The Last Cashion

1

On the morning of December 24, 1979, a woman walking her dog near the Blue Ridge Parkway outside Boone, North Carolina, discovered my grandfather’s near-naked body lying in a ditch, one bullet in his head, nine bullets in his chest. He was sixty-eight; I was twelve.

In the spring of the following year, on some random- seeming weekend, my father, thirty-nine, drove seven hours from his North Carolina home to visit me in south Georgia, where I lived with my mother. On the phone, he’d said he wanted to see me; needed to see me.

When his 6′4″ frame ducked beneath our kitchen door—making that room look inadequate, as he did for every room he entered—he carried some foreign scent I associated with mysteries hidden in the mountains. He wore tinted glasses and a leather jacket, and his black hair was Waylon Jennings–length. Waylon and the outlaw country crew were his musical heroes, the highway men, singers of sad songs, crazy but not insane. In one photo, circa 1976, my father resembles Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, weary from the road, eyes holding a collection of secrets he can’t talk about.

Our visits were usually confined to summers, and during the rest of the year when I pouted to my mother that I missed him, she told me to sit in my stepfather’s lap. Bobby Lee Powell was a gentle and stable man I loved, whose harshest words came on my last trip to his lap, when he asked whether I was getting too old for such things. (He too would soon be leaving.) I don’t remember how old I was then, but I remember the Christmas of ’79 being the year I got the shotgun I’d been begging for. Later, Bob took me to a peanut field before dawn, where we waited to ambush doves at their morning feeding. I wounded one that fell between us and stupidly jerked the gun toward it while Bob danced and yelled, “Don’t shoot.” Bob survived. The dove did not. I have no interest now in guns, in killing.

My father asked if I’d ever seen a greyhound dog race—a dumb question because my mother and Bobby Lee Powell would never consider granting me any such access—then he drove us to the track in Jacksonville, an hour away. I could usually count on him to entertain me, to point to my chest and say, “What’s that?”, then uppercut my nose with his finger and call me a sucker (every time), but he was somber now, eyes dark, fixed on the road. Between us on the seat of his Ford Ranchero (as extinct now as the Chevy El Camino) sat a folder stuffed with newspaper clippings about his father’s murder and two subsequent trials. He invited me to read the articles, and I guess I did, without comprehending much. Only recently, after visiting the Watauga County public library and the archives of the Watauga Democrat, have I started piecing it all together. Only lately, with help from my father’s sister, Molly, and his first cousin, Neil, have I learned much of what the articles left out.

I studied my father’s face while he drove down I-95, curious and alarmed at his stoic expression, and saw that he was crying. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t wipe away the tear I saw falling down his cheek. He didn’t disclose what he was thinking, and I didn’t ask. At the dog track we sat at a table that held his mixed drinks and our racing pamphlets. He bet on long shots to win, lost $400, and didn’t act surprised. I studied each dog’s history, bet on favorites to show, won $40, and felt like a champion. My father offered praise that amplified my pride. I imagined turning into a professional gambler. He said nothing of his loss, but I knew another layer of sadness had settled over him, enough that it warned me against gambling.

2

“He beat the shit out of me,” my father said more than once, referring to his father. There weren’t many stories—just this fact. He never deflected a question, but if I had one, it was usually simple, and he’d give a simple answer.

Q. Why did your father beat the shit out of you?
A. He was a mean drunk.
Q. Did you do stuff that pissed him off?
A. Wet the bed. Or entered a room.

Sometimes, he’d say, “What else do you want to know?” But I didn’t know the words to make the thoughts make sense. I’m fifty-seven now, and I have better questions for my father, who is nine years dead. Did those beatings linger beneath your skin the rest of your life, even as you fought to forget them? Did they teach you how to take a punch, how to fall and rise and receive another? If your father had hugged you instead of hit you, would you have defeated yourself anyway and blamed yourself only, as always? Just how bad was it, exactly?

