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1 Chapter 1 The guard shined the flashlight along the wall, searching through the predawn darkness for the prisoner in the basement, finding him crumpled on the floor. For twenty-five hours the man had been held in solitary confinement, in what the inmates called the Hole and the guards the Dungeon. The jail staff had given him a bare mattress for comfort, and a bucket for his waste. Now the spotlight found him facedown, his body covered with bruises, his neck broken. He was thirty-nine years old. I never knew my grandfather. I was born five years after he died in May 1948 at the old Municipal Farm, then the Kansas City jail, an imposing old castle that housed mostly drunks plucked from the streets and put to work planting corn and beans, and slopping hogs. Pay a fifteen-dollar fine or serve fifteen days. My mother never knew her father, either. He vanished when she was two or three, taking off at the height of the Great Depression. She bore his Irish name—Lyons—but could tell us little about the man. That is because her mother, my grandmother, was resigned to forgetting about James Lyons. All she would say was that he had died years ago at the old jail. “A lovable drunk,” she might tell us in dismissing her former husband. Or recall with a grin how he poured Irish whiskey into his morning coffee. Once at a baseball game, she turned to my mother and pointed at a vendor working the aisles. “That’s your father,” she said. When my grandmother died we buried the secret with her. Then my mother grew ill, and as the years passed she would occasionally wonder aloud, “If you could find out something . . .” Her brother, a Kansas City lawyer, tried once to uncover the story of their father but got nowhere. Eventually he died, and my mother followed him, and when they were gone a surprising thing happened. 2 Richard A. Serrano We discovered in boxes of old family memorabilia a loose photograph , stuffed with other pictures and frayed documents announcing births and baptisms, weddings and funerals. The snapshot is in black-and-white, and it shows two couples standing in a field somewhere , or perhaps a backyard in the city. All are attired formally, the men in suits and ties, the women in dresses. The photographer is shooting them from behind the sun, so they are squinting at us. On the back is a date, 1930, the year my grandparents were married . The couple on the left is a Mr. and Mrs. Geer, totally unknown to us. They are clearly intoxicated, slouching, their hair disheveled, stumbling against one another. On the right are Mr. and Mrs. Lyons: my grandmother Zillah and her husband, James. She alone is beaming at the camera, her smile wide, and her eyes bright and fearless in the harsh sun. He, however, is squinting, or is it just his narrow eyes, thin like his long mouth? He wears a dark suit and buttoned-down vest, his shoulders erect, projecting an air of self-confidence. He is taller than the rest; he appears almost to be holding up the others. He seems the strong one. He was twenty-two then, and had not yet disappeared into the bottle. Alcoholism eventually would become the other prison from which James Lyons could not escape, the other solitary confinement that would cost him jobs and wives and children, and grandchildren too, and send him to the jail that closed out his life. Looking again at the photograph, you can almost sense that he is bracing himself, that he knows hard times are coming. We filed the photograph away in our shoe box of family history, stuffed for a while in a cabinet drawer, later atop a closet shelf. Then recently I dragged it out one more time, after happening upon old Missouri death records that now are made available on the Internet . There to my horror—and yes, shame—I first learned about my grandfather’s end. He died from “shock . . . fractured neck . . . traumatic conditions . . .” His crime: drunk in public. So I went looking for him. I searched inside the limestone caves along the Missouri River where old city and county records are warehoused, in public libraries poring over microfilmed city directories and histories of skid row, in the ornate reading room of the Library of Congress in Washington, reading transcripts of Senate hearings into Kansas City...

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