Surviving My Family, Part Two

I have siblings who seem to forget running off and leaving their little baby sister with a drunken, abusive man they still worship to this day for some gods forsaken reason. They seem to forget that same little sister, at the tender age of 5, heard them screaming while our sperm donor beat them bloody with that big, ugly Texas shaped brass belt buckle on the end of his belt. I remember it flashed and little spits of blood flew off where the pointy tip of Texas had gouged their backs while they were spread-eagled against the wall. They forget that it was ME who stood up to the bastard with the loose spindle arm I’d ripped off of the cute little short-legged chair my Pawpaw had given me because I loved to sit in it when I was visiting. Yeah. Five years old and there I am beating the living shit out of my dad’s knees and shins, (all I could reach because I was so short) screaming at the top of my lungs “I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! LEAVE MY BROTHERS ALONE!” while they first froze in confusion and then ran out of the back of the house and into the night.  Me. Five years old. Tiny little toothpick of a girl, swinging a chair arm like a billy club. Can you fathom how fucked up that is? I backed him down the hall with that chair arm, right back into his bedroom (Mom hadn’t slept in there at any point I could remember; she slept on the sofa.). Then I sat with my back against the opposite wall, glaring up at him with that club across my knees, silently daring him to be stupid and put a foot past that threshold. His eyes were wide and glassy and he just backed into the room enough to shut the door. I stayed there all night until I heard Mom’s car pull up out front. At that point, I rabbited to my room, threw on my jammies and pretended to be asleep when she came in.

I’m not certain which happened first, the chair arm incident or the first time “good ol’ J.C.” decided it would be a wonderful idea to fondle me while I slept. I suspect it was the fondling because I was scared beyond all reckoning when he did that to me and I was most definitely not afraid anymore when I fought back for my brothers. I must have been ill at the time because that was the only time I usually slept with either parent. I don’t know if he realized I was awake, roused by an innate sense I seem to always have had when something just isn’t quite right around me and reeks of danger. I froze. I didn’t know what to do. His hands were in my little flowery undies doing things grown men shouldn’t do to little girls. I knew that even if no one had told me yet. Screaming wouldn’t work. Mom wasn’t home because she worked nights in admitting up at John Sealy’s ER. I doubted the neighbors would do jack shit for me. They all thought Joe was swell. I could never figure how they kept that delusion with all of the screaming and yelling and Mom hauling ass out of there with me late at night. But, hey, it was the 70’s and you didn’t butt in because it was none of your beeswax, was it? As long as he looked spiffy when he was outside, how could you possibly believe he was a monster behind closed doors, right? Pft!  I finally just moved, made an unhappy grunting noise, purposely rolled off the bed and set to caterwauling like I wanted to all along. He tried to comfort me and tell me, “It’s okay, baby. You fell off the bed, that’s all. Just crawl back up here with Daddy.” 

“No. I don’t want you,” was all the answer he got. I snatched my stuffed toy from the edge of the bed and ran across the hall to my room. I slammed the door shut and barred it with a chair the way I’d seen people do in movies so he couldn’t get in. I cowered in my bed and I cried until I fell asleep again. The next morning when Mom came home and tried to come in my room and found the door barred, I told her some silly shit about having bad dreams about monsters in the hall and that I had put the chair there to keep them out.

I think that at some point after that, I realized that this wasn’t my fault. Something was terribly wrong and fathers just weren’t supposed to do that to their precious baby girls. That part of me got angry, oh so very angry to the point that I declared war. So, that’s why I assume the fondling happened first. I do know the events happened close together. I was never sure, but I think Mom may have suspected something was rotten in Denmark but couldn’t prove it because she taught me how to kick someone in the crotch if they touched me in ways I didn’t like. The very next time Joe decided to try and have a go at me he ended up with a nice, hard-edged patent leather little girl shoe in his nuts. From that day forward, the war was on. Where before Mom would have to drag me from my bed at night and we’d sleep in the car on the beach while Joe tore the place up, for a long time all I had to do when he would come stomping in looking to cause a drunken row was turn, narrow my eyes at him and give him that dark, feral look my best friend later dubbed the “You can die now, asshole” look. He would clamp his mouth shut, turn right back around and either go back to the kitchen to drink until he could barely walk or stagger off to bed, leaving my mother bewildered but relieved.

I know now that I did the worst thing you can do to an abusive child molester: I took his power. A little five year old girl stood up to him and showed no fear and he hated me for it because it robbed him of the only way he had to not feel like a puny, rotten little maggot. He constantly tried to buy my affections, giving me lots of gifts. But he also tried to tear me down, too. See, right about the time I went into school, I started going from willow thin to positively rotund. They kept telling my mom she was feeding me too much when my diet hadn’t changed at all. So nothing got better. I just kept getting fatter even on a reduced diet.  He’d pick at me when Mom was at work and he was home. He’d tell me I was fat and ugly and I better marry the first boy who asked because I would be lucky to be asked at all. He told me to stop being stupid and dreaming about being something other than someone’s pregnant, ugly wife. Kid glove on one hand and iron gauntlet on the other. I guess he figured he would wear me down. No. I’ve had my stubborn streak a long, long time and I waited him out. He’d run my brothers out of the house as soon as they were old enough to either go into the military or haul ass to our half-brother’s house to live until they could figure out how to be grown men when he’d beaten them back to little boys their whole lives. Once again, they left Mom and I to deal with “good ol’ J.C” all by ourselves. There were little battles here and there, but he eventually started working on an oil rig. Mom and I could rest easy for weeks on end, knowing the fucker was miles out in the middle of the Gulf and couldn’t come home without aid of a helicopter. We probably both silently wished the asshole would fall over a rail and get eaten by a shark. I, for one, pitied any shark that might get that meal. It probably would have the most horrid heartburn ever. He would verbally beat us down while he was home which, to me, was preferable to him tearing up the house and ruining my books and toys. I would wait until he passed out, raid his wallet and give Mom what he hadn’t drunk away so she could pay bills and get groceries. When he’d bitch about where his money went, I would give him the patented saccharine sweet face and say, “Why, Daddy, don’t you remember? You ran out of money at the ice house last night. You came in cussing because you were out of money and out of beer.” He couldn’t really argue it when he’d come in shit-faced the night before and couldn’t even remember getting home, could he? And so it went.

(TO BE CONTINUED)