God of the Rodeo (6 page)

By the end of it, Mr. Denver Tarter lay on his back in the hall outside the butcher room—the place where Terry scalded the pigs in a tank and shot the cows and hoisted them up and put their heads in
a rack to decapitate them and stuck a knife in their hearts to bleed them and skinned them and gutted them and sawed them in half—and Mr. Denver Tarter’s short, thinning brown hair was soaked in blood and there was a gash all the way through his windpipe. He was gasping, wheezing, blood spattering from the hole in his throat. His eyes were wide open. Terry bent over him, gazing at the blue uniform shirt with “Mr. Tarter,” just that, stitched in red scripted letters on the breast, at the heavy face, at the hand raised weakly toward him, reaching out to him. A question droned through Terry’s mind, “How did all of a sudden this happen? How did all of a sudden this happen?” He stared for a long, long moment before walking out of the building, raspy breath behind him.

Even after eleven years Terry’s brain hadn’t found a safe place for this scene; the memory spilled forward often from the files. If the images—and the sound of that breathing—weren’t enough to convince him that Rev was mistaken, there was the fact that he’d spent time in another state prison on a robbery charge; he’d had his warnings before the murder. And at Angola, he’d been sentenced repeatedly to J and other cellblocks. He’d fought and fought, broken a man’s jaw and cheekbone, blackened a guard’s eye.

And perhaps it wouldn’t be reading in too much to say that the circumstances of Terry’s upbringing didn’t make it any easier for him to hear Rev’s words, that his childhood hadn’t left him buoyant with self-worth. Once, I visited Ora, the old woman he adored and called his mama. I turned off a main road of large, well-kept homes within wide-open Louisiana farm country, and drove up a rutted lane. Before and after a family move to California, Terry had spent his childhood here. The dead-end street was an enclave of tiny houses, dilapidated or entirely abandoned, porches caving and paint long gone, and of structures that can only be called shacks. Until recently, Terry’s real mother had lived in one of the abandoned houses. I found Ora in a two-room shack. Her clothes hung from nails in the walls. The furniture
consisted solely of a bed and two torn vinyl kitchen chairs. She spoke proudly of the way Terry had carried in water for her to drink and bathe in, before he went to Angola. Running water had come later. She recalled various children, most of them family and most doing relatively well, who had grown up on this lane. She also mentioned one grandson, two nephews, and one cousin all in prison. One of Terry’s brothers was in Angola for attempted murder.

But gradually Terry started listening to Rev, partly because Rev made him think of Ora. Her explanation for Terry’s crimes was that “his mama wasn’t religious people” and “didn’t knock the stink out of him when he was doing some nasty cussin’.” Now, every phone call, she told him to “get off into that Bible and ask the Lord to clean your filthy heart and mouth.” Maybe it was that simple. Rev, too, made it seem so. “Man, straighten up,” Rev said, and analyzed all of Terry’s troubles, at Angola and before: “You just got hanging with the wrong crowd.” Though his prison record had improved over the past two years, Terry wasn’t so sure. Just a few weeks ago, a kitchen guard had rebuffed a suggestion—“You don’t tell me what to do”—and left him trembling. Enraged. Lips literally shivering. Mind racing so fast he had no mind at all. Too much like when he’d turned the ax around and used the blade again and again and again.

Yet he
hadn’t gone
after the guard, had
only
trembled, then cleaned the ovens as he’d been told. And at last he gave in to Rev’s lobbying. He held hands in the circle and prayed.

Rev’s group of ten or twelve met every day inside the vegetable cooler. Before their shifts stirring mammoth vats of gravy with utensils the size of spades, or frying eight hundred fish cakes, the inmates shut the door, kept the light off, took in the refrigeration and the view of the fields through the one small window. Then, surrounded by a huge potato peeler, a row of sinks, and shelves filled with okra and eggplant, they clasped hands and bowed heads. There was a man in squarish, state-issued eyeglasses, another with “Man of God” tooled
into his tan belt, a convict who’d just dashed in from the weight pile and whose T-shirt was drenched.

