The Chaplain's Daughter

The Chaplain’s Daughter

Sometimes the finest pearls are found in the hardest shells.

By
K.T. Hastings

Copyright © 2013 Blue Ribbon Books

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

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1

The room almost resembled the common area on the urban campus of a college.  There were tables scattered around and anywhere from one to six chairs haphazardly placed around the tables.  Two televisions were suspended from painted iron beams that descended from the off-white ceiling, one with the sound on, showing a movie.  The other T.V. was showing a basketball game with the sound turned all the way down.  Yes, it could have been a dining hall or coffee shop at one of any number of campuses around the country. That is if it hadn’t been for the armed guard sitting at the desk.

Toby Jacks didn’t know from college.  He knew jail, though.  Toby knew full well that he was in Pierce County Jail in Tacoma, Washington.

Toby was barely 20 years old, having spent the final hours of his 20
^th
birthday being booked into jail two nights earlier.  His birthday had started out okay.  Toby and some of his crew met up with some ladies at a club in downtown T-Town.  The club was known to be…accommodating as far as age was concerned.  A few drinks, a few more drinks, and then things got a little hazy for Toby.  Just when Toby was getting some birthday snuggles with a girl that he met that night, his friend Amos came up and told him that they needed to go, NOW!  Toby and Amos ran out of the club and jumped into a car that was idling in the street.  There were two things that Toby was to later learn about that car.  It was a 2013 Acura…and it was stolen.

Normally Toby didn’t get into cars that were driven by people that he didn’t know.  Tonight he had been distracted by the combination of his new female friend and the free vodka shots that he had been downing as the “birthday boy.”  Only when he got settled in the back seat did he look at the guy behind the wheel.  “Who the hell are you?” he thought, but by that time the Acura was whistling down Pacific Avenue headed for the freeway.  Toby realized, sitting at a table in jail that he still didn’t know who the guy was who had been driving.

It had all gone down pretty fast.  The blue and white SUV that said “Tacoma Police” on the side had come up behind the Acura almost as soon as it had left town.  Even a little after midnight there was enough traffic on Interstate 5 that a full-fledged high speed chase was out of the question.  The driver of the Acura had tried a couple of evasive lane changes but there was no use.  The cops pulled the Acura over, everyone in the car was I.D.’d, cuffed and taken away.

“Happy birthday, huh?” Toby said to himself, as he looked around.  The jail was split up into a number of dormitory type units known as “tanks.”  Toby and Amos, booked at separate intake tables downstairs had been sent to different tanks after being transported to PCJ.  The tanks consisted of two floors. Each floor held 42 beds and was fronted by a screen through which the guards could see their “guests” 24/7.  Toby had, in effect, 83 roommates.  He didn’t know where Amos was.  He didn’t care.

Toby wasn’t a habitual and hardened criminal, but this wasn’t his first time handcuffed either.  He had a juvenile record and had spent time in Tacoma’s detention center, known as Reimann Hall, when he was 16 years old.  He and some friends had stolen candy, and fortified wine from a 7/11.  It hadn’t taken the cops long to figure that one out either, probably because one of the other guys had fingered Toby as the one who had come up with the idea.  It hadn’t actually been Toby’s idea.  The guy who fingered him had been the one with the idea, but he about wet himself when the cops had started questioning him.  Toby did 100 days in Juvy that time. He had stolen other things since then but had never gotten caught, but who knew what the birthday caper was going to cost him in terms of his freedom?

Toby had called his mother when he was booked but he didn’t know what she could do for him.  He had been arraigned that morning and bail had been set at $10,000.  That meant that his Mom would only have to come up with $1000.00 in cash to get him bailed out, but that might as well have been a million dollars to Wanda Phillips.  Toby knew that she wouldn’t be able to come up with the money, even if she were inclined to do so.  That wasn’t likely either.  She had been working two part-time jobs for years, and just barely staying up with rent.  She would see Toby’s arrest as just another thing to mess up her life perpetuated by her unappreciative disrespectful child.  She hadn’t answered the phone when he called from the booking room.  “Figures,” Toby said under his breath.

Toby could have called someone else, once he had been booked and placed.  He didn’t know who to call.  Toby’s Dad had left for parts unknown when Toby was five.  Wanda had taken back her maiden name and never spoke of him again.  Toby barely remembered him except as a guy who never sat still unless he was smoking weed, and sometimes not even then.  People who had known Oscar Jacks said that Toby resembled him a bit.  The resemblance was partly physical, but also due to Toby seeming to have inherited Oscar’s proclivity to constant movement.  Even now, Toby’s finger was tapping out a rhythm on the table in the common area of Tank 2D in Pierce County Jail.

Just as Toby was pondering how screwed up his birthday, hell his life, had turned out, the guard at the desk in front of the door stood up.  He was in his early 50’s with graying receding hair.  He had obviously been in pretty good shape at one time, but the sedentary work (and lunch time pastries) had done a number on his waistline.  Now he wheezed a bit as he stood in front of the inmates and yelled, “CHURCH!  ANYBODY WANT TO GO TO CHURCH!”

Toby hadn’t noticed the tall white-haired gentleman that had come in and apparently brought about the call to church.  He stood beside the guard and watched as a few of the inmates trickled toward the desk.  Toby watched the proceedings, but with no interest in going to whatever the jail called church.  It wasn’t even Sunday.  What the hell?

