Mamma bought a disposable camera, and one sunny day we all lined up with fake smiles to have our pictures taken. There were pictures of Mamma hugging Fanny and of Fanny sitting on the hay while Samantha and I worked. When Brian took a picture of all the women standing together, I pointed out to Mamma that I was supposed to be in Canada. She just told me to smile. She must have forgotten and did not seem worried that anyone would remember.
Those pictures were so bogus, how could a government employee not realize she needed to come out here and check up on us? Weren’t they trained to know that abusive people are some of the best liars in the world? We were “falling through the cracks,” society’s anonymous victims who would live and die in unacknowledged misery.
A year passed and summer came once again to the mountaintop. It was a welcome relief; winter always seemed to bring out the most brutal aspects of Mamma and Brian. Once Mamma had given poor Grandma a freezing bath and had laughed as she screamed.
At seventeen, I was still a slave on the mountain and had fallen into a deep depression. Aunty Laura and Uncle Bill had stopped visiting; Grandma no longer recognized them anyway. I wondered why I should continue to live.
One day, when Fanny was supposed to be mopping the front porch, she accidentally broke the mop head off the handle. She held the two mop pieces. As I walked from the pig pen to the house, I felt a knot grow in my stomach, as if some impending doom was descending. Mamma came out the front door and looked at Fanny.
“What the h**l did you do?” Mamma yelled.
She grabbed the metal pole and began to beat a crying Fanny with it. The screams were awful, and I knew Fanny could be seriously injured, but I was afraid of intervening, so I just sat by the porch, looking at Mamma with disgust. She finally stopped and went back in the house, slamming the door. Fanny sat down on the porch
“Let me look, Fanny.” I pulled her arms open. I was thankful for the little rolls of fat that covered her body, as they seemed to have saved her from any broken bones. I took her to the watering trough and applied cold water to the bruises that were forming. I then let her sit the rest of the day while I worked. I fantasied about hitting Mamma upside the head with a shovel. I did not understand enjoying the pain of others. I was affected deeply if I saw any living thing hurting, and I would immediately try to make things better. How could this woman be my mother?
The next day, I started my week inside the house. While doing the dishes, I could not get Franny’s screams out of my head. I suddenly grabbed a butcher knife and put it to my wrist. I took a deep breath, closing my eyes as I tried to force myself to slice through skin and made a light scratch, enough so that there was a light trickle of blood. ”Just do it,” I told myself.
I was turning eighteen in a few months, but I could see no way to escape. I tried to cut again, but I couldn’t. As I stood there in the kitchen, I suddenly stopped as if I had awakened from a long sleep. I realized that I could not kill myself because I wanted to live; I wanted to change the world somehow, and I could not leave Samantha, Fanny and Grandma. They needed me.
I applied pressure to the small scratch, wrapped a towel around it, and finished my work. A new fire was burning in me. I’ve got to get the hell out of here, somehow. Oh God, please get me out of here. I don’t belong here, please God … please God. I must have repeated this prayer at least two hundred times that day. I had a new surge of hope. I was unwilling to bend to the evil people who were supposed to be my parents.
That August, when Samantha turned sixteen, she also received a letter from the government stating she had to come in to set up a volunteer work hours in order to keep receiving her check. Mamma gave them some kind of excuse for her, but since Samantha did not go in, her check was cut, too. At that time, Samantha and I began trying to figure what I could do when I turned eighteen to change our lives. We had no knowledge of how the outside world worked, so we did not know where to start.
I thought aloud, “I know when I turn eighteen they cannot beat me anymore. I will be an adult and able to make my own choices.”
These dreams, however, were smashed by Brian as he began beating me for not meeting one of my time limits one day.
“So you think because you are almost eighteen you can start slacking off?” he asked, frustrated. “You better pick up the slack. I swear to God I will be beating you when you are fifty. You are never going to get away from me, never!”
“You can’t do that!” I yelled back.
“Oh, yeah? And who is going to stop me?” he hissed, putting his face up to mine. “What are you going to do, run away and prostitute yourself? Oh, yeah, maybe you should.” He threw me to the ground. “You would make a good little whore.”
And he was right. How would I stop them? I did not know how. Although I was scared, I was also determined to shake the dust from that horrible place off my feet as soon as I got the chance.
My eighteenth birthday came. Around midday, Samantha looked at me over Mamma’s and Brian’s heads. She was standing by the wood burning stove and motioned for me to make the speech we had been rehearsing at night. I was to tell Mamma and Brian that now that I was old enough, a few changes would need to be made. This would start with my making my own decisions. I cleared my throat a couple of times, trying to muster the courage to speak, but I could not do it. Samantha threw her hands in the air and shook her head.
