It's cold in here. That's what I notice first. I knew it would be. Places like this are always cold. It was surprisingly easy to get in this room. I never even had to show my ID. But it's just a small county jail. A couple of heavy doors with a small square of bullet-proof glass at eye level (if you're a 6' tall man) to push through and here we are in the common area.
Monochromatic. That's the second thing I notice. The walls, doors, floor, ceiling, even the heavy iron picnic tables that are bolted to the floor are the same shade of pale gray.
Every thing is hard. There are no soft surfaces. I glimpse two women who are new to the facility being given their bedding before being sent to their room. They can carry it--mattress and all--under one arm. That's the softest thing thing I've seen and it's pretty pathetic.
I stand awkwardly just inside the door as it clangs shut behind me and meet the stares of the women who are such a stark contrast to everything else about this place. They are soft and feminine and clothed in that obnoxious bright orange that people only wear when they want to be easily found. Though they wear no make-up and don't have blow dryers or flat irons, there is a beauty in them and I can easily imagine what they would look like if they were dressed for company.
There are about 17 women in this common area waiting for us; all of them inmates of the Cleburn County Correctional Facility. We have no idea what they've done to get here but it's probably better this way. The less we know the less we judge. This way, all I can see are women who are already paying the price for what they've done. I don't need to condemn; I am just here to sit with them for an hour.
They stand up and form a line that stretches to the back of the room. One by one they embrace me, my sister, and my aunt in greeting. They've never seen me or my sister before and have no idea if we are even worthy of their hugs but the fact that we came here with their beloved teachers, Ray and Esther Clevenger, is enough for them to know we are.
I am not generally a hugger but I would die before I would refuse a hug from any of these women. As I wrap my arms around them, I feel the flesh at their back, the unique form and shape and feel of each individual, and though I don't speak I hope to communicate with my touch that I am glad to be here. No. I am honored to be here, included in this bible study, wholly accepted by these women--no questions asked. There are not many groups of women who would do that. How can I help but do the same?
I find a place among them as we sit at the tables. Uncle Ray tells them to open their bibles to where they left off last time: Proverbs 29. Several women slide pictures of their kids out from between the pages of their bibles and lay them down carefully, touching each one tenderly. "My kids," the woman next to me whispers as she positions the pictures around her bible. "They're beautiful," I whisper back and I mean it. They are adorable--all four of them, and I ache a little, wondering who is caring for them in her absense and when she will get to see them again.
I did not bring my bible. Uncle Ray said they'd share theirs with us, so I sit and watch them find their places. I am astonished at how much they have written in the pages of their bibles. I love the sight of scripture that has been lovingly, painstakingly underscored, starred, highlighted, and wrinkled from use and misuse. Those are words that have been poured over and meditated on. Words that have convicted and comforted, wrecked and solaced.
The woman who sits across from me, a grandmother I would later discover, slides her bible across the table so that I can look from it and follow along. Uncle Ray begins with verse 1. He goes down the page, telling a story from his life to impart the meaning of each verse and how it applies to the lives of these women. He makes his way to verse 10: "The bloodthirsty hate the upright; but the just seek his soul." I struggle to understand the meaning of this King James text but the women nod, rapt, transfixed by his teaching. I have been doing bible studies for a long time--I'm not sure if I've ever seen an entire group so 100% committed to every word spoken. There are no yawns to stifle, no cell phones to check, no watches to look at, no fidgeting children to quiet, no appointments that cause them to leave early. Every word he says and reads is soaked in by every listener. I wonder how they have looked forward to this hour all week long.
For some of them, this might be the first time they have heard these words and I marvel at the life-transforming power of them. There is no stumbling block of good deeds that gets in the way of their salvation. They know their wrongs and they know what a precious gift grace is. They are taught that they are blameless now, that they are the ones Jesus died for, and they do not take it for granted like so many of us "good Christans" who have never found ourselves in this confining world of orange and gray.
