The Letter

It came in the mail last week, an official letter from the government. I put it on the table with the rest of the bills. I just was not ready to deal with it. I’m still not ready. In June for the last couple of years, the letter has arrived like clockwork. Everyday as I have re-sorted the mail trying to decide what to pay, I have been confronted with the letter. I get a knot in my stomach when I think about opening it and the old wounds.

In December of 1976, my world turned upside down. The month started badly and only got worse. Two of my dogs were injured in a very rare and freak attack. One of them, Dago, was very special to me. Several years earlier my boyfriend, Danny, and I had rescued the wiry-haired pup from the highway. I had thrown open the passenger door and scooped him inside just seconds before he would have become road kill. Since then, my whisker dog had thanked me daily with his presence and protection. In that first week of December, a mountain lion had traveled southward along the railroad tracks, mauling and mutilating pets and livestock. Dago, who had a bit of a Napoleon complex, fought fiercely to defend his neighborhood, but was no match for the lion. Dago spent almost a week in the hospital due to the loss of both ears, and severe facial and shoulder wounds. Blackie, my not-so-bright hound, faired much better. He received only superficial wounds on his hind flanks as he made a hasty retreat. I was happy to have them both home and safe.

My attention turned to preparations for a trip to the Soviet Union with my college Russian Civilization class. With only one week before departure, Mother and I had been shopping all day that second Friday in December. Normally Mother worked full time in my dad’s pawn shop. But being the owner’s wife had a few perks like occasionally playing hooky. When we arrived home, Mother called the pawn shop to remind my dad that they were supposed to go visit his dad in the hospital. That week, our family had a close call with my granddaddy. As far back as I can remember, Granddaddy had had a cigar growing out of the side of his mouth as a permanent fixture. He finally removed the cigar when the doctors removed his jaw and the cancer attached to it. The prognosis for him looked good.

Mother was calling to remind Dad about their plans. Usually the pawn shop closed by five and after a quick beer at his favorite local pub, Dad would wander home. To make it on time for the visiting hours, he would need to take the direct route home. I was in the kitchen when mother made the telephone call. After her first words, I knew something was wrong.
Dad’s small store, Bank Pawn Shop, had only three full time employees besides my family. Willis and Dee worked in the front part of the store with the guns, knives, and jewelry. Debby and my mother worked in the office at the rear of the store. My dad was the jeweler and pawnbroker and the personality that kept everything afloat. His casual customers called him “Mr. Banks.” The long time customers called him “Mr. Mac.” But for those who really knew him, he was Perry McClinton. That Friday, things had been slow so Dad let Dee and Willis leave early. At a few minutes before five o’clock, Dad and Debby were in the closing ritual: all diamonds and guns of value had to be put in the vault every evening; money counted; and the window displays had to be emptied. Alarms, steel bars and iron mesh were not enough of a deterrent for would-be burglars. Normally it took about thirty minutes to shut the store down. When the two men walked through the double doors, Debby was reaching into the window display closing jewelry containers. Dad had walked into the vault to put away a tray of blue velvet boxes, but heard the bells jingle as the men walked inside. One of them stood near the door looking around at the work boots and toolboxes. The other man looked in the glass display cases as he ambled toward the rear of the store. Dad called for Debby to come to the vault. He then he left the ornamental iron-caged office to wait on the men. As he had for the past fifteen years, Dad stood waiting patiently, watching the customers browse through the two long aisles of the store. He was suspicious of these men; they never made eye contact; they walked without purpose. Over the years, there had been several attempts to reach over the case to snatch, grab, and dash. Some had even been successful, therefore Dad tried to watch carefully. After a few minutes of “shopping,” the men again assumed their original positions with one man at the front door. The other one approached my dad at the display case where the handguns were housed. The young black man—later identified as Leon Foy - leaned forward, elbows on the counter, and mumbled something to my dad. Then as if in slow motion, Foy stepped back and pulled his revolver. With no time to wage the consequences, my dad, a short man with the severe Napoleon complex that seemed to run in our family, acted from the gut and pulled a .38 Smith & Wesson from his pocket. Unfortunately, Foy had already taken aim. All but one of my dad’s shots went wild as Foy accurately unloaded his gun into my dad. The wounded assailant and accomplice fled from the store empty handed as Debby screamed into the telephone for help. Daddy slumped to the floor, never losing consciousness.

