Did the morgue workers at Providence Hospital give Bobo a bag of Mama’s belongings? I don’t remember seeing one when she walked across the parking lot that morning. If they did, maybe she stuck it in her purse. Nanny and her sisters all toted huge, leather, multi-sectioned pocketbooks you could pack for an overnight trip in. What did Mama have on besides that housecoat? A necklace? Did she have on this little ring I’m wearing right now? Had she taken off her wedding ring or did she have it on too?
No one can say what the official time of her death was. No one would’ve been able to say she was dead until they got there, and since she didn’t answer when I called her from the kitchen door, she would’ve been dead way before the paramedics would’ve gotten there and written down a time. Did they put a tag on her so the morgue workers would know who she was? Yes, they would have. She would’ve been just another body to them. They would’ve cleaned her up, wiped away the blood from wherever it had splattered, and maybe even washed her feet. The autopsy said she had been barefoot. The front yard would’ve been muddy from the previous day’s deluge. The housecoat would’ve had mud on it too, from her falling to the ground.
I wear the ring on the little finger of my right hand. It’s a gold sort of filigree band with a small diamond in the middle. The bottom is worn through and broken but it’s still strong enough to stay in a circle. It sometimes pinches the bottom of my finger but I like the way it sounds and feels when it touches the menagerie of thin gold bands and signet rings I wear on the finger next to it. The setting of Mama’s ring has holes available for other stones, holes I’m sure she planned to fill when she came up with the money. They remain empty.
I DIDN’T OPEN THE OTHER ENVELOPE UNTIL THE NEXT MORNING. Looking at both in one day was too much for even me, and I am a known glutton for punishment.
It took a while to absorb the information in the report on Mama. I had to imagine the track of the bullet, make up a little movie in my mind of all of that happening to her—I played it in what I thought real time would’ve been but mostly in slow motion so I could grasp the wreckage—rearrange what I had had in my mind for so many years—that she was shot on the right and not the left, that the bullet came out of her and went back into her arm, that he shot her in the chest and not closer to her abdomen, that her chest was literally blown up or out or away. There were some new details to wrestle with.
I got up the next morning, a Tuesday, made my morning coffee after I picked up the envelope holding Daddy’s report and put it on the arm of the sofa next to my reading spot. I assigned meaning, of course, to the fact that it was a Tuesday morning around 5 a.m. and that they had died on a Tuesday morning around 5 a.m. I am not one to let details such as that just go by unnoticed. I’m not sure I believe in accidents. I’m not sure I want to.
I nervously turned on every lamp in the living room and laughed out loud just a little while reminding myself that I was not a character in a horror movie and there was no monster waiting to jump out from behind a door. I sat down on the sofa and opened the envelope, then unfolded the report. I saw his name at the top along with the case number and the disclaimer from the forensics department saying that it was retrieved under normal circumstances during normal office hours. Both reports had come stapled at the top and opened like a reporter’s notebook. I took a sip of coffee, exhaled as much as I could, and tried to concentrate on slowing down my heart’s rhythm. I squinted through my glasses while delicately lifting up the top page just a bit using the thumb and index finger of my left hand and peeked under it.
Daddy.
August 12, 1986. 12 PM.
73 inches, 165 pounds, severely injured.
He was so skinny. He and Mama didn’t even weigh a collective three hundred pounds.
Clothing: The body is received with a tan and white striped short sleeved shirt, a pair of light blue boxer undershorts, a pair of blue jeans with a dark brown belt with a stainless steel colored buckle, a pair of low quartered gray “Reebok” running shoes, a black sock and a blue sock.
I remember those clothes like I saw them yesterday except I can’t be sure about which pair of blue jeans.
A black sock and a blue sock. Oh my God. Tears come. His socks didn’t match. A black sock and a blue sock mean no one was looking after him, and he wasn’t looking after himself. He didn’t care if his socks matched. How long had he been wearing them that way? I should’ve gone out to his trailer to do his laundry and mate his socks. I can’t stand the thought of him walking around wearing a mismatched pair, looking like no one loved him.
