The Pale-Faced Lie

by David Crow

  He invited me inside.

  A widower, the man had bought the house shortly after we left and raised four children there. “I’ve probably seen you a dozen times sitting in a car staring at the house or circling the block on foot. What happened here that constantly brings you back?”

  A simple question, but asked with such kindness that the tears and memories came gushing out of me—Elephant Hill, cherry bombing the Navajos on Route 66, the Benny Paret fight, the knife-throwing incident, Lonnie swallowing the aspirin, ditching Mom.

  He put his arms around me and pulled me to the couch. “Please sit.”

  I cried my way through more stories as he sat quietly and listened. When I finished, he fed me dinner in our old kitchen, which looked remarkably the same except for the table and chairs. When he asked me to come inside, it was still light. It was nearly two in the morning when I stood to leave.

  At the door, I thanked him and extended my hand. He took it in both of his. “You can’t change your childhood, but you can let it go,” he said.

  “I don’t know. I’ve tried, but I could never unlock what I just told you. Maybe I needed to be inside the house, to talk to a compassionate stranger, to relive all that had gone wrong here—especially when Dad brought me back and I saw Mom sitting on the floor looking so hopeless. All the shame and guilt. Both my parents thought I was a coward on that terrible day, and I thought they were right, even if their reasons were different.”

  “That’s a lot for a ten-year-old boy to carry around, don’t you think? You just took a big step in telling me. None of that day or the rest of what happened was your fault.” He smiled. “You’re going to be okay, David Crow. Come by again anytime.”

  BACK AT MY FAVORITE HOTEL, the El Rancho, I jotted down notes about the events that occurred in Gallup. I felt lighter but leery. Could I let go of the past? It stunned me how much blame I had assumed for everything. The same tape had played in my head as far back as I could remember: “If only I had saved Mom. If only I had stopped Dad. If only I was a stronger person.”

  After a few hours of sleep and a fast run, I sat on the hotel bed and dialed my mom’s number. “Do you think it was my fault that you were abandoned? Did you really think I could have saved you?”

  “You deserve a lot of blame for not helping me, for not understanding my story, for not going with me when I had nowhere to go.”

  “But I was only ten years old. Do you really think I could have done anything to help you?”

  “Yes, you were my oldest boy. You never came around to help and you still don’t. You went with your daddy and ditched me.” I quietly put down the phone.

  Dad answered on the first ring.

  “Do you regret abandoning Mom and being so cruel to her? Do you regret the brutal beatings you gave Sam and me? Do you regret what you did to my sisters? How about the stealing, the buried body in West Virginia, the murder plots you tried dragging me into? Do you regret what you did—?”

  “Don’t give me any of your revisionist crap! You never did what I wanted you to do. None of you kids are worth a damn. You complained constantly, and I never thought you’d be much of a man. And you’re not. Don’t ever call again with your whining bullshit. You had it much better than I did. And much better than you deserved.” He hung up.

  I propped up a couple of pillows behind me and stretched out on the bed. At that moment, at age fifty-two, I wanted to be free of Mom, Dad, and Mona. They wouldn’t—or couldn’t—change and I couldn’t change what had happened.

  Then it came to me. The only way to be free was to forgive them—and forgive myself.

  It was advice I’d heard plenty of times, but on that day in the hotel, I was ready to do it. In an instant, I stopped expecting anything from them. Their approval, friendship, understanding, empathy, love. And I stopped believing that Dad, Mom, and Mona were right about me—or any of us. I didn’t want to carry around the burden of longing and guilt and shame anymore. I was done.

  How else could I ever feel any joy or happiness?

  It was as if a light went on inside my brain. It had been so simple, something I could have done long ago. But no tie is as strong as family, making it the hardest one to break.

  It took time, but I became more relaxed and less anxious. I began to like myself and my confidence grew, as did my ability to share myself with others. The childhood memories I had buried came to the surface, but I saw them through a different lens, without anger or blame, as though they had happened to someone else. This allowed me to break the cycle that had defined my family for generations.

  The benefits flowed. My lobbying firm flourished, and my two partners made it their firm also, becoming close friends and allies. My relationship with my children became stronger. Through lifelong friends, I met Patty, a wonderful woman who is now my wife. She was the first person I opened up to about my childhood. In the past, I’d always felt the need to omit and hide. Patty never judged me, for which I’ll be eternally grateful.

  WHEN DAD WAS IN HIS EARLY EIGHTIES, he and Mona asked me to be their legal and medical guardian. He was weakened by heart disease and back problems, and Mona had dementia and could no longer care for him. The health services administration determined they were unfit to live alone. Intervening, I made sure they could stay in their own home in Hatteras with proper care. Patty and I often drove the six-hundred-mile round trip to see them.

