Last Will and Testament

By Richard Van Doren

An aging minister struggling with lifelong sexual impotence and difficult churches falls in love with a new choir director of another race, but must contend with hostile congregants; a bitter, vindictive minister from another church; and violent members of a local racist cult. Writing from death row in the state prison, he relates the circumstances that led him to the mass murder of five human beings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Van Doren
• Release date: Nov 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781736163986

Richard Van Doren

Richard Van Doren is an ordained minister in a mainline Protestant denomination. He has always been fascinated by the fringe element in American culture and the extreme events that test faith. All of his novels and short stories deal with the collision of spirituality and earthly crises, or the ongoing conflict between the forces of good and evil. He moonlights as a college composition instructor, and every semester he teaches his students the two most important rules of writing: 1) write on a subject about which you know something, and 2) write on a subject about which you feel strongly. Over the years he has read and heard about countless instances of dark invasions into every day, innocent living. Anyone who has ever experienced something very strange, or who believes that we live in a reality that extends far beyond this world of the five senses will find his novels and stories much to their liking. All of these works contain instances that Van Doren has either experienced in his career or was told about by friends, students, parishioners and family.

Book preview

PRELUDE

It’s strange that some of the people I enjoy listening to the most on TV are outspoken opponents of any religion. They insist faith in a god is ridiculous. There is simply no evidence for it, and anyone who embraces such foolishness, or worse tries to convince others to do so, is not only a borderline psychopath, he or she conscientiously tries to lead others away from science and logic, two of the pillars of human existence—along with money and sex. We are enemies of the people, in other words.

I mean, I like Bill Maher, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Ricky Gervais—and I love, or I guess I should say loved John Lennon of what will always be, for me at least, the greatest band of all time, whose name is escaping me at the moment. (Surely, I jest.)

Fortunately, I have time to joke. I am presently incarcerated in the maximum-security wing of the State Prison, having already enjoyed my day in court before a fair-minded judge.

Now, I wait—for how long no one can say. These involuntary residencies can last for years, I’m told, although some in the know have assured me that I will be strapped to Old Sparky in a matter of months.

That still gives me time to read and write and ruminate on the stream of events that led me here.

To fully appreciate the story I’m about to share with you, you’ll need to at least consider the possibility of the following: that there is indeed a God; that God is, as the Bible says, all-loving and omnipotent. WAIT! HOLD IT RIGHT THERE! Did he say all-loving and omnipotent, a God who loves everyone and can do absolutely anything? All right then, explain the Holocaust." That’s the first challenge I’d pose if I were not a believer.

Admittedly, in the context of what we know as reality, there is no explanation for the Holocaust and the myriad of other dreadful chapters in human history that boggle the mind in their gleeful cruelty. To truly understand this fiasco called life, where joy is fleeting and despair a staple, one must consider the possibility of a reality greater than this of the five senses.

One must consider the existence of a spiritual realm, Even more, one must consider the possibility that a much greater drama is being played out in our midst that has little or nothing directly to do with humanity or any of our daily horrors.

Oh, right, there’s a battle taking place between good and evil which is still undecided—yadda,yadda,yadda. That’s part of it, but then God would not be omnipotent, would he—or she—or both? The battle has been decided; it is over already. The good guy or guys won. In fact, there never was a battle. Every ugly chapter in human history, whether it be one of mass murder or unrelenting mental cruelty, has unfolded only because God allowed it to happen.

And you call that all-loving? So, what are we pathetic mortals, God’s equivalent of lab rats? That’s a fair conclusion unless we are also willing to consider the possibility of a life after death, of a judgment day on which the innocent, the victims, ascend to paradise and the wicked, the perpetrators of violence, have to do serious time if not eternity in a decidedly unsavory location.

I know, I know, this is still only a partial explanation, so let me get right to it, at last. The Bible, and other sources of inspiration I am told, claims there was at one time just a spiritual realm, a place of harmony populated by eternal beings called angels. Jesus called this place both heaven and paradise. Other religions use similar terms. Everything was groovy (groovy?! does anybody use the term groovy anymore?) (An analytical reader could approximate my age from that single term.) Anyway, everything was—hunky dory (never mind) until the greatest enemy of all creation burst into being, what we know as ego or self-consciousness.

