On November 20th, 1965 at 10:57 a.m., Allan Cosgrove, a dog walker and bonsai tree¹ enthusiast, walked out of his apartment building on the outskirts of Decatur, Georgia on his way to his mother Eileen’s house. A small team of state workers fixed up the sidewalk concrete here several months beforehand, setting exactly 13 dowels of rebar before pouring the freshly mixed slurry, and smoothing it over with trowels.
     One of the state workers, Lassiter “Lucky” Jones, a father of two and adoring husband to Addie Mae, but something of the clown of his concrete-laying crew, thought it amusing to carve his initials into the concrete. “You shore is stupid,” said a crewmate, looking over his shoulder for the boss, who was eating a liverwurst sandwich obliviously. Aside from being stupid, the real problem with doing such a childish act of attrition is that it the concrete needs to be smoothed in order to set correctly. Without the balance of smoothing, concrete faces the possibility of being brittle.
     Earlier, on the morning of November 20th, Decatur had its first fall frost of 1965, slightly later than usual². A small amount of water had leaked into an opening in the concrete that siphoned into a small hole underneath the crudely dawn “L.J.” and froze overnight. The sun melted the frost at approximately 7:58 a.m. and the moisture filled the hole and expanded, creating a small but notable fissure. A crack. If for some reason, you had been watching that small area of concrete at that exact moment, you would have said, “Oh, so that’s what it looks like when concrete cracks.”
    The white rubber sole of Allan Cosgrove’s black canvas Chuck Taylor All-Stars landed squarely on that crack.
    The ribbing of the rubber soles of Cosgrove’s Chucks audibly caught the fissure—a small, but distinct ripping sound—sending Cosgrove sprawling on the sidewalk, the gift of a four-inch porcelain cricket he’d acquired from a miniatures manufacturer in Atlanta shattering on impact, lacerating Cosgrove’s left arm at a tendon, cutting straight through his axillary artery.
    Eileen Cosgrove loved to collect all things with crickets on them. She had plates and needlepoints and salt-and-pepper-shaker sets. Crickets, her mother had told her, were lucky as could be. That sound they make, her mother had said, was the sound of wishes being ground into truths.
    Allan Cosgrove, on November 19th, had committed two great³ crimes against luck. First, he had walked under a ladder. The ladder, you see, had been placed against the eave of the Agricultural Bank in Decatur proper while Allan had been inside arguing with a Mr. Horace Chance about an amount he had been trying to borrow from the bank to open a bonsai tree shop in Decatur. Mr. Chance saw no prospect of the store ever making enough revenue back to pay off the loan.
    Allan did not notice the window washer setting up outside while he argued, and he did not notice them as he stormed out of the bank, spitting something to the affect of, “Good day to you, Mr. Chance,” with no intention of actually wishing the mustachioed banker any pleasantry on this 66-degree, downright balmy, November day.
    Allan’s second great mistake was to not pick up a penny, which he could see was clearly head’s up. The rhyme started in his head, See a penny, pick it up… But Allan had no time for such foolhardy games and child’s play.
    And so, Allan cut his arm, and quite badly. He lost a lot of blood. He lay on the ground in the outskirts of Decatur. No one walked by for quite a long spell, and by the time the paramedics came, Allan badly needed a transfusion. He got the transfusion in time, but one of the orderlies had not properly cleaned the bed Allan was recovering in, Allan obtained a staph infection, and in his depleted state, Allan Cosgrove died. This was two days later, at approximately 7:42 a.m.
It was the straw that broke Eileen Cosgrove’s back. Allan Cosgrove, by stepping on a crack, did not literally break his mother’s back, but he did figuratively, and that day Eileen Cosgrove jumped off the rooftop of that same bank Allan Cosgrove walked under a ladder. Her back, in the end, was broken in several places, severing her spinal cord, and leaving her paralyzed from the middle vertebrae down, an unlucky ending indeed.⁴
    “Lucky” Jones got his nickname from winning at craps. Boy, would he ever clean up. “Law-dee-dah,” his momma would say when Lucky would come by dressed in a crisp new suit he got made for him by the tailor.
