Authors: Jodi Picoult
And squirted the precious drug onto the floor of the catwalk.
“What the fuck!” Crash exploded. “Gimme that back.”
“Haven’t you heard? I’m Jesus. I’m
supposed
to save you,” Shay said.
“I don’t want to be saved,” Crash yelled. “I want my kit back!”
“Come and get it,” Shay said, and he pushed the kit under his door, so that it landed square on the catwalk. “Hey, CO,” he yelled. “Come see what Crash made.”
As the COs entered to confiscate the hype kit—and write him a ticket that would include a stay in solitary—Crash slammed his hand against the metal door. “I swear, Bourne, when you least expect it …”
He was interrupted by the sound of Warden Coyne’s voice out in the courtyard. “I just bought a goddamn death gurney,” the warden cried, conversing with someone we could not see. “What am I supposed to do with
that
?” And then, when he stopped speaking, we all noticed something—or the lack of something. The incessant hammering and sawing that had been going on outside for months, as the prison built a death chamber to accommodate Shay’s sentence, had fallen silent. All we heard was a simple, blissful quiet.
“… you’re gonna wind up dead,” Crash finished, but now we were starting to wonder if that would still be true.
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The Reverend Arbogath Justus preached at the Drive-In Church of Christ in God in Heldratch, Michigan. His congregation arrived in their cars on Sunday mornings and received a blue flyer with the day’s scripture, and a note to tune in to AM 1620 in order to hear the good reverend when he took the pulpit—formerly the snack bar, when it was a movie theater. I would have ridiculed this, but his flock was six hundred strong, which led me to believe that there were enough people in this world who wanted to tuck their prayer requests beneath windshield wipers to be collected, and to receive Communion from altar girls on roller skates.
I suppose it wasn’t a big stretch to go from the movie screen to the small one, which is why Reverend Justus ran a television ministry site, too, on a cable station called SOS (Save Our Souls). I’d caught it a few times, while I was flipping through channels. It was fascinating to me, in the same way Shark Week was fascinating on the Discovery Channel—I was curious to learn more, but from a nice, secure distance. Justus wore eyeliner on television, and suits in a range of lollipop colors. His wife played the accordion when it came time to sing hymns. It all seemed like a parody of what faith was supposed to be—quiet and heart-settling, not grandiose and dramatic—which is why I always eventually changed the channel.
One day, when I went to visit Shay, my car was stopped in traffic leading to the prison. Shiny, scrubbed Midwestern faces worked their way from car to car. They were wearing green T-shirts with the name of Justus’s church on the back, scrawled above a rudimentary drawing of a ’57 Chevy convertible. When one girl approached, I unrolled the window. “God bless you!” she said, and offered me a slip of yellow paper.
There was a picture of Jesus, arms outstretched and palms raised, floating in the oval of a sideview car mirror. The caption read:
OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
.
And then below it:
Shay Bourne: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing? Don’t Let a False Prophet Lead You Astray!
The line of cars chugged forward, finally, and I turned into the parking lot. I had to pull my car onto the grass; it was that crowded. The throngs of people waiting for Shay, and the media covering his story, had not dissipated.
However, by the time I came close to the prison, I realized that the attention of most of these people was not held by Shay at that moment, but by a man in a three-piece lime-green suit, wearing a clerical collar. I got close enough to see the pancake makeup and the eyeliner, and realized that Reverend Arbogath Justus had now moved into the realm of satellite ministries … and had chosen the prison as his first stop. “Miracles mean nothing,” Justus announced. “The world is full of false prophets. In Revelations, we’re told of a beast that uses miracles to fool men into worshipping it. Do you know what happens to that beast on Judgment Day? He and the people who were fooled are all thrown into a lake of fire. Is that what you want?”
A woman fell forward from the cliff-edge of the crowd. “No,” she sobbed. “I want to go with God.”
“Jesus can hear you, sister,” Reverend Justus said. “Because He’s here, with us. Not inside that prison, like the false prophet Shay Bourne!”
There was a roar from his converts. But just as quickly, it was matched by those who hadn’t given up on Shay. “How do we know
you’re
not the false prophet?” one young man called out.
