Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator Read online

  As I reflect back and picture myself sitting, trembling under that overpass in rainy darkness as another Atlanta morning broke, I realize I was in that moment at the end of my profession. I held onto that scorched arm of some unknown man caught by Death, shaking so violently I could no longer hide it.

  A more official end of my profession would come after three trips to the emergency room within the following two months, certain each time that I was having a heart attack. The third visit required a ride from my office in the back of an ambulance. It was the last time I saw the hollow looks of my colleagues, those devoted few who had pulled this weight with me for so long, interpreting Death’s never-ending stories.

  When a psychiatrist assessed me from across her desk as I shivered like a lunatic standing out naked in the snow, I read my future in her eyes. There would be no end to this shaking. She told me I was one of the worst cases of post-traumatic stress she had seen since her days working with newly returned Vietnam vets. She placed me on medications to give my nervous system a break. I stayed home and slept for four days. Everything stopped. Even the remembered screams. And I knew, just as the psychiatrist had said, that I would soon be committed to a mental ward if I tried to go back to being Death’s interpreter.

  My unwanted partner had taught me so much, had stolen so much from me. I was no longer Senior Investigator Joseph Morgan. I was just unemployed, disabled Joe looking at a fresh new page and wondering what was next for me. But I had survived Atlanta. I had survived Death, for now. Even though I knew full well that no one ever beats it, I felt hopeful. I continue to feel as if I had, at least once in my life, cheated Death.

  Had my ancestors felt this way when they had retreated from their defense of Atlanta? What scars had they borne as they trekked back west to their homes? If given the chance, would they have done it all again? They had come ready to spill blood. I was there many decades later, ready to mop it up. It had probably meant very little to the people of Atlanta, but it had cost us almost everything.

  PAINTING

  THE TOWN

  WITH JOE

  THE NAME JOSEPH is a seemingly innocuous one. Think of it. To be described as mediocre or socially invisible is to be called an Average Joe. This is the name I have been known by at various times in my life. Others include José, Josephine (sadistic former stepfather), Dummy, Moron, Eeyore (ex-wife), Joey, and of course the ever-popular, bland Joe. My wife despises Joe. She believes it indicates an intellectual dullard. I don’t necessarily agree. What can I say? I find succinctness appealing.

  My wife insists on calling me by my given name; thus, everyone we meet knows me as Joseph. The name has great history: Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers; Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus; Joseph of Arimathea, who provided Christ’s burial plot; and to Alabamans everywhere, the hallowed Joseph William Namath. However, the Joseph who most influenced my life was the one after whom I was named. The influence that I refer to is not so much a result of his taking me fishing or passing on any words to live by; his influence was far more potent, and it originated from beyond the grave.

  By the time I was given my name, Joseph Frazer Killian had been dead for almost thirteen years. People just called him Joe. He was the eldest of six children and born to an alcoholic, skirt-chasing stonemason, my great-grandpa R.R. Killian, and his wife, Elizabeth, a woman so devoutly Christian that she forbade anyone to even speak of card-playing in her home. The courtship of my great-grandparents was the stuff of legend. Even their marriage made the front pages of the newspapers of the day—though certainly not because the two had scaled the heights of society, unless chopping cotton and milking cows qualified for social advancement.

  On the day R.R. and Elizabeth were wed, Great-Grandpa Killian had waited until Elizabeth’s father, Reverend Frazer Scott, had left to preach a local revival in his buggy, drawn by the family mare. Reverend Scott was well known as a fire-and-brimstone Methodist Circuit preacher. When her Killian beau came to the door, Elizabeth was cooking. As the story goes, he called out to her, like some backwoods Romeo, and Elizabeth rushed out of the house and hopped on the back of R.R.’s horse. Off they rode into local infamy, leaving the peas burning on the stove and subsequently setting the man of God’s house on fire.

  That evening, as the newlyweds most certainly found their first coital comfort in one another’s arms, Reverend Scott was searching for his shotgun in the burned-out remains of his home. The next day’s paper detailed the story of the two youngsters, and since Elizabeth was only fourteen, it also added how her father was shooting to kill if he ever caught sight of either one of them.