“I once counted thirty lashes on his back,” my aunt Molly tells me. She’s my father’s only sibling, four years older. When I place my recorder on her coffee table and ask her permission to proceed, she says, “I don’t give a shit.” She’s eighty-three at this point, and her memory is barbed-wire sharp. My wife and I are driving through North Carolina visiting friends and family, and I’m collecting stories. Molly tells me more about my father getting abused than he ever did.

“Daddy made him stand in the corner of the room, and if he so much as shifted his weight from one leg to another, he whipped him with a leather belt. And your father was a sickly kid. Scrawny.” When the beatings occurred upstairs and Molly heard the belt-strikes and my father’s screams, she prayed her father wouldn’t kill him. He hurt my grandmother too. “I remember him banging her head into a hall door. There was a blood stain on that door until we moved from that house.”

The next morning Molly drives out early and returns with breakfast. My cousin comes over again, as she did the previous night for dinner, and we talk and laugh, and talk and laugh some more. I delay our leaving. Molly and I take a moment to ourselves, sit on her porch and look out at her pond. It’s a beautiful spring day, and Molly is the last person to hold many narratives that I fear might vanish soon.

3

When my grandmother got a restraining order and filed for divorce, my grandfather fled to Florida, where he worked for Southern Railway, then to the Bahamas, and later to Ascension Island, off the coast of Africa, where he worked at a weather station for Pan American Airways and where, Molly says, he could legally ignore child support. My grandmother took care of her two children on a secretarial salary from an Asheville lumber company. A few years later my father dropped out of high school and joined the Army, the cheapest way out of town. He stood on the Berlin Wall and looked homeward, toward bigger battles. Twenty years passed without my father speaking to his father. At some point, my grandfather returned to North Carolina to join his father’s business, Cashion Oil Co. He bought and ran a gas station in Boone, living behind it in a trailer on a mountain slope now crowded with expensive condos. One day my father, knowing who owned the station, stopped for gas.

Did he want to confront him? Kill him? Forgive him? Give him a chance to ask for forgiveness first? He watched his father walk across the parking lot. As he would with any customer, my grandfather offered chitchat. My father held out his hand, said, “My name’s John Cashion.” His father, surprised, said, “That’s my name.”

My father’s reconciliation story concluded at this climax, mystified that his father hadn’t recognized him. John Sr. invited John Jr. to come back soon.

“They got to be buddy-buddy,” Molly tells me, surprised at this development.

She refused to reconcile, though her father never struck her. Not even the day she interrupted her mother’s beating to hit him with a bed slat that knocked him down a flight of stairs, requiring emergency-room stitches. The next day, he didn’t mention it. Sometimes, he was even nice to her, like the time she saw a dress she liked that her mother said they couldn’t afford. The next day, he carried it into the house.

“Isn’t that weird?” Molly asks me.

She suspects my father reconciled for selfish reasons. “Knowing Bub,” she says, “I’m sure his association with Daddy was for him to benefit from it, which he did.” “Bub” was the nickname his mother gave him, after her father. Molly’s children called him “Uncle Bub.” My grandmother, Helen Fred Linney, went by “Fred,” so- named because her parents feared, after four straight daughters, they’d be without a son. After Fred came five sons, three more daughters: twelve children total, including two sets of male twins.

My instinct is to defend my father, to say money didn’t motivate him, to say I knew him better than Molly did, to say something about the powerful pull an absent father has on a son, that his desire to reconcile had to do with a hope for love. And as an adult, he met this father, who wasn’t the man Molly knew. John Sr. was sober then, had joined AA, and was, at least to my young eyes, a jolly and gentle man. I spent a couple nights with him in his trailer the summer before he was murdered. I felt homesick, surrounded by odd smells and objects out in those dark mountain woods I imagined that boogeymen could hide in better than they could in the south Georgia flatlands. He tried to make me comfortable. I must’ve seemed strange to him, a shy and nervous kid who had no reason to be afraid. I remember the back brace he slept in, his uneven gait, how his clothes were more businessman than laborer, how he graced my palm with silver dollars, how I spent my afternoons trying to dam up the mountain stream behind his shop.

