I Am War, Mr. Tolstoy
Sheldon Lee Compton
I had a lot I wanted to forget. Years later I would read Tolstoy and, for moments rising and falling, nearly manage to do that, forget. Nearly. And then I’d turn a page and read I was actually seeing, feeling the approach of death, and along with it I felt that death ought not to exist.
Much of what I wanted to forget was about my cousin Ramey, who was five years older than me and the years we spent living with our grandparents. Father called him Hosscat. We shared a bedroom, our twin beds side by side separated only by Mamaw’s 1915 Victrola. Ramey would later confess to me during a long night of drinking in the late 90s that he had been abused before coming to live there. He was crying when he told me. It wasn’t an apology. At the time, it seemed like an apology, but he didn’t say he was sorry. He only talked about his past abuse. It was an excuse, nothing more and nothing less.
When my parents divorced, my mom struggled for as long as she could trying to raise me on her own. When my sister came along, she saw no other option for my well-being than to send me to my paternal grandparents. Her mother lived in Ohio at the time. That Father still lived with his own parents was neither here nor there. It was Mamaw who raised me during these years, from the time I was six until I was fourteen.
I can’t remember exactly how long it was before Ramey’s mom sent him to live with his dad, but it wasn’t long. His dad so often sent him to Mamaw and Papaw that eventually he moved in. We lived as brothers for all the time I lived there until I moved back to my mom’s as a freshman in high school.
Where Father had given up on living and decided to stay in a back bedroom, Ramey’s dad showed up so sporadically that no one really ever saw him. I would hear stories of him coming to correct Ramey for one thing or another, whipping him terribly, but not terribly enough for me. I wanted him to be corrected every hour if possible.
Drunk in the 90s, Ramey didn’t bring up details with his pseudo apology. How could he? How could he talk about the seven-year stretch of torture he forced on me? How could he talk about pinning me in the attic one summer day and raping me? The one saving grace being that he thought he had penetrated me when he had actually prodded himself between my upper thighs. I lay on my side waiting for him to finish, unable to breathe because of the high heat in the attic. Dust motes floated in a stream of sunlight from an opening near the top of the ceiling. Indistinct sounds mumbled in through the fibers of the wood. I knew people were outside or in their homes talking and spending time together. I wanted to know what Jay Hall and his wife were doing across the street at that exact moment, what Doug Bell was thinking while riding his bike somewhere quiet, what our cousin Todd was doing, awash in his escape. Somewhere a wood thrush called. I knew there were carp floating in the shade behind the grade school. I was envious of everyone. I was envious of local wildlife.
He had trapped me there after Todd joined me to have a look at the hidden stash of Hustler magazines we had all worked to buy and hide there. While we were looking at the magazines, he found us and laughed. “What are we doing boys? Ahhh looking at dirty magazines!” Before he could start the climb to join us, Todd adroitly dropped through the attic opening and ran away, being closer to the opening than me. I heard the front door slam as he finished his escape to run back to his house a short block or so away.
When he finished, Ramey dropped down the attic door and back into the cool, fresh air of the house. I watched from the opening while he adjusted himself in his jeans and walked away. I wanted to expire in the heat, just slip back into the farthest corner of the attic and pass away into a dark history.
Of course I didn’t think of it that way then. Then I thought I’d already died and that it was all over. Now I can understand how a dusty, hot attic was as good a place as any to enter into another kind of hell, the hell I heard about from Mamaw and from Papaw, complete with a lake of fire big enough that I’d never be found again.
Lakes of fire and eternal torment aside, the worst of it was the shame. When I came down from the attic, I first thought of nothing; my mind went blank in the cool air of the room. I breathed and felt my lungs expand and relax, expand and relax again like a smothered animal finally let loose from the trap. But I only allowed myself those first few seconds before I put my body back into survival alert, moving slowly and quietly to the room’s door and peeking around the edge to make sure Ramey wasn’t hiding and waiting like he often did in those years. The house was quiet. I exhaled and let my shoulders relax. The bedroom led directly to the kitchen so I stumbled into a chair at the kitchen table and at last realized that Ramey had apparently left the house. Maybe to go find Todd. It was at this moment the weight of what had just happened settled on me. In the stillness of the kitchen shame slathered itself over me. I couldn’t speak and, if I could have, there was no one home to speak to. But I could feel my tongue useless inside my mouth. If I could have swallowed it I would have.
Across the table I saw my reflection in the glass front of Mamaw’s dish cabinet. Old eyes. Slack-face. Elbows weak on the table. It was a hateful person there in the glass. Hate-filled and hurt and disgusted at my own lack of courage and strength. Repulsed at my inaction. I was nine.
There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes. God I hope so, Mr. Tolstoy.
On the occasional trips to my mom’s to spend the night, it seemed the temporary escape wouldn’t be enough. I began to create what have come to be known as paracosms. Psychologists say these are detailed imaginary worlds created in childhood. I imagined so fiercely I began to see bright red spots moving behind my eyelids. I could see through them, see their veins. It was how I knew they were alive.
