Quiet As It's Kept

by Monique Miller

  “Tyler, can you hold on for a second? That’s my wife on the other line.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Will clicked over to the other call and answered, “Hello?”

  “Will, where are you? I’ve called the house a few times.”

  “We are here. I was just a little preoccupied with something.”

  Morgan sounded like she was pissed off for having to keep calling. She let out a breath of air. “Look, I’ve got to work late tonight, so I won’t be home until about ten or so.”

  “You’ve got to work that late?”

  “I mean, I don’t have to, but I volunteered to work that late for the extra hours. And we need the money.”

  “Okay, well, thanks for letting me know.”

  “I am just trying to keep the lines of communication open,” Morgan said. To Will it seemed like she was trying to be sarcastic, especially in the way she kept making a point of saying they needed the money, thus pointing out the fact that he wasn’t working.

  He wasn’t going to let her sarcasm get to him. “Do you need me to bring you anything to eat later?”

  “Nah, I’ll grab something. Look, I gotta go. I’ll see you later on tonight.”

  “Okay, bye,” Will said. He sighed and clicked back over to Tyler. “Hey, sorry about that.”

  “Don’t worry about me. Like I said, I’ve got time.”

  “I didn’t mean to just dump all of that information on you like that,” Will said. But I asked God for help and He led me to you.

  “Yeah, and I know exactly why.”

  “Well, can you fill me in on it?”

  “Can I?” Tyler chuckled. “Oh, yes.” He paused for a moment. “You wouldn’t by any chance be free tonight around seven o’clock, would you? I mean, I know you just told me about how your days have been running.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am free this evening. Or, shall I say, the baby and I are free this evening. My wife was just calling to tell me that she would be in late tonight.”

  “Good, I’d like to invite you to a meeting that I am a part of. They meet at seven at the church twice a month.”

  “Are you talking about the men’s fellowship? I thought they only met once every other month on Fridays,” Will said.

  “This is not the men’s fellowship per se—not the men’s fellowship you’ve probably been a part of. I think being a part of this meeting will be good for you.”

  “How so?” Will asked.

  “For now, let me just say that you are not alone. At this meeting you will find that there are other men who have something in common with you.”

  Will pressed the button to end the call. He wondered what kind of meeting Tyler was inviting him to, and what kinds of things others at the meeting might have in common with him. Soon enough he would find out.

  Chapter 19

  After Will met Tyler in the foyer and dropped the baby at daycare, Will ascended the stairs to the second floor of the church, where some of the offices and auxiliary rooms were that were used for various activities like choir rehearsal, vacation Bible school, and church committee meetings. Will had never realized the second floor of the church held so many rooms until he started attending new members’ class when he first joined the church. From the outside of the church, the edifice looked as if it were one large cathedral. And the way the church had been designed, even from inside it didn’t look as if the second floor was as big as it was. The architect who had designed the space had used every nook and cranny.

  He followed Tyler down the hall until they reached one of the office doors. After Tyler knocked on the door three times, Will heard someone call from the other side, “Come in.”

  They entered the room, where Will saw a brother from the church he faintly recognized sitting at a desk. The church was so big it was hard to know each person and face, but since Will had been going there for a few years, he had become familiar with quite a few faces.

  “Please sit down,” the man said.

  Tyler sat in one of the two chairs in front of the desk. Will sat in the other chair, and started to wonder just exactly what was going on. Tyler told him there was a meeting at 7:00 that night, and, glancing at his watch, he saw that it was already a quarter after the hour. He’d met Tyler right at 7:00 in the foyer of the church. Then he checked the baby into the church’s daycare. Will knew that the daycare was open during church service for parents to drop their children off, but didn’t realize it was open during the week to assist parents during their committee meetings and practices.

  The daycare, which was usually broken down by age group in multiple rooms, was currently being held in one room. There were about twenty children in the room with three church attendants. The attendants had familiar faces too, but Will had never seen any of the three men working during church service.

  Will found himself glancing at his watch again and started to hope that Morgan wouldn’t arrive home earlier than she said she was going to. He didn’t want to have to deal with her ranting if she didn’t find him and the baby at home. His legs started to shake with nervousness.

  The man greeted Tyler. “Brother King.”

  Tyler returned the greeting. “Brother Nelson.”

  “Is this brother a friend?” Brother Nelson said. He was a middle-aged African American man with graying hair on his sideburns.

  Will thought it was an odd question. It also seemed strange that Tyler and the man were acting so formal. Normally when brothers in the church met they greeted each other with at least a handshake, if not a brotherly hug. These two men acted as if there was a cool distance between them.

  “Yes, this brother is a friend,” Tyler said.

  The man gave Will a slight smile. “Have you told him yet?” Brother Nelson asked.

  “No, I haven’t,” Tyler said.

  For the first time since Will walked into the office, he noticed the ticking of a clock that sat on the side of the desk. Time was ticking away, closer and closer to the time he’d have to go back home and figure out what he was going to have to do about his family situation. Instead of sitting there at the church going to a meeting, he needed to be at home, doing something to figure out how he was going to deal with a woman who was trying to kill him.

