Coming up for air

It's not your fault, everyone said, but the memories of that day at the lake were always ready to pull David Stevenson under. Three decades later, the old ghosts are beginning to relent.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published March 13, 2005

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GAINESVILLE - Even on a gloomy morning, Forest Meadows Memorial Park is a beautiful place. Tucked between Newnans Lake and Hawthorne Road on the east side of town, the old cemetery feels like country even in the city. A light drizzle drips off the shiny leaves of the magnolia tree that towers over the plaque marking Jimmy Cash's grave.

James H. Cash, it says. Beloved Husband of Louise. 1943-1971.

There are no flowers on the grave, not even the plastic ones that sprout from the earth everywhere else, but not because nobody cares. They do. Louise, who goes by Louisa now, remarried after five years of numbing depression and moved to Tennessee, but she has fond memories of Jim. Her kids spread out across the country, all except David. He is 42 now, a property appraiser, and lives an hour away in Starke.

David - his last name is Stevenson - forces himself to visit the cemetery every now and again, accompanied not by flowers but his own grief and guilt about what happened so many years ago in a little country lake, when he was just a little boy who was nuts about his new stepdad.

"How can a 9-year-old boy kill a big, strong man like Jimmy?" he asks, staring off into space. "I know it wasn't my fault, but I'd really like to know."

"Kind of like karma"

Haunted by ghosts that are now more than three decades old, David Stevenson comes across like a man in search of a life preserver. Sometimes he is sure the life preserver is within reach and his eyes crinkle up in a wan smile behind wire-rimmed glasses as he tells a story. At other times the old phantoms rise up, wanting to drag him under. As he talks, his eyes grow vacant and look away. He may even stop talking for a spell, lost in the memories of that haunted lake of his boyhood.

What happened wasn't his fault. Everybody told him so then, and they tell him so now, and deep down he knows they are right. He was just a boy, for God's sake.

So why does he feel this way?

It was a pleasant Florida boyhood, he always tells people. "I've read Huck Finn," he says. "I was Huck Finn." When he's doing his work, appraising property, he can drive by a river or a forest or a lake or a swamp and see the little boy he was fishing for bream, building forts, shooting a .22 at pop bottles, studying the sky for flying saucers, launching grapefruits like cannonballs at boulders that should have been pirate ships.

David's father, Louisa's first husband, was engineer Warren Stevenson, a Midwesterner who moved to Florida when even cities seemed like towns. They married in 1962, and David and his sister came along a short time later. David liked his father, who taught him to value outdoor Florida. At the same time, his dad was as quiet and conservative as his mother was volatile and liberal. Their marriage failed; even now Louisa blames her own immaturity. David was old enough to miss having a dad.

Jimmy Cash, a 27-year-old Tennessean fresh from the Coast Guard, came along about a year after the divorce, in 1970. He and Louisa met at a party at the University of Florida, where Jimmy was taking advantage of the GI bill to get a degree in building construction. It was a whirlwind courtship. Louisa - 29 years into her satisfying third marriage - still enjoys talking about her memories of Jimmy.

"He was full of life is what I remember most. He had a great personality. He had big plans about how his life was going to go. After he died, a few weeks later, I was going through his closet to get rid of his clothes. He didn't have a lot of clothes, or shoes, but what he had he kept in perfect order. That was so Jim, and so unlike me. He had it together."

David's memories of his stepdad are achingly sweet.

"He fished with me. Took me to the carnival in Gainesville and loved all the scary rides, even the Bullet, the one that turned you upside down. Didn't mind playing Monopoly. Because he'd been in the Coast Guard, I guess he knew all these complicated knots. He taught me all these cool knots. He taught me how to fight, you know, how to box. He was kind of butch, macho."

David has an old picture of Jimmy taken shortly before Jimmy died in the lake. Jimmy stares coolly into the camera like he's the movie star James Dean, holding a stringer of catfish. You can see a twinkle of rebellion in Jimmy's eyes, and the hint of a tattoo on his left forearm. Jimmy got the tattoo on a wild evening in the Philippines during his Coast Guard days. He swore he was ashamed of that eagle tattoo, but to David it was kind of cool his new stepdad had one.

