man had nagged at me since childhood.
“No, your daddy didn't kill that pathetic cracker. But I'd have leapt to the same conclusion if your daddy hadn't come around screaming at me about what
he thought I'd done. He was panicked over the hot water he was in.”
I believed him. There was no extra sell, just the matter-of-fact denial. So somebody else bashed that crazy skull and pushed the unconscious tramp into
the currents of the Ohio River to down. But who, and why? Uncle Matt was watching my perplexed reaction with a look that said, all you have to do is ask.
“So who did kill him?”
I wanted to retrieve the words as soon as I had spoken them, reach out and grab them back out of that stale air. I wanted to put everything back,
follow his advice, bury the matter, reseal the vault.
His manner softened.
“Your mother was convinced that all the stress was going to kill your father. It wasn't premeditated. It was pure impulsive hostility.
He was some crazed madman
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who had latched onto her family, and he jumped out once too often.”
“No!”
“She just happened to be holding a meat hammer. Opened up his skull pretty good. But your mom, she kept her cool. You remember that big old turtle we had
to haul back to the river that summer? That idea was fresh in her mind about then.”
“Please, enough. Enough.”
I had been wrong about my father's deepest loyalties. If it had come down to a choice of whom to protect, he was prepared to trade his brother's name and
liberty for his wife's, once she admitted to him what she had done.
I considered that while holding my mother's bony, cool hand as she stared vacantly at a lamp, five years into the deepest mists of Alzheimer's in a
Cincinnati nursing home. I scolded her aloud for her misguided, brutal act to protect my father's fragile heart. But deep down I was silently praying
that beneath the veil of her closed-off world she was not reliving the nightmare of what happened all those years ago.
The End
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