Of course they had Bible Study in prison. It was important that you take to heart the notions of sin and redemption. They made you sing, and not just church hymns, but “Rock-A My Soul” and “In the Sweet Bye and Bye,” songs you could move around to, clap and sway. You sang, “Jesus Met The Woman At the Well.”
Jesus met the woman at the we-ell
Jesus met the woman at the we-ell
Jesus met the woman at the we-eh-eh-ll
And He told her everything she ever done
It was a small group today, only six of them in the Activity Room. Five inmates and Janice, the volunteer minister. Janice was with the Disciples of Christ. She was nice, though once you figured out she was nice to everybody all the time, it took some of the shine off it. Janice was fifty or maybe sixty. She was homely, she had a face built for that word, homely, and so it was hard to tell age. A long, bony face. Glasses on a chain, a little frizz of gray-blond hair. Janice wore turtlenecks even now, in the middle of summer, baggy cotton pants, and Hush Puppies. She never seemed to feel the heat, while the rest of them choked on it night and day. Even the air in prison was locked up. Maybe Janice didn’t have enough juice in her to sweat. She was married to a Disciples of Christ minister. Homely didn’t seem to matter much to a minister.
That was not a Christian thought. It was the sign of a hardened heart. Anyway, you knew that nobody young or pretty or dressed or made-up nicely would ever come into this place. And, the sly, secret part of you whispered, even if they did you would hate and envy them like poison. Still, you would have liked to rest your eyes on something stylish for a change.
He said, Wo-man, wo-man
Where is your husband?
Most weeks the Bible Study meeting was bigger, because after all it was something to do, and the Activity Room was better than the Dayroom any way you looked at it. But then people found out it was too much like Group, where you had to talk about how worthless and pitiful you were, except here it went by different names, For all had sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And you actually had to read the Bible. So many of them couldn’t read, just flat-out couldn’t, it was amazing. If they’d ever spent a day in school, it was impossible to tell. It was sad, really, to hear them struggle over Bible words like salvation or humble.
It was un-Christian to look down on them, but you couldn’t help it, they were stupid. Stupid, and black, most of them, and poor, and crack-addled, and while you knew that none of it was really their fault, well maybe the drugs, knew that they had been treated viciously, beaten and raped and whored and kicked in the head again and again, still, it did not seem possible to love them in a Christian way.
Christ was perfect love and perfect forgiveness. Of course it was discouraging when you fell short of that. You prayed for God’s help in becoming more Christlike, although it was understood that you would always fall short. That was where humble came in. You were supposed to make a real point of not measuring up. The whispering part of you said, Why bother if you’d never get it right, and religion was just another prison sentence, a lifetime sentence, and only a fool would love everybody or want to. Love skinny, dried-up Janice, who smiled so hard her gums showed, smiled and smiled when nothing was funny so she could get you to believe in God? Love big fat mouth-breathing Bunny with her permanent yellow crescents of underarm sweat? Or mean-mouthed Jameelah, or scary, epileptic Crystal, or any of the warthog guards who by accidents of fate or circumstance had been granted absolute power over you . . .
“Teresa?”
Janice was smiling at you, that big, crucified smile. Bible Study was about the only place you were ever called by your given name. It was your turn to read and you hadn’t been paying attention. You smoothed your Bible and pretended to hunt for the verse.
“Matthew 5:45,” said Janice helpfully, as you hoped she would. You cleared your throat and read:
That you may be the children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
“Thank you, Teresa,” said Janice. You were a good reader and you knew Janice called on you more often because of it. You had always done well at school things.
“Let’s talk about this,” said Janice, folding her hands in her lap and leaning forward to include them all in the beam of her attention. “First, let’s break it down, see what it’s saying. Who has questions? Questions are what we’re here for, so don’t be shy.”
Nobody wanted to say the wrong thing, so there was silence. And you had just finished reading, so speaking up right away would have been showing off. It wasn’t good for a white girl to be seen as showing off. Janice measured the silence, and when it went on for too long she said, “I like the part about the rain. I think about a big crowd of people walking along under umbrellas, and nobody looking at them would have any idea which ones were good or bad.”