While they listen to Uncle Ray's preaching and concentrate on the scriptures laid out in front of them, they are probably more spiritually sure of who they are as daughters of the Most High than at any other time in their lives. This is their safe place. They are safe from the bad friends and temptations and stupid decisions that landed them here. They are safe from the psychological devastation of being judged--or worse--the self-loathing that probably haunts them day and night. They probably walk back to their cells after this hour of bible study with new promises in their hearts and new confidence that they will do things right next time because they serve a God of second and third chances.
I know how it feels to hear the powerful message of redemption and be so full of love and gratitude to God you're nearly bursting. And I know how it feels a few days later when the memory of the message has faded, the glow has waned, and the confidence wavers.
They leave the safety of the gray walls so abruptly. When the court date arrives they are walked from their cell to the judge, not knowing what the outcome will be. If they are freed, they are turned out without even enough warning to call for a ride. They go right back to the environment that got them here. No more Ray and Esther. No more godly women flanking them at those cold gray tables, encouraging them, keeping them in the Word, keeping the flame lit.
It's a miracle more of them don't find their way back.
I think about these women all the time. I remember their faces and I wonder about them. I lift them up in prayer and hope they find themselves surrounded by godly women on the outside who will continue to pour into them.
A few days later, my mind still on the verses Uncle Ray explained to the women, I look them up in my own NLT bible. I want to understand them better. I zero in on Proverbs 29:10 which says, "The bloodthirsty hate blameless people; [as for the upright, they seek their life.]" Suddenly I realize who the blameless are. They wear orange, condemned by the county, but considered blameless by a loving God. I get to choose who I will be. Will I be the bloodthirsty who hate them? Or the upright who seek the same new life they now possess?
It's an easy answer.
Showing posts with label prison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prison. Show all posts
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Delivered
Evelyn settled herself into the cushioned chair, set her purse on the floor, and used her orthotics-clad foot to slide it under her seat. There were 20 or 30 chairs in this small, shadowy room and thanks to the thoughtful design of stadium seating, the spectators would get a great view. As if they had come here to watch a movie or a ball game and not to watch somebody die.
There was an armed guard standing in the corner, wearing a baseball cap of all things (the casualization of society, she called this), watching people trickle in. There were a few she figured were reporters. Who else would want to memorialize this event with a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen? Some faces she recognized from the trial as families of the victims. One of them was a victim. Evelyn tried not to look at her. She sat two seats away and one row down. The woman had been shot and raped and left to die but somehow survived. Her testimony at the trial was horrific and is probably what convinced the jury to vote unanimously for death. In a perverted sort of way that Evelyn would have denied if anyone had asked her about it, she hoped the woman got some kind of satisfaction out of today. Then at least one good thing would come out of her son's life.
She kept her eyes on the window in front of her and wondered if it was a one-way glass. Maybe Richard wouldn't even know she was here. Maybe it was best that way. She thought of him as a boy and how he would stick out his hand, and wave a big goofy wave, and say, "Hi, Mom!" when he saw her, the way he did when she was 15 minutes late picking him up from school once. He was the only student left and stood on the sidewalk with a teacher who lifted her watch and stared at it when Evelyn arrived. Richard never doubted that she would be there for him eventually. She hadn't once come to visit him in prison.
Time had stopped for her around the time he was convicted 11 years ago. She knew intellectually that he was no longer a boy and that a grown man of 29 would walk through the door on the other side of that glass, but she preferred to live in her memories, a time of promises made, before she knew they wouldn't come to pass. Not in Richard's lifetime anyway.
The door to the room beyond the glass opened and Richard walked through in his baggy orange jumper, hands behind his back, followed by a physician and a man in a suit. Richard said, "You want me to sit?" Evelyn was shocked she could hear voices. She thought it would be sound proof and panicked a bit at what she might hear in his last moments. Despite everything, she didn't want to hear him suffer. The man in the suit told him not to sit just yet and took the handcuffs off. He bumped Richard lightly as he moved around him in the small space and Evelyn heard her son's voice again saying, "Pardon me," as he rubbed his wrists.
