Death In The Family, A - James Agee [62]
“I understand,” she said impatiently.
“Good, Mama. Well this cotter pin, that held the steering mechanism together down underneath the auto, where there was no chance of seeing it, had fallen out. They couldn’t find it anywhere, though they looked all over the place where it happened and went over the road for a couple of hundred yards with a fine-tooth comb. So they think it may have worked loose and fallen out quite a distance back—it could be, even miles, though probably not so far. Because they showed me,” again he put his knuckles where she could see, “even without the pin, those two parts might hang together,” he twisted them, “you might even steer with them. and not have the slightest suspicion there was anything wrong, if you were on fairly smooth road, or didn’t have to wrench the wheel, but if you hit a sharp bump or a rut or a loose rock, or had to twist the wheel very hard very suddenly, they’d come apart, and you’d have no control over anything.”
Mary put her hands over her face.
“What they think is that he must have hit a loose rock with one of the front wheels, and that gave everything a jolt and a terrific wrench at the same time. Because they found a rock, oh, half the size of my head, down in the ditch, very badly scraped and with tire marks on it. They showed me. They think it must have wrenched the wheel right out of his hands and thrown him forward very hard so that he struck his chin, just one sharp blow against the steering wheel. And that must have killed him on the spot. Because he was thrown absolutely clear of the car as it ran off the road—they showed me. I never saw anything to equal it. Do you know what happened? That auto threw him out on the ground as it careened down into that sort of flat, wide ditch, about five feet down from the road; then it went straight on up an eight-foot embankment. They showed me the marks where it went, almost to the top, and then toppled backward and fell bottom side up right beside him, without even grazing him!”
“Gracious,” Mary whispered. “Tst,” Hannah clucked.
“How are they so sure it was—instant, Andrew?” Hannah asked.
“Because if he’d been conscious they’re sure he wouldn’t have been thrown out of the auto, for one thing. He’d have grabbed the wheel, or the emergency brake, still trying to control it. There wasn’t time for that. There wasn’t any time at all. At the most there must have been just the tiniest fraction of a second when he felt the jolt and the wheel was twisted out of his hand, and he was thrown forward. The doctor says he probably never even knew what hit him—hardly even felt the impact, it was so hard and quick.”
“He may have just been unconscious,” Mary groaned through her hands. “Or conscious and—paralyzed; unable to speak or even seem to breathe. If only there’d been a doctor, right there, mayb ...”
Andrew reached across his mother and touched her knees. “No, Mary,” he said. “I have the doctor’s word for that. He says the only thing that could have caused death was concussion of the brain. He says that when that—happens to kill, it—does so instantly, or else takes days or weeks. I asked him about it very particularly because—I knew you’d want to be sure just how it was. Of course I wondered the same thing. He said it couldn’t have been even a few seconds of unconsciousness, and then death, because nothing more happened, after that one blow, that could have added to what it did. He said it’s even more sudden than electrocution. Just an enormous shock to the brain. The quickest death there is.” He returned to his mother. “I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. “Mary was saying, perhaps he was only unconscious. That maybe if the doctor had been there right on the spot, he could have been saved. I was telling her, no. Because I asked the doctor everything I could think to, about that. And he said no. He says that when a concussion of the brain—is fatal—it’s the quickest death there is.”
He looked at each of them in turn. In a light, vindictive voice