This is the first installment of a two part story (good news is, the second part is finished, barring a few editing issues and should follow in a week or two!). This story began as a simple one shot, but quickly became a monster - both parts run longer than my usual efforts...so be warned. I will say now, I have no clue how well I've come to being accurate about the key plot points, but I think it works. I hope you enjoy! Please let me know what you think. It is always your comments, both pro and con, that inspire me to continue...
As always, this is a work of fiction - all characters exist solely within the confines of the story and my imagination. Again, Enjoy!
I sat in the visitor's center feeling very out of place – concrete walls with small windows made of thick glass and metal bars giving off poor light supplemented by harsh fluorescents overhead. Several children fussed, squalled or fidgeted around women who were likely their grandmothers or aunts. A few other men sat at the small rectangular tables bolted into the concrete floor. Male and female guards were at the exit, weapons displayed prominently, their faces set in a permanent squint as they studied each of us for trouble.
By ones and twos, women came in from another door, escorted by female guards, harsh looking women with butch haircuts or tight buns pulling their hair taut. The women they escorted were dressed in shapeless blue khaki dresses or in blue khaki slacks and blue chambray shirts. To a woman, they looked around warily and then upon seeing family, their faces would break into expressions of love or shame and sometimes both.
"Visitor for Carleen Howard," called out a woman guard, bringing a woman through the door. I stood up, my heart beginning to pound, putting a hand on the table to steady myself. The guard pointed to me while the woman she escorted stared at me a little concerned or confused. She shook her head and looked quizzically at the guard who rolled her eyes and said something that got her moving, walking slowly and cautiously towards me.
She was dressed in the shapeless dress that most of the women prisoners seemed to be wearing. I tried to match her face to the one I held in my memories, few that they were. A woman in her mid-forties, dark brown hair streaked with white, chopped off in a crude pixie cut. She carried a lot more weight than I remembered – at least I think she did. Her face was fuller and her bosom seemed to swell out and strain against the material of her dress. Her ankles were trim however – her calves well muscled as if she did a lot of exercise.
She got closer and then her eyes went wide, showing me that they were as brilliant a blue as I remembered as she suddenly realized who I was. She stopped on the other side of the table and in a voice that while harsher than I recalled, I still recognized, said, "You shouldn't be here, John." Her eyes, so deeply blue, began to tear up.
I felt my own eyes begin to sting as I replied, my voice suddenly hoarse, "Hello, Momma."
#
On March 19, 1992, my mother murdered my father, emptying an entire clip from a police issue Glock automatic pistol into him while he slept on the couch. I was four years old and didn't witness it, but she freely confessed to the police when they came. I think the shots woke me up and I remember sitting next to my mother on my bed while she cried, hugging me tight with one arm while the pistol dangled from her free hand. I think I remember vaguely understanding that something had happened to my father, but not being real upset about it. He was mean to me and my mother...real mean.
My last memory of Momma was of her reaching out to me, sobbing and screaming my name as a policeman carried me away, trying to shield my view of a white sheet over the couch, stained a dark shade of red. Mom's eyes would have been red from the crying except for the dark bruises that had both eyes almost swollen shut – bruises that pretty much covered her face. Her long dark brown hair was falling down into her face, denying me one last look at her.
On August 1, 1993, Carleen Howard was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her common law husband, Lee Dean Garrett. Carleen or Carlie as her friends called her was twenty-one years old. Her defense lawyer's efforts for acquittal based on the preponderance of evidence of physical abuse or to achieve at least a reduction of charges were all in vain. When you kill the son of a sheriff in rural Mississippi, you are in for a world of hurt.
By then of course, I had become a ward of the state, never knowing that Sheriff Garrett had decided to sweep clean any connection between his late son and as he would later put it, "That sorry piece of white trash that crawled up from the wrong side of the tracks and her misbegotten bastard.
Before my sixth birthday, I was adopted by an older couple – then almost fifty themselves, childless since the mid 1980s when their only son had been killed in the waning days of our peacekeeping efforts in Lebanon. Kent and Donna Tucker become my mother and father and took me out of Mississippi to a small town in Western Illinois where I had about as nice an upbringing as anyone could ask for.
They were both wonderful people. Dad, beneath a gruff and grumpy exterior was a wonderful father, teaching me by example how to be a good man. Mom was a June Cleaver for the modern world – balancing a job as school teacher with raising a family. I was loved and I knew it and I loved them both dearly in return.
As the years passed, I let my early years fade away, only occasionally recalling my birth mother – usually picturing her as very pretty and often sad. The only memory other than that of her sobbing as she tried to hang on to me that last moment was of her and me on a picnic. I remembered my mother smiling as she spread the blanket on the ground, her deeply tanned face almost glowing, her eyes a bright shining blue, framed by long mahogany tresses. I remember hugs and kisses and her chasing me around while I laughed until I couldn't catch my breath. In the end, all I had was a memory that she loved me.
When I was fourteen and Dad thought I was old enough to know, he sat me down and told me the entire story of my real mom and dad. Lee Dean Garrett was a violent, hard drinking son of a man who ran his county with an iron fist. My grandfather had served as Sheriff of the county for nearly twenty-five years before my real mother, Carlie Howard emerged from the swamps of southern Mississippi at age 16, running away from home only to meet and get knocked up by Lee Dean.
The Sheriff wouldn't let him marry my mother, but tolerated her presence, helping his son set her up in a trailer park on the outskirts of town. Dad called my birth mother a "round-heels" which he said meant she was a slut. Lee Dean was an alcoholic abuser of women and despite the danger he represented, while he'd wander off for weeks or months at a time, Carlie would sleep around with other men.
When Lee Dean would find out, he'd beat my mother. When my birth mother was examined at the hospital following the shooting of my father, she had severe contusions about the face, arms and abdomen, two broken ribs, a fractured eye socket and a bruised kidney. Records indicated a total of nine older fractures from over a five year period. Not that it mattered. The son of Sheriff Garrett could have been a serial killer and still his father would see to it that his killer would spend life in jail.
I had known vaguely what my mother had done and didn't know how to really process this information. I felt some vague guilt over her situation, but whenever I voiced questions about how she might be now, Dad was vehement in dropping the subject. I always felt that his attitude of "leave the past in the past," bothered Mom. In the end, I concurred with Dad and simply pushed the matter of my birth family into a dusty corner of my mind and went on with my life.
I went to a university in Ohio, majoring in American Literature and writing my senior thesis on William Faulkner – perhaps my Mississippi roots influencing my choice. As I was considering whether to pursue a teaching career back in Illinois or to begin work on my masters with an eye towards an eventual doctorate, my adoptive Mom fell ill.
Mom's heart was giving out and now into her early seventies, the doctors were not hopeful. I returned home, temporarily shelving my future plans to help Mom and Dad out. Mom accepted what was coming with her usual grace, but it was killing Dad. Already in his late seventies, he seemed to age a year with each passing week that saw Mom slipping away.
Just before the end, I was sitting with her, reading her the latest potboiler by her favorite author – even holding a book was wearying to her. She stopped me and asked, "John, is your father asleep?" I nodded, knowing that most days now, he spent most of his time on his favorite sofa, napping away – sleep his only way to escape the sudden decline of his wife.