They nudged Richard toward a gurney in the center of the room and sat him down on a plastic green mattress and hooked him up to a heartrate monitor, which seemed to her like a waste. Thin black velcro straps dangled limp from the sides of the bed, jostling with Richard's weight in a grotesque little dance.
Richard was calm. More calm than she'd ever seen him, though to be fair, the last time they were together he was on drugs. For six excruciating years, his eyes were either dilated and darting all over the place or glazed over, hollow and sunken. Now they were clear and blue. His face was clean shaven. He looked so...healthy. There wasn't even a tremor in his hand as he stretched his arm out to have the inside of his elbow swabbed with alcohol by the physician, another waste of time it seemed to her, and have an IV started.
He laid down and inched his body up the mattress a bit to position his head on the little white pillow. The man in the suit fastened the velcro around Richard's arms and legs. He mumbled something she couldn't hear and Richard looked up at him and nodded. She thought Richard would be scared but he wasn't. He was just expectant, as if he was being strapped into a ride at an amusement park and had just been asked by the bored, sweaty, zit-plagued employee if the straps were tight enough. "Enjoy the ride," the teenaged boy would say, and it would have been vaguely appropriate here but that's not what the man said. He asked Richard if he had any last words. Richard stared unblinking at the ceiling and said, "Life is death, death is life. I hope that someday this absurdity that humanity has come to will come to an end. Life is too short. I hope anyone that has negative energy towards me will resolve that. Life is too short to harbor feelings of hatred and anger. That's it, Warden."
Evelyn gripped the arms of her chair. It was all she could do to keep herself from standing up and facing the room and giving a proper statement for Richard. She wanted them to know that he was sorry for killing his own brother with a 20-gauge shotgun. He was sorry for shooting those two other women, raping one of them, and leaving them all for dead. He had to be. She wasn't mother to a monster.
She labored for 26 hours to bring Richard into the world. His head was stuck for so long in the birth canal, when he finally emerged it was misshapen and lopsided and covered in meconium. His nose never did quite straighten out but she loved him even more for it. "Look what we did!" she had whispered excitedly to her husband in the dark early morning hours after his birth. "This is the one. Our deliverer," she said, welling with pride over her beautiful boy. He was born with the promise of greatness and he could get Evelyn back home where she belonged. She didn't deserve to go back after what she had done but the promise had been made and she trusted that it would be kept. Richard would save them all.
She reminded him of it often, even when he began resenting her for it. The summer Richard turned 12 was when her faith in him began to waver. He'd been in trouble more than he was out of it and she stood at the stove, stirring a pot of pasta and letting him have it. In her mind, she liked to see herself as June Cleaver with her apron, flats, and pearls, in control of every situation, telling him why he needed to stop this behavior and come to his senses. "We're all depending on you, Richard. Don't forget that." But in reality, she was barefoot, uncombed, exhausted, stressed to the point of sickness, and the pasta water had boiled over, hissing and bubbling, scorching the glass stove top.
"I don't give a (the foulest expletive in the English language, in her opinion) about the promise!" Richard shouted. Her fingers froze, just short of the knob to turn the heat down, and she stood like a statue while he railed at her. "Andy never gets this bull(another vile expletive that makes her cringe to remember). Why don't you do this to Andy? You leave Andy alone and you're always on my back!" Of course that was peppered with proclamations of hating her and wishing she was dead, but that wasn't what haunted Evelyn about the exchange. Later, she scrubbed furiously at the stovetop with her brillo and Softscrub, stunned that he was jealous of Andy. If anyone had a reason to resent her, it was Andy, who was always being overlooked and disregarded in favor of Richard. She didn't mean for it to be like that but so much was at stake for Richard and Andy just...was. Andy, eternally sweet Andy, never held it against her. He loved everyone and did everything that was asked of him without complaint. He was probably professing his love for his brother right up until Richard shot him.
