Daily Excerpt: Blest Atheist (Mahlou) - Mercy
Today's book excerpt comes from Blest Atheist by Elizabeth Mahlou.
Mercy
The Samaritan stopped because he was filled with mercy. He also had clearly been blessed with the resources to help. I stopped by habit. Very early I internalized the concept that helping even one person toward a better life is a way to justify one’s own existence. That may well have given a positive balance to the daily abuse I experienced throughout my childhood. Knowing that someone was better off because of something I had done—whether it was teaching a kindergarten class when I was in first grade, working as the teachers’ helper in conducting an extra reading group for the struggling readers in my elementary school classroom, or serving as an evening telephone resource to the eighth-grade members of my advanced mathematics class whose teacher kept confusing us with high school juniors—established a sense of self-worth that logically should never have appeared, given all the abuse I experienced at home.
Development of self-worth was not a natural part of what passed for nurturing in our home. As the oldest and most defiant of the eight children born in rural New England to my parents in the 1950s and 1960s, I received perhaps the greatest num ber of beatings, but I did not receive the worst of them. That was reserved for Rollie, my younger brother, who was a happy-go-lucky, live-for-today fellow with sandy hair, supple body, and a smile for all occasions. When accosted, though, he had my spirit of defiance. Rollie, as a teenager, could easily have dropped Ma to the floor but had sufficient residual respect for her role as a mother not to use his physical size to return the hurts she delivered to him. He mainly used words, but no words admit ting being hurt ever slipped past his lips. Not even when he was stabbed twice, once by Ma and once by Dad. In both cases, he remained defiant.
Ma’s stabbing of Rollie was not undertaken for any reasonable motive. Reason able people don’t stab their children. In a moment of rage, Ma stabbed 11-year-old Rollie in the buttocks for putting the hamburger planned for supper that evening in the roadside mailbox where no one could find it, something he did for spite for Ma’s beating him about something else. (Rollie, like me, could be spiteful; “don’t get mad, just get even” tended to be a modus operandi for both of us.) Realizing that she had drawn blood, Ma became even angrier, not at herself as one might think, but at Rollie.
“Look what you made me do to you! You bastard!” A master at self-justification, Ma was a good example of modern-day cognitive dissonance theory, side-stepping all responsibility for the abuse she rained on us. “Don’t you dare cry, or I’ll do it again. And don’t you dare tell, or I’ll do it again. This is all your fault. If you would behave, you would have no problems.”
None of us ever knew what “behave” meant. Ma’s expectations differed from moment to moment, depending on her mood. Her flash-floods of rage, thunder storms of criticism that were punctuated by lightning strikes of negative pronouncements of our worthlessness, faked heart attacks that rarely earned her the sympathy she hoped they would, and spitting fests seemed unconnected to any particular events. Neither of our parents drank, used drugs (unknown in that part of the world in those days), had affairs, or otherwise lived anything but what appeared to a life straight from the Decalogue. (How we wished that there was an eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not abuse thy children. Instead, there was only a frightening aside about punishing children for the iniquity of their parents.) In any case, beatings were always our fault.
“Go wash your hair, bitch,” Rollie retorted in defiance, referring to the fact that when Ma’s hair was dirty she was at her meanest. I often said the same to her, including using the word bitch or other equally pejorative label. Through example, she taught us a rich vocabulary of colorful epithets at a very early age. We never used them at school or in the community, but we had much practice listening to and using them at home in spite of Ma’s threats to wash our mouths out with soap.
“Don’t you tell me what to do,” she threw back at him. “I’ll show you who needs a hair washing!” She grabbed him by the hair and pulled him to his knees. “Now, say you’re sorry. Beg me not to hurt you more!”
“Hell, no, bitch,” he said. “You beg me to forgive you!” I understood Rollie. I would never beg for mercy, either. Fighting back was what kept our self-esteem intact.
Rollie twisted away, wrenching himself free from the hand that was holding him by the hair. “Hey, bitch,” he taunted her in defiance, “You want to try for the other side? I have two cheeks. You only got me in one!”
