What Ezra Said

Seventy Times

Chapter 38: What Ezra Said

On a Wednesday night in December, Ezra drove to the grocery store in town.

The store was a Food City on the main road between the prison and Lexington, the kind of regional grocery store that served the communities too small for the national chains and too proud for the dollar stores, and that stocked its shelves with the particular combination of necessities and aspirations that small-town grocery stores produced — the bread and milk alongside the seasonal displays, the cleaning supplies beside the baking aisle, the produce section where the fruits and vegetables were arranged with the care of a department that understood it was competing with backyard gardens and church potluck leftovers.

He bought rice. He bought beans. He bought coffee.

He stood in the produce section.

He looked at the cantaloupes.

They were on sale. Three dollars and forty-nine cents. The sign said SWEET RIPE LOCAL, which was an ambitious claim for December in Tennessee but which the sign made with the confidence of a produce department that understood its audience and that knew the audience would not verify the claim because the audience wanted cantaloupe, not accuracy.

He picked up a cantaloupe.

He held it.

He stood in the produce section of Food City holding a cantaloupe and thinking about Vance's description of forgiveness — the absence of charge, the memory without the weight, the discovery that the thing you had been carrying had set itself down at a moment you could not identify.

He did not feel the absence of charge.

He felt something else.

He felt the presence of something new. Not the old weight gone — the old weight was still there, because brothers did not stop being dead and the facts of March did not rearrange themselves because a chaplain stood in a grocery store holding a melon. The weight remained. But alongside the weight, in the space the weight had occupied alone for seventeen years, something else had arrived, and the something else was — he searched for the word. He stood in the produce section and searched for the word the way the study searched for words, carefully, with the understanding that the wrong word was worse than no word, because the wrong word reduced the thing it described and the thing he was feeling could not afford to be reduced.

The word was: room.

The sealed room in his chest — the room where the facts of March were stored in the order designed for survivability — had changed. Not opened. Not emptied. Changed. The walls were still there. The facts were still there. The order was still there. But the room had a window now. And through the window, light entered. And the light was the light of the study room and the men and the verses and the weeks of holding and the break and the Bibles on the table and the word brother spoken across twelve feet of institutional air.

The sealed room had a window.

The window did not erase the room. The window did not open the door. The window let light in.

Ezra put the cantaloupe in the cart.

He drove home.

He ate dinner. Rice and beans and cantaloupe, sliced into cubes with a knife that was the right size for the job because Ezra, unlike Vance's ex-husband, used the correct knife for every task, which was an accounting habit that he had carried into every domain of his life and that Elena had found both endearing and mildly infuriating, because precision in knife selection was an expression of a personality that valued order, and the valuing of order was the same quality that had built the sealed room, and Elena had understood that the room and the knife selection were expressions of the same man.

He sat on the couch.

He did not open the Bible.

He sat on Elena's couch in the apartment a mile from the prison and he thought about Sunday.

Sunday was the last verse. Verse twenty-five. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. The letter's final word. The word that closed what the letter had opened, which was a door between two people — one who had wronged and one who had been wronged — and the door was the letter and the letter was the door and the word that opened and closed the door was grace.

Grace, which was the beginning and the end.

He thought about what he would say.

Not the teaching. Not the theological framing. Not the chaplain's prepared remarks. He thought about what he, Ezra, the brother, the man, would say on the Sunday when the letter ended and the study completed its passage through the twenty-five verses that Paul had written from prison to a free man, asking the free man to do the hardest thing.

He knew what he would say.

He had known for weeks. He had known since the break. He had known since the Bibles on the table. He had known since Darnell said brother and Ezra said brother and the word crossed twelve feet of air and landed in the space between them where seventeen years of facts had been stored in an order that was changing.

He would say the thing the letter asked.

Not as a ceremony. Not as a performance. Not as a moment for Dale's newsletter or the warden's metrics or the Bureau's records. As a truth. Spoken in the room where truths were spoken. Held by the men who held truths. Carried by the room that had carried everything since September and that had not broken and would not break.

He finished the cantaloupe.

He washed the knife.

He sat on the couch.

He looked at the photograph of Marcus. The mortarboard. The grin. The finger pointing at the camera.

"Sunday," Ezra said.

Not to the photograph. Not to the dead. To himself. To the room in his chest with the new window and the light coming through. To the version of himself that was being built by the letter and the room and the men and the weeks and the faith, the version that was not the old version and not a new version but the version that existed when the sealed room got a window and the light changed the order without changing the facts and the facts remained and the light remained and both were true.

"Sunday," he said again.

He went to bed.

He slept.

He dreamed of Marcus.

Not the facts of March. Not the convenience store. Marcus at the kitchen table, sixteen years old, arguing about scripture. Pointing at the page. Saying: "Zeke, the text doesn't say what you think it says. The text says what it says. Read it again."

Ezra read it again.

In the dream, the text said: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Marcus looked at him.

"See?" Marcus said. "Your spirit. Not your theology. Not your chaplaincy. Not your sealed room. Your spirit. Grace is for the spirit. The spirit is the part that's still alive. The spirit is the part that can still be refreshed. The spirit is the part that walks into the room on Sunday and opens the Bible and says the true thing."

Marcus grinned.

"Now go say it, Zeke."

Ezra woke.

The apartment was dark. The cantaloupe smell lingered. Donna's television was off.

Sunday was coming.

Sunday was always coming.

And for the first time since September, Ezra was ready.