He furiously lashed into me about fifteen good licks. I don’t know if it was because we had our asses beat only a few hours before or if it was because he was real mad, but that one hurt more than most I could remember. Either way, I screamed loud enough to show him he had definitely made his point, short-lived as it might prove to be.
Shortly after he finished, he stormed back into the bedroom. We cowered, whimpering like beaten dogs. As he stood over us, he screamed for a while and called us names. I don’t remember much of what he was saying. My butt was on fire. I just wanted him to leave the bedroom. I didn’t want to be around him or Feenie. I don’t think Eddie did either.
As soon as he left, Eddie pulled his shorts down to look at the new welts forming on his butt and legs. He even had a few on his arms from where he was trying to protect his butt. Both of us sniveled for quite a while from the stinging pain. I showed him my welts. I had just as many as he did. I don’t know why, but it seemed to help ease my pain when I saw that he had the same welts as I did. He usually calmed down when he saw mine.
James said very little about the beatings that evening, preferring to read his comic his book over commiserating with us. The only thing he offered was “hey, I have faith that you two will find a way to get even.”
Eddie was both hurt and mad, insisting it wasn’t fair to get beaten so much for one stupid window. He said we had to do something. At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant when he said “the punishment didn’t fit the crime.” Now that I’m older, I fully understand that concept.
The next day, Feenie took Jeff and Tim and went to town. James was working at the bakery. Lee was doing the dishes. Eddie and I were told to hoe the garden. Before we went out, we showed Lee our bruises and welts we received courtesy of Feenie and The Old Man the night before. We told Lee that we thought it wasn’t right to get beaten so much just for one window. Lee agreed, but didn’t know what he could do to help.
Eddie had gone to the bathroom while I was talking to Lee. I was just about to make a peanut butter sandwich when I heard Eddie calling me from the hallway. “Mike, c’mere,” he said in a hushed tone.
I went back to see what he wanted to show me. He had opened the door to The Old Man and Feenie’s room. He pointed to a very nice silver watch sitting on the dresser. Even though I was standing eight feet or so from it, I could easily see the sharply defined black hands and Roman numerals against the display’s white background. The time was just a little more than half past eight.
“Whose is it?” I asked.
“Looks like it belongs to The Old Man. And we ought to take it for him beatin’ us so much last night,” he declared.
I agreed, though I told him maybe we ought to give it a couple of days. But Eddie wanted to take it right then, saying we might not get the chance if we waited. If someone did something to Eddie he thought was unfair, he’d say so, and demand justice. If he felt the offense was really unfair, that justice had to be swift. Somehow, he’d get me to agree, and we would devise a scheme to make things fair again.
We knew we’d get into a lot of trouble for taking the watch, but we took it anyway, figuring that would even things out.
I put the watch on my right hand, admiring its detail and workmanship as we made our way to the garden. Eddie started to dig a hole, and we talked about what was going to happen when The Old Man found it gone. I told him “he’s gonna really beat our asses for this one. We’ve never taken his stuff before. You sure you want to do this?”
Eddie stopped digging and said determinedly “don’t care. It’s just another ass beating. Hurts like hell at first, but we’ll get over it. Besides, if it gets real bad, we’ll just dig it up and give it back.” I was pleased to hear he at least considered things might get that bad for us.
After we buried the watch, we began to hoe the garden. Though the size of the garden suggested that two people would have to steadily work for a day and a half to finish, Eddie and I could hoe it in one long day. We declared Thursday to be hoeing day. We knew it would be grueling, but we resolved to do it all in one day, so we could spend the rest of the week catching worms or tadpoles.
By the time we finished, it was already early evening. We had worked through the day, to the point that the watch we buried so much earlier wasn’t much a part of our conversation. We talked about catching fireflies.
Feenie got back around six thirty or so. She inspected our work and didn’t say anything, so I guess it met her standards. She wasn’t the one we were worried about that night. We were worried The Old Man would go mad when he discovered his watch gone.
He made it home sometime after a quarter past seven. He took a shower. He had already been in the bedroom once and hadn’t noticed the missing watch. After supper, he left, going over to help Old Man Teter work on his sixty-two Chevy truck. Eddie and I spent the evening catching about thirty fireflies.
We worried over the next few days, certain that at any moment he would notice the watch and raise “living hell.” One day passed without him noticing it was gone. Then another one went by. After the third day, I had forgotten about it. Eddie never said much about it either, so I figure he forgot too.
Then one night about a month or so later, The Old Man came storming out of the bedroom, screaming “which one of you little bastards took my watch?”
In the month that passed since we took the watch until he finally discovered it gone, every one of us got our asses beat a number of times, and any of us had reason to take it and bury it or break it or just give it away.
He first turned to Lee. “Where’s my watch, you little klepto?”
Lee, confused, said “I didn’t even know you had a watch.”
The Old Man turned to James. “If you took it, you better tell me now. Otherwise, it’s going to get real ugly for you.”
James shot back “I didn’t take your goddamned watch. If I did, it’d be in pieces on the porch.”
