I fell out of touch with her. I never knew what to say when she described his deteriorating health, or the conversations they had while she sat at his bedside, or her decision to move back to her mother’s house. Her pain was not my pain, and I wasn’t eager to take it on. I didn’t mean to be cruel. Probably I told myself that my silence was a form of self-preservation. I was, after all, suffering from pain of my own. When I heard years later that my friend’s brother had died, I thought often of writing or calling but didn’t. We haven’t spoken since. I wouldn’t know what to say if we did.

  When the light changes, I ask my teaching partner, “How do you do it? What do you do with the grief?” She takes a long time to answer. She takes a breath. “Some lives are very long,” she says. “Some are very short. And when a person knows they’re going to die and chooses to spend any moment of the remaining time with you, you take it as a gift. Life is a gift.”

  We ride back to the coffee shop in silence: past men blowing leaves into the street, past people in their cars talking on their hands-free cell phones, past an old woman clutching her grocery trolley while waiting for the bus. I gather my things, say, “See you next week,” and reach for the door. “Actually,” she says, “you won’t.” She says she meant to tell me earlier, but then she got the news about the boy’s death. It’s been ten years of this for her, teaching writing to children who will die. She needs time. She needs space. She needs a break. I hug her once, hard. It’s the only thing I have to give.

  * * *

  We tend to associate mercy with alleviating pain and suffering, but also with reducing punishments and relieving our guilt. During the year I teach writing in the pediatric cancer ward, thirteen men are executed in Texas, the state where I live. One of them is Lawrence Russell Brewer, who was sentenced to death in 1999 for the murder of James Byrd Jr. On the night of June 7, 1998, Brewer and John William King, both self-identified white supremacists, rode as passengers in a truck driven by Shawn Berry. Sometime after midnight, the three white men encountered Byrd walking home from a party. In the morning, a mutilated human torso was found in the road in front of a historic African American cemetery.

  Police followed a gruesome trail back to the scene of a struggle, where they found Byrd’s wallet, keys, and dentures, as well as a cigarette lighter engraved with the words “Possum” and “KKK”; a wrench engraved with the name “Berry”; empty beer bottles, a pack of cigarettes, and three cigarette butts. That evening, police stopped Berry in his 1982 Ford pickup for a traffic violation. Behind the seat, police discovered a set of tools matching the wrench discovered at the fight scene. At his apartment, which he shared with King and Brewer, they discovered blood-stained clothing and piles of white supremacist propaganda. DNA tests on the three cigarette butts matched Brewer, Berry, and King.

  During Brewer’s sentencing, a prosecuting attorney read from one of Brewer’s letters to another jailhouse inmate, introduced as evidence into the proceedings: “Well, I did it. And no longer am I a virgin. It was a rush, and I’m still licking my lips for more.” The prosecution hinges on this: that this was to be the first of many murders he would commit as part of his initiation into a white-supremacist gang affiliated with the KKK offshoot Confederate Knights of America, which he joined in the Beto I Prison Unit in Texas. There he met William King, who was serving an eight-year sentence for a violation of his probation for a burglary he had committed at age seventeen. Over his prison term, King covered his body with racist tattoos and vowed to kidnap and kill a black man when he got free as part of a “blood tie.” Prosecutors said Brewer murdered James Byrd Jr. to attract attention and recruits to a racist group he planned to start in Jasper. They argued that people like Brewer, who can kill with no remorse, are the reason for the death penalty.

  By all accounts, even in the final moments before the execution, Brewer showed no contrition for his part in the murder of James Byrd Jr.: “As far as any regrets, no. I have no regrets,” he said during an interview earlier that week. “No, I would do it all over again, to tell you the truth.”

  * * *

  In his remorselessness, Brewer is unlike other prisoners on death row, many of whom spend their last breaths expressing sorrow and regret. They affirm their love for their mothers and children; they beg for mercy—not for a stay of execution, mind you, but for forgiveness; not from God, but from the families of their victims.

  “I hope you find comfort in my execution,” says Jermarr Arnold, executed by lethal injection in Texas in 2002 for the 1983 murder of a jewelry store clerk.

  “I pray that you find closure and strength,” says Timothy Titsworth at his 2006 execution in Texas.

