The Last Tree on Bluefield Avenue
by Tyler Kennett
Roadside Memorial Wikipedia
On the day of the accident, I watched the traffic light change forty-five times. I focused on the light instead of the ambulance clearing the wreckage. I was just a kid in the back seat of my grandfather’s car.
There used to be a tree past the light, the only one on the hill. The rest were bulldozed to make space for the road. Why this tree was left, I don’t know. I don’t understand why we leave one tree, knowing that one day it will come down too.
*
I go back to May 17, 2009. A man on Bluefield Avenue waves down a taxi driven by a young woman. She pulls over and he slides into the back seat, placing a bag at his feet. At the driver’s home, her young children wait for her to return from work. It is late in the afternoon. This is probably her last trip of the day.
The taxi driver is thirty-one years old.
A few blocks down the street, in an oncoming lane, my grandfather stops at a yellow light. The car behind him honks. “Oh, shut the hell up,” my grandfather mutters. My grandmother snaps at him, says he’s always too careful when he’s driving. We have to make it home in time for church. We need to hurry or we will be late.
My grandmother is fifty-six.
My grandfather is sixty-one.
I am nine.
Back in the taxi, I imagine the man sitting still in the back seat, talking to the driver while they’re stopped at the red light. When the light changes, as they pull ahead, the man slowly removes a sawed-off shotgun from his bag, placing it in his lap. He’s probably quiet about it, she doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s eyeing the large brown purse in the front seat. She has no money. He doesn’t know it.
The man is twenty-one years old.
*
I look for the tree stump each time I drive down Bluefield Avenue. It is decorated with a few garish fabric flowers, probably purchased from the Dollar Tree store. Whenever they blow away, they are replaced a few days later. For the longest time, they were always the same color, two red and one white.
I’ve never understood why fabric flowers are considered cheaper than real ones. A real flower will fade. It will die like the memories lost by those who forget you once you’ve been gone long enough. But those fake flowers have stood the test of time, forced me to remember her. Falsehoods last forever, and sometimes I think it is best to lie.
*
My grandfather once pulled a gun from the hunting cabinet, threatening the lives of my grandmother and me if we didn’t stop arguing. He held that old shotgun with a gumption used to kill more than squirrels. He’d hunted since he was a child, shot with accuracy, for the certainty of death. In Germany, where he was stationed after being drafted for Vietnam, he’d sharpened his aim further.
He told me that he could blow my fucking brains out. He didn’t have to tell me. At fourteen, I knew that he could. I’d seen what those old hunting guns could do. As he started going for bullets, I looked at him, pleading for my life, screaming at him to snap out of it. I stepped forward in front of my grandmother. I said, “Why are you trying to kill us?”
The curse was broken. He stopped in his tracks, dropping the unloaded gun as if it had burned his palms. The gun clanged against the floor and he broke down, apologizing and saying that he didn’t know what had gotten into him. As he embraced me, his tears soaked through the seams of my shirt. I stared over his shoulder at the nearly loaded gun. I cried too.
The argument had been my fault. I’d asked what we were eating that night. My grandmother said we were going to have poor-man spaghetti, a recipe made without meat. It typically found our plates when money was tight. It was one of my favorite meals, but I couldn’t help joking, “When are we going to have rich-man spaghetti? We never have money for meat anymore.”
My grandfather stood up in a huff. “Boy, can’t you appreciate anything we do for you?” He said that we should appreciate what we eat, no matter what it is, because we never know when we’ll eat again. He told me that, as a commander of a tank, he went days without food as he rolled through Germany’s mountains. He told me a story of a time when one of the tanks shot a tracer into a neighboring camp. He said that he didn’t eat for days after that. Though he never saw combat, only rigorous preparation and constant fear of it, he experienced psychological trauma during his time there. Still, he was never screened for PTSD. He was only diagnosed with hearing deficiencies.
After the day he opened the hunting cabinet, he promised to never open it again, a promise he made for the second time.
