My Last Testament
(A short story of man's unpredictable existence)
by JD Jones
Copyright 2013 by JD Jones
License Notes:
A letter found among the sparse personal items of a dead homeless man raises eyebrows with the local police. Some kids found his body while playing in the woods near their home. They told their parents. The parents called the police. He was pronounced dead at the scene, obviously several days past his expiration. It was titled, “My Last Testament”.
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No one likes to be forgotten. Even those of us who were never really seen while we were alive. If you are reading this, then I am dead. So be it. That is the way of life, after all. Some go on. Some pass on. Nothing ever really changes. No one ever gets the answers they search for. At least I never did.
I am writing this because I do not want to be forgotten or dismissed as just another dead, homeless guy. I was more than that. Much more. But none ever knew it. Know one ever took the time to talk to me and ask me what my life was all about. More is the pity, too. Because I think I was a pretty interesting guy. I have lived a long and sometimes happy life. Sometimes not. But it was never boring.
I first remember being alive when I was five. That was when mom brought home my second daddy. He was a big man. I guess all things are big to a five year old. But I mean he was a fat man. Not grossly fat, just more flesh than muscle, fat. And he always smelled like salami. That was because he was always eating it with some kind of stinky cheese. I hate cheese. I hate salami, too.
Second daddy was a severe man. Rough and always yelling. Mostly at me. I must have been a stupid child because no matter what I did, or how I did it, he got mad. Then he would whip me. He had a thin, leather strap he kept just to whip me with. Sometimes he whipped me so hard that I bled. Always he made sure it left some kind of mark. He always said a whipping is not a whipping unless it leaves a young man something to remember it by and something to think about the next time. Well, I got lots to think about back then. The only time he was not yelling or whipping was when he was asleep, which was a lot. And he slept hard, too. He snored like a train and it was hard to wake him up. He told us he had Ap Knees or something that made him sleep like that.
Second daddy stayed around until I was almost ten. I remember it because that summer one of my aunts brought me a radio for my birthday. Nothing fancy. Just a radio. But I remember thinking that if second daddy was still alive he would take the radio away to teach me some kind of lesson. He was always taking my stuff away. Most things I never got back. He said the kids at the pawn shop needed them more than I did. But he was dead by my tenth birthday. They said he just stopped breathing while he was sleeping. I just remember him not being there. Mom cried when he died, but she was happy again by my birthday. I was glad of that.
I was eleven when third daddy came into the picture. He was mean. He was always hitting mom and me. He didn't have a special strap or anything like that. He just used his hands. Usually he slapped us. Mom first, then me. Even if I never did anything. A lot of times he punched us. Many times mom had to go to the hospital after he punched her. Sometimes the police came around. But when they left, third daddy was always still there. And mom was always crying and staying in her room a lot. I didn't like that. It made third daddy mad when mom stayed in her room. Then he took his anger out on me. Once he tied me up with a rope and hung me from the ceiling fan. I hoped it would fall down but it must be pretty well attached because it didn't.
All that night mom stayed in her room. I could hear her crying sometimes. That was when I was not crying. Every once in a while third daddy would hit me. Sometimes with the flat of his hand. Sometimes with his fist in my stomach. Always I would yell or grunt or moan or something. He liked that. At least it made him laugh. And he yelling in at mom telling her to shut up. He never told me to shut up, though. I think he liked hearing me cry.
I was thirteen when third daddy left. They took him away in a big, black van. A few days later some policemen came around and took mom away. A kind faced, fat lady with a lot of perfume on came and took me away. She didn't keep me though. She gave me to some people with lots of other kids that didn't belong to them either. That was my introduction to the foster care system. Foster must be another word for greedy, if those people were any indication of what the system was all about.
They tried to keep me from finding out about my mom but I finally got the story. She was arrested, tried and convicted of killing third daddy with some rat poison in his coffee. People said mean things about my mom back then. Said she was some kind of witch or maybe a whore that got tired of men too easily. Bad things. People were always saying bad things about us back then. The trial went fast because mom refused to talk to anyone. Not a word. Just a sad silence, is how the newspaper described her presence in court.
I tried to tell people that she couldn't have killed third daddy. It was me that brought him his coffee that time. Mom was in her room crying again. He had made me put on one of mom's girly looking aprons and clean the kitchen and act like the woman of the house since mom was not being it. I remember that as the last time I ever got mad at third daddy. Because he was dead after that.
