Haunted by Kennedy

I was five years-old when President Kennedy was assassinated. Even at that young age, I knew something fundamental had changed. The memories remain very real.

Experts tell us that memories are not really archived in our brains, but rather rebuilt each time we reach for them. We overlay them with other detail enhancing some details, deleting others and ultimately placing the memories in context. So memories from childhood have been reconstructed countless times. I can only wonder how different my current recollections are from their originals.

One such memory of an event occurring just weeks after the assassination served as the basis for a chapter in my upcoming novel, Revelation 11. On a cold December day I played outside on our swing set. Looking up, I saw what looked like a black figure standing on a cloud looking down at me. What began as curiosity, turned to fear as I watched this strange apparition for several minutes. Ultimately, I ran inside, but never told my parents or my brother about the event until years later. To this day, I don't know why.

The event's fictional version appears below to give you a foretaste of the novel. It will be published in time for Easter 2014.

December 1963

Epiphany

“Who is the president now, mommy?” Ben Davis asked.

“President Johnson.” She replied.

He had asked the same question each day for two weeks as if changing presidents could now be a daily occurrence. The five-year-old had come in from playing for lunch two Fridays before to see his mother crying in front of the television. He remembered looking at the screen and seeing a large room filled with people moving back and forth in confusion. The announcer had said the room was the luncheon that President Kennedy was going to address, but he had been assassinated.

“What does assassinated mean, mommy?”

“It’s when someone important is killed.”

A large, black man crossed the screen in a white server’s coat. The tears streamed down his face. Ben had never seen a grown man cry like that.

Over the next days, images of death flooded the TV screen-the President’s body in state, the funeral cortege, the burial at Arlington.

In the gray days that followed, angst fed the nation’s subconscious. Even children like Ben knew something was different as a pall fell over the nation with the first days of winter. He heard stories that psychics had predicted the assassination, that a family received a message on Ouija board reading, “Thank you for praying for me while I was in purgatory.”

“What’s purgatory, mommy?”

“It’s something Catholics believe in. You don’t need to worry about it.”

“Was President Kennedy a Catholic?”

“Yes, he was.”

“So he has to worry about purgatory, right?”

Even at this age, he could tell when his mother was uncomfortable with a question. “That’s hard to say. Why don’t you go out and play on the swings until dinner?”

Ben bundled up against the cold, gray day. Dark, low clouds floated by against the lighter gray matte above them. He swung on the swings, watched the sky begin to succumb to the winter evening’s gloom. A small dark spot near one of the low, gray clouds caught his eye for a moment, then disappeared behind in the swirling vapor.

He continued to swing and look around the neighborhood to see if any of his friends were out playing. But this was the Cumberland Valley's appointed dinner hour and they were all crowded into the identical postwar crackerbox rancher eat-in kitchens.

His mother always saw the local custom of eating dinner precisely at five o’clock as peculiar. As a point of pride, and to accommodate his father, Jeff Sr.’s habit of having a few drinks before coming home, Ben’s family ate at 6—6:30, whenever, but never at five. Most likely, it would get dark before dinner and his mother would call him in.

He could just barely make out the sun’s position over the western mountains through the gray. He stood up to push off and swing as high as possible, pointing his toes and throwing his head back to look at the sky above him. The dark spot hovered above him in the clouds. Planting his feet to stop the swing, he stared up. More clearly defined now, the spot had a distinctive shape; a head, shoulders, and body apparently standing on the cloud. Long flowing hair crowned the robed figure. The fading light glinted off the suggestion of an eyebrow. Its face appeared to be looking down directly at him. To Ben, the figure looked like the silhouette of Jesus, the face subsumed in shadow.

The dark Christ moved as the cloud moved. What Ben imagined to be the face continued to gaze at him. He looked around his neighborhood. No one was out. All the dutiful diners safely huddled in their homes.
The more Ben identified the form’s distinct features, the more curiosity gave way to fear. He wanted to tell someone, anyone …or at least not be alone. But the five o’clock suburban dinner communion trumped all, even a heavenly figure standing on a cloud. Ben took one last look across the haunted landscape, saw no one, and ran inside to the light and warmth of home.