Heart of a Tiger: Growing Up With My Grandfather, Ty Cobb

by Herschel Cobb

  I tried to wriggle away, but his grip was like iron. He was not going to let me go. I was half crying, mumbling a protest, but no real words came out. Daddy again put the shotgun in my arms. My shoulder was throbbing with pain, and my body was trembling. I was so scared, my eyes saw the cracked veins in the whites of his eyes, every line in his face, every mark on his teeth, every movement of his tongue, and every bead of sweat on his forehead. The awful pain was going to happen to me again. He forced my left hand tightly under the barrel and pulled my right hand onto the trigger, saying, “Now, you’re going to do this, or else. Look down the barrel and pull the trigger.”

  I was terrified, certain he would hit me if I didn’t do as he said. I looked down the barrel, trembling. My shoulder ached with the pressure of the shotgun. I felt utterly doomed.

  Out of nowhere, a hand grabbed hold of Daddy’s wrist. The fingers wrapped around and squeezed. The hand that was holding my finger on the trigger grew still.

  “Enough, Herschel. That’s enough. Leave the boy alone! Do you hear me, leave him alone!”

  Granddaddy’s voice was strong and determined. His face was wedged between Daddy’s and mine. I watched his grip tighten around my father’s wrist and fingers. Granddaddy’s knuckles turned white and the muscles of his forearm stood out, quivering. His wrist looked huge, and his fist looked like iron. He was not going to let go.

  “Herschel, enough. Do you understand me, I said enough. You’re not going to hurt him. We’re going home. Now!” The intensity in his voice was palpable. This was a man who would never back down.

  I was only inches away from both their faces. Granddaddy’s whiskers were dark, and his jaw was fixed. They looked directly into each other’s eyes for what seemed like forever. I could feel the heat of their breath and smelled their sweat. I was still trembling when I felt my father’s hands let go of mine. As he stepped away, Granddaddy caught the shotgun.

  My father uttered a piercing, loud, “Shit!” as he stormed away.

  Granddaddy didn’t pay him the slightest attention. He rubbed my shoulder, knowing how much it hurt. “Hersch,” he said evenly, “I want you to get your stuff together and stay here.”

  He let go and I stood in a daze. My head was still ringing, and my shoulder and chest hurt. I didn’t have words to thank him, just feelings. They flowed throughout my entire body. My father would have never stopped. I was certain my grandfather saved me.

  The hunt was over. My father deposited his guns in the boat. Granddaddy gathered up the dead birds and put them into the boat, then returned for the rest of our stuff. I followed him to the outboard and scrambled to the bow, where I slid down and crouched between the forward bench and railings. Dad grabbed the tiller, and Granddaddy sat on the middle bench.

  Riding with the current, we motored swiftly toward the cabin. My fingers clung fast to the railings; I pulled up my jacket collar to cover my cheeks and hoped nobody said anything. I tried to keep looking ahead, but sat sideways so I could steal an occasional look at the two large men behind me. Daddy’s eyes were frozen on the hazy distance in front of us, refusing to acknowledge me. Granddaddy sat hunched over, glancing back and forth at his son and at me. When his gaze landed on me, he seemed apologetic, almost mournful. When he looked at his son, his jaw muscles tightened, as if haunted by what he had witnessed. He knew his son was a bully, but he had never seen the brutality taken out on a little boy. He looked like he might throw up.

  Later, when I was a teenager, I once asked Granddaddy about this trip. His answer was a clipped, unintelligible whisper, and that terseness stopped me from asking again.

  Shame and disgrace had soured the hunting excursion. Nobody spoke while we motored back to the cabin, or while Daddy tied up the boat, put his engine away, and Granddaddy loaded the shotguns and gear bag into the Packard. I stood near the car, rubbing my sore shoulder. Nobody went inside the cabin, and we left the sleeping bags and all the feathers. Daddy shuffled with his head down to the driver’s side and climbed in. Granddaddy got in the other side, and I hurried into the back seat, not looking up. I wanted to disappear, become invisible. Daddy started the car, gunned the engine, and spun the wheels as he accelerated in a roar. Soon the bumpy road slowed him down.

