…In Endless Song

I was eight years old.

The lady who drove me to the new house was quiet but nice. She’d been to see me at home a few times, and I guess she thought it would be better for me to not be there anymore. I wondered of course whether I was being moved away from my family because I was bad or something. I already knew I was bad, because of the way my stepdad treated me. He’d been in our family for three years, and I still couldn’t get it right. I got into trouble for so many things! For making my bed wrong, or spilling milk, or not doing my chores correctly, or talking at the dinner table. He disciplined my brothers and sisters and me by hitting us. Usually with a belt, but also quite often with a horse whip. Once, when my brother Mikey and I were playing, Ed came outside and saw us, grabbed the nearest thing he could find, and started hitting Mike with it. It was a bicycle inner tube with small hidden metal strips all around the outer edge.  We should have been doing our chores, but we had found a pile of hay and were having so much fun jumping into it, that we quite forgot about everything else. It was a beautiful little moment until Ed appeared. I hid under a pile of wood, and Ed unleashed his fury. The metal strips pierced Mike’s skin over and over and over again. His back got all bloody, and he kept screaming, at every hit, but his screams became quieter as time wore on, until finally he just lay there limply, but Ed kept right on going. I thought Mike was dead.

Mike got to go live with his dad after that. I always wondered if I needed more punishing than Mike since he got to leave and I had to stay. No matter how good I thought I was, there was always something about me that needed improvement, and the belt hanging on the wall, and the whip hanging outside were constant reminders.  Maybe now, I was being given up as a hopeless case, incorrigible. Sent away to live with strangers who could sort me out. And since my dad was in prison, going to live with him was out of the question.

I just sat in the front seat holding onto something, a bag probably. Not that I really had a lot to hold onto. There was more to let go of, actually, but I didn’t know it at the time. I was a little scared of what was coming next but it was almost a good kind of scared, like… anticipation. Not the bad kind of scared like wondering why daddy was coming in to my bedroom at three in the morning, no, just wondering what was coming next, and scared of the unknown.

When we arrived, and waited for someone to answer the doorbell, I just stood there quietly, not smiling, just staring straight ahead. I was just a skinny little freckle-faced kid with long brown hair and big dark eyes, full of questions, scared to ask. Finally someone opened the door, knelt down to my level and said "Hi Terry!"