Eddie’s face lit up with a big smile. I reached down into my pocket and pulled out a night crawler, along with a handful of dirt I had managed to hide from Feenie and The Old Man until just the right moment. Eddie and I always put a little bit of dirt in with the worms when we caught them, just to make them feel at home.
He couldn’t move his arm well enough to take the worm from me, but I could tell he was happy with the gift. I sat the worm, along with the dirt, on a table next to the bed. Feenie wouldn’t let him keep it, declaring “you can’t bring this stuff into a hospital. There are lots of germs and you can make a lot of people in here even sicker than they already are.”
“When are you comin’ home, Eddie?” I asked. “I got two empty buckets. The creek is fillin’ up with crawdads.”
He didn’t say too much at first. I think it must have hurt to start talking. After he started talking, he could easily finish what he was saying. But he seemed to have some problem when he started to say something. Making some pretty awful faces, he said “soon as the let me out.”
I poked at the cast on his arm, asking “does that hurt?”
He replied “no. I can’t feel any pain there, or on my leg. They itch a lot sometimes, especially at night. Now I know how James feels when he takes that wire brush to his arms,” referring to how James used to scrub his arms completely raw, especially in the summertime, when sweat would aggravate his eczema. He’d sometimes scratch until we could actually see the muscles under his skin.
We went to the hospital each of the next four days. Each day, Eddie found it a bit easier to talk. By Thursday, he was able to use his core muscles to lift his head and back off the bed. By Friday, though he still looked badly beaten and bruised, he was talking and laughing, showing little of the pain and accompanying facial contortions I saw earlier in the week. I didn’t go on Saturday, because The Old Man worked a double shift at General Tire.
Finally, on Sunday, The Old Man brought him home. Wearing crutches, he couldn’t move very fast. I ran out the front door to greet him. His formerly dark blue and purple bruises were beginning to soften to yellow, some almost disappearing completely. I wanted to go crawdad hunting, but Feenie and The Old Man said there would be none of it until he got his casts off.
Those four weeks were rough. When he came to the creek with me, he had to sit on the bridge, while I caught the crawdads by myself. I often thought about trying to coax him into the creek, but I always stopped short. Not only would Feenie and The Old Man beat me senseless, I knew there was a good chance areas under casts could become infected with parasites from the creek water. For the same reasons we didn’t drink it, I didn’t want it getting into any of his open sores. Besides, an infection would only have meant more time for him not to be allowed in the creek, which would have defeated the whole purpose.
Sometimes, when Sis saw him sitting on the bridge, she would come out to talk to him. He tried act like he was as interested in crawdad hunting as he was in her, but he had a tough time balancing both. How could he be concentrating on crawdads if he was laughing with her, up on the bridge?
You know, looking back, I think he even liked her. Every time I talked bad about her, he would say something like “she’s pretty funny,” or “she’s the only person I know who doesn’t look down on us just because were poor.”
Come to think of it, she never did make fun of me for being poor. Of all the things she teased me about, and there were many, including my sissy arm, my poor aim, my inability to catch every crawdad, and my funny haircut, she never once teased me about being poor. As I lie here, I grudgingly acknowledge that she and her sister may not have been the spawn of the devil I once thought they were.
Even after Eddie finally had the casts removed, he had to wear a back brace for another month or so. Though he still couldn’t bend well, or lift heavy rocks, he was allowed to get back in the creek. I was happy to see him getting back to normal. I think Granny felt sorry for him, because she didn’t have him working for her the whole rest of the summer. He spent every morning in the garden with me, lightly hoeing and weeding. We spent almost every other waking hour that whole month on the creek.
September rolled around. It was a pretty uneventful month, other than suffering the annual anxiety of canning season and returning to school. October, however, produced the event that forever changed the family.
Chapter 10: The Well
I don’t remember the exact date, but I know it was Saturday, because it was laundry day. I had already made countless trips to the well to bring in water on that miserable October morning. And I had to do it all alone, since Eddie was working at the greenhouse.
