Seventeen Years

Seventy Times

Chapter 2: Seventeen Years

Ezra's apartment was a mile from the prison in a row of beige duplexes the Bureau of Prisons rented for senior staff who preferred not to commute from Lexington. The rent was low. The walls were thin. The neighbor was a psychologist named Donna who worked the intake unit and had the particular exhaustion of a woman who spent her days asking violent men to describe their feelings and then documenting the results in a system that would use the documentation to deny parole.

Two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom with a shower stall narrow enough to enforce humility. A couch Elena had chosen before she died. A bookshelf Ezra had built after she died, because grief needed somewhere to put its hands on a Saturday morning, and lumber did not ask questions.

Two photographs on the bookshelf.

Elena at the beach on their tenth anniversary, her face turned toward the camera with the expression of a woman who had married a quiet man and learned to read the silence rather than fill it. She wore a blue dress. She was laughing at something Ezra had said that he could no longer remember, which meant the photograph preserved her joy more faithfully than his memory preserved its cause.

Marcus at twenty-two. Graduation from Tennessee State. Engineering degree. The mortarboard at an angle because Marcus had never worn anything straight in his life. He stood with one arm around their mother and the other pointing at the camera with the index finger of a man who was telling the photographer to hurry up because he had places to be.

He had places to be.

That was the thing about Marcus that the obituary had tried to capture and the funeral had tried to honor and neither had quite reached, because the quality that defined Marcus was not his intelligence or his warmth or his laugh — it was his velocity. He moved through the world as though the world were slightly behind schedule and he had been sent to correct it. He talked too fast. He drove too fast. He read too slowly, which was the one exception, because Marcus believed that words deserved more patience than people usually gave them, and he would sit with a page of scripture or a page of Baldwin or a page of thermodynamics with the same stubborn concentration, his left hand turning the book too far open, his right hand holding a pen he would use to underline sentences that met his standard for truth.

He walked into a convenience store in Nashville at 10:47 PM on a Thursday in March to buy orange juice.

The facts of what happened next had been entered into court records, spoken by witnesses, reconstructed by detectives, and narrated by a prosecutor with the organized competence of a man who believed that sequence was the same thing as sense.

Two men had entered the store four minutes before Marcus. One was named Curtis Deane. The other was named Darnell Washington. Deane had a gun. Washington had the car. The plan was to take the register.

The clerk complied. Deane took the money. They should have left. They almost left.

Marcus walked in.

Not because he was brave or foolish or unaware. Because he wanted orange juice and the store was on his way home from the library and the sign said OPEN.

Deane panicked. That was the word the defense used. The prosecution used a different word. The jury heard both and chose the prosecution's.

One shot.

Marcus was dead before the ambulance arrived. The orange juice he had not yet picked up stayed on the shelf. The store closed for three days and then reopened because commerce did not observe the same mourning period as family.

Deane was arrested six hours later in a motel room where the television was still on. Washington was arrested the following morning at his mother's apartment, where he had gone because he was twenty-four and terrified and did not know where else to go.

Deane received life without parole. He died in a federal prison in Mississippi six years ago of a heart attack the system recorded as a medical event and his mother recorded as the only mercy God had left for a son who had used up the others.

Washington received twenty-five years. He had been the driver. He had not pulled the trigger. He had not known Deane would shoot. The law did not require that he had known. The law required that he had participated in the felony during which the killing occurred, and participation was a fact he could not dispute, and so the sentence came down like weather — impersonal, enormous, and indifferent to the distinction between the hand that held the gun and the hand that held the steering wheel.

Ezra was thirty-one. He worked as an accountant at a firm in Nashville where the ceiling was low, the fluorescent lights were unflattering, and the work was precise enough to occupy his mind without engaging his heart, which at the time he considered a feature rather than a flaw.

He went to the trial. He sat behind his mother. He listened to the testimony. He heard the sequence. He did not hear sense.

The sentence was handed down on a Tuesday.

He went back to his desk on Wednesday and worked for three months without telling anyone what had happened because grief in an accounting office did not have a line item and he did not know how to enter it into a system that tracked everything except the one thing that mattered.

Elena noticed.

She noticed because she was the kind of woman who read silences the way other people read headlines — for the thing beneath the thing that was being presented. She sat with him on the couch she had chosen and did not say talk to me. She said I'm here when the words come.

The words did not come for four months.

When they did, what Ezra said was not about Marcus or about the trial or about the men who had killed him. What he said was:

"I need to find a room where the question of why is not something anyone tries to answer."

Elena looked at him.

"Seminary," she said.

Not as a suggestion.

As a recognition.

He enrolled the following fall at a small divinity school in Memphis where the buildings were old and the professors were older and the curriculum assumed that the students had arrived not because they had found God but because they had run out of other places to look. He graduated in three years. He was ordained by a congregation that prayed over him with the tenderness of people who understood that a man who enters ministry after a murder is not answering a call so much as following a wound to the only room where the wound is allowed to be the point.

His first chaplaincy was at a state prison in Alabama. Two years. Then FCI Hardin, where the warden had needed a chaplain who could run a chapel in a facility that housed eleven hundred men of fifteen faiths and seven organized gangs, and where the previous chaplain had resigned after discovering that the job required more from his theology than his theology had been built to provide.

Ezra had been at Hardin for eleven years.

Elena had been dead for four.

Cancer. The ordinary kind. The kind that begins with a test result and ends with a room in a hospital where the machines are more articulate than the people and the people are more present than the machines. She died on a Wednesday in November. Ezra held her hand. She told him to keep the couch.

He kept the couch.

He kept Marcus's Bible.

He kept the apartment because moving would have required making decisions about objects that still held the shape of the people who had used them, and he was not ready to collapse those shapes into boxes.

He kept the work.

The work was the thing that kept him, if he was honest, which he tried to be, though honesty in a prison chaplaincy was a more complicated discipline than most people understood. The men in the study room brought their worst truths to the table every week and asked him to hold the space while they examined what they had done, and in the holding of that space Ezra found the only version of ministry that made sense to him — not the kind that explained suffering, but the kind that sat with it until the sitting itself became the sermon.

He made dinner. Rice and beans. A discipline from seminary he had never abandoned because it was cheap and filling and required exactly enough attention to prevent the mind from wandering into the rooms where it should not go unsupervised.

He washed the dishes.

He sat on Elena's couch.

He opened Marcus's Bible.

He turned to Philemon and read the whole letter through, all twenty-five verses, in the quiet of a two-room apartment a mile from a prison where eleven hundred men were preparing for sleep or for the absence of it.

He had read the letter a hundred times.

He had taught it more than he could count.

He had never once, in all those readings, considered what he would do if the letter stopped being a text and started being a situation — if the man who had wronged him walked into the room and sat down in one of the eight chairs and opened a Bible and asked to be received.

That was a question he had not needed to answer.

It was September.

It was a Sunday.

In four days a man named Darnell Washington would arrive at FCI Hardin on a routine transfer from a facility in Alabama, and the question Ezra had not needed to answer would become the only question the room had left.