You had to wonder what would happen if Janice ever allowed a silence to die a natural death. Or maybe she knew what she was doing, because Bunny spoke up:
“There’s people who take one look at you and right away they’re acting like they’re way better than you are.”
Everybody nodded. They all knew what she meant. Even if it was true, in your own case, that you’d been pretty and had done your share of looking down on others. It took prison to let everybody think they were better than you.
Janice said, “But that’s not how God sees us. I know it’s hard for us to imagine. Somebody who doesn’t care about our outsides, only what’s in our hearts. God is beyond our imaginings. That’s where faith comes in.”
While Janice was talking, Jameelah and Keisha were nudging and rolling their eyes. It was very disrespectful. The worst part of prison wasn’t being locked up, it was who they locked you up with. Jameelah and Keisha were just kids. Screwed-up, ruined kids. They were always acting low and obnoxious and trashy. It was their first time at Bible Study, and probably their last. Here was Keisha, singing under her breath and chair-dancing, here was Jameelah mouthing a little wah-wah chorus with shoulder shimmies. You’d think that prison would be the one place you could get people to behave . . .
“Jameelah?”
Janice blinked and smiled, blinked and smiled. Janice could report you, get you kicked right into segregation, even if she did it nicely. So Jameelah quit her showing off, quieted, and stuck her bottom lip out in the ugliest possible fashion. Which was her way of demonstrating she wasn’t really giving in and nobody could make her do anything, and you understood that, you did, but you got tired of seeing it.
“Maybe you could tell us what faith means to you.”
Jameelah turned to Keisha with a look that clearly said, Who this bitch think she is? But Keisha was staring down at her Bible with a pious, cow-eyed expression. Keisha was always pretending to be even dumber than she really was. Jameelah took another long, narrowing look around the room, found no help there. Cornered, she muttered, “Means my grandma and her church talk.”
“Your grandmother went to church?” Janice’s helpful echo.
“She wore us out prayin. Prayed for things to get better and nothing ever did.”
“We can’t always see how God is making things better. That’s where faith comes in.”
But Jameelah and Keisha were trading secret, amused looks again. Jameelah liked to sneak up behind you, jab two stiff fingers into your kidney. Or walk past and flick her wrist your way, snag just enough hair to yank it out of your scalp. Then make a big production of showing it to you from across the room, smirking and rubbing your hair between her fingers, putting it in her mouth and sucking and tonguing it and any other disgusting thing she could invent. Jameelah bragged about everybody she’d ever beat up or cut up. There was always a different story and you figured some of them were lies but you didn’t know which ones. Cut old girl right through her top and bottom lips. Down to her teeths. Old girl won’t be talking her shit no more.
Someday, and you hoped it came soon, Jameelah was going to run out of luck, get her ass kicked by a guard who would know how to hurt her without it showing, or an inmate who wouldn’t care, turn her black face lumpy and purple with bruises.
Here you sat in Bible Study, Amen-ing along with everybody, and all the while you were thinking such thoughts. No matter how quiet and humble you looked, inside of you was a monster, and the monster talked to you in that sly, secret voice. But the monster had done a lot worse than talk.
She said, Je-sus, Je-sus
Ain’t got no husband
This was why you had to believe in Jesus Our Lord, because who else could forgive you and lift you up from hell? Or maybe hell was just like prison and you could get used to it too. Get used to the toilet stink and the lights that went on and off, on and off, always by somebody else’s choosing. Who would have thought that you’d miss that, turning a light on when you wanted it? Get used to prison underwear and generic sanitary pads and your skin growing coarse and thick because there was no such thing as decent soap or lotion. Get used to the sight of your own face reflected in a stainless steel mirror, a little older every day.
You were twenty-six when you came here and you were thirty-four now and one of the things your sentence, twenty-five years to life, meant was that you would never have a child.
Which was worse, never to have a child or never see it, have it grow up a stranger to you? Almost everybody here had children. The children had been parceled out by the state, or given over to relatives, and sometimes they came for visits and sometimes not. Sometimes there were pictures and crayon drawings and baby dolls, and sometimes not. Almost all the children were black, even the children of the white women, and that probably signified something but you kept such thoughts to yourself.
