“My Favorite Son”

“Ole Vernon has got hisself killed out on 89.” The man who delivered the news did not couch his words with sympathy or sound like the close friend of my dad’s he claimed to be. When I heard those words repeated after Mom and I returned to Prescott, I wondered who will die next?

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places, but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings.

Less than three months after Renée died, a loud knock in the middle of the night woke Mom and me, and I jumped to the floor from the top bunk, following her to peer from the corner. Two Las Vegas police officers stood at the door.

At that time, Mom worked in the records department of the Las Vegas Police Department. These men had arrived to deliver bad news in person. In person because they knew her, and also because we didn’t have a telephone.

Their message: Jay, my dad’s oldest brother was on his way from Reno to get Mom and me, to take us to Prescott. My dad had been killed in an automobile accident that afternoon. The man driving the other car died too, though his niece and nephew with him had survived.

The day after Renée’s funeral, my mother found some quote in a book that she picked up and opened, randomly placing her finger on a page and reading the words. Interpreting what she read on that page as a sign, preparation even, she became certain that she would die soon. Sharing this revelation with my dad, she appeared illuminated, almost giddy and relieved to have found an explanation for why Renée died.

“I’m going to die soon, and I won’t be here to take care of Renée.” When I heard Mom say those words, I was terrified.

Though my mother believed a motherless child bears the heaviest loss in life, (because her mother had died when she was seven years old), I witnessed how a mother who loses a child lives with a hollowed-out emptiness inside till she dies.

As I watched their animated exchange, my dad shook his head. How often he teased Mom saying, “Smart people are so stupid.” Only this time, he wrapped his arms around her and held her, trying his best to share and shoulder her grief.

Unfazed by her superstitious warning, he may have considered her irrational interpretation of what she had read some form of rational grief.

With Vernon gone just three months after Renée died, Mom convinced herself that the words had been a sign for him––a message sent to warn of his imminent departure. Not hers.

This second blow fell with swift force. My dad died instantly, the police report said, reassuring his family that he did not suffer. He could not have been rescued from the wreck.

A Different Story

According to my dad’s youngest brother Ray, he and my dad left the Pinon Pines bar at Granite Dells in separate cars heading north toward the airport. Ray said they were drag racing. It was a Sunday afternoon. The date, March 20––11 days past my dad’s thirtieth birthday.

“Birthdays,” my mom said, “are critical times.”

Despite her firm belief that people often died around their birthdays, insurance company actuarials show that people die without correspondence to their birthday. The explanation for believing that people die near their date of birth is that people pay more attention when death occurs near birthdays.

Forget facts and statistics. Once held, Mom’s superstitious beliefs proved hard to dislodge.

At “the House”

When Mom and I arrived in Prescott, we went straight to my granddad’s house.

“The House” was the epicenter for family life in Prescott. Everyone gathered at the house granddad had built for his second wife, Julia, who was his first wife’s sister. Pearl had died when his first five children were young.

Granddad and Aunt Julia had three other children together. Their youngest son, my Uncle Jimmy, was only four years older than me.

The Reeves family were descendants of Isaac Samuel Reeves, who was born in Granville, North Carolina in 1720.  From there, the family made their way first to Alabama and then to Arkansas where my great-grandfather Thomas Redden Reeves was born in 1874, the oldest of thirteen children. He and his wife Mary Elizabeth Norman (b. 1873) bore five sons and one daughter. Two of their sons were my grandfathers, brothers Hiram Franklin Reeves (Vernon’s dad) and Joel Monroe Reeves (my mom’s dad).

A pioneer and early settler in Arizona, my granddad, Frank Reeves (b. 1904), became a landowner and a contractor who built custom homes in Prescott. He owned the Miller Valley Builder’s Supply. I remember walking into his store like I owned the place. The Coke machine with a lever required a dime to dispense the soft drink, but it was always free for me. Christened first and favorite grandchild on both sides of the family, his first grandchild, I had been born on Frank Reeves’s birthday, which made me feel special.

My granddad, Hiram Franklin Reeves, and me

Auntie told Mom and me her part of the story.

