Maybe the founding fathers were wrong.

It has to stop somewhere.

a short story

by

John Crawley

Jimmy Madison never knew his father.

Jimmy grew up the only child of Amanda Madison who was the widow of Alex Madison of Lincoln, Texas. There were days that Jimmy wished his father’s death had been heroic and noble, or at least taken in a tragic accident like out on Interstate 20 as he drove his big rig back to small East Texas hamlet.

But Alex Madison died at his own hands. A gunshot to the head in the supply shed out behind their ranch-style home on the outskirts of town. He did the deed while Amanda was with Jimmy at the doctor’s office for a newborn check up. They didn’t find Alex for several days. The sheriff’s dog posse from Carthage was who found him. After that Amanda sold the house and together she and her infant son moved into the town. They lived right by the railroad and for as long as he can remember back in time, Jimmy was rattled to sleep by the passing trains hurrying through the Piney Woods toward Houston to the south.

Then one day, Amanda told Jimmy about his father. She told him of how he died and where it happened. She told him of the demons of booze and drugs that haunted him. They even drove by the old house to take a look and see the shed, which had grown in size under the supervision of the new owners. It now resembled a real barn instead of the small wooden structure where Alex’s life had come to an abrupt end. Amanda spared few details about Alex’s life and death that day.  Jimmy was twelve and old enough to take in the information and process it. He did so quietly and thoughtfully.

Years passed. Jimmy graduated from Lincoln High, attended Panola County College in Carthage and then went on to Texas A&M University where he studied chemistry. Somewhere in the back of his head he thought he might want to be a doctor.

His grades were good – excellent to be fair. He was involved in all kinds of extra curricular activities. He had an impressive resume. His test scores for medical school were extremely high. He was right on track. Then came the rejection letters. First from UT Southwestern in Dallas. Then the University of Pennsylvania. Finally UCLA said thanks, but no thanks.

Jimmy was saddened at the rejections. And there were far more than those three. In all, he was placed on the waiting list of seven prominent schools of medicine, but no one wanted to take him that semester. No reason given. He figured there were others with perhaps better grades, but that would be hard to do. Maybe some – a few– scored better on the MCAT. Finally on a Thursday before the start of the next semester, he received a letter from the University of Arkansas School of Medicine in Little Rock. The letter suggested that Jimmy reapply the following term so that the school, which thought his grades and application were of the highest order, might have a better chance in the total mix of students entering the program. Due to federal regulations the school had to take a blend – a quota – based on population and income and Jimmy was just outside the algorithm established by the department of education. They wished him well and hoped he would reapply soon.

            There was his answer. Only one school had been forthcoming enough to tell the truth. Jimmy was a Caucasian – white. He needed to be a minority to score a seat at one of the schools. Nothing against him, that just the way it was.

            Jimmy returned to Lincoln, moved back in with his mother, got a job at a local food processing plant, working in their quality control lab, running chemical analysis of the canned output. Day-in and day-out his anger grew, until one day he went and bought a gun. Not just one gun, but three.

            Lincoln’s schools were mostly black. That’s because during integration and busing in the sixties, a prominent white family, the Ellard-Dixons, built the state-of-the art Pines Christian Academy on the outskirts of Lincoln and most of the white students in town flocked to its pristine, new corridors and classrooms. Jimmy, being without the support of a father, and with the income of his working mother only, didn’t have the money for the steep tuition that the Pines required, so he attended the public schools.

Lincoln High was a good school. Jimmy’s own mother taught there. Biology and reading. While he was there, the high school won the state basketball championship, which tended to unite the town in ways he had never seen before. Jimmy himself won first place in the East Texas Science Fair held at Kilgore College and also one the state debate championship. As established, his grades were excellent and he finished well into the top ten percent of his class. In fact, only one black student made it into the top ten percent. The others, like Jimmy, were white, too poor to crack the elite ranks at Pines Christian.

Jimmy didn’t blame Lincoln High. He just knew that is where the black students would be that day. He waited. The school bell sounded ending the day on a warm fall afternoon and Jimmy Madison began to shoot students as they exited the buildings. He killed nine outright, two more died in Longview hospitals later in the day. When he ran out of ammunition, he calmly climbed into his car, drove to the outskirts of Lincoln to a ranch-style house and entered the shed that stood behind it. There he joined the father he had never known.

The deaths were so gruesome that the Lincoln city council, five whites and four black, voted unanimously to outlaw the sale of firearms and ammunition in the city limits. If you wanted a gun you had to drive to Carthage or Longview or Marshall. Even the NRA, second amendment rights advocates didn’t protest. Lincoln was a no-gun-for-sale town. It was a small step. But at least they did something about it.

Jimmy is buried next to his father in a cemetery west of the small town. There is nothing special about his grave or its marker, except someone in the dark of the night placed a silver, toy pistol on his grave. No one has ever removed it.