The Chaplain's Daughter (4 page)

“Ask him, son.  He will tell you.  He will tell you in quiet ways when you talk to Him at night.  He will tell you through the circumstances of your life as you move on from where you are now.  But tell you He will.  I promise…because He promises.”

John’s allotted visiting hour was almost up.  He could have scheduled more time with Toby but, as good as John was at his job, he wasn’t prescient enough to know when breakthroughs like this were going to happen.  He had another appointment in another tank.  He took Toby’s hands in both of his and said, “Would you like to close with a prayer?  Why don’t you offer the prayer?”

Toby looked a little shocked.  Wasn’t that only for people like John?  Toby had no idea how to pray out loud, or what he was supposed to say.  Toby had heard an expression one time, from his high school basketball coach, and it seemed to apply in this instance.  The coach had said, “There are two kinds of boys.  Trier boys and quitter boys.”  Toby decided to try.  He closed his eyes.

“God, it’s me, Toby.  I’ve been bad. I haven’t tried hard enough to be good.  Will you help me be better?  Thanks.”

John and Toby opened their eyes after Toby’s prayer and beamed at each other.  Toby’s simple words had landed on John’s ears more powerfully than if they had been prophetic utterances from the mouth of Billy Graham.  As for Toby, he was pretty glad that the prayer was over.  The important thing was that he knew that it wouldn’t be the last time, even that day that he talked to God.

The guard let Toby back into the main floor of Tank 2D with an electronic key.  As Toby walked back to his bunk, one of the other inmates stopped him.

“Are you okay, Jacks?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I don’t know.  Your face just looked funny when you came back in.”

Toby smiled to himself as he continued through the dayroom of 2D.  What had happened in the visiting room was something that he needed to keep between himself and John for right now.  He didn’t know how to talk about it, or even if he wanted to talk about it.  As he got back to his bunk and lay down on the thin unforgiving mattress he revised his last thought in a slight, but important way.  He needed to keep what had happened between himself, John…and God.

3

The following months went by a little faster for Toby than the months prior to his conversion moment.  He read through the packet that John had given him when they first met, only this time more carefully.  Now he saw the point of the maze.  No matter what path you took you always, eventually, found your way to the middle.  Before he had just thought that he was lucky with the maze.  Toby read some of the musings of Richard Rohr, who John had said was his favorite author.  There were a few Bibles on the bookshelf on the right side of the tank.  Toby looked through it as well.

Toby’s path to a greater understanding of God and spirituality wasn’t always a walk in the park.  Toby was still bored, and still flashed to anger too quickly.  The Bible was pretty confusing to him.  He had started at the beginning and soon got bogged down in the Jazab begat Hildak who begat Yorbish parts.  But he never missed a night of reading at least a little of the Bible.   Soon he began to understand what so many people don’t.  The first message of the Bible is about God.  The secondary message is how God works with imperfect people to bring about His will.

Toby had a flash of inspiration one night in October.  “If God can work through an asshole like David, maybe He can work through an asshole like me.”

November came to Tacoma, but the only reason that the inmates knew it was because of the calendar on the wall.  Toby and John had begun to talk about Toby’s options when he was released in less than two months.

“Where are you going to go when you get out?” John asked one day after they had finished talking about how the 2013/14 NBA season looked.

“I guess I’ll go to my Mom’s house.  She hasn’t answered the phone anytime when I’ve called, though.”

John frowned a little.  “Wait a minute.  Hasn’t she come to see you since you’ve been in here?  Even once?”

Toby shook his head and looked down at the tabletop.  “No.”

John took a deep breath and let it out before speaking again.  When he resumed the conversation it was in a quieter voice.  “Would you like for me to give her a call?  I will, you know.”

Toby shrugged.  “I guess.  That is if you want to.  I don’t know if she will talk to you either.  She’s pretty pissed at me.”

“I guess she is if she hasn’t even come by to see you.  Do you get any visitors at all?”

Toby’s face fell a little.  He hadn’t talked to John about this because he felt embarrassed.  He was the only prisoner that had been in the tank more than a month who hadn’t had even one visitor.  Some of the inmates got a visit every other day, some more often than that.  One guy had gotten back to back visits from his wife AND his girlfriend one day.  Toby had been incarcerated for over six months and hadn’t seen anyone except John and Max Lundquist. He was ashamed to have to answer truthfully. Toby wasn’t going to lie to John, though.  He answered with a simple, “No.”

John’s heart, always exposed to his counselees a little bit, went out to Toby.  The kid had made some poor choices, no doubt about it.  But where did it say that committing a sin, especially one where no one was harmed in a lasting way, meant that love should be withheld.  He decided right then that Toby’s Mom should be contacted.  What was the meaning of “loved one” anyway if there was no love proffered?

The next morning, before he went to the jail on his normal rounds, John placed a call to Toby’s mother.  Wanda Phillips answered the phone on the third ring.

“H’lo.”

“Ms. Phillips, my name is John Boylan.  I’m a chaplain at the Pierce County Jail.  Could I have just a few moments of your time?”

“Is this about Toby?”

“Yes ma’am it is.  I’ve been visiting with your son off and on since he got to jail, and I would like you to know that I think there is a lot about Toby to like.  He…”

Wanda laughed out loud, piercing John’s ear with her cackle.  Finally she spoke after clearing her lungs from what sounded like a lifetime of tobacco phlegm.