I could sense that something in me had shifted out of place. I had endured, by that point, three years of what would be seven years of a full round of different types of abuse. And already, by this point, I was defeated. I wanted to kill myself. That was the overwhelming thought sitting at the kitchen table. I wanted to kill myself. I had no place from which to form how this would be done, only that I wanted to be dead instead of alive and hurting so badly. The closest I could come to forming an idea was that I wanted to stay in that chair forever, my only need other than never moving again was to find some way to break Mamaw’s glass dish cabinet. I wanted to destroy at least that image of myself. Above all, the thought of what had just happened becoming a regular thing essentially broke my mind right then and there. I’ve never recovered. There was no way to get rid of that sudden moment of understanding that crashed through me: would this become a routine?
Tolstoy was brilliant but was oversimplifying when he said if you want to be happy, be.
Anything Ramey did to me would develop into an ongoing schedule that only he knew about and that I could hardly guess at. It’s possible he wasn’t imaginative enough for much else. If he jumped out and gut-punched me so I couldn’t breathe for a half a minute or so, it’d be something he did every day for weeks. Sometimes it would stop and I’d think it was over and we were moving on to some other torture, he would surprise me again with a gut-punch.
Often his abuse came hidden as wrestling. In the 1980s, professional wrestling was at the height of its popularity. Every kid aged five to sixteen was more or less a huge fan, and each new “signature move” of all the wrestlers. Hulk Hogan's Big Foot, Randy Savage’s Flying Elbow, Ric Flair’s Figure Four, Jake Roberts’s DDT. I got to know them through Ramey’s constant insistence on performing them on me. But, unlike on television, he did these signature moves on me without easing up. When I got a DDT (a splendid move in which one wrestler’s head is placed between the legs of the other standing wrestler then his body is flipped upside down, held there for a couple seconds, and then dropped onto his head.) In professional wrestling this move was completed without breaking necks by holding the targeted wrestler’s body up a few inches so that it only seemed like his head was driven into the mat. When I was on the receiving end of these, my head hit the floor. Every single time. It was the same for everything else.
The wrestling injuries at least had a pretense. The more frequent abuse came as one-sided fights. Five years younger, I was outmatched in the best situations. But fights between us happened spontaneously. Only Ramey had knowledge of when this would be, and he used that to his full advantage. At any moment I had my face held against the ground and knee-stomped, for example. I walked through the house holding my breath, preparing myself to be hurt physically. I even managed to make getting hit, stomped, or thrown into things hurt less in my mind. I did this through basic stubbornness and spite. As much as possible, I wanted to keep from him the pleasure he found in my misery. Sliding into this mindset would later be one of the key reasons I developed mental illness later in life. Keeping yourself mentally ready to be badly hurt or at least physically attacked at all times over the course of six years strains the mind’s ability to stay taut for so long. I managed it, survived it, but I lost a lot along the way, and picked up illnesses anyone could do without. The driving force behind my survival, apart from a basic fear of death, was that I was never, not ever, let him see just how much he was getting to me.
But stubbornness sometimes did nothing to soften the baggage that came with an injury. Mamaw and Papaw took us to the G.C. Murphy department store in town on the weekends. It was one of several kinds of outings they took us on both together and on our own. Once Mamaw thought it would be a good idea for me to buy a model car set and have Father help me with it. Mamaw had an amazing heart, and I honestly didn’t have it in me to tell her otherwise. So I bought the model car and a set of acrylic paints. On the way home, me and Ramey opened them to smell the paint. We closed the lids tightly, but I wanted to keep the silver paint in my pocket. Ramey had pretended to tighten the lid better for me and I returned it to my pocket. Of course he loosened the lid, which probably sounds like a pretty funny prank. I might have thought so, too, if it hadn’t been so humiliating.
When we got home and I stepped out of the car, I felt a stickiness on my upper thigh. I went to the bathroom and found that the bottle of gray paint had spilled and soaked through my pocket and onto my thigh. By the time I had my pants off and got to take a good look my skin burned like an awful rash had suddenly broken through my body. All was terrible until Father decided to step in.
He always chose to intervene at the worst times. This day he decided I would need to have Vaseline applied to the paint to get it to come off. He told me to get in the shower and take my pants and underwear off, which I did. He then started rubbing the Vaseline in. Just as I was thinking that I hoped no one ever heard about what happened, I heard Ramey’s trademark hissing laughter from somewhere in the house, and I knew he knew, which meant more people would know.
The fights were still the worst. Each time we had one Father would crawl himself out of bed (only at the urging of Mamaw telling him to be a parent) and come and give me the obligatory whipping. And he laid it on. Each time Ramey beat me, I always knew I had another coming from Father for fighting. He’d thrash me nine or ten times and then without a word go back to his bedroom and close the door not to be heard from again for days.
Later on I’d figure out that he only ever did this because Mamaw and Papaw drew a line at physical punishment. They guided me and gave me parental insight and so on, but they would not correct me. I was physically abused by Ramey and then physically abused by Father. That he wasn’t interested in his role abusing me doesn’t change the reality.
