Authors: Jamie Langston Turner
If Patrick and Rachel’s two children had reached school age, they would have attended Carrie Stern Elementary School in Greenville, Mississippi, at the corner of Moore and McAllister, the very school where I once taught before moving to Kentucky. But their children never attended school. Patrick and Rachel’s children were kidnapped from them at the Memphis Zoo, and their bodies were found a month later at a little spot in the road called Golddust, along the Mississippi River north of Memphis. This was in 1986, and these babies were two and three years old, a boy and a girl.
I was still in Kentucky at this time, a widow by then, having taught Fundamentals of English Composition to uninspired college freshmen for fifteen years at two different colleges. My sister Regina, Patrick’s mother, called me on the telephone and communicated the news of the kidnapping between long silences, then later sent me a newspaper clipping, which showed a picture of Patrick’s family taken less than a month before the abduction, a picture that had recently appeared in their church directory.
Patrick and Rachel had received an eight by ten of the same pose from the photography studio, free to all participating families of the church. This eight by ten, Regina told me, was what Patrick had taken from an end table in the living room and lent to the
Delta Democrat Times
for the write-up. This was only one of the many random details Regina wove into her halting narrative. Another was that Rachel couldn’t hold anything on her stomach, that she had been vomiting constantly since the children’s disappearance. Others were that it had rained solid for twelve hours, that Patrick’s roof was leaking right over the bed in the master bedroom, and that their church had held a prayer vigil through Saturday night and all day Sunday. No regular services, Regina had said, just people on their knees all over the sanctuary praying, many of them out loud.
Imagine hundreds of prayers floating up, hitting the ceiling, and vanishing just as the two children had. The case was never solved. Leads flooded in, but nothing turned up until four weeks had passed and a twelve-year-old boy saw his dog pawing at the ground along the riverbank in Golddust, Tennessee. Patrick and Rachel never had any more children. Regina never knew why, though I’m sure it wasn’t for want of asking. My sisters were not timid, especially Regina, who was the oldest of us and who believed in a Woman’s Right to Know Everything. Even as a child, when Regina sensed that information was being withheld, she would pester and snoop until she found out.
Eager to replace the gaps those two grandchildren had left in her life, she no doubt felt she was due an explanation as the years passed and Rachel bore no more children. As far as I know, however, her curiosity went unsatisfied. Because her other son never married, her obituary listed no grandchildren among her survivors. She died in her sleep at the same age our father had died of a heart aneurysm. Several years later our other sister, Virginia, likewise succumbed while stooping to water the African violets on her back porch. I have often thought I would prefer to go swiftly, as my father and sisters did, rather than linger as my mother, a curmudgeon and an inconvenience at the end.
But who can say? There is no good way to die. I cling to life, empty though it is. Soon the trees outside my window will shake in the cold wind, their leaves fallen, their branches “bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” as Shakespeare describes it in his seventy-third sonnet. Most of the birds have already flown farther south, but some will stay through the winter. Those that do will be intent on survival, and I mean to help them. The laws of the universe demand that someone help the weak. If not someone stronger, then let the weak help the weak.
The trip to the Memphis Zoo in 1986 had been a church outing. They had gone by bus, ten or twelve families, had taken their picnic baskets with them that hot summer day, had eaten together a little past noon, then separated for another two hours with plans to meet back at the bus at three o’clock to head back to Greenville. Since most of them had young children, they didn’t want to be too late getting home, especially since the next day was Sunday and there were Sunday school ribbons to be earned for perfect attendance. The preacher of the church, with his wife and four daughters, was among the group that day.
The specifics of the actual abduction were few. I discarded the newspaper article after reading it. I saw no need to keep it. It was a great tragedy. Why should I want to review it? Though I had not seen Patrick since he was a child, I was touched by his loss. I had not met his wife at the time, had no blood ties with her, but their children were my great-niece and great-nephew. I felt enraged by the crime but powerless, as one always is in the face of evil. I did not go to the funeral.