But I didn’t know him well. I had grown up in Georgia, where my mother took me when I was two, fearing my father’s drinking, careless spending, and inconsistent income based on commissions from sales jobs. Once, after he lost his driver’s license, she drove him door-to-door to sell vacuums. If he talked his way inside a home to conduct a demo, she waited in the car, sometimes writing letters home to ask her dairy-farmer parents to send what little money they could spare.

4

Eighteen months before her father was murdered, Molly’s husband, Jack, was robbed in the country store he owned outside Raleigh, shot in the head, and left in the rear of his store, leaving Molly with three children under ten.

I went to the funeral, my first, then sat in the back of a limo and held the folded flag they’d handed my ten-year-old cousin. The previous year, 1977, Grandma Fred, superhero to her children, dynamic babysitter of grandchildren, had died from stroke-related complications. My father, then thirty-six, remembered nothing of the days surrounding her death, so heavy was his drinking then. She’d loved him fiercely, Molly says, and tried her best to protect him, to spoil him, to smother him with all the love his father had beaten out of him. My mother says whatever goodness my father possessed came from Grandma Fred, a lady who embraced my mom (a Catholic!), though her own father, a Baptist preacher, wasn’t sure Catholics weren’t related to Satanists.

My father arranged for Molly to meet their father for dinner thirty years after they’d last spoken. He wanted them to reconcile, see if forgiveness was possible. The ongoing grief from her husband’s murder coupled with the exhaustion of working and taking care of three children was frequently more than she could handle, but she agreed to meet her father in Boone.

“It was a cordial dinner,” she says.

At some point, Molly informed her father she had no intention of forgiving him.

“But he was cordial,” she says. “It was a cordial dinner.” Three months later, he too would be murdered.

5

Molly tells me stories my father never did. One Friday night in 1947—my father was seven, Molly eleven—Grandma Fred came home late from work (during tax season, when working for an accountant made her busy), so my grandfather, “who had been drinking, of course,” locked her out of the house and imprisoned the two children for the weekend while Fred stayed with neighbors, afraid to call the cops. Monday morning, he sent the kids to school with strict instructions to avoid their mother. This was the day Grandma Fred hired a lawyer, got a restraining order, filed for divorce. John Sr. contested, sought custody. His plan, according to Molly, was to hurt Fred more deeply by passing their children off to his parents, Daddy Dick (b. 1882) and Mama Dick (b. 1884) Cashion. Daddy Dick had been mayor of North Wilkesboro through the 1950s, a powerful and influential figure fierce on family loyalty. He didn’t like that a lady would have the nerve to divorce his son and split the family.

Mama Dick had a reputation for cruelty. “Mama Dick was a bitch,” Molly says. “Daddy Dick was okay sometimes, but I did not want to live with Mama Dick.”

The judge took Molly and my father into his chambers and asked them questions. At the end of the hearing, he announced he’d gotten a call from a senior-level official in the state Democratic Party informing him it would be in his best political interest to award custody to John Sr., who served on the state and local executive committees of the party. But the judge said no; after hearing what he’d heard from the children, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he gave Mr. Cashion custody. Afterward, the extended Cashion family “basically disowned us,” Molly says. Daddy Dick’s will awarded my father and Molly one dollar each, a tactic meant to ensure they were not overlooked and could not contest.

“I never got my dollar,” Molly says. “Where’s my dollar?”

6

One summer when I was riding with my fast- driving father through North Wilkesboro, I pointed at a big tombstone in the corner of a cemetery. I said, “Hey! There’s some Cashions out there!”

“Not enough of them,” my father said.