The children were what was left over once the men were gone. Nobody had a man waiting for them on the outside, even though men were the reason they were in prison to begin with. That was true of nearly everyone, in some fashion, whether they had fought over the men or the men had to be impressed or gotten back at, or maybe the men had made them do things. Like Bunny, who’d driven her boyfriend and some other jerk all over Decatur, from the 7-Eleven to the Clark Station to the Bigfoot, filling a gym bag with cash register money, a regular taxi service. At the Clark station, the boy behind the register had been shot in the face. The boyfriend’s name was Reno. Bunny talked about him like she’d just seen him this morning, like they were a normal couple and did normal things like go to the laundromat or out to the movies: Oh, Reno hates it when you give him a hamburger and it’s not cooked through. Reno has him a big laugh every time that Taco Bell commercial comes on, the one with the little dog. He says we should get a little dog like that, name him Junior.
Maybe you could still have fond thoughts about a man if the worst thing he’d talked you into doing was drive a car.
Janice said, “Faith is what helps us through the times when everything else seems bleakest.”
Except that was every day. Every day of twenty-five years to life, and there wasn’t enough faith in the world for that. They advised you not to count the time you had left, months or years, it would drive you crazy. Besides, there was always the possibility of early release, good behavior credit, if those possibilities didn’t drive you, et cetera, the way they tossed the numbers around: You might get as many as seven or eight years off. Definitely three to five. The lawyer who’d never liked you much anyway, serving this up for a consolation prize as he cut you loose. Like there wasn’t any difference between three and eight.
Janice said, “Who can think of another Bible verse about faith?”
You knew what she was fishing for, they’d talked about it just last week, but you still didn’t feel like volunteering. Epileptic Crystal spoke up, surprising everyone: “You mean the one about the mountains.”
“Yes, that’s one. Do you remember all of it?”
But Crystal wasn’t saying anything more. She was a jack-in-the-box, with her frozen, medicated stare, her habit of popping up with unexpected speech, or, if the electrical storms in her brain broke through, with unearthly squeals and snores and gargling. Once they took Crystal in to the Beauty School, gave her a permanent that made her red hair stand up like a rooster’s comb, painted her face pink and blue. She didn’t seem to notice any of it, which made her even scarier. Like she’d forgotten she had an outside. Crystal had been here as long as anyone could remember, ten twelve fifteen years. They said she’d strangled her own mother, but other people said no, it was only a neighbor she’d killed, and the mother was thrown in there just to make a more interesting story. Crystal had hands like shovels.
“Matthew 17:20,” said Janice. “Because you have so little faith, I will tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, Move from here to there, and it will move.”
“Ain’t no seeds in no mustard.”
“Shut up, fool.”
Bunny said, “I wouldn’t waste time on mountains. I’d say, ‘Open up that big front gate, let me out of here.’”
There was general hilarity and agreement at this. Janice let it run its course, smiling, before she got back to business. “I wonder if Jesus meant real, actual mountains. Maybe he was thinking of the way our troubles can feel like mountains. Mountains in our heads.”
Jameelah said, “That exactly what it feel like. Big ole lonesome mountain in my head.”
You figured she was mocking, but she had an intense expression, an expression you only saw when she’d singled you out for some special meanness: what had you ever done to her? Jameelah had blackberry eyes and a round face, the face of a furious child. Now, who would have believed such a thing, maybe Jameelah would get herself saved along with everybody else, and then you and your monster thoughts would be the only one left out.
“The real miracle,” Janice said, “is when we ask Jesus to move the mountain, come into our hearts. We know he is only waiting for us to call on him, confess our wrongdoing, invite him to dwell within us.”
He said
Wo-man, wo-man
Where is your husband?
I know everything you ever done
The mountain was everything you’d ever done. The miracle would be to roll it all back so it never was.