Cold drizzle had fallen for most of the day. Earlier, when I went out to get the first of the day’s water, I wondered if I would see snow before the day was complete. Rain wasn’t heavy that time of year, but once it started, it never seemed to stop. Weather followed the same pattern, year after year. Two weeks of light rain changed into a few weeks of cold drizzle. Drizzle turned into flurries. Soon, snow blanketed the ground for the rest of the winter.
Sunshine came in limited supply from October to April, breaking through the clouds once every three weeks or so. Eddie said he was going to move to one of those places he saw on the television where they played football in the sunshine in January. Places like Arizona or California or Hawaii.
Don’t get me wrong, things weren’t all bad in late fall and early winter. We looked forward to months of delicious venison. The garden didn’t have to be hoed until the following April. Wet snow allowed us countless snowball fights. But the cold drizzle also meant we would soon be waking up cold, walking through that hollow, and freezing our butts off. It meant months of numb feet, numb ears and lots of fighting.
Lee washed clothes all day, and I brought bucket after bucket of water in from the well. We had been following a routine. I brought water in and he helped place it on the stove. In return, I helped him scrub clothes on the washboard until the water warmed on the stove. We both carried the old dirty laundry water out. Together, we filled the tub with clean water, then he started washing as I brought more water in.
I brought in what I believed to be the last four buckets needed. I helped Lee wash the remaining clothes in the tub and helped him hang them up on one of the three makeshift clotheslines we put up in the living room earlier. On gloomy days, we usually dried the clothes inside, to make sure we’d have clothes available for school on Monday. We’d usually get two sets washed and dried before The Old Man got home from the General Tire.
After Lee and I dumped the final tub of soapy water, we filled it up with fresh, warm water from top of the kitchen stove. I took off my shirt and kicked off my shoes, enjoying the warmth radiating from the coal stove.
Feenie popped her head out from behind the dark green wool blanket. “What the hell are you doing? You still have all of your dad’s work clothes to wash. You’d better get off your ass and get some more water in here.”
My heart sank. I thought “The Old Man’s work clothes? That will mean three more tubs of water: one to wash his filthy shirts, one to rinse those shirts and wash his dirty pants and smelly socks, and one more to rinse those.”
I complained “we’ve been washing all day and it is freezing outside. Can’t we do that tomorrow?”
She replied “Ok. I see. You don’t feel like getting a little cold and wet, huh?”
I guess I hadn’t mastered the nuances of sarcasm yet. I was happy she saw things my way.
She slipped her shoes on and went out the back door. I figured she was going out to see for herself how nasty it was. “When she feels how cold it is out there, she’ll understand,” I thought.
She walked back into the house with a set of shackles that The Old Man brought home a couple of months earlier to take over to the iron and metal junkyard to sell. I remembered playing cops and robbers with Eddie, locking them and unlocking them. We tried to run with them locked around our ankles.
She grabbed me
by my right arm and dragged through the house, out to the well, where she routed one shackle behind one of the five legs that secured the well cover to the ground. She yelled at me to stand still as she clasped a shackle to my left leg, then my right. She abruptly turned and walked back into the house, ignoring my pleas to give me another chance.
Though the drizzle had let up a bit, transforming into a fine mist, each droplet that formed on my skin felt like ice. Two hours separated daylight from approaching darkness, when it would become unbearably cold. I tried to escape the shackles, but they were too strong. My only saving grace was that it was Bingo night. She’d have to let me out before she left for Bingo.
Using every ounce of energy I could muster, I tried again to break the chain attached to the cuffs. Needless to say, I failed miserably. I looked around for something to cut them off with. Any tool that might have stood a chance against them was fifty feet away, resting comfortably on the back porch.
