The days would draw out, sad and long, and I would find myself jumping at the slightest touch or sound. Every tiny mistake, whether it was forgetting to close a door, dropping a dish, not coming immediately when called or talking without permission, would earn us a severe switching or belting. I had learned to count and would sometimes count the blows when we were punished, to keep my mind off the pain; usually, the average was fifteen licks. If Samantha and I cried, Brian or Mamma would beat us until we stopped. Many times we merely collapsed. Brian’s favorite stance for us when he beat us was to have us bend over and touch our toes. If we fell over or stopped touching our toes, the beatings would continue until we complied.
These punishments took place about three times a day for each of us. The worst part was that my mother would either participate in the punishment or stand by and watch. Sometimes I would run to her for help, only to have her shove me back at Brian, who would angrily grab at me.
Sometimes I would still be shaking from a recent beating when Brian would start reading us our nightly story. I would listen to the story and wish he were like that all the time. It almost seemed like he thought that the stories could absolve him, but they didn’t; a story could never wash away the pain that we suffered on a daily basis.
Brian forced us to call him Dad. I hated it, but I had no other choice than to comply. In the summer, Brian and my mother would work the mines and take the gold ore to southern Arizona to be assayed. This was the mid-1980s, and gold was at its ultimate peak in price. In the winter, we would drive farther up into the mountains where Brian and Mamma would cut down oak trees for firewood to sell in town.
On Sundays, we would go to a church in town. Brian would always warn us to not talk to anyone about our home life and only answer questions when asked. We were the quietest little girls in the church. I am still surprised that no one thought our withdrawn behavior was strange. Couldn’t they see our sad eyes and the angry looks that Brian shot at us? Or did they notice and just did not know what to do?
One summer day, about a year after we came to live at the mine, Mamma told me to undress and go outside and stand next to the five-gallon bucket to wait for my bath. She always stood us in that bucket and gave us our baths before we went into town. I did not want to undress and stand outside since Brian always came over and talked to me as he stared me up and down. Whenever I tried to turn away from his stares, he would get angry and tell me I was an ungrateful, selfish little girl. Although I was not a perfect child, I was certainly not selfish, and his saying so confused and saddened me.
On this particular day, I stood next to the bucket for a few minutes, trembling as Brian started inching his way over. When I could no longer stand his staring, I asked him if I could play in the sawdust pile until Mamma was ready for me. He just shrugged, so I ran over to the giant pile and covered myself with the sawdust.
A couple of minutes later, Mamma came out of the trailer yelling for me. I ran back to the five-gallon bucket and found that she was very angry because I had fine sawdust all over me. I tried to tell her that Brian had given me permission to play in the sawdust, but she grabbed me and started shaking me. She said I had the devil in me and that she was going to beat it out of me. I started screaming, half hoping someone would hear and save me, but of course, there was nobody to hear.
Brian came over and grabbed me. He put my upper torso between his legs and squeezed as hard as he could. I struggled for breath as his knees squeezed my five-year-old diaphragm. My mother began hitting me with a big leather belt. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I tried to break free. Brian squeezed harder and harder with his legs and Mamma said the pain was just the devil trying to come out. I screamed and screamed, but only my echo heard me. My mother laughed an evil laugh with every blow, and Brian goaded her into continuing . When I finally quit struggling, Brian let me go. I went limp and sank to the ground. I tried to get up, but I could not. I had a piercing pain in the left side of my rib cage, and every breath was torturous.
Mamma wiped me down roughly and dressed me. Tears rolled down my cheeks, but I was too weak to scream anymore. After she had dressed me, Brian came over and placed me in the back of the pickup truck with the canopy on it. I lay in the back as the truck bounced across ruts in the road on the way into town.
My little sister tried to hug me. I think she sensed there was something very wrong with me. The pain was so great, I could not breathe. I put a hand on my upper left rib cage. I was sure I had three broken ribs. I was in terrible pain, and the motion of the truck was making it even worse.
When we got into town, Brian parked at the far end of a shopping area, like he always did. He got out and came to the back of the truck to tell us not to make a sound. Then he and Mamma walked off into the store. They usually came back hours later with groceries or tools or clothes. We sometimes had a couple of old dolls to play with, but we did not have many toys because they would make noise and someone might hear us. They would sometimes come out of wherever they were to take us to the restroom. I can still remember how refreshing it was to get out of the back of the truck and walk around, seeing other people and breathing the fresh air.
Staying in the truck, however, was better than the times we had to go with them. On the rare occasions that we got to come out, Brian would make us carry a belt so that other people could see what bad children we were.
In truck, I would get up on my knees and stare out through the cracks in the canopy. I would see children walking by with their parents—little girls in pretty dresses, mothers laughing and hugging them, For a short while, I would imagine that I was them. But I was not; I was only a small girl with bright green eyes and dirty blonde hair. I was peeking out at the world from the back of a pickup truck. People passed by within a few feet of Samantha and me, yet they never knew we were there. We were two girls that did not exist—two sad, frightened little girls at the mercy of two merciless individuals.
