Denver
“I want you to know that I forgive you,” Deborah said [to the woman I had had an affair with]. “I hope you find someone who will not only truly love you but honor you.”
Her grace stunned me. But not nearly so much as what she said next: “I intend to work on being the best wife Ron could ever want, and if I do my job right, you will not be hearing from my husband again.”
Deborah quietly placed the phone in its cradle, sighed with relief, and locked her eyes on mine. “You and I are now going to rewrite the future history of our marriage.”
She wanted to spend a couple of months in counseling, she said, so we could figure out what was broken, how it got that way, and how to fix it. “If you’ll do that,” she said, “I’ll forgive you. And I promise I will never bring this up, ever again.”
For the next three and a half years, mostly at Lupe Murchison’s breakfast table, me and Mr. Ron wrote us a book. Of course, I couldn’t write or read at the time, but I told Mr. Ron everthing I could remember, and he wrote it all down.
But we hadn’t been workin on it for long when, one morning at Rocky Top, I just all of a sudden decided to shut my mouth. We was sittin at that big ol’ table Miss Debbie picked out for the ranch kitchen, and I just went quiet and commenced to sippin my coffee. Mr. Ron was sittin across from me, writin everthing longhand with a pen on yellow paper.
“What is it?” he said. “You haven’t shut up all morning. What’s got your tongue all of a sudden?”
I didn’t look at him. “I been thinkin ’bout forgiveness,” I said.
“And?”
“Well, there’s been a lotta forgiveness in these past coupla years,” I said, finally lookin up at Mr. Ron. “Miss Debbie forgave you for steppin out on her that time. And I done forgave the Man for makin me work all them years without no pay. And God forgave me of all my sins . . . ”
I could see Mr. Ron noddin along, encouraging me to keep goin.
“Mr. Ron, we speaks a lot about forgiveness,” I went on, “about how God forgives us and we is supposed to forgive others. But there’s a whole ’nother kind of forgiveness you don’t know nothin about!”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you know . . . it’s that statue y’all call Lamentations.
“You mean the book of Lamentations in the Bible?”
“No sir.”
Mr. Ron looked at me real hard, like he was tryin his best to figure out what I was sayin. “A statue . . . ?”
“Yessiree, a statue of Lamentations.”
“Oh . . . you must mean the Tower of Babel! That’s kind of a statue, and it’s in the Bible.”
“No sir,” I said. “This ain’t got nothin to do with the Bible. It got to do with the Man. You know what I’m talkin ’bout. This is the Man’s law that says after a lotta time has done gone by, you don’t got to go back to the pokey no more for somethin you done way back in the past.”
Mr. Ron started laughin then. “Oh, you mean the statute of limitations!”
“That’s it!” I said. “If we gon’ write this book together, I got to know all about that statue before I tells it all!”
It was May 1968. Now in case you ain’t heard nothing ’bout Angola [Prison], it was hell, surrounded on three sides by a river. I didn’t know this then, but in those days, it was the darkest, most vicious prison in America.
A few days after I got there, a prisoner I had met back at the Shreveport jail saw me and reached out like he was gon’ shake my hand. Instead, he gave me a knife. “Put this under your pilla,” he said. “You gon’ need it.”
The reason I needed to know about that statue of Lamentations was ’cause a’ somethin that happened to me after I left the plantation. One time when I was a bad man, I held up a bus. Now, you might already know I had to go to the pokey for that. Ten years they gave me, and that was a long stretch. So I wadn’t gon’ be tellin too much more about the pokey if I was gon’ have to go back to the pokey for tellin it!
It might sound strange to say this, but Angola Prison was a dynamic and precious thing. Down there in the bayou, they specialized in makin men outta boys. Funny thing about it was that even though all I did was hold up a bus, the Man decided to send me to prison in style. They packed me onto one a’ them little ol’ aeroplanes and flew me down. Plane landed right on the property.
Once I wound up there, the Man sent me to the worstest camp they had. They called it the “Bucket a’ Blood,” and I’d only been there one day ’fore I figured out why. Somebody got killed there ever night.
My first night in Angola, a great big brother came up to me and looked me up and down. “What you need from the store, man? I’m goin over there right now.”
I thought maybe he’d heard about me from the fella that give me the knife in Shreveport—like maybe he was lookin out for me. So I said, “Bring me some cigarettes and two or three candy bars.”
He brought ’em to me at my bunk, which was in a big ol’ buildin shaped kinda like a barn. Purty soon, I found out them things wadn’t free.
That night I was layin in my bunk on my back, starin up at the ceiling. I could hear rats in the walls, and somewhere way off, a man screamed. Wadn’t no lights on where I was at, and the cell was blacker than the bayou on a new moon.
“You ready?”
That big brother was standin right by my side. He’d slipped in real quiet and sneaked up to me in the dark without me even knowin he was there.
“You ready?” he said again, his voice a little lower. A little deeper. Right then, I knew what he was after.
“Yeah, I’m ready,” I said. “But I got to go to the toilet first.”
I swung my feet down onto the floor, and brother-man stepped back to let me get out of bed.
“You go on and lay down,” I said. “Put the sheet over you. I’ll be right back.”
I walked away from the bed into the pitch dark. I heard a whispering sound as his pants crumpled to the floor, then a creak-creak as he laid down on my bunk. The toilet was on the other side of the room. I walked over there and unzipped my britches, let him hear that I was doin what I said I was gon’ do.
“You want a cigarette?” I said. “For after?”
“Sure do,” he said, kinda cocky. I could hear him chucklin in the dark. So on my way back across the room, I stopped at the little shelf where I had stashed my cigarettes that he’d done bought me. It was also where I’d stashed my knife.
Brother-man screamed when I stabbed him. Screamed like a woman ’cause I ’xpect I turned him into one, right through the sheet.
I bent down close to his ear and growled real low. “You or any a’ your friends come ’round here again, I’m gon’ finish the job.”
While he was howlin and cryin and, I ’xpect, holdin what was left of his manhood, I saw lights go on outside. Then I heard boots poundin and guards drawin down. But they stopped outside the door to size up the situation.
“Moore! Who you got in there?”
“This fella’s done gone crazy!” brother-man screamed. ’Cept he didn’t call me “fella.” “Get in here and kill him ’fore he kills me!”
They sent me to the hole for that. But didn’t nobody try to make me his woman no more.
That’s why, though, when I think about Miss Debbie reachin out to me, my chest gets tight. I had told her straight up that I was a mean man, but she didn’t have no way a’ knowin how mean. I thank God today she found the courage in her heart to love me enough so that someday I could tell you that even a black ex-con from Angola that stabbed a man could maybe someday do some good in the world if he gets a chance.