I usually never so much as even touched the blanket that covered her doorway. But I had to know what was going on. I poked the blanket. No yelling or screaming pierced the air. I poked it again. Still no response. I reached for the blanket, frightened that Feenie would pummel me as soon as she noticed me. I peeled it back just enough that I could peek with just one eye.
She had her back to me. She was filling up a garbage bag with her clothes. I didn’t understand. “Why her clothes? Why not James’? Surely she’d have The Old Man take him and dump him on the side of the road,” I thought.
But she just kept taking her clothes out of the dresser and filling up the garbage bags.
James was at the sink, washing his forehead. After a couple of minutes, he picked up a tube sock from the floor and pressed it against the gash. A few minutes passed, and though he remained prepared for battle, he was no longer thinking of slitting her throat. He sat on the couch with a poker in his hand. If she came out of her room wanting more, he would have been more than happy to oblige.
After about six or seven minutes of uncomfortable silence, she came through the blanket with two garbage bags full. A huge knot protruded from her forehead and a sizeable cut ran across her left eye. James had punched her at least twice to get the key to set me free. I guess most any kid would feel distressed seeing his mom like that. But I didn’t. I felt nothing, indifferent.
As she walked out of the house, James stared at her. She looked at me, as if she wanted to say something, but didn’t. At that moment and for the first time in my life, I had seen my mother vulnerable. At that moment, at least to me, she was not Feenie. She was Mom.
She did not look back at James. She didn’t want to buy any more of what he was selling.
As she walked down those steps toward that old sixty-three Chrysler, I glanced over at Eddie. He had disbelief in his eyes. I think he was relieved James had calmed down. But I think he was saddened the evening turned out like it did.
Feenie said nothing to any of us before she drove away.
From that day forward, things were very different. She left us for the first time that night. At first, we were happy. But after a while, we began to realize the effect it was having on The Old Man. He rarely came home before ten or so at night. He spent just enough time to get a little sleep, then left for work before the kids got up.
I wonder where she is right now. I’ve heard people say mothers somehow just know if any of their children are in trouble. I wonder if she even senses something bad has happened to me. If I don’t make it out of here, I’ll probably get a bird’s eye view of her, provided she decides to come to my funeral. Even if I manage to somehow survive, I don’t expect her to feel any guilt for what has happened to me. I don’t envision her capable of that emotion.
Either way, I know she will never forget that night when she was knocked off of her throne.
Chapter 11: The Attic
The house on Knapp Street was an old, run-down, two story shack. Covered with crumbling, brown, tar shingles, it must have been once of the first houses built when the town was founded.
With almost no front yard to speak of, it certainly didn’t hold the play value of the old shack. It stood in the middle of a row of old houses, with two houses on each side. It seemed more a part of a senior community than a single family home. Old people lived in each of the surrounding houses.
Moving into town from the hollow was a condition Feenie placed on The Old Man in exchange for her permanent return. She told him she did not want to live so far from town, in case there was an emergency. I think fear of James had more to do with it. Either way, The Old Man agreed, and they moved us away from the only home I had ever known.
James and Feenie formed a “don’t-mess-with-me-and-I-won’t-mess-with-you” relationship. They hardly ever spoke to each other, and they never again came to physical confrontation. Even when he wasn’t working, James was hardly ever home, preferring to shoot pool over at Hedrick’s. Feenie and The Old Man didn’t set a time for him to be home. They agreed that as long as he went to school, they would not ask anything else of him.
I didn’t like the house much. We spent too much time inside. Feenie hardly ever let us go outside to play, saying she didn’t want us destroying the neighborhood. If we promised to go to the junior high school to run around, we could occasionally pry an “ok” out of her.
Inside, we had to remain quiet, careful to not disturb her. While television held tremendous appeal at first, it quickly lost its novelty. Before we had a television, I thought that people who had them were lucky. After spending so many nice days parked in front of one, I began to feel quite the opposite.
I don’t think Feenie liked the house very much, either. She seemed to take on the general feeling of the house. Studying the house from the outside, one would think its many windows allowed for plenty of natural light to brighten it. However, most of the interior rooms were so dark that we needed to have lights turned on in the daytime, just so we could see well enough to get around.
She spent a lot of time in her bedroom. In fact, I didn’t see much of her at all the whole time we lived there. She came out in the morning to grab coffee, then went straight back to her room. She came downstairs in the afternoon for about an hour before she headed off to Bingo, giving each of us a list of chores she wanted completed before she returned. She usually didn’t make it back until after all the kids were asleep.
School was due to start in about a week. I was going into the fourth grade. When we lived in the old shack, the beginning of the school year meant an end to summer fun spent exploring and hunting crawdads. But things were different in the new place. I actually looked forward to going back to school. I’d rather have been at school, where I could at least play during recess and talk with other kids, than be confined to the inside of that dark, quiet house.
Eddie always got excited that time of year, regardless of where we lived. Rather than focus on what he’d be giving up, he preferred to focus on the benefits of school. Though I hated the thought of returning in those hand-me-down clothes, he didn’t seem to mind that all the other kids made fun of us for being so poor. He used to say “I’m gonna change that. Someday those kids will be working for me.”
