First 50 pages of narrative non-fiction

Thomas Michael Townsend

Copyright 2008 TMTownsend, Burlington, Vermont

Opening:

For Marion Calvert Mays

Born March 22, 1952

Shot to death November 24, 1979

Her son 7 months old died November 25, 1979

I abandoned her memory October 31, 1980

27 years later I woke from my illusion …

One

The door that leads memory beyond violent death must open a creak-creak-creak at a time. If you push too fast the answer you seek will fly by like a spirit, and you’ll be left standing in the same place as you were moments before midnight exploring the depths of madness.

From Vermont to Maryland I drove in no hurry, coming down along the mountains near the Susquehanna, reaching the family home at 124 Northwood Drive in Timonium at 3 o’clock in the morning. I slipped through the door. I crawled into the twin bed in the guest room without telling him I was here. Exhausted and wound up at the same time I had a restless sleep. At dawn he sat in his easy chair reading as he always did until I awoke. I said hello, The Sun in his lap, as I headed to the shower. As was his habit, he made coffee.

I dressed casually in a blue T-shirt and Levis for summer days and the serious affairs I had in mind. I wore grass-stained sneakers. My hair was cut short, thick, mussed, the brown of youth sprayed gray. Waiting patiently for breakfast at his favorite diner 20 miles from Maryland Line, my 84-year-old father was attired in the style of his age: a baseball cap, cockeyed; a camera strung around his neck; a windbreaker even on a summer day; shoes with thick soles; pants pulled up high above his waist. There is a reason old wives are good for old husbands.

I had arrived in the community that treated me kindly as a child and so harshly as an adult, my 54^th birthday barely passed in this most unique anniversary year, with little explanation of purpose other than, “I think I’m going to write a book.”

What about?

“Marion.”

There was no expression on his face to belie my father’s interest in what prompted this decision. He didn’t offer an opinion. He just looked and wondered at his middle son.

Why had I chosen to write all these years after she was murdered? I could hardly answer the question for myself.

On this summer morning on the Piedmont as the sun peeked through the window, I asked my father, “Want to take a ride?”

He did. He knew when you were about to turn the knob, to suggest with your eyes it was time to walk through the door. In his way he remained a pup. He enjoyed a tour of Maryland’s countryside. He had fond recollections of the blue collar city that was our affectionate hard-knuckled Baltimore where the people conversed with long-O accent and crab houses molded the amiable social beings that we were surely intended to be.

On my mind was the superlative.

For 30 years I had worked at newspapers across this great republic, in all eight publications, including the big busy metropolitan newsrooms of The Baltimore Sun and The Des Moines Register. There was not a more enlivening job that kept your mind in play -- locked in the confined maze of the present. I had taken mortgages on nine houses. Twice I had been a husband. I had been a father three times. I had edited a thousand news stories and received the same number of challenging phone calls from readers. There was but one aspect that made me truly different, this I knew, which set me so far apart from the rest, when I was swept fiercely into the vortex of our national insanity. As a young man I came to know the primal definition of hatred.

Mine was a peculiar perspective on a life and a death. My perspective took root on the night of the bullet when a young mother with young child shot another young mother to death with child. The mother slain was my wife, the child my son. I was there when it happened. I was witness to the genesis of a depraved heart.

That was long ago. I told myself long ago I had to put it all behind me if I were to keep my sanity. Yet one day I knew I must awake from self-imposed to act upon my ceaseless compulsion, to reveal the secret that I had guarded so perfectly. I awoke in the same year when the length of an entire lifetime of a pretty woman had passed in the blur of time.

On a beautiful Maryland morning in June my surreal trek over hardened memory commenced. I opened the door that I shut 27 years before. I would finally come to know the soul I had tried to extinguish. I would come to know what happens to lives after violent death precipitously visits.

Two

Out we slipped, me in my grass-strained sneakers, my father in his windbreaker. We drove Northwood Drive and up the road to York.

Outside of town we followed the country highway as it coursed, turning left through northwest Baltimore County into the gracious horse country of Worthington Valley on our way to Westminster, where as a late 20-something I used to work. Off Railroad Avenue I stopped and saw old friends I hadn’t seen in nearly 30 years at the Carroll County Times.

I remembered them at the funeral, clumps of young office workers, tearful, clutching winter coats. I caught the women in the shop by surprise as I did everyone this summer. Remarkably, their hair remained the color of youth. Our talks were a serendipity homecoming, words evading the reality of a past we shared. I worked with them when the bullet first struck my lip and pierced Marion’s head, when she and the child she bore post-mortem died together at a hospital but a quarter mile from the row house where she was raised.

I always found this detail intimate and organic -- the closeness of her murder to her childhood home.

I was not long today at the newspaper office, for the women had tasks to accomplish and I could tell the managers perceived my presence as intrusion. We enjoyed seeing one another. I left as suddenly as I had arrived and poked around Main Street where I used to eat breakfast at Harry’s, curbs crowded with pick-ups, not knowing what I was looking for. My father was patient, waiting as I walked about aimlessly, me searching, as if I had lost a hundred-dollar bill.

We cruised Taneytown Pike through the swath of lovely dairy country by the brick bank where she was employed. As we passed the building I tried for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long to envision her there for a transitory moment at the teller’s station, Rapunzel hair to her waist shimmering like the surface of a cool clear pond, one quality I could never forget in lieu of everything I hid away. She was beautiful. I stopped. I walked into the lobby. I looked around. I knew no one. I sized up the place, too many years passed. I was a complete stranger so I left.

With the Blue Ridge a shadow, my father and I climbed uphill to Uniontown, turned left at the knoll just at the crest of the ridge where the good souls of western Carroll County rested. This is a turbulently peaceful place.

In the dip where a village resided was her dream house with four pillars and a long porch that slouched toward the cement sidewalk, an attached one-story building to the two-story with bay-style windows in Victorian style, an antique hand pump in the kitchen that used to draw water from an abandoned brick cistern in the dirt-floor basement and three stories above foot-inch-wide yellow pine planks in the attic. I steered my father’s van toward the German-sided house across from the Devilbiss Store. The houses in this compact village dated to the 1790s in the village. Most were well appointed, robed in colonial paint. This house at 3451 Uniontown Road, notably zip code 21157, once so familiar was now different for me, the color a used-up pale gray. We stopped, parking on the road’s edge by the culvert.

I walked across the front of the house, trying to remember. I walked around the side. I walked back to the front. It took a moment for the first image to come. This was difficult. I had to force my mind to relax, to take in much more than it had been tutored to do. I told myself to let the Blue Ridge breeze carry imagination. Try to remember a time in September.

I looked up to the second level above the front porch with the tin roof where rain used to tap my mind lazily into submission. On an early summer night when the smell of freshly cut hay wafted through the window I could hear the cars whoosh as I nodded off. Voices of pedestrians out for a late walk floated to the window and through the curtains and faded as they moved down the sidewalk. I tried to make out which neighbor strolled the sidewalk. An image appeared. I saw myself through the window though I knew I was looking for someone else.

As always I felt this intense loneliness -- sharp, deep, not what I needed now or ever, yet for some reason it was strangely comforting, a prickle that took me back to the razor edge between life and death. At this very moment in my life 27 years beyond, I was there immersed in the moments after her body was buried.

I was way too young for this.

I would be by myself the first time since the shooting. My mother Ann asked if I would be all right. I had little choice I replied. I stood in the hall with the petite radiator to the right, the door open wide, my parents’ car rolling down Uniontown Road to Westminster Pike on the way to suburban Timonium, I watching, wanting them to stay a few more minutes, but knowing time had arrived. I closed the door. I went to the kitchen. I heard the echo of my footsteps bounce off plaster walls and across the nine-foot-high ceiling, the sound of one. I moved room to room with too much energy pent up and no where to direct it. I touched anything that was hers. I whimpered, and in my privacy I cried like a baby.