*
My grandfather pulls away from the intersection. I play with my action figures. I’m tearing their heads, arms, and legs off before putting them back together in strange ways. I create my own characters, making them fight each other to get their pieces back.
We drive ahead as the taxi approaches us in the oncoming lane. The man with the shotgun points it at the driver’s head. I turn my head sharply as I hear her scream. She lifts her hands from the wheel and loses control of the taxi. They veer into our lane, heading straight for us.
My grandfather slams on the brakes. My grandmother screams, “They’re gonna hit us, Mickey!”
The action figures are no longer at war. They go flying. I follow them through the air. As fast as they fly, they fall underneath the front passenger seat. Our cars lock in place.
We are now at a standoff with the taxi as it sits inches in front of us, facing us, its front- end smoking. The tree, having stopped the taxi, bends to its will. It falls, crashing onto its hood.
If we hadn’t stopped at that yellow light, I would be dead. Inches away from a head-on collision, I’m frozen, staring ahead, counting the traffic light at the next intersection as it changes. From green to yellow to red.
*
My mother was forced to go to rehab shortly after I was born, leaving me with my grandparents who raised me until I left for college. A few years after the accident, she and my three younger siblings moved from Wilmington to a neighborhood near us in West Virginia.
I remember the first time that Child Protective Services was called to our home. The social worker said that my mother had been reported for bringing strangers into her apartment. Because of the concern for my siblings’ safety, my grandparents were asked to take them in for a short period until the social worker could meet with them, making sure that they were not at risk if they were to return to my mother.
I remember tidying my grandparents’ house, anticipating the social worker’s visit. I was the oldest, likely to have the longest interview. While I picked up my toys, my grandmother prepared a large meal as if we were expecting guests. She called me into the kitchen.
“If they ask if you are hungry, tell them you’re about to eat.”
I was hungry, but I told CPS this, instead.
“If they ask if we hit you, tell them you don’t get hit here anymore.”
I knew I would get hit if I didn’t, so I told CPS this, instead.
“If they ask you where mom is, tell them you stay with her on the weekends.”
I never lived with her, but I told CPS this instead.
“If they ask about guns, don’t tell them about any of the stuff from that day. They don’t need to know about that.”
They asked about guns in our house. I told them I don’t like to hunt.
“If you don’t tell them the right stuff, they’re going to take you away.”
My interview went as planned. Afterward, my siblings came to live with us. We were allowed to stay together
*
The other half of my family, on my father’s side, has never met me. I feel that some of them will see me for the first time when they lean over my casket. A newspaper clipping with a relative’s name will draw them in. I’m sure that they will remark how beautiful I look. I imagine that my father, if he comes, will say that I look just like the pictures. I’m sure that I won’t.
At each funeral I went to as a child, my grandmother would always say the same thing after looking at the faces that were drained of life. “They don’t look nothing like themselves. I can’t recognize them.” At the funerals of those closest to her, she is unable to walk to the front of the room. When her sister passed, she sat in the back pew during the viewing. She says that she wants to remember the way that they looked when they were alive. I’ve always felt that you can tell who loved the dead most based on how unrecognizable they find the face that lies before them.
I’m worried that I will not be seen by my grandmother if I die before her. My greatest fear is for her to be unable to walk to the front of the funeral hall. I hope that she is able to see me. I think that to be seen, living or dead, is my only desire. But sometimes I think that I would prefer a closed casket, living on only in peoples’ memories.
*
“He’s got a gun.”
“Tyler, get on the floor, now.”
I peek from the seat as if I am a soldier, ordered to not look above the trenches at the war raging above him. The man in the back seat puts the shotgun to the driver’s head. There’s a click, then a blast that leaves my ears ringing.
In an instant, all I hear is screaming. All I see is red. The shooter jumps from the taxi with the brown purse clutched in his hands. He turns toward us, dumping its contents to the ground. A small assortment of makeup compacts and brushes clatter onto the pavement. There is no money, only odds and ends.