Evelyn was constantly going over the years leading up to that nightmare in her mind, redoing scenes in her imagination that might have changed the trajectory, if only she would have known what Richard was capable of. One scene she would have like to do over was the evening her husband had been working late in the fields. Richard approached him and demanded to be paid for his labor. His father laughed in his face and told him his labor was unacceptable, and that it took a lot of nerve to walk up to him in this field with his hand out, as if he owed Richard something. Richard faunched and fumed and sputtered horrible things about hating his father then too.
Evelyn would have gone beyond praying if she had another chance at that night. She would have begged and pleaded with him, disgracing herself if need be, to get him to return to his father with a contrite and humble heart, knowing her husband would never turn him away. Nothing would have worked though; she knew that now. Richard's resentment morphed into an all-consuming bitterness. The whole family walked on eggshells around him. His anger bubbled to the surface any time he didn't get his way. Drugs entered their house. Richard dropped out of high school. A stolen car led to jail, then probation. Finally, the unthinkable in a field 16 miles outside town. An act so heinous, Evelyn refused to believe it until she watched Richard in the courtroom, cold and remorseless, not denying that he had done it.
Richard came back to the house after killing Andy to sleep off a drug-induced high. He woke up famished, drank half of a gallon of milk while he stood in front of the open refrigerator, and kissed Evelyn on the top of her head before walking out the door to take care of his "business," which she now knew was to pay off a drug dealer with money from an earlier robbery.
She shuddered in her seat, remembering that kiss, as the warden gave a little nod. Someone somewhere was flicking a switch, or pushing a button, or depressing a plunger that was shooting poison into Richard's body. Seconds passed and Richard twisted his head back, raising it up off the pillow, to find the warden who stood behind him.
"Wow!" Richard shouted. Evelyn jumped in her seat at his outburst. "That is great. That is awesome! Thank you, (that foul expletive again, an adjective this time) Warden!" His head fell back on the pillow at an angle that looked like it should have been painful. His mouth and eyes stayed open but everyone watching from the other side of the glass knew the end had come for Richard. He was gone. But the promise wasn't gone with him.
It was foolish of her to believe that it would be her son. Her own sins were too greivous. She never thought in a million years that murder would be the result and she would give her life to undo her mistakes. But she wouldn't spend the rest of her life grieving Richard either. He always believed he had a right to his anger and his life reflected that. He chose to hate and to hurt others. Now, looking at his dead body, Evelyn could see that the one who was really destroyed was him.
All around Evelyn, hugs were exchanged, sighs of relief that had been held in for 11 long years were expelled. But the woman who had been raped hadn't moved. She stared at Richard's body, seeming totally unsatisfied, maybe even feeling a little jipped. She probably came here to see him suffer or cry like a pathetic, scared child. Evelyn wished she didn't feel the inclination to apologize to the woman because her son wasn't more pathetic but there it was. She was burdened for this woman who would walk out of the room this day with a choice to make as well.
People began to trickle out. They had seen what they'd come for. Now it was dinnertime and they would celebrate as they broke bread together at the TGI Friday's across town.
After 15 minutes the doctor entered the room and pronounced Richard dead. They unhooked the heartrate monitor and wheeled the gurney through the door and out of sight. Evelyn had already checked the boxes and signed the papers for the prison. There was nothing left for her to do except to leave this room as well and go home to get on with the rest of her life. She pulled her purse out from under the chair, hooked it over her shoulder, and stood up, realizing that the woman had remained in her chair, staring through the glass into the now empty execution room. They locked eyes for a second and Evelyn looked away.
"You had another child," the woman said rather than asked. Evelyn choked out a hoarse, "Yes." She cleared her throat and said it again, clearer this time. On the one year anniversay of Andy's death, baby Seth had arrived via c-section to her aged body. In the quiet, early morning hours after his birth, she had whispered to her husband through tears of grief, "The Lord has given us another son in the place of Andy." Her husband had agreed at the time but as Seth grew, Evelyn realized that Seth was different than Andy. Seth was obedient like Andy, but he also had a love for God that came from somewhere beyond Evelyn's doing or understanding.
