a life of violence

I was born into a system of violence and malevolence. There is a story my mother tells of being bedridden with some unspecified illness while I was an infant. My oldest brother would have been almost four, the next not yet three. Justin took care of everyone by cooking toast as long as there was bread and fixing me cold bottles that my mother warmed against her body before feeding me. Breastfeeding was frowned upon as barbaric at that time. The father showed up drunk one afternoon as my mother lay in bed trying to tend to the three of us as best she could. The father stumbled upstairs screaming about fucking, lazy women who needed to be beaten to get out of bed. After a look at my mother he stopped screaming. She must have been quite ill.
My mother recalls asking him to take her to the doctor and buy some groceries for the kids. This must have set him off for she tells about him ranting and raving about being expected to do everything: work and cart her fat ass around and now buy groceries. This was just too much for him. He threw some bills onto the bed and stormed off saying he’d be back later for his things, he’d joined the army and was leaving tomorrow for boot camp. I believe a neighbor came to check on us after a few more days and provided some assistance for the four year old boy and our mother.
My mother often tried to protect us. Many of the beatings she received were because of some issue concerning one of us kids. The father would raise a hand to begin the latest round of physical beating; mother would attempt to distract or redirect the father’s maliciousness. Her distractions always proved disastrous for herself, but she created them nonetheless. If all else failed, she would taunt him about his latest girlfriend; or ask how many children he’d fathered outside of their marriage.
One of the earliest scars I received ran the length of my right leg from my knee down and curving around the bony part of the shin into the fatty part of the calf to end just above the ankle. I seem to remember being hit by a car while walking with my father, but someone else told me that the scar is from a nail sticking out of the wall that I fell against. My mother has a picture of me playing with a broom with my lower leg encased in bandages. It is clearly visible because my mother always insisted that we wear dresses. Even at the ripe old age of two.
My first recollection of violence was so long ago . . . .I was probably three years old. The father had my mother backed into a corner and was stabbing her swollen abdomen with the handle of yellow straw broom we used to sweep the floors. I was sitting on the stairs with my head stuck between two spindles supporting the banister. My parents were below me, in the hallway below the stairs leading into the kitchen area. My mother was trapped directly below me in the corner between the hallway and the kitchen itself.
My father had struck my mother so many times already that she was hemorrhaging and vomiting simultaneously. He was, of course, drunk and enraged. In between stabs of the broom he would backhand for good measure. It was not enough to kill the unborn child, he had to inflict more damage on the bearer of the unborn child. Every time she fell to the floor he would kick her before forcing her back to standing. He enjoyed knocking her down.
It seemed to me even at the tender age of three that the only time we ever saw him was when he was drunk and violent, or showing us his backside as he left again. That was the first child she lost that I was witness to. It was not the last. Nor was it the last episode of violence.
After this there was a long period of relative calm as I remember it. Long afternoons of sunshine and running outside with my three brothers and sister. One day I found a box of eight crayons that had been left on the metal doors covering the entrance to the cellar. The crayons had begun to melt and were soft and pliable as play dough, but would not leave color when applied to paper.
We played kick the can at night and my older brothers always told the scariest ghost stories. On rainy days when we couldn’t play outside, my mother would chase us around the downstairs of the duplex we lived in, usually starting in the kitchen, through the dining room, into the living room and through the hallway that I loved so much until the day when I stopped and wondered where all the blood and vomit and blackish gobs of stuff went. I didn’t recall ever having seen it cleaned up, but it was gone. I couldn’t ask anyone but my brothers because it just wasn’t done. They didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.
My father’s mother lived in the other half of the duplex. Her name was Carrie and she was very short, not quite five feet tall. She was very broad through the hips and even back then had a weatherbeaten look to her. Being of Spanish descent, Gram had a natural swarthiness that was only emphasized by the lines that time and too much trouble had engraved in her face. She seemed to like us kids well enough; and even stood up to my father once when I had wandered into her house, up the stairs and into her bedroom jerking her awake with a scream in the middle of the night.
I recall my grandmother trying to comfort me while I could hear my father crashing down the stairs in our side of the duplex. I started crying when he reached the door, cried hysterically when he opened my grandmother’s front door and screamed uncontrollably when he ripped me out of my grandmother’s arms. My grandmother’s head just reached my father’s chest as he stood there in his blue and white striped boxer shorts, but she took me bodily away from him and told him to leave me with her. He didn’t argue, he just looked at Gram strangely, turned around and left her side of the duplex without forcing me to go with him. I remember falling asleep that night thinking that I had finally been saved. I was so hurt and angry the next morning when Gram returned to me my mother’s side of the duplex with the warning that they had better do something about my nighttime wanderings. I don’t think I have forgiven her yet.