After the first month of weeping I thought I was milked of all the emotion that existed in all of existence until one evening when I sat on the bed in the room where Marion and I watched the Orioles suffer at the hands of the Pirates in the World Series. There is remembrance of the freak snow storm in fall 1979, a bellwether of the presence that was about to engulf my life a month later. I began crying, a little at first, then harder, harder, harder. I would weep more than I ever had. I did so for 15 straight minutes without let-up, perhaps more. Who counts? When this spigot turned off my shirt and pants were drenched. I was baptized in tears.

Anyone viewing must have thought my behavior suspect. With my father off on the sidewalk, I stood on the street 27 years later looking up through a bedroom window. This was not what I wanted to feel. But I always did feel this way, involuntarily, as involuntarily as my slamming on the brakes the split second the .357 slug spliced my top lip on the night it happened. It was chronology of real life today that I desperately needed to remember, unraveling the moments of one-to-one interaction.

I had to work at this reconstruction: Rising in the morning. Making coffee. Bringing a cup to bedside. What did we say to another? What did she dream this night? I wanted to know.

I was embarrassed to admit that I did not recall even the simplest of ordinary contact I had with a woman I had literally known since birth, was infatuated with as a youngster with her obvious prettiness, met in a stroke of fate in college, who I married, and in another stroke of fate, was beside her when she was shot to death. With my own feelings so callused over from the suddenness of murder, I had to dig hard into memories to find the soft ones.

I walked to the back yard, long, narrow and green. I concentrated, as penetratingly as I was capable. I grasped onto anything remotely familiar. My father waited. I stared at one specific point as in meditation to empty my mind of every thought I had since birth. The image I sought materialized momentarily in a wisp. I became clear as the image solidified: in shorts, barefoot, hands in dirt, smudged face, knees dirty. Her image came, smoky, a struggle to pull in completely. I saw her though I was always prevented from hearing a voice.

Why?

The face clarified.

Details rose like little ridges on a relief map. She had a red bandanna wrapped around her head, hair tied and bobbing. She wore cut-offs cut short-short. She barely acknowledged my presence off to the side yet I sensed motion. She directed our interpersonal activities with this motion as we sifted earth. No words spoken. Illusional. The tomatoes go here. The cucumbers there. Provide each enough room to breathe. She liked to work in the fresh spring dirt. She loved the smell. She wanted to can the vegetables. She needed to provide at the most personal level as she knew all women did in her family, the instinct of motherhood.

This I remembered without prodding. The green see-through jars with sliced vegetables placed in floor-to-ceiling cabinets in the country kitchen gathered dust after she left. Within short months of her murder I took the jars to the landfill over the hill not far from the historic homestead of Francis Scott Key. I always believed she would understand.

The garden had somewhat of its old shape. I looked left past the back porch. There was a grape arbor where she had found the 7 four-leaf clovers, a distinct karma among a similar assortment of numbers that would shadow me mystically along every step of the way. My casual acknowledgement of fey coincidence as normalcy induced friends and family to counsel me for even bringing this up in this book lest I be seen as a lunatic. I did not care what anyone thought of my behavior, and never have, because no one could truly even imagine what it is like to witness violent death.

Marion was impressed in finding the 7 four-leaf clovers as was I, but she was more impressed with the arbor the day we showed off our exceptional purchase. She presented the arbor with plump blue grapes that attracted yellow jackets to her Grandmother Hilda as if this were the reason only that she wanted the house “up the country” as colloquial Marylanders alluded. Grandmother had her mind on something else. The field stone foundation needed pointing up Hilda pointed with her cane.

I moved back to the front of the house. I worked hard to remember. More memories were squeezed. Across the street the colorful sign hung over the Devilbiss general store that advertised this as the only place for miles to shop. The cars used to stop a half dozen an hour always followed in morning or day’s end by a single tractor. The place was shut. No one tended store any more as far as I saw. Tom Devilbiss, with the thumb on a hand lost in a farming accident when he was a child owned the store when a young couple, Marion and Michael from Baltimore County, settled across the street. Old Tom told fantastic stories of how men of the village shoveled a path in three feet of snow six miles (truly) all the way to the Carroll County seat, Westminster, and young men and women sat in awe and listened. Now I was becoming he who told such tales.

Who would ever believe my story?

With my father waiting across the street in front of my former house his camera ever ready, I called, “Come on over.” He stood near the road sign proclaiming a town’s part in real history when the Union Army thundered through to do massive blood-letting in Gettysburg 30 miles away. They camped below the village on a farm before moving on to slaughter. Up to 7,000 men died over a mere three days in the 7^th month right up the road, the ultimate expression of domestic violence. Today the village of Uniontown was empty, a commuter ghost town.

“Nah,” my father waved off, sure about walking no farther than he must.

I looked into the window of the store, directed my eye’s snapshot and took my own picture of the museum of my life. It was no different than the last time I saw inside. It could have been November 23, the sunny late fall day before the bullet from the .357 magnum struck. Shelves of goods with cans and boxes were in place waiting for me to come in and pick out something. The floor, swept clean as if the broom were used yesterday, had one-inch thin shiny slats of hard wood transcribing the character of a bona fide general store. There is comfort to be found in a place like this. Addresses of customers lined the pigeonholes where mail was placed. No one took down the paper names after the store closed. They were affixed, a tangible census from the twilight. I used my hands to shield the window of the door from reflection to see if I was tacked on the wood. I wished my name to be there with the rest as I would always remain a part of this village.

This was the door I must walk through.

Any remembrance of my real life beyond one aspect certainly had vanished. After all this time I needed much more than that. Many in Uniontown at the time of Marion’s murder were old when the violence happened. Many now were up on the knoll with her and the infant at the cemetery of St. Paul’s Church where the horizon stretched to the Blue Ridge, and the face was against the wind.

Three

On a Sunday morning in the month of my 54^th birthday, twice the time of her lifetime, my father and I were up early. It was a perfect Maryland day in June with easy temperatures, dry and a blue sky. We ate at the Ashland Café in Cockeysville at hill crest. He had his favorite breakfast -- oatmeal with extra raisins, but no brown sugar, please. He was persistent as I in trying to protect a heart. We crossed the narrow back roads of northern Maryland and came to old St. James Church in My Lady’s Manor, this brick edifice surrounded by moss-covered wafer tombstones and the history of Revolutionaries and Tories. We walked into the chapel as if this were our home. We were like this the two of us. As we traveled this summer we were fearless.

So I pretended.

My hand reached for a second door.

My father and I sized up the interior of the sanctuary. Inside were enclosed stone-hard pews without padding. Episcopalians never made anything easy on the body or soul. Yet they certainly knew how to make a chapel shine in all its glory as if the Lord himself had directed the painting. Walls of the church had at one time been frescoed with pastels by an itinerant limner. He worked the cuddling colors of earth: reds and yellows, browns, greens and striking blues. The combination came together invitingly that had one purpose -- to open minds to the mystery of Providence.

To the right in the corner out of sight was the organ, and as we moved closer a young man sitting at the bench. We said something to let him know we were there. A head popped up surprised with our arrival in the empty chapel.

The voice said firmly, "Service is in 45 minutes."

I responded, “Thanks. I’m visiting from out of town. We’re not staying.”

I introduced myself. Long ago I was married in this chapel. I stood at the front and took the vows. Family members were former parishioners. Family lived at the base of the hill. Family rode horses through these grassy fields. Family shoed thoroughbreds at the blacksmith shop down the road. Family members were buried in the cemetery where memory ends.

I asked the organist about the pastor who presided over my first marriage. The name eluded. The young organist responded.

“Rector Robert Harper?”

Yes, I thought that might be it.

The sound of organ filled the air. The smell inside the chapel was country fresh. I loved this smell. The church women who prepared in the canteen set the record straight because I persisted. It was Rector Ralph Harper. For sure that’s who you meant, a highly intelligent man who taught at Johns Hopkins. As the women prompted I saw him the same in the service that began a new life and the service that memorialized the end of one. Rector Harper was stern with short graying hair, unflinching eyes and that particular Manor tongue, a touch of British authority that traced a past in the present. He had an undeviating way of running his church. Church women knew the persona.