  However justified Reverend Scott would have been in slaying R.R. for the theft of his young daughter’s maidenhead, not to mention the razing of his domicile, the better angels of his nature eventually prevailed, and the two survived to procreate. Perhaps as a peace offering, the young couple gave their first male child the good reverend’s name. Being the eldest child and the only male, Joseph Frazer Killian was idolized by his younger sisters. Each one of his sisters, including my grandmother Pearl, described him as a prankster, but one who would follow up any of his tomfoolery with a reassuring hug and a wink. As Joe matured, he became quite a strikingly handsome man. He was always dapperly dressed and was never one to get his hands dirty. He often looked as if he had stepped off a Hollywood soundstage during the silent era.

  Great-Uncle Joe Killian’s family, like many of their clan, resided along the swampy banks of Bayou Macon (pronounced Mason and named for the flatboat pirate Mason, who had plied northeast Louisiana in the 1830s). Bayou Macon was known for the various hooligans who had passed through over the years, the most legendary having been Bonnie and Clyde, who hid from G-men and bounty hunters in an area known as Swampers, or Killian’s Landing.

  The Killian Children. Bottom row, left to right: Juanita Killian Osterland, Pearl Killian Morgan (my grandmother). Top row, left to right: Roxie Killian, Eunice Killian Lambert and Joseph Killian (after whom I was named). Circa 1915.

  Originally, before the onset of hostilities between the North and South, the Killian ancestors had lived in grand antebellum style in Mississippi on lands that had been granted to them by the Spanish Crown at the end of the 1700s. But the Killians were forced to flee after General Grant had burned down their plantation just north of Natchez, Mississippi, while en route to his siege of Vicksburg. Ulysses was not held in high regard by the family, to say the very least. In fact, one of my grandmother’s uncles is rumored to have named a pig after the much-esteemed hero of the Yankee aggressors.

  After the war, the Killians continued their agrarian life on lands the family had already owned in Louisiana, but it was a life devoid of the successes of their earlier generations. Various members of the clan drifted into work as tradesmen and craftsmen, so it stood to reason that my great-uncle Joe would become a craftsman too. He chose house painting. The whole family eventually left Swampers, migrating northwest to the town of Monroe, Louisiana, and it was there that my great-grandpa Killian continued his trade as a stonemason—as well as his whore chasin’—while his son Joe eventually became the president of the state painters’ union.

  Joe Killian eventually married and had children. He led a good life, by anyone’s standards, and was loved by most who knew him, especially his quintet of sisters. Their names sound like characters in the mind of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Eunice, Roxie, Myrtle, Juanita, and Pearl. These names may conjure up images of flappers and bathtub gin, but they would never have been caught doing the Charleston in Great-Grandma Killian’s strict kitchen.

  What the Killian sisters lacked in Roaring-Twenties sophistication, they made up for in unrivaled loyalty to their family. Under the direction of Great-Grandma Killian, eight-year-old Pearl would take food to the local jail, because one of my great-grandma’s friends from the local Methodist church had been arrested for sending her husband to meet Jesus prematurely. Pearl was terrified to convey this basket of food to the woman in lockup, y
et typical of the Killian girls, her older sibling Juanita said, “Don’t worry, sister. I’ll protect you,” and off the two went to face an accused murderess together.

  This commitment to each other would serve them all well over the years. Decades later, after Pearl had married and started a family of her own, her mother-in-law said about the Killians, “If you kill a chicken, they all have to show up to eat it.” Though homeless and living under her daughter-in-law’s roof, the woman never quit bellyaching about the family who ended up caring for her until the day she died. The Killian bond was unbreakable, even in death.

  The weather on January 24, 1951, was cool and clear. That afternoon Grandma Pearl was at home, getting ready for a Wednesday-night prayer meeting, when her phone rang. Without telling her why, a nurse at the local hospital urged her to come to the emergency clinic immediately. Imagining her husband had been hurt at work or maybe one of her siblings was in need, Pearl tucked my four-year-old father into their car and raced to St. Francis Hospital in Monroe. What the Killian sisters found out that day would not only change their lives but mine too.