Like a viral pandemic, it began as a microscopic infection in the heart of a single angel whom some call Satan, Lucifer, the devil, etc. Let’s just use Satan for the sake of simplicity. Now Satan, like all of the angels, was beloved of God, so when he—or she—or it (we’ll use he for the sake of simplicity) decided that he wanted to run the show, so to speak, he exerted his powerful influence on other angels (even angels clearly differed in their degree of loyalty and depth of intellect), and launched a rebellion.

This rebellion aggrieved God mightily and he quickly realized that he needed to teach his wayward child a lesson, so he cast him out of heaven (with the proviso that he could come back anytime he wanted) and created a place for him to act out his frustrations, a place we call Earth (did anybody say big bang?). God even included a species of shallow substance and resolve called humans, whom Satan could exploit to prove that all this love and forgiveness stuff was empty folly, weakness really, that threw wide the door to ego-driven evil—evil being the general term given to any thought, word or deed antagonistic to the nature of God.

It gave God no pleasure to do this—he was fully aware of the consequences of such a strategy—but God loved his wayward angel and all of the lesser angels who followed him. So, he gave Satan the freedom to cause any shitstorm his mind could conjure—all to teach him the futility of evil, and the cleansing, purely logical, infinitely beneficial decision to say I’m sorry and come back home to heaven.

The problem with eternal beings is that they have a lot of time to work these things out. We humans, given our limited life spans, want answers to our questions and solutions to our crises right now, and if we don’t get them right now, we come to doubt all the crap we learned in Sunday school (paraphrased—thank you Paul Simon).

That’s why there’s evil in the world. Satan and his legions are constantly exerting their influence on humanity, which all can resist, but many choose not to. That’s the one point theologians often overlook when explaining the garden of Eden account in Genesis 3 (you’ll have to read it for yourself; I don’t feel like typing it out here). The nature of the serpent, whom many call the devil, is a minor issue. That God gave Adam and Eve the FREEDOM to disobey his commands forms the crux of the story, and for doing so were cast out of the garden and forced to live for the rest of history suffering the consequences of that choice.

Every act of human evil gives the devil hope that he can still win, so he prompts his legions to keep at it, whisper alternatives to obeying God in the ears of every person who has ever lived and ever will. These legions are called demons, and this story is about demonic possession, some of it subtle, some of it obvious.

I can hear this book being slammed shut from miles away.

But some will keep reading, if only for temporary diversion.

All of this introductory ballyhoo should, at least may help to explain why I Archibald Lexington, Reverend Archibald Lexington to some, today await execution for the mass murder of five human beings.

THE EARLY DAYS

1

I hate men!

Ah, there it is again, the mantra of my youth. I am sitting at the dinner table which accommodates six in our modest home in anywhere U.S.A. Five seats are occupied. At the end to my left sits my mother Lana Lexington who has just now uttered her favorite phrase. My oldest younger sister Janet fastens her eyes on the plate to my left. Number two, Daisy, sitting across from Janet, wears an expression of bewilderment. And the youngest Natalie chows down, oblivious to the tension building among the rest of us kids, while Lana’s face hardens into stone.

The chair to my right, sometimes occupied by the man of the house Derrick Lexington, is empty. Derrick is working late again this evening, and will most likely return home in a couple of hours smelling of martinis and maybe perfume.

But that is not the reason why Lana utters her favorite phrase. She hated men long before she met Derrick, married him, and punched out four children to keep pace with her younger sister Beatrice. All this will come clear later, as it did to me, but for now the only thing you need to know is that Lana Lexington hated men—hated them for as long as she could remember, as she would one day confess to her daughters.

Why? They would ask. Were you abused? No. Did someone betray you? No Then why? And there would be no answer.

The only thing that mattered to me was the fact that I was the only male sitting at that table, so she was obviously talking about me, whether I was the prime target, or not.

Do you hate me, too, Mom? I sometimes asked.

Sometimes she would barely whisper no. Sometimes she would say nothing.

But I knew the truth. When she said no she was lying for the sake of my sisters, whom I loved then and still do.

She hated me, all right. She showed it most explicitly during my early adolescence before she left homemaking duties for a full-time job with her very own set of wheels. I knew it because she would pick a fight with me the moment I walked through the front door after school. Sometimes she had a legitimate grievance. I had not emptied the garbage or taken it out front, or mowed the lawn, or cleaned my room. I was in my early teens and like most of my contemporaries I loathed doing that stuff.

