by Otto Penzler
I said, “Mawmaw, I’m trying.”
She said, “I know, baby. You’re my hope. Because the Savior knows your brother Tanner is nothing but your daddy born again to torment me.”
My lawyer felt about the same way about Tanner as Mawmaw. He said Tanner looked bad for us. First of all, he had a record of crime and violence that Mr. Goodenough could use to show a bad family background or bad genes or whatever. Second of all, Tanner had told the police he’d advised me to shoot Kyle and had said he’d be glad to shoot Kyle himself if I didn’t want to. After he blabbed this total lie at the police station (and Tanner would always say any wild thing he could think of to get attention), for a little while the police got the idea in their heads that Tanner had shot Kyle. They kept trying to get me to admit I was just pretending I was the one had killed Kyle, instead of my brother. They accused me of lying to protect him because he had a record and I didn’t. The police chief came to the hospital after my suicide attempt, questioning me about that.
I go, “I’m sorry. But I am not a liar. And I wouldn’t lie for my brother about something like this.”
The police chief, a nice man, with a little smile like life was one big joke, said, “Wouldn’t you lie to protect him, Mrs. Markell? Isn’t that a Luby family trait? I remember when your brother shot ya’ll’s cousin Crawder Luby in the chest at point-blank range following an argument over a girl in the parking lot of Lucille’s Steak House.”
I say, “Tanner was never charged with shooting Crawder.”
“That’s exactly right. Tanner drove Crawder to Piedmont Hospital and tossed him out in front of the emergency entrance. Now, when we came to interview your cousin Crawder, he claimed he had no idea who’d shot him. That’s why we never could charge Tanner with that crime because his cousin that he shot stood by him. So, yes, Charmain, I think you Lubys will lie to protect each other.”
“Well, I won’t,” I said.
Pretty soon they had to believe me because it turned out Tanner was off with Crawder the day I shot Kyle. They’d gone deep-sea fishing off of Wrightsville Beach and had run out of gas and had to be rescued by the Coast Guard. That’s why Tanner’d given me his Mercury Cougar to keep till he came back. At least I thought it was his. Now I see he was hiding it out.
So then the police believed I shot Kyle and wanted to know why. Was it for money? Was there another man in my life? But by then Mawmaw had got Tilden Snow III to represent me and every time I’d open my mouth he’d say, “Don’t answer that, Charmain.” Mawmaw got him because she knew he and his daddy and grandpa were all lawyers, and they knew her from back when she was the White Tornado in their house. He took my case on what he called pro bono.
According to my cousin Crawder, Tilden Snow III only did it because it was a good way for him to make his name as big as his Daddy’s, since newspaper and TV people were crawling all over us at my trial. That was a little bit because they said I don’t look like your regular-type killer, plus had been a Teen for Christ, even if some big snoots in town called my family white trash, and Mrs. Markell didn’t think I was good enough to marry her son Kyle since he’d been a big basketball star in high school and started out that way in college and scored eleven points at the NCAA tournament Sweet Sixteen game. He could of kept on playing too if he hadn’t got caught using cocaine.
But the other thing was two people in Creekside besides me had murdered somebody this same year and it’s not that big a place. So we were getting a reputation. A Mexican man used rat poison on his wife, which folks thought was a accident at first because that part of town did have rats you couldn’t kill with a pitchfork unless you hit them with a sledgehammer first. But then they found the rat poison in his wife’s Maalox. Then Lucas Beebee (who was crazy and everybody in town knew it) used a chain saw on a Jehovah’s Witness and put her toes and ears in a flower arrangement on his mother’s dining room table. A friend of the victim was there for the Beebee Easter buffet and recognized this woman’s earbobs in the ears and called the police. So Kyle’s murder was number three in a year and instead of Creekside, North Carolina, which is our real name, they started calling us “Homicide, U.S.A.” for a joke.
So Mr. Goodenough the D.A. said he was going to make an example out of me and he sure has tried. He’s been elected District Attorney in Creekside for twenty years running and they say it’s mostly because of his name. I remember those campaign billboards from when I was little: HE’S GOODENOUGH FOR YOU.