It was a strange voice that answered the phone. The pawn shop was laid back and any of Dad’s friends might answer the telephone in a pinch, but all knew to say, “Bank Pawn Shop” when greeting a customer. Instead of the customary greeting, Mother heard a tentative hello. She said, “Let me speak to Perry. . . . This is Doris. Who is this? . . . I’m his wife, Doris McClinton! Who are you? What’s going on?”

Mother went pale as her color drained. She held on to the receiver waiting for someone with authority or information to come to the telephone. She looked at me and whispered that something had happened. I stood with my heart in my throat watching, trying to read her face.
“This is Doris, Perry’s wife. . . . What has happened?”

The conversation was short. Returning the receiver to the cradle, mother turned to me and said in clipped, controlled words, “There’s been a shooting. Your daddy is on the way to the hospital. We have to leave right now. You’ll have to drive.”

“Has Daddy been shot?” I whispered.

“Yes.” I could barely speak. “How is he?” I asked.

“I don’t know, they said we need to hurry.” Mother was eerily calm going through the motions of getting her coat and purse.

“I can’t drive, Mother. I can’t.” I hurriedly called Danny who lived a few minutes away. He wasn’t in from work yet so his dad volunteered to drive us to the hospital. Mother and I rode like zombies in the car as he took his dear sweet time on the back roads to downtown. He chattered constantly totally unperturbed by the situation. My irritation with him kept my thoughts occupied. The obvious was too difficult to handle.

When we arrived at the hospital, it was not like in the movies. The people were not nice and helpful. They were too busy trying to save my dad’s life to care about our concerns. They said they were getting ready to wheel him into surgery and “no” we could not see him. I needed to say so many things. In the movies, they always have closure.

As we stood in the emergency room hallway talking to the doctor, I caught a glimpse of my daddy’s gurney heading to surgery. I knew with one quick glance why she did not want us to see him. His crimson face was caked with dried blood. I could see the hole in his neck. Breathe, breathe.

Doctors use a roundabout way of saying but not saying things. The doctor said that I might want to call in the family. As she walked away, a nurse presented me with the bag of Daddy’s clothes. His pants, shirt, underwear, and even belt had been cut from his body. Bullet holes were in every piece of material. The clothes smelled of blood. They were saturated with it. I felt nauseous and faint. I looked at my mother and realized I had to be strong. It was my turn to take care of her. For the first time in my twenty-one years, I had to be the parent.
In the waiting room, my mind raced. Who did I need to call? Aunt Lillian. She was loved by everyone and knew everyone’s telephone number. She would get the word out to my mother’s family and give me any phone numbers that I needed. My dad’s sisters both lived out of state and his mom was visiting the one in New Orleans. How do you tell someone that her brother would probably be dead by the time she arrived? When Grandma answered the phone, I tried to go through the pleasantries but she knew something from my voice. I thought it would be better for my aunt to break the news because at the time I thought 66 was old and fragile.
Each telephone call became easier as I became numb. Each repeating became less real, more surreal, a story — someone else’s story. Within an hour, family started arriving at the emergency room. Before the night was over, the almost fifty friends and family could not fit into the waiting room. We overflowed into the cafeteria where everyone tried to ignore the elephant in the room. As with a wake, there were lots of stories. Perry stories. “Doris, do you remember when Perry . . . blah, blah, blah?” Laughter would erupt, nervous laughter. Periodically a doctor or nurse would come talk to us for a minute and give encouragement as to how the surgery was going. The men tried to alleviate tension with nervous talk and laughter. The women seemed much more comfortable with silence. Daddy’s best friends, neighbors, my mother’s brothers, my cousins that he had employed at the pawn shop through their teenage years, people whose lives he had touched over the years banded to hold my family together.

Sometime during the wee hours of the morning, a surgeon said my dad might live. The surgery was not over but Daddy had been very lucky. He had been shot six times with a total of eight holes in his body. There were holes from his neck to his thigh. Some bullets had shattered in him, while others went through him. By the grace of God, no major organ, other than a lung, had been hit. Daddy would carry a bullet in his lung for the rest of his life. The surgeon said my dad should have died from so many shots at close range and they were still looking for fragments. He had lost a lot of blood. They would know more by morning. My first deep breath in eight hours almost overloaded my oxygen-deprived brain. I felt weak to my knees. I hadn’t cried yet. I couldn’t cry yet, I still had to be strong for my mother.