But in the late ’80s, my great-uncle Paul asked my father if he’d organize a family reunion. He accepted and worked hard to make it a big event, called it The Cashion Convention, invited everyone he could think of, including Red Cashion, a colorful NFL referee my football-hating father had never met, who may have been related. He didn’t come. Molly did. My father spoke through the PA system he used as a part-time auctioneer, turned up his charisma, made people laugh. Then he called for a new organizer. He didn’t want to do it again because it required too much time. His first cousin Neil Jr. nominated him to do it again anyway. My father sighed, accepted. “Just once more,” he said. Why did he work so hard to bring together these people he claimed to dislike? Why do I think of Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Miss Emily,” and how Miss Emily is so reluctant early in the story to surrender the corpse of her overbearing father, an isolated woman who, “with nothing left, [. . .] would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.”

7

My grandfather apparently did not name Molly in his will.

“I never saw the will,” she tells me. She says my father found it in a shoebox in their father’s closet. Neil says he later saw it too, a handwritten document that specified all assets (about $150,000) be split evenly between my father and Neil. My father honored the will, gave Molly nothing at a time when she could’ve used help. She consulted a lawyer, who advised her to sue for a third. “I thought about it for a long time,” she says. “I decided not to.”

She says she eventually, maybe just recently, forgave my father, but that wound is deep, and I’m not convinced. I don’t understand it either. I can’t imagine he enjoyed hurting her. Did he consider it more ethical to honor his father’s wishes? Just where did that money go, Pop? My mother’s also curious, since child support was sporadic during those lean years when she too was a single mom. And why, again, is my instinct now to defend him? To make excuses? To imagine he may have invested it (or gambled it?), planning to make one million he’d give to Molly, another million to my mom? Wouldn’t it be like him to risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose, and start again at his beginnings, never to breathe a word about his loss, as Kipling writes in “If,” a poem my father gave me on a piece of laminated wood the Christmas I was eighteen.

He told me once that he was the kind of person who had either lots of money or no money. I don’t remember the lots-of-money moments. Another of his cousins and drinking buddies, Jim, told me, “Your father always looked to me like the kind of person who had made two or three fortunes and lost them all.” When he found himself borrowing money from cousins and uncles, from Molly, from me, my mother, and friends, his self- loathing grew deeper.

Why did my grandfather give Neil Jr. the other half? Neil loved him, called him “Brother John” rather than “Uncle” because of the bond they shared as Masons, Presbyterians, family loyalists, Yellow Dog Democrats. Politics was in the blood. Neil Jr. served twelve years as North Wilkesboro’s mayor (1982–94), thirty years after his grandfather, Daddy Dick, had served in the same office. They both served on the state Democratic Executive Committee.

One newspaper headline read: “Boone Man Held In Murder of Democratic Party Official.” John Sr. was involved in politics long enough to make enemies. Was the accused a Republican? During his tenure on the Wilkes County Board of Elections, did John Sr., as Molly says, make it difficult for Black people to register? Molly says the ACLU sued his office and won, then the Democratic Party bailed them out. Learning this makes me want to add a bullet to his corpse. But all of this is gossip for my drunk ghosts. I imagine sitting among them, asking questions I fear they’ll answer too honestly. What I really want to know is this: Who are these people I descend from, and can I hope they are basically decent, despite their sins? Four of John Sr.’s five ex-wives attended his funeral. Does that mean he was well loved? Hadn’t he changed from the violent drunkard he’d been? Didn’t he hire the ex-convict who ended up killing him because he believed in second chances?

8

One October day in 1979, a woman entered the auto-rustproofing shop my grandfather owned then in Boone (in the days when snow-melting salt rotted cars that were more metal than plastic) and explained that her brother, Jack Wilson, twenty-nine, needed a boss willing to participate in the prison work-release program meant to help inmates matriculate into the community as responsible citizens whose crimes wouldn’t forever be held against them. Did she reveal his crimes? How, according to one article, he’d been sentenced to seven years in 1970 for deadly assault with intent to kill for “shooting a man five times and stabbing him several more times in the attack”? Maybe she skipped that part and revealed the early trauma that shaped him, how he’d watched his father murder his mother, a scene my grandfather might’ve imagined as the kind of violence a child could use help overcoming. Maybe she revealed none of his history, just as his attorneys later requested that his prior record be withheld from the jury for fear of them judging him too quickly. Isn’t this a reasonable request? Didn’t my grandfather’s history make it hard for Molly (among others) to see whether he had changed?