  Will couldn’t sit still any longer. “Look,” he said, standing up. “I need to get back home. I’ve got—”

  Tyler stood and placed his hand on Will’s shoulder. “Will, my brother. Please sit. I’m sorry if I’ve been vague about what is going on here. But there are certain precautions we take here, because many lives are at stake.”

  Will sat back down, remembering that the Lord had led him to Tyler. Now the Lord was giving him the discerning spirit to sit back down. The nervousness in his body dissipated.

  “Will, I invited you here tonight because, as I said earlier today on the phone, there are others who are going through what you are going through.” Tyler looked from Will to Brother Nelson.

  Brother Nelson gave a nod for Tyler to continue speaking.

  “Will, when we spoke earlier, you said that you were going to confide some things to me that you haven’t even confided to your own sister. And what I took from that was that you wanted me to keep the information in confidence as well.”

  Will nodded.

  “Well, as I told you earlier, there is a meeting here tonight and there are people, men, who have a great deal in common with you.”

  It had been strange that Will had seen about twenty kids in the daycare and three men watching the children there, but he had yet to see any other parents. The parking lot did have quite a few cars in it, but by his calculations there were way more cars in the lot than the number of people he’d seen that night. And he hadn’t seen anyone meeting in any of the other rooms, the fellowship hall, or even the sanctuary.

  “There are other people who have things going on in their personal lives that they want kept in confidence, only to be shared with people who mean them well,” Tyler went on to explain. “
You are about to meet some of those people. And, just like you, they want privacy. So anything that you see or hear needs to be kept in confidence.”

  Will looked from Tyler to Brother Nelson, and then back to Tyler again.

  “Can you do that? Keep anything you hear or see in confidence?” Tyler asked.

  “Yes,” Will said.

  “That means any information about the day, time, and location of this meeting.”

  “Yes,” Will said again, and nodded.

  Tyler extended his hand to shake on it. Will firmly shook his hand. Then Brother Nelson extended his hand also.

  Both of the other men stood and Will followed their lead and did the same. Behind the man’s desk was another door. Will assumed it led to another office. Brother Nelson knocked on the door with three short knocks, just as Tyler had done a few minutes before, and then he opened the door.

  Will followed both men as they entered the other room, which wasn’t an office. It was set up like a small classroom. Inside the room, Will saw men sitting in a circle. There were thirteen chairs and ten of them were occupied. Will, Tyler, and Brother Nelson took the remaining three seats.

  Brother Nelson began to speak. “I hope you gentlemen were able to update one another and do some catching up. I am sorry for keeping you all, but, as you can see, we have a newcomer here with us this evening.”

  Will looked around the room at the men. He saw a few other faces he recognized and a few he didn’t. The men’s ages ranged from early twenties to one man who looked as if he was at least eighty years old. Will wondered what exactly was going on.

  “Brother Tracy, as Tyler said a few moments ago, anything you hear in this room is to stay in this room. Each meeting we recite a vow of confidence to protect the privacy of everyone here. And that means anything that you say also in here. We are friends, and nothing you say here will be repeated outside of these walls.”

  One of the men stood up and retrieved a stack of papers sitting on a desk in the corner of the room. He took one and passed the others around. When Will got his copy he read it. At the top, it said, “The Secret Brotherhood Vow of Confidence.” He skimmed the vow, which basically said that the brothers gathered in the room vowed to respect the others’ privacy, and they would hold secret the information shared within.

  Once everyone had a sheet, Brother Nelson said, “Will everyone please read the vow aloud?”

  In unison, the men read the vow of confidence. Afterward, Brother Nelson said, “We trust that each of you will adhere to the vow you’ve just read, and that you know that this is an honors system. I also pray that you are all men of honor. Therefore, we will not be signing a roster recording the names of the people here, so as to not leave a paper trail that could one day possibly get into the wrong hands.” One by one, each man passed his paper back to the man who’d first passed them out.

  “Brother Tracy, feel free to listen and join in whenever and wherever you feel comfortable doing so,” Brother Nelson said. “Now that that is done, I’d like to welcome each of you back to our meeting this evening. I wish it were under different circumstances, but I am glad that because of this group we are all in the process of finding ourselves in better circumstances with each passing day.” Brother Nelson looked to his left. “Brother Chrispin, would you like to give an overview of what this meeting is about, so that Brother Tracy will have a better idea of why he is here and why he hopefully is finding himself among friends?”

  Brother Chrispin greeted the group. “Good evening, all. Brother Tracy, all of us here have some things in common. One thing is that we all have or have had wives. Another thing is that our wives, in one way or another, have been or are currently being abusive to us and/or our families.”

  Will sat back in his chair, wondering how the man standing before him, at six feet two inches and no less than 275 pounds, would allow a woman to beat on him. He imagined the man’s wife was Samoan. She’d have to be, to be big enough to beat on him.