  The apple of the Killian family’s eye was lying on a treatment-room bed, his hair freshly cut and his skin smelling of barber salts. Great-Uncle Joe had been shot while coming out of a local barbershop. The boy who had once loved, played, and protected his younger sisters was bullet-ridden. He had died in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital.

  According to witnesses, this pride of the Killian clan had not been pleading for his life but dancing and darting about the street, trying to keep his parked Ford sedan between himself and a murderer’s gun. It was beneath his Ford, on an Ouachita riverfront street in West Monroe, Louisiana, that he had met his end. As Joe had attempted to scratch his way across the tarmac toward safety, the murderer had stuck a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson under the car and pulled the trigger till there was no further point. Joe’s executioner had then strolled off down the street toward the river, casually holding the weapon in his hand as if he were going fishing in the Ouachita with a new kind of tackle.

  As the police and the Killian sisters pieced together what had happened, it became apparent that the young Killian lion had been slaughtered over paint. Great-Uncle Joe had been the first president of the Louisiana Painters’ Local. It was up to him to decide what bids would go to each union member. When a particularly lucrative job of painting a bridge spanning the Mississippi was posted, Joe had made the soon-to-be fatal mistake of not giving it to a fellow by the name of Moore, who then tracked my great-uncle to his barber and waited for him in the saloon across the street.

  In graphic detail, over and over again throughout my youth, my grandmother told me how it happened, her eyes weary with tears.

  “He always went to the same barber over in West Monroe. Joe always liked to look neat.” She would pause then before saying, “Everyone knew that he went to that barber on the same day every week.”

  The only time I ever heard my grandmother use profanity was when she told this story. She explained how Moore rolled the bullets of the revolver across the bar, telling the other bar dwellers, “You see these? They’re for that son-of-a-bitch Killian when he comes out.” Moore then coolly loaded the revolver, strode into the street, and pointed the weapon at Great-Uncle Joe.

  Of course, a story this salacious was big news in a small Southern town of the 1950s. The arrest, the sanity hearing, and the trial remained front-page news for months. But what really jolted both the community and the Killian sisters was that, even though his actions were clearly more than enough to get this unapologetic assassin the best seat in the house at Angola, Moore was pardoned by then governor Earl K. Long. It had long been hinted that Earl himself was insane and this only confirmed the fact for the Killian clan.

  The alcoholic, homicidal painter and the demented governor of Louisiana set in motion a Killian family tradition. Every year, for almost twenty years to come, on the precise date of beloved Joe’s death, Moore received a black wreath with WE WILL NOT FORGET emblazoned in gold script across its adorning ribbon.

  Maybe the insanity and the sorrow have been embedded in my DNA, some kind of loosely twined pair of threads strung through the generations and woven into me. From the moment I was old enough to listen, I was regaled with stories of a man I never met but for whom I bore a name. Tales of how cruel and unjust his death was, how his killer did not receive justice, but that in God’s time he would. My birthright was death.

  A Southern man looks not to chance but to the hand of God. My grandmother always told me that God had preordained me to do great things with my life. Her dogma coupled with the ceaseless homage paid to her brother set my young mind to work. I could not then have anticipated what awaited me these many years later, but what boy could imagine a destiny filled with bearing witness to mankind’s foolishness and fragility?

  Organized labor flyer registering their collective complaint against the campaign of Cap Barham who was running for Louisiana Lt. Governor. Barham defended the man who murdered my Uncle Joe.

  I sought out my destiny at the same time it was searching for me. When I was just a teen, I envisioned myself as an investigator, always asking why or how, and seeking to be in a position where those questions actually meant something. The investigation of death felt as though it fit me like a glove. All my senses told me I was born to it. Understanding the system, the people, and mostly the dead, felt like second nature.

