Chapter 1

The first dead person I ever saw was lying on my mother’s new linoleum floor in the kitchen. My dad was sitting at the kitchen table lighting what I imagined was his first ‘Lucky’ of the day. His .45 caliber pistol was lying on the table in front of him. Momma was trying to get my two-month-old baby sister to stop crying by trying to get her to nurse. Jenny was not cooperating and continued to scream as my younger brother and I stood in the doorway with our mouths open staring at the dead man.

Maybe I should give you a little more information.

It’s 1956. We were living on our farm way out in the country. How far ‘out’ you ask? It was 2 miles to our nearest neighbor, Mr. Chester’s house; he lived alone since his wife died.

Our grandpa and grandma had died so my brother and I shared their old room. A sure fired way to get my younger brother to shut up and go to sleep was to tell him I saw our grandparents walking around in the room late at night!

Jenny was two months old at the time and slept in the room next to our parents’ bedroom. There was a door in the wall between their rooms, so it was the perfect nursery. That would be Jenny’s room until she married and moved out.

My brother and I had been asleep for a while when we were awakened by a gunshot inside the house! We both jumped out of our beds but were afraid to open the door until we heard Mom’s voice in the kitchen. Then we ran down the hall to discover the scene described above.

Mom tried to run us back to our room, but dad stopped her.

“It’s alright boys. Come on in and sit down.”

His .45 caliber pistol, the one he had brought home from the ‘war’, was lying on the table as he lit what I suspected was his first cigarette of the day.

“Who’s that man on the floor?” asked my brother.

Dad took a long drag off the un-filtered ‘Lucky’ he was smoking, Jenny had stopped crying and began sucking on momma’s nipple, before he answered. “Don’t know. Son (he always called me Son, not by my name. He called my brother, ‘Brother’. Our baby sister he called Jenny. I bet you were thinking he called her ‘Sister’. He did not, it was Jenny or Jenn until the day he died.) look in his back pocket there and hand me his billfold.”

Not wanting to touch that dead man I hesitated.

“Go on boy do like I said. He’s dead he ain’t gonna bite,” he said in a raised voice.

I knew to get my butt moving. I was more scared of my father than that dead man! The billfold slipped out of his back pocket without much problem, then I handed it to my dad. He took out a driver’s license and read a name. Momma commented that she had never heard that name here in the county.

Dad grunted and said, “He’s from out of state.”

That made me ask, “What’s he doing breaking into our house. We ain’t got nuthin’ worth stealin’.”

Dad opened the wallet and there was seven dollars in it. He laid the money on the table and said, “Mother, put that with your egg money.” (Yeah, he always called momma ‘Mother’).

“Listen boys, we’ll never know what he was after. Maybe he thought we had something he could steal and sell, maybe he wanted to hurt your momma.”

(We were too young to understand ‘rape’.)

“Or maybe he wanted to steal little Jenny there. We’ll never know for sure. But really it does not matter a tinker’s dam. I stopped all his evil thoughts with this 45.” He pointed to his pistol.

“We need to call the Sheriff.”

“No, that will just bring more trouble. He might have family who would take offense at me killing their kin here in my kitchen. No, we’ll take care of this ourselves. Son, put your boots on and run down to the barn and get me a shovel. Brother, you get back in bed.”

“I wanna go with Son to get the shovel!”

“Awright, but you boys be quick about it. It’ll be daylight in a couple of hours and I have a lot of work to do before the sun comes up.”