“Mr. King, I’m gonna need you to lower your voice!” She smooths her crisp uniform as if it had wrinkled from my shouting. “If you don’t have your mother’s information, there are programs that can subsidize her care. Medicare. Medicaid. I’m sure you can visit one of those offices and they can help you. I’m trying to let you know what’s coming.”
“Help? Yeah if that’s what you call it. I’ll get my own subsidy or grant or whatever,” I say softer.
“Of course you will.” The fake politeness drips from her thin lips as a smile mars her ashen face.
Death isn’t the hard part. It’s the money it takes to die. Money I got tied up in other things and doesn’t deserve to be spent on Sara, on a mother, even if she’s my own.
But we all need a backup plan and I have the church. And I ain’t planning on praying for money either. I just have to ask for it. Church folk, folk like my wife, Alice, would say ask in Jesus’s name. I don’t have to ask Jesus though. I just have to ask Reverend Jackson Potter Sr.
Problem solved. Prayer answered. Ain’t God good?
JACKSON BLAISDELL POTTER SR.
Three lines and forty-five words. I have no idea how I am going to minister to my congregation. My left shoulder is tight and I want to pour a glass of whiskey and drink until my body is slack and slumped and I no longer have the energy to think how much my daughter, Layla, disrespects me. She pushes and pushes until you give her what she wants. That, or you better move to a remote location where she can never, ever find you.
All I want to do is protect and provide understanding, and I can never figure out how to do both. Perhaps because to protect I must omit, blur lines and control what I present myself to be in front my church. And to my family.
This chair is too soft. I can’t get comfortable. I stare at the mostly blank notepad. There is one sermon I have in reserve, but it’s one I can never deliver so I’ll leave it tucked away safely, in my Bible.
Rushing footsteps shuffle past my door and voices whisper bits of gossip about a funeral for a God-fearing woman, a woman whose life was taken too soon by a beautiful city with a lot of ugly, broken parts.
Some in our church and others who live on the twisting blocks of neighboring apartments whisper that Alice probably stored away money in the house and that’s what the murderer wanted. They always saw her scurrying about with stacks of papers and folders. Maybe those papers held some secret accounts. Others hear Lebanon turns a good profit at the bakery, so he probably also had thousands or tens of thousands stashed somewhere in the house.
It’s foolish listening to idle gossip. There’s never knowledge gained, just temporal excitement.
Many people believe it was a random act of violence, and our lives, black lives, are like that. Unforeseen patterns shape our fate. And on the South Side of Chicago, we exist with a unique kind of knowledge of how fragile life unfolds among these clustered rows of brick, cement and asphalt.
I need answers like everyone else. The problem is, I’m not supposed to be like everyone else. I’m supposed to know or at least act like I know.
Addressing her murder in my sermon puts upon me a pressure I haven’t felt in a long while. Reconciling myself with the fact Alice is dead is proving difficult. I’m dealing with my own guilt, my eyes overlooking bruises pancaked over with makeup and long-sleeved blouses on ninety-degree days.
What are the odds that Lebanon just abused her, but didn’t kill her outright?
The odds are low. They are very, very low.
Persuading others to put their faith in a God that didn’t protect a good person is not easy, but forgiving myself could prove damn near impossible.
Lost in my meditation, I don’t notice as the door creaks open and he strolls in. Doesn’t knock. Doesn’t care. Doesn’t respect the title on the door.
Nothing about Lebanon is friendly or shouts friend to me anymore, but that’s what he’s supposed to be, that’s what he was to me at one point long ago. That’s what I still want to see in him, what I need to feel in my bones, but those are cold, like the windowpane rattling against the gusts of wind.
“Need a favor.”
“They’re never favors. You just come in here and give orders like you run this place,” I say.
“Dramatic as always, Jack. Damn! I don’t ask if I don’t need.”
“Stop cursing. Have some respect for this place, and my place in it.”
“Your place.”
The door remains open and the hall, though at this moment empty of walking bodies, isn’t empty of listening ears. He follows my every move as I rise and close it behind him. I move deliberately, every limb and muscle careful not to incite suspicion or anger.
“You do that, you know? You tiptoe around me like Alice does, did. I hate that.”
Did he hate her or something about her so much that he took her life? I piece the night together as I remember it. Layla getting the call from Ruby. Her rushing out, her momma and me following behind. Blue lights, yellow tape, brown bodies and a redbrick house with rigid white bodies cycling in and out. Lebanon’s eyes filled with tears when people looked, his body shivering with grief when eyes wandered over his frame. But when people didn’t look, those few moments when something else grabbed their attention, the tears and the grief briefly seemed to dissipate.
“This is a private conversation. Listening ears and all,” I respond.
“Sure. Whatever you say, man. Now about that favor.”
“No. Whatever it is, I got things I need to do. And you need to be with Ruby right now.”
“Don’t tell me about my family, Jackson. Worry about yours.”
“Don’t let this robe fool you, Lebanon. Watch your mouth about my family.”
Wind rattles the windowpanes. Lebanon stares at the picture of me and my father on my desk and picks it up, the hard glint in his eyes softening a moment. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven in the picture, and I’m looking up at my father maybe the way all children look at their fathers at one point in their lives, with a mix of love and awe. He was telling me to look at Momma, but I refused to look at anyone but him. I had what some called a charmed life. Blessed. Then one night two officers came to the door of my home saying my father, Pastor Thomas Potter, died in a car accident. Some criminal trying to outrun the cops caused a good man to not come home. The guy who killed Dad died too, so I suppose there is some justice in that.
“Uncle Thomas was a good man.”
“Yeah, he was.”
“You’re a good man, too. A good pastor.”
“Now you want to sweet-talk me into doing your bidding.” I sit back down behind my desk and begin writing, trying to compile something, anything for a sermon I have to deliver in an hour or so.