  Dad and I spoke almost every day, either over the phone or in person, about his time in prison and how he survived his childhood. Whenever he had the chance, he’d bring up the BIG LIE, going on about his Cherokee heritage and the vicious crimes perpetrated on him and his family by the white man. Dad had no remorse about anything, except for not killing more of the bastards who richly deserved it. When I asked him if he felt bad about the way he’d treated Mom, he said, “Hell, no. Your mother should have died in Gallup.”

  At least once a month, Dad would call upset about something, whether it was figuring out a medical bill, getting his hearing aids to fit properly, or programming his TV. Before offering to help, I would say, “Dad, let me call Buddy for his advice.” He roared with laughter every time. Our inside joke about his first San Quentin cellmate was still fresh after more than forty years.

  By then, a decade had passed since I called him after my visit to 306 South Cliff Drive. He spoke as though the Crow children’s lives had been idyllic. But there was no longer any reason to argue or question his version of events—I was free from all of it.

  I’d done everything in my power to be his opposite, especially for my children and for Patty, the greatest blessings of my life. Dad knew I’d participated in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, as well as mentoring hundreds of interns in my lobbying firm.

  He laughed. “You always were a do-gooder. No one will give a shit what you do. Let me assure you of that.”

  I also mentored his accomplice’s granddaughter. I felt such relief after tracking down George’s family and apologizing to them. When I told Dad about it, his eyes filled with tears and he yelled at me to leave. The next time we discussed it, George was at fault. He was the reason they went to San Quentin. Dad told me to never bring him up again.

  One night, after an open-heart operation he wasn’t expected to survive, he grabbed my hand and motioned for a pad of paper and a pencil. He had tubes coming out of his mouth and IVs in both arms.

  “Can you forgive me?” he wrote, his eyes filled with fear.

  I gave him a big smile and squeezed his hand. “Of course. You’re my dad.”

  BUT HE DID SURVIVE.

  Two years later, Dad called me right after suffering a stroke and sounded like he had a mouthful of marbles. Until that day, his mind and temper had remained sharp, even as he approached the halfway mark in his eighty-fifth year.

  The next morning, I made the three-hundred-mile drive with Patty to see how he was. His voice was clear, but his eyes were bloodshot, and he was confused about why I had come to see him. Within days he had
a second stroke. When he was weakened to the point of barely being able to move, he was still irascible, scolding the doctors, telling them his brain was fine, but he had a bad back, and why the hell weren’t they working on that? After a few days in the hospital, we moved him to a nearby nursing home.

  A week later, on New Year’s Day, I was summoned again. Dad was fighting with the staff about the “garbage crap” they were feeding him. By the time I got there, he’d fallen into a deep sleep. When he woke up, I knew it was the last time I’d see him alive. His eyes were swollen, no longer mean or angry—they were sad and lost. A nurse came in for a moment, giving me time to walk into the hall to collect my thoughts.

  I told Patty that Dad would die soon, and I began to cry. She told me to go back to him, and that she would wait for me.

  When I returned to Dad’s bed, he stared at me. His piercing blue eyes regained momentary strength.

  He asked me to lean down to his face.

  Reaching up, he rubbed my head the way he did when I was a boy. “You were my favorite one. I love you, son. I always have. Please kiss me on both cheeks.”

  He had never uttered those words before.

  I bent over and kissed him on both cheeks. “I’ve always loved you too, Dad . . . Goodbye.”

  Tears streamed down his face as he gripped my hand with the same powerful strength I remembered from childhood, his eyes now closed.

  As I walked into the hallway sobbing, Patty put her arms around me. “It’s hard to say goodbye to a father, even him.”

  There was nothing left to say. She took my hand and we went out into the rain. Except for a few words spoken at a drive-through, we were silent the whole way home.

  The next day I drove to Dad’s old house on Burning Tree Road. It had been torn down, but the foundation was still in place. I stood there in the cold for a long time, remembering the night of the showdown—and the full Crow treatment.

  “Goddamn it, boy, make me proud even if it kills you.” Dad’s voice rattled around inside my head, as it always had and always will. “David, you’re scrawny, you can’t see, can’t hear, can’t fix a damn thing, but you are one tough little bastard, and the most clever son of a bitch I know. You could have talked your way out of San Quentin before God got the news.”

  I laughed. “Maybe so, Dad.” I took one last look, turned, and walked away.

  WITH THE HELP OF ANCESTRY.COM, Patty and I traced my dad’s family to eighteenth-century Northern Ireland and England. They settled in North Carolina and Maryland before the American Revolution.

  There isn’t a Cherokee among them.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Taylor Crow, Dad’s father, served as a corporal for two years in the US Army Corps of Engineers, clearing roads and building bridges to aid troop movements. His ship, along with many others, was fired upon by German submarine torpedoes, as Dad said. Taylor saw combat in France and was treated for several weeks in a military hospital for unspecified symptoms. Later VA records show that he suffered from severe headaches and lung issues the rest of his life. He died at the age of fifty-one while working as a hired man on a farm in Arizona. Taylor lived hard, drinking, fighting, and smoking heavily. There is no evidence Ella Mae poisoned him. She outlived him by fifty-eight years.

