“Your daddies whip you to show you they love you,” said the preacher, and I thought, Maybe he could just say it with a card.
The way it would always start was, we’d do something we weren’t supposed to. Say, throwing rocks, or throwing bottle rockets, or throwing our smaller friends.
“You boys better behave,” Mom would say.
And like all boys, we would not behave. We would throw the thing, and something bad would happen: a rock through a windshield, a bottle rocket through a crowd, a small friend through a window.
“Your father wants to see you,” Mom would yell out from the back door, as I crouched behind a large shrub and feigned the look of a boy with a great interest in ground mosses, while Bird descended from whatever tree he’d climbed, and soon we were inside, walking slowly toward Pop in his recliner.
“Come around here where I can see you boys,” he said, the unmoved mover.
“Sir?” we’d say, trying to look as darling and precious as two young boys can, doe-eyed and full of God’s holy light.
“Get around here,” he said, directing us to stand immediately in his line of sight. This was his way of suggesting we were not the center of whatever galaxy this might be, that we were satellites at best, distant and pathetic moons that must be hit with things to get back into proper orbit. His gravity brought us to him, not the other way around.
“What’d you boys do?” he said, and we told him. We couldn’t not.
“Come with me to my office,” he said, closing his recliner with the tortured squeal of its steely innards, a sound I have forever come to associate with anal discomfort.
We followed Pop down the hallway, and I did my best to leave a visible trail of tears and mucus so that the authorities could retrieve our bodies. Pop had no office, of course. What he had was a bedroom, where he selected his belt.
I bawled ferociously and very much wished to run, but he’d spiritually neutralized our ability to flee, the way a tiny bunny can see but somehow cannot run from the large snake. Several belts hung there on his rack, electric eels in slumber. He took one, folded it in half, and turned to us, while I began to affect the look of a child with polio.
“Who wants to go first?” he always asked.
I couldn’t imagine watching Bird get it. Bird was a known wailer, with screams like a schoolgirl being slowly lowered into a kettle of hot oil.
“Me,” I said.
I stood up, and Pop took my small left arm in his bearish left paw. As soon as the belt made its initial contact—on the bottom, occasionally on the top of the legs, sometimes the small of the back—I abandoned all reason and attempted to flee through the nearest architectural orifice: a door, a window, a wall mirror. But I only got as far as my arm could straighten, for Pop still held it tight, tight as a blood pressure cuff, while my legs continued to assert their right to flee, which led to my being occasionally horizontal, levitated. There was always a sort of call-and-response during this wicked dance, with Pop repeating a few questions that sounded strangely rhetorical, while in response I screamed like Robert Plant in Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.”
“When are you going to behave?”
“Ahhhhhhhhh!”
“When are you going to do what I say?”
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
“How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
From the street, it might have sounded like, like, well, exactly like what Robert Plant had been singing about: young children being slaughtered by a Viking.
These were no tender touches of parental scolding, the way you imagine fathers with expensive sneakers would do it, like they were prying ketchup from a glass bottle and regretting every delicate tap, while the children sort of stood there and cried, because it hurt their daddy’s feelings if they didn’t cry at least a little. No, these were mighty strikes, searing, launching me high into the air, such that I might seek refuge in the ceiling fan, reaching for it, for anything to pull me out of this chamber, a child attempting to catch an escaping balloon while being attacked by rabid fruit bats.
When Pop finally stopped, the sheer momentum would send me from the room with great speed, and I would run around the house seven or eight times, attempting to outrun my own buttocks and the liquid fire that spread over them and up my back, eventually collapsing into my bedroom, where I would use a telescopic arrangement of mirrors to inspect my hocks and wonder if such things happened to the hocks of other boys.
I never thought to ask myself if it was cruel. It was just one more condition of living with Pop, the way people in the Civil War didn’t complain about having their legs sawed off. It’s just what happened. You got shot, it got infected, they sawed a part of you off. I threw a rock, I got caught, and now, like so many Confederate veterans, I also couldn’t walk.
Why did he do it?
The list of reasons is long and unsurprising, the rocks, the clods, the failed yessirs, the petulant nosirs, all the petty urges boys will have, such as my trying to put a cat in a toolbox, after being repeatedly told that cats do not belong in toolboxes.
“Why would you do such a thing, boy?” Pop would say.
There was no good answer. I just lowered my head, and waited for the executioner to rise and mete out his electric pain. He was right. You can’t treat a cat like a set of metric socket extensions, even if cats are full of darkness and evil.
We got older, and the whippings got worse: harder, longer, louder. I have no illusions about any angelic goodness in children, knowing what I know of the heart of man, but this was starting to feel like child abuse.
“If he keeps that shit up,” Bird said, “I’ll fucking kill him.”
And he kept that shit up, and nobody killed him.
Mom would intervene, I hoped, at some point. If it got bad.
I knew she must have secretly believed it was wrong, or a bit much.
“Some parents put their children in time-out,” she said to Pop one day. “Like, when kids misbehave, you put them on their beds or the bottom stair.”
