And then he stops thinking about it because it’s never going to happen.
Reverend Fred Green wiggles two fingers at Irv, indicating that he’s to step to the lectern now. Irv removes his hat and leaves it on the chair behind him.
He shakes Fred’s hand and Fred whispers, “John Eight: thirty-two, Sheriff,” as Irv trades places with him. “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
“Yeah, I was thinking that too,” Irv says.
Irv looks out at them without speaking. The audience is silent. They are waiting for something. He rests his hands on the edges of the lectern and slides them back and forth and back again, feeling the space where Fred had, moments earlier, done exactly the same thing. The edges are still warm from the reverend’s hands. In the audience, in the fourth row to Irv’s right, sits the Jones family. Beside them, the Simmons family.
And that is when Irv figures out how to begin:
“If you ever get the chance,” he says to the packed room of a hundred and fifty faces, “to place your hands on this podium here, you can feel how the edges are slightly worn down. You can’t see it from where you’re sitting because of the angle. Can’t really even see it well from here. You have to feel it. They’ve been polished smooth by speaker after speaker in preparation and practice and worry about what to say. The wood is worn down by the emotions of people trying to talk meaningfully from this spot. I didn’t have this thought or know this until right now. That’s because . . . well . . . because I’ve never placed my hands here before. Which is, in a roundabout way, what I’m getting at. Despite being your sheriff I have never been here before to try and say something meaningful like everyone else who’s worn this thing down over time. And as I stand here, I have to ask myself, Why? Why didn’t I come here earlier?”
Irv pauses. The children are fidgeting. Older women are fanning themselves. The air conditioning is on but it is no match for the high summer sun, the worsted wool, and the full room.
“I remember thinking,” Irv continues, “that Jeffrey was killed across an invisible line separating one county from another, which meant it wasn’t my jurisdiction. There were so many emotions around it that I didn’t want to touch it, and I was glad my people weren’t implicated. Two months later Lydia died. That was on my side of the line. But somehow I didn’t let it touch me. I treated it as a mystery to be solved while keeping my distance. That made it a second time I didn’t come here to talk to you. I find this painful to admit, but I think the reason I didn’t come talk to you is because I was afraid to. I mean . . . I didn’t think anything bad was going to happen, but I was afraid of all the emotions. The anger. The grief. The way that people who speak from their hearts can sometimes say some pretty mean things and lay some heavy blame, and sometimes the wiser move is to avoid the conversation because it’ll only make things worse. I went through that in my marriage. But I also know that my marriage failed, so I obviously did something wrong.
“I don’t think that being afraid of all those emotions makes me a bad man, but I do think it might make me a coward. I feared walking in here and being treated like a villain in a story I didn’t write. My mistake, my failure as your sheriff and as a man and as a Christian, was thinking I had a choice. That somehow it might all go away and blend into all the other noise. What my cowardice proves to me is that I lacked faith. Faith in God, and faith in you. Because what I also learned from my failed marriage is that angry people, people who shout at you and accuse you, and vilify you, often do it to try and change you. Which means they think it’s possible. Which means they have faith in you. Which means they can imagine the New Jerusalem. And to avoid that, to walk away from that, is to turn your back on the Kingdom of God.
“I can’t help but wonder,” Irv says, “whether I might have made a small difference to Lydia if I’d have come here when Jeffrey was killed, or maybe when that grand jury verdict was read out. I wonder if, had she seen me here trying to serve this community better by being a part of it, whether she might have had more hope. I don’t know. But what I need to do now is tell you truthfully what I know.
“Lydia Bethany Jones, Ph.D.,” Irv concludes, “was not murdered. She also did not commit suicide, if anyone has that thought. It is my conclusion—backed by the evidence we have collected—that she accidentally fell off an unfinished building from the sixth floor. The reason she was there at all was to try to help a friend understand something about Jeffrey’s world and what that verdict meant to her. Something that was, for him and at that moment, beyond his capacity to understand. In trying to explain that world—with an actual view above it—she lost her footing and fell. The man she was with tried to save her and he failed. He is, right now, devastated to the point of self-destruction, because he loved her even if he didn’t understand her—though in my experience that’s often the way it is for the lot of us.
“It occurs to me now, as I’m telling you all this, that Professor Jones died as she lived: as a teacher. In her last publication, which I’ve read, she expresses a loss of faith in what the future might bring for this