The next morning Toby was summoned to the visitor’s cage where he was greeted by a sallow faced man that introduced himself as Max Lundquist.  Toby’s status as destitute qualified him for a state appointed attorney.  Max was it.  The attorney had one of those faces that could have been 35, or could have been 60.  He went through the facts of Toby’s case as had been reported to him by the court, asked Toby his version of events and then left, telling Toby that he would be in touch.  He didn’t say when, or what he thought of the case.  Toby wasn’t overwhelmed with confidence.

Toby wasn’t due in court again for two weeks.  He guessed that he would hear from Max before court but, beyond that, he didn’t know much.  He figured that the best thing to do would be to settle into life in jail.

County jail isn’t state prison.  Most inmates in the county system are in and out of the place in 7-10 days.  There isn’t time for a hierarchy of status to be developed.  Most of the inmates keep to themselves, sleep a lot, read, or play cards.  Once in a while a fight would break out, usually over the outcome of a game of Spades, and almost always perpetuated by one or more of the young toughs.  Other than that, the atmosphere is one of crushing boredom. Toby had no designs on being considered a “young tough” in jail.  He wanted it all over as soon as it could be. 

He was bored, though.  When the side rooms came available for meetings, support group meetings mostly, Toby considered declaring himself depressed, or an alcoholic, or a drug addict, just to have something else to do with his time.  He decided not to.  Who knew whether the leaders of the groups were telling the cops things that were said “in confidence?”   Toby didn’t trust them.  Toby didn’t trust anybody.   He didn’t even trust himself.  Hell, maybe he didn’t trust himself most of all.  He was a screw-up and would probably always be a screw-up.  He had been called that, and worse, most of his life.  Look at what was happening to him when he was 20 years and a week old.  He couldn’t even get bailed out of jail.  So to hell with the “meetings” and the do-gooders that ran them.  He took naps instead.

Six days later Toby was napped out.  There was no further word from Max Lundquist.  Toby hadn’t heard from his Mom, or about whatever had become of Amos.  Toby was sick of the slop that the jail called food and was tired of watching basketball games with the sound off only to have the unit put in “lock-down” so the guards could justify their paychecks by looking for someone’s smuggled in cigarette.

Toby suspected that the Department of Corrections knew that the enforced boredom can work in their favor.  The delays inherent in the system serve to make inmates amenable to making deals just to get out. Toby’s case would likely be continued for weeks into months, because there were others ahead of him in the system, and because the courts knew that the delays could break down a defendant’s resistance. Toby was halfway there already.  That’s why, when the fat wheezy guard shouted “CHURCH!  ANYBODY WANT TO GO TO CHURCH?” this time, Toby went.  It was there that he met John Boylan.

John Boylan was a jail chaplain, though he didn’t work for the jail per se.  His office was on the corner of 13
^th
and Yakima, about four blocks from Pierce County Jail.  John worked for the Archdiocese of Seattle, tasked with giving hope and counsel to jail and prison inmates in Western Washington. 

The night that Toby and John met, John told about “The World Versus Earth.”  He said that if you look at a picture of Earth there are no lines distinguishing the countries. It’s the lines that make up the “World.” He said that the lines separating people were manmade and the source of most of society’s trouble.

Toby had gone to church that night just to have something to do.  He had been in a regular church about four times in his life, and never gotten anything out of it.  As he listened to John tell his, frankly somewhat hokey, story he was struck, not so much by the words, as by the man who delivered them. John Boylan spoke with a combination of intensity and sincerity that resonated in Toby.  When John spoke, his eyes gleamed and his unruly shock of white hair bounced on top of his head.  Toby heard what John said that night.  He heard all of it, the earth and the world, all of it.

John said something else about the world that Thursday night that Toby would remember later.  He said, “The world will want to judge you by the worst thing that you have ever done.  That worst thing may be the reason that you are in Pierce County Jail tonight or it may have been something else that you’ve done in your past.  I want you to know that God will not judge you in that way, because you are, tonight, what you have always been.  You are a child of God.”

At the end of the church gathering that night John passed a clipboard around where the inmate could sign his name and put his inmate number down if he would like to meet with John Boylan privately at some time in the future.  Though Toby was half certain that this would play out in delay after delay, just like court, he signed his name and passed the clipboard back to the front.

The next day, shortly after lunch, Toby’s name was called out from the guard’s desk in the front of the tank.  The guard grunted, “You have a visitor.”

Toby was anxious to talk to Max Lundquist again.  His first court date was only a week away and he had no idea what his attorney had in mind in terms of…anything.  Toby felt discarded inside the walls of Pierce County Jail.

Toby’s visitor couldn’t enlighten Toby about any of his legal issues.  It was John Boylan.  The chaplain was dressed in a faded Seattle Mariners’ tee-shirt with the name “Hernandez” on the back.  He was wearing blue and white adidas, with matching blue and white laces in the shoes.  Toby didn’t know how a jail chaplain was supposed to dress but he wouldn’t have guessed that this get-up was standard issue.  He was expecting a suit and tie, maybe a clerical collar.  John Boylan looked like a gardener on his way to the ball game.

John smiled at Toby, and held out his hand.  “Toby Jacks?”

Toby shook John’s hand and nodded.  John sat down in the hard metal chair at the visitor’s table and indicated that Toby should do the same.

“I’m glad to meet you, Toby.  I remember you from the service last night. That was your first time, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.  I just got here.”

“How long do you expect to be here?”

Toby shrugged, and looked down at his feet.  John’s service the previous evening had struck a chord in the young man but he didn’t feel like spilling his guts to the guy.  Why was he asking personal questions, anyway?  Toby began to feel that putting his name on the sheet of paper had been a mistake.