Each in turn, some barely murmuring a line and others going on for minutes, they asked for things all-encompassing, things specific. “Lord, let us decrease that You may increase…. I’m praying for them to make me a clerk, Lord…. Touch us with the faith to accept everything as Your will…. I need You to stop that trickeration today, glory hallelujah…. Help us to put on the whole armor of God, O Lord, to wrestle with the flesh, O Lord, we are flesh, O Lord, make us spirit, O Lord, make us better than we are, O Lord, shield us in the armor of faith, O Lord, bar that devil by Your armor, O Lord, and let us remind ourselves that even while the world wants to see us fall, O Lord, we got a host of witnesses up there wanting us to stand up, O Lord…. We thank you, in the name of Jesus, we thank you for bringing us Brother Terry this day….”

Terry said little, but joined them before every shift that week. Then, on the third Saturday in October, he hesitated, put them off, told them no, and finally followed them to church that evening in what was known as the camp’s visiting “shed,” though it was simply a large room in the cinder-block complex. The Faith City International ministry had been coming to Angola every month for eight years. Rev had been helping with their services since the beginning as part of their “praise team.” Faith City happened not to be one of the new religious groups taking their message to the prison since Warden Cain had put out word for visiting preachers, since he had brought full-scale revivals to Angola, since he had declared, “This prison is open for religion.” But Terry could decide to attend church at the last minute, rather than having to submit his name in advance for the “call-out” sheet, because Cain wanted his inmates to worship.

Was that why Terry went that night? So some captain who knew the warden might see him filing in? So his name would appear on some list of the faithful he imagined Cain compiling? Was that why he had joined Rev’s circle in the first place?

To reach the service he left his dorm through the steel door, turned down the outdoor Walk, passed through a series of checkpoints with gates that could be slammed and locked in emergency. He lined up along a fence, still two massive barred portals from the front of the camp, and waited until a guard let everyone through another checkpoint into the shed. Inside, black plastic chairs, their backs stenciled faintly
I.W.F
. for the Inmate Welfare Fund that had purchased them, were aligned in precise rows, the brown laminate tables pushed to one wall. A Coke machine (for use by visitors only; the inmates could not have money), a Pac-Man machine, and a mural—this one a seascape with dolphins, a killer whale, a three-masted ship and a sky of puffy clouds-were the church’s side chapels. The pulpit was a dingy white wood, a small cross raised on its face.

Rev and the rest of the praise team, work shirts ironed and pens clipped businesslike to breast pockets, sat up front. Terry wasn’t going to get himself trapped up there. He took a chair in the middle of a row about two-thirds back. An inmate tuned an electric guitar, another checked the keyboard’s amp. Terry stared down at the crease in his jeans. He always slipped a pack to the laundry man to get his clothes pressed, but tonight’s jeans were special, his own, the pair he’d ordered from a catalog as opposed to state-issue. Below the crease were white leather Converse high-tops, again distinct from the no-brand state sneakers he wore in the kitchen. This was the outfit he put on for his rare visitors. And he’d had time, as he gravitated toward coming here, to have his close-cropped hair trimmed by the camp barber.

Many of the convicts around him were just as meticulously dressed. Levi’s or Lee blue jeans—subtly (or dramatically within the narrow confines of permitted dress) the men made this night different. And Sister Jackie, the leader of Faith City, encouraged the distinction. “They should feel they are going to a normal church,” she told me later. That evening she wore a black skirt and jacket, the jacket adorned with large gold buttons and, descending from the
shoulders, a multi-layered arrangement of gold chiffon. Forty or fifty convicts waited for her to begin. I asked if she ever worried about their motives, that they might be trying to impress the warden, or dreaming of impressing the pardon board should they ever come before it. She said no. She did not worry. She hardly thought about it. “People in the regular world use church and God for all kinds of reasons—it’s the same in the penitentiary. But I would say most of the inmates I see from the pulpit are sincere. At that moment. How they are affected afterwards, how deeply the experience changes them, that isn’t my place to judge.”

Terry watched this heavy, pretty woman, with perfect teeth and flawless brown skin and short, waved hair and gold plumage at her shoulders, say hello to the praise team and anyone else who waited his turn. She gave them each a long hug.

“Hallelujah!” she cried, taking the pulpit. “Won’t you praise the Lord tonight?” She shut her eyes. “We welcome you, Lord, we glorify you, Lord, we magnify you, Lord, we love you, Lord, everybody stand and give the Lord a wave, a wave offering tonight….” And most everybody did, stretching both arms toward the rough stucco ceiling and swaying, though five or six at the back remained in their seats and chatted, enjoying the air-conditioning, and two sipped coffee and joked in open amusement. A lone guard sat near the entry-way, toying with his clipboard. “I bind every spirit of condemnation in Jesus’ name!” Sister Jackie declared. Terry swayed dutifully, rigidly.