"I was very, very lonely after my divorce," Louisa tells people. "I prayed and prayed after my divorce that I would meet someone who would love me and love my kids. After I met Jim, I promised God that if Jim asked me to marry him I'd go back to church."

They married in the fall of 1970.

"I always felt guilty I didn't go back to church," she says. "It was like I had used God as a puppet to ask him for a favor, and when God granted me the favor, I just put that God puppet back on the shelf like he was a toy."

The marriage, however brief, was memorable. Louisa remembers laughter and love.

"I don't want to make him out like he was a saint," she says. "Of course, he was human. He had his own dark side. I remember, this one night, when he got real serious and heavy and told me this terrible story. It was so terrible I didn't interrupt him or ask him questions. I just let him tell it."

Jimmy told Louisa he'd once killed a man. Didn't feel a trace of remorse. He was aboard a Coast Guard ship in the South Pacific. At sea on a dark night, Jimmy waited in hiding for another mariner to pass along the slippery deck.

"Jimmy said he pushed that man overboard. He said the man had it coming. He said the man just disappeared off the face of the Earth that night. Jimmy said people thought it was an accident, though they always wondered if he might have had something to do with it, but Jimmy said nobody ever made the accusation."

Louisa is 62 now, and many years have passed. It is still hard for her to believe that Jimmy could have hurt anyone.

"Jimmy was not a violent man. Not even close. He never beat me, or beat the children, so I didn't know, and I still don't know, what to make of that old story except I think it had to be true. I know Jimmy was married once, before we met, when he was very young and living in the Philippines. I know his first wife left him for another man. I always wonder if maybe that man was the man he pushed off the ship. But I don't know.

"It's ironic, isn't it? Jim may have been responsible for drowning another man. It's kind of like karma."

A flying leap

During the marriage, the Cash family lived in Melrose, a rural community east of Gainesville known for pecans and outstanding fishing. They rented a tin-roofed Cracker house on State Road 21 on Lake Melrose, a good place to catch speckled perch and swim.

On May 7, 1971, David and his little sister were swimming when Jimmy came out of the house in his bathing trunks. Spring was going full-tilt. The lemony scent of magnolia blossoms would have been in the air; pileated woodpeckers must have been crafting caverns in old pine trees. In the late afternoon, the water in the lake would have been cool. Most men would dip their toes in, make a joke about the cold and creep in, if at all. Not Jimmy. Jimmy was Jimmy to the last moment of his life.

He took a flying leap off the dock.

He apparently didn't know, or apparently had forgotten, about the tree stumps in wait just under the water's surface.

You can't see the dock from State Road 21, by the way, but you can see the lake behind the house. For years, David refused to even drive past the house and tried not to think about what happened there. About a year ago he changed his mind.

So.

On a winter's day, in 2005, he is sitting in his Dodge Ram and working up his nerve to talk about what for most of life he has avoided talking about. Beyond the house is a hill, and beyond the hill is the lake. He lets the engine run but has turned off the CD player and that album by Kansas, the '70s band that had a mournful hit, Dust in the Wind.

"Something is wrong'

"Jimmy went in headfirst and came up holding his head, kind of shaking it, but face down in the water. It was just like Jimmy to play around like that, to goof off with me, so I played along with him. I got him in a bear hug and held him under. He was like a rag doll, but I kept thinking he's going to jump out of the water grinning.

"Well, he didn't do that. I pushed him farther down toward the bottom and stood on his back. I stood on his back. Stood on his back. Now in the back of my mind, I'm thinking he's goofing, but my little sister, she said, "David, something is wrong,' so we let him up. He was all purple."

They dragged him from the lake, David says in a Southern drawl so soft and quiet that a passenger in the truck has to lean his way to hear.

"I ran to the house and called my mom. She took one look outside and freaked."