My mind scoured the cute chapel. I heard car tires crunch over the stone drive. A mocking bird called. I saw a glimmer.

The sun sneaked from behind a cloud: wedding day August 10, 1974, summery gray at first, the old color of a Maryland sky, then a break-up with light glinting through low clouds, the day after Nixon resigned. Marion was attired in a simple lace-rimmed wedding gown. Daisies greeted guests. Bridesmaids were in yellow and white. The men -- long hair, sideburns and beards -- were handsome, unusually natty, in gray tuxes with stripes. Afterwards Marion and I took off for Virginia Beach, the loaned maroon sedan of my father smeared in words of love made of shaving cream and tin cans tied to the bumper with strings. We returned home a week later to see Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in Washington -- at the crowning moment of the Peace Movement. I tapped my foot to Our House and Military Madness.

I touched pews this second day of opening doors, and from the wedding day in 1974 my mind leaped five years forward when I sat as a young widower with gauze covering my face. I feel the seared moment. With the hard-dried residue from witnessing swift violence, the feeling came naturally, because, it never went away. My thoughts dwelled on the ride to my parents’ house from the hospital after the doctor told me a life had in the snap of the fingers vanished.

I watched phone poles and trees fly by. Snap. Snap. Snap. My mother prepared the twin bed in the guest room, the same I slept in on my trip this summer in 2006 knowing that no matter what she tried her caring would not result in what she dearly wished. I struggled with untying my laces. I was unable to see over the bandage. Blood dripped on my shoe. I took off my clothes. I was dazed. I was on the bed. I sat, I stared, and I tried to understand the grotesque drama that had unfurled. I had the hardest time believing this was true. I lay down. My body was racked. I looked through my toes toward the back window. I saw the street lights, a half mile away, the newest turn signal in the burgeoning suburban community, at East Ridge and Timonium roads. The signal blinked. On red, off, on red, off, on red, off. Lights were hypnotic. I placed my head on the pillow. I dropped into the deepest sleep I would ever have.

I would not dream for nearly three decades.

I wondered as I walked the chapel grounds. Where was Rector Harper now? The women of the church pointed.

The rector was at the west door, facing sunset -- born September 1, 1915, expired May 24, 1996. I walked to his place in the sweet earth. I took note of the death day -- the 24^th, a number familiar in the life of the Steuart-Mays clan. And then I took note of the obvious, at least to me, my intimacy, the death date, 17 years after.

Every time I counted.

Four

The house was off Boyce Avenue. This road was my route of deliverance the night the bullet chose the path of destiny. This was the road I drove at white-knuckle speed to save her.

Carol Grillo and I never talked about this spot to settle down in mid-life when the past was bunched in selective memory but we knew what Boyce meant in separate lives. This was the first time Carol and I mentioned where two friends, a wife and husband, decided to move, over the hill from where Marion died.

What draws us?

The community never changed. The neighborhood of Ruxton always was charming deceptively, rural splendor amid shingled urbanity, where a real Kennedy had settled, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, who happened to marry another Townsend of no relation to me, and the daughter of ill-fated Robert.

A talented artist with a pretty smile and an engaging personality, Carol Grillo knew Marion for the longest time. Marion and I were at her house in Rodgers Forge for dinner with her husband Phil, a good-looking blond with an infectious sense of humor and abiding friendship. Phil is a perfect a friend as you may find. He was the first person I called because he was closest to the emergency room. After Marion was slain Carol wrote a letter about herself so that her children would remember if something happened without comprehension as it happened suddenly one night long ago on a Thanksgiving weekend. There are things you never think about until there is a compelling reason.

There were 20 people at a summer party off Boyce Avenue. People milled about drinks in hand. All were Baby Boomers raised in the same environment in northern Baltimore County with similar memories of wavy two-lane tarred and chipped lanes, clear brooks, tan fields of grain and the smell of hay at the Maryland State Fair in late August. We drank slowly this evening and talked lightly about the girl they knew. Carol planned this party for a childhood friend in from Kenya -- Harris, and for me, as a way to reconnect with old friends.

She reminded as we talked before guests arrived because she knew instinctively what I needed to restring the tether. Marion was buried in Carol’s maternity dress. This was a detail that had passed me by as had a hundred more.

How could I possibly forget something this personal?

Once more Carol reminded. Did I recall her dream?

What dream? No, I didn’t recall.

Again forgotten, as memory was abandoned again and again and again.

I needed company of my own age to keep my mind on other things after Marion was slain. I came to Towson like clockwork to stay with Phil and Carol. We’d run out to a party. We would go to Broadway shows at the Morris Mechanic Theater. I love Shakespeare. We’d go to dinner together. We drank together.

Carol’s prompt helped. I now remembered seeing Tony Sciuto and his hip band at a night club off Harford Road. I was impressed with the coterie of pretty women with those girlish legs who accompanied the guitarist. He was a lucky man I thought having so many beauties surrounding him. There was the scar on my lip from the bullet that made me feel deformed.

On one of those weekends I had mentioned in passing to Carol how I lost my capacity to dream. I hadn’t dreamed since Marion was slain. This off-hand remark cued Carol to have her own reverie about her best friend. She dreamt that she and Phil had driven to Uniontown to help pack Marion’s belongings.

Phil and I were off for beer. Carol was in the country kitchen when it happened. Marion tiptoed the winding back stairs of the old house to the kitchen. She wore white. Carol was taken aback when her friend without warning appeared.

“What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead.”

Marion giggled. She and Carol were close. Carol could say anything she wanted.

There was a family photo album on the farm table that Marion’s brother Steuart had found for us for a mere $30. He always found incredible pieces at unworldly prices. I would sell this table after I became a single man, giving it away for the same price purchased.

Marion wanted to thumb through the scrapbook of family memories. Marion loved scrapbooks. Share this moment Carol, it will never come again. She and Carol were in the kitchen together holding the scrapbook. They talked. They laughed. They paged through the years of day-to-day occurrence that made life worth remembering. They talked as if whatever had happened to the best of best friends, and what tore asunder physical lives, never occurred, that everything was right.

There was a sound, the creak of the door. Marion looked toward the front of the house.

Phil and I had returned.

Marion heard the switch of the latch. The heavy door was pushed. She heard my voice travel the hall, the sound of one bouncing off the walls. I approached. She looked Carol in the eyes, turned her head, nodded. She could not see me. Too soon. The family photo album was shut. Marion departed. She went up the stairs.

For 27 years she would not return.

A piece at a time had to develop I began to understand bit by bit at the party this night with all our friends at the Grillo home off Boyce Avenue. I was introduced to someone I thought I knew but whom I did not.

Carol and these old friends told me things that bubbled up about someone with whom I shared kisses. They showed me how close friends remained to Marion, all best friends, each individually, streamed to her starlight in contrast to my Milky Way distance. They told me about her childhood, about riding bikes, her sense of reliable connection, her pointed humor, her playfulness, her likes, her dislikes, her capacity to diffuse a testy moment with a sweet pouting look.

How could this be?

I remembered so little of these stories, the electric qualities of romantic youth. I could not even remember the pet name given to her by her family.

We were introduced at birth! We had childhood crushes on each other! I was her college wooer! I was next to her when she was taken in a nano-second with our child!

I wanted to tell our friends one memory particularly to convey my own recollection, because it was all I had, but I was unable to confide what propelled my emotion every single day.

What could be more intimate than witnessing the murder of your wife?

Five

I liked driving the old roads of a slower time. I skipped through the middle of Anne Arundel County and made believe I was a boy. My father and I turned left onto Route 50 past the entrance into Annapolis, this historic city with cobble stones where Kunte Kinte of Roots fame was purported to have disembarked. My father and I moved toward the spectacular bay bridges, the first of two built the year I was born.