Of course, he did not wait for an answer. He took off running. She would not be able to catch him, and by the time he would return, she would have washed her hair and mellowed or have found a different child to beat. This particular event, this stabbing, would be over. It was a completed disciplinary action.
Years later, Ma would not deny the stabbing but would try to justify it. “I did not stab him,” she told me in a phone conversation in 1998, “I hit him. I just forgot I had a knife in my hand.” As if hitting were all right!
Dad, too, had a moment of rage that left a permanent scar on Rollie’s body and an emotional one on his spirit. It was the end of the summer a couple of years earlier, and we had just finished haying the lower field. Hardly anyone in rural New England of those days had the modern automatic haying equipment that bundles and ties hay into cubes or rolls. We had to do everything by hand.
Dad had been driving the tractor. Ma and we three older girls, Katrina (18 months younger than I), Danielle (three years younger), and I (fourteen at the time), had been pitching the made hay into the wagon. (“Made hay” is mowed hay dried in the sun; hence, the expression, to make hay while the sun shines). The three younger boys, Willie, Rollie, and Keith (the two younger girls, Sharon and Victoria, not having been born yet), had been treading the hay, walking on it with bare feet as we tossed it into the wagon so that the later forkfuls would intersect with and weigh down the earlier ones and the hay would not fall out of the wagon as it was driven back to the barn.
We did not have a large hayfork that could be lowered from the upper story of the barn and mechanically sweep the hay through the upper story window into the hayloft. Instead, we had to drive the tractor into the barn and toss the hay up into the loft with pitchforks. It was extensive hard physical labor. At the time, only our parents and we older girls were strong enough to pitch hay that far.
The boys were told to climb into the hayloft, and we began pitching the hay up to them. The boys were supposed to weave the sailing and falling hay together into mounds much like the way it is tread while being thrown into the hay wagon.
Rollie could not keep up with the amount of hay coming in his direction. Not being tread into the mix fast enough, hay kept falling back into the hay wagon by the forkful. Dad was clearly at the end of his physical and emotional endurance. An exasperated and provocative word from Ma, “Bartholomew, he’s horsing around again!” drew a sudden burst of anger from Dad. He heaved his pitchfork into the hayloft.
Dad’s rages were more frightening than Ma’s. Ma’s were routine events in our lives, stronger on certain days of the month than others but always roaming the skies like burgeoning cumulus clouds waiting for the final drop before bursting. Dad rarely raged alone but was easily kindled into flame by Ma. More important, Dad really did love kids, especially young ones. He would spend hours after work playing train engine, choo-chooing a chain of us through the 13 rooms in our old farmhouse. Even when exhausted from a long day at the factory, he would always find enough time and energy to change a diaper, dandle a baby on his knee, show us how to play the violin, listen to us practice the piano, or rehearse me for the spelling bee championship. So, when he raged, the loss of his love—the only safety parachute I had—put me into an emotional free-fall.
Regardless of what prompted Dad to throw the pitchfork, he did it. It went sailing through the air and, still with a good deal of force behind it, sliced through Rollie’s lower leg and nailed him to the floor of the hayloft. Nine-year-old Rollie stood still, speechless, for a stunned moment, realizing that he was pierced and pinned.
We were all shocked, so much so that I don’t remember if Rollie said a word, if anyone said a word. Wordlessly, Dad climbed the built-in ladder to the hayloft and worked to free Rollie from the pitchfork. I don’t remember if Rollie screamed. I do remember Dad sending the freed Rollie with eleven-year-old Danielle for bandaging. Danielle applied bag balm, a wondrous salve that we used on the cattle when they had cuts and abrasions, and wrapped Rollie’s leg. I suppose it should have been no surprise to anyone that she grew up to be a nurse. Her extensive childhood practice helped her to become a very good one. No doctor ever saw what happened to Rollie. It must only have been by the grace of God that his leg healed with no more damage than a scar as a reminder. None of us, though, needs a reminder. Both stabbings of Rollie are among our most vivid childhood memories.
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