A Crime Well Done

 

A
Crime Well Done

Riverton, SC

July 22, 2010

  

My mindset is that of a man of thirty-five years. I credit this phenomenon to an abundance of curiosity and willingness to accept the unacceptable. Life and its many mysteries keep me thinking young. Yet the face in the medicine cabinet mirror, sagging jowls, graying pouches, furrows, grooves and weathered skin tell a different story. That image glares at me with blue-denim eyes and screams ....

 

“Ninety-years ... old? Bullshit.”

 

They’re coming for me soon. My boy, Glen, and his wife that is. They’re packing me off to one of those homes ... you know the ones. Glen and Margie say I can’t take care of myself.

 

“It’s for your own good, Dad,” they say in their sing-song, baby-talk voices, like I’m some demented old coot ready for the funeral parlor. God, I’m sick of that phrase ... the sound their words make as they utter them. The words drool off their lips like honey oozing from a honeybee’s ass.
 

But they might be right. I’ve have left the refrigerator door open now and again. I’ve left the burner going on the stove. I’ve forgotten to lock the door at night.

 

“Hell, once in a while I walk away without flushing the damn toilet, but who doesn't’?

 

I don’t know. Maybe they’re right. Did I say that before? I forget. It doesn’t matter anyway.

 

“Assisted Living Facilities are Death’s waiting room.” 

 

That’s a quote from a source I can’t recall. I think those words are close to the truth. Being a pragmatic man I see no choice other than to pick an interesting magazine and take a seat, but before I cross my legs and wet a finger for page turning, there’s something I have to say. A story I have to tell. I’ll not surrender my mindset until I have cleansed Uncle Marion’s betrayal of the McAlister family from my soul. The crime he committed against my mother and me is beyond the pale.

 

***

 

Uncle Marion was my father figure. He meant everything to my mother and me. My silence, however, has not served society or my family. I’ve said nothing because I share in the blame for what happened. I could’ve stopped my uncle’s madness, but I failed the test. Like Uncle Marion, I am to blame for the farce that eventually played out.  

 

Today is the seventy-sixth anniversary of the event. Questions posed at the time were not answered, foremost among them: What happened to Marion Timothy Stoddard? People thought they knew, but they never came close to the truth. I wanted to get the mess off my chest. If only somebody would’ve asked, that’s the shame of it. Who would have guessed, in 1934, that a fourteen-year-old boy might shed light on one of history’s great crime mysteries?

 

***

 

To understand how these events were shaped by the times and circumstance, my story must begin with my father. I was eight-years-old when Jock Francis McAlister died, the victim of a tragic accident. He worked as a laborer for a north Chicago construction firm and his death was a catastrophic event for mother and me.

 

A year later, October 29, 1929, America’s economy plunged into a depression and dad’s death took on a whole new meaning. An insurance policy he provided paid out a one-thousand-dollar death benefit. A negotiated settlement with the construction company, I later learned amounted to eighteen thousand, four hundred dollars secured the future for mom and me.

 

Mom chose her trusty mattress as her depository. She placed her faith in home banking, having little confidence in the First State Bank of North Chicago. The same bank closed its doors a few weeks later. Her intuition paid off. During the dark days of the depression, the McAlister family didn’t go hungry; nor did we lose our family home or shiver in winter.

 

Today the Great Depression is a footnote. Modern history books skim over the financial collapse of 1929, but the human suffering it caused is indescribable and difficult to imagine. Try to explain in written text how it feels to lose everything, to go hungry, to experience cold to the bone. . .the task is impossible. To comprehend the desperation everyone feels at such times you must have lived it.

It is one of life's unimaginable tragedies.

 

The Great Depression hit the country like a pandemic. Its sickness infected us all and folks had trouble getting well. Entertainment was a luxury. I think that's the reason the name, John Dillinger, created so much excitement for those of us living in the mid- west. People would part with a hard-earned penny to read about the latest stick-up Dillinger and his gang pulled off. Men out of work cheered the bad men on, thinking on them as heroes.

 

The decade of the thirties introduced true hardship to America’s workingman. Jobs did not exist and if they did, one hundred men might turn out to fill one position. For the men who failed to put food on their tables there was little cheer. For folks like those, newspaper accounts of daring and resourceful outlaws, taking from the banks what the banks took from us provided cheap entertainment.

 

***

 

The McAlister family’s life changed on a hot, August afternoon in 1928. A knock on the front door sent me scampering from the parlor to the vestibule. Mom labored in the kitchen at the back of the house. I beat her to the door by a mile. I had no doubt my official Lone Ranger deputy badge and decoder ring waited on the stoop in the hands of the mailman. The Lone Ranger himself promised delivery in a special envelope. To my eight-year-old mind, the arrival of my badge and ring overrode my father’s hard and fast rule.