  I was overwhelmed with tiredness and couldn’t keep my eyes open. Battling my fleeting relief at not being hurt, I felt an overwhelming sadness, like a wound, open and sucking my energy. I pushed on Babe to make room for me to lie down on the seat. I wanted only to sleep.

  When I woke up, I was lying on top of my own bed, at home, with a quilt over me. It was the middle of the afternoon. I lay motionless and listened. I didn’t hear a sound. As I pushed myself up on one arm, I felt something in my hand. It was a crumpled-up part of an envelope. I tiptoed over to the window and looked out at the front yard, dreading the sight of my father. Yet I saw no cars in the driveway. Granddaddy had left. Mom and Dad weren’t home either.

  I smoothed out the paper in my hand. Written in dark green ink was a message, which I read and re-read and savored with hope:

  Hersch,

  Remember I love you,

  Your Grandfather

  CHAPTER TWO

  223 Pierce St., Twin Falls, Idaho

  I crawled back into bed, lay as still as I could, with just my eyes peeking out from under the covers. I held the message from my grandfather in my left hand. Drawing encouragement from it, I pulled the top of my head slightly under my pillow, so as not to be seen. My grandfather had left, and that meant I was vulnerable once again.

  All of my memories of guns and hunting were terrifying. In the hands of someone who couldn’t control himself, a gun stopped being the weapon of a sportsman. My father paid little attention to the usual boundaries that are kept and respected by most men and women. This was hardly my first encounter with the raw power of guns. When I was four years old, my father took me pheasant hunting with him. We had found a spot he liked, and he reacted as if having a tantrum when several men drove up in their pickup truck. He wanted the place to himself. So he pointed his shotgun at them and fired, over and over again, until they backed up and drove away in fear. He did this so easily, as if shooting somebody meant nothing to him. All he cared was that they didn’t poach the spot he had claimed.

  In later years I realized that my father lacked the ability to feel shame for the pain he inflicted on others. He acted on his impulses, and many of them were violent. He allowed himself to be ruled by them. He derived intense pleasure from the power he wielded while acting upon them. It was terrifying and paralyzing. So while I feared his violent rages, I never could be certain that he wouldn’t inflict his sadism just out of sheer sport. That’s what happened the previous summer after he purchased a new BB pistol.

  I was playing outside, wearing shorts, when he called, “Hersch, do you want to play?”

  As soon as I heard his voice, my entire body went on alert, tensed and on guard. I looked around but could not see him. He did not sound angry, so maybe he really meant what he said. His voice had come from the side of the house by the garage, and I ran across the lawn, around the corner, and saw him standing near the side door. He was unwrapping brown paper that bound a package. He told me he had ordered a new BB pistol, better than the one he had. He ripped apart the paper on the package, opened the box, and took out a pistol and a sack of BBs.

  “I want to try this baby out,” he announced. He filled the handle with BBs. Under the barrel was a small tube that fed the BBs into the firing chamber and a pump on the handle to create the air pressure to fire the BBs. He pumped until he could hardly move the lever on the handle, then took aim at a tree growing on the divider between the sidewalk and the curb and shot. I heard a little poof-pop from the pistol and a thud on the tree.

  Excited, he shook the pistol, rattling the BBs in the handle, and fired again. Poof-pop, then thud. “Now let’s see if it really works.” He took a couple of steps back, aimed at my bare legs, and shot. The sting made me flinch and jump away. He s
hot again and again before I even knew what was happening. The stings felt like sharp needles pricking all over my skin. As I flinched to one side, he shot again, hitting my calf. Although I didn’t see blood, the stings left small red blotches all over my legs. He shot ten or fifteen times and then had to stop to pump the lever.

  I started backing away, but he yelled at me to stop. “Stay right there, Hersch. Don’t be such a sissy.” When he shot again, I tried to cover my legs with my hands, but the stinging on the back of my hands, with hardly any flesh, hurt far worse. He yelled to get my hands away, kept shooting, then pumped a few times and shot some more.

  I looked around, desperate. I wanted to run or have someone help me, anything. He yelled for me to stay put and shot the ground around me so if I moved I would be hit. I was stunned. More than anything, I was afraid of getting shot in the face and waved my arms spastically back and forth between my eyes and my knees. The thrill of his new toy had totally overtaken him. He pumped the pistol handle and kept shooting at the same time. He had poured hundreds of BBs into the handle. BBs hit all around me on the ground and all over my bare legs, as fast as he could pump and fire.