    “You shore is lucky,” Jeffrey Jones, a tall old man and Lucky’s father, would say when he came around with a brand new car, Addie Mae and the twins in tow.
    One day, Lucky’s luck ran dry.
    He was shooting the die over and over and he couldn’t come up with anything. Crouching over the bottom step of the stoop, he rolled Little Joe from Kokomo and lost his brand new shoes. Then, he lost his suit, and his car, and he even lost Addie Mae’s diamond ring. Lucky was obstinate, and he was reasonable. He couldn’t keep on losing forever.
    He lost the shirt off his back and the pants off his legs. And he kept losing. He shook those die, blew on them, kissed them, prayed to God he could roll them true. There he was, in his skivvies, crouched down over a stoop, and he slung them die hard up against the bottom stair. They spun like tops for a split second, before dying down a few inches away from each other, staring up at Lucky, the eyes looking more like the eyes of a snake then ever, little black beady things. Lucky even thought heard a hiss.
    They took his drawers.
    Lucky stood there naked in the street, his balls dangling in the wind, no fig leaf to cover his shame.
Addie Mae found a four-leaf clover when she was 15. She closed her eyes and blew out all the candles on the cake and wished for something she never told anyone, else it wouldn’t come true.
    Addie Mae’s wish was to have twins. She met Lucky two years later, and he knocked her up good, and she got bigger than she was supposed to have. Addie Mae’s daddy literally held a shotgun to Lucky’s head and shouted, “You gonna marry my Addie Mae?” until Lucky whimpered an affirmative. “Good,” said Addie Mae’s daddy.⁵
The twins were named Garfield Jones and Winifred Jones. Garfield felt everything Winifred felt, and vice versa. When Winifred cried, Garfield cried. When Garfield broke his leg, Winifred couldn’t walk without crutches for two months, either.
    After Lucky had lost everything, Garfield and Winifred walked to school. On the way, they passed by Judson’s Pharmacy. Judd Judson was the owner. He was a small man with a big beak-like nose. He looked a bit like a puffin. Garfield and Winifred would steal penny candies from under Judd Judson’s beak-like nose, and he never noticed.
    On November 19th, 1965, the twins were making their usual penny candy grift, which went something like this: Winifred would approach Judd Judson with a question about science. “Why is the sky blue?” she would ask. Judd Judson thought this was a fun game, and so he would say, “Because God made it that way, little girl.” He said this in a creepy way. He wanted to do bad things with Winifred. The point is, she could ask him anything, and he’d answer, “Because God made it that way, little girl,” and it would distract Judd Judson long enough for Garfield to nab a pocketful of Mary Janes and other sumptuous treats.
     That day, Garfield filled his pockets too full. There was a conspicuous bulge puffing his schoolpants out far enough to look like jodhpurs. Winifred said, “Thank you, Mr. Judson, for telling me why it rains,” and grabbed her twin brother’s arm. Just then, a single Starlight Mint dropped to the ground.
    Judd Judson tanned Garfield and Winifred’s hides for that, 39 times each⁶, for each candy Garfield had pocketed. He took extra time on Winifred’s hide.
    Judd Judson fell out of a tree that very next day, and broke his neck. No one knows how he got in that tree, or why he fell out.
    Some of the old mothers in the neighborhood think they know why he fell out of that tree. They say that he said, at a neighborhood meeting, that he would rather die, God forbid, than have to have his business surrounded, and frequented by, colored folks. They say he said something about death. And they noticed he didn’t knock on wood. The old mothers in the neighborhood always knocked on wood, even if the occasion didn’t call for it.
    For instance, Addie Mae once knocked on wood when Lucky said he lost the last $50 they had on an ill-timed Acey Deucey bet. She didn’t know why she knocked on wood, but she wished she knocked on Lucky’s head instead. She wished she left him then and there. She continued to wish that for a long, long time, but by then the four-leaf clover’s luck had worn off.
    Instead, she stayed with Lucky. She made Lucky get that job with the state. She made him quit craps.    
