We Will Miss You Billy Boy

Yesterday I attended the funeral of my first cousin William Chalmers Dorn Jr. Billy to almost everyone.

Billy was thirty-seven-years-old and hadn’t lost an ounce of baby fat since he was born. What he had lost,nine months ago, was 85% of his skin in a freakish flash fire that happened when he was outside burning some leaves. For the same amount of time it takes a human life to be born, the ghost that Billy had become crept quietly toward the light.

First, for the longest time, in a coma in a burn unit in Paducah, Kentucky; then, for a much shorter time, in the ironically named Bryan Dorn VA Hospital in Louisville. Finally, after coming out of his coma long enough to say he hoped he hadn’t caused his mother too much worry, The Captain told this former Coast Guard sailor to “Stand down…”

Last Sunday Billy died.

Billy is the oldest child and the only son of Chalmers and Jeanne Dorn. Chalmers is my mother’s brother.

Chalmers has always intimidated me, at least until the last several years. Chalmers was an MP in the military before joining the City of Princeton Police Force. Chalmers is a big burly man who maintains the steeliest eye contact I have ever seen and tends to twitch in an imperceptible way even when he is at “rest”; in short, he gives the impression of restrained violence.

In the late 60’s, three things happened to Chalmers: Jeanne gave birth to twins that both died within a day, his father, my grandfather, died, and he was thrown off a third story fire escape during a race riot and landed on his back on a nail. After that, Chalmers was never the same man.

Jeanne is a school teacher, who is the best cook I have ever known. She is, if there ever was one, an earth mother. When she smiles, you see the sun coming up over the fields. When she welcomes you into her home, you know she means it. When she moves her largish frame around the kitchen, getting this or that dish of beans laced with fatback or plate of coconut cake ready for the table, you know she is really thinking about you the whole time. When she breathes, Chalmers is glad to be alive.

The last time I saw Chalmers and Jeanne, which was years ago, they took me to a local stock car race.

Chalmers loves cars. He buys a new one every year. Because he used to be a cop,

Chalmers enjoys the largesse of his fellow police officers.

Nevertheless, on the way to the races, Jeanne said, “Chalmers, you’re going too slow,” and took the wheel. After that, we spent more time in the median than we did in the road and passed several patrolmen who simply waved at us before we slid into the dirt area behind the pits at the race track. I never saw the race. I passed out from exhaustion at the race getting to the race. I dunno who won.

Jeanne and Chalmers’ two other children, Beth and Jeannie Marie, are indescribably beautiful. Beth is married to an almost stereotypical big hunk of a man who never seems to be unhappy from Georgia; together, they have four children, one of whom, Lisa, at age thirteen, has her black belt and wants to be an astrophysicist. Jeannie Marie, who is short like my grandmother, married a man who is roughly her height and has one child.  Jeannie Marie looks like Pocahontas.

Billy liked girls, he told my aunt, but he was too shy to date much. After he left the Coast Guard, he came back home to live with his parents and got a job as a security guard. His real job was to look after his parents and his sisters.

Sometimes he and Chalmers farmed. Chalmers was once a big farmer, two thousand acres. Soybeans mostly. Billy did most of the work. But mostly he lived with Chalmers and Jeanne.

Once, in the middle of winter, Jeannie Marie needed a typewriter ribbon to finish a paper she was doing for a graphics design class she was taking at a local technical college.  Billy drove her downtown in his truck and along the way hit a sheet of ice that caused him to skid down a street and hit several cars in the process. When the truck came to a stop at the bottom of the hill, Billy immediately got out of the truck and called the police.

When the policeman arrived, he asked Billy, “Why didn’t you just keep going?” Billy, irate, replied, “They’re someones’ cars!”

The most moving part of the funeral for me was when they folded the American flag on Billy’s mahogany coffin and handed it to his mother. The man who folded it, who must have been burying people before I was born, folded the flag with such great care I got goose bumps.

It must have taken him five minutes. Religiously he smoothed out every crease and made every turn and then very patiently waited for his young assistant to make the final tuck perfect before he handed the field of stars to my aunt and whispered something to her that I couldn’t hear. While he did this, I had flashes of Americans landing against impossible odds at Normandy and Confederate soldiers going over the top at Cemetery Ridge and Billy in the Coast Guard rescuing an eight-year-old on a catamaran that his mother shouldn’t have rented for him.

Billy was a big boy, although not as big as his father. He had a great smile and to the best of my knowledge he never hurt anyone. In particular, he loved animals and children. I never pushed Billy around when we were children because he giggled too much. Billy never got married. He was too shy.

Rest in Peace, Billy Boy.

Rest in Peace.

December 4, 1996 – Fiction based on fact