Say Jesus fixed it so you’d never gotten married. That would be your mountain. Make it unhappen. It didn’t seem like a lot to ask, and it wouldn’t hurt anybody. That long-ago time had been freedom, but you hadn’t recognized it then and so it didn’t count. If Jesus or anyone else was to hear you now, they’d think you’d been dragged kicking and screaming into marriage, but of you course you hadn’t. You’d called your freedom lonesome, and you’d traded it in for Howell Wolfe, a man with a joke for a name, mostly because he’d asked you to. And because he’d been so sure of himself. Howell Wolfe was a big man with a big man’s booming voice, and he knew what he wanted, and besides he was older than you were, he had knowledge of the world that you’d never have. He knew about money and politics and heavy machinery and electricity and football and the stock market and a whole list of other things that you didn’t really care about, but it was nice to know that the knowledge was right there if you ever needed it.
And so the two of you got married, and since Howell Wolfe had been married before he wasn’t inclined to make a big deal out of it, but you still had your dress and a cake and flowers and the wedding favors in lavender and silver, like you’d always planned. And then there was a whole house that needed to be furnished and stocked and decorated. Howell Wolfe wasn’t one to care about things like curtains or china, but he understood, from his previous effort at marriage, that it was natural for women to fuss with a house. Over time, his ideas and opinions and likes and dislikes had just naturally taken up space in your head, the same way that Howell Wolfe took up the space on a bed or a couch. You learned to keep a mug in the freezer so he’d have a frosted glass for his beer, and to buy a certain brand of beef gravy he had a taste for over mashed potatoes, and to wipe the bathroom mirror clean of steam after a shower, and any number of other things necessary to maintain the comfort of Howell Wolfe.
In many ways you’d been a good wife to him.
Jameelah said, “Why he got to be invisible? I mean God. And why he got to be some man?”
Then you’d been married awhile, settled into it, and it wasn’t that you were unhappy, not really. Unhappy made it sound like something had happened, and it was more as if things stopped happening. The wedding was over and the pictures placed into an album and that was that. The house was finished, that is, all the interesting things had been purchased and the house required only inconvenient repairs and maintenance. As did Howell Wolfe himself. Not terribly often, after the first few weeks and months. But you knew what it meant on nights you came in from the bathroom to find him propped up in bed, his pajamas folded on a chair and an impish expression on his face, as if he was playing a particularly naughty joke. And all you could do was try to reflect some portion of that naughty enthusiasm back in your own face, although you were also supposed to act as if the whole idea took you by surprise, and you hadn’t considered any such thing until Howell Wolfe’s intention brought it irresistibly to mind.
Then it was a matter of positioning yourself and letting him wad your nightgown up around your neck, because he liked that part, like making you bare and all the looking and touching it allowed him. Although you wished he’d turn the bedside light off, because there was a particular view of Howell Wolfe, inflamed and engorged, his mighty stomach atop it all, which you found discouraging.
It seemed natural enough to think about having a baby. And really, everything might have turned out differently if you had. But Howell Wolfe was not in a hurry for a baby; he said he wanted you all to himself for a little while longer. Besides, he already had children, big, grown-up children who were only a few years younger than you were, although it was not considered polite for people to point this out. The children hated you even before they met you. You hoped this would change over time, but of course, that was not what happened.
Janice said, “God is everywhere. Even in prison. And because he is invisible, because he is a spirit, he is mostly in our hearts.”
No one looked very convinced by this. Their hearts were not hospitable places. Their hearts were furnished with unmade beds and dirty sinks. Jameelah and Keisha were getting restless again, shifting and whispering. Janice said, “What is it, Keisha?”
“I say, the devil made me do it.” A joke.
“Made you do what?”
“You know. My troubles.”
You were unclear on what, exactly, Keisha’s troubles were. Something with crack, more than likely, the thievery and low-life business that went along with crack. You had to wonder what all that was about, drugs, because you never even smoked cigarettes or drank more than a glass of wine at parties, and here you were, biding your time with girls who put who knows what into their skins, and in the most disgusting ways possible. Crack: even the name was nasty.
“The devil doesn’t make us do anything. And you know what? Neither does God. God gives us free will. He wants us to choose to love Him. To make our own decision to turn over our lives and hearts to Him.”
