A real Man of God Malice in Wonderland a real man of god
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RIVER OF TEARS PRESTONSBURG 1993
But is it time enough to lay the dead to rest? Floyd County residents might discover the answer to that question today when -- finally -- they gather as a community to memorialize the victims of a bus accident that occurred 35 years ago. The commemorative service marks the anniversary of the nation's deadliest school-bus crash. Thirty-five years ago this morning, Bus No. 27 swerved off old U.S. 23 and plunged into the swollen Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River near Prestonsburg, carrying 26 children and the driver to their deaths. This is the first time Floyd residents have not just let the day slip by unnoticed. If you think 35 years is a strange interval at which to observe an anniversary for the first time, you should know it has taken this long for many Floyd Countians to find the heart to relive the tragedy. "Really, it should have been done sooner, I guess," says Virginia S. Goble, who lost three children in the wreck. "But the grief was just too intense." Neely George, a member of the committee that organized the service, says acknowledging the anniversary has required no fewer than "35 years of healing." Even now, the tragedy seems so close. Too close. "It seems like just a few days ago," says James E. Carey, who lost his only son in the accident. Donald Dillon, a survivor who cheated the river that day to become a coal miner, says, "It really don't seem that long. "It don't seem like I'm as old as I am." Dillon, a retired tipple mechanic, is losing much of his hair. John Adams, who was a rookie state trooper when he arrived at the scene, is a graying car salesman drawing retirement from the state. And Petty Thompson, a retired food-service representative who left his potato chip truck parked along the road for a week while he assisted tirelessly in the rescue effort, says he doesn't hear as well as he used to. Those who died in the river never will know the ravages of time, however. Some didn't even outgrow their baby fat. "You still think about it," Carey said, "and you still miss the children. Although they wouldn't be children now, you still think of them like that." Virginia Goble's husband, James B. Goble, 81, sits in a vinyl rocking chair beneath framed black-and-white photos of the three children he lost: James Edward, 12; John Spencer, 11; and Anna Laura, 9. He remembers watching John Spencer, who had lost part of an arm in a fall, gently pick bees off summer clover with the hook that had replaced his hand. But his most vivid memory of James Edward is of being the first to spot the boy floating on the brown river. "Pleasant thoughts were going through my head," Goble says, "because I had finally found my son." "I see my boy," Goble told another rescue worker. "How can you recognize him from this distance?" the other man asked. "From the clothes he's wearing," Goble said softly, already beginning to move their boat toward the form on the water. Nobody knows why the bus swerved across the road and over the steep river bank. Adams was the first state trooper to reach the scene, riding his '57 Chevy cruiser hard from the Pikeville post. "That probably was the fastest I've ever driven a police car," he said. Rescue workers already were on the scene. The bus was submerged in the river, which had risen 20 feet after two weeks of rain. The only hope left for parents whose children went down with the bus was that their bodies would be found. When the battered bus was hauled out of the water more than two days after the wreck, volunteers found only 15 bodies inside. It took another 69 days before the last child was found. One body made it as far as Auxier, six or seven miles away. The recovery effort continued night and day, with Rev. Dan Heintzelman using a public address system atop his jeep to keep onlookers abreast of developments. Goble worked 58 days on the river, taking time out from recovering bodies only to attend his children's funerals. He and his wife were one of three families to lose all of their children. Petty Thompson's son, Kenneth, would have been on the bus had he not awakened with a sore throat that morning and stayed home from school. Today, Kenneth Thompson sells Fords, Lincolns and Mercurys at a dealership in Portsmouth, Ohio. The crowds along the river bank slowly dwindled as more and more bodies were found. But the number of onlookers would increase each weekend as residents of nearby towns chose to spend their days off from work watching. Once, a barge churned up a body, a foot bobbing to the surface of the water. Floyd County Judge-Executive John M. Stumbo, then a member of the school board, noticed the black shoe still was laced.