I thought The Old Man was going to backhand him as he did so many times before for his belligerence, but he just kept going from one brother to the next, trying to get a confession. Eddie and I both told him we never saw the watch.
Since he didn’t find anyone feeling a pressing need to confess, he said “ok you little bastards. You know what to do. Line your asses up, youngest to oldest.” His system was simple. He would lash into us with the leather belt one time for each year we had managed to survive on this earth. I was ten, so I got ten whacks. Eddie was nine, so he got nine whacks, and so on.
We lined up as instructed. Usually that was the time when the offender confessed. Sure, there were plenty of times he beat all of our asses and still got no confession. But slightly more often than not, the offender confessed, sparing the innocent an unwarranted beating.
Before he began the whippings, he shouted “one final chance! Anyone got anything to say? I’m going to count to ten, then I’m going to start whipping some ass.”
As he began counting, I looked at Eddie, trying to get a read on his body language. Since he didn’t make eye contact, I had a tough time trying to figure out whether he felt that was one of those times when a confession was warranted. I admit, though he was younger, on matters of punishment and fairness, I usually deferred to his reasoning. I stood silent and hoped he wouldn’t crack.
The Old Man was counting in his usual cadence, shouting a number out, pausing two seconds, then shouting out the number that followed. “Three,” he shouted, walking past me as he continued to inspect the formation for signs of someone ready to break. “Four!”
He made it all the way to eight before Eddie blurted out “we did it! We took it a long time ago and buried it, the day after you whipped us for breaking the kitchen window.”
I didn’t like it, but I understood why he confessed. There existed an unwritten code amongst the kids. If someone wasn’t the offender, and was too beat up to take another beating, then the true offender had to fess up. Eddie later said he confessed for two reasons. One, James took a
pretty good beating from The Old Man the previous night, and while he could handle yet another, he didn’t deserve another one on our account. Two, Lee received a particularly brutal one from Feenie for breaking yet another plate while washing dishes earlier in the day, and needed some time to heal. “I figured we owed it to both of ‘em, but especially to Lee,” he told me.
The Old Man grabbed Eddie’s arm and started wailing on him, shouting “where’s it at, boy?”
Eddie, crying, shouted “it’s in the garden!”
The Old Man gave me my beating, then told us to get our asses up to the garden and get his watch.
Even though it had only been a month or so since we buried it, we could not remember exactly where it was. We knew it was somewhere in the potato rows, but we couldn’t remember if it was between rows three and four, four and five, or two and three. It had rained several times since we buried it, and the garden looked uniform. There were no fresh spots to indicate the ground had been dug up recently. I know – you’d figure we’d remember a simple thing like the location of a buried watch, especially one we knew could eventually cause us much trouble. But so much happened since we buried it. Between James’ encounter with the devil and the bobcat incident, I guess we had completely forgotten about the watch.
Eddie and I spent the next three days and nights looking for that watch. We didn’t look very hard during the day, but we made sure we were in the garden, digging, when The Old Man got home from work. We had a trouble light set up so we could dig at night. We dug from the time he got home until he fell asleep for each of the next two nights.
When he got home from work on the third day, he came up to the garden. By that time, we had dug up every inch of dirt between every row of potatoes. He said “you boys stay the hell away from my stuff from now on, you hear?” After Eddie and I both said “yes, sir,” he told us to put the shovels in the shed and get our asses to bed.
Strangely, Eddie and I have rarely talked about that incident in the last few weeks on the telephone.
Not long after that, three days after school started, Feenie left for the final time. I think we all knew she would eventually leave for good. She had come and gone at least seven times in the previous year, each time leaving for a couple of weeks, then coming home for a little while. Jeff and James confronted The Old Man each time she came back, asking “why do you always take her back?”
The Old Man had a very hard time explaining why. Though I knew it made The Old Man sad every time she left, I was always a bit disappointed when I came home to see she was back. At least when she was gone, the beatings subsided.
Chapter 15: Foster Care
I have no idea why anyone would choose social work as her career choice, especially those who work at Child Services. Child welfare workers are seen as meddling when investigating charges of abuse or neglect. They are run down if they don’t investigate aggressively enough, and something happens to a child they’re supposed to protect. They deal with parents who hate them. They are hated at least as much by the very children they try to help.
Mrs. Kroy was professional in every sense of the word. She never allowed herself to get emotionally attached to any of the kids she worked with. She rarely talked just for talking’s sake. Every thing she said was to make a point, and that point was made quickly and matter-of-factly.
Her silver hair belied her age. Her slender body and smooth face framed a woman thirty-five years old or so, but she looked forty-five with that hair. Not that it should have mattered. She presented as distinguished, educated, and sophisticated. I hate to admit it under these circumstances, but I might have had a small crush on her.
James had met her before. She was recommended to The Old Man to help him tone down James’ behavior at school. She seemed to think the motive for his fighting was more complicated than it presented. She couldn’t accept that James simply refused to allow anyone to bully his brothers. He especially hated older bullies tormenting his younger brothers. Fighting was simply his manner of communicating that hatred.