The situation did get out of hand enough one evening that I went to stay with my mom. Mom had remarried and had just had my sister, Kelly. She juggled a newborn, an alcoholic, abusive husband, and whatever problems came her way concerning me. The stepdad, Russell, had a younger brother named Pat. Pat was better to us than his own brother, and he was only sixteen years old. He was someone I could talk to, so I talked about Ramey and what he was doing to me.
“Stand up for yourself,” Pat told me one evening. “Do it just one time and you’ll never have to do it again.”
Wise words from someone so young. I took his advice to heart, but there was no way for me to know how I’d handle it when it came up. A couple weeks later I walked into mine and Ramey’s bedroom. It was empty, and as far as I knew Ramey was off somewhere away from the house. When I made it to the center of the room, he attacked. A punch to the head and then another one to the body. The crack to the head didn’t do much, but the body shot, a liver punch, buckled me, forced all the wind from me in one long and loud wail.
It was during and after one of these incidents when I left my sensible mind for the first time.
There was only a thin wall separating our bedroom from Father’s bedroom. This time he heard it himself and came crashing into the room. Ramey spun and darted around him and out the front door. Without a word, he started whipping me. He saw there wasn’t much progress doing it that way, so he pulled my pants down until I was standing in my underwear taking smack after smack. I tried to float away, pin myself to something else. I turned to the right and faced the window. Ramey was there. Outside in the yard laughing and pointing at me.
What happened next is a strange memory for me. At eight years old and about to have my first break with reality. I saw the window become a bubble, the kind formed by the old dip and blow bubbles. Out, out, out until I was sure it was going to break; there was no way it could take much more. It was going to break. While watching it expand ever closer to Ramey outside, I decided that since it was going to break anyway, I would punch through it to hit Ramey.
I remember the sound and I remember the way the window burst outward and I remember Ramey shielding his face. From that point on I can only recall three things: one, my aunt tending to Ramey, who had a cut above his eye, and paying no attention to me whatsoever. She had been visiting and placed herself in the middle of the situation with no prompting at all; two, walking across the street with Father to go to my mom’s; and three, realizing my hand was bleeding badly.
The black periods mixed in I assume could have been some early mechanism to protect myself, because when he got to Mom’s front door, he simply gave me a push into the apartment and then left without a word. Pat was there. It couldn’t have worked out better.
Mom noticed my hand and immediately left the living room to find a dish towel in the kitchen. While she was out of the room, I saw that Pat was looking at me with pride.
“I did it,” I said. “I stood up for myself.”
“And you’ll never have to again,” he said.
And I didn’t. That was the last time Ramey and I had any kind of physical altercation. However, it did nothing to relieve me of the numerous times he mentally tortured me. This nearly nonstop punishment and terrorization would lead me to many decisions that, to this day, make me feel guilty. Most accurately, survivor’s guilt, strangely enough.
But right or wrong, Tolstoy did write that he stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking. So how wrong could he ever really be?
I had a lot I wanted to forget. It was always really clear that Father had wanted more than anything to forget me. I say this with no hint of self-pity. Once you understand something as devastating as that, the rest of the time is spent adjusting to it, not trying to fix it and not looking for pity. The adjustment is hard enough that I’m still working on it.
Mamaw once showed me Father’s room while he was gone for a VA appointment with my grandfather. The room was a solid haze of smoke, books were piled all over the place, the mattress of the double bed had sunk through to the box springs. I noticed almost everything but not what Mamaw had wanted to point out to me.
“Look here on the walls, Zane,” Mamaw said, pointing at each of them. We all called her Mamaw “Do you see anything strange?”
I scanned the walls and remembered something about the pictures. Each had been of me, pictures Mamaw had put up in Father’s bedroom. Now they were turned backward on their tacks. They hung there tributary-crooked with my picture facing the wall. I knew why. I’d always known why.
“Your daddy says he can’t bear to look at those pictures of you,” she continued. “He said it’s too painful. He loves you, Zane.”
I wouldn’t have thought of it then but now I believe Mamaw was in simple denial about her son’s behavior. She knew what he did was wrong, but she twisted it toward the idea of some kind of positive, while unwittingly alluding to his true nature, that of an egomaniacal, self-centered man who, instead of trying to better connect with his son, decided he couldn’t stand being forever reminded of his failings.
While I lived with Mamaw and Papaw and endured unholy abuse, Father mostly slept. When he did get up and stir around, he did so in the middle of the night. My bedroom had an open door to the kitchen where Mamaw kept a light on all during the night. I had gotten used to it about the time I first saw Father shuffling around the kitchen table, hair a mess, face puffy from sleep, just wandering through the kitchen. He disappeared to the left of the door, I heard the refrigerator open with that hiss, saw the kitchen flood with light. The sounds he made seemed to echo around the house. He was rat-like, pilfering through the fridge for food, scrounging around looking for 2-liters of Coke and Salisbury steak tv dinners.