“Stair? We ain’t got no stair,” Pop said. “TV’s turning you crazy.”
“It’s more humane,” she said.
“Humane?”
Pop searched his vocabulary for this term, and found only a picture of a florist.
“When do you whip them?” he said. “Before or after the stair part?”
Something was in the air, you could tell. Times were changing. We heard things on ABC’s newsmagazine 20/20, where Hugh Downs would detail the horrifying ubiquity of child abuse in America, calling it rampant, especially in more rural communities, suggesting that if you had at least one relative carrying a shotgun or food stamps, there was a high probability you were being abused at this very moment, but also that signs were looking up, that America was getting wise to its warlike ways and learning to embrace more humane childrearing habits that involved what seemed like excessive talking and hugging.
Around junior high, I read something in one of Mom’s Reader’s Digests about child abuse, and they provided a toll-free number and a list of suggestions, including the procurement of a camera to document the abuse.
I happened to have such a camera, a Polaroid.
And I wondered.
And I wished.
I wished it were easier. I wished that Pop read things like Reader’s Digest, so he might be moved by its persuasive arguments about the power of human love and how hitting your children with such violence could lead to all sorts of pathological behaviors, such as them hitting their children, which were your grandchildren, which you had caused to be hit, and who would hit their children, your great-grandchildren, a whole lineage of big people hitting small people, and the small people attempting to flee, to fly, to run far away, so far, perhaps across oceans, even.
Was it really child abuse? How could we know it was wrong to hit things? We grew up hitting things: at school, on the field, in the woods. It was only normal that somebody would want t
o hit us, and why should we stop them?
All I knew was, I was ready to do something about it.
If Pop hated our walking around the house in our underwear, then he really hated our standing there, watching our mother urinate. I don’t know why I enjoyed conversing with my mother while she sat on the toilet, but I suspect it had something to do with every child’s fear that when a mother is out of sight, she might be enjoying herself.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” she said, that morning.
I guess I was about fifteen when this happened.
Mom and I talked about everything: books, foods, comedians we’d seen on The Tonight Show, bits I’d heard on A Prairie Home Companion, faults of logic she had perceived in sermons, new ways scientists had discovered for children to die tragically.
It was Sunday, the master bedroom, she in the toilet and me just beyond.
“What’s for lunch?” I asked.
“Can’t I ever be alone?” she said, the tinkle of her sweet, maternal waste plinking into the toilet. I should’ve let her be, I knew, but she was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a slave.
“Which tie should I wear to church?” I said, shoving both through a crack in the door.
Pop came into the bedroom.
“Your momma’s in the toilet, boy,” he said, and then he started hitting me with a hairbrush. Really hitting me. I ran around the room, evading the brush like a raccoon that had stumbled into the cottage of an angry maker of funny raccoon hats.
“Stop, please, no!” Mom said, from the toilet.
“Come here, boy,” Pop said.
He set down the brush and took up his belt.
As he whipped me, hard and ruthlessly and with abandon, he made loud declarations about how wrong it was for a boy to look upon his mother’s nakedness, and I reeled through the Bible concordance in my mind for some applicable verse, but it’s hard to do research when you’re being hit with something that used to be part of a cow.
By the time he was done, I was on the floor, a puddle of son.
“Go dress for church,” he said.
The only thing I felt capable of putting on my legs was some sort of healing cream, or holy water.
My plan was to crawl back to my room and pray to Jesus for a wheelchair, so I crawled, passing Mom in the hallway. I wanted her to see me crawling, so she would have more to testify about in the trial.
“I’m crippled,” I said.
I pulled up my shorts and showed her the stripy welts that had begun to rise from the back of my knee to my lower back, and on my arms, long red ribbons. It was strange, knowing that the worst physical pain you’ve ever experienced was caused by the man who’d brought you into the world.
She said nothing, tried not to look at me.
“It’s child abuse,” I said.
I grabbed carpet toward my bedroom, found my Polaroid and the toll-free number. I locked my door, disrobed in the mirror. Was this normal behavior for a father, a son? How many more times would I have to fly through the air, and then crawl through the house?
I took pictures of my naked bottom, which required my assuming certain positions that might have gotten me burned at the stake in an earlier century. I picked up the phone. What would they do to Pop, exactly? Would they send an agent to investigate? A sheriff’s deputy? Would we be on television? Cops? Would the world have to see these pictures?
I put the phone down.
I picked it up again.
Was it wrong, what he was doing? Yes. It was too much. I knew that now.
Did I hate him? Probably. I have never really been into hating people for doing terrible things, not because I am filled with tender mercies, but because I have always preferred to hate people for smaller crimes, such as not having prominent moles removed. And to be frank, I couldn’t disentangle my hate from my fear. The man was my father. Whatever was in him was in me. A frightening prospect. If there was something about him I hated, I’d just be hating myself, and I couldn’t bring myself to hate me, as much as I tried. I just had too much in common with me. We went everywhere together, even took baths together. But not Pop. I took no baths with Pop. And I had a special power that allowed me to go places he could not, which I’d begun to think might be a good idea, to keep him from hitting me, and to keep me from hating him, to keep me from wanting him to die.