  I heard the side door of our house open and my mother appeared. She had on an off-white summer dress with puffed sleeves and a cloth waistband. I was too dazed with pain to yell out loud, but I so badly wanted her to help me. I looked down at my legs, covered with red welts.

  She came up beside him and slipped her hand under his arm, the one firing the pistol. She lightly held him while he shot me some more. She watched as I hopped madly back and forth, hopelessly trying to dodge the BBs. She did nothing. He kept shooting, and pumping, and shooting. She stood there, watching me. I was standing, dodging, looking up at my dad, over six feet tall, nearly three hundred pounds, towering over me, and my mom, standing next to him, watching him shoot me. I didn’t have any words. My head was numb, blank, and dark. I was stunned. Only my heart screamed, not in words but in feeling, screamed so loudly that it felt like a white lightning bolt piercing through my bones, my muscles, my veins, every bit of my being: I will never, ever need or trust anybody ever, ever again! I was not crying. I was spent. Dad kept pumping and shooting, but luckily, fewer BBs came out. At last he was out of ammo.

  As he reached for the sack of BBs on the ground, I ran for my life. Their voices faded as I ran across the neighbor’s front yard. There was no fence or hedge to shield me, and I kept running as fast as I could. I didn’t slow down until I had run past several houses and reached the end of the block. Everywhere else the world was normal. The sun was warm, the sky was clear and blue, and I heard the voices of other families, grown-ups and kids, talking and playing. A car came around the corner, and the driver waved, even though I did not know her. Yet all I could feel, throughout my stomach and chest and legs and arms, was the danger lurking nearby. My father wanted to kill me, and my mother didn’t care. This feeling settled in me, not as thoughts or something I figured out, but penetrating into my emotional core.

  I reached the end of the block and sat on the curb, looking across the street at the edge of town. Across the way was a field filled with the straw-colored husks of stiff reeds, standing taller than I was and thick enough to hide all kinds of birds and animals. I wondered if I could live there, hidden and safe. Encouraged by that thought, I took a running jump, leaped over the irrigation ditch, and scurried into the stalks. I felt a sharp pain in my little finger on my right hand. I’d landed hard on the stubble and tore a ragged hole at the first joint; blood spilled out. I might try to hide, but the pain reminded me that inevitably I would have to go back home.

  My father enjoyed these games with a little person at his mercy. I knew that full well by now, because they had started when I was much younger. An earlier version of the BB gun was his bullwhip. During the summer I was four, he taunted me to run across the lawn and jump over the front walkway, running from the street to the front porch. When I ran and jumped, he whirled his bullwhip and snapped at my legs. The sting was like a swarm of bees had attacked my thigh all at once. He ordered me to keep running and jumping or else he’d catch me and tie me up. Sometimes I made it across without getting snapped, sometimes not. He laughed and laughed at his increasing success as I grew more and more tired. Finally, I gave up. I was so tired and my legs hurt so much that I didn’t care anymore. I stood in front of him, and he wrapped his whip around my neck, gave a little tug, but then oddly uncoiled it. Set free, I wondered why he hadn’t yanked on it. That was the obvious end of the game. Yet when I turned around, I saw the mailman walking up the street toward us.

  The bullwhip was a modification of a more primitive game that he had initiated earlier, when Susan and I were still small enough to share a bath. We immensely enjoyed the nights when Ayako, our maid, made us a bubble bath. It was like magic to be able to disappear under the bubbles or make funny shapes. In the wintertime, I liked to take a bath, get really warm, put on my PJs with feet, and climb into bed right away. The warmth was like being held and hugged in just the right way.