Feenie told us we were to stay inside. We tried our best to persuade her to allow us outside, but she quickly countered anything either of us had to offer. When she insisted we couldn’t be trusted not to disturb the peace and quiet of the neighborhood, we promised we’d be quiet and look for worms. When she said she didn’t want us tracking mud in and out of the house, we told her we would use garbage bags to kneel on while we dug. When she said we’d get sick from being out in the rain, we figured she wasn’t going to let us go outside, no matter how hard we tried.
I didn’t understand why she wanted to keep us inside. We would have been happy to head back over to the junior high to play football or anything, so long as it was outside. Plus, if we were outside, there was no chance of us getting on her nerves.
Nevertheless, we understood she was determined, so we made the best of it. After watching that television for some fifteen minutes, we decided to turn it off and play. We needed to find ways to run off excess energy, but Feenie hadn’t yet returned to her room yet that morning. If she had been held up in her room on the second floor, we would have likely held one of our patented broad jumping contests in the living room on the first floor, pushing the smaller sofa an inch or two farther away from the larger sofa for each successive jump, until one of us didn’t quite make a legal, Olympic-sanctioned jump.
Earlier, she had been sitting at the kitchen table thumbing through the newspaper, looking for food bargains. We hadn’t heard her clomping back up the stairs, so we figured we had a few minutes to chase each other before calm was to be forced on us. We ran up and down the stairs, chasing each other with garter snakes that we caught near a ditch, down around the junior high, a day earlier. I ran after him, chasing him through the living room. He slipped w
hen rounding the corner to the kitchen and stumbled into the back of Feenie’s legs.
She immediately turned around and threw her coffee on him. He hadn’t even started screaming from the hot coffee before she grabbed him. With his right forearm firmly in her left hand’s grasp, she took her free hand and smacked him in the head about six or seven times with a box of oatmeal, the object nearest her hand at the time. Had we known it was one of those very rare mornings when she cooked, we would have been more careful. We probably wouldn’t have even gone near the kitchen.
After she finished beating him, she violently jerked him by the arm, making her way toward me. She reached for a handful of hair, but it hadn’t grown long enough for her to grab anything meaningful. Perhaps she could have pinched a little between her index finger and thumb, but she clearly couldn’t grab enough to do any damage. I think she forgot for a moment that she had given us our monthly buzz cuts just ten days earlier. Frustrated, she wrapped her right hand around my left ear.
She marched us both up to the attic, twisting Eddie’s forearm and my ear to the point we were more than willing participants in the march. She pushed Eddie in hard, causing him to bounce off a beam that went from the floor to the ceiling. He screeched, grabbing his shoulder. She pushed me in just hard enough that I crashed into Eddie, causing us both to fall to the floor. Before slamming the door shut, she said “I’ll be back later to collect your bodies and bury you after the rats and spiders get through with you.”
She remained just outside the door for several seconds, lingering as she always did, hoping to hear one of us say something bad enough to justify a beating. Hearing nothing she deemed “beating worthy,” she left after thirty seconds or so, muttering something about how she couldn’t believe her life turned out like it did.
I secretly wished she had lingered a bit longer, at least until our eyes had adjusted a bit to the sudden blackness. I don’t remember ever being utterly frightened like I was in that moment. Eddie and I literally couldn’t even see our hands in front of our faces. We managed to locate each other by sound. We huddled near the beam Eddie was so brutally slammed into just a short time earlier.
“Eddie, I hate rats,” I said, trembling, figuring they were already flanking us, preparing to launch an attack. It’s amazing what darkness can do to the mind. I could see twenty rats in daylight in various states of attack preparedness, and I could quickly figure out twenty different ways to take them down. But in the darkness, I couldn’t tell what those vermin were up to. “I can handle the spiders, but can you take care of the rats?”
Eddie quickly responded “yep, I’ll take care of the rats. You just let me know where you think one is, and I’ll try to scare it off.”
We quickly grew silent, figuring that if they were coming for us, we might hear them, giving us a chance to launch an effective counter attack.
While we knew they had the sight advantage, we still had size. And contrary to any reports you may hear otherwise, size does matter. We reckoned that they’d probably get in their share of good bites and scratches, but we were going to take a lot of them down with us.
We figured that if we heard them far enough in advance, we might even give them pause by stomping on a few before they could inflict any real damage. We reasoned that any military, including one made up entirely of rats and spiders, might think twice about attacking, if we simply showed them the costs of doing so would be too high.
Several minutes of complete silence were suddenly interrupted with Eddie’s giggling. “What did she hit me with, anyway?” he asked.
I whispered “it was the oatmeal box. And you’re lucky. The rolling pin was only a couple of feet away. If she’d gotten her hands on that, you’d be in a world of hurt.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he whispered back, “but that didn’t hurt one bit. The coffee burned, but the oatmeal box? If she thinks that hurt, she needs to find better weapons.”