At my trial the D.A. said I had broke every vow I took in church when I promised to love and honor Kyle till death do us part. He said I was a black mark on the holy name of “Wife.” Every chance he got he told the jury how Kyle had been a basketball star and played for the ACC because around here that’s like saying you taught Jesus how to walk on water. He held up that souvenir basketball Kyle had from the Sweet Sixteen game that I’d shot a hole in and he carried on about it almost like it was worse I’d shot the damn basketball than shot Kyle in the head. That’s when I could see Dr. Rothmann on the jury start to fidget in her seat like she wanted to tell the judge to make the D.A. stop talking so much about how this was the very same basketball that Kyle had shot that three-pointer with, with two seconds left in overtime. Dr. Rothmann even rolled her eyes at the ceiling when the D.A. said how I’d cut short a promising young man’s great career in pro basketball when even the newspapers knew it was drugs cut short Kyle’s career when he had to drop out of college his sophomore year and no pro basketball team had given him the time of day since. He couldn’t even have held on to his job at Creekside Ford if his uncle hadn’t owned it.
Now, my brother Tanner is so dumb he figured it would look better for me if he told the police he gave me the gun to take home because Kyle hit me all the time and I was scared of him. The truth is, I don’t believe Tanner even knew I took his pistol out of his refrigerator that day.
And Kyle didn’t hit me. Oh, he said he was going to hit me all the time, but he didn’t have the guts. His style was more stuff like kicking my dog JuliaRoberts when I wasn’t looking. Or pouring nail polish on my new winter coat and saying Jarrad did it when Jarrad was so little he couldn’t even walk yet. Or making fun of me in front of his stupid buddies at Creek-side Ford. Or smacking Jarrad in the face when he was a tiny baby, which is the one time I ever slapped anybody in my life, when I slapped Kyle as hard as I could except it mostly just got his shoulder and he laughed at me.
So I couldn’t help Tilden Snow with his plan to use the “battered wife syndrome.” The only 911 ever got called from out house was me getting the ambulance for Kyle when he sniffed too much cocaine and knocked over his trophy case and almost bled to death from broken glass. Course if I’d let him die that time maybe me and Jarrad would be in Disney World right this minute, staying at the Polynesian Resort.
I don’t mean to make it sound like I wanted a fancy life. And maybe this is what I would of tried to explain to Dr. Rothmann if there’d been a way for her and me to talk. I could of took not having things, easy, no problem, if I’d had somebody that loved me, even liked me. Because you can hit somebody without laying a hand on them, which is what Kyle kept doing to me. That’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about what Mawmaw said about how I was her only hope and had to earn respect. So I told Kyle he had to respect me more and not make me feel small. But he laughed at me and said, “Yeah, well, maybe I would if you stuck a gun in my face.”
So that’s really why it all happened. That’s why when I was over at Tanner’s trailer and I saw that black pistol of his in the refrigerator, all of a sudden I got the idea I’d do just what Kyle said. Next time he was making fun of me, I’d stick a gun in his face.
So that Friday when Tanner carried Jarrad down to the pond to look at the ducks, I took his gun and hid it in my purse. Then on Saturday Mawmaw watched Jarrad for me and I worked all day at Pretty Woman. That night was bad because Kyle was trying to make me do stuff in bed I didn’t want to. Sunday morning he’s mad at me. He’s sitting on
the couch in his underpants and wearing his old college basketball shirt, Number 56, click-clacking with that straight razor blade at his cocaine. I’m trying to get me and Jarrad dressed to go pick up Mawmaw for church and I’m late. Then Kyle tells me to nuke him a cup of coffee and when I can’t get the microwave to go off Defrost, he starts laughing about “No-Brain Charmain.” Then pretty soon he starts bouncing his souvenir Sweet Sixteen basketball off the living room wall like he was in a gym and not our living room.
