Fallen Angel
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

In 1948, Alonzo Goldsmith and Isabelle Bird were married in a modest service in a small country church. He was twenty and she was nineteen. Neither of them knew anything of the world.

In less than a year, they brought forth a baby, a boy they named Timothy. The next year, they had a girl, named Peggy. Alonzo knew that, with two babies in less than two years of marriage, life was always going to be a struggle for him. Ten months after Peggy was born came Jesse, a stolid, dark-haired boy. When Jesse was barely walking, there came another girl; this one they named Storm. With two boys and two girls in less than five years or marriage, Alonzo declared there would be no more. One more would upset the balance.

Alonzo was never blessed with intellectual curiosity or an abundance of learning. He had to make a living for himself and his brood of children the best way he knew how. He got a job on an assembly line in a shoe factory. He stayed for thirteen years until, one day, he was told he didn’t need to come back; the factory was closing its doors.

After his time in the factory, he painted houses, worked in a lead mine, drove a school bus, worked as a janitor in a church, clerked in a hardware store, did cleanup work in a cemetery, and even for a while worked as a trash collector. No work was beneath him as long as it paid the honest dollar.

The growing-up years of his quartet of children passed in a kind of blur. They were starting kindergarten and then, before Alonzo knew it, he was putting on his blue suit and going to their high school graduations. Peggy and Storm were both out of the house and married by the time they were twenty and started having babies of their own.

Timothy, never much interested in the girls, moved to Alaska with a couple of his friends and got a job there. He sent greeting cards to Alonzo and Isabelle on Christmas and birthdays, but he would never come back home, he said, not even for a visit. He was happy in Alaska and didn’t want to be reminded of his growing-up years.

As a child growing up, Jesse was unlike any other. He was stubborn and uncooperative. He refused to sit still in school. He was a bully with his classmates. He defaced the walls. He pulled fire extinguishers down from the wall to watch them spray. Several times he ran away from school and was found wandering the streets. His name came to by synonymous with misdeeds.

At home, if anybody ever crossed him, he picked up the nearest object and threw it. He broke windows, dishes and mirrors, not to mention all his toys. He played cruel tricks on his sisters, putting a dead skunk in their closet or taking their clothes and books out into the back yard and setting fire to them. He called his mother vile names and painted obscenities on the wall of his room in his own blood.

His high school years were tumultuous. He cheated on tests, stole money, engaged in fistfights, threatened to kill a teacher for correcting him in class, slashed the tires on a school bus. At night, he went out drinking, sometimes not getting home in time to go to school the next morning. He shoplifted cigarettes and small food items. He had been barred from every drug store in town because he roamed their aisles and pilfered drugs.

Finally, he graduated from high school. He had the lowest scholastic record in his class and the highest number of days missed, but still he was allowed to graduate. The entire family attended his graduation and were happy for him. The next day he attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. He spent four months in the state mental hospital, after which he was said to be cured of whatever had been wrong with him and sent home.

His mother knew he was an aberration. Something that happens in the world. For every good in the world, there is a bad something or other. He was no more responsible for his actions than a wild animal in the forest. She loved him as much as she loved her other children, if not more. He was her fallen angel. He would come to a bad end, she knew. She could only hope for a merciful one.

After his stay in the mental hospital, he got a job as an apprentice meat cutter for minimum wage. In the evenings, he would come home wearing his white apron covered with blood, in which he seemed to take pride. Sometimes he brandished a meat cleaver in his mother’s or his father’s face, but they could ignore these things as long as he was going to work every day and staying at home in the evenings and watching television and napping in the recliner.

He began dating a checker named Maureen in the supermarket where he worked. In a few weeks, they announced they were going to be married. Maureen was going to have a baby, but she hoped nobody would notice until after the wedding. They rented a small house a few blocks from the supermarket where they both worked and, seven months after they were married, Maureen gave birth to a son, Matthew.

In the year after Matthew’s birth, Jesse began going around with other women, sometimes women he picked up on the street. He stole money from Maureen’s purse and began staying out all night, sometimes being gone for two or three days at a time. When Maureen confronted him over the loss of the rent money, he hit her in the head with a bottle and tried to strangle her. As he held her down on the floor, she slashed him across the face with a piece of glass and got away. After that, she filed for divorce, quit her job and took Matthew and went back to her childhood home to live with her widowed mother.

Alonzo was now in his mid-sixties and, after forty-five years, he had to give up working. He had a heart murmur, a fatty liver, arthritis, asthma, and deteriorating disks in his spine. Every movement for him was painful. He and Isabelle, sitting at the kitchen table, figured they could get by on what little money they had, since they only had themselves to take care of and didn’t need anything in the way of luxuries.

Just when Alonzo was looking forward to a serene old age, fatherhood was once again thrust upon him. Jesse lost his job, his home and his wife, and had no place to lay his head. Alonzo and Isabelle had to give him one more chance. They allowed him to move into his old room, but only if he could be the kind of responsible adult they expected him to be. If he engaged in any more of his destructive behavior, he would have to find another place to stay.

Jesse found a job as counter man in an auto parts store. He went to work every day and straight home afterwards and didn’t go out again at night. After a month of this good behavior he was stretched to the limit of his endurance and reverted to his old ways. He stole Alonzo’s pain medication and took grocery money from his mother’s purse. He stayed out all night and slept all day, forfeiting his new job. He was dirty and sloppy and his mother had to pick up after him the same way she did when he was a child. When she tried to speak to him, he called her a meddling old bitch and threatened to kill her.

When he broke a glass in the kitchen and sliced Isabelle’s arm with it, Alonzo told him he had to get out before the end of the day. His mother and father could no longer be responsible for him and he was going to have to make his own way in the world.

He got his things together, but before he left he had a few choice words to impart. They had always been against him, he said; they had hurt him and held him back by not loving him enough. They hadn’t seen the last of him, though. He’d be back and when they saw him coming they’d better say their prayers.

The next day they changed the locks on the doors and Alonzo bought two handguns, one for him and one for Isabelle. They took lessons on gun safety and made sure they kept plenty of ammunition in the house.

Two weeks after Jesse left, Isabelle was alone in the house when she heard a car out front. When she looked out the window, she saw Jesse getting out of the car with a shotgun. She heard him try to open the door and, when he found that his old key wouldn’t work, he began shouting and swearing.

“Go on now, son!” she called to him. “We don’t want any more trouble with you!”

“Let me in!” he yelled.

“No! If you don’t go away and leave us alone, I’ll call the sheriff! I swear I will!”

He banged and kicked at the door and when she still didn’t open it, he broke the glass out with the butt of his shotgun and reached through and undid the lock.

When he came through the door, she was ready for him. She believed that when he saw her pointing a gun at him, he would desist, but still he advanced on her, pointing his gun at her middle. She would never forget the look of hatred on his face.

She believed in that moment without a doubt that he would kill her and then kill Alonzo when he came into the house. Without thinking about what she was doing, almost by reflex, she leveled her gun at him and, from eight feet away, pulled the trigger. One bullet was all it took. He fell dead at her feet.

She called the police and told them calmly what happened. Ten minutes later, Alonzo came home. The story was in the newspapers and on television: Rural Woman Kills Mentally Ill Son in Self-Defense. No Charges Filed.

Alonzo and Isabelle had Jesse’s body cremated. There was no religious service. People heard about it and were disappointed there would be no funeral for them to go to. How could a mother kill her own son, they asked. Well, he was going to kill her. It was one or the other. What do you know about that? It takes all kinds.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp