The first page of my sister’s pseudonymous essay on her abused childhood.
Joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did not mean life was happily ever after. In this section I discuss the grimmest part of our lives, though I was largely blind to it when it happened and for many years to come. It is primarily the story of my sister, and much of it is recounted in her words.
One event happened when we lived in Jefferson that was a clue to Daddy’s troubled sexuality, but I was a rather naïve fifth or sixth grader—precocious enough, probably, to know who Freud was, but not experienced or sophisticated enough to understand the implications of the incident. I don’t remember how it came about, but on a warm sunny day, probably in the late spring or summer, Daddy decided that my sister, my mother, and I should romp in the sun without clothes on. (I don’t remember where the younger children were that day.) In another context, this might have been harmless, but it was out of character for our family and culture and was done, so far as I recall, without any kind of explanation or preparation. One day, out of the blue, Daddy compelled my sister and me to run a lap around the house naked, while Mom lay topless in the backyard, based on what persuasion or compulsion I do not know. I think he wanted my sister and me to do more, to embrace the experience, but as I recall, after our lap, we ran inside, got dressed as quickly as possible, and tried to forget the experience. I don’t know why Daddy arranged this performance, but I suspect it was related to his sexual interest in my sister discussed below.
It was such an odd, unpleasant experience that my sister and I never talked about it till recently, and she wondered if it had really happened. I felt exposed and humiliated by what I had done, and I was deeply shocked by what I had seen. Innocence was lost, but the experience gained taught no lesson.
I found the transition to adolescence difficult, a difficulty not decreased by this experience. This poem covers the time we lived in Jefferson, our brief stay in Wytheville, Virginia, and our move to Wilkes County.
Two Things Don’t Matter
i. In spring Mama makes a radish bed, sitting cross-legged on the ground, working clumps into fine particles like sifted flour. It’s making biscuits in reverse, she says. The soil’s as silky as her yellow scarf.
Summer evenings, Daddy prunes and stakes the Big Boy tomatoes, tying up the vines with strips torn from Mama’s threadbare sheets. If you let them run like kudzu, he says, to the sound of tearing cloth, the flesh will taste of dirt.
Mama dreams where the bantam hen is laying, by the garden fence in a clump of grass just beyond the summer squash. She collects each day’s egg, takes it home in a cupped palm between her breasts, sets it with the others
on the pantry shelf, then turns them daily to keep them alive. She counts the brood hens she’ll get, the number of eggs to a cake. In two weeks she sets the clutch in the nest. Every chick turns out to be a rooster. Shit, she says under her breath, shit.
ii. I’m going on thirteen, when life’s as mysterious as the chalky pearls secreted in crawdad heads. Daddy gets Mama to lie topless in the back yard. In the pine woods I step on mushrooms and pump out their spores in dense brown clouds.
Sister finds spots in her panties, steals pennies for candy, sits in Daddy’s lap, and sets fires in the pantry. Mama conceives her fifth child. One wintry morning, she throws up in a pasteboard box. She sets it
on the snow by the back steps, where it smokes as if afire. The roosters peck it clean. She weeps for the first dead Kennedy and craves bologna. She cans and dries beans, worries about crow’s-feet, pats her belly.
As she makes cottage cheese, leaning into the great pot with the clabber up to her shoulders, she tells me her dreams, says she’ll never die in the ordinary way, but will see Jesus come in glory.
iii. Next spring we replant the garden, but in June move to town where the boys wear dickies and obsess about rubbers, and the girls disappear into hose, hairspray, and bras. I’m lost in this
new world. I mow the grass and go to Sunday School. After my brother is born in August, pneumonia almost takes him, and Mama and Daddy spend weeks by the hospital bed, their hearts
ripe for tearing. On the day the baby’s out of danger, Daddy and I walk the garden at the old place. Tomato vines sprawl unkempt across the hard ground. We pick two plump ones, wipe off the dirt. The pulp
rushes down our chins, and he says, Two things don’t matter—where you are and what the time is. That night, as we lie awake in the yard, the falling stars furrow the sky with streaks of silent light. (Dead Mule, 2013)
****
In the country we hail from, killing snakes was a sport, a duty, sometimes an act of self-protection. Several years after we moved to Wilkes County, Daddy was able to buy a ramshackle country house on the Brushy Mountains, a low range east of the Blue Ridge. The house belonged to a grown-up farm, the fields were infested with snakes. On our first day, my six-year-old brother tried to catch a copperhead slithering through tangled chicken wire and honeysuckle within ten yards of the house. One summer, a little farther from the house, I scalped a copperhead with the lawnmower, and late one night our dogs woke us by barking at large rattler coiled near the backsteps. We killed probably twenty snakes a year. When my parents went on walks and encountered little copperheads crossing the dirt road by our house, they crushed them beneath their heels. We shot most of the others.
Daddy readily distinguished poisonous from harmless snakes and taught us the difference. Caring for the distinction was unusual, even more so his affection for nonpoisonous snakes. He caught and handled them and let them loose in the yard, especially king snakes. My mother feared only four kinds of snakes, she said—big ones, little ones, dead ones, live ones. Our neighbors felt the same, and many thought it their duty to kill every one they saw. A mild frenzy often seized whoever spotted a snake and drove him or her until the creature, however small and harmless, had been obliterated. My mother-in-law, with her many dogs and cats and conversable crow, once chopped up her tomato patch trying to kill a garter snake with her hoe.
Toward other animals, especially farm animals, Daddy had the callous attitude of the farmer and stockman: he was willing to use whatever force he thought necessary to bend an animal to his will without injuring it. When he beat and kicked our cow and whipped and manhandled horses, he seemed to me—my temperament was introspective and contemplative rather than active—scarily violent. He also lost his temper when objects thwarted him; repair jobs brought forth a stream of hard words, especially when his helpers misunderstood instructions or carried them out clumsily. Often the outbursts were a show of anger, a technique he had learned from his father and from his time as staff sergeant to control and intimidate beast and man. The technique does not preclude anger—real ire can make it more effective—but such outbursts, though they might be frequent on a given day, and extremely trying to everyone else’s temper, often reflected no ill-will toward the victim: they were like numerous but self-contained and harmless thunderstorms. However, Daddy could become really angry, and when he did he could maintain his wrath for hours and even days, until its victim surrendered or fled.
Outbursts of temper were but one weapon in Daddy’s arsenal. Perhaps his favorite was the question—I think of it as la question, a form of torture. However many forms it took, this was its import: when are you going to admit that you’re wrong and I’m right? When the question had been answered to his satisfaction, the victim was not done, for she (almost always my mother or my sister) had to repeat exactly a statement of confession, contrition, and resolution to do better composed by Daddy. He persisted in putting the question, He refused to accept silence or insolence. He had the patience to verbally harry the rebel until she gave in. (1)
The chief victim was my sister—two years younger than me, irrepressibly talkative and stubborn, a useful trait for the only girl among four rough-housing boys. She first aroused Daddy’s wrath in grade school because of her unsatisfactory grades and apparently even more unsatisfactory attitude. (These events happened in Wytheville, a year or so before we first moved to Wilkes County.) I was young, too, of course, still in grade school. I was submissive and unwilling either to blame Daddy or to watch what he did, so I recall little of what happened. But, even at a distance, it was hard to endure shouting and angry outbursts, the seemingly unending sessions of emotional torture and beatings with a yardstick: he beat her as if beating livestock. He had whipped us before, but in calm and measured retribution, and with the intention of intimidating rather than hurting us. This was far more intense. And pointless: the cause of my sister’s grades proved to be her teacher, a woman who threw desks across the classroom, failed nearly all her students in at least one subject, and after we had moved away was carried screaming and kicking from school on the day her father died. The semester of my sister’s travail, a group of parents tried to persuade the principal to dismiss the teacher; he only called her in for a chat; and Daddy punished one of her victims.