She beckoned another Faith City minister, a squat woman in floral, to a second microphone. Sister Jackie asked the musicians to step up and some of the praise team to join her, and Sister Jackie led the singing:

It seemed her voice wrapped from the end of the chorus around again to the beginning without a breath. The sound was big as a soloist’s in a fine gospel choir, and it made the plastic chairs, the yellowing ceiling, the dingy pulpit into joyful things. The praise team clapped, dancing almost in unison like back-up singers, yet also on the brink of disarray, chaos. One of them, a wispy inmate no older than nineteen, broke into a stationary hop every time she swept into the chorus again.

She surged into a new, even faster hymn, hardly pausing for the organ’s crescendo, and two convicts did what the lyrics instructed-ran around the room, circling the congregation, lap after lap until the words changed.

The wispy boy rattled a tambourine, and hopped and kicked and whirled with the abandon of Hasidim at a wedding. The runners switched to skipping in place. Off in a corner, eyes closed, one man gestured at the ceiling, furling and unfurling his fingers, apparently talking to God.

Very quietly, Terry did.

Sister Jackie did one last hymn, this one slow and a capella,

and steered the congregation toward prayer, everyone soon muttering separate words and she shouting over them, “In Jesus’ name I take authority over Satan’s power…. O yes yes yes yes
yes
.… O work with me tonight, work with me…. We know not how to pray but… we enter in by the blood….” Terry tried mumbling praise to God along with the man beside him, but just as in the vegetable cooler, he didn’t feel comfortable saying much. “O wonderful,” the inmates spoke around him, “O praise Jesus, O I know you hear me, Lord, O wonderful wonderful wonderful wonderful.” And then, led by Sister Jackie, whose tilted throat glistened with sweat and whose mouth produced “O yadareeba yasheeda. O badatimba kimba o shey,” they began speaking in tongues. “Abinda binda binda binda binda,” skidded from one man’s lips. It went on and on, she sliding back and forth between language, “Come into our presence, O Lord,” and these other calls, “O yadareeba,” while some inmates stayed deep in their strange sounds, and others didn’t speak but clapped randomly, loudly, without rhythm. A few turned blindly to the walls, palms lifted as though to feel their own shadows.

Now and then the anarchy of syllables fell into a lull, and during one softening a man two rows ahead of Terry, a man with his body doubled over and his face buried in the crook of his arm, could be heard murmuring, “Shastada koondo koondolo po li ri ri koondo koondo koondolo.” The voice pleaded, dwindled, whimpered and all but sniveled, before it went on begging for something it could name only in these nonwords. “O li ri ri ri ri.” The syllables became more
and more broken. They became only exhalations struggling to form consonants, like the sound of someone struggling to explain himself after he’s burst into sobbing. But the effort was minor, surrendering. It ended not in any explanation but in exhausted gratitude: “O thank you, thank you, Jesus, thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.”

Terry kept his head bowed and kept quiet. He studied the crease in his jeans. He didn’t feel qualified to be a part of this. He knew the Spirit was supposed to lead him to the right words, the right sounds, and he didn’t feel any Spirit entering into him.

“Some of you,” Sister Jackie emerged into preaching, “are in some dead situations. Dead, dead, dead. And it’s worse than that. You’re in a cave. And that’s not all. There’s a stone at the front of that cave, a rock, a boulder you can’t move, and it’s laying there on your heart and blocking the exit from that pit, and it’s crushing you, it won’t let you breathe, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re dead, you’re not living, you’re
entombed!
And all you have to do,” her voice thinned, as though she were a kindergarten teacher directing children in their first collage, “is say, ‘I believe.’ That’s all. ‘I believe.’ That’s the only price for getting that rock rolled away. That’s the only price you have to pay for Jesus’ love. ‘I believe.’ How many of you are in that tomb? How many of you are without Jesus? How many of you will let Jesus take your pain? How many of you will speak that faith, ‘Jesus died for me’? It’s so simple. ‘Jesus died for me.’ We’re
all
sinners. How many of you will accept the free gift of his love? How many of you will take what’s offered to everyone and barred to nobody. Nobody. It’s so
cheap
. You don’t even need to make four cents an hour! You just pay with your anguish. Should I make it sound a little bit harder? Should I raise the price and cut back supply? Get everyone rushing up here then. How many of you are ready? How many of you are ready to come up here tonight and be saved?”