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By Root 704 0

there’d be the sharp left for the avenues, of course the avenues, still poor, abandoned cars on the sidewalks, but now I’d see satellite dishes screwed to the vinyl sides of some of the houses, now I’d see security lights and bred pit bulls. The lumberyard still there, the concertina wire coiled at the top of the fence and gleaming in this April sun, my brother and our dead stabbed friend passing me two-by-fours, and look, a flash of blue gunning up Fourth Avenue. “And lead us not into temptation.” And me following in my family car, an old used Toyota wagon, the booster seats of my two youngest still strapped in the back, their raging father in his suit and tie accelerating after the boys he’d been, hoping he’ll find them, hoping he won’t.

“But deliver us from evil. Amen.”

There was the young captain’s orders in the air, the report of seven rifles firing three times each. The acrid smells of hot brass and cordite. A sob from one of my sisters or my mother. Then the low mournful wheeze of the bagpipe, its nearly frantic search for the notes becoming “Amazing Grace,” the man in his kilt walking slowly off into the trees where we heard the last note without him, like some lovely echo we all one day leave behind.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank Alane Salierno Mason, once again, for helping me to find the true book within the one I’d first written. I would especially like to thank my family for allowing me to write so openly from my memory of our mutual past: my sister Suzanne, a national leader in the field of domestic violence prevention; my brother Jeb, an inspired and inspiring architectural designer of homes and restaurants and public spaces; my sister Nicole, a professor and licensed therapist who works with families not so different from the one she came from; and my mother Patricia, who after thirty-five years working with and for the poor, is now, at age seventy-two, a newly certified Montessori teacher for young children. I am honored to be her son.

And here’s to my father who, when I first began to write in my early twenties, told me not to do what he did. “Don’t wait till your mama and I are dead before you write about us, son. Just go ahead and write.”