The year of birth bridged to the year of her death.

Sailboats dotted the water as we ramped up the incline to the arching spans. To the right a steely freighter treaded to Baltimore leaving a long creamy soft wake. I did this often traveling for vacation fun -- “down the ocean” as we said in the lingo of the Chesapeake where teens had first blush of romance under the board walk. I taste the Thrasher’s fries. I smell onions and peppers frying with the Italian sausage. I hear the laughter at the old-style amusement park with cheesy rides. I feel the sweet salt breeze waft through the car window gracing my lip.

Dad and I entered a dreamy realm on a sultry July morning thickened with adhesive humidity on the Eastern Shore, this unique space of cornfields, corner gasoline stations and small-town living, which had at least several times proposed succession from Maryland because it was so distinct, so by itself, so aloof I guess you might say like myself. We sped by people fishing on bridges with tall plastic buckets nearby for a catch of perch or perhaps a prized rock fish. We buzzed fields of sweet white corn. We sailed on reeds that waved in the wind. We passed through forests of loblolly pine. We eased by marshes with cattails and rivers with glassy surfaces on windless days where water moccasins slithered on the mud leaving trace impressions.

We steered left into Princess Anne, uneventful unless you knew otherwise, where the country court of Somerset County dealt with events of unspeakable violence, mostly from places far off but on occasion of its own ugly doing. The village had a welcoming main street with a friendly appearance that strung through like all small towns do in Maryland. The street was populated with useful stores and commerce that offered utilitarian wares that everyday people needed. The village had brick buildings and a tree-draped avenue off the side with clapboard houses. In the center, two buildings dominated: the Washington Inn and the Somerset County Courthouse. My father and I walked to the courthouse.

Once upon a time Princess Anne was any little town in America.

I reached for the next door.

My reporter’s nose led me into the office to the left on the first floor through a tight hallway. I met a court clerk, Jackie. I told her who I was. I was interested in reviewing the record of a murder trial. Could she help? I told her the year. I provided the names. The clerk was unsure. It was a long way back but she would try. She and another in the office remembered.

My father and I chit-chatted with workers. They looked to see what a young man with distant deep brown eyes had become. I waited and waited, longer than I expected. I began to think that I came for nothing. Perhaps my impromptu journey born out of my lingering loneliness would end as soon as it began. Perhaps it was time to turn around and head back by myself locked in my own little world to Vermont and let this compulsion finally be buried as it should. Perhaps there was a reason I was enabled to forget so much. Perhaps contrary to what I believed I was blessed with capacity to abandon.

Jackie re-appeared at the door.

Twenty-seven years after the event that inalterably reconfigured lives of families she managed to locate the bundle of court records that told a story of homicides. She seemed surprised by her find. By now she noted the records should have been transferred to the state capital. I knew there must be a reason these files remained in a basement in a little town on the shore.

There is a reason for everything.

She brought the six-inch pile and stacked it on a desk. I had never seen these papers. I wanted to review as much as I could. As she flipped pages my editor eyes knew what to look for. I asked her to stop anywhere I saw hand-written pages. These were so intimate.

One legal pad started with notes of the judge, 43 pages I counted, a compendium of criminal justice. Two other batches of white pages were hand-written letters from the young mother who slew Marion. I scanned exchanges. I read the killer’s own written words to the judge asking for mercy because of her own 5-month-old daughter. In this letter she dwelled on a lesser crime she had committed in a second mindless act of misbehavior in between the trial and sentencing, virtually ignoring the essence of the universe, the very reason I was here today.

I read autopsy descriptions I had never seen and now knew intimacies about Marion’s murder I had never been made aware of. I touched the paper that described how a young mother expertly manipulated a .357 magnum for the very first time, one of the more powerful handguns a person can wield. How she first shot out a street light. How she aimed and next shot me and Marion.

Who was the target that night?

A fast thoughtless action?

Accidental?

Or intentional?

Why?

Always the question.

I felt it, that same awful feeling which filled my soul.

My eyes watered.

Public records tell the cold truth. In these files I saw what my life was, is and would forever be no matter how I much I tried to recapture the make-believe before the violence happened. The records were a potent portrait through the institutional eyes of government machinery. This was the way the state remembers an innocent taken violently.

Marion was a document that the state kept as judicial property and because of the circumstances the public owned but never really understood you or cared who you were. She was a number, testament to a binge that doubled the rates of murder from 1960 until 1979 in the Grand Republic, propelled by illegal drug use, even higher into the bloody 1980s and later the era of mass murder in our schools, colleges and onto the fields of Amish peace.

It was all so out of sync to live and die this way. I seesawed on the imbalance.

Princess Anne remained as preserved as the first I saw her. She was petite, slightly attractive though never physically ugly even under my hardened eyes. I doubted many would remember much about the bolt of lightning that struck our families in 1979. We were strangely the intruders, part of another legal carnival of many rolling like a quick summer storm in from Baltimore on the tip of a prosecutor’s provocative tongue to a shy hamlet on the shore. There remained similar stories of families at this ancient tidewater courthouse submerged in flood of officialdom, not to be brought up beyond recollections of tense moments in trial or the inexplicable decisions of juries, unless someone like me from the past arrived, turned the knob, walked through the door and asked one final time to retell the tale.

Six

I returned to placid Vermont land of peace. I knew this journey had been waiting. What drove me to this time? I do not know, did not understand.

The wheel of chance took a turn. My eyes followed the swirl until the wheel stopped -- tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Impulsively I wrote to the judge. I never had a single word with him. Not a goodbye, not a thank you, not even hello.

Nearly a month after combing the court records with the help of his clerk, I took a second week of vacation and came back to Princess Anne. My father and I traveled across the Bay Bridge to the courtroom and 86-year-old Lloyd L. Simpkins. We cruised through loblolly pine and past coves of reeds that whistled. It was early morning when we arrived. Dad and I walked a bit on the neighborly sidewalks of Princess Anne. I must feel a place each time I arrived as part of my warm-up. I can feel this place as I write.

We walked to the courthouse.

Judge Simpkins came. He introduced himself, showed us around on the first floor, then without telling us what he was doing he took us to his courtroom. I walked through a narrow door for the first time since October 31, 1980 when judgment day arrived. My breath was taken away. I felt no differently than I did the first time I experienced this place of judgment.

I plunged through a hole of anticipation.

The wood bar, chest high, commanded the front of the court running the course of 12 feet. Windows, 11 feet high from floor to ceiling I estimated, permitted rivers of light to cascade in. At the front were the desks for Nelson R. Kandel, right, the tenacious defense lawyer who dug in at every turn for his client to build the jury’s sympathy for the young mother from the heart of a blue collar city neighborhood accused of murdering another young mother from the heart of suburbia; and the prosecutor, left, Dana M. Levitz -- huge, imposing and theatrical, with the boom of a voice that shook courtrooms.

The trial started in another July, the 7^th of the month in 1980, on the 7^th day. It was hot and humid. In this courtroom America’s charade over requiring responsibility for self would be placed on explosive display. It was here where the small-town jury treated a family in a way we would never understand as if for some reason what happened to us was deserved. The jury’s response remains a deep mystery to me. Judge Simpkins sat with me and my father in his courtroom with only ceiling fans at time of trial. The scene was described then by Evening Sun columnist Dan Rodricks as a snapshot of “Inherit the Wind.”

Judge Simpkins was maybe 5 foot 6. His hair was gray, balding, not too bad for his age. He dressed casually, a plaid shirt, no tie. He walked around the bricked court building as if this were his living room searching for the newspaper he had left somewhere, perhaps on the kitchen table. He knew everyone, and he had something informal to say to all as he passed in the tight hall. He was born in Somerset County. He had a past as a public servant weaved into Maryland’s rich political tapestry. Before this job he was in the state legislature for eight years, secretary of state eight years, then chief of staff to J. Millard Tawes, coincidentally 54^th governor, born in this county, too, who worked in this very courthouse as clerk of court. Governor Tawes coincidentally died 27 years before my interview this summer, coincidentally in June 1979.