Then he starts in on me about the Visa bill and what was I buying shoes for “that kid” for anyhow when he was so dumb he couldn’t even walk yet so he must take after me? I’m looking at Kyle bouncing that basketball while I’m standing there crying, and Jarrad’s crying too because I’m crying. I’m thinking, How dumb was I marrying this man when I was just sixteen when Mawmaw begged me to at least finish high school? How dumb was I not knowing maybe he was a freshman in college and a big basketball player, but he was still, excuse me, a total asshole?
So I’m standing in the living room, holding Jarrad. Kyle’s yelling about the Visa bill, and my whole body fills up with the idea that year after year after year for the rest of our lives Kyle’ll do the same kind of meanness to me and he’ll do it to Jarrad too if I don’t make him respect me starting now. And that’s the first time I think about Tanner’s gun since I took it. So I walk down the hall to our bedroom and I put Jarrad in his crib. Now he’s crying at the top of his lungs, and I can hear Kyle yelling from the living room, “Shut him the fuck up!” I go get the pistol out of the bottom drawer of my bureau where I hid it and I walk back in the living room and I stick it in Kyle’s face and I say, “You shut the fuck up.”
He’s surprised and his mouth falls open. But he’s not scared. And then he laughs. “Hey, where’d you get that thing?” he says, pointing at the gun. “You planning to shoot somebody?” I don’t say a word, I just keep looking at him. He says, “Well, No-Brain, if you’re planning to shoot a pistol you got to take the safety off.” He laughs some more and then he snatches the gun right out of my hand. He waves it in my face and says, sarcastic, “Here you go.” He snaps this little lever on the side of the handle. “That’s the safety.” Then he hands the pistol back to me. “Knock yourself out.”
Off in our room, Jarrad’s bottle falls out of his crib and he cries harder.
All of a sudden Kyle starts throwing the basketball against the wall close to me. He breaks a lamp. Down the hall Jarrad screams like the world’s gone crazy and Kyle turns purple. “I told you, shut that stupid kid up!”
I say, “You’re scaring him.”
Kyle screams, “I’ll scare him okay!” And then he throws the basketball hard right at me and hits me in the head with it. Then he grabs the ball back and spins around to run down the hall. And that’s when I pull the trigger. The pistol goes off. The noise was so loud it hurt. Most of the back of Kyle’s head flies away. But he spins around and it goes off again and then it flings out of my hand. His knees bend, and it’s weird, it’s just like he’s at the free-throw line and is going for a basket. But then he drops the ball, which is all crumpled because I shot it, and his knees give way like the floor fell out from under him. He jerks over sideways and lands hard. The whole room shakes. Down the hall Jarrad keeps screaming. All I can think about is, at least Jarrad didn’t see it but the noise must have scared him. I run and go pick up my baby and I hide his eyes against me so he can’t see Kyle lying there and we run out of the house. I drive Jarrad to Mawmaw’s and tell her I can’t go to church. I say I had a fight with Kyle and I can’t talk about it now. Then I go back home and Kyle’s still lying there with blood oozed out all around his head and his stomach. I have to run to the bathroom ’cause I’m sick to my stomach. I don’t know what to do. I just keep wishing I could make it go away. After a while I get an old blanket and wrap him in it. He’s cold but I try not to touch him. I think I fainted. I don’t remember the rest but I must of drug him out to the backyard and poured the kerosene on him and lit it.
That’s the truth. If I could take the stand and tell Dr. Nina Rothmann the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, that’s what I’d tell her.
But Mr. Goodenough made out how I’d plotted and planned to kill Kyle for his insurance policy and how I sneaked up on him and shot him in the back of the head from behind. Like I would plan for Jarrad to hear that gun go off so loud! The D.A. claimed how I tore up my own house to make it look like burglars so people would think I wasn’t anywhere around and it was the burglars that set fire to my husband. But how I was so dumb I used my own brother’s gun and left my fingerprints on it and on the kerosene can too and left them both right at the scene. The D.A. said I never meant to really commit suicide in the Marriott. It was a “ploy.”
Mr. Goodenough spent a lot of time telling the jury, “Imagine the horror and anguish” of Mr. and Mrs. Markell when they saw their only son smoldering on a brush pile. Then he’d hold up the crime scene photos (that my lawyer tried to get excluded but he lost) and wave them right at the jury and shout, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, just imagine!”
