um, reboot

The story which I am about to tell doesn’t bear much weight if we are to look for the truth in things. But this is not the reason for me telling it. What you have to understand is that I am asking you simply to listen, not to understand, or even to pass judgement on the man which this story relates. It tells of my grandfather, a man whose ambition eventually outweighed his common sense. In his prime he owned a successful tobacco farm. In truth, it was a front for his own little branch of the New York crime scene. It turned out that not all of those crops were tobacco plants, so to say. In the inner circles of the mafia he was seen as a monster, showing the same mercy and compassion to his fellow people as he did to the rats that would sometimes seek refuge in the rafters of his lake-side villa. If any one of his many goons ever fucked up they would often be found missing a limb the next morning, a punishment that my grandfather himself liked to administer. He was surprisingly accomplished with a knife. After all, he’d had a lot of rats to practice on.

It was ironic, they said. My grandfather was a devout christian, a puritan of the very highest moral standards. He was also a direct descendent of the very first man to be tried, convicted and killed by the American justice system. Hypocrisy ran deep in his blood heritage. And nowhere was this more evident than with his first-born son, my uncle. From what I’ve heard he was his opposite in almost every way. You would be hard-pressed to find a warmer, more loving person. But my grandfather’s ways finally got to him. My uncle killed himself. They found him hanging from the large oak tree in the garden; his neck was broken in three places. He was not a day past twelve. He was like that, my grandfather. Anything he touched died, and to this day I know not how he did it.

Yet his greatest mystery lies not with how he lived his life, but with how he ended it.