“Aunt Julia was lying on the couch when I got to the House.” She said my granddad and Aunt Julia had just gotten home from deer hunting. “I asked Aunt Julia, ‘How am I going to tell Uncle Frank that Vernon has been killed?’ Aunt Julia came up off the couch.”

“Uncle Frank was sitting at the kitchen table eating cheese,” Auntie said. “I walked into the kitchen and he said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I told him about the phone call, and he said, ‘When did it happen?’ And I said a few minutes ago. He threw his glasses across the room.”

“I’m going out there,” and Auntie went with him.

“We met the ambulance bringing Vernon’s body into town. The police tried to stop us [at the scene of the accident] as the wrecked cars were still there. They recognized Uncle Frank and motioned us to park.”

(Everyone in Prescott, it seemed to me, knew my granddad.)

Later that afternoon, Uncle Frank and Unc, Auntie’s husband, went to the Hampton Funeral home on Cortez Street near the Prescott Courthouse Square.

“They knew Uncle Frank,” Auntie said, referring to the men at the funeral home. The doors opened to my granddad before he had gotten out of the passenger seat in his El Camino.

“They begged him not to look,” Auntie said, “but he and Carroll [Unc] did.”

“Uncle Frank lifted Vernon’s body in his arms and kept saying, ‘He was my favo-RITE son, my favo-RITE son . . .,’” [the last syllable sound like kite].

“Carroll said it was just awful.”

Nearby, two of my granddad’s other sons stood. Watching. Hearing. Hurting.

Accident Details

Out on Highway 89, the skid marks from my dad’s two-toned blue 1954 DeSoto went for 144 feet to the collision point. The car’s brakes worked but the steering mechanism failed when, according to police reports, the driver hit a highway marker, which then lodged up under the car, cutting the fluid line. The passenger side was crushed, broadsided by the station wagon the other man drove. Although the windshield cracked, it had remained intact. My dad’s body landed outside the vehicle, coming to rest on the pavement, near where the two cars had collided.

The police told my granddad that my dad had died instantly. I remember hearing people say that dying instantly was a good thing.

More than anything else, I remember hearing that nobody believed his brother Ray’s story, for both he and my dad had been drinking before the accident. Ray said they were drag racing when Vernon lost control of his car. But Ray disappeared from the scene on foot and no other car was found nearby.

My dad had driven stock cars at local races, a part-time hobby. He was a good driver, Mom said. No, he was a great driver!

“Out on the old Wickenburg Highway, Vernon was driving too fast to make the curve.” My mom kept repeating a story of when my dad drove a car to the bottom of a canyon, and though the car was demolished, she said my dad got out without a scratch.

“Brake into the curve and accelerate out,” Mom repeated, reinforcing the driving lesson my dad had given her, stressing those same words to pass on that lesson to me.

My dad had always made me feel safe. I thought he was invincible.

My mother would not permit me to attend my dad’s funeral. She told me it was because I did not go to Renée’s, even though she hadn’t given me a choice. Instead of going to the funeral and cemetery, I stayed at the House, lying in Aunt Shirley’s bed, my dad’s youngest sister, the sheets pulled up over my nose, staring at the open closet door where the top shelf held Shirley’s coveted Madame Alexander doll collection, each in the original box.

Thinking about the verses in the Bible that describe faith, how with the faith of a tiny mustard seed, you could move mountains and raise the dead, I visualized the mountain behind my granddad’s house. I imagined getting out of bed, seeing myself leave out the backdoor, crossing the field beyond the back fence and trying. Trying to move that mountain. If you really believe, I told myself, you should at least try.

Instead, I lay frozen, adding another layer of guilt. This time, not for anything I had done, but for what I failed to do. Acquainted with grief and loss and death since Renée died, these moments of regret and missed opportunities haunted me. I started accumulating a sense of responsibility for things completely beyond my control.

Picturing that scene forever after––the people, the furniture, and the fireplace at the House, the parakeet in the cage set on the hearth that I talked to each time I visited––the living room had seemed massive compared to our cellblock apartment and the adults who lived in the House had seemed infallible.

Took this picture last week in a shop in La Veta, CO. Not a parakeet, but serves as a timely reminder.

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A Mountain of Meaning