Both the Markells testified against me. They were the State’s last witnesses. Mr. Markell slumped and looked beaten down. Mrs. Markell could scarcely sit still on the stand she hated me so much. Course that was true even before all this. I didn’t like her either. She had spoiled Kyle so bad he told me himself how when he was little he would kick and slap her and she wouldn’t do a thing about it if they were in public except give him what he wanted. On the stand Mrs. Markell said it didn’t surprise her at all that I’d killed her son and she wouldn’t rest easy till I had paid the price. They had to haul her off the chair she was shouting at me so loud even after she was excused. Her face looked just like Kyle’s when he was yelling.
I’ll tell you how I could rest easy even strapped down in the death chamber. That’s if I knew Priscilla Markell had lost her case trying to get my baby Jarrad away from Mawmaw. I can’t stand the thought of her screaming at Jarrad until he turns into a screamer too. And Tilden Snow has promised me he won’t let that happen even if I do get the maximum. Which he’s worried I’m going to get if all he’s got on the defense side is character witnesses and the emergency doctor saying I really did try to kill myself judging from my stomach.
But some things you can’t do. And letting Mr. Goodenough ask me sarcastic personal questions and twist my answers around into lies and make fun of me and say I don’t deserve to be Jarrad’s mama is one of them.
So that’s all the far we’d got to in my trial by this morning. And that’s when all of a sudden Dr. Rothmann calls over the bailiff and hands him a note and then the judge studies it for a minute at the bench and then the judge says we’re taking a recess and he calls Counselor Goodenough and Counselor Snow to “come in my chambers,” and they all leave us sitting here, waiting and waiting.
About an hour later, Tilden Snow comes back looking surprised but sort of smug. He motions for Mawmaw to lean forward and he whispers to us all this stuff about how Mr. Goodenough was backing down and dropping Murder One because otherwise he’s going to get a hung jury and how if they could work it out would I agree to say I’d shot Kyle but I didn’t plan to. Would I say I did it without premeditating and when I’d gone to pieces for a minute. I look at Mawmaw and she pats my hand. I tell him yes I will say that because it’s the truth. Tilden Snow says I ought to thank my stars he got Dr. Rothmann put on my jury! I swear I think he even believed it was his plan all along, after he’d told me I was wrong for trusting her. He runs back off to the judge’s chambers, all puffed up like a little rooster in a tan suit.
So we wait some more. After a while Mawmaw leans over again from the row behind me and every now and then I can feel her hand patting me on the back. Right through my blouse I can feel the stiffness of her fingers and the calluses and rough spots on her hand like each one had a memory in it like a electric spark. I can see her mopping the kitchen floor of this house, and me helpin
g her make the beds in that house, and us walking in the rain to the bus stop from this other house, dropping off the trash bags on the way. I can see her fingers working to tie the bow on my dress the day she took me to Tilden Snow’s grandma’s big house that they called Heaven’s Hill. That was the day the little boy ran out the front door and hollered, “That’s my swing. Get off of it.” It was only after his grandmama came out with Mawmaw and told him to be nice to me because I belonged to the cleaning lady that he said, “I’m Tilden Snow. You want to marry me?”
I said to him, “No, I don’t.” And I looked over at Mawmaw ’cause I was worried she’d be mad but she was smiling like I had said the right thing.
So I’m feeling all these memories in Mawmaw’s hand while she rubs my back. Then the jury comes back with the judge and all, and Dr. Rothmann stops in front of me for a second and looks right in my eyes. And I nod at her and behind me Mawmaw stands up and gives her a little bow.
After a lot of talking, the judge tells me to stand up and I do and say I’m guilty and I get fifteen years. The first thing I think is, I’ll get out in time for Jarrad’s high school graduation. Then they come over to take me out. I turn around and I grab both of Mawmaw’s hands and I kiss them. I say, “I’m sorry, Mawmaw, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
She says, “You hang on, baby.”
So I do.
GALAHAD, INC.
Joan H. Parker