I was sure he didn’t hear me get out of bed. To this day I couldn't explain why I wanted to confront him. Something about the situation brought me to a point of near rage. There was a second or two while I stared at his pockmarked back that I wanted to just hug him, be hugged by him. Instead I just spoke, acknowledged him there holding a fresh pack of Fischer’s bacon. He didn’t speak. Instead, like a snared animal, he jolted his body around to find me. When he did, his eyes, always so severe and sinister, seemed to have popped from their sockets. I didn’t speak and Father didn’t speak. He turned back to the fridge and began pawing through it again.
I would find him several more times in random places throughout the house when I got up to use the bathroom or went for a drink of water — sitting up straight as a board on the living room couch staring into the dark, lurching around doors and out of sight like a middle-aged wraith. He always seemed aware that I saw him but never spoke to me. If anything, he would turn his gaze on me menacingly until I left to go back to bed.
These were times when he told me outright that he never wanted me, that his life ended the second he learned my mom was pregnant. This came out in a gush of words and pain while, I would learn later, he was intoxicated and high. But it was the truth, there was no mistake about it. Even as a young boy, the disgusting truth of what he was saying was obvious. It always left me speechless, trying not to cry. I didn’t want him to know that it hurt me; I wanted him to feel like he’d failed in trying to make me feel bad. When all along — and I was too young to understand such nuance then — he didn’t care what I felt bad or good about. Turns out when you wish somebody hadn’t been born, you care even less about how they feel.
Mr. Tolstoy, you cannot truly believe that we lose because we tell ourselves we lost.
One evening while Mamaw washed dishes I came to her and must have asked her about something to do with the Holy Bible. I had been attending bible school that summer and had a few thoughts I needed to express. Without stopping her dishwashing, Mamaw spoke with conviction, saying, “Zane, when Gabrielle blows his horn you’ll be able to hear it. And when you hear that horn blowing just ask for forgiveness for all your sins and accept Jesus into your heart and you’ll be saved.”
I took note; I took hope into my heart. If Gabriel could get here soon, I would be spared more days in the attic. I went to bed over the next several weeks figuring since I was a child, Jesus would spare me any bad things I had done because I was an innocent. This was always a takeaway from one of my conversations with Mamaw. All in all, I felt good about the possibilities.
One night, Gabrielle blew his horn. I heard it loud and clear. Even considering my heart attack to come forty years later, this was the fastest and hardest my heart had ever pounded. I lay flat on the bed with my arms out, my fingers twisting the bed sheet into tight balls, chin held high trying to be brave and ready to turn and flip into the sky. I thought it might be like an incredibly terrifying roller coaster that would end in either constant pain or roads of gold and angels flying about happily.
The horn that blared, and this sometime in the early morning hours, came from Trivitte Trucking. For whatever reason, one of the short bed coal truck drivers decided to blow his horn at just that time. It was the loudest sound I had ever heard, it seemed. And may have been up to that point. I peed the bed and ran straight to Mamaw, shaking her by the shoulders. Papaw rolled over then sat up, his hair poking out from his head in blades shiny with Vitalis.
It was a half hour or so before Mamaw had calmed me down completely. She took my wet underwear and brought fresh ones, pulled the sheets and gave me new ones that smelled like Tide and were cool from their folds in the closet. It was rebirth in the wake of rebirth. But never far from all the birthing was plain and simple death, the end of all things here on earth. Death. The mystery.
All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do. Now you’re talking, Leo.
The night Trivitte blew his horn, Ramey wasn’t there. Every now and then he would go to his mom’s for a weekend or even a couple weeks. These were the best times. From age six to thirteen, it was these weekends and weeks without Ramey when I had the chance to live a child’s life instead of a survivor’s existence. This time was spent reading books and then playing and pretending to be the people in the books. I climbed mountains with my shirt off and tied around my waist like a buckskin flap and tried to make every atom of my body the great Native American Pontiac. During another week of freedom, I tinkered with Papaw’s tools in his large basement workshop. Having read a long list of juvenile biographies, I was Eli Whitney that week, creator of the cotton gin, a mechanic who changed the way work was done in the fields of America.
During these days of freedom, I can never remember the exact details when Ramey would come back from his mom’s. I only have a feeling as memory, this unmatched dread and exhaustion. Survival is a feeling, and I was exhausted from it, the vigilant awareness and heightened senses, the tensing of the body, the muscles around the neck, the shoulders prepared always to raise to offer more protection to the head and neck. All of it was a feeling in the center of me moving outward and filling me up. I survived, and there were so many things I had to do to manage it. The entire experience was primal.
As for me, I am unbearably weary of myself. Oh, oh, oh, Lev, I have plenty to say…
…listen, I am busted. I am broken. I am bent. I am critical, tolerated at best, a nuisance, an obligation. I am devastated. I am unworthy. I am terminal, barely alive, living inside my head, angry, scourged, molested, wounded. I am scarred. I am an act of courage even living here. I have forgotten how to laugh. I am transparent due to skin loss. I am suffering with no voice. I am war, Mr. Tolstoy.