By then, John Sr. had a soft spot for second chances, eager to play a role in a redemption story. He’d been sober thirty-two years, had an AA sponsor, and was himself a sponsor to many. My math puts his last drink around when Grandma Fred divorced him, which is a good time for a good man to go sober in the redemption story I’d like to believe. But as an avid twelve-stepper, he skipped the amends-making, according to my father, who never heard an apology for the broken bones, the busted home, the fractured ego. Why was that so hard? Still, as one who went through five marriages, John Sr. must’ve rooted for people struggling for fresh starts, knew some help was needed to interrupt the incurable goddamn thirst that grows so fierce in wounded throats. He cursed a lot, as Cashions do, according to my Aunt Mary (Neil Jr.’s mother), who asked me once, “Do you cuss? If you don’t cuss, you’re not a Cashion.” I was fifteen then, just learning.

My grandfather hired the ex- con. Business was good, in part because of a contract to treat state-owned cars in western North Carolina, obtained while Neil Jr. worked for Governor Jim Hunt, though the only role Neil played, he swears, was to get John Sr. a meeting with the transportation secretary. “He was a smooth talker,” Neil said. “Like your daddy.”

I imagine my grandfather shaking Jack Wilson’s hand, looking him in the eyes, saying something hopeful, asking nothing of his past.

“John took a liking to him,” Neil said. “Tried to help him. Loaned him some money. Fathered him a little bit.”

Fathered him a little bit.

Over the next two weeks, Wilson’s attendance grew spotty. Then John Sr. suspected him of stealing. Jack denied the charge. John Sr. called him a goddamn liar, then invited him to exit the goddamn premises and never return. Jack didn’t take this kindly. Issued threats with such volume and sincerity that my grandfather called the sheriff, his friend Ward Carroll, to report the threats and to confess that he was scared.

“Ward was a character,” Neil said. “Retired sawmiller. Wore a big white cowboy hat.” I google Ward’s image and see the hat, affixed at 45 degrees. Ward told John Sr. that he and his deputies would watch for Wilson; they’d drive by John’s trailer, make sure he was okay. My grandfather looked into getting a gun-carrying permit. He knew Wilson was angry.

One article reported that “Wilson allegedly threatened Cashion because he (Cashion) had refused to pay an insurance claim on an injury he (Wilson) received while working at the rustproofing company.” What’s that story? And how were these threats delivered? By phone? In person? Postcards of the Linn Cove Viaduct on the Blue Ridge Parkway with glued-on words cut from magazines?

My grandfather was last seen on December 23 at the Hungry Bull Restaurant in Boone. When he got home that night, car full of groceries for dinner at Neil Jr.’s house in two days, he had company. A truck was backed to the side door of his trailer, tailgate down, trailer door open. The truck belonged either to Jack or to his partner in crime, James Cecil Berry, both in the process of stealing my grandfather’s washer and dryer.

John Sr. didn’t much like this idea. He’d probably paid cash for them, got a discount at businesses where he’d bought other appliances for the homes he’d shared with four ex- wives. Detectives reported that the front door glass was shattered, though the door itself had been left unlocked. John Sr.’s wallet was found open and empty on his living room floor. “Evidence of a scuffle on the front porch,” one detective reported. My grandfather kept about $2,000 in cash, Neil told me, in case he stumbled upon some opportunity for trading. Who else knew this?

Did John Sr. try some smooth-talking? Or did his language turn violent—inquiring, for example, just what in the fucking hell the no-good mother-fucking crooks had the nerve to be doing? Begging was beneath him, or so I imagine, but who knows what we’ll say when we realize we’re never more alive than when we’re almost dead, as Tim O’Brien writes in “How to Tell a True War Story.”

