Dad's Very Bad Day

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened the day of my fourth birthday, July 9, 1953, and the early hours of the next morning. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

Once again, my life was spared simply because of my Mother's weak stomach. I turned blue, and she couldn't stand to see that. If she had thought of simply hiding the rest of my body under the sheets while holding the pillow of my face, she wouldn't have seen any of my skin turn blue and I would have died. But she was in no condition to think.

Next she took me back downstairs, where I sat for a long time on the sofa in the living room while she paced and talked to herself more. Smothering didn't work, what would? She kept talking about finding a way to kill me that wouldn't be ugly. She talked about locking me in a closet and walking away. It wouldn't take that long to walk to town. Then she could hitch a ride, take a train. No, they'd find the body, she'd be charged for leaving me, it wasn't fair. She said, "Damn you! Why couldn't you just die? I HATE YOU! FILTHY BRAT! DIE!"

She got me dressed. "We're going outside to look for the damn dog." It didn't make any sense. She was the one who chased the dog off. She never cared about the dog. Why were we going to look for him? In retrospect I think the idea occurred to her as worth doing just because nothing else she wanted to happen would happen. We were going to look for the damn dog because she couldn't think of a way to kill me that she could stomach that wouldn't leave evidence pointing to her.

I was still weak. I got outside and sat on the ground. She was ordering me back up when my Father came back. He drove up and parked directly in front of the house. He came out of the car reeling. He was drunk. But he said, "I'm here to give myself up. Call the police. Tell them I killed my son."

My Mother laughed at him. "You fucking idiot! He's not dead! He's right over there sitting under the trees. You think you're so fucking strong! You're such a big man! You couldn't even kill a four-year-old! Some soldier!"

My Father ignored her taunts. Seeing me, he broke out in tears. It was the only genuine sign of concern for my welfare I experienced from the two of them that day.

Following that I was allowed to go back into the house. I collapsed onto the sofa while my parents argued what to do next. There were hours of argument. I slept through some of it, so I can't remember it all.

I know that the question of whether to finish me off was raised again by my Mother. My Father was adamant about that. He wouldn't consider it. My Mother spent a long time yelling at him for abandoning her with me. She called him a coward and a wimp for driving away. I found out that he had been gone 3 hours, and spent all the time in a bar. At first he acted humiliated but as she rubbed it in more he began to threaten to hit her if she didn't shut up about it.

Finally she started in to him about the fact that I needed to see a doctor. "If we aren't going to finish him off, we can't just leave him the way he is. He hasn't been able to stand on his own two feet for more than a minute since it happened. How are you going to explain that to your army buddies?"

This led to a long hushed discussion about my Father's career and how he had to be careful. If it got out that he caused this, it could cost him a promotion. My Mother was more than willing to help him preserve his career, but how?

One thing: they both had to be sober. So deep into the evening there was an aroma of coffee brewing from the kitchen.

Another thing: They shouldn't go to an army clinic. I didn't know it then but there was an army infirmary close to the east gate of Fort Devens near Shirley. At any time that day I could have been driven to it within 20 minutes, and there would have been doctors on duty to take care of me. It was ruled out because the army doctors would likely have reported signs of abuse to my Father's commanding officer.

So my parents called a civilian general practitioner out of the phone book. They woke a doctor up that worked out of his own home. They wanted him to make a house call but he insisted that they bring me to him. Fortunately it wasn't far. The doctor's house was on Leominster Road near the east end of Shirley, fewer than two miles away. We got there in five minutes.

As we were getting ready to go, and on the way, I was told that I had fallen down the stairs in the house. I was told, further, that if I didn't say that, "Don't think you'll be safe from us. They won't take you from us right away." I was told that the doctor would try to trick me into saying one of them hurt me. I was to just keep repeating that I fell down the stairs and not give any more details. "Tell the man you can't remember anything more, since you hit your head. You don't even know how you fell."

The doctor was a spectacled old man in his late 60s or 70s who looked a little like if Wilford Brimley put on glasses for his Liberty Medical commercials. While my parents were in the room he peeled the rags off my head. He looked and grimaced and said, "This injury is hours old! Why wasn't he brought to me sooner? Am I the first doctor to see him?"

My parents made lame excuses. They said they didn't think it was serious at first. "We thought the bleeding would have stopped by now."

The old man glared at my Father, and said, "You're with the army aren't you? I've never seen you before. I know everybody in Shirley." My Father said he was a Captain, and the doctor said, "Then you should have had enough training to know that with a head injury like this you need to think about the possibility of concussion, not just bleeding."

