 © Merrily Cordova Laytner
|
Good-bye Virgil Click to read Click to |
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© Merrily Cordova Laytner
|
Good-bye Virgil Click to read Click to |
Good-bye
Virgil
In 1958, in the conservative Western railroad town where we grew up, Virgil Acuña died
while working at the local newspaper.
Virgil, you were small for a high school kid even though you were 15 or 16. You had large ears, dark olive skin with big freckles, and red curly hair that stood up so you were visible even in a big school like ours. You had a wily, playful way of horsing around and calling attention to yourself. You worked in the evenings at the town’s newspaper as part of a crew that included other high school kids. I knew one of them, a boy named David.
On the night you died you were, as the newspaper said, the "object of a prank." The other fellows grabbed you and inserted an air jet from one of the big presses up your rectum. The blast of air ruptured your intestines and stomach. I never knew how soon you went into shock, how quickly you lost consciousness, how much you suffered. They told us little. The police arrived, there was an investigation, an autopsy, a funeral, news stories. But this whole event was hushed up. Afterwards the kids at school said, "Virgil got goosed." When kids talked about your death, they wondered if the boys involved would "get in any trouble." I never heard an adult speak about what happened: not my teachers, not my parents.
After the investigation, the newspaper reported that the boys who had pulled this prank would not be charged with any crime. Their actions had been "foolish" but not "malicious."
I remember you now, and for the first time, I know that the crime those boys did was rape. The real reason the boys were not charged was because they were white and you were Mexican, a "spic" as kids in our high school commonly put it. The newspaper led the campaign to make light of this whole affair because they wished to excuse themselves from legal responsibility. Your parents might have sued. The people of our town accepted the newspaper’s characterization without question.
I never knew your family. No Mexican family lived in the white, middle-class neighborhood where I grew up. Only in church on Sunday could we have come in contact, but we didn’t. In our high school of 2,000 students, there were many Mexicans, yet even at school I could never really have known you. You would have been one more student who responded to his name when the roll was called. And of course you weren’t in senior English or drama or creative writing or chemistry or trigonometry or Latin. Instead you were in auto shop, ROTC, gym.
So you died. Your death was made to seem an unfortunate stroke of bad luck. Your name appeared on the final page of the yearbook imposed on a photograph of clouds. The memorial page. Poor Virgil died and went to cloud land.
Virgil, now I know that you died as a result of a crime. And I know the town, the newspaper, and the high school all conspired to cover up this crime. As far as I know, your family or neighbors or priest never protested. It would have seemed impossible. They would have been treated as troublemakers. Your death tells a lot about our town and the people who lived here. It tells a lot about me.
Profile
I met her in the fall of 1995 in Portland at the Pacific Northwest College of Arts where The Oregon Writer’s Workshop shares a space on the third floor with the print shop. The fan was blowing the kerosene fumes out into the rain. She wore the seasoned Oregonian attire: rain gear, plaid sneakers, and a loose white shirt over jeans. Bejeweled. Elegant.
She spoke with authority and conviction of her family of women raised in Utah and the intersection of the human and the natural. Much of her writing tends to myth. In a family photo her father holds, with some help, a 250 pound cat fish. In another, snow all but buries her family, posed in the aftermath of a blizzard.
Elegant, and eloquent, is what I’d call her work, and there’s a commitment and a discernment that characterizes the best writing.
—Bruce Smith
Bio
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