  “I just ask that my death bring you peace and solace. If my death brings you that, then I will gladly give it,” says Jeffery Tucker to the widow of his 1988 murder victim. He recites the Lord’s Prayer as the chemicals begin entering his bloodstream. He and the victim’s son together say, “Amen.”

  * * *

  Consider, by way of contrast, the last words of Troy Davis, executed in Georgia, and at the same time, on the same day, as James Russell Brewer: “I am innocent,” Davis proclaims. Sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of white police officer Mark MacPhail, Davis never ceased proclaiming his innocence, and the justice system never ceased pronouncing his guilt: four times the governor signed Davis’s death warrant, and four times Davis’s lawyers appealed for clemency. Despite serious doubts about Davis’s guilt, about the rigor of the trial, about the racial biases of the trial judge and jury, and the racist sentencing practices of the state of Georgia; despite recantations by seven of the nine original witnesses; despite no physical evidence linking Davis to the shooting; despite more than 1 million signatures on petitions asking for clemency; despite the protests of former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, fifty-one members of Congress, Amnesty International, the NAACP, and numerous world leaders, the Supreme Court reviewed but failed to act on an appeal to stay Davis’s sentence, and allowed the execution to proceed.

  “I ask my family and friends that you all continue to pray, that you all continue to forgive. Continue to fight this fight,” Davis says, as he is strapped to the gurney, looking straight into the faces of the witnesses. “For those about to take my life, may God have mercy on all of your souls.”

  * * *

  It is winter when I meet my new teaching partner at the Starbucks counter near the hospital’s entrance and we ride together in the elevator to the classroom on the seventh floor. Only a few of the youngest writers are here today, and the classroom teacher lets us know that one of our writers, the teenage girl who sometimes wears a hijab, has been too sick to come to class this week. She hopes someone will come to visit her. As a group, we decide to make snowflakes for her room. It is winter, after all. The writers—one from West Texas, another from the United Arab Emirates, another from Ecuador—have never seen snow and have never made snowflakes out of paper. It’s hard to work the scissors, which are made to be safe for use by healthy children, not for children who are weak from chemo. We watch YouTube videos of snow falling in a blizzard, of icicles forming on eav
es, of a dog hopping joyfully through drifts. We choose the best snowflakes for the sick teenager’s room. We write poems in which we are all snowflakes on a harrowing adventure from the clouds to the ground below. We tromp toward her private room and pile in around her bed. She leans back on her pillow, smiling, too weak to sit up or cover her head. While my teaching partner and I tape the snowflakes to the windows, the writers take turns reading their poems to the girl, who listens with her eyes closed, grimacing in pain. A nurse comes in to fiddle with her IV trolley, which promises relief but does not deliver it. The children are hungry for their lunch, so we climb off the bed and head quietly toward the door. “Stay,” she calls after us. My teaching partner leads the children back to the classroom to meet their parents; I stay to read one more poem, Miguel de Unamuno’s “The Snowfall Is So Silent.” “The flakes are skyflowers,” I say:

  pale lilies from the clouds,

  that wither on earth.

  They come down blossoming

  but then so quickly

  they are gone . . .

  Her eyes loll in their sockets as I read, the morphine at last reaching its mark. Her mouth goes slack. The teenage girl becomes a child like any other child. She sighs and falls asleep.

  * * *

  People tend to associate mercy with forgiveness—with compassion offered by those in a position to instead impose cruelty. But I associate mercy with a tiny classroom on the second floor of the First Baptist Church in my hometown, with shoes I notice are scuffed, tights I notice are torn, and a dress I notice is smudged as I sit with other scuff-shoed children on the floor while one of the deacons’ wives holds a picture book open on her lap. She is part of one long memory in which we learn about the Flood because it is March and raining, or about the crucifixion because it is Easter, or the trials of Job because it is summer and there is a terrible drought. We learn about the Garden of Eden when it is fall and our fathers, who art in the fields, are harvesting the crops. Hallowed be thy name. When we, who have until now sat on the floor together, are separated—boys in one room, girls in another—the stories become warnings. Lot’s wife, who disobeyed the angels, is turned into a pillar of salt. Eve disobeys a direct order from God, and every woman everywhere for all eternity is punished for it. Pain is what humanity inherits from her curiosity. It is only through God’s mercy that any of us is granted a reprieve.