Every where I turned there was coincidence.

Judge Simpkins started his tenure as judge July 5, 1971 the year after I was graduated from Dulaney Senior High School and the decade when the violence jumped in Maryland, fueled by the explosion of heroin, cocaine, crack, methamphetamine and PCP. In semi-retirement this judge heard cases two days a week. The judge was as amiable as any old Baltimorean with a tidewater accent, a tinge of southern lilt, not unlike you would hear on The Manor. The judge happened to receive the murder cases moved out of the big city. His nickname was “Hot Dog”, and if you asked him to say why he cagily found a different topic to talk about.

Judge Simpkins started out the interview telling his own history, then moved into stories of cases, for at heart he is a storyteller. Two cases Judge Simpkins remembered. He brought these up because of connection to the former prosecutor, Mr. Levitz.

One case involved a little girl abused horribly and shamefully by her parents starting at age 2. My father and I listened to this family saga told informally as if we chatted over a morning cup of coffee with a friend we hadn’t seen in years. It was strange when you thought about having a conversation with a man and among the first things he told you was the brutality that marked us.

The judge told us the father was a handsome man in his 40s. The mother was pretty. They had three children. They lived in a new home in a nice neighborhood. They were on the bowling team with neighbors. There was no reason for what they did. The oldest girl, 12 or 13, was in the hospital having a miscarriage. The father fathered the child. The 8-year-old called to say she had a sister who was kept in the closet. That’s when they found her. Her parents imprisoned her for eight years.

What possesses us?

They never let her out. Upon discovery, the daughter weighed in at 30 pounds. Just like an old woman who neared her century mark. Neighbors never knew they had three children. Letters came in from all over. The world wanted to adopt her. Now she was an adult. The judge heard she was married, doing fine. Social Services wouldn’t tell him where she was. The mother received 37 years. The father received the maximum 47 years, locked away in his own closet.

In the penitentiary, Judge Simpkins said in the final words on this case, “They made a girl out of him.”

The second case the judge spoke of involved a young man, the sort people remembered as “quiet.” The judge told us he was the kind of boy you’d bring home with you, and you’d say he was good.

He shot six people.

Two he didn’t know. Two were women nine months pregnant. He wasn’t charged with killing the fetuses. The single legal superlative was left for the state’s case in behalf of Marion. This massacre was over the reason too many people died violently in our free society -- drugs. The young man engaged an argument. He shot the husband twice because he liked him, to put him out of his misery. “You don’t want many friends like that,” the judge said. Going to jail, the accused escaped from a state vehicle into the marsh of cattails. That’s where he stayed until he was caught. While he was in jail, women contacted him. They wanted to wed. Why anyone would want to marry someone serving four life terms was simply beyond rational for Judge Simpkins.

The judge leaned forward after culling the detail of abuse, murder and grief, with the slightest hint of emotion. He supported himself with one arm, elbow easy on the table. “Most cases I don’t remember,” he told me and my father. “What I remember about your case was that you rushed your wife to the hospital. She was shot in the ear.”

There is a deliberateness about a criminal judge that normal men and women can never possess.

We talked more, the judge turning away from his trial work and me. He conversed with my father about other ordinary things -- Maryland politics. Two old men near the same age had much in common. They knew all the same people. Maryland is a small intimate state.

Contemporaries were gone. My father and criminal judge responded to one another as if they were long-lost cousins catching up on life. “Sure, sure, I remember.” They talked about good governors. They talked about crooked ones, of which we had a few in our time.

My father and I ventured downstairs. I asked the clerks where to find deep-fried crabs, my father’s favorite. Not around here I was told. We had to drive 30 miles to Ocean City, and we would. My father deserved this. As the judge walked through the door looking for a fishing buddy he was to meet he turned to me and said casually, “So you’re writing a book? Send me a copy when you finish.”

Seven

A mother smiled behind Bette Davis eyes, an attribute she inherited from her father. The eyes always looked sad but they carried this I-love-life twinkle that made all cheery. She placed cookies on a dish. She moved back and forth to the kitchen. She gathered thoughts as she squeezed tissues. I knew what was on her mind. She asked if I wanted more coffee. Of course, please.

Peggy Mays poured a fresh cup and then sat at the country-pine table where for two decades she prepared dinner for her gentle husband, a handsome son and her pretty daughter who ate together, as one, as family, as it should have been well into her old age. She eased into the subject at hand, and we looked into each other’s pupils. “Now, where were we?” There was only one place, a Saturday night, the clock moving through the final hour, each second a tick tock closer to the door to Providence that swung open with sheer suddenness.

A queasy feeling gnawed as I sat at the kitchen table. I had felt this same feeling when I was a child of 9 years old. I was at the cliffs at Loch Raven Lake where as children we pretended. I stood on a ledge and looked down. A sheet of winter ice extended, thinning into the horizon of a choppy reservoir. The breeze blew back my thick brown hair. I was about to experience a moment most believed was cliché: seeing an entire life pass before the eyes.

The cliffs were off the Dulaney Valley Road, the road that led over a truss bridge up the hill, onto Jarrettsville Pike, through the grassy horse fields to The Manor, where pretty Marion Calvert Mays was born. It was near the truss bridge where Marion’s Uncle Gene died in 1962 in a car accident, 17 years before her death. The lake was tucked many places into the woods which was padded with white pine and a soft half-foot floor of needles. A half hour of hiking brought my pug-nosed freckled-faced friend Mike, a skinny buddy Tommy and I to this place. This was where in spring we fished for bluegill and where in summer we swam.

The day in March started off with temperatures in the high 50s. We boys had a few days off from school. It was warm. It felt like swimming weather. We were tempted. We touched the water in the open coves exposed to sun. We looked at each other. “No way in hell!” We laughed and ran. In spite of the balm we were nonetheless dressed for winter because we started off our day-long extravaganza early morning. It was frosty, and you could see your breath. When the sun rose it became a glorious Maryland day, precursor of gorgeous spring, until a cold front swept through mid-afternoon. We rambled through the woods and trudged between long lines of a regiment of pine planted by reservoir planners to guard against runoff. We enjoyed this leisure time

The wind picked up as we walked off the cushioned bed of pine needles that muffled sound onto a hard used path of rock and dirt and you heard the clop-clop, clop-clop of boys’ feet. We felt it. The weather turned, suddenly, severely. Instead of late spring, it was now a normal early March afternoon, random but intentional. A raw bite cut the air. It came beckoning.

We took the path that turned left, up a hill, toward the cliffs. We stood atop, looking over the gray sky that touched tree tops. We watched the lake surface roil in the distance. Mike decided to climb atop the rocks. I was unsure. Ice in the cove covered the end where water abutted granite walls. It was colder here because gigantic boulders the size of houses provided shade.

Mike easily jumped to a ledge. He was good in trees, too. He could climb anything and was given a nickname at little league games, one of many. Most were of bad taste, but this one was harmless enough that any parent would find it acceptable, “Monkey Liebert.” The ledge led to a tilt in the rock that angled like a sliding board. Without saying a word, Mike started across. Nothing stopped this real boy. His body slanted.

Come on, he waved.

I was reluctant yet compelled. Two choices I was presented, and I took one.

I started, taking the same leap, now safely on a ledge I thought, spine to the stone, hands flat to my sides, pushing down to keep weight up. I was nervous. Heights frightened. My feet pointed toward the cove, a wide sheet of ice right under me shielding the frigid water. I looked down and saw brown leaves tumble across ice. My eyes followed. I felt light-headed. I felt myself slide. I slid a little more, a little more, a little more. My foot slipped. I flinched as if I had fallen asleep for a split second when I were driving and crossed over the center line, and then, awoke in mortal fear.

My grip was lost!

