The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,39
probably half the people in that ministry use her post office box to exchange letters with their inmate pen pals. You don’t give them your real address. She even lets the volunteers in the Muslim and Christian ministries use her post office box. For all you know those are letters she was storing for that Molly woman. She volunteers with one of the evangelical ministries. That’s what LaReigne said.”
“Oh, we know who Molly’s pen pal was, but at least one of these letters was definitely written to your sister.” Mansur reached over and slid one of the pages in front of me.
Dear La Reigne,
The first thing I want to say to you is that I don’t want you to take my letter the wrong way. I’m sure you get so many letters from the guys here, telling you how beautiful you are. You are beautiful, but that’s not why I’m writing you. I felt like, when we talked at the ritual, that there was a spiritual connection between us, and I’ll understand if you didn’t feel the same way, but I still wanted to reach out to you. Because the truth is, I’m alone in here. I’m supposed to have these friends, and people who support me, but I can feel myself changing, and they’re not people who like change.
The second thing I want to say to you is that I’m not the man you think I am. It’s brave and generous of you to come here every month to work with us and give us a chance to worship, and I don’t blame you at all if you think I’m exactly like the guy you’ve probably read about in the newspaper. I did those terrible things. I hurt people. That’s true, but I’m not that guy anymore. I’ve grown so much in the last four years, and I want to keep growing. What I need is a friend who is outside this circle of hate and destruction that I find myself trapped in, because I don’t want to be part of that anymore, but here in prison, there’s no way out.
I don’t want to say anything negative about Conrad, because honestly, he has been a good friend to me. I was just a kid when he took me under his wing, and maybe that more than anything is why I went along with what he planned. I’m not saying that to deny my responsibility for what I did. I should have refused to be part of it, but I looked up to him like a father and it was hard for me to say no. In here, he’s one of my only friends. Him and Craig Van Eck and Craig’s crowd, and I think you know enough about them to know they aren’t the best people for me to be around. They’re trying to drag me back down. To keep me trapped in the same old thinking that brought me here. I don’t want to keep being that person, but I can’t get away from them either.
As much as I want to change, I need protection. There’s no safety for someone like me alone in here. Especially with all these gangbangers in here. They would be happy to get at me. To hurt me or kill me. I know I’ve done terrible things, and you may even think that I am a racist (I truly am not!) but they hate white people. It would give them bragging rights to bring me down. So whether I want to be part of Craig’s group or not, whether I feel like part of that circle, I have to have friends in here to watch my back.
Thank you for reading all this, and if you feel like you can, a letter from you would mean so much to me. Just to know that someone out there has heard me and believes that I can be a better man.
Merry meet,
Tague
“So he wrote her a bullshit letter,” I said. “Inmates are bullshit artists.”
“Maybe you’d be more interested in the love letters your sister sent to Barnwell?”
“Not really.”
Mansur didn’t care. He pushed another stack of photocopied letters across the table to me, but I ignored them.
“You don’t seem surprised at the suggestion that your sister sent love letters to Barnwell.”
“These aren’t even love letters,” I said, after I’d looked at the first few. LaReigne was a romantic sap, and those letters weren’t even all that gushy.