Head and Facies: The top of the head has been blown off by a gunshot wound to be described in more detail subsequently. The blast effect has lacerated the skin down over the left cheek. There are no other injuries to the head or face.
Eyes: The left orbital region is distorted because of the gunshot wound.
Oral Cavity: There are no injuries to the mucosa. The teeth are in very good repair.
I hope I got his good teeth. Mama’s were noted to be in good repair as well. This gives me hope for the future life of my own. What do you know—something to be hopeful about is found here.
Upper Extremeties: There are no injuries. There is a moderate amount of thin droplets of blood on the anterior and radial surfaces of the left forearm. There is a large amount of blood around the thumb and index finger of the left hand. There is a small amount of blow-back blood on the radial and anterior surfaces of the right arm and over the extensor surfaces of the fingers.
Evidence of Major Trauma to the Body: There is evidence of a contact gunshot wound to the head.
Entrance: On the anterior surface of the forehead in a zone 1½ inches above the bridge of the nose, almost directly in the midline, there is a region consistent with that of a contact gunshot entrance wound.
Daddy had said just weeks before, “Yeah, everybody’ll say, ‘He looks real natural except for that hole in his head.’”
He shot himself in the forehead? I always thought it was under the chin. I swear I was told he shot himself under the chin. Wouldn’t it have been harder for him to shoot himself directly in the middle of the forehead with a rifle? He thumped Sissy and me both on our heads while we were riding in the backseat of the car when he was driving once so I know he had long arms, but the barrel of a Remington 742 is twenty-two inches long. He would’ve had to turn his wrist around backward to use his index finger to pull the trigger with his right hand. From the description it seems he used his left hand. But if he used his right thumb, that would be easily done, I guess. He could’ve held the barrel with his left hand. That would explain the amount of blood on that arm. Or maybe the blood from his head pooled on the ground and he fell onto his left side. I go through the motions with my own hands. It’s hard to say what he probably did or didn’t do to accomplish shooting himself in the middle of the forehead with a rifle.
Exit: The defect on the scalp at the vertex of the skull is consistent with an exit wound, but because of the extensive numbers of lacerations, the exit and entrance are combined.
Direction of the missile track: The missile track is from front to back, almost straight the transverse dimension and upward.
Path of the missile track: The missile track perforates the skin, shatters the skull, avulses the brain, and exits.
To avulse, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: to pull or tear away.
Comment: As a result of the gunshot wound, the vault of the skull is shattered into multiple fragments. There are extensive fractures of the base of the anterior fossae, with extensive fractures of the nose, nasal bones, orbital plates, sphenoid bone, and ethmoid bone.
The anterior fossa is at the front of the skull and holds the frontal lobes of the brain. The sphenoid bone is around the eye. The ethmoid bone is in between the eyes. I picture Daddy with part of his head gone and lacerations on the left side of his face.
Diagnoses:
I. Gunshot wound to the head
A. Contact gunshot wound
C. Fracture of the base of the skull
D. Avulsion of brain
Evidence Submitted: Tissue specimen, blood specimen, gray metallic missile and photographs.
Cause of Death: Gunshot wound to the head.
Manner of Death: Suicide.
I imagine the photographs. I cringe and my eyes burn.
I am glad and not glad they didn’t send them.
The laboratory results that are attached to Mama’s report are here with Daddy’s as well. Again, the presence of the third cartridge.
And there is this:
The blood was positive for ethyl alcohol, 0.13 percent, and negative for other basic drugs.
Daddy’s sister, Katharine, told me that not a drop of alcohol had been found in his system. She must have gotten his results mixed up with Mama’s, which were clean. The time of the autopsy was 12:00 p.m. He’d been dead for probably seven hours give or take, so there had to be some decrease in the alcohol content in his body by that time, though some alcohol can be produced in the body after death. It’s hard to say for sure, but I think it’s safe to assert he had been drinking.
There was also 1+ fatty liver disease present.