Evelyn shuffled through the narrow path between the chairs and timidly laid a hand on the woman's shoulder. "Choose love. Choose life." She paused and said, "So that you can live long after this life is over." The woman remained stiff and unaffected but Evelyn gave a motherly squeeze and left the room.
Seth had a son named Enosh.
Enosh
Kenan
Mahalelel
Jared
Enoch
Methuselah
Lamech
Noah
Shem
Arphaxad
Shelah
Eber
Peleg
Reu
Serug
Nahor
Terah
Abram
Isaac
Jacob
Judah
...
David
...
Jesus, the promised Deliverer, referred to himself as a Son of Adam (Man) more often than as the Son of God.
This allegory of Genesis 3:15-4:25 is loosely based on the story of Texas inmate, Richard Cobb's execution in Hunstville on April 25, 2013 as reported by Michael Graczyk, AP.
http://news.msn.com/crime-justice/man-put-to-death-for-texas-store-abduction-slaying
There was an armed guard standing in the corner, wearing a baseball cap of all things (the casualization of society, she called this), watching people trickle in. There were a few she figured were reporters. Who else would want to memorialize this event with a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen? Some faces she recognized from the trial as families of the victims. One of them was a victim. Evelyn tried not to look at her. She sat two seats away and one row down. The woman had been shot and raped and left to die but somehow survived. Her testimony at the trial was horrific and is probably what convinced the jury to vote unanimously for death. In a perverted sort of way that Evelyn would have denied if anyone had asked her about it, she hoped the woman got some kind of satisfaction out of today. Then at least one good thing would come out of her son's life.
She kept her eyes on the window in front of her and wondered if it was a one-way glass. Maybe Richard wouldn't even know she was here. Maybe it was best that way. She thought of him as a boy and how he would stick out his hand, and wave a big goofy wave, and say, "Hi, Mom!" when he saw her, the way he did when she was 15 minutes late picking him up from school once. He was the only student left and stood on the sidewalk with a teacher who lifted her watch and stared at it when Evelyn arrived. Richard never doubted that she would be there for him eventually. She hadn't once come to visit him in prison.
Time had stopped for her around the time he was convicted 11 years ago. She knew intellectually that he was no longer a boy and that a grown man of 29 would walk through the door on the other side of that glass, but she preferred to live in her memories, a time of promises made, before she knew they wouldn't come to pass. Not in Richard's lifetime anyway.
The door to the room beyond the glass opened and Richard walked through in his baggy orange jumper, hands behind his back, followed by a physician and a man in a suit. Richard said, "You want me to sit?" Evelyn was shocked she could hear voices. She thought it would be sound proof and panicked a bit at what she might hear in his last moments. Despite everything, she didn't want to hear him suffer. The man in the suit told him not to sit just yet and took the handcuffs off. He bumped Richard lightly as he moved around him in the small space and Evelyn heard her son's voice again saying, "Pardon me," as he rubbed his wrists.
They nudged Richard toward a gurney in the center of the room and sat him down on a plastic green mattress and hooked him up to a heartrate monitor, which seemed to her like a waste. Thin black velcro straps dangled limp from the sides of the bed, jostling with Richard's weight in a grotesque little dance.
Richard was calm. More calm than she'd ever seen him, though to be fair, the last time they were together he was on drugs. For six excruciating years, his eyes were either dilated and darting all over the place or glazed over, hollow and sunken. Now they were clear and blue. His face was clean shaven. He looked so...healthy. There wasn't even a tremor in his hand as he stretched his arm out to have the inside of his elbow swabbed with alcohol by the physician, another waste of time it seemed to her, and have an IV started.