Blood covers his hands, and he looks directly at me. We will lock eyes for the rest of my life. We both know that we shouldn’t be here. We both know that no one had to die.
I’m no longer a kid.
*
I was always the first kid to arrive at elementary school in the mornings. My grandfather would pour coffee for me in a travel mug that mimicked the larger one he took with him. He was a parts mechanic for the coal mines, used to operating heavy machinery and sorting through parts after his time as an army tank commander. School started at 8:00 a.m., but I would usually show up before 6:30 a.m. The first teacher to get to school was Mr. Johnson, a gray-haired gym teacher who liked me because I knew a lot about sports for someone so young.
On a normal day, as we waited for someone to open the school, I read the sports section of the newspaper while my grandfather read the front cover. But on the day after the shooting, my grandfather left the paper in the mailbox. Instead of reading, we sat in silence, heat humming from the Subaru. We hadn’t talked since the night before.
I walked into the building that morning and looked up at Mr. Johnson. “What’s up boy?” he said. “Did you watch Kobe beat up on the Rockets? It looks like he’s going to make it back to the finals!”
I was a huge fan of Kobe Bryant, but I hadn’t watched that game. I tilted my head to see the newspaper tucked under his arm: Arrest Made in Fatal Bluefield Shooting.
“I saw that happen,” I said, pointing to the headline. He froze, lead me to a table, listened to my story, and gathered enough to know I was telling the truth. Later, one of the kids in my class asked if our teacher had heard about the shooting in Bluefield. I spoke up, telling the events with a level of detail that only an eyewitness could have had. The class fell silent.
My teacher took me to the principal’s office and told him that I needed to rest my head due to a headache. The principal asked what was wrong, but I said nothing, fearing suspension. My grandfather came back to school to get me, and we went home. That was the last day I talked about the shooting.
*
On Christmas, the year of the shooting, my mother came to my grandparents’ house for the celebration. She brought my brother Trevor. They were still living in Wilmington at the time, so it was rare to see either of them. It was one of the first times that we were together as a family. On one hip, she held him, a future light of my life. On the other, she carried a long package addressed for me. It was the first gift that she had ever gotten me. She placed it against the tree, far in the corner where the good gifts went until the end of the night. I watched that box as if it might disappear if I took my eyes off it.
The cameras were on me as my mom handed me the gift to open. In Christmas spirit, I ripped the paper, revealing a long red box containing a Daisy BB gun. On the front of the box a silhouetted figure held a gun, pointing it toward the other end of the box. I jumped to my feet, throwing the gun to the carpet. Running through the hallway, I screamed, “They’re going to kill me.” I ran as far as I could, then cowered in the dark laundry room. Though she’d come home for the first time in so long, I told my mother to leave.
Christmas was over.
I’d ruined the night.
My mom hasn’t given me a large gift since. She rarely comes to Christmas gatherings on time, usually working until the night is nearly over. I wish someone had told her that it wasn’t her fault, but no one was allowed to talk about the shooting. About that day.
*
I witnessed my first closed casket funeral that same year, when I was nine. It was for the woman. The taxi driver. We walked in, signed our names in the guestbook, and left. My grandmother couldn’t take it. She took an obituary, but I was not allowed to see it. I’ve been to a few more funerals since, and I feel that there is a sense of peace when there is nothing there to be seen. Everyone signs their name to a guest book that will surely stay buried, not revisited.
While some, like me, may prefer the idea of a closed casket, victims of violence lose their right to choose. Their caskets are closed so that the pastor can walk up to the podium and reassure everyone that God chooses when his children come home. If they were open, everyone would know that God had lost control. That woman who tore down the last tree on Bluefield Avenue had no choice.
I check each time I drive by the stump on Bluefield Avenue to make sure that a few flowers are still there. Faded as they are, she hasn’t been forgotten, but the stump is slowly cracking at the seams.