What does the presence of a third cartridge mean? Was there a misfire between the two shots that killed them? If the first shot killed Mama, and how could it not have, and there was a misfire in between it and the one Daddy put into his head, I can’t imagine what he must’ve felt. Did he think that his rifle had malfunctioned and he wouldn’t then be able to avulse his brain? If that was what happened, I can’t imagine his agony.
Why do I and how can I worry over his agony? Which one of them made me so soft that I fret over what he must’ve felt at that moment?
What if the third cartridge was indeed a misfire and it came first? Would that not have jarred him into another, better, saner state of consciousness and made him change his mind? What sort of determination does a man have to have if the first intended round doesn’t fire and he goes on with the killing anyway? If there was a misfire and it was first, before he shot Mama, then he was already a dead man. He just finally stopped his heart. If he could do that, this wasn’t a crime of passion as I’d always considered it and hoped it was, but one of control. And one of loss of control. Not of himself, but of her.
I GUESS DADDY WAS FINALLY DESPONDENT ENOUGH TO DO IT. Maybe it was a gradual build of desperation, or maybe some switch flipped. I don’t know. What I do know is that, in 1986 when this occurred, the three of us—Mama, Sissy, and I—had left him. We’d left him before, but this time it was different and he might’ve let that sink in.
Sissy’d spent most of her time in Killeen, Texas, that summer. She had graduated high school in early June, and had gone out there to spend a few weeks with our aunt Brenda and our cousins, Lance and Lacy. When those few weeks were over, Mama and Daddy and I drove west to get her, stay a couple of days, and then head back to Alabama.
We arrived on a Saturday morning after driving through the night. On the following Tuesday, the three of them—Mama, Daddy, and Sissy; seems like it was always the three of them—drove down to Austin for the day to hear some music. I stayed behind with Lance and Lacy. Daddy got drunk while they were in Austin, and when they were ready to head back to Killeen, he forced Sissy to start the drive.
Sissy, livid and worried about Mama, took off driving too fast. Mama was caught in the middle of them as usual, just as Sissy was always caught in the middle of Mama and Daddy. Somewhere near Georgetown, just north of Austin, Daddy got up from the back of the van and crouched behind the driver’s seat, yanked Sissy’s head back by her hair, and told her to slow down.
Sissy pulled the van over on the side of Highway 35, jumped out, and ran down the shoulder of the road with Daddy chasing her and Mama chasing him. Sissy outran them both and flagged down an unwitting old man who offered his car. He told her to take it up the road just a bit to a convenience store and to call the police. Unfortunately, Sissy didn’t stop at the store and didn’t call the police. She instead ended up taking that man’s car all the way to Killeen, some forty miles away, to the only safe place she knew.
The cops arrived at the scene pretty quickly anyway. Sissy was gone, but Mama and Daddy were arrested for disorderly conduct and Daddy got a drunk driving charge. When Brenda delivered Sissy to the Georgetown jail later that day, she was booked for unlawful use of a motor vehicle.
She couldn’t leave the state until the charges were dropped or the case was settled in some way. We had to leave her there. Mama also promptly left Daddy when she and I arrived back in Alabama, shuffling me around with various relatives—Jane and Jim, Mammy and Dandy—until she found the rental house on Barden Avenue. It was ten miles or so from the trailer we’d shared with Daddy.
The events in Texas had been the last straw for Mama. Thank God something finally was.
Mama and I were settled in the Barden Avenue house when Sissy’s charges were cleared up and it was time to go get her. It took us all weekend, driving all day to Houston on Friday, spending the night with Mama’s brother, Larry, then driving to Killeen the next day. We got Sissy, turned around, and drove back to Alabama on Sunday.
The next day, Monday, it rained bucket-loads while Mama drove up to Frankville with Daddy to get his mama, whom we called Mammy. She hadn’t been well. Mama and Daddy took her back down to Mobile, where she checked into Mobile Infirmary. I don’t know how Daddy talked Mama into going with him that day, but he had a way of talking her into things. It didn’t seem to matter to him that we’d moved to another house. Daddy was good at convincing Mama to discuss things when they fell apart. He always got her to try and talk things out, but they always went back to the way they had been before. Despite his misery, Daddy wanted to keep things the way they were and had always been. He wanted to do anything but change.
