you can't make amends for.'
I sighed. 'You're trying. That's the best any of us can do. Look, it's not like I fight death penalty cases all the time-but my boss used to. He worked down in Virginia before he came up north. They're emotional minefields-you get to know the inmate, and you excuse some heinous crime with a lousy childhood or alcoholism or an emotional upheaval or drugs, until you see the victims family and a whole different level of suffering.
And suddenly you start to feel a little ashamed of being in the defendant's camp.'
I walked to a small cooler next to a file cabinet and took out a bottle of water for the priest. 'Shay's guilty, Father. A court already told us that.
June knows it. I know it. Everyone knows that it's wrong to execute an innocent man. The real question is whether it's still wrong to execute someone who's guilty.'
'But you're trying to get him hanged,' Father Michael said.
'I'm not trying to get him hanged,' I corrected. 'I want to champion his civil liberties, and at the same time, bring front and center what's wrong with the death penalty in this country The only way to do both is to find a way for him to die the way he wants to. That's the difference between you and me. You're trying to find a way for him to die the way you want him to.'
'You're the one who said Shay's heart might not be a viable match.
And even if it is, June Nealon will never agree to taking it,' the priest said.
That was, of course, entirely possible. What Father Michael had conveniently put out of his mind when he dreamed up a meeting between
June and Shay was that in order to forgive, you have to remember how you were hurt in the first place. And that in order to forget, you had to accept your role in what had happened.
'If we don't want Shay to lose hope,' I said, 'then we'd better not lose it either.'
M I C H A EL
Every day when I wasn't running the noon Mass, I went to visit Shay.
Sometimes we talked about television shows we'd seen-we were both pretty upset with Meredith on Grey's Anatomy, and thought the girls on
The Bachelor were hot but dumb as bricks. Sometimes we talked about carpentry, how a piece of wood would tell him what it needed to be, how I could say the same of a parishioner in need. Sometimes we talked about his case-the appeals he'd lost, the lawyers he'd had over the years. And sometimes, he was less lucid. He'd run around his cell like a caged animal; he'd rock back and forth; he'd swing from topic to topic as if it was the only way to cross the jungle of his thoughts.
One day. Shay asked me what was being said about him outside.
'You know,' I told him. 'You watch the news.'
'They think I can save them,' Shay said.
'Well. Yeah.'
'That's pretty fucking selfish, isn't it? Or is it selfish of me if I don't try?'
'I can't answer that for you. Shay,' I said.
He sighed. 'I'm tired of waiting to die,' he said. 'Eleven years is a long time.'
I pressed my stool up close to the cell door; it was more private that way. It had taken me a week, but I had managed to separate out the way I felt about Shay's case from the way that he felt. I had been stunned to learn that Shay believed he was innocent-although Warden
Coyne told me that everyone in prison believed they were innocent, regardless of the conviction. I wondered if his memory of the events, over time, had blurred-me, I could still remember that awful evidence as if it had been presented to me yesterday. When I pushed a bitencouraged him to tell me more about his wrongful conviction, suggested that Maggie might be able to use the information in court, asked him why he was willing to go along with an execution so passively if he wasn't guilty-he shut down. He'd say, over and over, that what had happened then didn't matter now. I began to understand that proclaiming his innocence had a lot less to do with the reality of his case and more to do with the fragile connection between us. I was becoming his confidant-and he wanted me to think the best of him.
'What do you think is easier?' Shay asked. 'Knowing you're going to die on a certain date and time, or knowing it might happen any moment when you least expect it?'
A thought swam through my mind like a minnow: Did you ask Elizabeth that? 'I'd rather not know,' I said. 'Live every day like it's your last, and all that. But I think if you do know you're going to die, Christ showed the way to do it with grace.'
Shay smirked. 'Just think. It took you a whole forty-two minutes to bring up good ol' Jesus today.'
'Sorry. Professional hazard,' I said. 'When He says, in Gethsemane,
'0 my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me...' He's wrestling with destiny... but ultimately. He accepts God's will.'
'Sucks for him,' Shay said.
'Well, sure. I bet His legs felt like Jell-0 when He was carrying the
Cross. He was human, after all. You can be brave, but that doesn't keep your stomach from doing somersaults.'
I finished speaking to find Shay staring at me. 'Did you ever wonder if you're dead wrong?'
'About what?'
'All of it. What Jesus said. What Jesus meant. I mean, he didn't even write the Bible, did he? In fact, the people who did write the Bible weren't even alive when Jesus was.' I must have looked absolutely stricken, because Shay hurried to continue. 'Not that Jesus wasn't a really cool guy-great teacher, excellent speaker, yadda yadda yadda.
But... Son of God? Where's the proof?'
'That's what faith is,' I said. 'Believing without seeing.'
'Okay,' Shay argued. 'But what about the folks who think Allah's the one to put your money on? Or that the right path is the eightfold one? I mean, how can a guy who walked on water even get baptized?'
'We know Jesus was baptized because-'
'Because it's in the Bible?' Shay laughed. 'Someone wrote the
Bible, and it wasn't God. Just like someone wrote the Quran, and the
Talmud. And he must have made decisions about what went in and what didn't. It's like when you write a letter, and you put in all the stuff you did during vacation but you leave out the part where your wallet got stolen and you got food poisoning.'
'Do you really need to know if Jesus got food poisoning?' I asked.
'You're missing the point. You can't take Matthew 26:39 or Luke
500:43 or whatever and read it as fact.'
'See, Shay, that's where you're wrong. I can take Matthew 26:39 and know it's the word of God. Or Luke 500:43, if it went up that high.'
By now, other inmates on the pod were eavesdropping. Some of them-like Joey Kunz, who was Greek Orthodox, and Pogie, who was
Southern Baptist-liked to listen when I visited Shay and read scripture; a few of them had even asked if I'd stop by and pray with them when I came in to see Shay. 'Shut your piehole. Bourne,' Pogie yelled out. 'You're going to hell as soon as they push that needle in your arm.'
'I'm not saying I'm right,' Shay said, his voice escalating. 'I'm just saying that if you're right, it still doesn't mean I'm wrong.'
'Shay,' I said, 'you have to stop shouting, or they're going to ask me to leave.'
He walked toward me, flattening his hands on the other side of the steel mesh door. 'What if it didn't matter if you were a Christian or a
Jew or a Buddhist or a Wiccan or a... a transcendentalist? What if all those roads led to the same place?'
'Religion brings people together,' I said.
