Today's Reading
PART ONE
The Murder
"It's Him"
JANUARY 16, 1983
The day they found my great-grandfather's body, the Bayou Nezpique was draining. It was a cold, wet winter in Evangeline Parish—the gray weight of it seeping into each and every sodden air particle.
On the Nezpique Bridge, a ten-year-old boy stood with his father and mother, taking his turn testing the family's new hunting rifle.
It had rung true thus far, ripping through the beer cans, the dangling branches, a lone rubber boot buried on the bank. The boy pointed to a strange, dark mass at the bayou's center.
"What's that, Dad?"
"Hmm... dunno, son. Maybe someone killed a deer, dumped the carcass here. Why don't you see if you can shoot a hole in it?"
The new gun stood upright almost as tall as the boy. The father got down on one knee and helped him poke the barrel between the bridge's wooden rails. The boy closed one eye, leveled his aim.
"Now careful careful. Take your aim, and one... two... three... now, shoot."
The forest reverberated from the sound. The target careened, dipped, then bobbed in protest.
"Good job, boy."
Leaning over the railing, the father asked the mother, "What do you think it is?"
"Looks like trash to me," she said, prying the gun from her son's hands. A minute later, she split a hole beside his.
Squinting, the father noticed a rope, stretched taut around one end of the shadowy shape. Taking his turn, he found it in the scope. And he fired. The twine popped, and the black mass rolled.
He froze, "Is that..."
The woman's hand raised to her mouth. "That's... that's an ear."
It kept turning: an elbow; a hand; dark, wet hair.
She grabbed her son, whose face had faded dull as the sky. She spun him around, burying his head in her belly.
The man stared, stunned, at the crumpled body, and he recognized it. "That's Mr. Aubrey. It's him."
Tell Me Again
I don't know how old I was the first time i learned of my great-grandfather's murder, only that I was enough of a child that the telling was draped in the distance of "the olden days." The mythology, first delivered most likely by my father though I cannot remember for sure, was made louder in the way it was whispered—the way I understood that this is something we do not speak of.
And we didn't, for almost a decade afterward.
Even today—consumed as I am by the event's minutest details—a ghost version of my childhood imagination, illustrating the unsaid, lingers over the facts as I know them now:
Aubrey, "PawPaw" they called him, floating belly-up, arms outstretched, framed by lily pads and cattails. My father on a tall horse, discovering him.
Emily, my mawmaw, spread-eagle, tied by her wrists and ankles to her bedposts, wailing.
Now I know PawPaw Aubrey's resting place in the Bayou Nezpique1 was narrow, claustrophobic, more river than lake and more ditch than river. It was winter and everything was brown—the water, the leaves, the mud. My father never saw his grandfather's body. And MawMaw Emily—well, I know now that she asked the abductor if she could sit upright, ever dignified, on the bed's edge while he tied her wrists to the frame. I know that she insisted the man handled her "gently," and that she likely never even screamed.
Still, I can conjure these false scenes as readily as the new ones, as memories. The myth feels as real to me as the truth.
After all, even now, there is still so much we do not know.
...