The new guy wanted me to call him Frank. That was his name. But I always thought of him as fourth daddy, on account that he was the fourth man who was like my daddy, telling me what to do and stuff. His wife's name was Gloria. Frank and Gloria. They had a big home that needed lots of work. But they opened their doors to us homeless kids and let us live there. They fed us and bought us clothes and gave us chores to do so that we would not grow up shiftless. Gloria yelled a lot and sometimes hit us. She was small and her hits didn't hurt anything like third daddy's had. Still, it hurt enough to get our attention.
One afternoon, one of the bigger kids was smoking and I warned him he was going to get into trouble. He pulled out a knife and threatened to cut my throat. I was never so scared as I was that day. I made sure and told fourth daddy about the knife when I told him about the smoking. I was afraid the bigger kid was going to burn down the house. He always threw the match on the floor, like he was too cool to throw it in an ashtray. I didn't know. I was just afraid.
They took the big kid away for ten days. Then they brought him back. As soon as he got me alone he pummeled me like he had promised. I had bruises all over my face and arms and chest and a cut over my right eye. I remember looking in the mirror and wondering how long before they would go away. It took almost two weeks.
I stayed close to Gloria during that time. The big kid would not hit me if she was around. A few times she left and fourth daddy always let the bigger kids beat up on the little kids. Long as there was no blood and no one had to go to the hospital. He hated having to take us to the hospital. So, I got a few more beatings then.
A week later, the big kid fell out of the attic window onto the driveway. His head split open like a water melon. Blood ran everywhere in little streams while he died. No one saw him fall and fourth daddy found him later. The police came and found a shovel up in the attic. They said it had some hair and scalp from the big kid on it and the only prints on the shovel belonged to fourth daddy. They took him away and because he was never coming back the fat lady with the perfume come and got me, too.
I stayed in her office at the public works department building for two days while she tried to find someone to take a dumb, fourteen year old boy who was still in the seventh grade. I saw that she worked hard and she was always kind to me. I asked her why I could not live with her and she told me her cat did not like strangers. Imagine that. I could not have a place to live because some cat did not like strangers. Just my luck. Mostly all bad.
Finally she took me to a home for children on a farm w
ay out in the country. There I learned to live on my own a lot. There were a lot of things to do with the other children but I decided I had better just keep to myself. Too many bad things happened to people in this world.
There were three couples at this farm for children. We all got our own rooms and did not have to come out of them if we did not want to. So I mostly stayed in mine. For four years I saw kids come and go at the farm. It was a boring place. Lots to do and chores like at fourth daddy's, but nothing that interested me. Except the hog slaughtering. Now that was really interesting. Killing and then boiling and finally stripping the hide off a two hundred pound hog. It was a lot of work but I always liked it. And the men sometimes let me help cut the meat up, too. They laughed because the other kids always ran away when hog slaughtering started. They hated the smell and the mess. I liked it. It felt good doing something useful. The hogs needed killing and the meat needed cutting up for our freezer.
When I turned eighteen, they made me leave the farm. I was too old to stay there any more and I had to go make it on my own. I had gotten a job at a local farm but it barely paid enough to get me an apartment. I had to have food stamps and heating assistance to live there. It was not the most dignified time of my life. I had a small black and white TV someone had given me and the programs I watched never showed anyone living like I was living. That was how I knew that what I was doing then was wrong.
I went down to the local homeless shelter and asked the guys there what they did to live. They explained to me the tools necessary to live on my own and I acquired them. In less than a month, I gave up the farm job and hit the road. That was when my real life started. That's the part I really wanted to explain in this letter. Not that part about having it rough growing up. A lot of people have it rough. That's nothing special. The special stuff started after I hit the road. I just didn't want to go to my grave without sharing it with someone.
The first thing I learned after choosing to live homeless was that I was invisible. At first it made me mad. People tried to ignore me so much that they actually created a blind spot for me to travel in. I could walk down a street and because I was a “homeless guy” everyone did not look my way. I could have been carrying a dead, bleeding baby and they would never have noticed because they were so intent on ignoring me.
The second thing I learned was that being invisible was also a good thing. If I took something no one could blame the guy who was never there. As long as it was small, inconsequential stuff nobody cared about, no one was going to admit they had seen me. If they saw me, they would be obliged to get me some help. If they arrested me, they would have to feed me and bathe me and get me some good clothes. They did not want the obligation. No one did.
Being invisible also made me the perfect choice. Not everyone could do what I have done. Most could not. I used to think that most people were all the same. Truth is, people are all very different. I am different from others. Others are different from me and from each other. Some differences are good. Some are not.
I was traveling through Alabama the first time I saw the difference. A young mother was screaming and hitting her child in a store parking lot. I had been hoping to ask her for a handout, but watching her beat that child worse than she ever would a dog, something inside me flipped on. Like a light switch being turned on. I followed them as they walked home with their bag of groceries. The woman talked loud, fast and angry all the way home. The child cried and flinched every time the mother's voice changed pitch. I knew the signs of abuse by then. I had lived them.