James never spoke badly of her. He called her “an old battle axe,” but never expressed any desire to harm her, like he did Feenie.
Nearly six weeks had passed since we last saw Feenie. The Old Man managed to keep it all together for about three weeks, but eventually things inched out of control. Soon, there was little order in the house at any time when The Old Man was at work. Fighting one another daily, we broke much of what Feenie hadn’t taken with her. Jeff and James went at it almost every day, putting a hole or two in nearly every sheetrock wall in the house.
Mrs. Kroy began coming to school each Monday and Thursday to check up on us. She usually wanted the same information each time she visited. She wanted to know when I last took a bath. She asked about what I had eaten since her previous visit. Finally, she seemed especially interested in how my brothers were adjusting to life without Feenie.
On Tuesday morning of the sixth week, she told me she was ordered to find “loving homes” for the six youngest of the children. She said since no families were willing to take in six brothers, we had to be split up. “I’ve already spoken to all of your brothers, except Lee and Jeff. I’m going to the junior high next to talk to them,” she explained.
I was devastated. I spent the entire afternoon staring at the clock, waiting for the day to be done, so James, Eddie and I could talk. I expected it would be several days before she would split us up.
I was surprised to see her outside my classroom at three-thirty. I was horrified to learn she was taking me straight from school to a family I had never met.
“I ain’t going nowhere but home!” I screamed.
Mrs. Kroy, ever composed, softly said “look, Mike, it’s not permanent. It’s only until your father can create some stability.”
I didn’t know what stability was, but I didn’t need any of that. I just wanted to go home with my brothers.
“Eddie and James are on their way to homes right now,” she said.
I won’t ever forget that moment. Thoughts of not being able to see James and Eddie overwhelmed me. I instantly knew the family would never be whole again. I sat down on the floor and cried.
I was rarely one to cause a scene in school, save for fighting when the teasing became too much. But I have to say my crying, something nobody outside my family ever saw from me, drew a bit of attention that day. Thankfully, the curious kids were whisked along by teachers and the principal to their waiting busses.
After five minutes or so of my nonstop wailing, Mrs. Kroy offered her hand and said “come on, it won’t be as bad as you think. You’ll see.”
Without Eddie and James, I really had no reason to go home. I imagined a lonely house, devoid of activity. I imagined that The Old Man would be devastated when he got home. Granted, he always came home to utter chaos. And maybe he could have used some peace and quiet. But since Feenie left, he never seemed to get too angry, regardless of the condition in which he found the house. Besides, aren’t seven unsupervised boys living in a tiny two bedroom house supposed to create chaos?
I agreed to go with her, but only on the condition that she promised to let me visit Eddie and James. She said that shouldn’t be a problem.
She stopped at the Five and Dime and bought a pair of pants and a shirt for me. She said “tomorrow, you’ll be going to a new school. Wouldn’t you like to show up in some nice clothes?”
I surveyed my clothes. My green and white striped shirt and brown corduroy pants were fine with me, even if they were dirty. Although I must admit I was a bit uncomfortable having to hold my left arm to my side so other kids wouldn’t make fun of the large hole in the left underarm.
“What new school? I don’t want to go to a new school. Besides, who’s gonna help me understand schoolwork like Eddie does?”
She had no immediate answer. She paused for a while, then offered “if you have trouble understanding something, please tell your teacher. She can find resources to help you.”
I sulked in the car all the way to my new home. Mrs. Kroy offered little sympathy. I asked her about a hundred times when I could see Eddie and James. She said “we need to get you situated in this home first and then we can talk about that.”
I cannot say anything bad about my first family, Mr. and Mrs. Phares. Though they were far too young and busy to take in a child on a permanent basis, they agreed to keep me until Mrs. Kroy could find a more permanent home.
Mrs. Phares seemed saddened by my childhood experiences, and I did nothing to stop her from showering me with sympathy gifts. To their credit, neither she nor her husband yelled at me or hit me once in the three weeks I lived with them.
At my first permanent home, I learned a lot about being a personal servant. I grew to appreciate Lee’s suffering.
Mrs. Vanderwier was very heavy. She never left her big, dark blue leather recliner, except to go to the bathroom. Neither she nor her sixteen year-old daughter seemed to want to do any work. That said, they put me to work doing just about everything that needed to be done, from washing the clothes and dishes, to scrubbing the soap scum out of the bath tub. Needless to say, I quickly grew to dislike them.
I hadn’t been there five weeks when, after spilling hot coffee on “Momma Vanderwier” for the fourth time in that last week, I was removed and placed with the Gibsons, some thirty miles from my hometown.
I lived with the Gibsons for quite a while, far too often playing punching bag for their fourteen and fifteen year old sons.
When I went to visit James, I told him I was getting beat up a lot. He told me to do what I had to. I tried to stay far away from those two, since they were so much older and bigger than I. But they seemed to seek me out.
Three Minutes More Page 13