Beside me, a mother tucked her sick child into her arms more tightly. She looked at my collar and frowned. “Are you with him?”
“No,” I said. “Definitely not.”
She nodded. “Well, I’m not taking advice from a man whose church has a concession stand.”
I started to agree, but was distracted by a burly man who grabbed the reverend from his makeshift pulpit and yanked him into the crowd.
The cameras, of course, were all rolling.
Without thinking twice about what I was doing, or that I was doing it on film, I pushed forward and rescued Reverend Arbogath Justus from the clutches of the mob. He wrapped his arms around me, gasping, as I pulled us both up onto a granite ledge that ran along the edge of the parking lot.
In retrospect, I didn’t know why I had chosen to play the hero. And I
really
didn’t know why I said what I did next. Philosophically, Reverend Justus and I were on the same team—even if we pitched religion with very different styles. But I also knew that Shay was—maybe for the first time in his life—attempting to do something honorable. He didn’t deserve to be slandered for that.
I might not believe
in
Shay—but I believed him.
I felt the wide, white eye of a television camera swing toward me, and a herd of others followed. “Reverend Justus
came here, I’m sure, because he thinks he’s telling you the truth. Well, so does Shay Bourne. He wants to do one thing in this world before he leaves it: save the life of a child. The Jesus
I
know would endorse that, I think. And,” I said, turning to the reverend, “the Jesus
I
know wouldn’t send people to some fiery hell if they were trying to atone for their sins. The Jesus
I
know believed in second chances.”
As Reverend Justus realized that I might have saved him from the mob to sacrifice him all over again, his face reddened. “There’s one true word of God,” he proclaimed in his camera-ready voice, “and Shay Bourne isn’t speaking it.”
Well, I couldn’t argue with that. In all the time I’d been with Shay, he had never quoted the New Testament. He was far more likely to swear or go off on a tangent about Hanta virus and government conspiracy. “You’re absolutely right,” I said. “He’s trying to do something that’s never been done before. He’s asking questions of the status quo. He’s trying to suggest another way—a better way. And he’s willing to die for it to happen.” I raised a brow. “Come to think of it, I bet Jesus might find a lot in common with a guy like Shay Bourne.”
I nodded, stepped down from the granite ledge, and shoved my way through the crowd to the security partition, where a correctional officer let me through. “Father,” he said, shaking his head, “you got no idea how big a pile of you-know-what you just stepped into.” And as if I needed proof, my cell phone rang: Father Walter’s angry summons back to St. Catherine’s, immediately.
I sat in the front pew of the church as Father Walter paced in front of me. “What if I blamed it all on being moved by the Holy Spirit?” I offered, and received a withering glare.
“I don’t understand,” Father Walter said. “Why would you say something like that … on live television, for the love of God—”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“—when you had to know that it was going to bring the heat down on St. Catherine’s?” He sank down beside me and tipped his head back, as if he were praying to the carved statue of Jesus on the Cross that rose above us. “Michael, seriously, what were you thinking?” he said softly. “You’re a young, handsome, smart, straight guy. You could write your ticket in the Church—get your own parish, wind up in Rome … be whatever you want. And instead, I get a copy of an affidavit from the attorney general’s office, saying that as Shay Bourne’s spiritual advisor you believe in salvation through organ donation? And then I turn on the midday news and see you on a soapbox, sounding like some kind of … some kind of …”
“What?”
He shook his head, but stopped short of calling me a heretic. “You’ve read Tertullian,” he said.
We all had, in seminary. He was a famous orthodox Christian historian whose text
The Prescription Against Heretics
was a forerunner of the Nicene Creed. Tertullian had coined the idea of a deposit of faith—that we take what Christ taught and believe it as is, without adding to or taking away from it.
“You want to know why Catholicism’s been around for two thousand years?” Father Walter said. “
Because
of people like Tertullian, who understood that you can’t mess around with truth. People were upset with the changes of Vatican II. The Pope’s even reinstated the Latin Mass.”