Louisa was a registered nurse. As she blew breath into Jimmy's lungs, David tried calling on the telephone for help. It took a long time for paramedics to arrive. David isn't sure his instructions were clear enough. The paramedics didn't have a respirator with them.

"A neighbor took my sister Cindy and me to their house to wait. I remember we watched cartoons. Can't remember which cartoons, but we focused on them. Maybe we were in shock, maybe what had just happened hadn't sunk in. Nothing sunk in until a neighbor ran in and said, "He's dead! Good God! He's dead!' A while later my grandparents arrived and took us to their house in Gainesville. I never spent another night in Melrose."

Nefarious thoughts

Louisa asked a priest to do a funeral service. The kids didn't go. At home, Louisa held David tight and told him it wasn't his fault, that he should put such a thought out of his mind. Now she believes it might have been good for David to think about it and to talk about it.

"Mostly I was numb," Louisa says. "My parenting was poor. I was sick for a long, long time. I wasn't stable to begin with, so everything got worse."

In the fall, she had a baby. Jimmy's baby. Named her Missy.

Louisa moved from Gainesville to Naples. Jimmy had bought a good insurance policy, thank God, and Louisa didn't have to work. She says she was incapable of working, of thinking straight, of following through on much. She was too sapped by grief to do anything sensible. She remembers buying a house on a vacation to North Carolina, driving home to Florida and deciding the new home was a mistake. David remembers moving 21 times before he was an adult.

"I would spend a lot of time up in her room at night talking about life," he says. "One night while Mom and I were talking, it was about a year after Jimmy died, I look out the window and see this giant man in a tree watching us. The man was actually leaves and limbs, but it was perfect looking like a man. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. I would look away and then look back - the man was still there. I mentioned him to my mom. She was shaken, too. She had seen him before, and she thought it was Jim saying he was in heaven and happy."

Sometimes David, barely 10, smoked pot with his mom.

"I read the Bible and smoked marijuana," Louisa says now. "For some reason, pot and the Bible seemed to go together. I was so lost."

Terrible years passed. Louisa married again, her kids got a new dad, and slowly she put her life back together. She gave up pot but hung on to Jesus. Still does.

David tried to do his best. A smart kid, he barely got by in school, unable to concentrate, lonely, racked by guilt. After school he delivered papers, bagged groceries, learned carpentry, had the first of many girlfriends. One broke his heart, but often he broke up with a girl before she could break up with him. When you're close to someone, you will hurt badly if they go first.

He earned a finance degree from the University of Central Florida, bought a house in Starke, lived alone, of course. Considered himself a poor candidate for marriage. David rented movies. Identified with Being John Malkovich, a strange film about stolen identity. Read War and Peace just to see if he could. Can tell you lots about Pierre Bezukhov and Anna Pavlovna and the Battle of Austerlitz. Numbed himself with alcohol or cannabis.

He saw doctors and gave up intoxicants. Experienced good days. But just when he thought he was over the hump, the bad ghost would come calling and suggest that Jimmy's death was no accident.

David wrote an e-mail to a friend about such a haunting:

"When you're standing on someone's back and they are drowning under you - nefarious thoughts did float through me at that moment. Some times I think maybe some force outside of me took over my body and I did it on purpose - or maybe I just have a totally damaged soul or am quite mistaken with too much imagination.

"I remember that moment - I am not sure it was all me at that moment - Jimmy was taking the place of my dad - maybe my territory was being threatened and I tried to harm him."

Life preservers

David Stevenson likes to garden. His house in Starke sits on 6 acres. He grows onions and tomatoes. Tomatoes are hard to grow anywhere in Florida, what with the nematodes and aphids and too much sun or too little, but he must have a green thumb. Barring a hard freeze, he should have a beautiful crop come spring, a time for optimism.

He has been trying. He has taken up golf, a game that requires concentration and work, one shot at a time. He enjoys shooting baskets. When the ball goes through the hoop, it's a good feeling, a job well-done. He is very shy but has forced himself to make new friends.

He got to know his neighbors.