Then he demanded to speak to me in private. My parents stood up, my Mother saying, "Do you have to?" but the doctor ignored her and took me firmly by the hand into a small office leaving my parents open-mouthed in his living room/waiting area.

He first made small talk with me. Then he asked me questions that he already knew the answers to, like, "What's your name?" "They told you." "I want you to tell me." He asked the day of the week and the month.

He asked me how it happened. I said, "I fell down the stairs in the house." He said, "They told you to say that. What really happened?" "I fell down the stairs." "It isn't the kind of injury you'd get from falling down the stairs." "I fell down the stairs."

This went on a few more rounds. I never said anything except, "I fell down the stairs," "I fell down the stairs in the house," "I fell down the stairs, sir," "I fell down the stairs in the house, sir." Finally he smiled faintly, and took me back to the waiting area.

The doctor said there was no sign of mental impairment, but I should be taken to a specialist for further evaluation in a few days. He said there were plenty of good specialists at the base that could see me. He said any danger of concussion had passed.

On our way out the doctor told my Father in low voice, "I'm going to be keeping an eye on your family. I have sources on base. If I hear about anything like this happening again, I'm going to find out who you work for and they're going to hear from me. And no, he didn't say anything to me, except that he fell down the stairs. But you and I know you told him to say that."

Dad was unusually quiet during the trip back.

No Escape

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened the day of my fourth birthday, July 9, 1953. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

I regained consciousness on the porch. My Mother was talking to herself loudly and excitedly. She cursed my Father for driving off with the only car and ditching her with me. She cursed me for bleeding. She cursed me most for waking up. "Why doesn't he ever die?"

She said, "What am I going to do? If I take him inside he'll bleed all over everything! I don't want him bleeding all over everything!" This was the argument that prompted her to get rags from the kitchen and wrap my head with them. It would be nice to think that some mothering instinct was at work but it's very hard to say.

Once I was wrapped up she dragged me in to the kitchen. She complained that my rags were already soaked with blood. I was fading in and out. Sometimes she seemed distant. My vision occasionally blurred and doubled. My head was pounding. She took off the first set of rags, lifted me up and rinsed my head under the faucet, and then wrapped me in fresh rags.

By now, her running monologue was veering into a new subject: what sort of permanent damage might have been done. She started to say things like, "What if he can't speak anymore? What if he can't speak Hawaiian anymore? That was the only chance he had of being useful! What good would he be then?" She interrupted her conversation with herself to demand me to speak.

"Talk to me! Say something! Damn it, say something right now, or I'll take you and bury you in the woods out back right now!"

I managed to say something like, "I can talk, Mommy, I'm OK, don't worry about me."

She laughed and said, "You're the one who'd better be doing the worrying if you can't still speak Hawaiian!"

Then she took me by one arm and half dragged me and half made me walk up the stairs and around to the bathroom next to the master bedroom. She stripped me and made me stand in the tub, and began raping me anally with her fingers. She said, "I want to hear Hawaiian! Now!"

It always worked before. Whenever she raped me, Alaka'i would come to Kona's rescue. Kona never had to bear being raped. Alaka'i was the "older" personality. He was the one there for the first birthday. He was experienced with horror, so he would bear it and shield Kona from it. Then, he would curse my Mother out in Hawaiian, which she would think was beautiful because she didn't know one word he was saying. Maybe I get my xenomania from Mother. Everything is connected to everything else.

It didn't work this time. I was there as Kona. Alaka'i didn't arrive. That rape was my first as Kona. As Kona, I didn't speak Hawaiian.

It went on for a long time. I don't know how long. Maybe an hour. Maybe only half an hour. She raped me until after I lost control of my bladder and bowels. She washed me with water, then raped me some more. I would have spoken Hawaiian to make it stop if I could.

During the raping I became light-headed and felt my consciousness fading, only to be screamed at, "You're not going to faint on me!" and have cold water splashed in my face and up my nose. There was no escape.

Finally she gave up and took me in and laid me out on her bed. I was glad that the raping was over for the moment, but I was in a panic about Alaka'i. It suddenly occurred to me that when I was in the driveway and thought I was dying, it could be that just one of us was dying, and that the other one would have to go on without any help.

But my Mother's monologue was now all about killing me. Her speech was racing. She paced back and forth in front of me at the foot of the bed. She was saying that my Father was probably gone for good, and there was no way she was going to take care of me by herself. She discussed with herself, as if I wasn't in the room, how she could finish me without being charged with murder. The discussion was frantic and chopped, with different refrains mixed together, repeated over and over again.