We called her names and giggled a bit more. And though it was still very dark, my eyes had adjusted a bit. I was at least able to make out a general outline of Eddie.
Feenie must have heard us. She marched up the stairs, her legs forcefully stomping the old wood floor, announcing her fury in advance. She launched the door open and came in swinging a belt. She caught Eddie three or four times and got me three good times. As she stomped out, she screamed that we wouldn’t be getting any lunch.
While that was an inconvenience, I was much more concerned about all the rats and spiders scheming to kill and eat us. The moment she flung the door open, I glanced around the attic, hoping to gather enough intelligence to prepare a strong defense. But they never showed themselves. They must have scurried when they heard her stomping up the stairs. I was a bit distressed that none gave away their positions. Clever little creatures!
I thought about how things would have unfolded if we still lived in the old shack. Since there was no attic, she would have beaten us a bit and just tossed us outside, where we could always find apples or wild grapes or berries to eat. In emergencies, we had the garden from which we could steal a tomato or two.
In the new house, no lunch meant exactly that – no lunch. Fortunately, we were smart enough to know to eat a lot when we first woke up, if we could find anything. Peanut butter and bread could usually be found, so we would gorge on sandwiches before she made her way downstairs.
We had been huddled, sitting back to back for about thirty minutes, when suddenly we began to hear noises from near the west wall. Obviously, something other than the old books and wood that generally occupied that area was over there. My heart began racing, certain the rats had retreated when Feenie made her second trip up, formed a different plan, and were amassing to launch an all out attack. “I think they’re getting ready, Eddie,” I whispered, suddenly feeling the urge to go to the bathroom.
Eddie didn’t seem to be as alarmed as I. He said “we’re a lot bigger than rats. We probably look like Godzilla to them. They wouldn’t take the chance of attacking us first, unless they’re crazy rats. Besides, the plan is no different now than it was before. We’ll hear them coming, stomp on a few, and chances are they’ll leave us alone for good.” I hoped that to be the case, but I had a tough time calming down for the next couple of hours.
Though still very dark up there, our eyes had again adjusted a bit, aided by a tiny sliver of natural light shining through under the door. Knowing we would be able to see a little bit, at least until nightfall, helped to ease the terror slightly. We hoped to be let out before nightfall. Otherwise, it would become very dark, meaning we would have to fend off the rats and spiders in pitch black.
Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, the attic door began to slowly open. I figured Feenie was coming in to beat us some more because she hadn’t yet heard us screaming in terror. Strangely though, we hadn’t heard her stomping up the stairs to announce her arrival.
To our relief, it was Lee.
“Eddie, c’mere,” he said in a hurried and hushed tone. “I brought you and Mike a sandwich and some water. I could only bring one sandwich and one glass, so you’ll have to share. If Mom saw me with two of each, then she’d know that I was making ‘em for you two.”
We said we understood, and thanked him. We weren’t real hungry, but we didn’t know how long we were going to be there, so we knew we should eat and drink.
As Lee was leaving, I asked “Lee, can you turn the hall light on? It’s pretty dark in here, but we can see a little bit with the light that’s coming from under the door. Once night comes, we won’t be able to see at all. The rats and spiders will have a big advantage.”
Lee said he would, as he carefully closed the door, nervous that Feenie might be wondering where he was. If she didn’t hear him about the house, cleaning or making her coffee, she would have assumed he was helping us and would have put him in there with us.
Eddie and I put our faces down to the floor and watched as he walked away. After a few seconds, a tiny bit of artificial lig
ht came shining through the crack under the door.
As night approached, we spent ten or fifteen minutes planning how to defend ourselves from the inevitable cowardly nighttime attack. We figured that since they hadn’t attacked all day, they spent the entire time working together, scheming to take us down. To defend ourselves from the onslaught, we decided we would stand back-to-back and kick and stomp anything that came to get us. We also figured it best to fight them by swinging the denim shorts we were wearing.
We would have preferred to be wearing shoes. But we hadn’t planned on the day turning out as it had. Neither of us had shoes on earlier when Eddie ran into Feenie, so we had to make do with the shorts. We pulled off our shorts and each held a pair by one leg. They felt heavy enough that we would be able to kill spiders and at least hurt the rats enough to make them think twice about attacking us.
Remaining ever vigilant for a surprise attack, Eddie and I began talking about the old house in Cravensdale. He talked about the Indian. I talked about crawdad hunting. We talked a little bit about Lee. We agreed that as bad as things were, poor Lee had the worst of it.
We stayed up in that attic the whole day and a good portion of the evening. When The Old Man got home and let us out, Feenie told him we intentionally tried to knock her down so she would burn herself with coffee. He whipped us with the belt, then told us to get a sandwich and get to bed.
Lee was in the room when we got there. He asked “you guys ok?”
We thanked him again for the water and the sandwich he gave us earlier. We knew he had made it for himself, but had given up his lunch for us. We told him we must have had a guardian angel up there. We spent the whole day in that attic ready to fight rats and spiders, but didn’t end up having to.
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