Sometimes I would talk back, like most teens do, and say I’d do it later, but by then it was too late. The fuse had been lit, the trigger pulled. Lana jumped off her kitchen chair and came at me, eyes bulging, teeth bared and fists flying. You son of a bitch! she’d scream, Don’t you mouth off to me! And the fists would come down hard—on my chest, shoulders and upper arms. She’d chase me into the living room, not through with me yet. And this would happen, maybe, three times a week, always ending in the time-honored phrase, I hate men.

Eventually, my body hardened to the point where punching me became painful to her, so she turned her attention to Janet, with not nearly the frequency, mind you, but with comparable drive. By my mid-teens, I had learned a self-defense technique that never deliberately inflicted pain. I would never hit my mother, of course, or do anything else that might cause her injury. But I did learn how to make it painful for her to hit me, and gladly taught Janet my secret. Janet, by the way, is (soon to be was) six years younger than I; Daisy nine years younger and Natalie twelve.

Hold your arm out like this, I showed her, bending my elbow to create a shield in front of me. When Lana slammed down her fist, I lifted my arm and met her blows midway, thus protecting my body from impact. Before long, her forearms were covered with bruises of her own creation, although she would blame me for causing them. Soon Lana, or Mom if you will, would withdraw her attack—until I looked the other way. Then she’d sneak in a final punch on my back or neck and say something like, You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?

You might call this the afternoon ordeal, because there were others. At least once a week, we’d all wake up to the sound of screaming and slamming of doors, tirades ignited by a missing garment or the sight of a messy room. Sometimes these scenes occurred during the warmer months before central air, when the windows were wide open. I always wondered why the neighbors were so nice to me when all I ever did was say hello. Looking back, I now realize they felt sorry for me, perhaps a little more than they did for my sisters because, after all, I hate men often accompanied the drama.

Lana prided herself on writing nasty letters, but if she lacked a suitable target, she focused that nastiness on me. I absorbed such a litany of name-calling that I forgot most specific insults. Certainly, bastard comes to mind, which would someday give way to homosexual, but she dropped son of a bitch when I finally got smart and said, You’re right. I am.

That instigated the expected punch, but it was worth it.

My sisters didn’t fare much better growing up, but Lana’s attacks failed to have as profound an effect because she was the parent of the same sex. Additionally, Janet and Daisy need not show the restraint that I did because they were weaker due to their age and lack of testosterone. So, they could take Lana on one at a time or together, even wrestle her to the ground, which they did more than once, or so they bragged to me.

The physical attacks finally stopped when I left for college, although the malice intensified. Lana resented me for enrolling in higher education when she, an excellent student in high school, became a bank teller on the urging of her parents, to await the one moment that gave a woman’s life true meaning, her wedding day.

Allow me to interject an aside here. I was not a particularly good student in high school, but I did get involved in several extra-curricular activities, chief among these being the theater. After bit parts in school plays my freshman and sophomore years, I landed the leads in nearly all of our school productions in my junior and senior years. One might conclude I was driven toward show biz, because I demonstrated above average talent, but truth be told the rehearsals kept me in school until almost dinnertime, thus minimizing my late afternoon encounters with Lana. After high school, except for a one-act play I performed in for a college friend. I never took to the stage again.

As for college, I enrolled for one reason: to stay out of Viet Nam. That proved the motivation for many of my peers, who simply tried to get in somewhere. You see, there was this little thing called the 2S deferment in those days, which allowed a college student to delay military service until he graduated. Ironically, pre-medical and pre-seminary students could put off their service indefinitely. I say ironically, because I eventually entered the seminary a decade later, a decision that could not have been farther from my mind during college.

Please forgive another aside. The 2S deferment was a hardcore racist policy and I confess I knew it at the time. If you had enough money to attend college, and earned academic credentials just short of horrific, you could find a college to attend somewhere. Of course, the poor, in particular people of color were drafted right out of high school, which explained the fact that black men, while accounting for less than ten percent of our national population at the time, comprised over a third of our fighting forces in that Asian nation ten thousand miles away.

It didn’t take a genius to grasp why black Americans exploded violently in Watts/Los Angeles, Detroit and Newark, New Jersey. As if enforced poverty, lynchings and blatant contempt from white folks weren’t enough, the good ole U.S. of A. was sending young black males to be slaughtered in a conflict that was later exposed as being unwinnable. And some white dude shot and killed Martin Luther King Jr., too.

