Over the River and Stabbed to Death
Personal Essay by Randy Osborne (from the archives)
My childhood home is for sale—bank property, cheap—because of the murder in the backyard. I might buy it.
Not murder by the standard of law, the jury decided, but a violent and fatal act just the same. And not in the yard but in the main room of the house, the room where my grandmother Madeline worked her sewing-machine treadle decades ago. See how she pushes the fabric through and the needle jumps and cloth cascades off the table. The Singer whirrs, its clackety chatter like celluloid flapping loose on a full reel when the movie’s done. The curtain can never lift on that screen again, of course. Ridiculous to think. And yet.
Here’s what happened at 1802 S. Fourth St. in Rockford, Ill., about a week before Christmas 2011, according to trial testimony. Terry Johnson, 47, visits resident Raymond Gitchel, 59, for the purpose of smoking cocaine. They smoke cocaine. Johnson tries to steal a bag of heroin from another guest. He and Gitchel argue. Gitchel tells Johnson to get out. Johnson refuses. The dispute grows noisy, and someone appears from the second floor of the house with a baseball bat. But Gitchel acts first. He plunges a knife deep into Johnson’s thigh. Johnson cries out to all present, “He just stuck me!” Then to Gitchel, “I can’t believe you just cut me! I can’t believe you just stuck me!” Finally Johnson limps away— trouser leg no doubt soaked already—complaining that he will need stitches. He doesn’t get them. The knife has sheared his femoral artery. Johnson is bleeding to death.
Later, one of Gitchel’s housemates reports Johnson begging for help outside. Everybody ignores this. “Oh well, he should have left,” Gitchel remarks. The temperature sinks to twenty-one degrees that night. Next morning Johnson lies face up in the grass beside the chain-link fence.
What should we do, somebody asks. “I don’t know,” Gitchel says. “I’m going to make a sandwich.”
My grandmother Mad would love this story. I love this story. She raised me.
On pulpy detective magazines Mad raised me. On Poe and Hawthorne and the Bible (Old Testament only, please). On mythology, too, which is why Johnson’s thigh injury makes me think of the Grail King, his grievous wound, his barren land.
Mad raised me alone, her husband having jolted the family by leaving for some strumpet he met at work. An old man. They could hardly believe the sap still flowed. But when does it ever not?
In news video the day after the crime, trench-coated cops tromp the plank steps of Mad’s yellow-taped front porch. The same steps where I once sat, chin in hands, and waited for my life to start. I would grow up a writer or doctor—if the latter, a surgeon, specifically. I would incise people. The blade, like words, can harm or heal. Or I would be a radio star.