He was tied up and pushed into a trunk, where he bounced for twenty-two miles as the car snaked into Avery County, maybe Highway 105 to the parkway past Grandfather Mountain State Park. Or Highway 321 past touristy Tweetsie Railroad, where my father took me one summer and where my grandfather himself once worked, playing with the lifesize steam trains he liked that reminded him of his days with Southern Railway Company. What did he think about on the way? What level of bladder-emptying fear is possible when you ride thirty minutes in a trunk toward some bad end? Whoever was driving turned, finally, from the parkway onto the unpaved surface of Carroll Gragg Road, December-dark, devoid of other cars.

He was removed from the trunk, untied, and ordered to undress. Were his business clothes offensive? Did the killer(s) hope he’d feel the agony of being cold? Did they envision his final indignity as being discovered in his underwear? Did they wear the same size shirts and shoes? One story that came out in the later trial was that the kidnapper(s) wanted him to walk back home. To give them time to escape? To punish him? He must’ve asked for his goddamn shoes. Did his last words ask for some goddamn mercy? Who can say?

The first bullet entered his forehead. Nine more bullets flew into his chest. A reporter wrote, “He was found in his long underwear and socks, which were not dirty.”

10

My father got the call at Molly’s house. He’d planned to spend Christmas there, trying to be present for her fatherless children. His Uncle Paul couldn’t spit out the news over the phone, kept repeating, “Your daddy.” His wife picked up the other receiver, said, “John, your daddy’s been killed.”

John Jr. met Neil Jr. in Boone, where they identified the head with the strange hole in it.
In the days, months, and years that followed, how often did my father see his father’s head like that?

They went next to John Sr.’s trailer. From the freezer, they pulled out a still-sealed half gallon of vodka he kept around for AA newcomers suffering delirium tremens so he could treat them with small portions in order to wean them safely.

“We drank it,” Neil said. “Me and your daddy. We drank it.”

“Of course you did,” I said. “I would have too.”

11

Most Cashion funerals are held in the North Wilkesboro Presbyterian Church designed by my great-grandfather, Daddy Dick, who took a year off from Cashion Oil Co. so he could supervise the demolition of the old church and the construction of the new one. He was careful to remove and rebury Chapman Gordon beneath the east steps where his father, my great-great grandfather, John A. Cashion, had buried him in 1862 after digging him up from a meadow through which he was grading North Wilkesboro’s first roads. Early news reports claimed Mr. Gordon had come to town from Tennessee to visit his brother, “took pneumonia and died and was buried on the plantation.”

Daddy Dick kept Gordon’s casket in his garage for three years while the new church was being built. From the garage, Mr. Gordon was employed to haunt Neil and his friends when they played past dark. “Mama Dick yelled at us,” Neil said. “She’d say, ‘Old man Gordon’s going to get you if you don’t come in.’” When the east steps of the new church were ready, Daddy Dick summoned family members, called a preacher to say a word, and reburied Gordon, such was his respect for restoring skeletons to their rightful place.

I didn’t attend my grandfather’s funeral. Molly did. Sheriff Ward Carroll was a pallbearer. In the Cashion corner of the cemetery, John Sr. joined his brother Roy, a firefighter killed in action at thirty-seven. Their sister, Mary Frances, dead at twenty-three in a car crash, lay next to them. Roy’s twin, Ray, is in there now, along with siblings Paul, Neil Sr., and Patricia. The Cashion tombstone is the only one facing Hinshaw Street, where they lived. My father is not among them. He’d long expressed to me a desire to have his diabetes-ravaged body donated to science, but if they rejected it (as he feared might happen), he told me to do with his remains whatever cost me the least. Because he was so averse to paperwork, I was shocked to find he’d already completed the forms for his body to be donated, and I was happy that he was not, in the end, rejected. His ashes (except for those I gave to my mother and to his best friend) remain in the same box I received them in, perched on a bookshelf beside me now, where I write this from, in Wisconsin.