That summer slowly turned into winter. My ribs never healed quite right. It felt like they bunched together and became a small knot, and even to this day, when I am running, I still feel pain in that knot. As time progressed, Brian and Mamma became more and more irritated. It was 1988, and the gold mining industry was suddenly experiencing an upsurge of activists protesting in front of the mines and in the surrounding towns.
These people were against the use of dynamite because of how it disturbed the animal habitats. Due to this, Brian was finding it harder and harder to get mining permits from the State. His frustration was turned back on my sister and me in a big way. Sometimes, we were left alone in the trailer and I would have to scrounge up something for us to eat from the ingredients in the cupboard.
The following spring, Brian was unable to get any permits and lost the mine. Shortly afterward, we packed our things, and Brian set fire to the tools and the mine shaft so the man that took over would have great difficulties. Brian said we were moving to Washington State to stay with his dad who had a small shop there. Samantha and I were excited. We felt we were beginning a new and perhaps better life. We would no longer be isolated. Brian bought a new trailer that was a little bigger, and we packed everything inside.
On the day before we were to leave, we came back to the trailer and found it had been broken into. Brian became angry, grabbed his pistol out of the truck and ran up into the thick manzanita brush. He came back with a teenage boy. He had the gun pressed to the kid’s head. Brian yelled at the boy to tell him where our stuff was or, he said, he would kill him. I remember standing in front of them, frozen, unable to move, and thinking that if he shot and missed, I was in the direct line of fire. The teenager was screaming, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Your stuff is up in the brush.”
Brian laughed and said, “I should just shoot you anyway.”
But he finally let the boy go and chased after him, firing the gun in the air. I will never forget that day. It is etched into my mind forever.
I was so scared; Brian seemed so cold and dangerous.
We left a few hours later and hit the road for Washington. Brian seemed to be in a lighter mood as we traveled, and he told us stories of growing up in the Evergreen State. It took us about three days to reach Seattle. Sometimes, Samantha and I got to sit in the cab rather than the canopy covered truck bed. I would stick my head out the window and feel the wind whip through my hair as I smelled the new scent of the ocean. My sister and I pointed out exciting new sights to each other, although we were careful not to make a sound.
As we traveled during the day and camped by night, things seemed nicer. Mamma and Brian were preoccupied and did not feel the need to beat us so much. For those few days, I told myself that things might not be so bad and that everything was going to get better. Little did I know that a dark cloud was looming in front of me, the extent of which I could not comprehend as a child. It was a dark and ominous cloud that threatened to engulf me, not even leaving a trace.
Engulfed by a Shadow
The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and
the feeling of being unloved.
—Mother Teresa
We arrived in Washington one sunny day in June. I was six-and-a-half years old, and my sister would turn five in August. Our journey came to an end at Brian’s dad’s bicycle and locksmith shop in a little town not far from Seattle. It was a small shop that they had worked in together when Brian was a teenager. After Brian left, his father continued focusing most of his attention on the locksmith part of the business before eventually retiring. When we arrived, the lower part of the building was being rented out to small business tenants, and the upper level was where Grandpa lived.
As we drove up in the back alley behind the shop, I watched curiously as Grandpa came out to greet us. He was a kind, older gentleman and I was surprised when I met him. I had expected an older version of Brian, but Grandpa was just the opposite. While Brian was loud, chubby and plain mean most of the time, Grandpa was gaunt and quiet. He gave Samantha and me each a big hug. We instantly loved this seventy-seven-year-old man. Samantha and I each grabbed one of his hands and followed him upstairs.
The loft was quite spacious with two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a large bathroom. We moved into the bedrooms, and Grandpa said he would sleep on a foldout bed in his living room.
That afternoon, Brian’s older sister came by to visit. She seemed angry that she had not seen Brian for nearly ten years. She was dressed in a suit and had short, stylish hair. She walked with an air of confidence, and I could feel that Brian resented her.
Aunty Laura owned a small, successful business just a few blocks away, and when I asked her if she could stop by every day and visit us, she laughed and said she would try. I was so excited that I clapped my hands happily, but when I turned around I saw my mother’s face glaring at me. After Aunt Laura left, Mamma and Brian cornered me in my new room and began slapping me and backing me into a corner.
“Don’t you ever talk out of turn like that again!” Brian yelled at me. “In fact, do not talk to her at all! She is only here to see what kind of bad things she can find out about me through you girls.”
I felt my heart sink—maybe there was no new life; maybe it was the same game with only a few extra innocent players. Mamma and Brian brought my sister into the room, sat us both down on the bed and began laying out the rules. We were not to make any noise when we were being punished. We were not to tell anyone when they had punished us. We should always appear to be happy when around others. If we were caught pouting or complaining for any reason, we would be punished again. We were also not to disturb Grandpa or go anywhere with him.