Sheldon Lee Compton
I had a lot I wanted to forget. Years later I would read Tolstoy and, for moments rising and falling, nearly manage to do that, forget. Nearly. And then I’d turn a page and read I was actually seeing, feeling the approach of death, and along with it I felt that death ought not to exist.
Much of what I wanted to forget was about my cousin Ramey, who was five years older than me and the years we spent living with our grandparents. Father called him Hosscat. We shared a bedroom, our twin beds side by side separated only by Mamaw’s 1915 Victrola. Ramey would later confess to me during a long night of drinking in the late 90s that he had been abused before coming to live there. He was crying when he told me. It wasn’t an apology. At the time, it seemed like an apology, but he didn’t say he was sorry. He only talked about his past abuse. It was an excuse, nothing more and nothing less.
When my parents divorced, my mom struggled for as long as she could trying to raise me on her own. When my sister came along, she saw no other option for my well-being than to send me to my paternal grandparents. Her mother lived in Ohio at the time. That Father still lived with his own parents was neither here nor there. It was Mamaw who raised me during these years, from the time I was six until I was fourteen.
I can’t remember exactly how long it was before Ramey’s mom sent him to live with his dad, but it wasn’t long. His dad so often sent him to Mamaw and Papaw that eventually he moved in. We lived as brothers for all the time I lived there until I moved back to my mom’s as a freshman in high school.
Where Father had given up on living and decided to stay in a back bedroom, Ramey’s dad showed up so sporadically that no one really ever saw him. I would hear stories of him coming to correct Ramey for one thing or another, whipping him terribly, but not terribly enough for me. I wanted him to be corrected every hour if possible.
Drunk in the 90s, Ramey didn’t bring up details with his pseudo apology. How could he? How could he talk about the seven-year stretch of torture he forced on me? How could he talk about pinning me in the attic one summer day and raping me? The one saving grace being that he thought he had penetrated me when he had actually prodded himself between my upper thighs. I lay on my side waiting for him to finish, unable to breathe because of the high heat in the attic. Dust motes floated in a stream of sunlight from an opening near the top of the ceiling. Indistinct sounds mumbled in through the fibers of the wood. I knew people were outside or in their homes talking and spending time together. I wanted to know what Jay Hall and his wife were doing across the street at that exact moment, what Doug Bell was thinking while riding his bike somewhere quiet, what our cousin Todd was doing, awash in his escape. Somewhere a wood thrush called. I knew there were carp floating in the shade behind the grade school. I was envious of everyone. I was envious of local wildlife.
He had trapped me there after Todd joined me to have a look at the hidden stash of Hustler magazines we had all worked to buy and hide there. While we were looking at the magazines, he found us and laughed. “What are we doing boys? Ahhh looking at dirty magazines!” Before he could start the climb to join us, Todd adroitly dropped through the attic opening and ran away, being closer to the opening than me. I heard the front door slam as he finished his escape to run back to his house a short block or so away.
When he finished, Ramey dropped down the attic door and back into the cool, fresh air of the house. I watched from the opening while he adjusted himself in his jeans and walked away. I wanted to expire in the heat, just slip back into the farthest corner of the attic and pass away into a dark history.
Of course I didn’t think of it that way then. Then I thought I’d already died and that it was all over. Now I can understand how a dusty, hot attic was as good a place as any to enter into another kind of hell, the hell I heard about from Mamaw and from Papaw, complete with a lake of fire big enough that I’d never be found again.
Lakes of fire and eternal torment aside, the worst of it was the shame. When I came down from the attic, I first thought of nothing; my mind went blank in the cool air of the room. I breathed and felt my lungs expand and relax, expand and relax again like a smothered animal finally let loose from the trap. But I only allowed myself those first few seconds before I put my body back into survival alert, moving slowly and quietly to the room’s door and peeking around the edge to make sure Ramey wasn’t hiding and waiting like he often did in those years. The house was quiet. I exhaled and let my shoulders relax. The bedroom led directly to the kitchen so I stumbled into a chair at the kitchen table and at last realized that Ramey had apparently left the house. Maybe to go find Todd. It was at this moment the weight of what had just happened settled on me. In the stillness of the kitchen shame slathered itself over me. I couldn’t speak and, if I could have, there was no one home to speak to. But I could feel my tongue useless inside my mouth. If I could have swallowed it I would have.
Across the table I saw my reflection in the glass front of Mamaw’s dish cabinet. Old eyes. Slack-face. Elbows weak on the table. It was a hateful person there in the glass. Hate-filled and hurt and disgusted at my own lack of courage and strength. Repulsed at my inaction. I was nine.
There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes. God I hope so, Mr. Tolstoy.
On the occasional trips to my mom’s to spend the night, it seemed the temporary escape wouldn’t be enough. I began to create what have come to be known as paracosms. Psychologists say these are detailed imaginary worlds created in childhood. I imagined so fiercely I began to see bright red spots moving behind my eyelids. I could see through them, see their veins. It was how I knew they were alive.
