Truth and Consequences

Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward...Job 5:7

Sometimes a mishandled truth can be a greater casualty than silence.

If I was to tell my story, I always knew the beginning needed my mother before I was born. She needed a context, so one would understand how her jaded view of men effected my life.

My parents had expressed their love in the bedroom enough for me to be born. Later, I would learn not every child was made with love. I gave them extra credit for it, because down the broken road they certainly needed it.

My mother chain-smoked Kool cigarettes when she birthed me on February 28th, 1958. I lived in a vapor tent during my infancy. She guarded me during my vulnerable months. But far as I know she kept on smoking. I was a told a baby girl died with crib death. Her name was Karen. After I got older, my father would drive by the cemetery and remind me she was buried in an unmarked grave. I wondered what her life would have been like before me, born between brothers. I also wondered if smoking had a part in it.

Like my mother, I learned early to be a survivor. But during the most horrific event in my life, I learned that the tongue could save or sever family ties. From earliest memories I'd clung to mother like a baby sloth. I still recall the lovely scent of unsmoked cigarettes and the shiny packs they came in. Something about them were attractive and deadly, not unlike the garden of good and evil.

During those very early years when I could barely walk, one of my favorite words was Daddy. I believe it was 1960, and I was only two when an evil event took place. There was so much love around me, it was hard to believe in my virgin mind that there could danger lurking from the person I trusted the most.

Often, my father would come home and play with me and my brother. I remember him, putting me on his back and then trying to throw me off. I would hang on for dear life until my stomach hurt from laughing. Often, my father would play the part of a horse and would snicker and whinny away. Although he worked hard, he never seemed to tire of us.

One day, my father came home early from his work at the steel mill where it appeared he learned his oldest brother had cancer and would die. They opened his stomach to look inside, and it was mush. I found out later in life when my mother could fill in the missing details, that she had heard the devastating news from an aunt. She didn't want my father's family to break the news. She knew how close he was to his big brother and feared how he would react.


I vaguely remembered how I would run to my father when the door from the long porch would pop open. As I turned the corner from the living room into the dining room, I froze as if something held me back. Maybe it was father's scary eyes locked on my mother, who stopped in her tracks behind the table. She had seen the same venomous look in my father's eyes. My brother and I watched the scene unfold, my brother curled up into a corner with his big brown eyes watching, helpless as a slug.

My father darted toward my mother. Without a word between them, it seemed she knew why he was angry. As the events unfolded I would try to get closer when it seemed some force, some entity held me back. I watched in horror, as my mother tried to escape around the dining room table throwing chairs in my father's path. At one point, she had her hand on the porch door to escape when my father grabbed her, I think by the collar or hair.

He yanked her away from the door and slammed her down on the floor. She tried to get up but fell back toward our basement door nearby. He pushed her back ward against it, yelling at her. She pleaded with him, "Think about the kids! Stop! What about the kids?"

My mother tried to kick him away, but it was useless. Her legs spun like someone pedaling for their life. Then he grabbed a chair and used the legs to poke and taunt her. "You should have thought about the kids when it mattered!"

Then the blood spurted from my mother. I watched him bang her head against the basement door. In my fogged recollection, it seemed my world turned orange from the wood and smeared blood on the wall, door, and floor.

"Oh God, no my mother cried. You're killing me!" Those words: her whimpering voice haunt me to this day. Over the years, I've learned how to deal with the PTSD, but those words still haunt me to this day. I was a two-year old boy watching my mother's life ebb from her. And I could still hear cry like a helpless cat in weakened voice. "My babies, no, no, please God no."

Most of what I relate and remember had come back to me in flashbacks over many years. My memory of it was like a jigsaw puzzle where pieces stayed missing. But I did recall how when she was passing out and blood was coming from her head, he dragged her down the basement steps.

I broke free from what I thought then was my sister holding me back. But she never jumped into the fray. I vaguely remembered looking down into the basement like it was a black hole. I heard my father scolding her. And to this day, I can still remember the smell of stale potatoes below. Funny how the memory of smell lingers with flashbacks.

My father reappeared, dragging my mother up the stairs one bump at a time. His anger seemed to be subsiding. My mother moaned and muttered. "I'm dying. I'm dying."

He looked over at my brother and I standing, stammering around helpless. Something finally broke his spell. He suddenly knelt down and said to her, "I'm sorry." He lifted my mother and guided her stumbling walk through the dining room into the kitchen where there was bathroom.