Still surviving, as of this writing, are Molly, her three children, many cousins, and me, the last Cashion. Twenty years ago, when my father and I ran into Neil Jr. in a North Wilkesboro bar, Neil asked me what my holdup was on having children. I knew what he was getting at. He told me anyway. “You know the line stops with you?” I knew. He looked sad about this. My father didn’t. He didn’t care if I didn’t care. I didn’t care.

12

Jack Wilson was arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, and armed robbery. He was sent to Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh for a psychiatric evaluation. His court-appointed lawyer suggested he’d be unfit to stand trial, contending that the trauma he’d endured watching his father murder his mother had distorted his view of right and wrong.

My aunt Molly worked in the psychiatric unit at Dorothea Dix, first as a nurse for many years, then as an administrator. I called her Nurse Ratched, after the pill-providing, lobotomy-encouraging administrator in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a likeness she laughed at and did not deny. Had she seen Wilson—the man charged with murdering her father—during one of her shifts? If so, she likely wouldn’t have known why he was there. If she had known, would she have said hello? Thanks? She’s no psychiatrist, but I trust she could’ve diagnosed his fitness to stand trial based on the trauma she endured the night someone murdered her husband. She went fifteen days without getting dressed. People came for the funeral, then disappeared. My father went to her at once, but how often did he check on her after that? Not enough, she says. Her three children were hungry. She got dressed. Got addicted to work—two consecutive shifts, eighty hours a week for forty years—put three kids through college without taking out a loan, remained as busy when they left home because it kept her mind from wandering. If she’d been evaluated, she would’ve been declared fit, but that didn’t mean the upside- down world looked abnormal. If she had met Jack Wilson at Dorothea Dix, she might have said, “What’re you in for?” She would’ve listened, said, “That’s tough. I hear you. You may be fit to stand trial but you’re not fit. I’m not either. Take this.”

For nine days my father and Neil Jr. stared at the back of Jack Wilson’s head while the state made its case to a Watauga County jury, calling more than thirty witnesses, entering more than forty items as exhibits. But no murder weapon. Some witnesses placed him near John Sr.’s trailer on Highway 105. Others testified about the threats they’d heard or heard about. When he was arrested, two $100 bills were found rolled up inside his pack of Camel cigarettes, unusual for a man who was likely unemployed. After nine days, the judge, Sam J. Ervin III (son of Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., chairman of the Senate Watergate committee that led Nixon to resign), dismissed the case for insufficient evidence.

On his way out of the courtroom Wilson pointed his index finger at my father and cocked his thumb. He lifted his hand in recoil and winked and said, “Gotcha.” My father never told me this. His best friend, Ken Welborn, seated next to him then, told me. Ken said, “I’ll never forget that moment as long as I live.” What did my father do next? If I were a betting man, I’d say he found the nearest bar and stayed until the lights came on.

13

“Cashion’s Body To Be Exhumed” read a headline in the Watauga Democrat, March 26, 1981. A second autopsy was ordered because a .22 caliber handgun and some clothing had been found five miles from John Sr.’s trailer. The gun’s purchase was traced to James Cecil Berry, forty-two, of Route 1 in Vilas. He had been arrested March 15, charged with murder, kidnapping, armed robbery, and conspiracy to commit breaking and entering alongside his pal Jack Wilson. His case went to a jury trial too.

In the second autopsy, two remaining bullets were extracted from my grandfather’s body. They didn’t match Berry’s gun, and he was found not guilty. He blamed his former partner, revealed many of the details I’ve shared here. He may have been eager to do so. A month before his trial, Berry had been indicted for allegedly assaulting Wilson—felonious assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill—motivated because Wilson had allegedly been sleeping with Berry’s girlfriend. I heard this from Neil Jr., who heard it from detectives, who know what I confess here too about my own narrative: Everyone is an unreliable narrator.

