Intersection

I'm contemplating three black-and-white photos—rather, photocopies of exposures—that spanned the front page of the August 21, 1966, Williston, North Dakota, Herald. The middle shot shows my father, lying in the grass, wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt.

Correction: it shows my father's body. The caption, which leads with the slug "At Death's Door," explains that he has just died in an auto accident. The far-left photo shows the open driver-side door of his tan Ford Fairlane.

My father's face is obscured, but by what I can't tell. I can make out the top of his head, his torso, his legs, and a mangled lower left arm, its hand resting on his chest. The poor reproduction masks details of the injuries.

I tell myself that the object covering his face is a towel tossed there by the ambulance crew. In truth it looks eerily like a woman's leg—a trick of light and timing, an unintended sight gag, thigh bleeding off the photo's left edge. I can discern my father's ear below his dark hair, and I'm grateful that this grim, grainy photo, taken in darkness by a stranger, in a hard rain at a nondescript roadside, offers up such a tender detail.

I refer to the man in the plaid shirt as "my father," although when he lived I called him Dad. The generic "father" helps objectify the image before me, which was captured for the purpose of news. "Father" in my mouth is a euphemism, a distancing mechanism, like a foreign word that I've learned to pronounce but whose nuances of meaning I don't grasp. I was 11 when he was killed.

As I puzzle over the drape and other ambiguities, I look away often, taking long breaths. I've had these photos in my possession for seven years. But I pull them from their file drawer only once a year, on August 20, the anniversary of the accident.

Curiosity always attends my viewing of the central image. Where, precisely, was my mother at the moment the shutter opened on this scene? And my aunt Marie—my father's older sister—and her husband Carl? For those three were in the car, too; they also died in this crash.

I am at once shocked by these images, relieved at what they fail to show, and frustrated that they are not clearer. If they were fuzzier, I might convince myself that what's covering my father's face is his own right arm. That would seem more dignified, as though he were shielding his face the way celebrities and criminals do, defending identity and privacy against a camera's impersonal intrusion. If I could say with certainty that it's his arm I see, then I might also believe that by this gesture he meant to protect not only himself but his six children from the horror of seeing him like this. It consoles me to imagine him conspiring with fate, rain, darkness, and a bad camera angle to deliver us all from the sight of his lifeless face.

In the far-right photo, he appears again. Two medics tend him now, their hands beneath his head and shoulders. The accompanying caption does not reidentify him except as "one of four accident victims," but the plaid shirt is unmistakable. Studying the blurry faces of those medics, I'm envious that they were there to render their useless aid, to touch him, to cover his face and declare his death official—envious, that is, until I consider the reality of that scene.

An aunt handed me this photocopied front page in 1994. As I beheld it I winced, tears welling despite decades of practice containing them. She appeared startled at my reaction, as though she thought surely I'd gotten over all this a long time ago. I felt as if I'd seen these images once, briefly, when they were new and I...