This story was a finalist in Glimmer Train's"Family Matters" contest for spring of 2007.
My early life
seemed to be governed by skewed timing, like a fixed race or a bungled
joke. My only sibling, a sister, was
first to leave the womb, beating me by almost five years. During those five years, the war came and
went, Uncle Francis drowned, and the neighbor who owned the land above our
pasture hanged himself. By the time I
got there, those events were old news; everyone talked about them, but their
substance had vanished. By age two and a
half or so, I was also aware of the fact that I was ugly. My sister made sure I knew this, along with
the other obvious truth: that everything
important in the world had happened before my time. I was an add-on, an also-ran, a one-child
clean-up crew who gathered the leftovers and kept quiet. Of course, there were still on-going
happenings beneath the surface that no one talked about. They hung in the air like persistent bad
smells: Uncle Jimmy’s dalliance with a passenger on his bus route, our mother’s
insanity, and my sister’s visits to the Ghostes.
Back then, in the
late ‘40’s and early ‘50’s, children played outside for most of the day. Where they went wasn’t questioned, as long as
they stayed alive and out of trouble. The
woods and fields belonged to everyone. I
idolized my sister, and tried to keep track of all her comings and goings. Sometimes, she actually noticed me, and
allowed me to play army with her. She was the one, of course, who had a real
army outfit and a toy rifle that loaded with a crack across the knee. It was my job, dressed in my corduroy
overalls, to carry the blanket and the little cast iron skillet, a fitting task
for me as Private Kenmore, and her position as General. She always craved company, so I was good
enough in a pinch. That’s what made it
doubly puzzling and hurtful when she denied me access to the Ghostes’ house.
I never wondered,
then, why our father had bought her the rifle and uniform and me nothing; I
just figured it was all due to timing.
She had arrived first; she knew the parents better because of her head
start. She was the ground-breaker because
of her position as first-born. She was
her father’s darling; I was my mother’s compensation.
Our mother,
sexually obsessed with our father, seethed with jealous fury, disappointment,
and hypochondria. She treated her elder
child’s stuttering and misbehavior at school as ammunition to be held against
her, rather than as symptoms to be investigated. When teacher after teacher came to our house
searching out a reason for her aggressive behavior toward other children, her
persistent carving of nonsense words into the wood of school desks, and her
non-stop talking, our mother played dumb.
She made tea and fed them brown sugar cookies, clicked her tongue and
changed the subject. When they left,
nothing was said; our mother just seemed to chalk it up to the fact that my
sister was “bad” and not worth correcting.
She would snicker a little, too, in an I-told-you-so way, and my sister
would glower and stuff herself with what was left of the cookies.
The measles laid us low in the winter of ’48
or ’49, soon after the shaky bed episodes had begun. The sleeping arrangements in that childhood
dwelling were curious, and I have no memory of how they came about. The parents, educated through the sixth and
eighth grades only, were primitives, willfully unaffected by the post-war rise
of the middle class. Our father had left
home to serve in the war at the very end of the conflict, between VE and VJ
days. As a married man and father, he
was drafted late, and never saw combat.
I was an infant, and remember nothing of his time away. My memories are only of his return; snippets
of his appearance are embedded in my mind’s eye: the color of his wife-beater
style undershirts: dirty olive-green; the comb he used in his heavy black hair:
metal; his shaving gear: ancient.
That little
uninsulated house with no central heating got mightily cold on winter
nights. At the age of three, I still
wore baby night gowns that tied around the feet like drawstring flour sacks. Oddly enough, our mother shared the double
bed with me, my sister slept in an old iron bed across the room, and our father
spent most of his nights in a clanky-springed cot behind the porch door. When the cold was unbearable, he came into
the big bed, and I recall being squashed between the grown-ups. As I lay awake, the bed used to shake like a
vibrator. Huddled in my drawstrings, I
felt profound disgust. Across the room,
my sister slept in silence. Like most children, she entered third grade at the
age of eight. That year, she was at the
peak of her school troubles, and was probably somewhat emotionally
weakened from run-ins with classmates
and teachers, and physically tired from her trips to visit the Ghostes.
When the measles
hit, sleeping arrangements changed for a few weeks. My sister and I, ill with fever and coughs
and streaming eyes, lay together in the big bed with the black-out shades
pulled, day and night. Cisco Kid on the
radio was our only amusement; the rest of those days and nights we spent in a
feverish stupor. Because she had carried
the sickness home with her from school, it had felled her first, and she
recovered and returned to classes while I remained in bed.
One afternoon, a
day or two after our mother had pronounced her cured, I heard her come in from
school and sit heavily in a kitchen chair.
The day was bitterly cold, and only a few moments had passed before she
half staggered into our sleeping room and collapsed on her own iron bed against
the wall. I was still weak and ill, but remember calling out to her; she didn’t
answer.
She lay there for
what seemed like weeks, as if she were dead.
Our mother would come in now and then to show her to a grandmother or
aunt and say, “It’s the sleeping sickness; she’ll either wake up or she won’t.”
No doctor was ever
called, which was odd, even for poor folk. Our father didn’t show his face; he
just drank his cheap wine and puffed on his cigars. The smoke drifted to the airless room where
we slept and turned everything there blue/gray and chokey. My eyes and throat burned; my sister slept
on. The only other sign of our father
came when he threaded his way bare-assed to his squeaky porch bed. Night after night, there he was, bundled up
above the waist, but always buck naked below.