About daylight, Daddy was critical but stable. In less than a week he would walk out of the hospital to my car. On the way home, we detoured by the pub for his beer and for him to show his war wounds. Daddy said he wanted to see which holes were going to leak.
For nearly a week, I tried everything possible to get out of the trip to the Soviet Union. How could I go? Everything in me wanted to grasp firmly to my life and not let go. Dago, my granddad and my dad were all in their respective homes recuperating. We survived the first two weeks of December. Mother said if I could get the money back from the travel company, I could stay home. Fate took control and two days after Daddy left the hospital I left for the Soviet Union. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as I thought.

I didn’t know anyone in my Russian Civilization class. The other students were primarily married couples and instructors. I felt so alone. There wasn’t a soul to comfort or console me until I met Fraser in Leningrad. He was from Georgia, the American state, not the Russian. We played in the snow, were chased by the KGB through Gorky Park, and stood in line for hours to see Lenin’s Tomb. When my call home assured me that my dad was alive and well, I relaxed and fell in love.

Three days before Christmas, I arrived home from Moscow. I was excited to show my gifts and souvenirs to the family. Everyone was in the living room, except Dago. When I called for him, the room went silent. He had died. The autopsy showed gangrene had reached his brain. I had reached my breaking point. The tide of pain and fear that had ebbed in my heart now flowed from me. I finally cried. For three months I cried.

It’s all coming back, it’s all coming back to me now.
The letter is still on the table waiting, intimidating. The Alabama Department of Corrections Parole Board. For over twenty years, I had not given a thought to Leon Foy. For the last two years as an “interested party” I am forced to relive one of the worst times of my life. If I had a crystal ball, maybe I would know what to do. I don’t want to go to his hearing. I don’t even want to write a letter to the board although every other day my mother asks if I have mailed one yet. How do I know if he has served enough time? He did not even go to trial for my dad’s shooting. He was convicted of murdering a customer at a different store that he robbed. I am reasonably sure that the murdered victim’s family would still oppose his release. My dad, who died from an unrelated illness, has been dead almost as long as Foy has been in jail. My wounds and anger are gone now. As much as the memories hurt, I only have to deal with them that month in the summer. If Daddy had died from the shooting, I probably would feel differently now. But the more I think about it, I realize everything my dad did after the shooting was colored by that traumatic incident in his life. In return, I reacted to the ups and downs he suffered. At a time when I had never heard of the problem, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I was living with a sufferer. Some of the most awful things that happened in my life and in our family can be traced to my dad’s near death experience. Do I want to punish Foy for my first marriage and divorce? Or the onset of my dad’s middle-age crazy phase? Then there was the sense of immortality that my dad achieved from his survival. If six bullets could not get him, why should he worry about his blood pressure? I guess I am still angry at Foy. He is alive and my dad is not.

Maybe Foy has changed, jailhouse religion. We never got a letter of apology though. He had no skills to make a living at twenty years of age, what is he like at forty-five? How has he spent these last twenty years that my dad and his other victim did not get to enjoy? Did he put himself through college with the law books in the prison’s library? Why did he get to live? How many lives does one have to destroy before . . . ? There are so many questions left unanswered, but the answers won’t bring back my dad or change the past.

My sister called to see if I had mailed my letter to the parole board. She too was in a quandary, not sure what to do. I guess I had hoped Joanna, a psychiatric nurse, would tell me what to do. My mother tells me everyday what to do. She would like to rip Foy’s head off, where as my sister and I would just prefer to stick our heads in the sand and never have to hear his name again. If they let him out of jail, I won’t receive any more letters. Then again, if they let him out he might just be on the evening news.

When in doubt, don’t. I didn’t know what to write to the parole board, so I didn’t write anything. In fact, I never even opened the letter this year. After a few weeks of being shuffled with the bills, the letter found its way to the burn pile. Outside, the fire licked up the letter and other discarded papers. My anger burned again, fueled by years of repressed rage. It will never be over. It will never be over.

My life today is intertwined and entangled with that fateful Friday in December; all the memories and all the consequences. Only a few more months and it will be summer again. The government letter will be here soon, with all the memories and pain. Once again, I will cry.