Southern Legitimacy Statement: Despite being from a place called Union (South Carolina), I am a born, bred, and dyed-in-the wool Southerner.
Call Me Aa-ron
If you run into me somewhere and say hey, don’t call me Air-ron. That ain’t my name. Call me Aa-ron. Aa-ron Philpot, Jr. I am named after Aa-ron Philpot, Sr., the one what killed my mama. Shot her right in front of me.
That’s what I’m told happened. I was a baby when it happened, a real young baby, so don’t remember nothing myself. But I’m told that’s what happened. How others knowed it well enough to tell me, I don’t know. It was just me, Mama, and him in the house that night she was shot dead.
I’m told by them what claims to know that Mama was in their bedroom in a rocking chair with me in her arms. She had on her nightgown. I wasn’t no more than a few months old at the time. Mama was singing me a lullaby, trying to put me to sleep. What song it was, they didn’t say. They did say I was a noisy baby right from the first and right bothersome to get to sleep. So Mama sang. They said the front door slammed and in come Aaron Philpot, Sr., into the bedroom and says, “I know what you done” and held out his arm with a pistol at the end of it. He fired it three times, straight at Mama. That’s how many times it took to kill her and to leave me, a baby, covered in her blood. It left me with a ringing in my ears too. Those loud three pops. To this day, it sounds like I got little bells going off in my head. That’s what Aaron Philpot, Sr., left me with – no mama and a worrisome ringing in my ears day and night.
You can go years and years and years without knowing the most important things in your life. That’s what happened to me. I was growed up a bit and going to school when I found out what happened that night. And I didn’t learn it from any kinfolk either. The other young’uns at school told me. Told it right hateful-like too, like they was making fun of me. “Aaron ain’t got no mama or no daddy,” they said, like I wasn’t standing close enough to hear them. “Know why? ‘Cause his daddy took a gun and shot his mama’s head clear off her neck. That’s how come. Now his daddy’s in prison in Columbia. For life!”
Later, I went up to Meemaw, my mama’s mama, to see if she could explain. She was the one what raised me from a baby after mama got gone. She went pale-white when I asked her and put her hands up to her face and busted out crying. Had to sit in a chair to keep from falling. She just shook her head and said, “Don’t ask. Don’t ask, Bubba. Please don’t ask. You ain’t supposed to know yet. You ain’t supposed to know at all!” Like she had the power to keep other people’s mouths from moving in hateful ways. I just stood in front of her, her crying and all, determined to know. It took years to get the whole story from her. She told it in pieces as the years went on. Finally, when I was fifteen, I got the whole thing from her.
She finished by saying, “It’s the worst thing what ever happened in Compton County.”
I looked at her and said, “What did he mean, Meemaw, when he said he knowed what she did?”
Meemaw shook her head. “I don’t know, son. Nobody knows. All we can do is speculate.”
“What?” I said.
“We think he believed she was seeing another man behind his back. But that don’t sound right. That don’t sound like your mama. Your mama wasn’t that kind of girl. She was a good Christian girl. Knowed her Bible and everything. She was devoted. To him and to you and to Jesus Christ. We believe he lost his mind. Your daddy. Or was starting to. We all believed he wasn’t kindly right, right from the start. That he was mighty quare. Talked of God like God talked to him direct. Like he had a direct line to God that even the preacher didn’t have. Said he believed in angels and had walked with one once out in the country with the moon coming down around both of them. Well, we believed in ‘em too but never claimed to talk to one, and…. Oh I don’t know, Bubba. I just don’t know!” And she went back to crying into her hands. She sniffed good and went on a little. “We believe one of them made-up angels put it in his head that your mama was seeing that Jarman boy, Ned. But she’d-a never done it. No. Not a Jarman. Not your mama. Not even if she had to.”
I quit school not long after hearing the whole thing. I was old enough to quit, so I done it. As you might expect, nothing good come from quitting and leaving Meemaw’s house. Wasn’t too long after, I got into drinking and drug-taking. I laid down with strange women, bad women, most of them old, because the old is so anxious to take company with the young. But not all of them old. Some was young but so eat up and rotted by meth and pills and drink and whatnot, they might as well have been old theirselfs. Faces all caved in. Arms run up and down with scratches. Some looked like they was a hundred years old. I wallowed in nastiness. Not because I liked it or enjoyed it, but because I felt I had to, that I was finding out something by going so low. About myself. Or maybe about Aaron Philpot, Sr., the man what killed my mama. It was like I was preparing myself for something, getting to know the lowest of the low so I could match him in some way in lowliness, Aaron Philpot, Sr., understand him better, maybe even be like him in some way. Which might make you ask, “Why in the world would you do that? Why would you want to be anything like him? Him a crazy killer locked up in jail and pretending to talk to angels. Him what took your mama away before you even got to know her. Ain’t there nobody else you’d druther be like?”
“What did he kill her with?” I asked Meemaw once in the middle of her telling about it.
The question surprised her. She looked at me with big eyes then looked down at her hands, where the fingers was fighting with each other. “A gun,” she answered, almost in a whisper.
“I know a gun! Everybody knows it was a gun. What kind of a gun?”
She still wouldn’t look at me. The fingers still fought with one another. She shook her head. “I don’t know. A pistol, I reckon. A handgun. That’s what we was told.”
“Did the bullets take her head off like they said?”
Then she looked up, quick, her face all red. “No! That’s just more hateful talk from them what don’t know nothing about it! Her head was attached. Her face was as pretty as ever going down into the dirt.”
Since then, I have bought me a gun. The boy at the Super SaveMore looked at me like he didn’t believe I was old enough to buy it. I stared him down good enough that he didn’t ask no questions and took the fake ID I give him. The gun’s a Rueger Charger. It’s got a detachable magazine so you can fire off more rounds without having to change cartridges. You got to hold the thing and shoot it with two hands. I suspect it could take the head off anything, human or animal. Fact of business, I know it can.
I keep it with me always, like a young’un I got the legal keep of. Even if I’m in the house of one of them strange old women or them meth-head young ones. Even when I’m in bed. Sometimes I kick the woman out and lay the Rueger next to me, like it’s the prettiest girl in the world. I don’t sleep much, no matter where I am. Too stuffed full of my plan. To see Aaron Philpot, Sr., and give him a piece of my mind. I reckon I could go down to Columbia and do it, but they too many people around for that, too many with guns theirselfs. I want it to be one on one. He’ll be out one day. They always get out, even the ones what kills other folks. That’s how fouled-up things has got these days in the United States of America. The mother-killer can get free ‘cause some doctor says he was onced crazy but is now cured and brain-healthy as me and you, and now the mother-killer can mix in with the mother and the innocent child and the preacher and the old memaw like he never, ever done nothing to begin with.
And when he gets out, I’ll be on the tail-end of him, I promise you. Whether he comes back to Compton or goes all the way to Hawaii or Alaska or Africa, I’ll be there ready to introduce myself to him for the first time. Me and the Rueger Charger. And by the time we done, they’ll be only one Aaron Philpot in this world.
