“Jane, I was just over at Dottie Farris’s house. Stevie is with me, and I was bringing him home. And well … I went to the door, the one at the kitchen, and I saw …”
It was only at that moment, Mrs. Hamilton would say later, that she remembered the three muffled booms that had swept through the sheeting rain that afternoon, the second rapidly following the first, the third coming several minutes later.
Several minutes.
What, during those several minutes, did Mrs. Hamilton, the gray, overweight wife of the town’s only Presbyterian minister, think was going on across the street at 417 McDonald Drive?
Several minutes.
Later, when I began my search, I read those two words in the thick file which the Somerset, New Jersey, Police Department finally allowed me to see: “Witness stated that although the second shot followed closely after the first, there was a duration of several minutes between the second and final shots.”
And then this: “Witness stated that the television program
And so, all across the Eastern Seaboard,
Years later, looking at a series of police photographs while two uniformed officers watched me warily from the other side of the room, I tried to reconstruct the grim choreography of my family’s murder:
From them it seemed clear that Jamie had been the first to die. In the pictures, a set of bloody tracks lead from Jamie’s room down the upstairs corridor to Laura’s. She’d probably been near the window when she heard first the deafening roar which came from Jamie’s room, then footsteps moving down the corridor, and last the sound of her own door as it opened toward her. Reflexively she turned toward it, and saw my father standing there, the barrel of his shotgun lowering toward her. Against its blast, she raised her hand, perhaps to shield her face, or perhaps in a pleading motion which he immediately refused.
From Laura’s room, the tracks, still thick with blood, lead directly to the room opposite Laura’s, the master bedroom, the one with the floral curtains. He must have found it empty, because my mother was not killed in that room. There were no spattered walls, no blood-soaked carpet for the police to photograph in that dimly lighted bedroom.
The tracks head back down the corridor, down the stairs, into the living room, and through it to the small solarium, where they move into it a little way, then turn and head out again. It is a line of trajectory which could only mean one thing. That my mother was trying to escape, but witlessly, never thinking of leaving the house, too passive even to make that final domestic break.
The tracks then move back through the living room, a little wider now, for he is searching for her desperately, taking longer steps, perhaps in fear, or rage. Certainly, he is moving faster.
The tracks are seen in the dining room next, then in the kitchen. Still, she eludes him. He wheels around, leaving a slender mark on the tile floor to indicate the fierceness of his turn, how for just an instant, he lifted almost entirely from the ground, whirling on the backs of his heels.
The tracks move again, toward the door that leads to the basement, then down the wooden stairs toward its flat cement floor. At the third step from the bottom, they stop.
Because of the hard rain which had been falling for hours by late that afternoon, water had seeped into the basement, a small lake gathering near the middle of the room. My mother passed through that puddle several times, her watery trail making a bizarre and illogical pattern on the cement floor. Perhaps she ran about, zigzagging in her terror, while he stood on the third step, laboring to bring her into his sights.
At last, she came to rest in a back corner, behind the huge cardboard box in which she stored our Christmas decorations. It was there that he raked her with a third and final blast.
All of this, then, was what my father did.
And in the years that followed, it was to this single horrendous act I had reduced him. All his life had collapsed into a single savage and explosive instant. I couldn’t imagine his life before or after it. My father was frozen forever as he had stood upon that third step, his shoes still glistening brightly with my brother’s and my sister’s blood.
But there had been a life before that one murderous instant. Not a great life. Not a life of high achievement, or even noble failure. But a life nonetheless, the kind that most of us live, plain but sturdy, building day by day a structure that holds up.
My father, as I came to discover, was a country boy. Throughout all his early years, he lived on a small farm in rural New York. Each day, he did the chores common to children on a farm. He gathered eggs, milked cows, cleared the weeds that sprouted intransigently among the neatly proportioned rows of the family garden. In the summer he swam in the great blue lake several miles away. In the fall he went to a country school named for Daniel Webster where he learned to read and write sufficiently to carry out the basic tasks of life. Later, when he was fourteen, he transferred to the high school in the nearby town of Highfield. It was named for a local boy who’d died in the Spanish-American War, and my father graduated from it at somewhere near the middle of his class in June of 1931. In the class photograph, taken at the town ball field on graduation day, he is positioned on the back row, the fifth boy from the left, his black hair greased back, staring at the camera with an ordinary smile. Inside the high school yearbook for that same year, a slender volume made of cheap paper and bound in leatherette, and which I found in one of the boxes I inherited from Aunt Edna, he is said to have been a member of the baseball team. A picture shows him individually, dressed in a flat black suit and bow tie, his nickname printed underneath:
Town Crier. What had his classmates meant by that? Was there something in him that suggested warning and alarm, a sense of being startled from one’s sleep? Had the faces of his classmates ever grown taut as they stared into my father’s youthful eyes? When some of them later read of what he did, were there a few among them who had not been surprised?
I wondered about his parents, too. In photographs they are a sturdy, farming couple, plain in that way that makes plainness seem beautiful, noble, and even a little superior to more sophisticated and elaborate things. At night, when the lights were out, and they lay together in the darkness, had they ever voiced the slightest concern for some odd look or disturbing word they’d noticed in their only son?