That was how our new life began. Brian joined the union and worked local construction jobs; Mamma stayed at home with us and took care of the house. Sometimes, after the work was done, we would walk to the park only a few blocks away. Samantha and I liked these outings, but we were awkward around other children and usually just played with each other. We would stay for about half an hour, then walk back to the apartment above the shop. I always dreaded it when I would see the shop in the distance. It was like a prison and my heart would always flip flop as my feet crossed the threshold. Sometimes, I wondered if the other kids I saw at the park were scared to go home. In the afternoons, we were allowed to go outside and play in the alley behind the shop. We loved playing in that alley; it was a great place to escape. When Brian came home in the evening, it was even worse. He always found a reason to beat us and he always used the full force of his strength.
They beat us without mercy or would make us stand in the corner for hours at a time, but it was usually in their bedroom, out of sight. Since we were not allowed to cry when we were being belted or beaten with a stick, Grandpa usually did not know what was going on, but sometimes we could not help it and cried anyway. Grandpa pretended he did not notice our tear-streaked faces, but sometimes I could see a disturbed look on his face.
That summer, I learned to read. Some people were wondering why I was not yet in school since I was nearly seven, so Mamma began pretending I was being homeschooled. The lessons were done at random and I understood very little, but I picked up on the reading part, and soon, I was borrowing books from Grandpa and losing my sad self in his western novels and historical books.
As I skipped over the big words, I would imagine myself as the hero in the book, and I could forget for an instant that I was imprisoned by two people whose only joy in life seemed to be to inflict pain on others. I was being held hostage in front of people who could have saved me, had they known. My sister and I were captives in plain sight, yearning for a rescuer that would never come.
As the summer progressed, Brian began to act even stranger than usual; he ordered a bunch of books on a group of people called the Amish.
One morning during breakfast, Brian announced that we were going to become God-fearing people and obey the Bible in its entirety. He had Mamma take Samantha and me to a local class on crocheting so we could learn something that would keep us busy, like the good little Amish girls supposedly were. We learned how to crochet in just a few days.
After we had learned to crochet, my mother took us to the local thrift store and started buying a bunch of dresses for us. We were not used to wearing dresses, or anything nice for that matter. Being the little girls that we were, we had fun twirling around in our new full-skirted dresses. Brian came home a few days later with some plain, white muslin dinner napkins. Mamma tied them around our heads and put one on hers as well. Brian stepped back to look at us and smiled.
“Not quite Amish yet,” he said, “but pretty close.”
From that day on, he took up reading the Bible to us every morning before he left for work. Aunty Laura seemed to be in shock over our new way of dressing and argued about it many times with her brother. He told her she belonged to the wicked world that he was no longer a part of. It was clear that he enjoyed being the most religious and pious member in his family.
Now, Brian and my mother had a new avenue to make us comply with their every demand. We were different than the people around us. The clothes we were now wearing isolated Samantha and me even more. Again, we were not allowed to talk to anyone other than Mamma and Brian and, when we wanted to talk to them, we had to raise our hands most of the time. We spoke so little. We were like ghosts people barely seemed to notice.
For the next four years, we traveled to Washington in the summer and back to Arizona in the winter. In Arizona, we would live in trailer parks and, when spring came, we would pull up stakes and drive to Washington, where we would alternate between trailer parks, the beach and random truck stops. In the summertime, Brian would work construction jobs and, in the winter he would work a few small mines he had in northern Arizona. Mamma continued to collect government checks for us, one for herself and one for Samantha and me. Since she and Brian were not married and she was not working, she qualified for almost all assi
stance.
My sister and I were mostly confined to the trailer, crocheting and cleaning. Sometimes we were allowed to play outside around the trailer or read books. We were very lonely girls. Even though we were used to it, we did not understand why we had to be so isolated.
The fall I was seven, Mamma finally got nervous that the State would notice I was not in school and she enrolled me. At school, I was not used to being around other children, so I usually stayed at my desk. I could read better than the other first graders, but I was seriously behind in everything else. Although Mamma had me wear normal clothes to school, I must have seemed strange. It was not long before the teachers asked to meet with Mamma and Brian to talk about my behavior. The teachers seemed bewildered when I did not race out to play like the other children, and I took little interest in coloring. I was plain scared of everything and everybody and would shy away from the teacher when she tried to hug me. Needless to say, Brian got nervous about all the questions, so my time in school only lasted a few weeks.
After that, Mamma continued to keep the homeschooling books in a cupboard in case anyone from the State was ever to ask us if we were being educated. A few times a week, she would give us a couple of school books and we would read the instructions, trying to figure out how to do the lessons. Many times, we got most of the answers wrong. I can remember that I wanted to learn, but it was so hard to teach myself. I dreamed of growing up to be a great and famous doctor that would save the world and find a cure for AIDS like the missionaries in Africa that I had read about in a National Geographic. But that seemed unlikely given the nature of my education.
Tears of the Silenced Page 2