I plunged, through the air, through the leaves that I saw spider on the surface, through the ice with a heavy coat, sweatshirt and winter boots. I felt the hardness of the ice as it slapped my soles. It hurt. My hands brushed the edge of the hole my body made as I punched through. It hurt. I felt a rush of cold water up my nose. It stung. I tasted the lake. I sank to the bottom. I saw leaves as they floated in swirls past my face. My friends counted bubbles, wondering, what should they do? Would he come up? How long could they wait? Who would go in first, through the hole? They looked at one another.

While they did this I stood on the muddy bottom, my arms above my head like a Y. It was dreamlike, though I knew this was real: I was drowning. I panicked. I looked up. How do I get out of here? I knew I must push. There was one way out of a very desperate situation as I would learn years later in another desperate situation on a road near Baltimore’s border and I had two similar choices and I made the one that altered everything. I pushed with all my might, the weight of my clothes and boots dragging me down with each effort. I tried my way up. I twirled to the bottom like a shad dart. I flailed with a determined measure of self-control. With all my energy with arms flapping like pectoral fins, I tried to push myself to the top. I knew this time had to be it. Or else. I pushed with force and flapped hard. I began to ascend. I saw a speck of light. This light led my way. I pierced above the surface like a whale ascending the surface of the Inside Passage.

Best friend Mike was there on the bottom ledge hand extended. You all right? You all right? I was sopped. I coughed. Water poured from my nose. I gasped for breath. Mike pulled me out. Man, you are one lucky guy I heard Mike’s voice. You came up through the opening. If you hadn’t ... It wasn’t said, but I knew. At this very moment, while he reached out to me, I should be dead.

Maybe I was.

A dry coat was given to me to keep warm. I was too big for it. I looked like a hobo. The sleeves climbed up my arms. I shivered, my teeth chattering, not because of cold, out of shear fear. I punched a hole in ice. I re-emerged through the exact same place.

At the dining room with Peggy Mays it was the odd feeling. I had returned to the same place to another hole punched rudely through my life where I had started in marriage almost three decades before. I was again to see my entire life pass.

Not far from the tissues, Peggy Mays had a box of keepsakes in front of her accumulated over her 83 years. She showed me black and white family pictures; the business card of her grandfather, a well-known wainwright in the horse country, Frank Schmidt; a melancholy poem by her father Eugene Steaurt, whose late-night writings on the losses in life was a comforter as counting sheep -- he lost his son to a hit-and-run driver and a granddaughter to an irresponsible mother who discharged a .357 magnum; a sad farewell note from namesake Aunt Marion Ellis (Peggy’s legal name was actually Marion, too) who committed suicide leaping from a truss bridge 70 feet into Loch Raven Lake; love letters from the hands of a daughter.

We small talked about the life of Peggy Mays in a perfectly kept two-bedroom condominium flat with George gone now for nine years. She missed him so. He was never the same after his daughter was murdered.

Peggy always had a neat house, uncluttered, Maryland welcoming. She and I talked about sentimental days. We talked about my children and where I had settled in inviolable Vermont after roaming the desert for 18 years across the country as a newspaper editor. Over this time I and my former mother-in-law had hardly stayed in touch. She knew this as well as I. Yet we could never be far apart spiritually.

I was the one who had decided to start this discussion of the hard detail which we had at a pine dining room table discovered in a shop near Paradise, a pleasant Sunday drive over the Maryland line. I needed to talk -- and hear her voice tell me what was kept stored I knew in the heart of hearts.

We did not say a word to one another that crazy swirling unbelievable night at the emergency room. I saw you pass through the hospital foyer. A single moment our rheumy eyes locked in the window’s reflection.

Do you remember?

She did.

I always wondered but never asked. Were you asleep when the call came? Did you answer the phone? What was said?

There was an intimate question I had held back because I was afraid to ask. How did you and George survive the 90-minute drive from Thurmont to the hospital in Towson, knowing no matter how much you wished, that you could never change what had happened? What did you two talk about after you learned the horrible news?

She was tearful. After she told me she asked, “Do you need more coffee?”

I talked, she poured.

I paced the recital I practiced as a journalist the questions written to make sure I posed every one I hadn’t that I should have though never sticking to script. We sat for two, maybe three hours.

Where was Steuart when it happened? I never talked in any depth with a brother about the death of his sister not the way grieving men should. Marion was 27 when she was taken, so young, I the same.

There were a few questions I asked of father George Mays involving the shooting. Not many I could recall. There was one.

Who identified Marion’s body? Though I witnessed her death and of course drove to the hospital and knew it was she, I was not called upon to perform this brutal obligation to look at one you loved lying lifeless on a metal table. A father’s eyes swamped. Head dropped. I knew his answer as he cried through his words.

I now asked a mother whose eyes were teary. Did you realize this very year was the 27^th anniversary of the murder? An entire lifetime had passed. She did, of course. How could she not?

I talked at this table in July and August of 2006, several hours at a clip. I saw her again in October. Peggy Mays wrote a letter that month and said she wanted to write more. She wrote again in November, twice, one letter arriving a day before the 27^th anniversary. She wrote during the winter of 2007 and into summer right before the anniversary date of the murder trial. She routinely wrote from this time forward, more in this one year than all the 27 others that preceded.

"Here goes another long letter -- call it my therapy."

“Did I tell you…?"

She hadn’t.

"I couldn’t talk about it."

“It seemed crazy at the time because I knew in my heart it was true."

“I could not cry. The pain was too much. I went to the basement to scream out my anguish.”

"I never asked God why."

Many times over I did ask God the question she would not.

Why? Why her? Why us? Why not me?

"The end of this letter," she finished. “Are you ready for another?"

Yes, send more. A mother needed to let her heart run. I needed to listen, and this was the first I had truly done that. Why had I not talked before about this in this way? She told me something excruciating to admit. She was unable to keep a picture of her own daughter.

"It took a while before I could."

I had to ask myself, how? How could a mother who loved a child so dearly not keep a picture? What made her do this? I wanted to know. I needed to know. Because I was no different than she.

I too could keep no picture.

Eight

There was a scrapbook memory written of two families right after birth enjoying life at its best.

Two were introduced as fortune guided at Union Memorial Hospital where all Baltimore babes were born. It was 1952, a leap year. The boy was Thomas Michael Townsend: June 6. June 6 was a Friday. Friday’s child is loving and giving. The girl was Marion Calvert Mays: March 22. March 22 was a Saturday. Saturday’s child works hard for a living. The family Mays was noted as 12^th visitor to see me cradled in my mother’s arms. It could have been the first hours after my birth. Marion was all of 3 months old. I was all of days young.

“George, Peggy, Stuart and Marian" visited, according to my pink baby scrapbook. My mother misspelled names of the Mays children, unlike her. She was good with language, a fine writer who kept newspaper editors busy with her prolific commentary. Two mothers kidded about our initials because of the rhythm: MCM and TMT. MCM grew up in the countryside of My Lady’s Manor in northeast Baltimore County, then moved to Towson near Baltimore and played with Barbie dolls. TMT grew up in the semi-rural, semi-suburban paradise and played Tom Sawyer.

Here I was raised in the fragrance of pink and white honeysuckle, lost in the memory of a flowering meadow where the South either begins or ends. I stayed until my 19th birthday when I struck out on my own, the middle child of three boys with uninhibited independence, to make my generation-ordained journey to San Francisco -- with Marion, to return to earn a degree in journalism at the University of Maryland, to marry a sweetheart who went back literally to my first moments of my life.

I never knew about this storybook introduction until I read my baby book for the first time 54 years to the month after I was born. I never knew the first little girl I met was Marion. This never came up until I began writing my story and paged through the diary of my beginning.