  “And, my brother,” Brother Chrispin continued, directing his attention, “I know what you are thinking. You are thinking how could a man of my stature allow a woman to beat all over me.”

  Will had to nod in agreement.

  “My wife has never laid a hand on me,” Brother Chrispin said.

  Will cocked his head to the left with bewilderment as another man started speaking. “My wife never touched me either, not physically. But she was emotionally abusive toward me and my children. For her we could never do anything right. She always had a habit of being inconsistent in the things that she said, the things that she did, which caused my children and me to be confused all the time.

  “Her inconsistencies often consisted of lies she told not only to us, but also to family members, and to my children’s school teachers and the administration. By the time my wife and I separated, my children and I were all basket cases. Emotionally, my soon-to-be ex-wife caused us to have to be in counseling. My children and I have to see a therapist each week to try to get our lives back on track.” The man chuckled. “Well, I don’t know if my poor kids’ lives were even on track in the first place.” He shook his head.

  One by one, each man told a story about how he had been abused by his spouse: psychologically, sexually, physically, or emotionally. Most of the men spoke about the physical and emotional abuse they experienced or were still experiencing at the hands of their wives.

  When the flow of testimonies got around to Tyler, he said, “My wife used to physically harm me. She would strike me, punch me, kick me, and even slap me whenever she got into one of her raging moods. Not once did I ever strike her back.” Tyler shook his head. “You might ask how I as a strong black man would allow my wife to hit on me like that. Well, it wasn’t that often, and even though the situation progressively got worse, she always apologized after each occurrence.

  “I was taught that you should never hit a woman. And I believed my wife when she said she wasn’t going to be abusive to me anymore. She even stopped for a while. It wasn’t long enough that we started talking about having a child, and eventually had one. But a few months after my daughter was born, she returned to her old ways of coming loose at the seams and getting angry at the drop of a dime.” Tyler paused, taking a deep breath.

  “Her actions started to concern me more because now it wasn’t just me in the home being subjected to her rage. Now I had my little girl to think about. I encouraged my wife to get help and she said she would, but she never did.

  “The straw that finally broke the camel’s back was one morning when she was going off on one of her yelling frenzies. She had gone one step further in her attempts to cause me bodily injury. She’d heated some syrup in the microwave for the pancake breakfast she’d made. As I tried to leave the kitchen, she threw the container of hot syrup on me.” Tyler pulled up his sleeve to show where he’d suffered burns. “They had to do skin grafts on me. I ended up being in the hospital it was so bad.”

  Will remembered seeing the scar on his arm that day at the park when they’d first talked. He’d wondered what had happened, thinking that maybe it was some type of burn from a fire or something.

  The last person to speak was Brother Nelson. He took a deep breath before giving his testimony.

  “I am blessed to be sitting here today. If it were not for the grace of God, I wouldn’t be here. My family members refer to my ex-wife as the Black Widow, because she leaves a trail of dead husbands behind her. I was her third husband, but when we married I thought she had been married only once before. Sadly, I found out different a few months after I left her.

  “And if it were not for my family, I probably would not have realized until it was too late that the woman I loved so much was trying to kill me.” He closed his eyes as if remembering the things he had gone through. “For almost a year my wife tried to kill me by putting poison in my food. She was putting small amounts of arsenic in my food. After we were married for only a couple of months I started feeling nauseated and was vomit
ing a lot. I thought I had the flu. I also had headaches, diarrhea, stomach cramps, and hair loss.

  “After a couple of weeks of having my so-called flu, my family started getting very concerned. My mother, who was known for being infamously nosey, had tried to tell me that my wife was doing something to me. I ignored her and told her to mind her own business. I mean, I loved my wife and there was no way she would try to do anything to harm me.” Brother Nelson closed his eyes, clasped his hands together as if praying, and took a moment to pause.

  When he opened his eyes, a tear trickled down the side of his cheek. He placed his hands on his lap and continued. “I thank God that my mother didn’t listen to a word I said and continued to be the nosey body she always was. Because one weekend, while my wife and I were out of town, my mom searched my house, and found a box of poison hidden on my wife’s side of her closet under her shoeboxes.

  “My mother tried to call me on my cell phone to let me know what she’d found, but she never got in contact with me. My wife had turned my ringer off and the next time I did get a chance to talk to my mother, it was from a hospital room.

  “During our trip out of town, my wife gave me so much arsenic in my food that I ended up in a coma. When my mother found out, she immediately came to the hospital and told them to test for arsenic poisoning. They did and found it in time enough to treat me.”

  Will shook his head. It had seemed as if each testimony got worse, in a crescendo ending in Brother Nelson’s near-fatal experience. Will couldn’t believe his ears.

  Brother Nelson continued. “I thank God each and every day for sparing my life and restoring my health to what it was before my ex-wife started poisoning me.”

  The room was quiet for a few moments before Tyler spoke again, directing his words to Will. “As you can see, each man in this room has been abused psychologically, sexually, mentally, or physically. And this group, which we call the Secret Brotherhood, is a support group for abused men.”