I could sense that something in me had shifted out of place. I had endured, by that point, three years of what would be seven years of a full round of different types of abuse. And already, by this point, I was defeated. I wanted to kill myself. That was the overwhelming thought sitting at the kitchen table. I wanted to kill myself. I had no place from which to form how this would be done, only that I wanted to be dead instead of alive and hurting so badly. The closest I could come to forming an idea was that I wanted to stay in that chair forever, my only need other than never moving again was to find some way to break Mamaw’s glass dish cabinet. I wanted to destroy at least that image of myself. Above all, the thought of what had just happened becoming a regular thing essentially broke my mind right then and there. I’ve never recovered. There was no way to get rid of that sudden moment of understanding that crashed through me: would this become a routine?
Tolstoy was brilliant but was oversimplifying when he said if you want to be happy, be.
Anything Ramey did to me would develop into an ongoing schedule that only he knew about and that I could hardly guess at. It’s possible he wasn’t imaginative enough for much else. If he jumped out and gut-punched me so I couldn’t breathe for a half a minute or so, it’d be something he did every day for weeks. Sometimes it would stop and I’d think it was over and we were moving on to some other torture, he would surprise me again with a gut-punch.
Often his abuse came hidden as wrestling. In the 1980s, professional wrestling was at the height of its popularity. Every kid aged five to sixteen was more or less a huge fan, and each new “signature move” of all the wrestlers. Hulk Hogan's Big Foot, Randy Savage’s Flying Elbow, Ric Flair’s Figure Four, Jake Roberts’s DDT. I got to know them through Ramey’s constant insistence on performing them on me. But, unlike on television, he did these signature moves on me without easing up. When I got a DDT (a splendid move in which one wrestler’s head is placed between the legs of the other standing wrestler then his body is flipped upside down, held there for a couple seconds, and then dropped onto his head.) In professional wrestling this move was completed without breaking necks by holding the targeted wrestler’s body up a few inches so that it only seemed like his head was driven into the mat. When I was on the receiving end of these, my head hit the floor. Every single time. It was the same for everything else.
The wrestling injuries at least had a pretense. The more frequent abuse came as one-sided fights. Five years younger, I was outmatched in the best situations. But fights between us happened spontaneously. Only Ramey had knowledge of when this would be, and he used that to his full advantage. At any moment I had my face held against the ground and knee-stomped, for example. I walked through the house holding my breath, preparing myself to be hurt physically. I even managed to make getting hit, stomped, or thrown into things hurt less in my mind. I did this through basic stubbornness and spite. As much as possible, I wanted to keep from him the pleasure he found in my misery. Sliding into this mindset would later be one of the key reasons I developed mental illness later in life. Keeping yourself mentally ready to be badly hurt or at least physically attacked at all times over the course of six years strains the mind’s ability to stay taut for so long. I managed it, survived it, but I lost a lot along the way, and picked up illnesses anyone could do without. The driving force behind my survival, apart from a basic fear of death, was that I was never, not ever, let him see just how much he was getting to me.
But stubbornness sometimes did nothing to soften the baggage that came with an injury. Mamaw and Papaw took us to the G.C. Murphy department store in town on the weekends. It was one of several kinds of outings they took us on both together and on our own. Once Mamaw thought it would be a good idea for me to buy a model car set and have Father help me with it. Mamaw had an amazing heart, and I honestly didn’t have it in me to tell her otherwise. So I bought the model car and a set of acrylic paints. On the way home, me and Ramey opened them to smell the paint. We closed the lids tightly, but I wanted to keep the silver paint in my pocket. Ramey had pretended to tighten the lid better for me and I returned it to my pocket. Of course he loosened the lid, which probably sounds like a pretty funny prank. I might have thought so, too, if it hadn’t been so humiliating.
When we got home and I stepped out of the car, I felt a stickiness on my upper thigh. I went to the bathroom and found that the bottle of gray paint had spilled and soaked through my pocket and onto my thigh. By the time I had my pants off and got to take a good look my skin burned like an awful rash had suddenly broken through my body. All was terrible until Father decided to step in.
He always chose to intervene at the worst times. This day he decided I would need to have Vaseline applied to the paint to get it to come off. He told me to get in the shower and take my pants and underwear off, which I did. He then started rubbing the Vaseline in. Just as I was thinking that I hoped no one ever heard about what happened, I heard Ramey’s trademark hissing laughter from somewhere in the house, and I knew he knew, which meant more people would know.
The fights were still the worst. Each time we had one Father would crawl himself out of bed (only at the urging of Mamaw telling him to be a parent) and come and give me the obligatory whipping. And he laid it on. Each time Ramey beat me, I always knew I had another coming from Father for fighting. He’d thrash me nine or ten times and then without a word go back to his bedroom and close the door not to be heard from again for days.
Later on I’d figure out that he only ever did this because Mamaw and Papaw drew a line at physical punishment. They guided me and gave me parental insight and so on, but they would not correct me. I was physically abused by Ramey and then physically abused by Father. That he wasn’t interested in his role abusing me doesn’t change the reality.