This place where we were born and raised was Heaven, forged with corner groceries with penny candy and nickel packs of baseball cards with nuggets of orange and black Orioles, ponds that lured Canada geese, porch-delivered bottles of milk from Cloverland Dairy and fields fringed with black-eyed Susans. After the war a journalist dubbed it the Land of Pleasant Living. Paradise began its ascent on the hot July sand of the Atlantic shore. Paradise was carried on the cattails of St. Michael’s, Oxford and Easton where osprey mothers nested. Paradise lifted over the Chesapeake and hundreds of sun-specked sail boats that departed from the docks of Annapolis. Paradise eased to a halt behind a line of Chevys and Fords stopped at lights in neighborhoods of row homes with painted screens on front doors where marble steps of Italians, Germans, Russians, Greeks, Irish and Polish of old Baltimore glistened on sunny days. Paradise peeked out of musty curtains in the parlors of Baltimore Street, lusty den of iniquity of Blaze Starr stardom. It rolled up to the butter-cup-covered hummocks of the Piedmont Plateau of horsy Harford and Baltimore counties where the gentry celebrated the steeple chase as their lord-bequeathed sport. It stepped up onto the fields of Carroll County where you’d certainly notice the contrasting smell of cow barns with elegant Swiss Brown grazing and the sweet aroma of ky-blue cotton candy at the 4-H summer fair. It muscled over the granite of the Blue Ridge in Thurmont where come November hunters from blue-collar Hampden and white-collar Timonium hunted their quarry.

My parents, Ann Majorie Snosky of immigrant-German background and William DuMond “Bill” Townsend of English blue blood Glen Cove, N.Y. heritage, married in Bel Air weeks before my father went off to war. My mother was a country girl born in Sparks, a live wire who could talk more than anyone on earth. My father was born at our unassuming crossroads in northern Baltimore County in Timonium a dozen miles from what was known in the vernacular of our home town as old Bal-mer, this cultural niche of America where the syllables were swallowed. He was quiet, the absorber, the perfect complement that made a war marriage unbreakable. He understood the land welcoming and warm, yet raw and roughneck.

As a young man my father joined National Guard in a moment of truth he told me because the Guard sponsored good beer parties. He got his beers but ended up going off to fight as a real solider in the regular Army. Like many soldiers, my father kept his nightmares to himself after he was discharged and arrived home to dinner at The Chesapeake Restaurant on Charles Street. He had served in New Guinea and the Philippines. His division, the Red Arrow, was one of three in the world -- outside the Soviet Union and Germany -- that had the misfortune of engaging the longest in an exercise of universal madness. He began to talk about his own personal time of violence only after my mother passed from a heart attack in 1998. I sensed this was a process of reconciliation, the same way I suspected it took me 27 years to write a book about an event as painful. Murder was part of his thoughts every single day of his life I learned as murder was a part of mine, as daydreaming about your daughter’s soccer game is a part of yours.

Step by step the stories of comradeship in arms started to build as my father moved into elder-hood. The response now became a steady chronicling of historical documentation well into his 80s as I asked him more about what had taken place. In reading histories of the Civil War I noted a similarity of fraternity among soldiers who fought the formidable fight. These aging soldiers were prompted to reveal something seared on the soul which they hid for decades as if a timer in old years now sprung telling, “It is your moment.”

Freud walks next to us until the end.

I never could believe this final outpouring from my father had anything to do with the brotherhood of the Greatest Generation. This was merely the same process of Peggy Mays needing to write me letters about her feelings of unfathomable loss, and I dare admit, inescapable guilt. How can you possibly be guilt-less any time the essence of life is taken no matter the circumstance?

It was during late-in-life father-to-son talks when I crossed over the 50-something threshold that I understood what my father experienced as a young man. For the first time he told me about killing.

One recollection that seeped through the fractures of memory involved the rifle my father brought home as a souvenir that made you wonder seriously about the genesis of existence. The rifle was heavy I knew because one day he allowed me to drag it to school as part of show and tell. I walked down the street carrying the weaponry as if this were an everyday event along with my canvas school satchel that continuously slid off my shoulder. I was a sight. The rifle was almost as tall as me. Missing the firing pin, the weapon had a honey-colored stock. It had a long scoping mechanism that lifted five inches. It was a bolt action. The rifle was toted with a thick worn leather strip. A piece of wood three inches long was chipped on the stock’s top. I fantasized this was where a bullet struck. And this is the story my father remembered, and it finally dawned what it really meant to me. He was in the jungle on edge, ready for an inevitable firefight. He crouched, carbine in hand. He had no idea of knowing. A Japanese sharpshooter in a leafy perch with a depraved heart had a bead. The sharpshooter sited, was aiming, intense, steadied, ready to pull the trigger, ready to kill, to unload this powerful weapon into the head of a stranger in the fillip of the fingers to end it all, until a comrade-in-arms spotted the sniper. Comrade fired, surely. His bullet hit the would-be assassin. The Japanese soldier died, my father lived.

It was a bullet that saved my father’s life.

As I become older and moved through the time of a young widower when a powerful weapon ended two lives close to me, the irony so glaringly apparent became infatuation. The bullet that spared my father and killed another man ensured that I was born.

After war my father returned to Maryland comfort. Love birds bought a $9,000, three-bedroom house with a poured concrete basement, no more than 1,300 square feet with small bedrooms and a tiny kitchen, one bath on the first floor with the only commode and shower for a family of five, a lot minus the shade of trees, a limestone driveway, a septic system and tan cement-asbestos shingles. This place was Timonium, unincorporated as all towns were in Baltimore County. Tom Sawyer had his mighty Mississippi. I had adventure in the heart of semi-rural, semi-suburban paradise on Northwood Drive. Our lot without sidewalks merged with the street as if a natural part of the topography. The street was my river where I plied my raft. Along the banks -- in our backyards, we saved the virginity of women folks, shielded children from danger and battled nefarious Nazis.

In summer, county crews moved down each of the three streets in the neighborhood and shoveled out tons of chip over hot-sprayed tar. On hot days the road surface appeared to have shiny scales that shimmied as the heat of a Maryland mirage rose. You came to see images that did not exist. The work kicked up a trail of dust that left a layer of white powder on cars. We boys watched because we knew of the sticky fun that would keep us occupied vacation long that infused our mothers with conniption. Stay out of the way -- and off the tar. Of course we listened -- for a second. The heat of summer leavened the tar creating masterful bubbles. Barefoot boys popped many. Fathers spent a half hour cleaning feet with alcohol before we were permitted in the house to eat dinner. We laughed because it tickled when rags ran through our toes. Our fathers laughed with us.

Up the road was Nash general store, tended of course by Mr. Nash and his wife, Mrs. Nash. I never knew their first names. Children never knew first names of adults. The store had been at the corner of Belfast and York roads, forever at least in my little mind. It was well worn. For me, Nash store represented the scent of the old South: smoky, toasty and homey. In summer the store felt cooler because of its basement location. In winter it was bone-dry and embracing. The store had unpolished wooden cabinets covered with glass. Here you discovered rows of penny candy, bundles of red string-licorice and individually wrapped pieces of bubble gum. A red metal box with a big Coke across the front contained gallons of water and chunks of ice. This metal box was a respite during unforgivable hot spells. To cool off one placed the arm into the icy water to the elbow. In seconds body temperature plummeted. On the counter was an old cash register, which when used sang out "ping." Jars were filled with pig's feet, red sour sausages and huge kosher pickles. The jars lined were about the only things tidy in this repository of mishmash. Much in the store was in perpetual disarray because there was too much stuff to pack into such a miniscule space. Things were stacked with plans to put them away but no one ever did. That was one reason I liked the store. Randomness created distinctive personality.

Further down York Road, south, was Lutherville, sister neighborhood. It held a special place in the Townsend household. Christmas Past had its origin in this very spot. On a Saturday morning in early December my mother, father, grandmother Lucy and brothers Stevie and Monty would squeeze in the family fumy sedan with its cushioned cloth seats and static-filled radio tuned to WCBM and Gene Autry’s “Rudolph.” We arrived at the train station which dominated the village center for a special treat that was packed in the Florida warmth, a wood-slat box of citrus sent by relatives. Dad jimmied the box. My mother plucked a orange and passed a piece to each of us. There was invariably a nip of snow in the air as always a tease this time of year, the sky Navy gray. The train's toot was heard down track. The toot extended for seconds, then stopped, then began anew.

