Murder in the Newsroom

Father

"I will not cry," I told myself as I looked down on that face, the face of a man I had loved, loved like no other in the world. "I will not cry," I told myself again, as I saw his eyelids, closed for the last time. Tears welled up in my eyes, triggered to life by the sounds of my mother and Anna sobbing. "No, I will not cry," my anger spoke to me from deep within my mind. "I will not cry for the fool."

Dressed in the customary long black satin dress of mourning my mother stood next to me. The veil hid her face, but I could still picture it in my mind. Small lines, age lines, stretched from the corners of her eyes down toward her ears. Worry lines, even more prevalent in the past few days, creased her forehead, but in general, she was still the beauty my father had fallen in love with. Her eyes still shone clear and bright especially when she was working on a difficult or exciting story. You see, my father was a newspaper publisher. Not a very big newspaper, but one that I thought was well read. We, and I do mean we, worked late into the night on publishing day, only to get up even earlier than normal the next day to hawk the paper throughout the city of Augusta.

If you have never been inside a printing house, you may not understand what I am about to say. Some day you'll come to smell that sweet smell of printer's ink. It is a smell that crawls under your skin. Once it gets there, you can never get rid of it. One whiff and instantly you know it's printer's ink. And no matter how you fight it, your mind pictures words on a paper, the hard cold metal printing press, and the block of letters used for laying out the pages.

I watched as my little sister Anna, now just ten years old, walked leaning on my mother, toward the polished oak coffin. Silently Mother leaned over and kissed father, visible in the opened coffin. Anna followed, sobbing uncontrollably, and then it was my turn. Tradition forced me to appear as though I was grief stricken by the death of my father. But I was not. I had been when it happened, but now, two days later, I had come to realize some things. I thought I had come to an understanding of the world - of my world anyhow, the world of a 14 year old.

Slowly I also approached the coffin and carefully placed a copy of our paper, the Morning Sentinel, into his folded hands. My mother had thought my father would like to have something to read as he rested. Tears blurred my sight as my heart broke under the memories of these hands holding me, scolding me, congratulating me. Overflowing, the tears made tracks down my cheeks, and I wiped a few away, unashamed at the display of emotion.

Suddenly I saw them again, the words that brought the hatred back. "Publisher Gates Slain!" read the headline of the paper I had placed in his hands. "Editor Slain by Stupidity," my mind shouted down at me. I heard my voice break the silence of the funeral. "Fool," I said out loud and for the first time felt the eyes of the fifty or so mourners in the parlor upon my back. But their presence could not check my mouth, or my heart. "Fool." I looked over at my mother, her eyes filled with humiliation or anger, clearly visible through the black veil. "He was a fool," I angrily stated again. The defiance of youth, the energy of a misunderstanding adolescence sounded in my voice. "You know he should be alive now. You know." My mother shook her head completely shocked and taken back by my words.

"Andrew!" she snapped. "Andrew Jackson Gates!" The voice stood the hair up on the back of my head. I had heard it whenever she lost her temper with me. It was a voice, which normally was followed by a spanking hand. But this time I stood up to it. I had to. I was right! All that I could see was how right I was - the anger told me.

"You know I'm right," I stated again and stalked out of the parlor of the small home my parents owned on Winthrop Street in the capital of Maine. Racing past the numerous people still making their way into the house, I found a refuge on the front porch, near the porch swing my father had just built. Here I sat, head in my hands, not crying, but thinking; thinking about my father, and the months that had just passed since the November election. He had been a campaigner, a campaigner for the "truth," or so he told me each and every time that we put the paper to bed.