  Cleo Cole, the man Dad and George attempted to kill before I was born, died a few years after the assault, blind and bedridden, angry until the end that justice had not been served. Smiley, his wife, lived for two more decades. Presumably, she didn’t see the thirty-day notice in the Los Angeles newspapers asking if anyone objected to Dad’s pardon because it went through uncontested in 1959.

  George died broken and penniless in 1997. He never received a pardon for his violent felony conviction due to meaningless parole violations, including moving without telling his parole officer. His son, Jeff, who became a friend of mine, said his dad didn’t tell him about the crime except to say, “Don’t try to protect a lady’s honor in California.”

  Buddy, Dad’s first cellmate in the Q, served an eight-year sentence, as Dad had predicted. While in prison, Buddy lost both his car upholstery business and his wife.

  Mona declined dramatically after Dad passed. Her dementia worsened, and she fell into a coma the last year of her life. She died in 2018.

  Mom is eighty-eight years old and lives near her adopted son and his loving family. She and Wally were married for over fifty years, and he stayed devoted to her until the day he died. Without fail, Mom and I talk on the phone a few times a week. She still hates the Crow family and feels the need to say so in every call.

  Lonnie, my oldest sister, is a college professor and lives with her professor husband. They have two adult children and three grandchildren.

  Sam, my younger brother, and his wife work in the medical field. He is the proud stepfather of three children. He never had his hand or stomach smoothed, and his left big toe still has a severe bend.

  Sally, my younger sister, is a schoolteacher with two adult children.

  I continue to work at my lobbying firm in Washington, DC. Over time, my eyesight deteriorated further, and I ultimately had five LASIK surgeries in Canada, several years before the procedure was approved in the United States. I have 26 percent hearing in my right ear and less than 9 percent in my left and can hear only with the help of powerful hearing aids and my highly skilled audiologist, Dr. Melissa Yunes.

  My wife, Patty, and I have three children, all married to wonderful spouses. She and I live in the suburbs of DC.

  ________________________

  Thank you for reading The Pale-Faced Lie. As an independent publisher, we rely heavily on word of mouth to gain exposure, so if you enjoyed the book, please tell your friends. And we would be very grateful if you could post a rating and short review on Amazon and Goodreads. We look forward to your comments.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would never have happened had it not been for my friend John Campbell, who encouraged me to write my story. His excellent advice and insights helped me tremendously, as did his readings of different drafts of the manuscript.

  My heartfelt thanks to my many other friends who did early readings: Melinda Schilling, Randy Russell, Laurie Flanagan, David Beaudreau, Angela Jamison, Sam White, Tom Edmunds, Tom Van Arsdall, Stephanie Binns, Mike Mitchell, Allyson Donaghy, David Sandum, Bill Osburn, Lindsay Mitchell, Debi Cabral, and Alexa Adams. The book is better because of their candid feedback.

  A special mention to my niece Meredith, who read the book with a careful eye and helped guide me with regard to several sensitive Crow family episodes. And I thank my children and their spouses for listening to these stories over the years.

  I am indebted to my editor and publisher, Sandra Jonas, who took a raw manuscript and helped craft it masterfully, painstakingly taking it apart to make sure every detail was perfect and accurate. Her meticulous attention and creative skills are second to none. My gratitude to Trish Wilkinson for her superb preliminary editing and for introducing me to Sandra Jonas.

  I want to thank the Navajo people for allowing our family to live on their reservation. My Navajo friends, Henry McCabe and Richard Kontz, as well my Menominee friend, Jim Fredenberg, were my guiding lights during childhood, and are still good friends today.

  My warm thanks to my friend Jeff Wolverton, whose father, George, was Dad’s accomplice. Jeff helped me understand how much his father suffered after leaving San Quentin and opened my eyes to the power of forgiveness.

  I can’t imagine how I would have survived my childhood without my siblings, Lonnie, Sam, and Sally (not their real names). I am especially grateful to my older sister for her encouragement. Nor would I be where I am today without the angels who appeared in my life when I needed them most: Evelyn, Rex Kontz, Chauncey Ford, Herm Davis, Tom Coleman, Randy Russell, and my Sigma Chi fraternity brothers. I am profoundly thankful to all of them.

  And my deep appreciation to my amazing wife, Patty—my anchor, my partner, my friend—for her patience and steadfast
support.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DAVID CROW spent his early years on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. Through grit, resilience, and a thirst for learning, he managed to escape his abusive childhood, graduate from college, and build a successful lobbying firm in Washington, DC.

  Today, David is a sought-after speaker, giving talks to various businesses and trade organizations around the world. Throughout the years, he has mentored over two hundred college interns, performed pro bono service for the charitable organization Save the Children, and participated in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. An advocate for women, he is donating a percentage of his book royalties to Barrett House, a homeless shelter for women in Albuquerque.

  David lives with his wife, Patty, in the suburbs of DC. For more information, visit his website: davidcrowauthor.com.