The situation did get out of hand enough one evening that I went to stay with my mom. Mom had remarried and had just had my sister, Kelly. She juggled a newborn, an alcoholic, abusive husband, and whatever problems came her way concerning me. The stepdad, Russell, had a younger brother named Pat. Pat was better to us than his own brother, and he was only sixteen years old. He was someone I could talk to, so I talked about Ramey and what he was doing to me.
“Stand up for yourself,” Pat told me one evening. “Do it just one time and you’ll never have to do it again.”
Wise words from someone so young. I took his advice to heart, but there was no way for me to know how I’d handle it when it came up. A couple weeks later I walked into mine and Ramey’s bedroom. It was empty, and as far as I knew Ramey was off somewhere away from the house. When I made it to the center of the room, he attacked. A punch to the head and then another one to the body. The crack to the head didn’t do much, but the body shot, a liver punch, buckled me, forced all the wind from me in one long and loud wail.
It was during and after one of these incidents when I left my sensible mind for the first time.
There was only a thin wall separating our bedroom from Father’s bedroom. This time he heard it himself and came crashing into the room. Ramey spun and darted around him and out the front door. Without a word, he started whipping me. He saw there wasn’t much progress doing it that way, so he pulled my pants down until I was standing in my underwear taking smack after smack. I tried to float away, pin myself to something else. I turned to the right and faced the window. Ramey was there. Outside in the yard laughing and pointing at me.
What happened next is a strange memory for me. At eight years old and about to have my first break with reality. I saw the window become a bubble, the kind formed by the old dip and blow bubbles. Out, out, out until I was sure it was going to break; there was no way it could take much more. It was going to break. While watching it expand ever closer to Ramey outside, I decided that since it was going to break anyway, I would punch through it to hit Ramey.
I remember the sound and I remember the way the window burst outward and I remember Ramey shielding his face. From that point on I can only recall three things: one, my aunt tending to Ramey, who had a cut above his eye, and paying no attention to me whatsoever. She had been visiting and placed herself in the middle of the situation with no prompting at all; two, walking across the street with Father to go to my mom’s; and three, realizing my hand was bleeding badly.
The black periods mixed in I assume could have been some early mechanism to protect myself, because when he got to Mom’s front door, he simply gave me a push into the apartment and then left without a word. Pat was there. It couldn’t have worked out better.
Mom noticed my hand and immediately left the living room to find a dish towel in the kitchen. While she was out of the room, I saw that Pat was looking at me with pride.
“I did it,” I said. “I stood up for myself.”
“And you’ll never have to again,” he said.
And I didn’t. That was the last time Ramey and I had any kind of physical altercation. However, it did nothing to relieve me of the numerous times he mentally tortured me. This nearly nonstop punishment and terrorization would lead me to many decisions that, to this day, make me feel guilty. Most accurately, survivor’s guilt, strangely enough.
But right or wrong, Tolstoy did write that he stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking. So how wrong could he ever really be?
I had a lot I wanted to forget. It was always really clear that Father had wanted more than anything to forget me. I say this with no hint of self-pity. Once you understand something as devastating as that, the rest of the time is spent adjusting to it, not trying to fix it and not looking for pity. The adjustment is hard enough that I’m still working on it.
Mamaw once showed me Father’s room while he was gone for a VA appointment with my grandfather. The room was a solid haze of smoke, books were piled all over the place, the mattress of the double bed had sunk through to the box springs. I noticed almost everything but not what Mamaw had wanted to point out to me.
“Look here on the walls, Zane,” Mamaw said, pointing at each of them. We all called her Mamaw “Do you see anything strange?”
I scanned the walls and remembered something about the pictures. Each had been of me, pictures Mamaw had put up in Father’s bedroom. Now they were turned backward on their tacks. They hung there tributary-crooked with my picture facing the wall. I knew why. I’d always known why.
“Your daddy says he can’t bear to look at those pictures of you,” she continued. “He said it’s too painful. He loves you, Zane.”
I wouldn’t have thought of it then but now I believe Mamaw was in simple denial about her son’s behavior. She knew what he did was wrong, but she twisted it toward the idea of some kind of positive, while unwittingly alluding to his true nature, that of an egomaniacal, self-centered man who, instead of trying to better connect with his son, decided he couldn’t stand being forever reminded of his failings.
While I lived with Mamaw and Papaw and endured unholy abuse, Father mostly slept. When he did get up and stir around, he did so in the middle of the night. My bedroom had an open door to the kitchen where Mamaw kept a light on all during the night. I had gotten used to it about the time I first saw Father shuffling around the kitchen table, hair a mess, face puffy from sleep, just wandering through the kitchen. He disappeared to the left of the door, I heard the refrigerator open with that hiss, saw the kitchen flood with light. The sounds he made seemed to echo around the house. He was rat-like, pilfering through the fridge for food, scrounging around looking for 2-liters of Coke and Salisbury steak tv dinners.
