Twenty-Nine
I’ve never been to my grandparents’ grave. Not since my grandfather was laid to rest beside my grandmother. Before that—not since the stone went in, long before he died. The stone is rose-colored, engraved with a rose, and inlaid with their wedding portrait. My grandmother loved roses. So do I. I have the outline of a rose tattooed on the nape of my neck for the Marianne Moore poem “Roses Only” that I painted on my wall as a teenager. When my grandmother lay dying in the hospital, I sang “The Rose” to her. Some say love, it is a river that drowns the tender reed. Some say love, it is a razor that leaves the heart to bleed. I sang it to her, too, a few years before she died, when she came to stay with us alone while my grandfather was in the hospital. I had never seen her so restless, so plagued with fearful energy—I had, I realized, never seen her alone. The first night she stayed with us I went down the stairs to kiss her goodnight. My mother had made up the green pull-out sofa bed for her, but she wasn’t lying in it. She was sitting on its edge. When I walked into the room, she looked up. “More than fifty years we’ve been married,” she said. She had her mother’s prayer card in her palm and was worrying its edges with her fingers. “I’ve never gone to sleep without your grandfather. Not one night since.”
I was thirteen, maybe. I had never thought about the accumulation of all those nights. The way they added up to a life.
Who my grandfather was must have come to my grandmother like a pebble inside her: impossible to ignore one moment, impossible to admit the next. An awareness, then a vanishing. She must have willed herself not to feel him leave that bed at night. She knew who my grandfather was as a man. She couldn’t let herself see who he was as a molester.
Driving away from the cemetery, I am thinking about the Langley graves. The concrete over Alcide had darkened; the concrete over Bessie, still light. She died just a year before my visit. Someone put in markers for their children, with Oscar’s school portrait and Vicky’s christening one, and their concrete was the same color as Alcide’s. Bessie was probably alive when they were put in. The four graves together—the two big and the two little—looked unmistakably like what they were: a family. I am thinking about this, I am thinking about my grandmother lying in that bed, missing her husband, and the way she smelled of lavender when I leaned over her to kiss her papery cheek goodnight—when I see through the trees that the road ahead of me stops at an intersection. I see a yellow railroad crossing sign.
And then the name of the street I am coming to, which blows high and loud inside me like a whistle.
Packing House Road.
*
On the evening of May 27, 1992, eighty-two-year-old Della Thompson is sitting out on the patio at her house on Packing House Road, watching Wheel of Fortune through the patio door. The sun is setting over the wide flat grass of this part of Louisiana, the sky lit up in the fuschia bursts and golden streaks that are the gorgeous legacy of pollution in this part of the land, and out of the corner of her eye she notices a motorcycle going, she will later say, “real fast” down the road, so fast she cannot make out any passenger or driver. So fast she cannot make out Joey’s small arms clutching his father’s waist and Terry leaning forward to turn the throttle up faster, to make the motorcycle fly. Does Joey close his eyes against his father’s back? In this last moment, is what he feels the wind?
A train whistle pierces the air, loud and long, long enough to startle Della. You could see the train coming before that. It didn’t need the whistle. Then the train speeds past, the sunshine knifing off its silver body. After that, nothing. She goes back to watching her program.
But soon there’s a rumble of a pickup truck coming up the road. Della likes to watch passing cars. There aren’t many. So she watches the pickup stop near the crossing. She watches a woman get out and walk over to inspect something on the ground. She watches as the woman bends over and starts to pick it up.
Then Della hears screaming.
The woman runs toward Della’s house, yelling for Della to call the police.
*
On the diagram submitted with the police report is a figure eight drawn flipped on its side in front of the tracks. It looks like an infinity symbol. Above it, on the tracks, is noted “gouge marks.” This is where the train collided with the motorcycle, whose wheels form the loops of the symbol, and flipped it. Then the infinity symbol repeats again and again, tossing through the air before coming to rest. Airborne. The small outline of a body, marked “Victim #1,” lies parallel to the tracks—fifty-eight feet and eight inches, the diagram notes, from the point of impact. Terry Lawson. Between his body and the tracks are two carefully labeled circles representing the motorcycle’s gas tank and seat, and then the fender much farther away. The motorcycle blew apart in the impact. Closer in to the tracks lies the outline of a small body, apparently ejected much earlier than Terry. “Victim #2.” Joey, his son.
The train didn’t hit Terry. He hit it. He hit the second car, at such velocity that, the record notes, the train engineer never knew he’d hit anything at all and continued on toward Chicago. The report I found in the files said “accident.” The police never investigated it as anything else.
In all the briefs the defense filed in this case, the briefs with the unenforceable and strange requests, the brief that argued that though Jeremy was found dead and wrapped in blankets it might not have been murder, I found one in the boxes marked “Motion for Exhumation.” A hair sample was taken from Ricky Langley, Clive noted. But all that the sample proved was that the pubic hair found on Jeremy’s lip had not come from Ricky. Given that, wouldn’t it make sense to test whom the hair might belong to? “There is information that Mr. Lawson molested June Lawson, his daughter,” Clive wrote.
The motion does not specify what this information was.