Blood of the Lamb (19 page)

“Would you do something for me?” he asked.

I didn’t respond.

“When you find out who did it, will you tell me first?” he continued.

I just might
, I thought.

“And if it’s Bobby Earl,” he said, no attempt to conceal his contempt, “would you invite him back for just one more revival service?”

Later that afternoon, I took Highway 20 into Tallahassee and picked up I-10 heading west toward Greensboro. Greensboro was a small town in Gadsden County, which borders on the Georgia state line. It was originally settled by wealthy slave owners, and is still famous for its large plantations, substantial black population (joined now by Mexican migrant workers), and tobacco crops.

In Greensboro, I bought a pack of Certs at a convenience store and then drove over to the AME Church near the high school where Pottersville regularly got beaten in every athletic competition. The church was actually a small white clapboard house with a chimney that had been converted into a steeple. However, I suspected, that like most of the conversions that took place inside the church, the process was incomplete and didn’t seem to be working out too well.

Perhaps because everyone else was running on CPT, I was one of the first to enter the small sanctuary. I walked down to the front where the casket was centered between the two altars and looked at the lifeless shell that used to be Dexter Freeman’s mother. Even in death, she was beautiful, and I could easily see Dexter’s handsome face in her features. She wore a delicate white dress with lace around the neck, and in her hands was a Polaroid picture of herself and Dexter that had been taken in the visiting park of Potter Correctional Institution. You could tell by her expression that the blue inmate uniform her son wore didn’t diminish in any way the fact that her boy was the apple of her eye.

A small door to my right opened, and I turned to see Dexter enter the sanctuary, his wife and daughter at his side, his son in his arms. He wore a navy blue double-breasted suit and a burgundy silk tie over a crisp white shirt as if he had come from a GQ photo shoot rather than a Florida state prison. His son’s suit matched his, and his wife and daughter wore matching navy dresses with white lace collars. They were the picture-perfect young American family.

When he saw me, his face lit up, and he rushed over and wrapped me up in a hug that included his son.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he said. “Honey, this is Chaplain Jordan, the one I was telling you about.” He looked at me. “This is—”

“Honey,” I said, and took her outstretched hand.

“I’m Trish,” she said with a smile. “And this is Moriah.” She touched her daughter on the head. I held my hand out and she took it.

At the mention of Moriah, I couldn’t help but think of Abraham and Isaac; Bobby Earl and Nicole.

“And this is Dexter, Jr,” she added with a big smile.

“What’s up, DJ?” I said, and held my hand up for a high five, which he gave me with no hesitation.

When I looked back at Dexter, he was shaking his head, and staring at me. “Thanks so much for coming, Chaplain. You’ll never know what it means.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “You have a beautiful family.” I winked at Moriah.

“Thank you,” she said, as she shrugged her shoulders and looked down, an embarrassed grin spreading across her adorable face.

Standing there with Dexter’s family, attempting to offer support and perhaps comfort in their time of crisis, I thought about how strange it was. Only a sometime-investigator and all-the-time prison chaplain would be caught in the seeming contradiction of trying to minister to one of a handful of suspects in a murder he was investigating.

“Am I early?” I asked.

Dexter shook his head. “Everyone else is running on CPT,” he said.

“That’s Colored People Time,” Trish explained.

“Oh,” I said, and winked at Dexter.

He shook his head. “Honey, he works in a prison that runs on CPT. He knows words and phrases Chris Rock doesn’t.”

I smiled. “I’m going to slip back there,” I said, nodding toward the back, “and give you all some time together.”

“Thank you,” he said, “but I’d like for you to sit with us. We don’t have any other family.”

“I’d be honored to,” I said.

After the funeral and interment, I stood with Dexter and his family beneath the canopy of a towering oak tree in front of the small church as they underwent the tearing of their souls at having to say good-bye again so soon. The air wasn’t as cool as it had been, but the gentle breeze made the shade beneath the shelter of the oak tolerable.

I was facing the church and Dexter when I saw the expression on his face change. I turned to see what was behind me.