I was sure he didn’t hear me get out of bed. To this day I couldn't explain why I wanted to confront him. Something about the situation brought me to a point of near rage. There was a second or two while I stared at his pockmarked back that I wanted to just hug him, be hugged by him. Instead I just spoke, acknowledged him there holding a fresh pack of Fischer’s bacon. He didn’t speak. Instead, like a snared animal, he jolted his body around to find me. When he did, his eyes, always so severe and sinister, seemed to have popped from their sockets. I didn’t speak and Father didn’t speak. He turned back to the fridge and began pawing through it again.
I would find him several more times in random places throughout the house when I got up to use the bathroom or went for a drink of water — sitting up straight as a board on the living room couch staring into the dark, lurching around doors and out of sight like a middle-aged wraith. He always seemed aware that I saw him but never spoke to me. If anything, he would turn his gaze on me menacingly until I left to go back to bed.
These were times when he told me outright that he never wanted me, that his life ended the second he learned my mom was pregnant. This came out in a gush of words and pain while, I would learn later, he was intoxicated and high. But it was the truth, there was no mistake about it. Even as a young boy, the disgusting truth of what he was saying was obvious. It always left me speechless, trying not to cry. I didn’t want him to know that it hurt me; I wanted him to feel like he’d failed in trying to make me feel bad. When all along — and I was too young to understand such nuance then — he didn’t care what I felt bad or good about. Turns out when you wish somebody hadn’t been born, you care even less about how they feel.
Mr. Tolstoy, you cannot truly believe that we lose because we tell ourselves we lost.
One evening while Mamaw washed dishes I came to her and must have asked her about something to do with the Holy Bible. I had been attending bible school that summer and had a few thoughts I needed to express. Without stopping her dishwashing, Mamaw spoke with conviction, saying, “Zane, when Gabrielle blows his horn you’ll be able to hear it. And when you hear that horn blowing just ask for forgiveness for all your sins and accept Jesus into your heart and you’ll be saved.”
I took note; I took hope into my heart. If Gabriel could get here soon, I would be spared more days in the attic. I went to bed over the next several weeks figuring since I was a child, Jesus would spare me any bad things I had done because I was an innocent. This was always a takeaway from one of my conversations with Mamaw. All in all, I felt good about the possibilities.
One night, Gabrielle blew his horn. I heard it loud and clear. Even considering my heart attack to come forty years later, this was the fastest and hardest my heart had ever pounded. I lay flat on the bed with my arms out, my fingers twisting the bed sheet into tight balls, chin held high trying to be brave and ready to turn and flip into the sky. I thought it might be like an incredibly terrifying roller coaster that would end in either constant pain or roads of gold and angels flying about happily.
The horn that blared, and this sometime in the early morning hours, came from Trivitte Trucking. For whatever reason, one of the short bed coal truck drivers decided to blow his horn at just that time. It was the loudest sound I had ever heard, it seemed. And may have been up to that point. I peed the bed and ran straight to Mamaw, shaking her by the shoulders. Papaw rolled over then sat up, his hair poking out from his head in blades shiny with Vitalis.
It was a half hour or so before Mamaw had calmed me down completely. She took my wet underwear and brought fresh ones, pulled the sheets and gave me new ones that smelled like Tide and were cool from their folds in the closet. It was rebirth in the wake of rebirth. But never far from all the birthing was plain and simple death, the end of all things here on earth. Death. The mystery.
All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do. Now you’re talking, Leo.
The night Trivitte blew his horn, Ramey wasn’t there. Every now and then he would go to his mom’s for a weekend or even a couple weeks. These were the best times. From age six to thirteen, it was these weekends and weeks without Ramey when I had the chance to live a child’s life instead of a survivor’s existence. This time was spent reading books and then playing and pretending to be the people in the books. I climbed mountains with my shirt off and tied around my waist like a buckskin flap and tried to make every atom of my body the great Native American Pontiac. During another week of freedom, I tinkered with Papaw’s tools in his large basement workshop. Having read a long list of juvenile biographies, I was Eli Whitney that week, creator of the cotton gin, a mechanic who changed the way work was done in the fields of America.
During these days of freedom, I can never remember the exact details when Ramey would come back from his mom’s. I only have a feeling as memory, this unmatched dread and exhaustion. Survival is a feeling, and I was exhausted from it, the vigilant awareness and heightened senses, the tensing of the body, the muscles around the neck, the shoulders prepared always to raise to offer more protection to the head and neck. All of it was a feeling in the center of me moving outward and filling me up. I survived, and there were so many things I had to do to manage it. The entire experience was primal.
As for me, I am unbearably weary of myself. Oh, oh, oh, Lev, I have plenty to say…
…listen, I am busted. I am broken. I am bent. I am critical, tolerated at best, a nuisance, an obligation. I am devastated. I am unworthy. I am terminal, barely alive, living inside my head, angry, scourged, molested, wounded. I am scarred. I am an act of courage even living here. I have forgotten how to laugh. I am transparent due to skin loss. I am suffering with no voice. I am war, Mr. Tolstoy.