The 2nd
I just turned three months old when I killed my father. Now, to say that an infant is capable of murder is a stretch. A three month old has not been around on this earth long enough to love or to hate to the point that they could commit such a passionate crime. Man slaughter, on the other hand, it seems, is a completely different story.
It’s funny how the law can distinguish between man slaughter and murder. However you decide to label it the end result is the same. This time the result is my mother’s soft white hands, now crimson from the blood, smearing the tears as they try to make their way down her face. My father is split into uneven pieces in the driveway. You see, when a man is hit with two 40 caliber slugs at point blank range it isn’t like the movies. Your body doesn’t fly back 30 feet to a techno soundtrack. No, when you are hit with that blast your body tends to separate from itself.
The only thing traveling through the air is the smell of gun powder hanging thick around the scene like a morning mist. The screams of absolute terror are muffling the sounds of a new born neglected. An ambulance siren is now in the distance trying to add its frivolous wails to the already chaotic symphony. A mother, now widowed, a father, now slain, and a baby who is responsible for it all. This is how I entered the world.
And with a thud my father was gone from our lives. My brother, who was still a child himself was years away from being ready to be the man of the house. My mother, who hadn’t had to have a job for a year and a half would now have to find a way to support two children. A queen without her king and two princes who were years away from holding their own crowns would now have to be the inhabitants of an empty castle. Looking back on it now the scene almost seems beautiful to me. It always manages to play itself out in slow motion in my mind. The soundtrack to this repeating cinema, Ave Maria resonates as my mom rushes out the door only to be greeted with her deepest nightmares. The hell of her inner demons and her greatest concerns are waiting just outside and as she is running out they rush in to be her unwanted guests now. Unannounced company is always the worst the kind.
The ambulance has just pulled into the driveway. The police officers make a bee line for my mother, the paramedics for my father. Neither one of them are recoverable at this point. My brother appears from the house to meet the new guests. He is 9. At this point in his life things like this weren’t even shown on television yet. My mom rushes to protect him from seeing the carnage, forgetting that she herself is covered in it. Wiping blood across his face sends her into hysterics and one of the deputies has to bring my brother inside.
By now the neighbors have started to gather around to see what has happened. A few of them have already gotten sick from the scene and are doing their best relaying the play by play to the others. A couple more police officers show up and begin asking questions. One of the neighbors saw it all happen. “One second he was waiving to me and the next he wasn’t” seems to be all the older gentleman can muster at this point. The coroner arrives and makes his way over to the body. By now they have started compiling all of the pieces that had been scattered by the slugs. “How did this happen seem to be the question echoing from the crowd?” The crowd wouldn’t have had to look far to find the guilty party. The one person who was responsible for it all was inside waiting for the words to explain how something like this could have happened. I did it.
My father was a hunter, a true outdoorsman. He loved being in the woods and he really loved the thrill of the hunt. On this particular trip though time got the best of him and he found himself in a rush heading home. Forgetting to unload his gun before traveling home the safety had been switched off in transport. As he was unloading his firearm from the back of the station wagon the trigger caught on my stroller handle. With one swift pull his life ended. Now granted there may be an argument that there is no way that at three months old I could have done anything to have caused or prevented this. But, as I said, looking back now, at the age of twenty five, I still feel responsible. This is truly one of those existential moments where one event triggers a factorial affect of events that spin off of the main chain leading life down the path of the unknown and the unpredicted. Life as it turns out is just one large reaction to a previous reaction. Proactivity is just an illusion we trick ourselves into seeing so keep some sane rational on our fleeting moments on this earth.
Before me there was a sports car, a man who loved the outdoors and a woman who had been swept off of her feet. Then, my sheer existence transforms the sports car into a station wagon, the woman swept from her feet is now a mother buying a stroller to keep in that station wagon, and that man is my father trying to hold on to that one activity that made the week that much easier to get through. The sports car holds the stroller, which also holds the gun, which ends his life and there is me, my mom, and my brother slapped into the reality that life up to this point had for some reason been worth living.
Three days later the funeral was held. At the wake there were people from all over to wish my father one final farewell. He had managed to make quite a name for himself in the grocery business before his untimely demise. He had gone into business with his father, who we were both named after. There the three of us were. The first generation of Richards weeping burying his own son, the second generation, lie in the casket unaware of the emotions throughout the room and then there was me, the final generation, the only one who was wearing white to the funeral. In case you have never noticed, clothes manufacturers don’t make baby clothes in black. What a sad painting it must have been. Black suits, black dresses, tears, handkerchiefs, sorrow, pain, regret, and a baby who was dressed in white, just like it was any other day, burying the father that he would never know, burying the path that came before him. A pearl in the sea of life, swallowed up for the time being by the ebony waves of a passing storm. It was a true work of art. The three of us men, bound to each other by our own names, each staring a new world without each other directly in the eye and being scared absolutely shitless about it. I just didn’t know how frightening it would be at the time, I had the rest of my life for that.
My family owns a plot in a cemetery in New Orleans and the next day we all met there to bury a friend, a husband, a son, and a dad. The raised grave is a gorgeous gray marble. KAUFMANN is spelled out on the front of it, letting all those who pass by know that our family is lying beneath and next to them. My grandfather and his first wife had purchased the plot years ago and planning on the two of them being buried there, followed by my father, his wife, my father’s sister and her husband. Destiny it seemed had other plans for the plot when Richard Kaufmann Junior, not senior, was the first name to be carved into the headstone. [Find Dad’s B-day] – February 21, 1983 was all the inscription said. A sad reminder that at the end of it all sometimes all we are on this planet is two dates. A reminder to each of us that despite all of our accomplishments, despite all of our best efforts to leave a mark on those around us and to our life’s work the cliff-notes to our existence can easily be broken down to born on this date and died on this. Well fuck that. I want my tombstone to read. Richard Kaufmann III lived. And when I was here on the earth, let those who loved me remember those times and let the rest of the world wonder.
To say that my life began amongst less than happy circumstances we should agree at this point is an understatement. If there is one thing that I took from my father’s death it is this. You never know how long life is going to be. Even now, as you read these pages the rest of your life is made up of nothing more of fleeting moments. The number of those moments is unknown. The one thing that my father was unable to do was to make sure that we were all taken care of after he was gone. All the love that he had given to us had been traded from us and all we got was two empty shot gun shells and stain in our driveway that is still there to this day.