Nobody had anything to say to that. There was one of those lulls when attention drifted and shifted, and the women moved their haunches stealthily beneath them on the molded plastic chairs, and examined without really seeing the posters on the walls that exhorted them to seek prenatal care, get job training, achieve self-respect. The overhead fan stirred the heavy air. From somewhere outside the Activity Room, down an echoing corridor, came the sound of a shout, abruptly cut off. There would be another fifteen or twenty minutes of Bible Study, that was all, and then they would rejoin what was known as the general inmate population.
How could you choose what you loved? God or anything else? It wasn’t a decision thing. If it was, you could have decided to love Howell Wolfe, and that would have been that. Serviceable, married, everyday love. The other kind, the crazy, boy-mad, broken-heart kind of love, was something you figured you’d outgrown, and revisited only when you went to the movies. Lovelovelovelovelove. Say it often enough and it was just a noise. What good was love to you now? For similar reasons, there was a man who you no longer thought of by name. He was just He. Like God. The monster in you sniggered.
Jameelah said, “I know for a fack there’s a devil. And they peoples follow the devil too.”
At work, at the hardware store, you wore a uniform smock over your clothes, designed to protect you from all the hardware grime. It had the fortunate result of preventing men from being able to look down your shirt. But since your name was embroidered on the pocket, that meant everybody had the use of it. Teresa, huh. What’s the other one’s name?
You were accustomed to men who said such things, even at the strangest times. Nine in the morning while you were ringing up their tubes of caulking or washers or staple guns. Invitations. Jokes you pretended not to get. One or two of the worst cases made a habit of asking you about merchandise that was always either on the bottom shelf so they could make you bend over, or up high enough so that they had to hold a ladder for you to climb, maybe brush up against you while you tried to hold yourself aloof, tried not to see their faces reflecting the pictures in their heads.
You’d thought that once you were married you could quit your job, or at least cut back on the hours, since your new husband made a good living. But Howell Wolfe was thrifty. No, outright cheap. In fairness, it was the only thing you could really say against him. He fussed importantly over grocery bills and phone bills. Ordinarily, cheapness wasn’t a thing that ended up killing a man.
Not that the job was all bad. Sometimes it was nice to have something that was yours, a place to go to. And there were always nice people who came in, people you looked forward to seeing. He was one of those. A face you came to recognize. He was always stopping in for one thing or another, though later he admitted that he’d made extra trips on your account. He was polite. Never in a big important hurry. He waited his turn, and even once he got up to the register he didn’t go in for small talk. You appreciated that. So many people were convinced of the urgency and importance of hearing themselves make noise. He kept his eyes to himself, although you noticed him watching your hands. Later, after a great many other things had happened, you realized it was a kind of flirting. How slow you could make your hands move. Slow dance of wrists and fingertips, coins and receipts. His knuckle slid across your palm. And then one night when you got off work, he was outside waiting for you.
And the woman said, the serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
He didn’t have a name you used now, but back then you’d covered yourself with his name as if it were perfume. Saying it over and over in your head. Lovelovelovelove. Here was the part where the memories got confused, or maybe over time, from overuse they’d simply worn out, and you couldn’t remember the order of things. Or because they were shameful things that would grieve Our Lord Jesus, you tried not to dwell on them. You couldn’t remember touching. Or you could, but you couldn’t feel it anymore, the greedy ache of it. You weren’t fooling Jesus or anybody else. You were a monster. You hadn’t said no to anything he’d told you to do.
If you want us to be together, it’s the only way. Because surely Howell Wolfe would never give you a divorce, was likely to act in violent and unpredictable ways if you asked. And they couldn’t just run off, since Howell Wolfe would have ways to find you, would come after you, would lay in wait to exact his vengeance. You had long since come to appreciate the absolute dumbness and evil of such arguments. At the trial there had been a lot of testimony about Howell Wolfe’s insurance money and how you stood to benefit from it, and that was reason enough for most people.
I can’t stand the thought of him touching you. It makes me crazy.
You remembered the weight of secrets. And once or twice, when going about your chores at work or at home, when you’d stopped absolutely still, transfixed with wanting. And in the fever and hurry of wanting and secrets, it had come to seem that kissing touching fucking—might as well say the word—a man who was not your husband was the same as any other betrayal.