"The whole community came together -- both political parties, all the churches," he said. Born in the ensuing chaos was the Floyd rescue squad, the first of its kind in the area and a model for other volunteer outfits that followed. Graham Burchett, a driving force behind the recovery effort, did not even take time out to attend funerals for his two nieces. "Too busy working on the river, " he said. About 10 years after the wreck, Burchett and the rescue squad proposed putting up a memorial at the accident site, but parents balked. They did not want a constant reminder. The little things are enough: The rise and fall of the river. Drives past the scene. Dillon tries not to think about the accident, he says. Until this year, attempts to memorialize victims of the accident were futile. "Why did you wait 35 years?" Heintzelman asked organizers. But he knew the answer. "I guess maybe up to 10 years ago, when somebody talked to me about the bus tragedy, it choked me up," he said. Heintzelman broke even as he spoke last week. "We cannot wipe it out of our minds," he said. George, who helped organize today's service, said, "We see this as part of the healing process." It will "bring the memories back," Dillon said. "But I guess that's for the best sometimes." OF LULLABIES AND BABY'S BLUE EYES LEXINGTON 1994
''Don't push,'' he told your mommy. ''Blow it away,'' he said as another contraction began. That night: Except for your soft face and thick, dark hair, the thing I remember most is the doctor's hand. The same hand he had used to comb his hair, brush his teeth, take out the garbage, scratch his head, knock back a drink. Now he was using it to alter the course of history, to stop the rush of time the way Superman stops a speeding bullet. What did you miss in those lost moments? How many waves crashed ashore, how many raindrops fell? All this I wonder as I stand at the kitchen window, five months later. Time slips away. Winter is pallid and bare. I hold you up so you can peer out. How far can a baby see?
''Sounds like the wind,'' your mommy said. The sound track of your birth odyssey was a rushing noise. Now the fetal heart monitor was making it. The machine had lost its tenuous bead on your tiny rhythm section; you were tossing and turning too much. Your mommy and I had heard the same whooshing sound the night before as the storm of the summer approached. Sitting at the dinner table, we had listened to the wind outside as your mommy -- nine months pregnant with you -- winced, pausing over her red beans and rice. That seemed a long time ago now. Here it was, seventeen hours later -- and nothing. Storm damage on the noon news. We watched on a cheap Zenith: Streets, brimming with rainwater, had become rivers; trees, shorn of branches, had become telephone poles. And you -- had you heard something in that wind calling your name? Your mommy's labor pains seemed to have blown over with the storm. ''Nothing on,'' she said, using the remote to turn off the television. Not much later, the doctor zapped us, too. ''Baby's head's gone north,'' he said. ''Let's cancel and let you go home.'' It seemed the wait never would end. But here we are today, you and I, holding each other tight for lost time, Sunday afternoons and the warmth of your cheek on mine. We don't embrace our youth until it comes back to us in adulthood, tickling our neck and reminding us just what a miracle life is. We got a different room when we returned to the hospital seven hours later. Time crawled -- enough for a baseball game. Extra innings. Braves over the Reds in 10. Around midnight, my palms started to sweat. Complications, the nurse told us; you could be in danger. Something about merconium. The doctor would be ready to suction out your tiny nose, mouth and throat before you drew your first breath. Just one problem: Nobody knew where he was. The nurses began to scramble. There were OB/GYN sightings: Somebody had spotted the doctor in the building earlier, hadn't they? Where was he now? Had he fallen asleep on the couch in the doctor's lounge? Had he been called away to deal with some life-and-death situation in his own