They were Jerry and Sylvia Teston, easy folks to talk to, despite their own daunting problems. Years ago, Jerry got hurt in an auto accident, lost a lot of blood and required a transfusion. Now he was dying of AIDS.

David had so much respect for Sylvia, an attractive woman with beautiful skin and a steady gaze. When she wasn't taking care of her husband and her aging mother, she was working as a waiter and finishing her college degree.

Jerry died, and David offered his regrets. A year passed. Sometimes he and Sylvia talked at the gravel road. If nothing else, David understands grief. He asked if there was anything he could do.

Sylvia threw David a life preserver.

Well, could he fix her front door? A few jalousies needed fixing, too. He once had worked a summer as an apprentice carpenter and fixed everything in her house, even the toilet and towel racks. In return, she invited him to supper. Turned out she was a good cook who could do wonders with chicken and mashed potatoes.

And so it went for months. They never went out on an official date. Cautious and gloomy, David disliked the idea of a date. A date was a commitment of sorts, and he believed it was safer to keep things casual. His idea of a get-together was a meal at her house, quiet talk, a rented video, a polite good night.

The ghost was still there, below him, pulling on his legs.

One day early last spring, Sylvia, who was 36, told David she had accepted a real date with another man, a nice guy from Macclenny. She didn't know what, if anything, the date was going to lead to. But she was interested in getting to know this man anyway. Unlike David, he wasn't afraid.

It was another life preserver, though neither David nor Sylvia knew it.

David hated the idea of Sylvia going out with another man. His first impulse - the old self-destructive one - was to say goodbye before he could get hurt. But this time he didn't. He is unsure why, except he had been thinking a lot about the past, about confronting the old ghosts, about daring to give up his guilt and get well. Perhaps Sylvia was part of that.

He telephoned and asked her to go on a walk.

"Will you marry me?" he blurted out.

It was the first optimistic thing he had done in many years.

"I know it's April 1," Sylvia told him, "but you'd better not be kidding."

They were married by a justice of the peace last April 28.

On their honeymoon, they traveled to St. Augustine and stayed at a B&B next to Ripley's Believe It or Not museum. They took a carriage ride that was part of a "Haunted St. Augustine Tour." David was relieved to see no ghosts.

At Sylvia's urging, David is attending church again, a Catholic church because David was raised Catholic and says he values tradition. Sylvia belongs to Grace Community Fellowship Church, where they speak in tongues, but she still accompanies David to Mass at St. Edwards', too.

They talk about having a child before too long.

Sylvia really wants a child.

David says, "Oh, I don't know. I'm 42. Maybe that's too old. I don't know if I could be a committed father."

"Well, you didn't think you could commit to getting married," Sylvia says. "But here you are."

No Hollywood ending

David didn't attend Jimmy's funeral. Nobody wanted that little boy to see that poor man in his coffin. For a long time, David stayed away from the cemetery. When he turned 21, he worked up his nerve. Wept at the grave and asked Jimmy to forgive him. Ten years later, he visited again. Wept.

Now, in the winter of 2005, he parks his truck on the cemetery road next to a canopy where another funeral service is about to begin. Workers arrange seats in neat rows in front of a freshly dug grave.

Ignoring the preparations, David walks past tombstones, reading as he goes, until he gets to Jimmy's grave. He hunkers down and brushes away a dead leaf and thumbs the sand out of the depression in the letter "A" in the name James H. Cash.

He doesn't say "Hello, Jimmy" or "Jimmy, I'm so sorry" or tell him about Sylvia and then instantly feel like a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. That would be a nice ending, but it would be one of those TV movie endings, pat and unbelievable.

"You know," he says, "I don't know how this story is going to end. I'd like to think it's going to have a happy ending, but I don't know. I think I'm on my way, but it's hard, you know. . . ."

He climbs back into his truck, starts the engine, drives slowly, out of the cemetery. As he heads out, a long line of cars, lights on, turn in. Another day, another funeral.

- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com

- Times researchers Kitty Bennett and Carolyn Edds contributed to this report.