My father put her head in the sink. He ran water over her head. Then he tried to stem the blood with a towel. It didn't seem to be working. "I'm not going to make it!" She cried. She stomped her feet.

"You're not going to die." He chided her, like she'd made more out of it than she should. "I bet your sorry now."

"I'm sorry. Oh God I'm sorry. I need stitches. The bleeding won't stop."

My father, whose hazel eyes shifted to a sadness when he looked at us boys. I didn't know it at the time, but he suddenly cared about being our father. Maybe he wasn't going to kill my mother after all.

Imagine what it was like for my tiny mind to possess and digest his words and actions.

The last thing I recall during that time, was how he relented, afraid my mother would die. We were summoned into the cold light of a winter day, and then into the car.

It wasn't until I was eighteen years-old and visited my mother one day in her apartment where I could explain to her about the flashbacks I'd been having in my teens. My mother filled in the missing pieces of my patchworked memory with PTSD. I explained to her how as a younger teen, I would be playing with my best friend in his house, playing tag, running around their dining table. I would freeze, go into a trance like state. I recounted to her what I remembered. I desperately wanted answers. But the one I wanted most was the WHY "Why did Dad go into a rage and almost kill you?"

My mother lifted her dry, weathered hands in the air. "Oh, my goodness, your father made his family think I was having an affair! That's how he kept it under wraps."

"I don't get it. An affair?"

"No! Your father was so close to his family and especially his older brother Frankie, that when he figured I was trying to keep the news of his terminal illness from him, he went berserk!"

That was it! It was then that I finally let tears freely sting my face. I had an answer. And I understood during my formative years after the domestic violence, my father continued to worship his family. I once came home from school to the country house he raised me in, and I found a shot glass with his fingernail scratches on it and the distinct smell of whiskey. Then I learned his other brother almost died of a massive heart attack that day.

My mother added. "Keep in my mind, his mother passed away shortly after we were married, and your brother Robert was born. The cold hard truth was, he couldn't handle a loved one's death. He came out of the great depression too. His family was insanely close. To withhold information about his brother's terminal cancer to him was a far worse betrayal than adultery."

And then I said, "So it was over his family, he nearly killed you."

"Yupp."

With tears staining my face I hugged her. My mother wasn't a hugger. In fact, I probably could have counted on five fingers the number hugs I exchanged with her as I grew up in a fractured family. But I took what she gave me. Yet, I noticed she never cried. She'd been hardened like the hammer my father used to wield over hot metal in the steel mill back in the day. I also noted though I looked like my father, I had her misty blue eyes. I would always have her eyes, something to hold on to. I too was a survivor. But I knew then there was more...

Before I left, I turned to her, "Wasn't my sister there? I remember someone trying stop me, block me from seeing what happened. She told me not to look."

My mother looked stunned. "Ann wasn't there that day. She was in school. When we were at the hospital she came home and saw the blood. She didn't know what happened. It freaked her out. She ran to a neighbor's house."

"I thought she was there. I could have sworn it." It was my turn to look puzzled.

My mother added. "I guess you don't remember the part where your father told me before we went to the hospital to get stitches. He told me, I would have to say I fell down the stairs. He told me, he would never go to prison. He would kill me first."

I froze by the doorway, listening to parts that had been buried and forgotten.

Oh, and another thing. "When I told the doctor I'd fallen, you were in the room, and with tears in your eyes, you said, "Daddy hurt Mommy. You were always my truth teller."

Then it occurred to me what good my honesty did. Nothing. Not one thing. He was never jailed or punished, unless you count my sister and brothers hatred of him as a forever punishment.

Before I walked away, I explained, "If it wasn't my sister, someone told me, someday I would understand. How is that possible? Maybe it was my imagination, but I don't think so."

My mother had no answer.

It was then that I knew, God had given me answer. I had not been abandoned and forgotten, not even on that day. I really wanted to tell her that there must have been an angel in the house that day, but it was useless. As I walked into the bright summer street into my vulnerable adulthood, I knew experts would say it was a defense mechanism of the mind. I must have invented that my sister was there that horrific day.

A heavy weight, like an anvil lifted from shoulders, as I slipped into my car. Then it occurred to me, what if it was my other sister Karen who died from crib death? What if she'd given me a message of hope that day despite the evil?