Local boy, so no surprise he turned out to be a good man, a family man, and a State Trooper… I’d never met him, never heard his name, until the 23rd of August, when he came across a truck in the ditch.
It was a Sunday, daylight, in church-going Southwest Louisiana, and the driver of the truck came out of the cab with a sawed off shotgun.
It got sad around here.
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That Dog Don’t Hunt…
No telling how many people died all over the world, on the same day that Trooper Vincent died, but that didn’t make it any less of a bad lick ‘round here. This here, these parts, this is home, and we don’t accept it, for a man to shoot a policeman in the head with a sawed off shotgun. No sir, that ain’t for us. Not here. That dog just ain’t gonna hunt.
It began to become a blur. Press conferences, pictures of the nobody-home eyes of the killer, heroes identified, and then here came pictures of his wife and son…and he became less of a blue Trooper uniform, and more of a blue jean neighbor, and it got sadder around here.
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This Is Our World
This is Southwest Louisiana. You go south, you get those tough souls in the white rubber boots, you go west, the accents get more Texan, you go north and it’s piney woods and farm land, head east and you’ll bump into Cajun and German stock…
…but SWLA has had some time, to figure itself out, to sort out its values. We have a chain of generations here. We might have left grandpa’s farm for an industrial job, but we didn’t leave without what he stood for…and we’d be ashamed in our old age, if we thought we hadn’t valued up our offspring with the same solid start we were given.
Most of us are just a few generations off the farm, and at any family gathering we have the honor to be near someone who’s known hard times, and not got beat.
That’s why, when Trooper Steven Vincent died, SWLA stirred up, and got busy. We couldn’t keep it from happening, but we weren’t letting him go without telling him he mattered, and that This, whatever-This-was that gave his killer that no-soul look, was not welcome here…
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You Would Have Thought A Head Of State Had Died
The local TV station filled their week with stories on Trooper Vincent, there were fund raisers for the family, and the funeral was broadcast live. Businesses closed, entire streets were shut down for a funeral procession that went on and on and on and on…
…and on… When the first car was in one zip code the last car was in another.
Maddox Malone, one of ours, saying what we all wanted to say.
Fire departments joined ladder trucks to form a flagged arch, families sat for hours along the route to the cemetery, with their homemade flags and signs, and there on that route was little Maddox Malone, a first grader…
…Maddox doesn’t know death. He knows happy, he knows sad, but he came from the factory a child of caring, and his target is the son of the fallen trooper, who he knows is very sad. With his mother’s help Maddox composes a sign, to say what he can say, to care how he can care, to reach out in a child’s way…
He sat on the side of the road for four hours…waiting, waiting, just to hold up a sign for the little boy on his way to bury his daddy. It said –
“Sorry about your dad,” complete with stick figure policeman…
This kid, this sign, this moment, the all of it, it punched me in the heart.
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The Altar Call
I’m no clergy with a bag o’ words to say to the bereaved. I was sick about it a week ago, and I’m sick about it now.
Change is everywhere. It’s fast, irrational, inconsiderate, and makes us feel small. A lot of change just seems like decay. Part of the change in America is all this violence, so pointless, as if we’re raising people not like ourselves, not like our past ancestors, and not good for our future. Sometimes America just looks like something sick, and we don’t know how to doctor it.
But there are pockets of goodness, and from what I saw, Southwest Louisiana is one of them. We care, in an old fashioned way. We put effort behind sentiment, we put labor behind good intentions. We mobilized without leadership, doing the thing on our heart, doing our best, each in our own little way.
If a funeral is a thousand sermons for a thousand ears, the sermon I heard was Home.
I’m Home. I respect us. I trust us. I feel hope here. I met one little Maddox and assume there’s a whole lot more out there, raised by our people, our way, with our values. Proud to know you, SWLA. Hold your head up. Generations gone before would approve of you.
You couldn’t keep Trooper Vincent alive, but you were loud in saying that he mattered, and that you cared.
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This edition of Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories is brought to you by Eighty-one. Uncle P can be reached at 81creativity@gmail.com.
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