Mental patient slashes ex-wife, commits suicide

By Ernie Calvert

(JODIE) 77-year-old Deacon “Deke” Simmons and Denholm Consolidated School District Principal Ellen Dockerty arrived too late on Sunday night to save Sadie Dunhill from being seriously hurt, but things could have been much worse for the popular 28-year-old school librarian.

According to Douglas Reems, the Jodie town constable, “If Deke and Ellie hadn’t arrived when they did, Miss Dunhill almost certainly would have been killed.”

The two educators had come with a tuna casserole and a bread pudding. Neither wanted to talk about their heroic intervention. Simmons would only say, “I wish we’d gotten there sooner.”

According to Constable Reems, Simmons overpowered the much younger John Clayton, of Savannah, Georgia, after Miss Dockerty threw the casserole at him, distracting him. Simmons wrestled away a small revolver. Clayton then produced the knife with which he had cut his ex-wife’s face and used it to slash his own throat. Simmons and Miss Dockerty tried to stop the bleeding to no avail. Clayton was pronounced dead at the scene.

Miss Dockerty told Constable Reems that Clayton may have been stalking his ex-wife for months. The staff at Denholm Consolidated had been alerted that Miss Dunhill’s ex-husband might be dangerous, and Miss Dunhill herself had provided a photograph of Clayton, but Principal Dockerty said he had disguised his appearance.

Miss Dunhill was transported by ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where her condition is listed as fair.

3

Never a crying man, that’s me, but I made up for it that night. That night I cried myself to sleep, and for the first time in a very long time, my sleep was deep and restful.

Alive.

She was alive.

Scarred for life—oh yes, undoubtedly—but alive.

Alive, alive, alive.

4

The world was still there, and it still harmonized… or perhaps I made it harmonize. When we make that harmony ourselves, I guess we call it habit. I caught on as a sub in the Westborough school system, then caught on full-time. It did not surprise me that the principal at the local high school was a gung-ho football freak named Borman… as in a certain jolly coach I’d once known in another place. I stayed in touch with my old friends from Lisbon Falls for awhile, and then I didn’t. C’est la vie.

I checked the Dallas Morning News archives again, and discovered a short item in the May 29 issue from 1963: JODIE LIBRARIAN LEAVES HOSPITAL. It was short and largely uninformative. Nothing about her condition and nothing about her future plans. And no photo. Squibs buried on page 20, between ads for discount furniture and door-to-door sales opportunities, never come with photos. It’s one of life’s great truisms, like the way the phone always rings while you’re on the john or in the shower.

In the year after I came back to the Land of Now, there were some sites and some search topics I steered clear of. Was I tempted? Of course. But the net is a double-edged sword. For every thing you find that’s of comfort—like discovering that the woman you loved survived her crazy ex-husband—there are two with the power to hurt. A person searching for news of a certain someone might discover that that someone had been killed in an accident. Or died of lung cancer as a result of smoking. Or committed suicide, in the case of this particular someone most likely accomplished with a combination of booze and sleeping pills.

Sadie alone, with no one to slap her awake and stick her in a cold shower. If that had happened, I didn’t want to know.

I used the internet to prep for my classes, I used it to check the movie listings, and once or twice a week I checked out the latest viral videos. What I didn’t do was check for news of Sadie. I suppose that if Jodie had had a newspaper I might have been even more tempted, but it hadn’t had one then and surely didn’t now, when that very same internet was slowly strangling the print media. Besides, there’s an old saying: peek not through a knothole, lest ye be vexed. Was there ever a bigger knothole in human history than the internet?

She survived Clayton. It would be best, I told myself, to let my knowledge of Sadie end there.

5

It might have, had I not gotten a transfer student in my AP English class. In April of 2012, this was; it might even have been on April 10, the forty-ninth anniversary of the attempted Edwin Walker assassination. Her name was Erin Tolliver, and her family had moved to Westborough from Kileen, Texas.

That was a name I knew well. Kileen, where I had bought rubbers from a druggist with a nastily knowing smile. Don’t do anything against the law, son, he’d advised me. Kileen, where Sadie and I had shared a great many sweet nights at the Candlewood Bungalows.

Kileen, which had had a newspaper called The Weekly Gazette.

During her second week of classes—by then my new AP student had made several new girlfriends, had fascinated several boys, and was settling in nicely—I asked Erin if The Weekly Gazette still published. Her face lit up. “You’ve been to Kileen, Mr. Epping?”

“I was there a long time ago,” I said—a statement that wouldn’t have caused a lie detector needle to budge even slightly.

“It’s still there. Mama used to say she only got it to wrap the fish in.”

“Does it still run the ‘Jodie Doin’s’ column?”

“It runs a ‘Doin’s’ column for every little town south of Dallas,” Erin said, giggling. “I bet you could find it on the net if you really wanted to, Mr. Epping. Everything’s on the net.”

She was absolutely right about that, and I held out for exactly one week. Sometimes the knothole is just too tempting.

6

My intention was simple: I would go to the archive (assuming The Weekly Gazette had one) and search for Sadie’s name. It was against my better judgment, but Erin Tolliver had inadvertently stirred up feelings that had begun to settle, and I knew I wouldn’t rest easy again until I checked. As it turned out, the archive was unnecessary. I found what I was looking for not in the ‘Jodie Doin’s’ column but on the first page of the current issue.

JODIE PICKS “CITIZEN OF THE CENTURY” FOR JULY CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, the headline read. And the picture below the headline… she was eighty now, but some faces you don’t forget. The photographer might have suggested that she turn her head so the left side was hidden, but Sadie faced the camera head-on. And why not? It was an old scar now, the wound inflicted by a man many years in his grave. I thought it lent character to her face, but of course, I was prejudiced. To the loving eye, even smallpox scars are beautiful.

In late June, after school was out, I packed a suitcase and once again headed for Texas.

7

Dusk of a summer night in the town of Jodie, Texas. It’s a little bigger than it was in 1963, but not much. There’s a box factory in the part of town where Sadie Dunhill once lived on Bee Tree Lane. The barber shop is gone, and the Cities Service station where I once bought gas for my Sunliner is now a 7-Eleven. There’s a Subway where Al Stevens once sold Prongburgers and Mesquite Fries.

The speeches commemorating Jodie’s centennial are over. The one given by the woman chosen by the Historical Society and Town Council as the Citizen of the Century was charmingly brief, that of the mayor longwinded but informative. I learned that Sadie had served one term as mayor herself and four terms in the Texas State Legislature, but that was the least of it. There was her charitable work, her ceaseless efforts to improve the quality of education at DCHS, and her year’s sabbatical to do volunteer work in post-Katrina New Orleans. There was the Texas State Library program for blind students, an initiative to improve hospital services for veterans, and her ceaseless (and continuing, even at eighty) efforts to provide better state services to the indigent mentally ill. In 1996 she had been offered a chance to run for the U.S. Congress but declined, saying she had plenty to do at the grassroots.

She never remarried. She never left Jodie. She’s still tall, her body unbent by osteoporosis. And she’s still beautiful, her long white hair flowing down her back almost to her waist.

Now the speeches are over, and Main Street has been closed off. A banner at each end of the two-block business section proclaims