President Barrack Obama once astutely observed (I’m sure he was not the only one or the first) that there never were any ‘good ole days’ in the United States. Our country had several brief chapters of greatness, but every generation demonstrated its own unique brand of ugliness, along with the old faithfuls of bigotry, sexism, greed, etc.

Fortunately, our generation’s white racism was tempered for so many by the great black athletes who, by God, actually looked and acted like regular human beings.

And the music... oh, the music!

We will now return to the initial theme of this chapter: portions of my youth and the peculiar circumstances that led me to become a mass murderer.

Visits home from college never lasted very long before Lana’s first outburst of unbridled rage.

Truthfully, there were so many episodes and variations on her hostile expressions that I don’t remember many specifics. The punching and occasional slapping, of course, I would never forget, but the insults, in fact the rhetoric in general was designed to be the most cutting, hurtful attack that came to this person’s mind. And it was so common as to be expected.

Like children of alcoholics, which Lana was not, we learned what buttons not to push, and we certainly learned never to speak of the past, no matter how pleasant the memories were. Somehow, she’d find a way to dredge up some perceived slight and sneer, while making herself out to be a martyr. It could almost break a casual listener’s heart to hear how ungrateful and selfish her offspring behaved.

Now, I’d be lying or neglectful if I didn’t say there were moments of contriteness, an unexpected caress here, a kiss on the cheek there, but two words never passed Lana’s lips the entire time I knew her. The words, of course, were I’m sorry. To her dying day, which wasn’t too long ago, Lana never apologized. If anything, when a conversation drifted to the past, she was quick to identify the many ways her kids had wronged her, as if the emotional and physical violence she committed never happened.

Once, many years later, Natalie, my youngest sister administered to me a brief but revealing psychological test. Picture yourself walking through the woods; eventually you come upon a house in a clearing; it appears welcoming and smoke drifts from a chimney. You approach without fear, but deeply curious, never having known of this house before, although it seems strangely familiar. You walk up a short flight of stairs onto a porch and peer inside. Clearly, there is a kitchen beyond. You open the door and look around. The kitchen has all of the usual amenities, a sink, a stove, a refrigerator and counter space. In the middle sits a table surrounded by chairs. What do you see on the table? I answer immediately. Nothing, I say. She laughs. That was my answer, too, she said. What we see on the table is supposed to represent our memories.

It’s not that we didn’t have any memories. It’s just that we had trained ourselves never to look back, because every time we did, something painful would surface. Lana’s manic eyes, bulging neck veins and clenched teeth would find their way into our reverie in quick fashion.

That’s enough about Lana, for now. Derrick deserves some attention, too

2

I know, I know, it’s easy to blame one’s parents for the missteps and failures of life. Criminals and head cases the world over point to bad or absent parenting to explain why they turned out the way they did. The truth is, one need only look in the mirror to understand one’s condition. At least that’s the way the reasonably well-adjusted and successful rationalize, even some who overcame nightmarish experiences and found a way to thrive on this planet. But our paths are largely affected by our early years, especially if one is physically and/or sexually abused, or abandoned by one or both parents either through conscious choice or death.

Had either of my parents died young or split the scene, at least I could imagine how it might have been had they stayed. I became an avid reader, and so many novels contained characters with only one parent. They fantasized about euphoric vacations, loving hugs and wise life advice. Usually, the main character had one parent he or she could trust, albeit flawed, while the other disappeared or exhibited distinctly anti-social or even violent behavior.

Lana’s younger sister Beatrice dropped dead of an aneurysm when she was thirty and pregnant with her fourth child. From that moment on, my three female cousins, Beatrice’s daughters, received the bulk of sympathy and attention—from my maternal grandparents, Lana and Derrick, and everyone from their father’s extended family.

We—myself, Janet, Daisy and Natalie—were the lucky ones. We still enjoyed the stability and emotional support that only a two-parent household could offer. We enjoyed all the advantages of youth, even though we never went on any vacations, rarely got a hug and received no advice whatsoever.

Maybe that partially explains why Janet and Daisy are both hardcore alcoholics, who tested extremely intelligent and worked in jobs far below their capabilities. Natalie seemed to escape the detrimental effects of life in the Lexington household. I guess all the mistakes had already been made and neither Lana nor Derrick took the time to screw her up.

