of flowers he’d picked from the garden that she hadn’t seen yet. He put them in a small painted vase. I looked at the green sky on that vase, the willow, the muddy water and awkwardly painted rocks. I was to become overly familiar with this glazed scene during those dinners because I didn’t want to look at my mother, propped up staring wearily at us as if she’d just been shot, or rolled into a mummy pretending to be in the afterlife. My father tried to keep a conversation going every night, and when I had exhausted my meager store of the day’s doings, he forged on, a lone paddler on an endless lake of silence, or maybe rowing upstream. I am sure I saw him laboring on the muddy little river painted on the vase. After he’d spoken of the day’s small events one night, he said he’d had a very interesting talk with Father Travis Wozniak and that the priest had been there in Dealey Plaza on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Travis’s father had taken him into the city to see the Catholic president and his elegant first lady, who was wearing a suit the exact mute pink as the inside of a cat’s mouth. Travis and his father walked down Houston Street, crossed Elm, and decided that the best place to view the President would be there on the grassy slope just east of the Triple Underpass. They had a good view and watched the street expectantly. Just before the first motorcycle escorts appeared, someone’s black-and-white gundog ran out into the middle of the street and was quickly recalled by its owner. It often bothered Travis afterward to think that if only the dog had got loose at another time, perhaps just as the motorcade passed, messing up the precision and timing of things, or if it had thrown itself under the wheels of the presidential convertible in an act of sacrifice, or leapt into the President’s lap, what followed might not have happened. This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next. It gave him the sensation that he was tottering on the tip of a flagpole. He was poised on circumstance. He said the feeling has grown stronger and more persistent, too, since the embassy bombing where he’d been injured.
Interesting, my father said. That priest. A flagpole sitter.
Father Travis had gone on describing how the motorcycles preceded the presidential convertible, and there was John F. Kennedy, looking straight ahead. Some women sitting on the grass had brought their lunch to eat and now stood up beside their sandwich boxes and wildly clapped and cheered. They drew the President’s attention, and he looked directly at them, and then smiled at Travis, who was dazzled and disoriented to see the portrait in the living room of every Catholic family come to life. The shots sounded like a car had backfired. The first lady stood up and Travis saw her scan the crowd. The car halted. Then more shots. She threw herself down and that was the last he saw, for his father threw him down, too, and covered him with his body. He was slammed into the ground so suddenly, and his father was so heavy, that he bit into the sod. Ever after, thinking of that day, he remembers the grit in his teeth. Soon his father felt the shift of the crowd and the two of them rose. Waves of confusion swirled, turned chaotic when the presidential car streaked forward. People ran back and forth, not certain which direction was safest, and subject to racing rumors. He saw a family of black people cast themselves onto the earth in grief. The speckled gundog was loose again; it trotted right and left, nose high, as if it were actually directing the crowd instead of being buffeted this way and that by surges of people in the grip of conflicting terrors and fascinations. Some tried to run back to the place they had last seen the President and others grappled with people they thought somehow responsible. People sank to their knees and were lost in prayer or shock. The gundog sniffed a fallen woman and then stood beside her, pointing gravely and motionlessly at the