The air has a snap to it on a blue-skied April day in Virginia; a beautiful day for a funeral. As the thin crowd of mourners—friends and a scattering of the family—ebb away to go on with their lives, four men remain at the graveside. Two sons who’ll never see 30 lying in their coffins, two fathers struggling to speak. What do you say when you’re burying your boy and his husband, a loving couple whose marriage ceremony you missed, whom you struggled to understand or accept?
Buddy Lee Jenkins, a wiry and weathered white man, introduces himself to Ike Randolph, then spies the lion and twin swords tattooed on the Black man’s hand. Prison ink. Buddy recognizes it from his own experience; he did a nickel Upstate himself. Two ex-con fathers, two murdered sons. Ike has spent 15 years staying away from “Riot” Randolph, the man he used to be. Now he has a landscaping business to run, an orphaned granddaughter to raise, and no time left to mend fences or find forgiveness from Isiah, a son he loved and let down. Again and again.
Tears glisten in Buddy Lee’s eyes as he recalls whipping his son Derek with a belt when his boy was 14 years old and had been kissing a boy by the creek behind their trailer.
“You think they gonna catch who did it?” Buddy Lee shouts to Ike’s back as he stomps away.
It won’t be the only funeral in this story.
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