State Hospital for the Criminally Insane
Rusk, TX
December 4, 199x
Joanne Calhoun-Gilmer, Editor
Houston News-Express
1000 West Live Oak
Houston, TX 77004
Dear Ms. Calhoun-Gilmer,
After all that has been said in the media (see enclosed articles from your paper; I was called "the Toolbox Killer"? Oh, please!), I think the truth should finally be known. This may be hard to believe, but I swear this is what happened, the way I remember it. The people here tell me I am insane and that there is absolutely no way I can tell the truth; Luke (he’s one of the nurses) says I wouldn’t know the truth if it dropped on my head wrapped around a twenty five pound block of cement. I tell him that if somebody dropped a twenty-five pound block of cement on his head, he wouldn’t know the truth either. I don’t think he thinks that’s funny. He just smiles in that condescending way, shakes his head, and walks off. Anyway, this is the whole story.
What I remember most was the smell of Grandmother’s house: flowers blooming, freshly squeezed lemonade, a light tinge of ammonia from when the floors had been mopped the previous Sunday, beans and cornbread cooking. The cornbread was divine, slightly sweet with a grainy texture, the way good cornbread should taste. Grandmother herself carried the faint scent of potpourri from the sachets she kept in her closet and drawers.
The house was a stone building on a concrete base, the stones in the walls all shapes and sizes, bound by mortar and Grandfather’s love. Grandfather died in the same wreck that killed my folks, just after I was born, so I never knew him. The garage was a separate building, with a workshop which had remained boarded shut since Grandfather’s death and space for at least three cars and the tractor. It was an old wooden building, tormented by years of bad weather, but somehow it remained standing.
Out back was the barn. Grandmother told me to never go in there unless I had an adult with me. She considered me a child, even after I turned sixteen. I think she was losing her memory, getting old and going senile or in the first throes of Alzheimer’s disease. The barn was the evil place where Grandfather went to get drunk when he just wanted to forget about everything and Grandmother said that if he hadn’t built that damn barn, he wouldn’t get drunk because he would have nowhere to go. I said that he could have gone to his workshop, when I was about twelve, and Grandmother looked at me like I was absolutely nuts. No, he had too much respect for the tools, she said, and he wouldn’t get drunk in front of them any more than he would have gotten drunk in front of her. I thought it was weird at the time but I later found out what she meant about the tools.
Anyway, one night, when I was eighteen, I figured I was old enough to go out to the barn by myself and so I did. I spent the night in there, with the field mice and the dirt floor and the saddles and the branding irons and the empty hay loft upstairs. When I went in the next morning, I showered and changed clothes and went into the kitchen for coffee. Grandmother was fixing breakfast for herself and I told her that the barn didn’t seem that evil; in fact, I had spent last night out there. She gave me another one of those you-must-be-crazy looks and didn’t say a word to me the rest of the day.
At the end of that summer, I started going to Lone Star Community College, about an hour away from the farm. I got a job on campus to pay for insurance and gas for my pickup and took fifteen hours my first semester. That was when I met her. Denise was her name, and she was also a freshman and lived off the highway I took to school, about five miles closer in. When I saw her, it was love at first sight. She was tall and red-haired and had gorgeous eyes. I introduced myself to her in Dr. Phillips’ English class and we immediately struck up a conversation. We began to spend most of our spare time together, neglecting our studies. I passed two classes that semester, both of them with low Cs. But at that point, it didn’t matter to me any more. I had Denise and somewhere near finals time she told me that she had fallen in love with me because I was different from the guys she had been dating; I cared about her, and not just about sex. I decided that a career in academia was not for me and enrolled in an auto mechanics trade course for the next semester.
Over the Christmas holidays we made love for the first time since we had been going out together. Her breasts were young and full; glorious rises over the flat of her stomach. Her eyes were pure, innocent; her tongue, eager and jubilant. The way she looked there, naked upon the bed, reaching to me, was more than simply beautiful, it was sensual, erotic. We proceeded slowly, both of us being virgins, but soon learned the desires of the body and succumbed to the rage of hormones within us both; taking turns at pleasuring and being pleasured. She had a clean scent, one of nature and peppermint soap, mingled with the slightest acridity of perspiration. When we were finished, time had slipped away and several hours had passed. We lay there, basking in the glow, languidly stroking each other. This occurred several times during that holiday season, a mutual interaction, an expression of our love.
Just before the next semester began, I received a notice from the school that I would be required to supply my own tools for the auto mechanics class: a seventy-two piece socket set, several adjustable wrenches, and screwdrivers. I asked Grandmother if I could use Grandfather’s tools, the ones boarded up within the workshop. After making me wait a week while she thought on it, she finally consented, provided that I boarded the workroom back up when I finished. No problem. I retrieved the needed tools, plus an extra hammer in order to reseal the workshop. Surprisingly, the tools (Craftsman, of course) showed not a speck of rust, despite being in the garage with no weatherproofing or insulation for seventeen years. Although curious, I did not appreciate this specific fact until much later, and, sadly enough, much too late.