Candles Burning

One

MY father died unpleasantly.

Mama put it that way. “My husband died,” she used to say, letting her voice catch before concluding, “unpleasantly.”

Stepping on a wasp barefoot—that’s unpleasant. A mouthful of sour milk—that’s unpleasant. What happened to Daddy was no mere unpleasance. It was murder. And not a cozy one. Not the butler in the library with the revolver, not a bloodless, painless, game of clues with a polite high-class suicide to avoid the common gallows at the end.

I was seven years old when Daddy died. I did not entirely understand the nature of Daddy’s death nor did I accept its finality. His death was an event that had happened to me, and to Mama, and to my brother, Ford; the realization that it had happened to Daddy came only with the passage of time. The pictures of the bloody footlocker that made the cover of what turned out to be the last issue of True Sex Crimes, the stories that appeared in that grimy little scandal sheet and its trashy ilk—Savage Real Crimes, Twentieth-Century Grue—were successfully kept from my eyes until much later.

Recently I have read or reread all the newspaper and periodical clippings and the popular psychological forensics farragoes, such as Dr. Meyers’s 1975 publication, Sexual Pathology and the Homicidal Impulse, which included a chapter entitled “Footlocker, Broomstick and Cleaver.” The unspeakably cruel details of Daddy’s death quickly defeated the cynical attitude with which I had armored myself. Mama’s once ludicrous euphemism now lodges sharp as a fishbone in my throat.

The women who actually murdered Daddy were caught. They were tried. They were judged guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair. Even in Louisiana in 1958, it was rare for women to be executed but what they did to my father was, in the opinion of the judge, “an unimaginably heinous atrocity against nature.”

But the two guilty women did not die by electrocution.

Judy DeLucca was murdered in the prison laundry—slit open from throat to crotch with a razor blade embedded in the handle of a toothbrush. When Janice Hicks, housed in a different wing of the same prison in Baton Rouge, heard of her friend’s death, she began to gasp frantically. She was dead before a doctor could be summoned. The autopsy showed that her lungs were full of water.

Seawater.