family? The top of your head was visible. I had a knot in my stomach and the copper taste of anxiety on my tongue. And that's when it happened: The doctor sauntered in, put his hand flat against your head and held you back. The nurse's hands began to shake. I couldn't breath too well as I watched her, trembling, try to fit the end on a tube that could save your life. ''Relax'' the doctor told her. This can't be happening, I thought. The question of whether you would be a boy or girl was lost in the worry: Would you be at all? Everything I saw seemed to be in slow motion. The room was going gray. Gray. Then: Someone was saying something. ''It's a girl.'' The world came flooding back. Colors filled my eyes. I looked at your face, at your toes. The doctor laughed; the television still was on, and David Letterman had just pulled his hair out. I laughed, too, surprised at how easily and loudly it came. My eyes met the doctor's, and he lowered his head quickly as if somewhere over my shoulder he had happened to glance down the horrible, wonderful maw of eternity. Maybe we all had. Just a few moments before, at 12:31 a.m. Saturday, June 20, 1992, I had seen the future. It is wonderful, I tell you. And frightening. And filled with talking animals and mutant heroes and the fragile wish to fly like a bird . . . I brought you home on Father's Day, something to wear around my neck. Now you lay your head on my shoulder, so gentle on my face. The things I wonder: Who will you be? What will you do? No lullaby is soft enough, no lifetime long enough. Will your eyes still be blue when you break your first heart? And will that heart be mine? HAIL AND FAREWELL LEXINGTON 1995
From the pages of your good-bye letter. Nobody else could have known the language of our newly broken family, so it was with the wind alone that our house shared its secret history that night, whispering from the chimney of all the memories and dreams my mother was burning. This is what happened the night of the day you left: Back and forth she walked, from the bedroom she had shared with you for 15 years to the fireplace in the family room, where once we had roasted marshmallows on the ends of straightened-out wire shirt hangers. Back and forth, in the halls, all night. Carrying armloads of everything imaginable from the bedroom to the fireplace just to dump it into the flames. I caught glimpses of her from my bed as she rounded the corner outside my room. I heard her talking, talking, though no one was there. I saw her head bent low as if she were in a hurry. Later that summer, the summer Elvis died, I came to know without a doubt that, at age 15, my childhood was behind me. But that night, I still wondered: where were you and when would you be coming home. Some things, some souvenirs of that life, my sister and I found unharmed in the days and weeks and months that followed, and we tucked them away so they would not be discovered and burned, too. (I’m sure my mother spared them only through some oversight.) I took these things along as I started my own family years later. One of them is a fading, black-and-white photograph of you and Mom on some lost, summer day -- before either my sister or I was born. I found it again, just the other day, as my own kids played in the other room, shrieking and laughing. I went on, long ago, to build a new life without you, then to build a new life without either you or Mom. How many lives we live only to die once. The square-jawed man and brown-haired pretty-girl in the yellowing photo no longer exist, and they certainly didn’t exist anymore the day you left notes for all of us and walked out of our lives. But once upon a time it was this way: the sun shining bright, the shadows deep in your letter sweater (the one she is wearing in the photo), your arms around each other. She sat on a fence rail, her legs crossed. You stood beside her, your hand on her knee. Your eyes were on her, a half smile on your face, the sun forever and always on your nose and cheek and chin. And she, looking ahead, out of the picture, a smug-happy smile on her face. As if she knew all the secrets but the ones that counted.
