Witness: Just in conversation. I’ve used it in conversation with my wife. It’s a figure of speech, nothing more.
Mr. Logiudice: A figure of speech. Witness: It is not a scientific term. I’m not a scientist.
Mr. Logiudice: Of course. We’re all non-experts here. Now, when you used this, this figure of speech, “the murder gene,” what were you referring to?
[The witness did not respond.]
Mr. Logiudice: Oh, come on, Andy, there’s no reason to be shy about it. It’s all a matter of public record now. You’ve felt a lot of anxiety, haven’t you, in your life?
Witness: A long time ago. When I was a kid. Not now.
Mr. Logiudice: A long time ago, okay. You were worried-a long time ago, when you were a kid-about your own history, your own family, weren’t you?
[The witness did not respond.]
Mr. Logiudice: It’s fair to say that, isn’t it?
Witness: [Inaudible.]
Mr. Logiudice: I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. You’re descended from a long line of violent men, aren’t you? Mr. Barber?
Violence did run in my family. You could follow it like a red thread back through three generations. Probably there were more. Probably the red thread ran right the way back to Cain, but I never had any desire to trace it. A few stories, lurid, mostly unverifiable, and a few photographs had come down to me; that was affliction enough. When I was a kid, I wanted to forget these stories entirely. I used to wonder what it would be like if a magical amnesia descended and erased my mind completely, leaving only a body and some sort of blank self, all potential, all soft clay. But of course, no matter how I tried to forget, the story of my ancestors was always stored in deep memory, always ready to poke up into awareness. I learned to manage with it. Later, for Jacob’s sake, I learned to drink it down entirely, leaving nothing for anyone to see, nothing to “share.” Laurie was a great believer in sharing, in the talking cure, but I never meant to cure myself. I never believed such a thing was possible. That is what Laurie never understood. She knew that my father’s ghost troubled me, but not why. She presumed the issue was that I never knew him and there would forever be a daddy-shaped hole in my life. I never told her anything else, though she tried to pry me open like an oyster. Laurie’s own dad was a shrink, and before Jacob was born she was a teacher at the Gavin Middle School in South Boston, fifth- and sixth-grade English. She believed, based on these experiences, that she had some understanding of under-fathered young boys. “You’ll never be able to deal with it,” she would tell me, “if you won’t talk about it.” Oh, Laurie, you never got it! I never intended to “deal with it.” I intended to stop it cold. I meant to stop the whole sordid criminal line of descent by absorbing it all inside me. I would stand there and stop it like a bullet. I would simply refuse to pass it along to Jake. So I chose not to learn much. Not to research my history or analyze it for causes and effects. I purposely orphaned myself from the whole brawling lot of them. As far as I knew-as far as I chose to know-the red thread went back to my great-grandfather, a slit-eyed thug named James Burkett, who came east from North Dakota carrying in his bones some feral, wicked instinct for violence that would manifest itself over and over, in Burkett himself, in his son, and most spectacularly in his grandson, my father.
James Burkett was born near Minot, North Dakota, sometime around 1890. The circumstances of his childhood, his parents, whether he had any education-I knew nothing about these things. Only that he grew up on the High Plains of Dakota in the years after Little Big Horn, at the closing of the frontier. The first real evidence I had of the man was a sepia photograph on thick card stock, taken in New York City at the H.W. Harrison Photographic Studio on Fulton Street on Wednesday, August 23, 1911. The day and date were carefully noted in pencil on the back of the photo along with his new name, “James Barber.” The story behind this journey was also murky. The way I heard it-from my mother, who got it from my father’s father-was that Burkett lit out of North Dakota to escape an armed robbery charge. He lay low awhile on the southern shore of Lake Superior, clamming and working on fishing boats, then made his way to New York under a new name. Why he changed his name- whether it was to avoid an arrest warrant or just to make a new start with a new identity out east, or for some other reason-no one knew for sure. Nor could anyone explain why my great-grandfather chose Barber as his new surname. The only solid evidence I had of this period was the photo itself. It was the only image of James Burkett- Barber I ever saw. He would have been about twenty or twenty-one when it was taken. He is shown full figure. Slim and taut, bandy-legged, in a borrowed coat, with a bowler held in the crook of his arm. He squints into the camera with a Bowery smirk, one corner of his mouth curling up like smoke.