He laid down and inched his body up the mattress a bit to position his head on the little white pillow. The man in the suit fastened the velcro around Richard's arms and legs. He mumbled something she couldn't hear and Richard looked up at him and nodded. She thought Richard would be scared but he wasn't. He was just expectant, as if he was being strapped into a ride at an amusement park and had just been asked by the bored, sweaty, zit-plagued employee if the straps were tight enough. "Enjoy the ride," the teenaged boy would say, and it would have been vaguely appropriate here but that's not what the man said. He asked Richard if he had any last words. Richard stared unblinking at the ceiling and said, "Life is death, death is life. I hope that someday this absurdity that humanity has come to will come to an end. Life is too short. I hope anyone that has negative energy towards me will resolve that. Life is too short to harbor feelings of hatred and anger. That's it, Warden."
Evelyn gripped the arms of her chair. It was all she could do to keep herself from standing up and facing the room and giving a proper statement for Richard. She wanted them to know that he was sorry for killing his own brother with a 20-gauge shotgun. He was sorry for shooting those two other women, raping one of them, and leaving them all for dead. He had to be. She wasn't mother to a monster.
She labored for 26 hours to bring Richard into the world. His head was stuck for so long in the birth canal, when he finally emerged it was misshapen and lopsided and covered in meconium. His nose never did quite straighten out but she loved him even more for it. "Look what we did!" she had whispered excitedly to her husband in the dark early morning hours after his birth. "This is the one. Our deliverer," she said, welling with pride over her beautiful boy. He was born with the promise of greatness and he could get Evelyn back home where she belonged. She didn't deserve to go back after what she had done but the promise had been made and she trusted that it would be kept. Richard would save them all.
She reminded him of it often, even when he began resenting her for it. The summer Richard turned 12 was when her faith in him began to waver. He'd been in trouble more than he was out of it and she stood at the stove, stirring a pot of pasta and letting him have it. In her mind, she liked to see herself as June Cleaver with her apron, flats, and pearls, in control of every situation, telling him why he needed to stop this behavior and come to his senses. "We're all depending on you, Richard. Don't forget that." But in reality, she was barefoot, uncombed, exhausted, stressed to the point of sickness, and the pasta water had boiled over, hissing and bubbling, scorching the glass stove top.
"I don't give a (the foulest expletive in the English language, in her opinion) about the promise!" Richard shouted. Her fingers froze, just short of the knob to turn the heat down, and she stood like a statue while he railed at her. "Andy never gets this bull(another vile expletive that makes her cringe to remember). Why don't you do this to Andy? You leave Andy alone and you're always on my back!" Of course that was peppered with proclamations of hating her and wishing she was dead, but that wasn't what haunted Evelyn about the exchange. Later, she scrubbed furiously at the stovetop with her brillo and Softscrub, stunned that he was jealous of Andy. If anyone had a reason to resent her, it was Andy, who was always being overlooked and disregarded in favor of Richard. She didn't mean for it to be like that but so much was at stake for Richard and Andy just...was. Andy, eternally sweet Andy, never held it against her. He loved everyone and did everything that was asked of him without complaint. He was probably professing his love for his brother right up until Richard shot him.
Evelyn was constantly going over the years leading up to that nightmare in her mind, redoing scenes in her imagination that might have changed the trajectory, if only she would have known what Richard was capable of. One scene she would have like to do over was the evening her husband had been working late in the fields. Richard approached him and demanded to be paid for his labor. His father laughed in his face and told him his labor was unacceptable, and that it took a lot of nerve to walk up to him in this field with his hand out, as if he owed Richard something. Richard faunched and fumed and sputtered horrible things about hating his father then too.
Evelyn would have gone beyond praying if she had another chance at that night. She would have begged and pleaded with him, disgracing herself if need be, to get him to return to his father with a contrite and humble heart, knowing her husband would never turn him away. Nothing would have worked though; she knew that now. Richard's resentment morphed into an all-consuming bitterness. The whole family walked on eggshells around him. His anger bubbled to the surface any time he didn't get his way. Drugs entered their house. Richard dropped out of high school. A stolen car led to jail, then probation. Finally, the unthinkable in a field 16 miles outside town. An act so heinous, Evelyn refused to believe it until she watched Richard in the courtroom, cold and remorseless, not denying that he had done it.
