BUTTERFLY
In
loving memory of Donald Hammond
Donald Hammond suffered from an
invisible something. Growing up, he lived with his family on a farm outside of
Clay Center, a dot on the map in northeastern Kansas with currently just under
five thousand people, most of whom have sprouted gray hair. His room was off
the kitchen. A double bed. A chest of drawers. Clothes on the floor. A window.
Hammond pitched summer league
baseball in high school. The early sixties. The diamond stretched between the
public pool and the park. Packed stands climbed from the dirt as the sun struck
the crowd. Chatter. Roaring. Clapping. The announcer buzzed. Balls slapped into
gloves. "Steeeerriiike!" blasted the ears of the crowd frequently
when Donald Hammond pitched. Scouts observed from the stands. His lifetime
goal: to play Major League Baseball.
Hammond mostly avoided people. He
went to prom without a date, as he never dated in high school. When tugged into
conversation, he'd struggle for words. He once told his sister's boyfriend, now
husband, John that he didn't know what to say when talking to people, so he
said nothing.
After high school, Hammond attended
a trade school in Beloit for shop classes. His pitfall was that his mind wandered
when he performed tasks. He once crashed a tractor into a light post. While burning brush on the farm, the flames
ripped out of control and consumed the barn. At trade school, a fiber blade
sliced through the tendons in his right arm. He couldn't grip a baseball
anymore.
Schizophrenia is a form of
psychosis, a lost sense of reality. Schizo is split. Phrenia is mind. Both
derive from Greek. Symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia include delusions of
persecution and hallucinations of voices, smells, tastes, sexual touching, and
visualizations on rare occasions. The cause is unknown, but prenatal illness
may increase the chance of contracting schizophrenia. The illness tends to run
in families and can be set off by the spurt of puberty or outside stresses.
On a global scale, one million
people commit suicide every year, one person every forty seconds. In his mid
twenties, Hammond snapped after an argument with his parents. Screaming about
suicide, he stormed out of the farmhouse and into his car. He sped to a pasture
off Highway Eighty Two, west of Wakefield, and his parents followed him. His
father jumped out of his car and into his son's, while his mother drove home.
Hammond muttered more about killing himself to his father, and once back on the
highway, he veered into the left lane and floored it toward an oncoming car.
His father struggled for the wheel, but he was in his late fifties and
recovering from an illness. At the last moment, the oncoming car swerved into
the other lane to miss them. Days later, Hammond was institutionalized in
Topeka for several months. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
A fuzzy photograph of Donald Hammond
taken in his mid to late thirties displayed a squinting face with a thick black
mustache covering the top of an unwavering mouth. Brush and dead trees reached
out of the ground behind him. Sturdy legs, hidden by dark blue jeans, rose from
his black boots to a light leather belt with an elaborate design and a huge,
oval buckle. A solid body filled a blue button up shirt with a collar. He
leaned to his left, putting his weight on a rifle as if it were a cane, his
hand around the barrel and the butt in the grass.
Hammond had once been a date with a
slender woman with shoulder length brown hair. For several weeks he courted
her, buying gifts and taking her on dates. Then, for no reason, he delivered a
break up speech, and all was done. Hammond's mother also tried to set him up
with a young woman, whom she had over for dinner. He behaved as if she were
invisible.
After Hammond was released from the
institution, his father retired from the farm, and he brought his wife and son
to a house in Clay Center. Hammond lived in the basement. At night, he would
pace the house, and the only way he could sleep was if his father sat in bed
next to him with a hand on his chest to hold him down, which led to sleepless
nights for them both, but when Hammond did sleep, he was capable of being out
for up to fourteen hours.
Donald Hammond was thought to be a
possible threat after his parents died, when he quit his job and stopped taking
his medication. He lived alone in a house in Clay Center, never cleaning
anything and only leaving to eat at Wendy's or go to the grocery store.
After pledging money toward the
sheriff's department, Hammond received an honorary deputy card from the
sheriff, which he thought gave him the right to carry a concealed weapon. He found a waitress he liked at a bar in
town, and he opened his jacket toward her, flashing the gun as he told her that
he was an honorary deputy and was here to protect her. He followed her home on
his motorcycle, and she called the police. On a chase, he led the police back
to the farm where he grew up, owned at the time by his sister Shirley in
Wichita. After the arrest, a psychological evaluation determined that Hammond
was not a threat to anyone, so the police released him.
Neighbors once spotted Hammond in
his yard, in the snow, dressed in white underwear, rubber boots, and a Mickey
Mouse hat with earflaps. He wielded a double-bladed axe over his shoulder while
searching for brush to remove.
Years later, Donald Hammond's
neighbors reported a foul stench resonating from his house. No one had seen him
for four days. His legal guardian and former high school classmate found him on
the floor, sitting against the wall and decomposing in a mess of bodily fluids.
The mortician covered Hammond with embalming powder and zipped him inside a body
bag. The spot on the wooden floor where he died was several shades darker than
the rest of the room, and in the days following, the house would smell of
bleach, but the effort to eliminate the deathly odor failed, and the house had
to be torn down. Due to decay, the cause of death could not be identified. It
was summer, 2000.
A few days later, clouds spread over
Clay Center. Forty to fifty showed at the cemetery. White gravel roads traveled
about the graves, which were grouped by family and covered by dark grass. Warm
and humid air engulfed them. Six or seven rows of metal fold out chairs spread
back from the closed coffin, but most had to stand.
John and Shirley Browning sat
directly before the coffin in the front row. They had driven from Wichita, almost
three hours to the southwest, while most of the others were from Clay Center
and knew, or knew of, Donald Hammond. A minister from the First United
Methodist Church of Clay Center, the church John and Shirley were married in,
began the service.
Less than a minute later, a pink and
black butterfly landed on the coffin directly in front of Shirley. Facing her,
it folded its wings, unfolded and folded again. She noticed. John noticed. It remained in the same spot for the entire
eulogy, folding and unfolding its wings. The minister summarized Donald
Hammond's life. Shirley dropped her head but didn't cry, the same reaction as
everyone.
The Greek word for butterfly is psyche, meaning soul. Aztecs also
believed the dead return as butterflies or sometimes humming birds. While
butterflies spend the summer in the United States and Canada, they travel south
to Mexico in the autumn, and the locals believe they carry the spirits of lost
relatives honored on El Día de los Muertos
(The Day of the Dead). For Christians, the butterfly symbolizes resurrection. The
caterpillar cocoons itself, appearing dead, and the butterfly rises.
John and Shirley remained at the
site for a half-hour and exchanged pleasantries. The butterfly returned. It
hovered in front of John's face. He remarked that the butterfly was a pest.
Then someone noted it had been on his shoulder since the sermon had ended.
Again, this was published in October 2012 in Underground voices. They have a kickass site. Check them out at www.undergroundvoices.com
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