Mostly The Truth

My chest was constricted. I had to struggle to force the air in and out of my lungs in successive intervals. The old man sat, looming as big as evil itself, on the front porch of his house next door. It was old man Langley

Suddenly he and I were the only two people in a very small universe, and I knew he wanted to kill me. I furiously peddled my tricycle down the broken slabs of the sidewalk, pushing my legs harder than I thought possible. My lungs were bursting, and my heart pounded wildly. It was imperative that I escape from his sight; but, like in a dream when you try to move and can't, my legs were beginning to slow and were on the brink of totally refusing to cooperate.

Then the old man turned his grotesque head in my direction, evil emblazoned eyes beginning to burn my skin. The heat of the staring eyes was incredible, but I continued to jam my feet at the pedals. I thought I was going to reach the porch but a piece of broken concrete jumped up and turned my front wheel. Instantly, I was catapulted off the trike, head first into the coarse St. Augustine grass. Ignoring the razor jagged cuts of the serrated blades, and the bruises on my cheek and bare knees that took the brunt of the blow when I hit the ground, I quickly stood and flung myself beside the porch, beyond Langley's vision. His terrific gaze continued to search for me, but I remained stiff and silent in the shade of the porch to make sure he didn't physically move toward me. As I waited in the drenching wetness of my own sweat, I recalled the stern warning from my mother that morning as we came to visit the Tubertini's, "There's the man who killed your grandfather."

It was an old story, so infused in my thinking that I didn’t even remember the first time I heard it. It was part of my being, a salient part like an arm or leg. The family revealed it, remembered it, propagated its existence as though without it we would not be a family; that of a dark night in the thirties when an irate, irrational man, Langley, fired from the iron darkness indiscriminately toward my grandfather who was holding my uncle of three years old. He bled to death on a nearby porch begging his two oldest sons not to take Langley’s life, subsequently marring their own.

I never saw the grandfather because he left twelve years before I was born. But he was real and lived through the precious grandmother who loved her first grandson as much as she had loved the only husband she ever knew until her death, almost fifty years later, at eight-five. Often, since that horrendous day, when I first saw the sinister and withered form of Mr. Langley languishing on the small porch, I have studied the only picture made of my grandfather: a tall handsome man in a dark grey suit, leaning against a pine tree. In my mind, he was as different from his murderer as light is from dark. This contrast, I think, helped me to direct my later judgments about many things. As an adult, when I read, in the newspaper, of Mr. Langley’s needless and violet murder by thieves, I could feel a sense of sadness. I thought of his deceased grandson who, ironically, became my very best friend before we knew each other’s history.