The newspaper reported a disappearance so swift as to be beyond possibility, except that the facts spoke for themselves. The children were indeed gone. They were sitting on a bench one minute, with ice cream cones, and in the blink of an eye they had vanished. Both parents were within arm’s length, one fetching napkins at the concession counter behind the bench, the other turned sideways on the end of the bench, loading the camera with a new roll of film. Imagine turning around to wipe a mouth or to snap a picture and finding your children gone.
I met Rachel for the first time at Regina’s funeral, by which time she looked different from the picture in the church directory. Her face had lost its smooth roundness and its smile. At her mother-in-law’s funeral I saw people treat her tenderly, as one who had suffered much. I saw them follow her every movement with their curious eyes. I heard the hiss of whispers as she and Patrick entered the chapel behind Regina’s casket, and I imagined the words: “They’re the ones whose babies were snatched.”
I would like to state that curiosity played no part in my coming here to live, though many will not believe me. I am something of an anomaly among southern women, for I have no morbid urge to wallow in tragedies or feast on the grotesque. I am too old to ponder such darkness. I serve only myself. Old age is tragedy enough. Like the birds at my window, I am intent on surviving the winter.
Since coming to Patrick’s house, I have never heard the children referred to, have certainly never spoken of them myself, have seen no evidence that they ever existed in this house. Their names were Toby and Mandy, I remember that, and they both had yellow-white hair, as did their father in his childhood. I imagine their mother to be a saint, martyred by grief and sanctified by pain. I have constructed for her a purified essence that I know to be false, for I know people. Yet it is easy to maintain my fantasy, as she rarely speaks. Fantasy may account in part for my survival thus far, as may silence for hers.
I have no fantasies about Patrick. He is a simple, literal-minded man concerned with office supplies, which are sold at a store called the Main Office, where he goes by the title of Manager. I hear him talk to Rachel at length about his employees, new products, late shipments, monthly profits, and the like. He reads aloud letters to the editor from the
Delta Democrat Times
and comments on each, sometimes angrily. He reads aloud from the Bible in a preacherly voice. He follows sports, though he was never an athlete himself. Dugout brawls and slugfests on the basketball court interest him, as does boxing, the most primitive and brutal of sports.
He reads historical accounts of battles, explorations, and naval disasters, as well as biographies of inventors, presidents, and entrepreneurs. He also reads
Time
magazine and
Reader’s Digest
. At the supper table he often speaks in great detail to Rachel about what he is currently reading. Patrick has high blood pressure and an abundance of nervous energy. He has an opinion about every subject and gives it unsolicited. Though he windily claims to be politically independent, it is clear that his bumper stickers in an election year bear the image of an elephant rather than a donkey.
Patrick and Rachel attend a church regularly. I do not know its name. Whether it is the same church that chartered the bus to the Memphis Zoo in 1986 I cannot say. Neither do I know whether the loss of their children reinforced the foundation of their religious beliefs or gnawed away at it. I do know, however, that they leave the house before ten o’clock every Sunday, dressed for church and carrying Bibles. During the first two weeks I lived here, they invited me to go with them. The second time I told them they needn’t ask again. I believe I made it clear that my religion, or lack of it, was my own business. Another Sunday they invited me to go for an afternoon drive with them, but again I declined. I have no desire to see beyond Edison Street. I know what Greenville, Mississippi, looks like.
There is another view from Patrick’s house besides the backyard view of field, gazebo, and the like, though to see this one I must go to some trouble. This I do. When I hear Rachel start her car and drive away for groceries or other errands during the day, or when she and Patrick leave for church on Sunday, I open my door and walk through their kitchen into the dining room and from there into the living room. I turn the rocking chair around to face the window, and then I sit down.
Across the street is a lawyer’s office in what was formerly a neighbor’s redbrick house. To the left of this is the parking lot of a funeral home, and to the left of that the funeral home itself, a two-story white Victorian-style house with gingerbread trim. A signboard, like a doctor’s shingle, hangs above the top step:
WAGNER’S MORTUARY
. The clients here, however, have passed beyond a doctor’s skill. I wonder if this was the same mortuary where the bodies of Toby and Mandy were taken. Imagine looking out your front window to the place where you chose caskets for your babies.