I was nineteen years old the first time I sneaked into a house at night. There was no father in that house. Only the mother and the child. The mother had a man friend that came by and brought her some liquor. He stayed until about midnight and then drove away in his rattling, old pick up truck. Soon after that the lights went off.
I waited outside for a few more minutes and then let myself in at a window that was not locked. I was careful and quite once inside. I looked around the house, seeing where everything was. The living room with not much furniture. The kitchen with even less food in any of the cupboards. The refrigerator was mostly empty. I saw the woman kept her liquor in there, though. No milk for the child.
I found the woman's purse and looked through it. She had a driver's license. Said her name was Margaret. Her picture looked more like a mug shot. She was actually prettier in person. I remember standing in the woman's hallway thinking how funny it was that such a pretty woman had such a nasty disposition. She was mean. She hated her life and was taking it out on the child. The more I thought about the yelling and screaming and hitting I had seen earlier, the madder I got.
I found the child's room. A mattress on the floor and a couple of boxes for clothing and toys, which were half in and half out of the boxes. The child looked so small lying all curled up on that mattress with only a light blanket balled up all around him. I stepped into the room and walked slowly around the mattress. I saw the kid from every angle and then I knelt down and watched him sleep. His mouth was partly open and he was breathing through his mouth. His nose was snotty. I could see it because there was plenty of light coming in the window with no curtain on it. The street light outside shined right in that window.
I watched the boy breathe in and then out. He was lying on his side and he seemed to grow with each breath and shrink with each exhale. The human body is an amazing thing. All them parts alive and growing and doing their own thing all the time. A fantastic, miraculous thing.
A long time later, I left the sleeping child and continued my walk around the house. A neighbor came home next door and I watched them get out of their car and go into their house from the woman's front window. It had a curtain on it but it was threadbare and ripped in a couple places. These people had obviously not been doing too well for a long time. Maybe never.
I sat on her couch, a raggedy, smelly rough feeling thing. It reminded me of the couches I had seen at the dump once. Bad. Sitting there in the mostly dark house, with only the light from the street light shining in, I thought again about the woman and the child. Obviously the woman could not handle life with the child. They could never be good together. The woman would always resent the child for making her a mother instead of some party girl. Funny how people hated obligations.
For more than two hours I sat on that couch and listened to the sounds of the house and the woman and the child. If I had money, I would have helped them out that way. But I had none. So, the best I could think to do was do what I knew I could do.
I went into the back of the house where the woman's bedroom was. I had gone to the door in my earlier prowling. This time I went in. Slowly I walked around her room. She had a bed and a dresser and clothes in her closet. The door to the closet was slightly opened and squeaked when I pulled it a little farther open. The woman stirred but did not awake. Good thing. If she did she would have been looking right at me.
I felt my heart pounding in my chest and enjoyed the rush of adrenaline the fear produced in me. People had always told me that the adrenaline was to feed the fight or flight response inherent in every person. I was amused to sense that my adrenaline was not the flight kind. I had no intention of running out if I was caught. I came in for a reason. No sense leaving until I had fulfilled my reason.
I knelt by the bed and watched the woman like I had the child. She wore a t-shirt but that was all I could see. She had a blanket pulled up to her chest as she slept on her side. It was a better blanket than the kid had but not much better. I watched her breathing and noticed she grew a little with each breath like her son did. She was not a very big woman. Petite would be the term most people would use. She had dark hair and a pretty face. I wondered what color her eyes were as I knelt there beside her sleeping form.
I left her bedroom and went out to the kitchen. I had to look in three drawers for what I wanted. It was big. It was mostly sharp. It was perfect.
Back in her room, I stepped on a floor board that groaned under my foot.
I stopped and held my breath for a moment. The woman's easy, smooth breathing stopped, too. It seemed like forever I stood there in the semi dark room waiting to hear her breath normal sleep breaths again. She rolled over, away from me and then I heard the easy sleep breaths come again. My heart was really pounding now. Not from the scare. That was good too. But now my heart was pounding because of what I was going to do next.
Slowly, I moved near her and held my hand near her head. I tried to control my racing heartbeat but it was no use. I guess when a man is excited he can not control his heart.
For long minutes I watched her again and held my hand close to her face. I wondered if she could smell my hand. I was that close. I wondered if the human body could identify strange smells in its sleep. I had no idea. Interesting but of no real meaning to my purpose.