  Why would God have me, this Joseph from a long line of Josephs, be the one to record the despair of broken-hearted mothers, wives, and, yes, sisters? Maybe I thought I could do good. Maybe I thought I could save the Great-Uncle Joes of the world and by doing so soothe the anguish of the Killian sisters.

  But at the end of the day, things shake out a bit more simply. The path I journeyed as a death investigator was handcuffed to the legacy of a man who bled to death in the street, beneath an old car, and a decision he’d made about paint. You see, neither my long dead great-uncle nor I is an Average Joe.

  JERRY LEE AND ME

  IN THE SOUTH, music influences your life one way or another. As a small child I would sit in ancient wooden camp-meeting chapels with their sawdust aisles listening to “Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling” and the pleadings of a traveling evangelist. I’d be jammed in next to my Southern Methodist grandmother, wondering if the shouted pleadings would ever end.

  “This message is for every mother, brother, daughter, or son. When you walk out that door and get into your car, you may be stepping into eternity! This may be your last chance!” I can’t count how many times I heard these same lines repeated through my childhood. Fat, sweaty, balding, and claiming to have been called by God to preach but lacking any call to formal education, the preacher expected his congregation to trust him without question. “The savior is calling! But he is a gentleman, brothers and sisters. Jesus never barges his way in. He’s waiting at the door of your hearts. Won’t you answer him today?”

  A Southern evangelical Christian church is great theater. The drama is in figuring out who would avoid the Devil on any given night.

  I preferred to listen to the local music minister sing the hymns in his baritone, rich with a patina that only comes from Deep South humidity and a diet of unfiltered Camels. There was always something soothing about the familiar voice of the music minister as opposed to the preacher, who I knew even at my young age was playing the congregation of suckers with his message of spiritual extortion. From the beginning, I favored the music over the preaching. A music minister once said to me, “The great thing about heaven is that there will never be any more sermons, just endless singing.” Amen to that.

  The Killian children with parents: Robert R. Killian, Great-Grandfather and Mary Elizabeth Scott Killian, Great-Grandmother. Though they remained married, his chronic drinking, whore-chasing and card-playing ran contrary to her staunch Methodist worldview.

  For all the folks in the South who clamor to be shouted at in church, just
as many worship the King—Elvis, in all of his crushed-velvet glory. But not us Morgans. It was the Killer our family measured any advertised musical talent against, and to a certain degree still do—Jerry Lee Lewis.

  Whether it was Gershwin or the Stones coming through our tinny television speakers, my father would glare at the screen and state, “Well that sum bitch shore ain’t the Killer.” Then he would abruptly stand and walk away, scratching himself through his boxers, and subsequently slam the bedroom door behind him. My father had been thoroughly proselytized by Jerry Lee. I am still amazed to this day that I was not named after him, Jerry instead of Joseph.

  God bless my grandmother. She warned every Morgan, including Daddy and me, about the evils of secular music but to no avail. Who could renounce Jerry Lee, especially when the family rumor was that we were related to him? Hell, my grandmother’s home in Monroe, Louisiana, was located just down the road from Swaggart’s Grocery, owned by Jimmy Swaggart’s aunt and uncle. And Papaw claimed that he had sold horses to Mickey Gilley’s father. So the die was cast for us all, most importantly my father.

  My very first concert was seeing the Killer rock the Civic Center in Monroe with my mother. That piano stool flying through the air as he kicked it backwards while singing “Great Balls of Fire,” that’s one image forever burned into my memory. I stood through the entire show. This sure wasn’t a camp meeting and the audience here was actually cheering while someone shouted at them.

  Daddy worshipped at the First Church of Jerry Lee. Like a Mississippi Delta snake charmer, Jerry Lee had the ability to make my father groove like no one else. Whether it was the rockin’ Killer or the trailer-park Jerry Lee trying his hand at the country side of life, Daddy danced—destructive, angry, and unfaithful to everyone but his deity. I didn’t understand then but there was a rhythm tumbling out of the Killer’s ivories (Granny would’ve said it was the devil), a rhythm that scored my father’s dance with both life and death. It was a rhythm I loved too, but it also frightened me—just like my daddy frightened me.