And sometimes, that’s what I wanted.
Sometimes, I really did want him to die.
However, I also pitied him. The more I read, the more I learned, the more I looked down on him and the smallness of his philosophy.
I was not a bad kid, not really. I could hear Pop now: And how much worse would you be, boy, if I didn’t do it? And honestly, I don’t know. I looked at the Polaroid. The image of my buttocks was ghastly. I put the phone down. I would not rat out my father. Other things could be done to get justice. I could major in performing arts, for example.
Something inside me died that day; something else came alive.
All boys have a bridge to their fathers, or sometimes it’s grandfathers, uncles, teachers, a gangplank over which stagger the lessons of manhood. At some point in the boy’s life, that bridge is savagely burned, as if by a retreating army, and the boy will be alone, and no longer a boy, but something not quite a man, and I was coming to see that my bridge was on fire, would soon be gone, and that when it burned to nothing, I would be alone, and free.
I would run away.
I knew that others did it—because they’d been hit or burned with irons or starved or sexually violated. Occasionally some adolescent from our community would go missing, and we’d be told by adults that these young people were “going away for a while,” usually to stay with a cousin in Alabama, usually because they needed to work out some things, usually out of their uteruses. But most did not leave.
Why not? Was it something in the water? The irresistible tug of the land? In all our years at this place, Bird and I had mapped just about every square inch of ground on either side of the highway as deep into the trees as any child might want to venture, had found its secret places, its veins of clay, waterfalls, abandoned cabins, springs of crystal waters, artifacts in banks of mud, bones across the roots of fat old trees. Its mysteries were endless, a labyrinth you didn’t want to leave, with its own private Minotaur.
We were aware that other places existed, thanks largely to the news: that Los Angeles was a place of Gang Warfare and Chicago was a place of Gang Warfare in the Snow, that New York was a place where residents enjoyed a tradition of being stabbed and mugged in close proximity to well-regarded museums. Nobody ever came to us from these places, and we knew that if we went there we would get AIDS.
The only other place that seemed to matter was the one where Jesus lived, and we sang about it at the Church of Christ at least once a week. “Some glad morning when this life is over, I’ll fly away,” we sang. The message of this song was that you could leave Mississippi, but you had to die first.
“I’m getting the fuck outta here,” Bird had always said. “And you better, too.”
Pop might’ve been burning the bridge between us, but he was also holding on for dear life. I made many feints at leaving, applications to distant boarding schools that accepted me, offered scholarships, which he ignored.
“Do they even got a baseball team?” he’d say.
I’d be invited on a family vacation by a friend to some distant state, on a mission trip to South America, but always, he said no. Everything was no. Leaving was no.
“He’s afraid,” Mom said.
“Of what?”
“That you won’t come back.”
I applied to distant universities, and he lost the applications, or laughed.
“Notre Dame?” he said. “You ain’t a dang Catholic.”
I felt that since I’d lived through Pop’s own inquisition, I could probably handle whatever the papists had in store. I tried to tell him, but he couldn’t hear me, that I’d never felt at home here. Books had given m
e a thousand vistas onto a thousand worlds, worlds without goats on roofs or chickens in trucks, worlds that I’d heard were in fact real, were realer even than anything on NBC Nightly News, and which could be reached by conventional methods of transportation, such as burro, or bus.
There was something desperate in Pop during my last few years in the house. He hit me hard, so hard, hard as I’d ever seen him do, but there was none of our old dance. I did not fly. I couldn’t. Something inside me had turned to stone. I was becoming a Stonehenge, just like him, and he held me tighter, gripping my arm, because he knew, when he finally let go, I would not be coming back.
And that’s when I came through the living room in my underwear.
He started hitting me almost immediately, striking me in thrilling new places, such as my knees, and shins, and throughout the rest of my Demilitarized Zone. Mom shrieked in horror, pulling at Pop to stop.
It was a small laundry room, and we were all in it, along with a week’s worth of laundry and a freezer full of deer sausage, and Pop lashed out, literally and metaphorically, at any piece of me he could get at, while I found myself ascending the dryer that held my missing pants, climbing in reverse, as if by magic, without even the use of my arms, which were protecting my tender exposed regions from the cobra of his belt.
“No, no!” Mom screamed. “Stop, stop!”
I have lived a long time in that moment there on the dryer, held it captive like the memory of a first tornado, a last kiss. I go back to it often, and have to admit to myself, Yes, I hated him. Right then, I did. And I knew he would die one day, and I thought of that day often, and what it might free me of, and felt ashamed.
What did he think he was doing? Trying to raise me right? Did it work? Had he prepared me to venture out into the world’s most dangerous latitudes, places that scared him so much, such as coffee shops and bookstores, with their dangerous poets and light jazz?
Later, when I went to these coffee shops, and we got to talking, I told a few close friends about it.
The World's Largest Man Page 15
