詹姆斯·亞曆山大·湯姆/James Alexander Thom
It was early in the spring about 15 years ago, a day of pale sunlight and trees just beginning to bud. I was a young police reporter, driving to a scene I didn't want to see. A man, the police dispatcher's broadcast said, had accidentally backed his pickup truck over his baby granddaughter in the driveway of the family home. It was a fatality.
As I parked among police cars and TV news cruisers, I saw a stocky, white haired man in cotton work clothes standing near a pickup. Cameras were trained on him, and reporters were sticking microphones in his face. Looking totally bewildered, he was trying to answer their questions. Mostly he was only moving his lips, blinking and choking up.
After a while the reporters gave up on him and followed the police into the small white house. I can still see in my mind's eye that devastated old man looking down at the place in the driveway where the child had been. Beside the house was a freshly spaded flower bed, and nearby a pile of dark, rich earth.
“I was just backing up there to spread that good dirt,”he said to me, though I had not asked him anything.“I didn't even know she was outdoors.”He stretched his hand toward the flowerbed, then let it flop to his side. He lapsed back into his thoughts, and I, like a good reporter, went into the house to find someone who could provide a recent photo of the toddler.
A few minutes later, with all the details in my notebook and a three by five studio portrait of the cherubic child tucked in my jacket pocket, I went toward the kitchen where the police had said the body was.
I had brought a camera in with me—the big, bulky Speed Graphic which used to be the newspaper reporter's trademark. Everybody had drifted back out of the house, tighter family, police, reporters and photographer. Entering the kitchen, I came upon this scene.
On a Formica topped table, backlighted by a frilly curtained window, lay the tiny body, wrapped in a clear white sheet. Somehow the grandfather had managed to stay away from the crowd. He was sitting on a chair beside the table, in profile to me and unaware of my presence, looking uncomprehendingly at the swaddled corpse.