Years later, after being paroled for a burglary conviction, Wilson was assigned another work-release job, this time at a fast-food restaurant in Wilkesboro. Neil learned of Wilson’s close proximity and feared his father—my grandfather’s brother, another hard-drinking Cashion with a violent streak—would rush immediately to the fast-food counter and kill Wilson. Neil asked the prison superintendent to transfer Wilson out of town, and he obliged. Sometime later, inside his home, Wilson fatally shot himself. According to Neil, he’d left a suicide note saying he could no longer live with himself.

I remember my father telling me that the man who killed his father had killed himself. He squinted toward something far away and grew reflective. But again, I didn’t know how to say: “What’re you thinking?” or “How does that make you feel?” His answer might’ve been, “I don’t know yet—ask me later.” I imagine some part of him even sympathized with Wilson. He seemed uninterested in vengeance. The state had pursued the death penalty against Wilson, but my father didn’t believe execution did anyone any good.

Neil Jr. was not conflicted. He thinks now what he thought then. “I hope the bastard rots in hell,” he told me.

Why did Jack Wilson finally answer “no” to Sartre’s ultimate question: Is life worth living? And how long had he been delaying his answer? Since his father killed his mother? What sort of chance does a person have after seeing such a thing? Neil had a more concrete theory. “He got jailhouse religion,” he said. “I think he got to where he could feel the spirit of the Lord or the Devil one and couldn’t handle what he’d done.”

14

I don’t remember what else we did the weekend we went to the dog track. I was used to staying in motel rooms with my dad, exotic to me, boring to him, but I don’t remember where we stayed that night, or the next. It’s a safe bet he took a full fifth back to the room, that I fetched buckets of ice, watched him mix his drinks, stirring with a finger, sticking his finger in his mouth as if to dry it. I don’t remember if he’d already taught me to play liar’s poker with the serial numbers on dollar bills, or if that came later, along with five- card draw and seven-card stud. If we played that night, we played with my winnings. If I lost, he kept my money. If he lost, I kept his. The stakes were real.

I see now, slow learner that I am, why his depression deepened during each year’s holidays, the time of his father’s murder. And I can imagine more honestly now, finally, what the road looked like to him after he dropped me off and drove back to North Carolina. I see some of the images that haunted his highways while he listened to sad songs, how ghosts crowded his periphery and kept pace, how they hunched in his truck bed and tapped against the glass and repeated what he already knew: that his early beatings still rode shotgun, that he’d have to fight harder to find self-love, that he’d lost all his money again, that money would forever be a worry, that declining health was ahead of him, that he missed his mother and wanted to tell her so, that his loneliness, even through three more marriages, would endure, with a sister who kept her distance and a son who remained too sullen, that his incurable goddamn thirst still raged from his throat, and that as a salesman, rejection would be the only companion he could count on. Because I’m a writer, I’ve come to admire how he kept asking for more of it.

Meanwhile, I sped toward all the magnified self-absorption of a tormented adolescence, and all I saw was that my own odds for happiness and success had grown into the greatest long shot in history. Despite our distance and through all the years that followed when we went through our long series of connections and disconnections, as we changed and grew and failed to grow, and through my own crippling doubts and failings, he continued to bet on me. Where did he learn such faith?

I see now that he taught himself how to live as a long shot, how to survive loss and loneliness even as he battled himself for forgiveness, as I too have done, as so many of us do. If it helped him to visit me that weekend, I’m glad. Having him to go to later helped me too, though I’m trying to forgive myself for not going often enough, or well enough, or at more selfless times in his final years. But here I am, finally, extending my hand from Wisconsin, where I live now, introducing myself to these ghosts who say their name is the same as mine, who say they’ve been expecting me, who ask whether I’d like to stay for one more drink, who ask what else I’d like to know before I’m through with them.

Read more from Issue 22.2.