 

“Do not open the door without an adult present. Understand me, boyo?” He’s said.

 

Mom came up behind me as I turned the latch and pulled the heavy oaken door open. A sweating fat man in grimy overalls shifted his weight from foot to foot on the other side of the screen door. His odor squeezed through the tiny wire squares like soft Limburger cheese and smelled of old mud and sour socks. Two red-faced policemen waited behind him and stared at me as if I’d done something wrong. I took a step back into mom’s apron. The fat man stared at me and kneaded a dirty fedora hat between powerful looking hands.

 

“What is it?” Mother said.

 

The fat man made a gurgling growl deep in his throat. He smacked his thigh with his battered hat, coughed and said, “Mrs. McAlister? My name is Albert Zonski. I represent the Hobart Construction Company of Chicago. I’m sorry to inform you of your husband’s demise. An accident, ma’am. A cable broke. A beam fell and ....  We’re truly sorry, ma’am ... truly sorry.”

 

Mom hugged me tight and asked me to be a man before she went up the stairs. I don’t remember much after that, but I do remember Uncle Marion bursting in the front door around the supper hour. He found me on the parlor floor playing with the fire engine truck my father gave me for my birthday a month past.

 

Uncle Marion was mom’s older brother by two years. He looked nothing like her with his dark hair and five foot, eight-inch frame. His rangy, muscular build made him look bigger, at least to me, but I know now, he was a man of average height.

He stayed with us for a long time, helping mom to cope and giving me his ear. He lost his job for not showing up, no small thing to suffer in August of 1928. When he learned he’d been fired, he laughed and banged the table.

 

“Don’t worry yourself, sis,” he said. “I never liked that job anyways.”

 

***

 

I’ve learned from life experience that people handle pain in different ways. For kids, loss of a parent is an inconsolable event. The first few days I think I was numb. When the reality of my father’s death hit me, it felt like a huge hand had reached into my chest and scooped away a big part of me. The ache from what that hand took hurt bad. Over time, Uncle Marion helped me fill that cavity up in a way no mother could. As time went on I used him like a crutch. He listened as I screamed at life and its unfair ways. When my anger passed, he listened to my fears ....

 

How would we live without my father? What would happen to mom? Where would we go now? How could I grow up without my daddy? What would the months ahead have in store for mom and me?

 

Uncle Marion found other employment. Mom refused to discuss what he did to earn money. I didn’t care. Uncle Marion was there when I needed him for school, for fights and neighborhood squabbles. He gave me man-to-man talks, advising me on all the tiny, meaningless, but important needs a boy growing into a young man needs. For all that and more, Uncle Marion was there.

 

I confess to another reason I was so attracted to my uncle. He dressed in fine clothes. He had plenty of money in his pocket and some of the men Uncle Marion called friend scared mom silly. Things like that made my uncle seem mysterious and a little dangerous. His secret lifestyle drew me to him like static electricity draws the hair up on your arm.

 

On a stroll near the shores of Lake Michigan, my uncle told me his friends thought he looked like the famous outlaw, John Dillinger. The comparison gave him something to brag on for sure, but I thought his friends were nuts. He did have hazel eyes and a deep dimple in his chin. I suppose you could say he resembled the famous bank robber. Maybe … a little.

 

We had plenty of man-to-man talks as I grew. It became obvious, the older I got, which side of the McAlister family I favored. Once a week it seemed, mom would get red in the face and cry silent tears when she looked at me. Tall for my age, I sported a head of tightly curled, red hair.

 

I’d heard that neighborhood kids made jokes about my looks, but they didn’t try joking to my face. From the time I entered puberty, Uncle Marion told me I was the spitting image of my father and that was a proud thing to be. His affirmation of me, for who I was, swelled my heart with pride.

 

***

 

July 22, 1934 was a special day for our family. The date marked my Uncle Marion’s thirty-fourth birthday. Mom planned a grand lunch to celebrate the occasion. Uncle Marion came through the door that afternoon holding two tickets aloft.

 

“It’s the Sunday night movie show for us, boyo, so be on your best behavior.”

 

I felt a rush of blood flush my skin as he made his entrance. His look ... hero worship is the only way I can describe what I felt for him. I couldn’t contain my excitement at Uncle Marion’s extravagant and unexpected gift. I had turned fourteen that blistering July day. Uncle Marion and I shared many things and most important of all, we shared our days of birth.  (More to come)