The war now begun between Daddy and my sister lasted for years. Though in some of the issues Daddy may have held the right position, right and wrong had little to do with his attitude. It was, like his treatment of her in grade school, incommensurable with the visible causes: something provoked him to act irrationally. Did he unconsciously see her as the image of himself in rebellion against his own father? In beating his daughter, was he beating a part of himself into submission? There was a puzzle here that I did not understand till much later.
Women in the family had it hard, especially Daddy’s mother. Sallie suffered from rheumatoid arthritis the whole time I remember her—she turned 47 the year I was born, in 1951. Her hands, knees, and feet were swollen and deformed, her voice a thin falsetto that to me expressed the essence of pain. The only somewhat effective treatment in the 1950’s and 1960’s, cortisone injections, drove Sallie “out of her mind,” or so an aunt told me. Sallie preferred to live with the pain and disability.
As we have seen, Sallie’s family, the Grubbs, had a history of depression, and Sallie had already suffered acutely. Aside from depression, Sallie was bullied by both her husband and her mother-in-law, Emma, who lived with them. She worked in the fields as well as the house, and probably had little she could call her own. My grandfather, Elbert, was not an easy man; disagreeing with him never ended well. Elbert was also unfaithful, fathering at least one child by another woman. Sallie sometimes knew the identity of his partners. Elbert passed on gonorrhea from one of them. On receiving the diagnosis from her doctor, Sallie chased Elbert out of the house with a broomstick. Her youngest son, born eight years after Max, developed a rare, disabling disease, Reiter’s Syndrome, whispered among us to have been caused by exposure in the womb to sexually transmitted disease. There are suspicions in the family that Elbert molested, or tried to molest, his only daughter, who left home as soon as she could.
Daddy carried on the legacy of abuse. I did not know its extent until my sister and I had a long discussion, in early 2006. She told me that an essay she had written, “A Single Word,” was being published pseudonymously in a collection edited by Marlo Thomas, The Right Words at the Right Time, Volume 2: Your Turn! In our conversation she told the history of abuse recounted in her essay. “All my life I had adored my dad,” she wrote:
"He was big and affectionate. He liked to show me off at family gatherings, picking me up and holding me over his head for everyone to see. I loved the smell of cigarettes that permeated his clothes and hair, even the slightly perceptible line of grease under his nails."
At the age of thirteen, she enjoyed her life in the country, and tolerated the isolation of a religious country home:
"I was rarely allowed to be on the telephone with my girlfriends for more than three minutes at a time, especially if my dad was at home. And most of my knowledge of sex was from dirty jokes that were tolerated—and even encouraged—within my family of four brothers and no sisters.….
"My dad had firm rules at home and equally concrete consequences for any sort of disobedience. In our strict religious community, men were revered as the family leader, and not to be defied. Period."
As an example of “concrete consequences,” she discusses the fifth-grade beatings. Her description makes them seem less horrible than I remember, perhaps because, for her, they fit a familiar pattern:
"[I]n the fifth grade I got two F’s, so my father grilled me in history and math every night, whipping me with a yardstick if I didn’t know the answers to his questions. I got all A’s the rest of the year. His rules worked for him; they justified his actions. But as tough as he was, he was predictable—and I have always relied upon predictability."
But she and Daddy were living a dangerous secret life, the meaning of which became clear to her one Sunday:
"During one [church] service, our branch president (the congregation leader) said a word that was new to me, yet was also somehow familiar. I didn’t know how I knew the word exactly, but somewhere inside of me an alarm went off. I had a gut feeling it was a very important word and I couldn’t wait to know its meaning.
"I anxiously waited for church to end. As soon as I got home I pulled our huge dictionary from underneath the television and took it into my room. I found the word and stared at it. As I read and reread the definition my heart raced, and its meaning grew sharper and clearer. The word was incest."