We viewed the train head on, its friendly bumper human-like. As a child I swore I saw the train smile. As an adult I hopped this same rail from Baltimore to Jacksonville shortly after Marion was slain. For some silly reason I had a desire in the midst of the confusion of random behavior. I needed to experience Disney World. As I struggled to deal with the trauma of witnessing homicide I rode all the rides, a grown man outsized in tiny carriages intended for youngsters standing in line by himself eyes lost in the deepest thoughts with this pink scar on his lip. I was especially taken with the midnight tour of Neverland.

A dozen miles northeast of our crossroads in Timonium off the Manor Road in the countryside of steeplechase Marion and her brother Steaurt were born. George Mays and Peggy Steuart married in 1946 first after the war among returning soldiers and waiting brides-to-be. The Mays bought the tenant house next to Manor Tavern for $2,000. These were industrious roll-up-the-sleeves Marylanders. They tore the house apart. They knocked off the front porch. They put on a new roof. They took one room on the second floor and made a proper bath. They put in a new kitchen in back, tacked up siding adding a three-panel fence and shutters. A dream house in a fount of childhood fantasies for any little girl was completed.

My Lady’s Manor was a gift to us Marylanders, actually first "Lord Baltimore’s Guilft" as the roadside sign reads to his wife Margaret, Lady Baroness of Baltimore. Charles Calvert conveyed the property as a wedding present on September 10, 1713. Before his eyes in travels across his land grant came a wondrous surprise like a fairy leaping out from behind a sycamore: a swath of rolling wooded countryside with purling brooks and meadows with daisies, white-tailed deer and red fox, soaring red-tailed hawk and billowy clouds place matted across blue sky, a remembrance of the Lord’s own English countryside, so perfect for My Lady. She never stepped a dainty toe onto The Manor.

My Lady’s Manor was indeed Maryland’s beauty mark of 10,000 acres in northeast Baltimore County. The Manor was a self-contained arrangement of farms where horses were a center of life, a home to jousting, blessing of hounds and fox hunts. It was a land of hill and dale and rickety wood bridges. Narrow roads wound the acreage rising and falling with the shape of the earth veering around bends, up hillocks, along hedge groves. Paved highways once stony country lanes were the width of a single car. Entire stretches of road endured up until the 1990s without centerlines. Oak and maple overhung stretching to touch windshields. Wild mushrooms, dandelion greens, lambsquarter, wild mustard, fox grapes and elderberries scattered the roadside and leafy woods. Homes with creepy ivy sat way off the road. Ponds were filled with sunfish. And the prettiest little red brick church you could find, this chapel of ease, St. James Episcopal Church raised in 1750, surrounded by a cemetery that bridged Colony to Republic, permitted you to stand on a hill shoulder to shoulder with the past and the present.

Shortly before Marion Calvert Mays was born (pronounced in Manor-ese as Cull-vert) there were homes lit by oil lamps. It was almost 1950 before far-back farms received electricity. There was a one-room school that educated children. There were homes of high condition and of "middling" range. There were farms and locales with names that fashioned sense of place: Loafer’s Lodge, Verdant Valley, Boon’s Delight, Beautiful Meadows, Blue Rocks and World’s End. There were the last names chiseled on the graves at St. James that told the story of the original settlers, gentlemen farmers and courageous jockeys, some who died in their passion as horses drove over open field, brooks, downed trees and painted jumps in point-to-point steeplechases, these families as lasting as the land itself: Streett, Steuart, Pierce, Gittings, Price, Hutchins, Rutledge, Cockey, Philpot and Griswold. And there were first names of people who populated the hills and fields, a throw-back to generations: Isaac, Josiah, Louisa, Penelope, Matilda, Jemima, Pinkney, Gertrude, Estelle, Maude, Hannah, Ariel, Oliver, Eleazas, Cornelia, Martha, Octavia, Clementine, Wilbur, Cassandra, Eli, Belinda, Greenbury, Silas, Aquilla, Elijah, Moses and Prudence.

More personally for two families, you could find first names on granite markers that would be taken from grave to hospital nursery and were bestowed in two families to the progeny. Those were Marion and Joshua.

The family Mays-Steaurt nestled into familiar life. Peggy tended to the children, George worked as a supervisor at a trucking company. They attended to St. James Church. George was on the building committee and oversaw construction of the country day school. At the Parish House at St. James Church and later the Manor Tavern young couples put on dinners and groomed social networks. There was a store at the tavern, too. All gathered at some time during the week. This was where neighbors socialized. They caught up on the news. Mr. Bosley, a skinny man with a beard who chewed tobacco, ran the place with old wood floors, checker boards and a pot belly stove. He played cards games and gambled. As an adventurous boy Steuart collected bottles in the stone parking lot next to the blacksmith’s shop, cashing them in for two cents each, buying gumballs.

It was the blacksmith’s shop owned by Steuart’s great-grandfather where an uncle, Gene, taught his nephew how to play baseball. Uncle Gene played with gusto all of his sadly lived short life. The Orioles scouted him. On any whim he organized neighborhood baseball games with Steuart. George Mays worked hard commuting as a manager of a trucking business so he had less time in the evenings. Uncle Gene would say to Steuart, “Let’s have a game! Go get the help at the Griswold’s. Get the Cromwell boys. Don’t forget Musser. Find the pastor’s son.” They gathered themselves and played baseball behind the blacksmith’s shop.

There were so many bonds of which I never knew. It’s funny how you never ask direct questions about the past of the people who bore or raised you. Our parents were raised in the same northern plot of the county. My father and George Mays attended Towson High School together. They went on double dates. Peggy and my mother Ann attended Sparks School, a couple years apart. Peggy grew up in a family unsettled by divorce with her parents Eugene and Hilda. George grew up in a stable family with his parents George and Emma. My mother grew up in a family surrounded by love with her parents Michael and Nellie. Michael died of an aneurysm. George would die in the same way. My father now has the same condition. My father grew up in a family rendered by marital dissolution in the middle the 1920s with his parents DuMond and Lucy. Like Peggy, my father grew up in an Episcopalian household. Like Ann, George was dipped in the Bible of the Methodist. Each I suspected was in search of something the opposite offered.

After the war the pairs vacationed together on South River on hazy summer days in Anne Arundel County. It was 1951, cusp of a new beginning. I walked through the door. Two couples with one young child each, boys, danced along shore in the wonder years of young parenthood. Peggy was pregnant for the second time. Ann would be pregnant soon. The babes to be were Marion and I. The women were dressed in short-shorts and elastic halter tops. They were sexy for their husbands. Their smooth shoulders were rich brown because of August sun. The men were in sleeveless T shirts, the old-fashion kind, with hairy arms and hairy backs. They were here for a week’s vacation, Maryland thrifty. They were obligated as all shore vacationers to net a bushel of blue crabs. Mother Nature amply provided. Such was a slice of lighter life on this lazy part of the Chesapeake when living was easy every day for these couples who like so many of their generation had a bloody war-torn awful past to want to forget.

These families drifted apart on another hazy lazy summer day as young couples do, sometime in the late 1950s. While one family visited on Northwood Drive my brother Monty and Marion’s brother Steuart walked across York Road, where cars drove too fast and still do. Steuart was hit as he moved through the cross walk. He was injured slightly, and the accident scared the dickens out of his parents. I don’t remember much about this commotion, but I do recall Marion in our front yard. Even at our young ages, not much more than 6 or 8, there was this definite attraction.

The accident shook families. They drew into themselves because a traumatic event has a way of stewing emotions and triggering disconnection. Parents and friends would not rejoin again for years pretending for so long in spite of their intimate association that they were never this close.

Two infants introduced at birth at Union Memorial Hospital near the Johns Hopkins compound were the lynchpin of reunion. Off into the future they would find each other, star-crossed, and completely unaware of the transcendent past.