The Collective(31)

How do you think the mother of Richard Ashley Shawger’s victim feels . . .

I look for more articles about the sentencing until, finally, in the one from the Roxbury paper, I find a picture of the Langford family. In the photo, they’re leaving the courthouse, the mother held upright by two men, one her age, the other much younger and taller and wearing an army dress uniform. I read the caption: Lionel Langford, who read a statement at the sentencing, was accompanied by his wife, Violet, and their older son, Corporal Thomas Langford, twenty-four. The mother’s eyes are closed. She looks as frail as a crushed leaf.

In Lionel Langford’s statement, he reportedly said that as a good Christian, he had no other choice but to forgive Shawger for killing his son. My wife and I asked God for guidance, he told reporters after the sentencing. He showed us the right path.

I look at that mother. Her closed eyes. Her drawn cheeks. According to the article, she said nothing at the sentencing. She had no statement for the press. She let her husband do the talking, but was he really speaking for her?

In the same article, there’s a picture of a group of young men posing in camo, rifles at their sides. It reminds me of the recent photo of Shawger and his buddies, only minus the deer, and there are no beer cans in sight. Half of them look too young to drink legally. From the caption, I learn that Nathan Langford is the one on the far right—a thin boy in a baggy flannel shirt who looks like a gawkier version of his older brother. Next to him stands Shawger, with a thick, dark beard and shaggy Kurt Cobain hair. Shawger is smiling. Nathan Langford is not. Shawger’s got his bulky arm wrapped around Nathan’s neck, fake-strangling him. Good one. My eyes find the photo caption: Courtesy of Violet Langford.

She did make a statement of her own after all.

I think about googling Violet Langford’s name, because there’s something familiar about it. I can’t tell, though, whether I really do know it from somewhere, or if it’s simply one of those names that sounds like I should.

My eyes are so salty, though, the lids heavy. My vision starts to blur, my body telling me that it’s going to sleep, whether I want it to or not. I move away from the computer and collapse onto my bed, the fever dream taking over. I’m floating through the night sky, a sea of stars that’s all milky swirls, like camouflage. And Nathan Langford is out there, beyond my reach. Nathan’s in his flannel hunting shirt and he’s showing Emily his forehead, whispering something I can’t get close enough to hear. . . .

When I open my eyes again, the sun is bright outside my bedroom window and it feels as though I’ve slept for days. When I glance at the phone, though, I see that it’s just six hours later. Ten a.m. I guess that was all I needed. I head into the shower and let the hot water pour over me, the steam clearing out my lungs, my mind.

Violet Langford. It isn’t the sound of the name that’s familiar. It’s the look of it. I’ve seen it in print.

I get out of the shower and dry off, the name still in my head. Violet Langford. As I wipe the fog off the bathroom mirror and brush my teeth, I try to recall where I’ve seen it. The font. The size . . . The color. It’s blue. Facebook blue. “That’s it,” I whisper. That’s where I’ve seen her name. Violet Langford is a member of the Niobe group.


I HAVEN’T BEEN on Niobe in ten days. Compared to the heroin of Kaya, it’s like the weed I used to smoke in high school. But once I’m on Facebook, I’m able to find the group quickly, and it seems as though no time has passed. So many new posts since I’ve been here last, women pouring out their grief, drowning in it, trying—and mostly failing—to help each other to shore.

I click on the member list and scroll through it until, sure enough, I find the name. Violet Langford. I was right.

I click through to her personal page. It’s public, which is a good thing. I can learn about her.

Violet Langford. She supports the Sierra Club. She works full-time at the Havenkill Library. She likes to garden. She has three cats, and she frequently posts pictures of them. The cats’ names are Skip, Elsie, and Coconut, and judging by the number of pictures, Coconut may be her favorite. She posts no pictures of herself, though. Not even in groups.

Violet Langford’s husband and older son are both dead—which makes me choke up when I realize it. On the anniversaries of their passings, she posts old, happy, uncomplicated photos—Lionel in his wedding tuxedo, Thomas as a baby. I scroll back until I can find her talking about the circumstances of their deaths—Lionel of a heart attack twenty-five years ago, when he was only in his early fifties. Thomas in an IED explosion in 2005, during his third tour in Afghanistan.

Violet Langford never remarried. She has only around fifty Facebook friends, most of them female and most of them, like her, use photos of their pets as profile shots. Like me, she leads a solitary life, in a house too big for just one person, a house full of memories of the dead.

How does she do it? I wonder, as so many of my “friends” must wonder about me. How does she go on living like this? I must focus on what’s important, though, and that is just one item of information: Violet Langford lives in Havenkill. And that’s only a forty-five-minute drive from my house.


HAVENKILL IS ONE of those picturesque Hudson Valley towns—full of historic plaques and statues of men on horseback and window boxes and white Colonial buildings with lacquered black shutters. Matt and I used to love to spend long weekends at Havenkill bed-and-breakfasts when we lived in the city, daydreaming about moving to the town (which I believe is technically a hamlet). We can be just like George and Mary Bailey, we’d say. But they really were just daydreams. The truth is, there’s something we both found slightly off-putting about Havenkill—a judgy, insular quality behind the Bedford Falls veneer. The big, unapologetic cross in the town square at Christmastime; the hardness in the eyes of some of the smiling store owners—especially when you’d mention you were visiting from the city; the enormous historic mansions at one end of town and the tiny tract houses on the other, never the twain shall meet. It gave both Matt and me a hinky feeling, so that when we decided to move to this area, we steered clear of Havenkill and the neighboring towns on the east side of the river and opted instead for the more rugged terrain of the west.