Taking a deep breath myself, I let it out half way and prepared to move. I had learned the technique from an article I had read on shooting firearms. Never owned a gun but I figured the situation was about calming the body for its work more than getting the gun ready.
Thus prepared, I reached down and firmly placed my hand over her mouth. Instantly, she was awake. I saw the fear in her eyes and felt her try to pull away. I rolled her onto her back and climbed up on her body, straddling her hips with my legs and sitting on her heavily. I leaned forward with my upper body and forced her head into the softness of the mattress and the pillow.
She tried to squirm and then she tried to yell. There would be no more yelling from her. I had heard quite enough already. I pointed the knife down at her eyes and pushed forward until I saw her fear turn to quiet knowledge that nothing was going to change what was happening. She went limp under me and I continued with my work.
First the eyes. The offending eyes. She cried as I cut her. Digging out those eyes. Blood erupted all around her eyes and flowed from the sockets. The eyeballs popped out easily and I severed them so they would fall out onto the bed. She screamed under my hand but I pushed harder and muffled her frantic desire to call for help. Who was going to help the child while she beat him? No one. That was exactly who was going to help her now. She was bleeding badly so I finished cutting her cheeks and nose and forehead until they were a raw mass of hamburger meat stuck to a face. I can't believe how vividly I remember every moment of that first time.
She was crying and gushing up sobs and blood was everywhere. Her hands tore at my arms and beat against my sides but I held her tightly in place. She still did not realize that I had to take away her control. Her control was killing the child. She needed to be out of control. I was making that happen.
Checking my heart beat again, I realized it was normal now, not racing. The adrenaline was still pumping but the pounding heartbeat was gone. She was no longer in control. I was no longer excited about taking her control away from her. I was calming down and she was winding up. I knew if I removed my hand or even just lightened up on the pressure driving her back into the bed, she would be screaming for the neighbors or whoever else she thought might come to her rescue. But no one was coming to help her tonight.
Quickly I slashed her throat opening it up wide until I was sure I was slicing against her spinal column. She was dead by then. She had stopped struggling. Her blood was everywhere. I remember how sticky it was that first time. Thick and kind of a sweet smell, too. I fought the desire to play in it because I still had more work to do.
I got the glasses and the liquor the guy had brought and put them in the bedroom with her body. I got a towel from the bathroom and wiped the knife down from fingerprints and left it in plain sight. I had gone through the dirty clothes basket in the laundry room and found some men's boxers. I brought them into the bedroom, too. The guy was not a nice guy and someone had to take the blame for this. I wasn't. That was another thing I had learned over the years. People in authority needed someone to blame for everything. It didn't matter about truth or anything like that, just someone to blame.
Quietly I took off my clothes and changed into some of the man's clothing I found in the closet. I made sure to smear my blood stained clothing all around the bathroom as I changed. I would have liked to wash my hands and arms but that would have to wait until I was safely away. I had seen a creek a mile down the road headed out of town.
My shoes were all bloody so they went into the trash bag with my clothes. With everything settled I took one last look in the boy's room and made sure he was still asleep. His life was going to be different after what I had done. I only hoped it worked out okay like mine had.
After that night I was not just rambling any more. I was hunting. Looking for things to fix. Sometimes, I went whole months without finding anything. Sometimes, I had two jobs in one week. It just ran funny that way.
Once I was even questioned by police about a death that they were investigating. It had nothing to do with me but they were pulling in all suspicious characters looking for someone to blame. I guess a homeless guy is easy to blame if they wanted to. But my appointed lawyer showed them they had nothing to hold me on. It was amusing to be asked about a death I had not caused and not about the ones I had.
A couple times people had come awake while I was in their house. That was scary, thinking they might catch me. I could not let that happen. I could not do my work if they caught me. As I sat in a dark closet while they inspected their house for intruders, I thought about what I should do if I was found. I came to the only conclusion possible. I would have to kill them all. My identity needed to be kept secret at all times.
About the fourth year of my being on the road, I read a newspaper report about some task force looking for a serial killer. They had been looking for about a year then and the paper had little to report about what they had discovered so far. What they did say was rather amusing. I remember they thought at first they were searching for a guy with money or some other means or reasoning for traveling around a lot. Later they changed their focus to people who moved around a lot, no real job to hold them down.
They also connected the murders by a sometimes foolish and childish (their words) effort to frame someone else for the murders. I stopped trying to blame someone else for them. They would have to find their own people to blame after that article. I did not consider myself foolish or childish. I was not trying to fool anyone. I know I had left my fingerprints all over the place. I was just trying to help them blame someone because I was not around for them to catch. Well, they ended that with their hurtful words.