I helped Sissy get settled into her new room at the house on Barden Avenue. She still hadn’t spoken to Daddy since that fateful day in Austin when she was thrown in jail. She was still too angry and I didn’t blame her. The day was heavy with more than just the hot rain. It was charged up and dark.
I don’t know what Mama and Daddy talked about that Monday. They might have been planning on getting back together even though Daddy had signed the divorce papers she’d served him. She hadn’t signed them and they sat, unfiled, in her desk drawer at McDermott, Slepian, Windom & Reed, where she worked as a legal secretary. Mama might’ve told him that they would not be getting back together. I’m sure her indecision gave Daddy hope that things would go back the way they’d been before. What went on between them is a mystery, but it always was. I didn’t see everything. I didn’t know everything. I wasn’t supposed to.
What I do know is that they got Mammy settled at the hospital and then Mama came back to the house alone to join Sissy and me. Carolyn came over. We got Chinese food. Daddy kept calling. We all went to bed.
Hits and Misses
I spend what feels like an inordinate amount of time thinking about what I call near things. Things that almost happen but don’t. How many times have we unknowingly been a baby’s breath away from death and somehow escaped it because we got lucky or it just wasn’t our time? Does it work that way? How many times did he almost kill her and decide not to? How many times did he almost kill himself and decide not to? How many times had she successfully talked the gun out of his hand?
What could’ve happened in those four or five hours after she quit talking to him that Monday night that might’ve changed what did happen? I can wear myself completely out on the what-ifs. What if Sissy hadn’t come home from Texas? Would he have been so very desperate to be included in what we were doing? What if a bird had squawked or flown over Daddy’s head that morning when he pulled the gun out of his van? What if someone had driven by the house and seen him with it and stopped?
I could make it up with this detail put in and that one left out every day for the rest of my life, tryi
ng to change the architecture of it, and rearrange space and time so that they would’ve lived longer, but to what end?
They’re gone, not coming back, can’t rearrange any of it.
AFTER SISSY FOUND MAMA AND DADDY IN THE YARD that Tuesday morning, she ran down the street to her friend Gary’s house and returned with him and his daddy. Meanwhile, Carolyn had called the police. I sat on the couch and heard her tell them what she thought might’ve happened. The police arrived with the morning sun, which had come up with a vengeance even though I couldn’t figure out how it had the heart to. People started to arrive at the house on Barden Avenue, most of whom I don’t remember anyone calling. I guess word just spreads that way. Their faces are now rubbed out in my mind.
I mostly remember the sunlight. It was brighter than any I could recall ever seeing before and it shone itself through the windows, hitting every reflective surface it could find, and blared back into my face. I felt blinded. I meandered around confused and numb. I said a few times that I didn’t understand why they weren’t taking Mama to the hospital. An ambulance had arrived but it didn’t seem in a hurry to leave.
I knew that once I admitted she was dead I wouldn’t be able to un-admit it.
The men had gathered outside like men tend to do. They washed away the blood and pieces of Daddy’s head from the vehicles and the ground with water from the garden hose. The women made coffee and tried to tend to things inside and answer the telephone, which kept ringing. The closest I’d been to the yard was the kitchen door that I called Mama from. I don’t know what it looked like out there except that there were people hanging around.
The police came inside after they collected what they needed from the crime scene—the gun, the cartridges, fingerprints. They loomed like giants—all black uniforms, badges that looked larger than they needed to be, and shiny, squeaky leather belts, holsters, and boots. I was taken back to my bedroom for questioning. No one else was allowed in with me. I had been closest in proximity to Mama and Daddy. I was the last person who saw them alive. Only one wall had separated me from the front yard where they’d ostensibly fought and struggled, then died.
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