This word illuminated a childhood of abuse:
"[I]t started when I was in kindergarten. My father would have me parade around the house naked. The touching started when I was nine or ten [in 1963 or 1964], the kissing not long after. I remember my dad kissing me full on the mouth in front of the whole family at the dinner table, as if I were Mama, or a girlfriend. No one said anything when it happened, nor did they seem to notice my discomfort and embarrassment. It was probably too dangerous for them to admit to seeing it. My dad would tell me that this making out would help me to be the best wife I could be someday; and that he was teaching me. He told me that a lot. Any time I was alone with him, something would happen, and as I got older, the action progressed. Never to intercourse—but to oral sex, which was just as bad, or worse. It happened everywhere: at home, in the car, in his bedroom, in the barn, in the parking lot of the grocery store. Behind the church.
"Up until then, I had always thought my life was normal. Now I knew better. But I was bright enough to know that if I ever told anyone, Daddy would go to jail. Then how would we live? Who would replace the salary of a bank vice president? My mother was a housewife at the time. She wasn’t conscious of what was going on. She had a certain naiveté about her. Beginning in third grade, I had a sense she was jealous of me. She yielded totally to my father so I knew I couldn’t go to her to protect me. I even once asked her to tell Daddy to stop kissing me. She laughed."
I do not remember the kissing at the dinner table nor the dirty jokes, though I’m sure Daddy would have told them. I have a way of filtering out anything that makes me uncomfortable, possibly a trait I learned in response to these situations. But I do remember his cuddling my sister on his lap, just as he cuddled my mother, and it did make me uncomfortable. I thought Daddy’s relationship with my sister was uncomfortably close, and at times I was jealous. I must have known the dictionary meaning of incest but lacked the moral imagination to understand the behavior I witnessed.
My sister bravely approached Daddy: “When I told my father about the word I’d read I didn’t address him aggressively. I pleaded. I said our relationship had to change immediately.” She had expected a war of wills, “or that he would rape me,” but he did not argue or disagree or coerce. “I stood my ground. Now that I had the facts, I knew I had a reason—a real honest-to-goodness reason—for it to stop. What we had been doing was wrong.”
But there was a Cold War that went on for the rest of Daddy’s life. Mom did not protect my sister, then or ever, and Daddy drew her unwitting brothers to his side. The memory remains traumatic.
"I never allowed myself to be alone with [Daddy]. Not in the car or in the house. Every time he came into my room to try to make out with me, I told him again that it was wrong. He kept trying and I always said no. Finally, he stopped. In fact, we eventually stopped having any kind of normal connection. He would not hug me or even look at me anymore.
"Ending this secret relationship was the hardest and best thing I ever did for myself. I loved my father, yet he hurt me more than anyone else ever could have."
When my sister told her story, over a long lunch at the North Carolina Art Museum, I was shocked but not surprised—it made sense of clues I had seen over the years: the cuddling, Daddy’s disproportionate anger at her, his irrational dislike of her first husband. She asked me, “How could you not have known? Why did the men of the church not see what was going on and stop it?” I had no answer.
*****
Not long after, I wrote the following poem and, after some hesitation, shared it with her. She has told me more than once that she feels validated by the poem:
Judgement Day
I chew my tobacco and I spit my juice. I love my own daughter but it ain't no use. —Uncle Dave Macon, “Sail Away, Ladies”
“It could’ve been me born dead when Mama was down with measles and pneumonia,” I say, “could’ve been me buried under the lamb sleeping on its vertical stone pasture. Or I could’ve been kicked by a mule, bit by a rattler. Could’ve jumped too late when the log truck’s brakes gave out.” Peter listens and raises his head, as heavy with all he knows as a hod full of bricks.