I started to shiver. I saw Lee looking at me through the kitchen window, tears streaming down his cheeks. I didn’t know if he was crying for me, or if Feenie had done something to him, like burned him with hot water, or hit him with a skillet. Either way, I knew he couldn’t help. If it was James, I would have stood a chance of getting free. But Lee couldn’t stand up to her.
I considered the worst. “I will freeze to death and become a statue forever,” I thought. I hoped she would at least put me on the front porch once I was frozen. I didn’t know if statues were capable of seeing, but if they could, I wanted to be on the front porch so I could see my brothers coming and going, even if I would never talk to them.
I then thought about how long it might be until The Old Man got home. “Although he didn’t usually get involved in matters like this, he wouldn’t allow her to let me just stay out here and freeze to death,” I thought.
I did consider that she would try to convince him I did something so terrible that the only reasonable punishment was to chain me to the well. But even The Old Man would agree she overreacted, given the weather.
I huddled up next to the well. It felt colder than the surrounding air, so I was careful not to lean on it. I positioned myself to allow the well to help block any breezes. Even slight gusts felt like a million needles piercing my skin. Thank God the air wasn’t blowing too hard.
My spirits lifted when I saw Eddie running towards the house. Granny had let him off early enough that he’d be able to make it home before dark. He just made it over the little wood bridge when I waved my arms, hoping to catch his attention.
He sprinted over to me. Seeing that I couldn’t stop shivering, he ran into the house through the back door. As my eyes followed him, I saw Lee, still watching me, through the kitchen window. While demonstrating to him that I was getting very cold, Eddie ran out to me with a shirt and a big wool blanket. I didn’t care the shirt was too small. I quickly put it on, then wrapped the blanket around me. I immediately felt much better, much warmer.
He asked “why did she put out here?”
“She got mad that I didn’t want to bring more water in.”
He said he was going to go inside and act like he was just getting home. He said he was going to try to find the key and open the shackles.
After a while, I heard him plead with Feenie to let me go. I heard him say he was going to get the police. Then I heard a bone-rattling slap, followed by Eddie’s crying. Even after that, he pleaded with her to let me go.
I knew she had the final word, at least until James got home. “Feenie might beat James, but he would find a way to get the keys,” I thought. James had been becoming more and more hostile toward her. A few days earlier, James told The Old Man he was ready for Feenie, declaring “if that bitch lays another hand on me, I’m gonna kill her. How she dies, I’ll leave to you, Geezer.”
About a week earlier, after she smacked Lee in the head with a skillet, James went so far as to tell The Old Man he’d prefer to strangle the very life out of her, so he could watch the look on her face as she slipped away. When he said “I’ll cut her throat and make it quick, if you prefer,” The Old Man slapped him across the face.
I think The Old Man knew that if he wasn’t home to stop it, James would eventually take her down, even if it meant getting stomped by The Old Man for doing it.
Eddie snuck me out a peanut butter sandwich and some cabbage. Sadness filled his eyes as he handed it to me. He said he wished it was him chained to the well, instead of me. A big, red handprint covered the left side of his face. Blood dripped out of the corner of his mouth.
“Mike,” he said “I wish I could leave here. Other people don’t live like this. When I collect money from the paper route, people let me inside their houses and….it’s different…people just live different than us. I want to live in one of those places. I see kids in those houses with their moms and dads. They’re not yellin’ or beatin’ each other, or talkin’ ‘bout killing each other. It ain’t normal for kids to be thinkin’ of ways to torture and kill their moms.”
I really couldn’t grasp what he was talking about. I assumed all parents treated their children as ours treated us. But since he began delivering papers the previous September, a job Feenie got him, he talked a lot about how other people lived. I was just happy it wasn’t me who had to get up and walk that route in the winter with the weight of ninety newspapers.
“You need anything?” he asked. “I couldn’t find the key. I think she has it in her bathrobe pocket.”
“No. Just stay out here and talk to me. The Old Man will make her let me out of here as soon as he gets home.”