Richard came back to the house after killing Andy to sleep off a drug-induced high. He woke up famished, drank half of a gallon of milk while he stood in front of the open refrigerator, and kissed Evelyn on the top of her head before walking out the door to take care of his "business," which she now knew was to pay off a drug dealer with money from an earlier robbery.
She shuddered in her seat, remembering that kiss, as the warden gave a little nod. Someone somewhere was flicking a switch, or pushing a button, or depressing a plunger that was shooting poison into Richard's body. Seconds passed and Richard twisted his head back, raising it up off the pillow, to find the warden who stood behind him.
"Wow!" Richard shouted. Evelyn jumped in her seat at his outburst. "That is great. That is awesome! Thank you, (that foul expletive again, an adjective this time) Warden!" His head fell back on the pillow at an angle that looked like it should have been painful. His mouth and eyes stayed open but everyone watching from the other side of the glass knew the end had come for Richard. He was gone. But the promise wasn't gone with him.
It was foolish of her to believe that it would be her son. Her own sins were too greivous. She never thought in a million years that murder would be the result and she would give her life to undo her mistakes. But she wouldn't spend the rest of her life grieving Richard either. He always believed he had a right to his anger and his life reflected that. He chose to hate and to hurt others. Now, looking at his dead body, Evelyn could see that the one who was really destroyed was him.
All around Evelyn, hugs were exchanged, sighs of relief that had been held in for 11 long years were expelled. But the woman who had been raped hadn't moved. She stared at Richard's body, seeming totally unsatisfied, maybe even feeling a little jipped. She probably came here to see him suffer or cry like a pathetic, scared child. Evelyn wished she didn't feel the inclination to apologize to the woman because her son wasn't more pathetic but there it was. She was burdened for this woman who would walk out of the room this day with a choice to make as well.
People began to trickle out. They had seen what they'd come for. Now it was dinnertime and they would celebrate as they broke bread together at the TGI Friday's across town.
After 15 minutes the doctor entered the room and pronounced Richard dead. They unhooked the heartrate monitor and wheeled the gurney through the door and out of sight. Evelyn had already checked the boxes and signed the papers for the prison. There was nothing left for her to do except to leave this room as well and go home to get on with the rest of her life. She pulled her purse out from under the chair, hooked it over her shoulder, and stood up, realizing that the woman had remained in her chair, staring through the glass into the now empty execution room. They locked eyes for a second and Evelyn looked away.
"You had another child," the woman said rather than asked. Evelyn choked out a hoarse, "Yes." She cleared her throat and said it again, clearer this time. On the one year anniversay of Andy's death, baby Seth had arrived via c-section to her aged body. In the quiet, early morning hours after his birth, she had whispered to her husband through tears of grief, "The Lord has given us another son in the place of Andy." Her husband had agreed at the time but as Seth grew, Evelyn realized that Seth was different than Andy. Seth was obedient like Andy, but he also had a love for God that came from somewhere beyond Evelyn's doing or understanding.
Evelyn shuffled through the narrow path between the chairs and timidly laid a hand on the woman's shoulder. "Choose love. Choose life." She paused and said, "So that you can live long after this life is over." The woman remained stiff and unaffected but Evelyn gave a motherly squeeze and left the room.
Seth had a son named Enosh.
Enosh
Kenan
Mahalelel
Jared
Enoch
Methuselah
Lamech
Noah
Shem
Arphaxad
Shelah
Eber
Peleg
Reu
Serug
Nahor
Terah
Abram
Isaac
Jacob
Judah
...
David
...
Jesus, the promised Deliverer, referred to himself as a Son of Adam (Man) more often than as the Son of God.
This allegory of Genesis 3:15-4:25 is loosely based on the story of Texas inmate, Richard Cobb's execution in Hunstville on April 25, 2013 as reported by Michael Graczyk, AP.
http://news.msn.com/crime-justice/man-put-to-death-for-texas-store-abduction-slaying
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)