Flesh and Blood

Though my name is the only one on the cover, this assemblage of ink, paper, cardboard, glue, and stitches is actually the culmination of a collective effort, and I’m truly grateful to the following for their contributions:

For unparalleled support and encouragement, for penetrative insight, for unwavering faithfulness, I’m far more thankful than I can express to Pam Lister, my own personal patron saint.

This book is in existence because my son, Micah, thought it should be, and because he and his sister, Meleah, were willing to endure their mom’s reading and rereading of their dad’s writing during our many treks down the long, empty rural highways of North Florida.

I’m indebted to Pam Lister, Lynn Wallace, Bette Powell, Ron Kenner, and Jeanmarie Martin for editorial and proofreading assistance.

I’m grateful to Phillip Weeks, Dayton Lister, Terry Lewis, and D.P. Lyle, M.D. for help with the correctional, legal, medical, and forensic details.

I’m also appreciative of Adam “Professor Kisses” Ake for his mad computer skills.

Thanks, too, goes to the following people who have shown great kindness and support to me and to John: Carolann Johns, Lou Boxer, Jon Jordan, Tim Whitehead, Dan Nolan, Fran Oppenheimer, Bruce Benedict, Kevin Dreyer, Jamie Smith, Rich Henshaw, Margaret Coel, Michael Connelly, Dawn Radford, Georgia Anglen, and Joan Bond.

There is a distinct pleasure in reading an anthology of short stories featuring the same character. Each story explores a different aspect of the character’s life and shines the spotlight on different parts of his or her personality. In the best of such anthologies, the stories build upon one another, adding layer after layer of complexity and contradiction until the character’s inner life—the most guarded thoughts and feelings—are exposed, and in the process, we, the fortunate readers, are able to gain a deeper insight into our own guarded thoughts and feelings. And isn’t that the true value of stories? We open an anthology and begin reading, anticipating both the pleasure to come from the reading itself and the way in which the stories will take us outside of ourselves for a brief time and provide a new perspective that can help us to make sense of our own lives.

Flesh and Blood and Other Stories
by Michael Lister is that kind of enriching experience. The character whose life opens up for us is John Jordan, a man of irony and contradictions, which make him real, like an old friend we thought we knew who continues to surprise us. He’s an ex-cop and an alcoholic struggling to hold onto sobriety and sometimes failing. An ex-cop in recovery, he says of himself, and now a chaplain at a tough prison in the northern gulf region of Florida. He wears a clerical suit and collar, yet finds he has little in common with other men in clerical suits and collars. He navigates the rocky shoals of racial tensions in a place where old prejudices still run beneath the surface of things—”a white man at home among blacks, underprivileged and oppressed. “ He’s in love with Anna. “The one,” he says,” and the one who got away.”

He’s also a superb detective, this John Jordan, often called upon to investigate the inexplicable and sometimes unsolvable cases. Ex-cop and chaplain, he is part Sherlock Homes and part Father Brown. What he brings to the investigations is the combination of Sherlock’s powers of observation—the ability to see details others overlook— and Father Brown’s openness to the fundamental mysteries at the heart of life. Those are the mysteries that infuse these stories. Even after Jordan has solved the crime, wrapped up all the facts, provided the answers, the fundamental mysteries linger, reminding us that not everything in life is knowable or solvable.

Four of the stories might seem like typical mysteries with ingenious and suspenseful plots that challenge Jordan’s powers of deduction. Yet by the endings, we’ve glimpsed the larger mysteries at the center of the stories—mysteries that recede from our grasp like clouds drifting overhead. In “Bad Blood,” an elementary teacher is found bludgeoned to death on the prison grounds. Jordan uncovers the facts and apprehends the killer, but the mystery of the infectious nature of evil and its power to spread into the most unlikely human hearts remains just that—a mystery.

“Blood Bought” and “Blood-Red-Rec-Yard-Ruse” brings Jordan face to face with the mystery of love and the way it exerts control over the human heart and will. And in the brilliantly plotted “A Taint in the Blood,” Jordan struggles with the darkness in his own heart and with the possibility that his theory about “the great disconnect of prison”—the vast difference between how someone appears and what he may be capable of doing—may also apply to him.

Running through all of the stories is the mystery of divine grace and the way it can penetrate even the darkest places. The stories are religious in the best sense of the term—open to possibilities. Jordan is a chaplain with more questions than answers, yet he recognizes that grace—the sign of God’s presence in the world—is capable of manifesting itself through the most unlikely people and in the most surprising situations. “Flesh and Blood” begins with the mystery of a pregnant nun who happens to be a virgin and concludes with the mystery of forgiveness and the way in which it can heal the human heart. In “A Fountain Filled with Blood,” Jordan confronts the fundamental mystery that the truth may be something other than what is apparent when he is drawn into the case of a ten-year-old black girl who says she is Jesus returned to earth—and gives every indication that she just might be.

The remarkable story, “Image of Blood,” weaves together the various strands that run through the anthology—mysteries of the human heart, of relationships and of God’s presence in the world. At the request of his dying mother, Jordan sets out to determine whether the Shroud of Turin might be the actual cloth that had wrapped the body of Jesus following the crucifixion. His search through the scientific studies for what is real and authentic about the shroud becomes a metaphor for his relationship with his alcoholic mother. The facts he uncovers—the certainties—only lead to deeper questions. What is more important, fact or faith? Can something be at once real and unreal? Ironically, it is the mystery of the shroud rather than the facts that begins to heal the broken relationship. As Jordan says, the shroud “works its magic.”

Indeed, mystery and magic fill these stories. They are in the richness of the language, such as the descriptions of the north Florida landscape with Spanish moss hanging from oak branches, forests so thick they block out the light, and the dark, greenish-black water of a slough filled with cypress trees. They are in the remarkable insights into men who are imprisoned—into what makes them want to live and want to die. They are in the deft details that reveal Jordan and the characters with whom he interacts. He can spot a murderer by instinct, he says, “by the pale green teardrop tattoos at the corners of his vacant eyes.”

And mystery and magic are in the journey that we take with John Jordan into the unseen wonders permeating all of life, beyond the facts and the data and what we might imagine is the extent of reality. The idea that God’s grace might illuminate even the darkest, most violent and disjointed places may be startling, even unsettling, but it is also comforting. That is what the best stories do: they startle and unsettle us and, in the process, expand our view of reality. Most of all, they touch us, perhaps with God’s grace.

Margaret Coel
Boulder, Colorado
July 2006

I was leaving Potter Correctional Institution following an unusual day when the call came. The day was unusual because it was good, and good days at PCI were about as rare as innocent men.

Anna Rodden,
the
one, and the one that got away, was next to me as we headed toward the parking lot on the other side of the chain link fence and razor wire, and though we would part ways when we reached our vehicles, I had no reason to believe that I wouldn’t have as good a night as day.