I took a deep breath. “I thought being a spiritual advisor meant doing what Shay Bourne needs to face his death with peace—not what
we
need him to do, as a good Catholic.”
“Good Lord,” Father Walter said. “He’s conned you.”
I frowned. “He hasn’t conned me.”
“He’s got you eating out of the palm of his hand! Look at you—you practically acted like his press secretary today on the news—”
“Do you think Jesus died for a reason?” I interrupted.
“Of course.”
“Then why shouldn’t Shay Bourne be allowed to do the same?”
“Because,” Father Walter said, “Shay Bourne is not dying for anyone’s sins, except his own.”
I flinched. Well, didn’t I know that better than anyone else?
Father Walter sighed. “I don’t agree with the death penalty, but I understand this sentence. He murdered two people. A police officer, and a little girl.” He shook his head. “Save his soul, Michael. Don’t try to save his life.”
I glanced up. “What do you think would have happened if just one of the apostles had stayed awake in the garden with Jesus? If they’d kept Him from being arrested? If they’d tried to save
His
life?”
Father Walter’s mouth dropped open. “You don’t
really
think Shay Bourne is Jesus, do you?”
I didn’t.
Did I?
Father Walter sank down onto the pew and took off his glasses. He rubbed his eyes. “Mikey,” he said, “take a couple weeks off. Go somewhere and pray. Think about what you’re doing—what you’re
saying
.” He looked up at me. “And in the meantime, I don’t want you going to the prison on behalf of St. Catherine’s.”
I looked around this church, which I had grown to love—with its polished pews and the spatter of light from the stained glass, the whispering silk of the chalice veil, the dancing flames on the candles lit in offering.
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be.
“I won’t go to the prison on behalf of St. Catherine’s,” I said, “but I will go on behalf of Shay.”
I walked down the aisle, past the holy water, past the bulletin board with the information about the young boy from Zimbabwe the congregation supported with their donations. When I stepped outside the double doors of the church, the world was so bright that for a moment, I couldn’t see where I was headed.
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There were four ways to hang someone. The short drop involved a prisoner falling just a few inches; their body weight and physical struggling tightened the noose and caused death by strangulation. Suspension hanging required the prisoner to be raised upward and strangled. Standard drop hanging—popular in America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries—meant the prisoner fell four to six feet, which might or might not break his neck. Long drop hanging was a more personal execution: the distance the prisoner fell was determined by weight and body type. The body was still accelerating due to gravity at the end of the drop, but the head was restricted by the noose—which broke the neck and ruptured the spinal cord, rendering instant unconsciousness, and a quick death.
I’d learned that next to shooting, hanging was the world’s most popular form of execution. It was introduced in Persia twenty-five hundred years ago for male criminals (females were strangled at the stake, because it was less indecent)—a nice alternative to the blood and guts of a typical beheading, with all the same punch as any public spectacle.
It was not, however, foolproof. In 1885, a British murderer named Robert Goodale was hanged, but the force of the drop decapitated him. Most recently, Saddam Hussein’s half brother had suffered the same grisly fate in Iraq. This was a legal conundrum: if the sentence of death was to be carried out by hanging, then the prisoner could not be decapitated, or the sentence wasn’t fulfilled.
I had to do my homework—which explained why I was reading the Official Table of Drops and estimating Shay Bourne’s weight when Father Michael came into my office. “Oh, good,” I said, motioning to the seat across from my desk. “If the noose is positioned right—there’s something about a brass eyelet—the fall causes an instant fracture of the C2 vertebra. It says here brain death occurs in six minutes, and whole-body death within ten to fifteen minutes. That means we’ve got a four-minute window to get him back on a respirator before the heart stops beating and oh, I almost forgot—I heard back from the AG’s office. They denied our request to have Shay hanged instead of executed with lethal injection. They even included the original sentence, as if I haven’t read it a bazillion times, and told me if I wanted to challenge it, I had to file the appropriate motions. Which,” I said, “I did five hours ago.”
Father Michael didn’t even seem to hear me. “Listen,” I said gently, “it’s easier if you think about this hanging business as science … and stop connecting it personally to Shay.”