I surmised that the charge in North Dakota was probably more serious than armed robbery. Not only did Burkett-Barber go to great lengths to escape it-a low-rent stickup man on the lam did not have to travel so far or transform himself so completely-but upon arriving in New York he displayed an aptitude for violence almost immediately. There was no apprenticeship. He did not work his way up from petty assaults, as novice criminals do; he stepped onstage a hoodlum in full flower. His criminal record in New York included arrests for ABDW, assault with intent to rob, assault with intent to murder, mayhem, possession of an infernal device, possession of an unlicensed firearm, rape, and attempted murder. Between his first arrest in New York state in 1912 and his death in 1941, James Barber spent nearly half his days in prison or in custody awaiting trial. On two charges of rape and attempted murder alone, he served fourteen years combined.
It was the record of a professional criminal, and the one description of him that surfaced in the casebooks bore that out. The case was an attempted murder in 1916. It generated a perfunctory appeal and was therefore written up in the New York case reports in 1918. The summary of the facts of the case, as reported by Judge Barton in his decision, is just a few sentences long: The defendant became embroiled in an argument with the victim, a man named Payton, at a Brooklyn bar. The argument had to do with a debt Payton owed either to the defendant himself (according to the defendant) or to another for whom the defendant worked as a “stalker,” or debt-collector (according to the State). In the course of this argument, the defendant, in a transport of rage, attacked the victim with a bottle. He persisted in the attack even after the bottle had broken, after the affray had spilled from the bar out onto the street, and after the victim’s left eye was badly damaged and his left ear shorn nearly off. The attack finally ended when several bystanders, to whom the victim was known, intervened to overwhelm the defendant and hold him forcibly, with great effort, until police arrived.
One other detail from that court decision stood out. The judge noted, “The defendant’s reputation for violence was well known to Payton, as indeed it was well known generally.”
James Barber left at least one son, my grandfather Russell, who was called Rusty. Rusty Barber lived until 1971. I knew him only briefly, when I was a very little kid. Most of what I know about him comes from stories he told my mother, who later passed them on to me.
Rusty never met his father and therefore never missed him. Didn’t waste a hell of a lot of thought on him. Rusty was raised in Meriden, Connecticut, where his mother had people and where she returned from New York City, pregnant, to raise him up. She told the boy about his father, including his crimes. She did not mince words, but neither she nor the boy made a big deal about it or felt especially burdened. Lots of folks had it worse in those days. It did not occur to anyone that Rusty’s father might affect the boy’s future in any way. On the contrary, Rusty was raised with essentially the same expectations his neighbors were. He was a mediocre student and a little wild, but he did graduate from Meriden High School. He entered West Point in 1933 but left after his plebe year, much of which he spent in special confinement and walking disciplinary tours. He came back to Meriden, worked odd jobs, drifted. He married a local girl, my grandmother, and seven months later had a son, whom he called William. Once, Rusty was involved in a minor scuffle and wound up getting arrested for assaulting a police officer, though he had not done any such thing, really. Just did not like the way the man laid hands on him.
It was the war that turned things around for Rusty Barber. He joined the Army as a private and took part in the D-day invasion with the First Infantry Division. By the time the war was over, he was a lieutenant in the Third Army, a winner of the Medal of Honor and two Silver Stars, and a certified hero. During the battle for Nuremberg in April 1945, he single-handedly stormed a German machine-gun emplacement, killing six Germans, the last two using his bayonet. There was a parade for him back in Meriden. He rode on the back of an open convertible and waved to the girls.
After the war, he had two more kids, bought his own little wood-frame house in Meriden. But he was not nearly as well suited to peacetime. He flopped in a series of businesses-insurance, real estate, a restaurant. He did finally find a place as a traveling salesman. He repped a number of clothing and shoe lines, and he spent most of his working life driving around southern New England with boxes of samples in his car trunk, which he displayed to