“Wait!  Don’t tell me!  You think that he’s a good ‘un underneath, right?”

“Actually I do.  I’ve gotten to know him and we...”

That was as far as John got before being interrupted. “Stop right there, John is it?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Stop right there John and let me learn you a few things about Toby.  You know him for a few months, you say, and now you presume to tell me that my son is a good boy!  Well he’s not!  Sure he can tell him mama that he loves her but then he goes right back out and breaks my heart again  He’s been trouble from the day he was born.  I don’t have time for it!  I don’t have time for him, and that’s final!

John had heard this kind of thing on the phone from inmate families before.  Usually they were scared as well as angry.  John’s task with families was to get them to understand that, though a crime had been committed, it wasn’t a crime against the family personally.  The fear came from family members, like Wanda Phillips, who didn’t have any answers left.  Usually they had done their best.  When their loved one ran afoul of the law the family members often reacted with anger borne of frustration.  John played a card that had often worked before.

“Ms. Phillips, how about if you and Toby and I get together, just to talk?  I can schedule an hour of time and we’ll sit down and chat.  No pressure, no expectations, just a visit.

Wanda answered in a way that surprised John.  “Not interested, John.  I’m too busy trying to put food on the table and a roof over my head.  I don’t have time to come down to the jail so Toby can tell me lies to my face.  I’m through with that fool!  And you can tell him that!”

“Okay, Ms. Phillips.  By the way, do you mind if I call you Wanda?”

“I don’t care, I guess.”

“Wanda, I appreciate you talking to me.  I won’t tell Toby everything that you said today, but if he asks, I’ll tell him that you won’t be able to get together with us.  Should I assume that he won’t be welcome in your home upon release?”

Wanda paused for about half a breath.  Then, even after she said, “No” to John’s question about Toby’s release John felt that the door might not be completely closed by Wanda.  It was one thing to reject your child out of hand when he was safely behind bars.  It was quite another to say that the child that you raised couldn’t come to your house in a time of need.  While John had been hoping for more, he wasn’t completely discouraged after he ended the call to Toby’s mother.

When John and Toby next visited the subject of how Toby might make some legal money came up.  Toby had worked in the kitchen of a restaurant for about six months, but had gotten fired for missing work too often.  That had been during the period of time that Toby had experimented with methamphetamine.  He had truly intended to go to work, but after a few puffs on a meth pipe he discovered that it was Wednesday evening and he had missed his Wednesday shift…as well as his Tuesday shift…and sometimes his Monday shift.  His boss had been as understanding as she could be but eventually let Toby go.

John asked Toby if he had any ideas of what he would like to do long term.  Toby shrugged and shifted in his seat.  He was 20 years old and had never had a single thought about a career.  If he needed 20, 50, or 100 dollars to get something he had always just hustled it off of somebody or stolen whatever he wanted off the store shelf.  He had a closet full of Nike shoes and Under Armour shirts that had never been paid for.

“Stores are owned by rich people, and the stuff is insured anyway.  Why shouldn’t I have it?” had always been his thought process.

John was by no means an employment agency but once in a while he came upon a job that could be filled by one of his clients from Pierce County Jail or the Washington State prison system.  The prison system had a job referral program, though, while the county lockup did not.  John had one idea, though.

“I have a connection with somebody at the Ram Restaurant,” he said, referencing a local steak and burger house on Tacoma’s waterfront.  “If you think you can stay clean that might be a place for you to start.”

Toby looked at John to see if he was joking.  John’s usually smiling face was sober and stern.  He had more to say.

“Toby I admire how far you have come and I do believe in you.  But you need to know that the only way to change your life is to change the people that you are around.  God can do great things in your life, but the friends that you had when you came in here are the same people that will try to drag you back down when you get out.  You have to change your friends just as easily as you change your clothes if you are serious about becoming a new man.  Are you prepared to do that?”

Toby quickly thought about the friends that he had been around since high school.  They had never really known him nor did he know them, now that he thought about it. 

“New friends for a new me.  I can do that.”

John smiled.  “I’ll make some calls.”

That night, right after dinner, John started making some calls on Toby’s behalf.  He didn’t have any luck at the Ram, but he kept trying.  First John contacted Applebee’s then TGI Friday’s and finally Lincoln Avenue Grille.  Each restaurant manager was sympathetic to John’s cause.  None, however, had a job opening for John’s client.  Alyssa was half listening to her father’s efforts.  Finally, when he took a break to get a glass of water, she asked him what was going on.

“Dad, who is this Toby person?  You aren’t believing a load of B.S. from some prisoner are you?”

John took in a deep breath and let it out.  “Toby has a rough history and not much in the way of personal resume’ but I feel like there is something inside him that can be brought to the fore.”

Alyssa rolled her eyes.  “Daddy I love you but you can’t get this way.  This Toby character is just going to disappoint you.  A bad apple stays bad.  That’s just the way it is.  Society needs to try hard to keep the apples from going bad, but once they turn that’s it.”

“Pumpkin, that’s just not true,” John said ruffling her hair as he came back to the phone with a glass of water in his hand.