A Greensboro City police car crept by, as if in slow motion, the two young, white police officers inside glaring at Dexter in a manner that indicated they had no intention to protect or serve.

I looked back at Dexter. The muscles in his jaws were flexing and his eyes had narrowed to slits. Trish continued to hug him, only now it was about restraint as much as affection. “Don’t,” she said. “We’re not going to let them keep us apart one more day than we have to.”

He seemed to relax a little, and when I turned back, the police car was gone.

“The one in the passenger’s side is Larry Lassiter, my brother,” Trish explained. “He’s the one who set Dexter up.”

I nodded.

“We better get you back,” she said to Dexter.

“Okay,” he said.

“Would you mind if I followed you?” I asked.

“Mind?” Trish said. “I was going to ask if you would.” We walked over to our vehicles. “Now that Mama Freeman is gone,” Trish said, “we’ll be moving, too. We’re going to get away from them. If we can just make it until then.”

“An actual innocent inmate,” Anna said. “I’ve become so jaded I didn’t really believe they existed.”

I had called Anna from a convenience store in Greensboro and asked her to check with FDLE about Larry Lassiter. What she had discovered, that Lassiter was under investigation and Dexter was believed to have been set up, so surprised her that she had rushed up to tell me the moment I arrived at the institution. I had just been buzzed through the sally port when she rushed up and gave me the news.

“They gonna get Dexter a new trial?” I asked.

“It has low priority,” she said. “They’re not going to do anything until they arrest Lassiter. Don’t want to warn him.”

“So Dexter could EOS before anything happens,” I said.

She nodded and frowned. “At least it’d be taken off his record.”

I shook my head. “That’s not enough,” I said.

“Not much we can do.”

“I’ll talk to Dad, see what he can do.”

She shook her head to herself in disbelief again and said, “An actual innocent inmate.”

In seminary, I had read
On Death and Dying
by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. In it, she shared her experiences with the dying and what she had learned from them. Kubler-Ross witnessed each of her patients experiencing the same five stages when faced with a terminal condition. I read the book as a part of a class on hospital ministry and experienced its truth first-hand while I served as a student chaplain at Emory Hospital. Memories of those days drifted over me like the sounds of a sad love song that brings both pleasure and pain as I drove over to Mom’s.

I had watched helplessly as the initial denial began with the first shake of their heads as the doctor delivered the grim prognosis, listened as they shared with conviction the opinion that this was a mistake, just a mix-up of records or an invalid test result. After a while, the light of their denial burned out, and then, like a lightning flash in a dark sky, their anger bolted out of nowhere and struck with rage at whatever happened to be in its path. I was usually called in on the next stage, for when it came to bargaining, everyone wanted to talk to the ‘Man upstairs.’ I heard confessions and received numerous vows that would be kept if only God would allow them to live. When this failed, which of course meant I had failed them as much as God had, they sank slowly into the quick-sand of depression, emerging much later, as if from baptism, new and clean in their acceptance.

My mom, who would die soon from the disease of alcoholism if she didn’t receive a liver transplant, was in the midst of a lengthy stage of bargaining, and had grasped the religion of the dying with all the fervor and desperation of a falling rock climber clinging to the last safety line.

When I arrived at Mom’s, an extremely overweight lady in illfitting polyester pants and an untucked religious T-shirt that read “Turn or Burn” over fiery flames met me at the door. She wore thick glasses, and her labored breathing whistled out of the numerous gaps between her too few teeth.

“You the son who’s a preacher?” she asked with a smile that scrunched up her face, lifted her glasses, and narrowed her eyes.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m John.”

“I’m Sister Bertha,” she said. “Come on in. I came over here to pray for her. You wanna join us?”

“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll—”

“You’re a preacher, aren’t you?” she asked. “Prayin’s what you’re paid to do.”

“Actually, I have to do most of my praying on my own time,” I said. “You go ahead. I’ll see her when you’re finished.”

She turned back from closing the door and eyed me skeptically. “You don’t want to pray with us?” Her question was filled with accusation and disdain.