“I’d run from Daddy, but couldn’t stay away. Joined the navy when I was 16, but he pulled me from the boat the day it sailed for New Guinea. Then I worked farms and ranches out west, but back I’d come, broke, like that boy in the joke who walks in circles ‘cause his foot’s nailed to the floor. After the army, I married a sweet girl from home, seventeen to my twenty-four. She was untouched by any man.
“Had four young’uns in eight years, saw days and nights repoing cars from no-count trash and deals gone bad and bills and bankruptcy-- all made me long for my army days when I roamed free, ice-fishing above Fairbanks, the baseball at midnight leaving the pitcher’s hand like a falling star, and I called to whores out the bus window, ‘Just call me Pee-Pee, honey, I’m all your’n.’”
Our daughters all wanted to be ballerinas. Mine could arch her head backwards to rest in the arches of her raised feet, while I could just see those little breasts kissing her leotards. ‘Show me how you dance,’ I’d say, and she’d grin and twirl in her pink tights and tutu, a cherry bloom with upturned arms. I imagined the skin shimmering over her ribs, the hollow below them waiting to be filled.
“I’d wake at an odd hour, walk to and fro while bats were chasing bugs around the moon, till I couldn’t stand it. I’d stand at her door. I’d slip inside her room. ‘You were whimpering in your sleep,’ I’d say, and lie beside her. Or lay her on my belly.” And what did you think, asks Peter, when she became in that house of hardheaded boys the only one by day fierce enough to defy your will?
“Her grades all went to D’s and F’s. Not that she was stupid, she wouldn’t try. ‘Read,’ I’d say, ‘Now tell me what it says.’ ‘No, goddamit,’ I’d say, ‘that’s not what it says. Read it again,’ and I’d lay on the belt. The day the reverend preached on Lot and his daughters, the girl turned on me with burning eyes, and in her room she wept, If you touch me again, I’ll tell. I’ll tell if ever you do it again. And I didn’t.”
Well, says Saint Peter, come on in and sit, but you’ll have to sit in silence till you can sum up all you’ve done—each angry touch disguised as love, what it cost your sons to see you beat their sister, what it cost her mother to contrive denial, then add what your girl did to herself, and if you can own the whole while a feather falls from your lips to the floor, you may ask permission to beg forgiveness. (Raving Dove, 2009)
I do not know how to weave this story with the story of the tragedy at the end of Daddy’s life. Aside from the turbulent and pressure-filled circumstances of his life in the 1970’s (the main subject of this account), the causes of his underlying instability were, I suspect, his secret acts of abuse and betrayal of trust, followed by unacknowledged guilt and shame. In retrospect, his collapse became visible in the second half of 1971 after he participated in an illegal act for his employer, but chronic guilt must have played a large part, perhaps even the main part, though it remained a silent canker in his soul.
NOTES Note 1: The technique I call the question bore similarities to the abuse of children and others in some religious and political cults: “Beatings and constant yelling weren’t the worst things that children in the Community of Jesus had to endure, however. Another alleged staple of life that the community denies was a disciplinary tool called the 'light session'—spontaneous group shaming sessions in which a community member is suddenly singled out for a shortcoming, a shared piece of history, or a sin. Sins can be anything a light session leader decides. “After the accusation, the target is then made to endure lengthy, sometimes hourslong [sic] psychological browbeating. The goal, in Whyte’s view, is to tear a member down completely. The only legitimate response is complete emotional breakdown and confession. Once the subject has been turned into a shuddering wreck, they are then love-bombed by the same group that had just berated them endlessly. They are told they have won a great spiritual victory. The subject is then ordered to reciprocate the stated love.” —David Jager, “Fifteen Minutes of Flame: Aaron's Bushnell's agony...,” Tablet, 25 March 2024 (https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/fifteen-minutes-of-flame)
1st draft posted 15 March 2024; updated 30 March 2024. Second draft posted 8 May 2024. Send comments, questions, and corrections to jsabsherphd@gmail.com.