  These times of innocent pleasure were destined to be interrupted by his sadism. One night Susan and I had finished our bath and were drying ourselves when Daddy burst into the bathroom. He stood in the doorway, towering over us. He took Susan’s towel from her and sank about half of it in the bath water while Susan stood naked next to the sink. She must have known what was going to happen because she started pleading, “No, Daddy, please no, please no.” He wrung the water out of the towel, took a corner of it in each hand, spun it around until it was like a thick rope that bellied in the middle, and snapped it at her butt, using the tip of the towel like a whip. She had already started to cry. The towel made a cracking sound when it snapped, and a red splotch immediately showed on her behind. I gaped, my eyes wide open, instinctively pulling my towel as close to my body as possible. Susan was crying and pleading at the same time, crouching down, trying to cover her butt and legs with her hands. King of the game, Daddy flipped the wet towel around and around again, sizing up both of us. He hit Susan again, and then yanked my towel from me and threw it on the floor out of reach. He coiled the wet towel in his hands, telling me, “You’re next. Get ready, Hersch.”

  I turned, trying to protect myself, but got whipped in the back of my right leg. The snap felt like I’d been smacked with a belt. I grabbed the spot with my hand, bending over at the same time. Tears welled up in my eyes. I thought we were done for. Susan pushed herself up against the wall as hard as she could, still naked.

  In through the open bathroom door waltzed my mother. She had her glass of whisky in her hand and said, “What are you doing? You know it’s the kids’ bedtime. Now let them go.”

  “I’m only playing with them.”

  Disregarding our terror, she walked away, calling to Ayako to come and put us to bed.

  Susan began sobbing. Caught in his game, Daddy looked at the red splotch on her leg and told her, “Put some cold water on it. It will be all right.” He then dropped the wet towel in an ugly curl on the floor and left the bathroom.

  Realizing that she couldn’t use it, I handed my towel to Susan. She dried herself, telling me at the same time, “You better be careful. He did this to me last year too, when it snowed.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off her leg, not understanding what had just happened. I asked her if it was a game. What did the snow do? She told me it was not a game at all, it just hurts. She told me that Daddy had chased her all around the upstairs, snapping at her as they went, and when she was cornered in her room, he snapped at her feet to make her jump.

  Daddy called his game “Rat’s Tail.” It did not matter if we were taking a bath or not. Sometimes he caught us in the hallway or when we were in our rooms playing. He would snap a few times in the air, coil his towel again, and snap, snap, snap. That demonstration was enough to send me scrambling. As I ran, he chased me and snapped. Most of the time I had my PJs on and it didn’t hurt so badly, unless he lashed my hands or arms.
/>   I wanted to learn how to make a Rat’s Tail, so one night he gave me a small towel. He said he would teach me. The towel was larger than my washcloth, but smaller than the one I used to dry myself. He told me to watch and began to show me. He immediately whirled his wet towel around and around into a belly-laden whip and snapped me in the hands. It stung like blazes. Smarting from the pain, I dropped my towel, only to have him snap at me again. Then he picked up my little towel and handed it to me and said to watch him. He flipped his towel around and around again into a whip and snapped me in the hands again. This time it hurt even more.

  I was backing away from him, wanting the “lesson” to end, but he picked up my towel, rolled it the right way, and handed it to me. It was soft and dry and I tried to snap him, but all that happened was the towel unraveled. He laughed and laughed. “Come on, Hersch, hit me!” He held out his hand for me to snap with my towel. I fumbled to roll it up again, but I was really just waving my dry towel at him.

  While I was fumbling, he rolled his wet towel into a whip and snapped me expertly on my bottom. I jumped with pain, and he laughed some more. “Hersch, you better practice,” he commented, and left my room. I rolled up my towel a few times, trying to make a whip, but it never worked, so I put it over my head instead and pretended I was invisible. He said he was going to show me how, but really it was a trick and a lie.

  The fear of pain and certain doom started before I actually could conceptualize the world any other way. It was as much a part of my day as getting up, brushing my teeth, and eating. When I was still too young to participate in his sadistic games, when I was three years old, my father first started in with his tales of the bogeyman. He told me that if I didn’t behave, the bogeyman was going to get me. If I made a noise or any type of commotion, he told me to “watch out.” He was dead serious, and I believed him. He went on to describe the creature in lurid detail. He told me about its huge claws and long fangs and gooey, stinky mouth. He told me it could fly and would take me away and I’d never come back. I’d have to live in a cave and eat dirt and never see my family or friends again. I became so scared that at night I hid in the center of the house, near the stairs, where there was a light, away from any windows.