“Well, I—”

“Listen,” she interrupted. “Your mother’s under the attack of Satan. She needs prayer warriors now more than ever. She has become a precious saint and this whole thing is just Satan trying to snatch her life.”

I nodded as she spoke, but I didn’t say anything.

“What?” she asked angrily. “You don’t agree? I can’t get an amen from a supposed-to-be preacher?”

“Actually,” I said. “Her condition is the direct result of her actions. Not the work of the devil. As unpleasant as it is, in truth, she’s reaping what she’s sown, and I believe that it is to her benefit to deal with the reality of what she’s done and what she’s experiencing because of it. She needs our compassion, but love doesn’t involve lying to her or supporting her in denying her responsibility.”

She shook her head, her face scrunching again, this time as if she smelled a bad odor. “My God,” she said. “No wonder we’re in the shape we’re in, when preachers are so deceived. Do you know anything about spiritual warfare?”

“Lady, I’m a recovering alcoholic,” I said. “I know all about spiritual warfare.”

She snorted and rolled her eyes. “Do you know how to bind and loose the enemy? Do you have the Gifts of the Spirit?”

“I—”

“I bet you don’t even speak in tongues,” she said and turned and waddled down the hallway to my mother’s sickroom.

I went to the kitchen to wait. While I was there, I noticed how dirty it was. Dishes were piled in the sink, plates of discarded food lined the counter, and the kitchen table was covered with letters and bills.

I began to clean.

Sister Bertha prayed long enough for me to clean nearly the entire kitchen. Her prayers were loud and demanding, formal and austere. She addressed God, the Devil, demons, and even cancer, though my mom’s condition was cirrhosis of the liver. She also prayed against her “blind and deceived family” and rebuked us for being a hindrance to her healing. When she was finished, she paraded out of the house without saying a word to me.

I continued to clean the kitchen long after Bertha had left. She disturbed me, and her irresponsible, judgmental religion left me angry and embarrassed. I was certain that her pseudo-spiritual, superstitious cocktail was eating away at Mother’s soul. When my anger had subsided, I walked down the long hall that awaits every son, to the room where my mother faced her mortality like the single raised finger of a Ferris wheel operator signaling that only one rotation remained on the ride of her life.

I quietly entered the room where I found her sleeping, and sank into the chair beside her bed. I studied her face as if seeing it for the first time. The gravitational pull of desperation in her eyes was held in by her heavy lids, and I could examine what was normally too painful. It was the guilt and pain she felt when she looked at me that hurt me most.

Her stress-creased face radiated a calm glow, and the corners of her mouth were turned up in a small pleasant smile. She looked peaceful. She looked only vaguely familiar. Perhaps I had been wrong about Sister Bertha. Perhaps I had been guilty of judging her for judging me. She must have been doing some good—she must have wanted the same thing I did.

My head fell into my hands and I began to pray… for Mom, and for her son, who needed forgiveness once again. After a while, I sensed she was looking at me, and I looked up to see the wide-eyed, adoring face of a mother—one I didn’t recognize as my own—gazing at me lovingly. I looked away for a moment. I was used to the glazed, out-of-focus gaze, the bobbing-head, confused leer, but not the compassion only a mother was capable of.

When I looked back, she asked, “Were you praying for me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “And for me.”

“For you?” she asked. “Why?”

“Because I’m quick to judge and slow to learn.”

“No, you’re not,” she said, and I got the impression she thought I was talking about her. “Why didn’t you pray out loud?”

“I didn’t want to wake you,” I said. “But I probably will before I go, if you will allow me to.”

“Allow you to?” she said, shaking her head. “Allow you to? I’m your mother, John. Don’t be so bashful. You don’t have to ask me if you can pray for me. You act as if I’m a stranger.”

I could tell by the quick flash of pain in her eyes that she had read my thoughts. “In a lot of ways we are strangers, Mom, and you know it. We really don’t know the people we’ve become.”

“Well, you’ve become a man of God,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Don’t,” she said and reached for my head. “I mean it. You’ve got to get more bold about your faith, that’s all… like Bertha. I want you to lay your hands on me and cast out this foul demon of sickness.”