After his case hit the front page of the Tulsa World,Jay more or less went directly to ground. He stopped attending services, for instance, at the Harvard Avenue Christian Church, a modern brick edifice where his younger daughter, Terri, taught preschool and where he usually sat front and center with his wife on Sundays, singing loud enough for everyone to distinguish his voice. "It's kind of like someone dies," he said. "What do you say? 'Sorry for your loss'? I just didn't want the people I would come into contact with to have to come up with some kind of statement like that."
His minister, the Rev. Stephen Wallace, was one of the few people the U.S. attorney allowed Jones to talk to about details of his plea bargain, and Jones went to see him right after he knew it was all going to be made public. "Mainly what I did was listen and ask, How can we be helpful to Jennifer and the daughters?" Wallace told me. The Jones family was also on the church's "telecare" list, which meant they would get called every now and then to see if they wanted a prayer said for them in absentia. Jones wasn't his first congregant to run afoul of the law by any means, but Wallace found this sort of counseling somewhat challenging. "How do you show mercy on the one hand-'You're a cared-for person; you're an important person in God's eyes; God sees us all as precious'-but at the same time say that what they did was wrong, it was hurtful to a lot of people? Sometimes people are willing to accept that kind of thing and sometimes not. They say, 'I didn't do anything,' and a lot of times you don't know what really did happen. But since Jay's consistently said, 'I messed up here,' it made it easier. We could move on to a message of forgiveness and grace and then repentance."
As the reporting date closed in, Jay and Jennifer began to peel away their early hopes that some kind of miracle would keep him from going away. On May 9 of last year, when the federal judge put his imprimatur on the sentencing deal, Jennifer relinquished her illusion that maybe he would get some sort of house-arrest arrangement. Quite to the contrary, she learned, unlike the state variety, federal sentences are served in full, with no possibility of parole.
The most Jones could hope for was a 15 percent reduction for good behavior, which meant the earliest he would be out was the end of September 2007. In a letter sent to his lawyer, Jones's doctor tried to get him special consideration, saying he was deeply concerned about what prison might do to his health. He had suffered two heart attacks, after all, in 1986 and 1998, the last around the time he learned of the anonymous letter to the rating agencies, and was taking three different medications for high blood pressure. Jones's lawyer, Robert Nigh, a former public defender who represented Timothy McVeigh in the unsuccessful appeal of his death sentence, recommended against sending the letter on to the Bureau of Prisons. Their likely response would be to assign Jones to a special medical facility out of state, which would make family visits difficult.
Neither was Jones getting any comfort from his prison handbook, which suggested that his agreement to testify for the government at the Bartmann trial in September would not exactly endear him to the other inmates. "The only-I guess 'disturbing' would be the right word-thing out of the whole book that I saw would be, and it's just something I'll have to deal with, I guess, is they don't like rats," he said early in June as we drove the Deville down to check out a barbecue place outside of Shawnee. "One thing the author seems to focus on is keep to yourself, mind your own business, leave everything alone and don't rat anyone out, which is understandable. But I guess I'll just have to risk that, and I could justify that by saying I guess I'd rather get the [expletive] beat out of me four or five times than I would spending another fifteen or twenty years in jail."
On Friday, June 27, with just three more days to go before prison, Jones announced that he would like to put on his special electric blue Porter Wagoner suit and his high-crown white cowboy hat-his Tom Mix hat, he calls it-and drive up to play country music that night in Chelsea, fifty miles north of Tulsa. Jones has played the guitar ever since he was a boy, mostly songs from the fifties and sixties dealing with loss, heartbreak and premature death of girlfriends and close relatives. His suit had been tailor-made by the famous Manuel of Nashville, sewn with thousands of sequins in a gambling motif, with cards and dice and dollar signs. It cost $10,000 and was in the style of the one Manuel had made for Wagoner to wear at Grand Ole Opry shows. He had worn it only three or four times since he bought it in 1997, which was obvious that night from the difficulty he had buckling his trousers.
Jones would play country music anywhere they allowed him to, but he particularly liked going up to Chelsea because hardly anyone knew him there. The gig was at the civic center near the Burlington Northern railroad tracks, where every Friday night thirty or forty farm couples, many in their seventies and eighties, gather for potluck supper and to push and pull one another around the dance floor. Jones usually plays backup rhythm, but this time he stepped up to the mike to employ his thin, reedy voice in service of a blue-grass song that started off "There's a cabin in the pines in the hills of Caroline/and a blue-eyed girl is waiting there for me." During a smoking break outside, he took some ribbing about how Porter Wagoner must be missing his suit by now, when the lead guitarist in the group, who hits more than seven feet in his boots and cowboy hat, slipped Jones a piece of paper with his name and address on it and said quietly, out of anyone's hearing, "You write me a letter, and I'll write ya' back."
June 30 started with a blinding rainstorm that for half an hour forced cars on the freeways encircling Tulsa to pull off to the side. Jennifer had taken two Ambiens the night before, but still didn't manage to sleep. Jones was awakened at 4:00 a.m. by the cat pouncing on his chest. The prison wanted him there by noon, and I volunteered to drive him the two hours down to Oklahoma City because friends had advised it would be too wrenching for the family to drop Jones off. Holly wasn't there because the doctor said that she was too close to her delivery date to travel up from Dallas. Jay's younger daughter Terri, twenty-nine, arrived with her husband, Jay Q., and a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts, while Jones attended to a list of last things to do. Yes, he fitted a fresh propane tank onto the cooker out on the deck. Yes, he canceled his cell phone, and he told Jennifer where to go in case of a tornado. Get down into that little closet in the basement, where she keeps Miss Celie's dog food, he says. The whole house can blow away, and that room will still be standing.
Terri started reading out of the prison manual. "Daddy, it says to take your eyeglasses and a lot of change for the vending machine."
"Sweetheart, they don't let you have money."
"Yes, they do, and you can take your wedding ring and-" Jennifer cut in to tell him not to forget his medicine.
"Mom, I don't know if you can take your medicine," Terri said. This made Jennifer start to cry.
"He has to take his medicine."
"No, he can take his eyeglasses, he can take his Bible or a religious medal and he can take his wedding ring, as long as it doesn't have any stones, and that's it."