He said “no, The Old Man is unloading a rail car at the foundry today. He probably won’t be home ‘til real late. I don’t think she is goin’ to Bingo, either. Otherwise, Jeff would be here to watch us.”
I figured I was finished. She wouldn’t let me out, no matter how much I cried and begged.
Eddie said “Mike, I gotta go find James. Soon as Feenie sees you covered up, she’s going to put me here, and then we’re both screwed. James will make her get you out of here. I promise I’ll find him. I think he’s playing pool at Hedrick’s. I’ll run there and I’ll be back shortly.”
Thinking about being tied up out there until The Old Man finished unloading a rail car was unpleasant. I didn’t know what to say. While I knew it would mean being tied up for several more hours, I still didn’t want Eddie to leave.
I finished the peanut butter sandwich, then went to the back side of the well, trying my best to hide the blanket from her view. “Please hurry, Eddie,” I thought as I watched him run back down the hollow. But I knew that as long as I stayed wrapped in the blanket, I would not freeze to death, so long as it didn’t start raining.
After about forty-five minutes, I saw Eddie and James running towards the house. Eddie was running as hard as he could to keep up. Darkness began to set in. James was screaming as he was running. I was sure Feenie could hear him, too, yelling “say your prayers, woman! You die tonight!”
My suspicions were correct. She met him at the door, a Pall Mall in her right hand and a big, glass ashtray in her left one.
He yelled at her “where’s Mike?” He already knew the answer to that, because Eddie told him she had me chained up to the well.
She screamed back at him “none of your damned business. Get your ass inside! You and Eddie better have this place clean in half an hour!”
He stood resolute, undeterred by her screaming, and unwavering in his demand for the key. He never before physically fought with her, fearing The Old Man. But from the tone and anger of his voice, I felt that would soon change. He screamed at her “you got two minutes to get him away from that well!”
She yelled back at him “you don’t tell me what I have!”
She then smacked James in the forehead with the heavy glass ashtray she was holding in her left hand, opening a huge gash that ran vertically from his hairline to the bridge of his nose. Blood poured down his face, dripping off the tip of
his nose.
She screamed again “I said get your ass inside and get this place clean. And I better not find a single drop of blood anywhere!”
I didn’t see what happened immediately after that. James was inside. Eddie stood just outside the door, staring at the happenings inside with a concerned look on his face. I heard a lot of yelling and screaming, some gurgling, name calling, and slapping. Feenie and James each were doing their share.
I heard James yell “I said give me the key, you stupid bitch! Where is it?”
Then I heard Feenie, muffled, as if she was having some trouble breathing, say “here, take the fucking key. Take that little bastard with you and get the hell out of here.”
James yelled a bit louder. “I ain’t goin’ anywhere, ‘cept to let Mike out, then I’m comin’ back and I’m gonna finish you off. This shit ain’t happening no more. The Old Man won’t stand up to you. I will. You are done. I’m puttin’ an end to your shit, once and for all.”
A tranquil, eerie silence fell over the house as James and Eddie came to unlock me. “What happened?” I asked.
“Don’t worry ‘bout it,” said James. “Bitch ain’t gonna pull any more shit like this. Old man is too big a pussy to do anything. He had his chances. This is bullshit. I’m going to go cut her damned throat.”
As the three of us walked back into the house, Eddie pleaded with James not to kill her. Not because he had any special feeling for her, but he didn’t want to see James get killed by The Old Man.
We stepped inside the house. Expecting a big fight-to-the-death, I braced myself. Strangely, it was quiet. “Wait,” I thought. “Was that crying I heard coming from Feenie’s room?” Yes, it was. I don’t ever recall hearing her cry before. I thought maybe James hurt her pretty badly.
She hadn’t made him cry one time with her beatings since he was eight. Some four years later, the tables had turned. James had established a new order. The Old Man was still the man of the house, but there was no doubt Feenie would have to deal with James much differently than she ever had before.
Three Minutes More Page 9