I knew that bare ass better than I knew his face; it glowed with a
deadly whiteness, even in the pitch dark of the black-out shades.
My sister
recovered, no thanks to our mother or anyone else we knew. It was a slow recovery for both of us,
because of a persistent gut-wrenching cough that our mother diagnosed as
“whoopin’,” and treated as a personal annoyance, rather than as a health
concern.
Our first day
outside was beyond magic; we were so happy that we accidentally ruined the
lilac bushes by picking all their buds in the hedgerow to make “soup.” Our mother found us with our potful of green,
and beat us both with a switch. We were
so delighted to have risen from our sick beds that we didn’t feel the
blows. A few little switchings across
our legs were just silly routine; it was the real beatings that brought out the
scars.
It wasn’t only his
undershirts that said “wife beater” about our father. His hands, stained with axel grease and wood
dough, did a fine job of showing the world of our little household that he
meant business. The threatened beatings
were just as memorable as the bloody ones, and they piled upon each other in
those years as densely as stove lengths in the woodshed. One such incident was especially
colorful. I was four or five years old,
alone with our parents in my sister’s absence; she was probably at school. It was daytime, and winter, no doubt, when handyman
work was scarce and our father hung about the house, spitting tobacco juice
into a basin. Our mother had made
“trouble” for herself in one of the hundreds of ways he had of defining it, and
the two of them sat facing each other in the kitchen on either side of the
kerosene stove. She was sniveling, as
usual, and he, snarly-faced, had added a large meat cleaver to the picture,
which he waved periodically for emphasis.
He was using some powerful language, and his high whiny voice had gone
up yet another octave.
He raved on, and I
stood there, silent as always, big-eyed and unnoticed. The meat cleaver was about level with my
forehead, and it looked thick and mean.
I was sure that my mother’s head, would, at any moment, be split to
pieces, and the terror of being left alone with him was agonizing. I don’t know which was stronger, my intense
fear of him, or the paralyzing hatred and disgust I felt in his presence. Both emotions made it all the more
unbelievable to me that my sister just didn’t seem to get it. On the couple of occasions that our mother
half-heartedly told us we would have to leave him and go off into the unknown
with her, my sister would cry and protest, as if the thought of leaving “Daddy”
were too horrible to bear. I was shocked
at her blindness, but then, she was never present when the beatings occurred. She was always conveniently at school or
berry-picking, or baby-sitting our deaf grandmother. She came home to witness the blood, but never
the blows.
Our father worked
only sporadically in the winter; he spent his idle days at the kitchen table
with a six-pack of beer or a bottle of cheap wine. When he grew tired of
spitting tobacco and drinking inside, he would head to one of the outbuildings
to tinker with machines or wood. At least
once a day he would go for a walk in the forest, with or without his
shotgun. These walks were unannounced,
and we children, as far as I know, were never invited to accompany him. I never really knew if he were lurking in the
barn or shed, or if he had left the property.
I didn’t care; I felt only relief in his absence. Nonetheless, I always moved swiftly and
quietly when outdoors, and always avoided the shadow of the barn.
It was during
afternoons like this, when my sister and I were at play, that she would
suddenly tell me she needed to visit the Ghostes. She said it was a place far, far away, where
only she was privileged to go. It was
wonderful there, and the Ghostes fed her sweet cakes and waited on her hand and
foot because she was beautiful, and because they loved her. I wanted so much to go there with her, but I
was forbidden. She told me that the
Ghostes didn’t like ugly, and if I were to follow her, they would take me and
keep me prisoner, and I would never see my mother or my aunt or the dog again.
This warning would send me back to the house at a gallop without a backward
look.
She would return
sometime later and not say a word. I
knew better than to question her about her trip; I would just keep busy with my
crayons or a book or the view from the kitchen window. Her silence at such times always disturbed
me, and I didn’t know why.
It was
earth-shaking to finally grow big enough and fast enough in the leg to outrun
my father, if that were ever necessary; he wasn’t half so scary to a
teenager. My fears of being
over-protected and forbidden social contacts in adolescence, as my sister had
been, were unfounded. Our mother’s
craziness had settled down somewhat by then, and our father seemed tired out
from the energy he had put into overseeing, and jealously watching, my sister’s
coming of age. By the time she moved
out, under circumstances less than pleasant, our parents didn’t care what I
did, or how late I stayed out, or with whom.
By my college graduation time, it was obvious that they just wanted to
spend the rest of their lives the way they had begun…in ignorance and impotent
fury. I did take note of the fact that
when my sister graduated, our father worked for months to fashion her a
magnificent desk of aged cherry wood…a labor of love it was. My graduation gave me a frozen fish handshake
and fifty bucks…another relief.
By the time our
father died, my sister had divorced our family and two of her five
husbands. She had moved away as far as
possible; to the opposite coast. It was
a little surprising, then, when I located her by phone to relay the death news,
that she cried and screamed in sorrow, and still referred to him as
“Daddy.” To me, he was old meat that had
left the world in a most fitting way: bare-assed in bed, lying on his back with
one knee raised.