"John was the one who punched him. He's the one they'll convict," was one refrain. Another was, "I can smash his head with a shovel, and bury him so far in the woods they'd never find where I did it." Another was, "I don't have to smash his head, if I bury him he'll die soon enough anyway. Just so long as the police can't hear him making noise when they come looking for him."

Finally she decided she wanted to "get it [my dying] over with." She said I'd be easier to bury that way. She took the pillow out from under my head and put it over my face. As Kona, I felt relief again that I might be able to join Alaka'i in the ultimate escape. But I struggled anyway, because you can't help it. When someone's smothering you, the panic and fear and struggling just happens.

Boys Bleed

My 4th birthday was uneventful until my Father arrived home from Fort Devens. There were presents. I remember two of the presents.

One was a Fisher-Price educational toy that consisted of a plastic weighing balance with weights in the shapes of digits. The weight of each digit was proportional to its value. So you could learn adding by discovering that 2 and 3, for example, exactly balanced 1 and 4, but not 8 and 9.

One was a Raggedy Ann doll. I really despised that one. It looked like an evil witch to me. I hated her almost as much as "Teddy", the bear my Dad gave me on my first birthday, the birthday that by now was a nightmare best forgotten.

I didn't get long to play with the presents because my parents said that for another present they were taking me out to a nice dinner. The self-serving aspect was obvious to even to me, the 4 year-old. But I shrugged it off, knowing that I was going to be leaving for Hawaii. Or half of me was.

My Mother was slow getting ready. She had to "put on her face." So Dad and I went out alone to the car. He got in the driver's seat. I slid into the back seat from the right side. Alaka'i assumed control, and said, in Hawaiian, a short speech he had composed and memorized. The gist of it was, "Father, though we have had our difficulties, you are an honorable man. So it is right I tell you I leave now for Hawaii. Keiki Kona will stay, so you won't be losing a son. I am sorry to have to leave, but since we can't get along, this is for the best for both of us."

Alaka'i's idea was that he would give the speech first in Hawaiian to give my Father an opportunity to show off his knowledge of that "beautiful language", and then, only if necessary, translate. Translating became urgent when my Father turned red and screamed, "HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU NOT TO TALK LIKE THAT! YOU SPEAK ENGLISH AND SPEAK IT NOW!" He jumped out of the front seat and ran around to the passenger side of the car.

So Alaka'i said, quickly, in plain English, "I'm going back to Hawaii. Goodbye, Daddy."

As the words left my mouth, Dad was at the passenger-side back door and hauled me out. He shouted, "YOURE NOT GOING ANYWHERE! YOU'RE NOT TALKING TO ME LIKE THAT! NO KID OF MINE IS TALKING TO ME LIKE THAT!"

My Mother walked up, face intact, in time to hear that and see him draw his fist back and give me a roundhouse punch on the left side of my head. The force threw me to the ground, where my right temple struck a large rock jutting up from the earth.

I sprang to my feet immediately and ran from my parents around the front of the carand south along the long driveway in front of the house toward Leominster Road. I would escape yet running that way. I got about 100 feet and felt a wetness and heard my Mother scream "LOOK AT THE BLOOD! HE'S GOING TO DIE!"

I thought she couldn't mean me. I was alright. I stopped and turned around to see who was going to die. When I looked back I noticed out the corner of my right eye that a fountain of blood was striking the dirt to that side. I felt sick to my stomach as I realized it was my fountain of blood, from my temple.

My mother had been bringing the dog Koko out to go with us. She was preparing to put him on a leash. In the excitement he got free and ran toward me. He ran up and found the puddle of blood that I was creating, and he began lapping it up.

My Mother couldn't take the sight of that. She could demand my Father kill me, over and over again, but she couldn't deal with anything as gross as the dog licking up my blood. I can't complain. I'm alive today because of her revulsions.

She started yelling at the dog now. "You horrible, horrible, animal! Get away!"

She ran up to us and chased Koko away from me, just as I dropped to my knees dizzy from the loss of blood. I said, "Please don't hurt him. Let him drink, he's just a dog, he doesn't understand." At the same time I saw the car's tires spin gravel out as my Father drove off by himself, and turned back once more to see him leaving.

The car with my Father driving passed Koko, who was by now twenty feet from my Mother and I. Koko was standing there looking back at me and my Mother, and she yelled at him, "GET AWAY, YOU MONSTER!" and he ran off at top speed in the direction of the receding car as if in obedience.

I was left alone with my Mother. I passed out, relieved at the thought that I was dying, and that Koko had also gotten away.