Robert Walker - Unnatural Instinct

When Jimmy Lee's mother had died, it was then that the voice of her son came full-blown into Isaiah's head, all the way from the prison cell in Huntsville, Texas. Isaiah had at one time decided not to go to the execution, had decided no man should sit and stare at what the sovereign State of Texas planned for his son. He could not leave his ill and dying wife, Eunice Mae, who had never wavered in her devotion and duty to him. He couldn't leave Eunice in her state, not for the likes of Jimmy Lee, not for a moment.

Still, Jimmy Lee's words came creeping, seeping into Isaiah's head through his mother's mind first: clawing, snatching start-stops, stutters, and pleas. Toward the end, he'd thought that perhaps, just perhaps Jimmy Lee had found peace, but maybe in the end, Jimmy Lee simply didn't want to be alone… in the end. Something about how he had done as his daddy had told him. That he'd confessed his sins before Christ and had discovered the healing power of the Word.

Isaiah had pleaded with young Jimmy to read the Bible his mother had sent him, simply to read the Bible and to read it closely, and to find its message, and to deliver himself over to Christ his Savior, for many a battle was won with the Bible in hand, and those reading the Bible over the ages had been so taken over as to go out and win wars against Philistines and Muslims and all manner of infidels and soldiers of the Antichrist, to wage war on the Antichrist in whatever form he next chose to appear. And if whole races and populations could act out what they read in the Bible, if it had that power over the minds of multitudes, then why not over the individual, and why not Jimmy Lee, the most lost soul on the planet?

Isaiah thought it a strange debate going on in America as to violence on TV and film, when in fact for countless generations the Bible had depicted more true violence than any film imaginable. Still, there it was, and if the Holy Book could affect the passions of nations, why not the dedicated individual who sought to understand its deeper purpose?

So with Eunice Mae now at peace, deep in the ground, a Bible passage she herself selected and impressed upon Isaiah as the sure way to vengeance to see her over to the other side, beyond the River, he had pulled up stakes for the greater Houston area. He'd been on the road for hours without sleep. He feared he would miss the execution, his final good-bye to a son who had been born a bad seed, born with the mark of Cain. Cain slew his brother Abel, and while Jimmy Lee never had a brother nor ever killed a man, he had killed some women: six in all, and all of them loose and no account. Even the police reports said that much.

It was the last thing Isaiah Purdy meant to do before he died: give something back to his son, his only son born with a fevered brain, an agitated soul, and a broken heart. Be there in the end for him, a show of support they called it.

The drive was lonely-utterly so. No amount of music or talk radio could end the metallic, hard, awful-tasting emptiness that exuded an odor like death surrounding Isaiah there in the cab of the van he'd purchased for the trip. And why shouldn't everything smell of rot and decay and death? Death now stalked his little family like some rabid hound of hell. Here he was leaving his wife in a lonely grave that he'd dug with his own hands, followed by a journey toward his son's execution, followed by a claiming of the body, followed by what Jimmy Lee kept telling him he-and by extension they-wanted.

His cross-country journey was one of a modem day black hearse pulled by an engine fueled by vengeance. The Lord called for vengeance in a place inside Isaiah's head that he had no previous knowledge existed, a place where contact with voices of a purely evangelical hatred dwelled. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, blood for blood, flesh for flesh. He need only gather the parts for the ageless, timeless ritual, and like Jimmy Lee and God kept repeatedly telling him, he could do this. He could be the hand of God, the instrument of His wrath.

A fitting ending to a life that had had no specialness about it, a life of a simple man without dreams or aspirations above working the land. Sometime during the journey to Huntsville and to Jimmy's execution, Isaiah began to wonder how the boy got the way he did. “How'd my boy come out so bad?” he'd asked the air.

Isaiah, with Eunice's considerable help, had raised Jimmy Lee in as strict a biblical sense as possible, always mustering up the courage to punish the boy with the rod as the Bible said. Isaiah had beaten the boy whenever he did wrong, so why had he come out the way he had come out? Had to be a bad seed.

As the white lines and road signs whizzed by, Isaiah continued to ponder the question of his troubled son. The more he rolled it over in his mind on the long, empty blankness of highway leading out of Iowa City, the more he believed in his deepest recesses that Jimmy Lee had one of those gene defects the scientists talked about on that TLC television show that Eunice Mae would stare at for hours late in the night. Late in life, Eunice Mae had discovered her liking for such, that and the animal stuff. He chuckled, recalling how it'd been Jimmy Lee who had insisted on putting in a satellite dish and a brand-spanking-new twenty-five-inch TV. Regardless of all his vile and admittedly wicked ways, the boy had always been good to his mama and in his way to Isaiah, his papa; regardless of all those women they said he had harmed, he had never once taken on devilishly or evilly toward his own… at least that much could be said of the boy.

Isaiah swerved to avoid the headlights of an oncoming Mack truck that blared its horn at him. He turned hard to avoid the truck, sent up a shower of debris as he hit the shoulder and grass off U.S. 20 outside Sioux City. He'd buried his wife this day and had begun his journey, and now he'd almost joined Eunice in the hereafter. The minivan careened to a full stop, but not before the van rocked to one side, nearly going completely over an embankment, but somehow righting itself with a bounce onto all four Firestone tires.

He sat there for a moment with the engine idling and the headlights piercing the emptiness of a wall of black trees. For a long moment, he wondered at the fickle hand of fate in a man's life and why he had not been killed. The truck had come within inches of smashing into his left front end. The embankment had been just steep enough to have easily reached out its arms to pull him into the waiting creek twenty feet below. He imagined the van upside down in the creek, him upended with it, unable to free him self, and drowning in the muddy bottom. Maybe it'd been best had it happened that way, he thought, anxious as he was to join Eunice, and besides, it would end this strange, unbidden pilgrimage to Huntsville. Death would have brought an instant solution to his immediate problems and an end to Jimmy Lee's voice in his head, a voice like a bull terrier that had clamped down on his brain, holding firm and taking control, without letup, day and night, night and day, over and again, endlessly tumbling in-out-around-through the pathways of Isaiah's skull.

“ Maybe I best ought to park it right here and get some damn sleep,” he said to the photograph he had pinned to the overhead visor, a picture of himself with an arm draped over Eunice's bony shoulder. The photo had been taken when they had gone to the Jersey shore to see the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. It had been a wonderment of nature the likes of which neither of them could muster words for, and so they had asked a stranger to snap a photo of them with the ocean as backdrop, and Eunice had said that every grain of sand on the beach was special and unique, and that she regretted that they had never found that special uniqueness that seemed buried in their boy, Jimmy. Still, they had smiled for the camera even then, even knowing that their only son had that same day been placed on death row and placed on the schedule for execution. The trip had been Eunice's swan song, he told himself; she had somehow known that her heart would give out, just as the doctors had said: a condition of the heart. Isaiah wondered how much of the condition was brought on by the situation her son now found himself in.