To look at the bright but fading day framed within those scalloped borders makes me ache the way I ache when I see the ocean at night. The way I ache when I sneak into my babies’ room and watch them sleep. The way I ache sometimes on a Sunday afternoon, or when I hear a soft, summer rain on the roof. Strange: I see photos of my late grandfather, the man I called Grimpy and loved so, and I smile; he lived life long, then death took him gentle. Couldn’t be helped. But what became of the people in this photo? Where do the innocent go? All I know is: The photo has a profound hold on me. I stare at it spellbound as I might a museum piece. Time is the truest artist. The lengthening of shadows, the flight of years, the knowledge that nothing lasts: these are what give the world its most breathtaking beauty. “Only the days are long,” John Barrymore said. “The years move on hidden wheels.” Now, years later, you knock at my door, a grandfather: once coal-black hair now sparse and sprinkled with gray; the square jaw softened. Happy Father’s Day, I say as the kids run up to see you. It’s funny, the things we remember finally. Of everything that happened in our house on Roxburg Drive -- that house you finally left us in -- I still carry this image: Cabinets closing by themselves. Things getting moved around. Remember? Haunted house, we used to say in better times, and we would laugh. It’s not surprising, now, thinking back on it, that our house would have been possessed. I don’t have to remind you of all that died there: love and family; the brown-haired pretty-girl; her square-jawed man. The dead, they just vanish. It’s the living that leave ghosts. Best of 1993, 1994 
WHEN GOOD PREVAILS LEXINGTON 1994
Hell’s flag. Cobb was convicted Thursday of murdering his first wife, Lisa Cobb,on March 3, 1984, by tossing a hair dryer ino the tub as she bathed. His “inner demons” took over, he testified, when he happened to glance across the room as he sat on the toilet washing his wife’s hair and saw the tag on the dryer’s cord -- the one that warns of electrical shock. “Now is the time to do it,” the demons said. And Hal Mark Cobb, a church music minister looking for a way out of a marriage devoid of song, paused ... A warning label became an invitation to kill. The devil sat on the toilet. The chill of Lisa Cobb’s murder is the wind that blows out of a sky without a heaven. At a glance, it would seem everything sacred died in that bathroom in south Lexington. How can a man wash his wife’s hair so tenderly while contemplating her murder? How can a man of God drop a humming hair dryer into hiw fie’s bath as their infant daughter plays only inches away? How can innocence survive in a world in which, toe-to-toe in a cramped space, evil can whip good so soundly?
“Someone has said they think Daddy might have done it,” Kear told Chelsea. The girl is Hal Mark Cobb’s daughter -- the child who played in the bathroom that day 10 years ago when her father electrocuted her mother. “The police are looking into it,” Kear told Chelsea, “but unless they can prove anything, we’ll assume he didn’t do it.” Kear was Cobb’s second wife. They married in August 1985, seperated in 1988, were divorced in 1990. “Our marriage broke up because he wanted to live a gay lifestyle,” Kear has said. Until police began investigating Lisa Cobb’s death in 1992, Chelsea had no idea her father might have killed her mother, Kear said. Neither did Kear. All they knew was this: “The same story the rest of the world had been told,” Kear said -- the one in which the Cobbs’ siamese cat knocked the hair dryer into the tub. Chelsea does not remember her mother, has no memory of playing on the floor of that bathroom or being whisked away from the tub by her father and bounced on his knee as her mother’s life ebbed. The Kears didn’t even tell the girl her father was a suspect until they has checked with a child psychologist. But Chelsea has taken it all in stride. “She’s doing great,” Kear said. She keeps pictures of her biological mother and has one of her father. It sits on her dresser -- at least it was last time Kear checked. The photo shows Chelsea and Hal Mark Cobb on the porce before her first day of first grade. The Kears only told Chelsea Thursday night that there had been a trial and that the man in the picture had been found guilty of murdering her mother. They did not want to distract her from her school work. Chelsea is a good student, and popular. She is class secretary, too. She has long, blond hair, blue eyes and dreams of an acting career -- as her father once did before a jury, after watching him cry on the witness stand for five hours without once having to wipe a tear from his eyes, gave the last act of Hal Mark Cobb twelve thumbs down. “She’s beautiful,” Kear says of Chelsea. “The older she gets, the more she’s beginning to look a lot like her mother.” This year Chelsea has the lead role in her school’s Christmas play, The Gift of the Magi. It is a story of prevailing innocence and love triumphant. THE HEART IS THE LAST TO GO LOUISVILLE 1994