    In Russia, they say if you sneeze while you’re saying something, you’re telling the truth. The real reason that Judd Judson died is because death comes in threes. If you believe that, and you say it, you might sneeze. But sneezing won’t discourage the fact that Allan and Eileen Cosgrove and Lassiter “Lucky” Jones met their untimely demises because they didn’t follow the rules of the universe.⁷
    Winifred and Garfield Jones watched Judd Judson fall out of a tree on the morning of November 20th, 1965. Winifred had seduced him there with promises of the flesh. After the tanning, Winifred told Judd Judson that she enjoyed the feeling of his hand on her and wished him to meet her. It was too much for Judd Judson to deny.
    And so, Judd Judson climbed the tree, and Winifred stood from a branch on the upper reaches of the tree, looking down, her skirt slightly open to entice Judd Judson further.⁷ The puffin climbed and climbed until the he reached a branch that Garfield Jones had made half a cut through earlier with one of Lucky’s small toothy saws.
    When Judd Judson stepped on that branch, it cracked and Judd Judson fell twenty feet or so, taking branches and dead leaves with him. He lay in a heap on the ground. Winifred scurried down the tree and off with Garfield. They didn’t think Judd Judson was going to break his neck. They had only wanted to scare him. They checked his breathing, and realized he was real dead.
    “Fuck,” said Garfield Jones.
    “Fuuuu-uuuck,” said Winifred Jones.
    They took off running.
    Even in stride, however, Garfield and Winifred Jones knew not to step on any cracks.
    By the time the lights went down on Decatur, Georgia on November 23th, 1965, three people had gone off to see the Lord. Their mortal coils had ceased, if you don’t believe in lords with a capital L. They were deceased. They each had cases opened on them: two accidents, one suicide. But there are things left out of those reports, evidence that isn’t strictly fact. You can’t disprove something that can’t be proven is the logic of those who believe in superstition. Or, a man tripped, his mother killed herself, and two kids murdered a perverted shopkeep. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.⁸

^{1 The bonsai tree is known alternatively as the “lucky money tree” or the “good fortune tree.” Allan Cosgrove was actually quite bohemian.
2 A late frost is bad news for allergy sufferers. Allan Cosgrove’s neighbor, an old woman named Celia Brown, sneezed convulsively in Allan’s presence at high noon on November 18th, 1965. Allan remained silent. Allan did not like the squawking of Celia Brown’s black cockatoo, and thus did not like Celia Brown. Regardless, it is possible an evil spirit entered Celia Brown that day.
3 Allan Cosgrove also committed several lesser crimes against luck in the days prior to the laceration of his arm, including but not limited to: whistling at night, dropping a dishcloth, and rocking an empty rocking chair. All common occurrences, but luck adds up.
4 It should be mentioned that in Indonesia, it is believed that if a woman begins her menses on a Thursday, she will experience sorrow. Eileen Cosgrove, at 62 years of age, began her last menstruation on Thursday, November 18th, 1965.}

^{5 Because of the shotgun nature of Lucky and Addie Mae’s wedding, care was not taken. Several omens of misfortune reared their ugly heads: they were wed on a Friday in March, Addie Mae wore pink, a cock crowed on the morning of the wedding, and Addie Mae glimpsed a sow on the way to the wedding. If you are wedding luck literate at all, you can see why bad news followed Lucky all over town.
6 In Afghanistan—where Judd Judson would often comically reference as the place the milkman delivered from, since the milk always seemed to arrive expired—the number 39 is considered extremely unlucky and should be avoided at all costs.
7 There is an old German belief that if you see a virgin early in the morning, it is bad luck. A whore, on the other hand, would bring good luck. Despite her knowledge of man’s carnal desires, Winifred was most certainly a virgin.
8 Garfield Jones, the co-murderer, went on to become a NASA astronaut. Before Garfield left the scene of the crime, he picked up an acorn from the foot of the tree Judd Judson tumbled from. Carrying the acorn as both a talisman and a reminder of past indiscretions, Garfield led a charmed life, and is now retired in Miami. Everyone else is dead.}