Prologue
George Watson was the father of my life, but he was not my father. His actions more than sixty-four years ago set in motion the events that led to my birth. He killed a man so that I might live. What his intentions were on the day he took a life, I do not know. But I know the result.Â
Is it macabre to say that I am grateful to a man who committed such a deed? It gives me no pleasure. Sometimes I am bewildered by the consequences of his actions. When I learned about George Watson, I was flooded with emotions and numbed. Sometimes I felt and sometimes I did not feel, all at the same time, as if I were standing beside myself impassively watching this other me feel anger and confusion. What was clear is that without George Watson, I would not be here.Â
The man George Watson killed was named Eulo Small, Jr., but everyone called him Junior. His wife was Irene Small. Junior died on November 4, 1955, only weeks before their third wedding anniversary.
The spot where Junior died resides as a crisp image in my mind because I have stood on that ground, I have surveyed the landscape. He perished in a violent head-on collision near what locals called the Jones Dairy on a quiet stretch of road outside a hamlet called Nichols in South Carolina, population at the time around four hundred.Â
Today, the scene looks like a Hollywood movie set that was abandoned decades earlier and left to rot. Three structures squat on the arid land that was once a working dairy farm: two crumbling outbuildings and a lonely silo scalped of its cone-shaped top, its remaining circumference strangled by a dead creeping vine. The dairy failed in the 1960s according to locals. It has sat idle ever since, slowly disintegrating, scrubbed of color and all remnants of its former life.
Junior’s obituary offered few details, but my mind needed little fodder to imagine the events that unfolded that day in 1955.Â
It began with George Watson, the antagonist and catalyst of my version of this story. He swayed drunkenly as he stepped up onto the eighteen-wheel logging truck. He reached for the door handle, but it was locked. He fumbled for the keys and dropped them. They clanked loudly on the metal between his feet. He bent to retrieve them, lurching unsteadily. He stood upright, or tried to, then forced his eyes to focus on the keys in his hands. He found what he thought was the right one and attempted to insert it into the lock, missing several times.
George Watson's logging truck was loaded. So was he. It was not his first liquid lunch, but he was not concerned. He knew the route.
Once on the road, he moved his truck slowly through the gears. In his condition, he moved unsteadily. Soon he turned onto Nichols Highway, outside the town of the same name in northeast South Carolina.
Nichols Highway was a two-lane country road paved in faded asphalt with a broken white center line. Nothing about it said “highway,” neither today nor back in 1955 when George, drunk as he was so often before, got into his truck. There were few posted speed limits, fewer patrolling police cars.Â
The eighteen-wheeler gained speed and soon George approached a soft curve in the highway. He was nearing a familiar landmark, the Jones Dairy.Â
It was here, in sight of the dairy—a busy farm back then, alive with activity, ripe with the smell of cows and manure, chickens clucking, dogs barking—that George lost control of his eighteen-wheel logging truck. It slid slowly, inexorably across the broken white line. He probably did not realize it was happening.
No one will ever know how the driver of the on-coming vehicle reacted at that moment. There was probably some reaction, but it arrived in vain, witnessed only by the old silo at the Jones Dairy. Today the silo leans away from the highway, as if it were still turned away from the accident in horror. But someone must have heard what happened as the eighteen-wheeler slammed into the vehicle. According to Junior’s obituary, his car was traveling at about forty-five miles an hour. He died instantly.
They say an eighteen-wheeler always wins the argument. George Watson walked away, unharmed. It was 2:30 p.m. on November 4, 1955. A Friday. Junior was twenty-eight years old when George killed him.Â
It was not hard to imagine the scene along Nichols Highway more than sixty years ago, when the Jones Dairy became the unwanted center of attention. There was no 9-1-1, no cell phones, but someone must have called the police, had an ambulance dispatched. George Watson was not arrested, but he had to appear at an inquest and a court hearing, where his actions were determined to have been an accident. That much was in Junior’s obituary.
After a tour as an Army first lieutenant in Korea, Junior settled his family in Mullins, his hometown, a mile or two down the road from Nichols. He was laid to rest in a nearby cemetery. A little more than three years earlier, he had met a woman, Irene, at Ft. Dix in New Jersey. She was an Army nurse, a second lieutenant. They fell in love, married, and had two daughters, Susan, and Jayne.
George Watson made Irene a widow with young children on that November day in 1955. She knew him—not personally, but by reputation. After the accident that killed her husband, she had heard the stories about George: that he bragged about being stone drunk, about getting off scot-free. She knew he was guilty. She called him a murderer.
In all likelihood, George Watson is dead now. It is probable that he lived out his life indifferent to the consequences of the fatal accident he caused on Nichols Highway.Â
George Watson had no history that I could uncover before he slammed his eighteen-wheel logging truck into Junior’s car. Nor could I find anything about him after the accident. He was nothing more to me than an apparition who performed his role, then disappeared. He was a bit player in every way imaginable, but also one who changed history. Not of nations, nor of communities, but certainly in the lives of one family. And mine, too.
In Irene’s grief at the death of her husband, Junior, she met another man. He consoled her, offered her his shoulder for comfort, and became intimate with her and she with him. Soon Irene was pregnant. She gave birth to a boy on November 22, 1956, more than a year after Junior was killed by George Watson. The day after the boy was born, Irene turned him over for adoption. Twenty-six days later, he went home with Martha and Harold Ibach.Â
That boy was me.