Derrick Lexington was the youngest of five boys and the younger of twins. In other words, he was the baby of the family.

By now, you’ve probably figured out that I spent a lot of time trying to understand why Lana and Derrick behaved the way they did, and I think I have a pretty good idea about that. It’s not without some sympathy that I tell their story, or at least the one that affected me and my sisters, but a little more effort could have been made on our behalf.

I won’t spend as much time with Derrick, because his influence doesn’t play as critical a role in the unfolding of my story as does Lana’s. But if I had to choose, I’d have to say I could forgive Lana more easily than I could Derrick. My sisters, on the other hand, thought Derrick was adorable, and that was the crux of the problem for me.

Because he was undoubtedly the target of consistent teasing from his older brothers; because his twin was voted Best Athlete in his high school senior class while Derrick was voted Nicest Smile; and because that same brother, Ben, was given a tryout with the New York Yankees, while Derrick’s considerable athletic talents were relegated to local sports teams, Derrick had to find a different way to compete.

He simply had to be better liked than everybody else, no matter what company in which he found himself, and that included my friends, my girl friends and my sisters’ boyfriends. As I blossomed into a much better than average looking man and shot up in height, over seven inches taller than he, Derrick frequently sought and often found a way to put me down, either to my face or behind my back.

A few anecdotes rather than a full litany of offenses should suffice when explaining Derrick’s influence, or lack of it, on me. He loved embarrassing me in front of my friends. A case in point, three of them and I were playing whiffle ball on our front lawn. It wasn’t close to dark yet, but Derrick stuck his head out the front door and announced it was time to come in. I said, Okay, just let us finish this inning. Without another word he came storming out, grabbed me by the wrist and slapped me on the behind while the others looked on in shocked silence. I was thirteen, or thereabouts. What thirteen-year-old gets spanked in front of his friends?

The summer after my sophomore year in high school Derrick announced that I was going to paint our house. Of course, we would be going nowhere that year, as usual, because there was work to do around here. First, he handed me a ladder and a steel scrub brush for taking off the old paint, which was the original coat when our house was built in the early 1920s. All of the other houses on the block were white and well kept, but ours was an eyesore, and I was going to be responsible for remedying that situation. Our house was dark grey with dark green shutters. Now there’s a reason why professionals get paid decent money for jobs such as this. There are particular steps and procedures that should be followed in a job of this scope, none of which I was privy to. I figured you tried to scrape off as much of the old paint as possible then slap on a coat of the new stuff, which is exactly what I did. Almost as soon as the new paint dried, the paint beneath bled through creating ugly brown streaks for all the world to see. Derrick traveled the neighborhood complaining how I botched this simple job and created this neighborhood eyesore, which he made no attempt to correct. For the duration of my high school career, our house stood out as a legitimate blockbuster on an otherwise very attractive street.

Derrick liked to whip me with his belt when he felt he had sufficient grievance, until at age sixteen I told him he was never going to do it again. He never did.

Derrick never spent a minute teaching me anything that might be useful around the house, like the names of basic tools and their functions. He used to love telling me to go get a wrench, for example, which at the time I didn’t know from a screw driver. When I inevitably brought the wrong item, he laid into me with a stream of ridicule. I guess it was Lana who remarked, You never even showed him how to wipe his ass, because one weekend afternoon Derrick called me into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet and took a toxically stinky shit. He then proceeded to wipe himself, show me the soiled paper and say, There. Now you know how to wipe your ass.

Sometime in my twenties, Derrick, Janet’s boyfriend, my girlfriend at the time, and I were all playing pool at the boyfriend’s house. I excused myself momentarily, and while I was out of the room Derrick pinched my girlfriend’s derriere. He looked at my sister’s boyfriend and laughed. When Gina, my girlfriend, told me about it later I wanted to kill him, but she urged me to let it go. She just thought it was something I should know. I told each of my later girlfriends that at some point Derrick would take her aside and bad mouth me about something, anything. They doubted me at the time, but later confirmed what I said was true.

Derrick sought out my company only twice that I remember, both times to ask for money. The incident I remember most clearly took place while I was in the seminary where I took a full load of courses and worked twenty-five hours a week to pay for my education. (Derrick and Lana did not offer a cent toward my expenses in undergraduate and grad school.) He said he couldn’t see his way clear at that time, but would pay me back as soon as possible. He needed one thousand dollars. It so happened I had eleven hundred dollars in