Were I a deep thinker, I would contemplate death from a philosophical perspective. Were I religious, I would have yet another vast cave to explore on the subject. But I am neither. I am a former teacher, a quarter Jewish and three-quarters Doubtful. Therefore, I sit in the rocking chair staring at the mortuary, often with my hand over my heart, feeling its quick shallow beats. I sit and wonder what it was like for all those people in their last breath, before they were brought through the back door covered by a sheet. This is the extent of my deep thinking. I try not to think of the moments after their last breath.
And did the proximity of Wagner’s Mortuary influence my choice to live with Patrick? For some people a nearby mortuary would be a discouraging factor. For others, an attraction of sorts, considering man’s inevitable end. For me—well, here I am. I knew the mortuary was across the street when I chose Patrick’s house.
I have heard the term
prearrangement
as it relates to funerals. I have heard it described as a way “to spare your loved ones additional grief when the time comes.” The word
death
is carefully avoided.
I knew a woman once, a colleague of my husband’s named Helga Sedgeworth, an imposing spinster who taught university courses in ancient and medieval literature. At a department dinner party one evening Helga told us that she had recently flown to New Brunswick, Canada, to the town of her birth, where she had gone to a funeral home to choose her own casket and headstone. She had filled out a form concerning her choices for the funeral service itself, had even selected flowers for the casket spray. She had gone to the adjoining graveyard to view the location of her plot.
She spoke solemnly to the ten of us around the dinner table. One of the men, a professor of modern fiction and poetry, tried to lighten the moment by asking if she had climbed inside the various caskets to test them for size and comfort, but she seemed not to hear him. For her headstone, she told us, she had chosen the inscription “Perhaps my love, my lord, inhabits there,” words she identified as those spoken by Psyche upon spying a distant temple on a mountaintop in her search for Cupid.
Helga had then written out a check for over eight thousand American dollars and left the funeral home. The same professor tried once more to make her smile. Had she gone dancing after that? he wanted to know. She turned to him and said, “No, I drove to a seafood restaurant and ate lobster.” Much later, during coffee, after we had drifted to other subjects, Helga filled a pause: “If one dies in the winter in Canada, the body is kept in storage until late spring when the ground has thawed.”
When my breathing comes faster, I force my eyes away from the funeral home. I look into the sky and try to think of rules that don’t bend. I try to remember things I might have once said in a classroom: “The past participle of
lie
is
lain
,” or “The pronoun must agree with its antecedent,” or “Avoid the sentence fragment.” I see these rules regularly broken in the things I read. I break some of them myself.
The page I seek out first in Patrick’s
Time
magazines is called Milestones. In sentence fragments, it records the deaths of noteworthy people. “DIED. FANNY BLANKERS-KOEN, 85, Dutch homemaker who won four gold medals in track and field at the 1948 Olympics, the most ever in one Olympics by a woman.” “DIED. UTA HAGEN, 84, revered stage actress and acting teacher best known for originating the role of Martha in Edward Albee’s 1962
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?;
in New York City.” Sometimes the cause of death is given: “of leukemia,” “of pancreatic cancer,” “a suicide by hanging,” “of a pulmonary illness.”
CEOs of companies, authors, actors, shipping magnates, gospel singers, museum curators—one by one they fall. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them.” Thus quotes the clown at the end of
Twelfth Night
. And then there are the masses, of whom I am one, who never taste greatness in any form, whose deaths go unrecorded in
Time
magazine.
Perhaps some would say that my wealth is a source of greatness, but I know what happens to money when one draws his last breath. It changes hands. Whatever man has done to get and keep it is, in the end, of no consequence. It is his no longer. Having lifted not a finger, fools may fall heir to a wise man’s fortune. Or wise men may fall heir to a fool’s fortune. Whatever the case, the “whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” The clown in
Twelfth Night
was no fool. He knew that nothing very much matters after all.