The lady who wrote the newspaper article said I was a mean spirited, probably crazy psychopath with violent tendencies. I wasn't mean spirited and maybe I was a little crazy. Who knows about those things? I did not have violent tendencies, though. Everything I did was to prevent violence from happening to the children. I didn't keep track. I didn't keep trophies. I didn't care anything about the mean people who needed to die. Just the children. They needed someone to protect them. That was all I cared about.
I went to the reporter's apartment building but they would not let someone like me in there. I didn't get to see her. Probably for the best. I had no idea what I would say to her until I actually met her. Maybe she wasn't a bad person, just misinformed. So I left.
Once I was taken to jail on a vagrancy charge and the officer joked that I was probably the serial killer they were looking for. I considered telling him I was in a clever way but decided I was not clever enough for that kind of thing. I was just a do it and get it done kind of person. No real planning needed for my life, except whatever providential planning was going on in the atmosphere to bring me into contact with these mean people. So I let him talk and push me around. I got a good night's sleep indoors anyway. And in the morning they gave a me breakfast before making me hit the streets again.
I once went for three months just shuffling from rooming house to rooming house, odd job to odd job with no real excitement in my life. Just everyday survival. It was so boring. I started to think that maybe I had killed all the mean people that needed killing
back then. But, like I said, it only lasted three months. Mean people must grow fast.
After the third killing, I lost track of how many mean people died. If I was to guess, I would probably say about a hundred. But over the years my memory is not what it used to be. I once got a calendar and counted out how many I would have done if I did one every three weeks. It came to sixteen or seventeen, something like that. As I write this letter, I am now forty nine years old. If I make it to fifty I will write a new letter but as of today, I think maybe I have killed about five hundred people. That seems like a lot but it is not. I counted up the days of my life and they add up to almost eighteen thousand. Eleven thousand of those have been since I started out on the road. So, five hundred is not much compared to elven thousand. That is only like one person for every twenty days or something. People got to work much more frequently than that so I was not as busy as I seemed at times. Mostly because of the travel needed to keep out of jail.
I can not be sure if I am remembering everything just right, either. Maybe sometimes I remember something that was just a memory of something I had already done, or even just a thought I had that became a memory somehow. I am not sure. I read a book once where the guy in the story relived the things he had done over and over. Maybe that was what I was remembering as specific different killings. I do not know.
Well, I have done what I set out to do, tell everyone, or at least someone, what I have done. Not because I need forgiveness or anything. I did what I did because it was necessary. Someone had to do it. Like I said, I guess I was chosen. So I did it to the best of my ability.
The last few days I know I am done. I don't feel like helping out any more. I hurt in lots of places lately and I am losing weight fast. I don't eat a lot, but it was always enough to keep me healthy before. Now, I think I am wasting away. One of the other guys at the shelter said he thought I should see a doctor. He said he thought maybe I had cancer or something. Well, if I do, I am not going to complain. I've had a good life. It started out hard where my only purpose, it seemed, was to let other people beat on me. But it got better. I have lived a life full of purpose and I am happy to say, I am satisfied that I will leave this world someday having done a lot of good for others.
Sometimes I think of those kids I saved from mean adults. I wonder if they are all right. Probably not all ended up in as good a place as I did. Some probably went to worse places but I never knew about that so I could not help. I did what I could.
As I write this, I wish I had kept a diary of my life. It seems to me that some people will need more details. Some will want more proof of what I am saying. All I can say now is that I never wanted credit for anything I did. I just wanted the pain to go away. Most of the times, as I helped those other kids, I could feel my own hurt getting smaller. Really. For weeks afterward, I could feel like I was almost normal again. But the pain always came back so I knew I was not. Then I would see another person needed rescuing. Seeing their pain brought back mine. I guess you might say, killing those mean people helped us both out, them and me. We needed it. Relief from the pain I mean. Even if those kids went to a worse place, they had a few days where they did not feel the pain, at least.
But I should have written it down in a book. That's what people who do important things do. Write it down. I just did not know at the time. Like I said, I was no big planner or anything. I just went and did it. Now it is done. I feel that in my bones. I am finished.
I don't know how many more nights I have on this earth. I am feeling worse and worse each day. Like I said, if I reach my fiftieth birthday, I will write a new letter and tell everyone how it feels when I am fifty. If not, then this is at least a partial remembrance of my life. Maybe someone will care. Maybe not. I only hope one of those kids will have a good life like me. Maybe they will have a better one and get rich and famous or something. That would make it even better. I would like to think that I had done something real good like that. That's all us kids need, you know. A chance.
I am going to go to sleep now. Maybe I will wake up tomorrow. Maybe I will not. That's what my life is now, a life of maybes. No purpose. Just maybes.