All you have to do is leave the side door to the garage open. And then go to spend the evening at your sister’s. The house backed on a forest preserve and it was possible to get in and out without people noticing. It was possible to enter and wait in the garage until Howell Wolfe came out to watch the portable television he kept on his workbench, something he did every night. There were two full-sized televisions in the house but he liked sitting in the garage. It was a big garage and he had it fixed up with a lawn chair and an electric heater for cold weather.
Janice said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe the devil is just the absence of God’s love.”
Janice looked tired. Well of course you’d get tired, trying to beat the Bible into heads like these. Janice craned her neck delicately within her turtleneck. The faintest sign that she might be feeling the heat. In a little while she would pack up her Bible and go home to her minister husband and fix dinner and pray some more over it. What did Janice pray for? She was already full of charitable deeds and holy thoughts. Oh Lord we thank thee. For her harmless, holy life. Because Janice had never let anyone talk her into anything. Had never wished to be talked into anything, or maybe she had, but nobody was interested, and so she was not going to hell. Like you were. And while you were waiting around for hell to happen, you lived in an obscene barnyard where the animals were made to line up, count off, squat during strip searches so their labia could be inspected, eat with plastic spoons, answer to their last names only, even if that name belonged to a dead man.
All this time, you had been what they called a model prisoner.
If I do what I mean to do, I’ll leave the front door standing open. Then when you come back, don’t go inside. Go to the neighbor’s and call the police.
He had not wanted you to see the body. But the police, who had not been fooled for a minute, showed you the photographs of Howell Wolfe’s liquid, flattened face. They asked you about the state of your marriage. It seemed there had been some gossip already.
I know everything you ever done.
“Let us pray,” sighed Janice.
That was the signal that the session was over, and you stood up and held hands in a prayer circle. Oh no. You’d been careless. Usually you arranged things so you held hands with Janice and maybe Bunny, but today you reached out and here was Jameelah on your left and Crystal on your right. Jameelah’s hand was curled over, ready to fist, and you looked at each other sideways, because even though your eyes were supposed to be closed in prayer, it would be bad judgment to be that unwary. Jameelah’s face was full of thunder, and her black eyes moved back and forth beneath her lashes, some kind of skitter Morse code: Hurt/Don’thurt/me/you/me/you. Janice had closed her eyes. So had Crystal, on your right—you made sure of this with a glance—and Crystal had your hand locked in her strangler’s grip, and maybe that was what sent the electricity in Crystal’s brain right through you.
One minute you were pretending to follow along with the prayer, even as the monster inside you hooted and sneered. Then there was something just below the threshold of sound. A vibration. Bees in a hive. A wind gathering itself.
Your right hand sizzled. Crystal jerked and flopped and pulled you over on top of her. Crystal’s mouth was inventing new obscene words, a whole new alphabet of spit. Her eyes were hard-boiled eggs. She squealed, a purely mechanical sound. Her heels drummed the floor and there was a smell, metallic and urinous both, as if all of Crystal’s fluids had been superheated. A commotion of voices, but it only reached you dimly, because Crystal’s electricity was surging and snapping through you, blue and yellow brain fireworks. She had you so tight that your eyelashes tangled together, and when one of Crystal’s eyes opened—opened normally, that is, as if there might be seeing involved—it was like looking straight through a telescope at the universe in miniature, otherwise known as heaven.
And you saw in that instant how all the mathematics in the world might be erased, so that three might indeed become the same as eight, and how one particular, burning day would stop lasting twenty-five years or forever.
And then Crystal’s grip loosened and you were raised to your feet. Incredibly, your left hand was still in Jameelah’s and had been all the while. Guards were running in and talking importantly on their radios, and Crystal moaned at the center of a circle, people telling her to do this or that, calm down, sit up, speak or don’t speak.
No one seemed to notice Jameelah, crying and crying, bawling really, butting her inky head against your breasts, soaking your shirt with her tears.
Oh sweet baby girl, don’t cry, don’t cry. But you were crying too. Who would have believed such a thing? That here was your child, arrived at last, and it was true what they’d said all along. Love was the only way back into heaven.