Of course that wasn’t about to happen. It was clear there would be no going out of turn. Only one living thing in that dim apartment was eaten up with cancer. Only one was on the verge of going away wherever, forever. “Know who this is?” Freddy asked his dying mother, pointing to me. “Is this Robbie?” “I should hope so,” Granny whispered. We all strained to hear -- what? Has any of us ever before listened so closely to Granny? To anyone? It’s all about wasted time. Standing on the precipice of the stillness and the void, suddenly we find we are not alone. Something was in the bedroom that day -- something unseen and abiding, at peace with the centuries and the chill of a late wind. We were there for Granny. We were there for each other. Until now, I never thought my grandmother looked like an old lady. There were the clear, sharp eyes, the feisty spirit, the high cheekbones. The easy manner of someone who has enjoyed life. It had, after all, been a pretty fair existence: the glitz and glory of train rides, big cities, high heels and sunny days at the ball park -- all beside my grandfather during his days in the office of the old Louisville Colonels minor-league baseball team. But the woman in the bed, this woman who bore two daughters and a son, now wasn’t healthy enough to support even one life. Her 83-year-old body was failing. The thing she carried inside her this time, so late, was a killing thing, a shadow, where once, long ago, there had resided the precious lives of her babies. Those babies, now grown, and some with babies and grandbabies of their own, stood in front of their mother as the refrigerator in the kitchen hummed and the bananas in the bowl on the hutch grew brown. In so many ways the apartment was as it always had been, right down the bottle of Kentucky bourbon on the kictehn counter -- a common sight by my grandmother’s stove, especially when my grandfather was alive. All my life, wherever my grandmother lived in Louisville was ground zero for family. No matter where I’ve lived, no matter where my parents have lived, no matter what else was going on in my life. No matter. The woman on the couch in this overgrown river town was always waiting. Sitting there in her housecoat with her cigarettes and her iced coffee. We would flood the place at least once a year -- usually at Christmastime -- to eat ham and brownies with powdered sugar on top. But this time we weren’t here for Sunday dinner. I knew we never would be again. The woman on the couch had become the woman in the bed. Only one other stop remained. I was looking on my Granny for the last time, trying to remember the lines of her face, marking the rise and fall of her stomach as she breathed the last few times of all those millions of times. We had come here because Freddy had called to say if we wanted to see her alive one last time, we had better come now. It was late on a chilly afternoon. Shadows fell long across the ground outside. Traffic whispered along the road a few blocks away. The lights of the city were starting to come on. And here I was. I could see both bones in Granny’s arm. I didn’t see the horses, though. Of course, that didn’t mean they weren’t there. I knew Granny had seen them -- in her room, at Freddy’s house, wherever it was her mind wandered free these days. “You have to get those horses out of your yard,” she told Freddy, who had never kept anything more exotic than a rabbit. I had no reason to doubt the horses really existed somewhere in that in-between place where my Granny now rested. Maybe she was seeing something none of the rest of us could. There was the rabbit, too, of course, but he was real -- and Easter present from Freddy to his kids. When my eyes adjusted and I finally saw it sitting there on her bed, it seemed strange, out of place. Amid the contrived brightness of the room -- yellow walls and tulips; floral curtains, Granny’s new robe -- the drab, gray-and-white rabbit, sitting so still, seemed like something dropped in from another dimension, as if it had poppsed out of that long-ago world in the black-and-white photograph of my grandfather that sat propped on a table near the bed. “Want me to take the rabbit?” Freddy asked Granny. There was a pause. The woman in the bed raised her hand slowly, ran her long, bony fingers down the rabbit’s head between its ears. A couple weeks ago in the hospital, the day before the biopsy, Granny had wanted her hair done; that squishy hospital pillow had messed up the back. Now, somehow, she found the strength to pet a small, frightened animal destined to outlive her. Ovaries and colon, kidneys and stomach, the heart is the last to go. “Do you want me to take the rabbit?” Freddy asked again. The light in the window had faded to a dusky gray. The woman in the bed had only three more sunsets left before all those horses carried her away on the wind. “No,” she whispered. Yüklə 1,63 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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