A FEW TENDER MINUTES

10:01 AM

It is a summer of rain and I am a seminarian. I visit the Osborn State Correctional Facility. The metal gate opens, then closes behind me, like legs uncrossed and crossed. On the mental health ward, behind a small meshed window, a naked man, wrapped in a bedsheet, poses like Constantine crossing the Milvian Bridge. There is a particular sound in prisons. More insistent than rain, it is the honeyed sound of the hive, the sound of men packed in on top of each other, the sound of regret, anger, and resignation, all beginning and beginning again. I hear them hum in their cells, sticky, strong from barbells. Then I see them—their skins colored black, brown, mocha, plum, peach, and white. Intricate tattoos cover the men like road maps. Semen sweetens the air. A muscular inmate’s biceps rise from his T-shirt like loaves of bread. His one-armed boyfriend smokes a cigarette with his hook. We enter the chapel. My fellow seminarian panics. A nurse rushes him to her office in a wheelchair.

 

 

11:08 AM

We are told the sedated seminarian will not return. Rain messes up Connecticut. Rivers break. Gardens drown. Water collects in the spokes of the spider’s web, straightjacketing the flies. In the prison yard, beyond the chain-link fence with razor strips, the landscape runs like a finger painting done by a child. In the thickets, the shadowy traffic of birds in panic. The Carolina wrens have returned to the chokecherry trees—voluble, curious evangelists. The males construct nests with feathers, mud, and twigs. The females inspect and throw out their sticks and sing: “Begin! Begin again!” The male will sing 250 repetitions until a nest can be settled upon. Through the window bars, rain hammers the wrens as they argue over feckless nests.

 

 

11:50 AM

The clock is a wheelchair disappearing down the corridor of time. We pray with the inmates in a circle. Allowed a few minutes with each inmate, I have time for two. A sex offender says he has been wrongly accused. How will he return to his mother’s house? How to begin again? The guard says, “Next.” Before me is a man who does not disclose his crime, a Native American who will be released tomorrow. Something about his expression is reminiscent of Sitting Bull after the Battle of Little Bighorn was won and he had entered those rodeo shows with Buffalo Bill: triumphant resignation begins to describe it, but not completely. For forty years, he tells me, his job has been to greet new inmates, which gave him money for toothpaste and pencils. Behind him, a mural of crude voluptuous angels covers the cinder blocks: their wings and breasts have absorbed the Clorox stink of the place. What prayer is in my book for him? The guard picks at his nail beds with his key. He says: “Two more minutes.” My crucifix dangles from my chest like a fledgling.