“What is wrong with you?” Samantha whispered as I put Fanny’s coat on her to go back outside to work.
I shrugged. “What do you want me to do, Samantha? You know they are never going to agree to anything I ask, and they could very well really hurt me. I don’t know what to do.” I shook my head. “I really don’t. They will never let any of us leave here, you know that.”
So I waited. I tried to figure out the perfect time to confront Mamma and Brian and to plan the perfect things to say, but I was just too scared. But as the months passed I started to chafe at the injustice of being an eighteen-year-old going on nineteen who was still beaten and yelled at. If I didn’t do something, my life would be the same when I was thirty.
Finally, one sunny April morning, I got up the courage to do something that would completely change our lives forever and send me spiraling headlong on a crazy and dangerous quest for truth and justice.
The Community
By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything.
—H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau
On a sunny mid-April day, I was outside with Fanny thawing out a water faucet that had frozen overnight. When finished, I went into the house for a hammer, so I could nail the wood and insulation back around the faucet. As I went back to the house to return the hammer, I saw Mamma and Brian walking around and watching me. They had started something new with me: instead of telling me to bend over as they once had, now they would just take the flyswatter or the big leather belt and start beating me with it—as if my compliance were not necessary.
When I reached the house, I saw Samantha was mopping, Not wanting to track mud all over her floor, I set the hammer down inside the door and took Fanny with me to finish our other morning work. About ten minutes later, I felt Samantha tap me on the back. I jumped and then looked at her, perplexed.
“What?” I asked, a little anxiously.
Samantha shrugged. “I have no idea. Brian said to come and get you.”
I motioned for Fanny to follow us, and we all went into the house. The three of us stood in the middle of the living room, looking from Brian to Mamma inquisitively.
“What do you want?” I asked Brian impatiently. I was tired and still had a lot of work to do.
Brian pointed to the door. “Did you put that hammer there?”
I looked at the hammer and nodded. “Uh, yeah,”
I answered, confused. “I was going to put it away at dinner time.”
“Why did you not put it away when you were done like you were supposed to?” Brian’s teeth were clenched.
“Well,” I stammered, “I didn’t want to track up Samantha’s floor while she was mopping, and I did not think it would hurt anything.”
“Why did you not come and ask our permission?” Mamma asked with a hand on her hip.
“What?” I queried with a look of astonishment. “It seemed kind of unimportant, I guess.”
“Oh, asking our permission is unimportant to you?” Mamma fumed.
I lifted my hands in exasperation. “It’s just a hammer. I don’t understand what the big deal is.”
“The big deal is that you think just because you are eighteen, you can do whatever you want without running it past us first. And at the same time, you assume we should feed you and clothe you with your arrogant and evil attitude,” Mamma shot back at me.
“Now, to teach you a lesson,” Brian walked toward me. “You will bend over and touch your toes like a good little girl while I beat the h**l out of your butt.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Samantha shaking her head and mouthing, “Don’t do it, don’t do it.”
I was trembling and very scared. Despite the fact that Brian had had surgery four months earlier, he was stronger and much bigger than I was.
“I told you to bend over,” Brian snapped as he pointed to the floor.
I straightened my small frame and clenched my fists at my side while whispering, “Please, Lord, help me. Please, Lord.”
“Excuse me?” Mamma asked sarcastically.
“No, I will not do it,” I said emphatically. “I am a grown woman, and you have no right to tell me what to do or to beat me.” I took a deep breath to keep my voice from shaking. “That much I know about the law. And if I go to the police station right now, they’re going to haul you both off to jail where you belong.” I stamped my foot for good measure and for a split second enjoyed the looks of shock on their faces.
“You are going to do none of those things,” Brian barked at me. “And you know why? Because we did not give you permission, that’s why.”
“No,” I shook my head. “I don’t need your permission. I am an adult now, and I will do what I think is right.”
“Bend over and touch your toes—NOW!” Brian growled, pushing me.
“No,” I protested.
“NOW!” he repeated
“NO!” I shouted back.
“I said touch your toes, da**it.” He grabbed me and tried to make me bend over.
I pushed back at him, yelling, “NO! And you can’t make me.”
Suddenly, Brian snapped and he began twisting my head as if trying to snap my neck. I felt the pressure growing in my head, and I thought I was going to die. “No,” I cried inwardly, just as I was on the verge of blacking out. “This is not how it was supposed to end.” As if in slow motion, I felt my neck twisting further and further, and I was waiting, wondering if I would be able to hear the crunching sound or if I would die first. I was unable to move, although I was resisting as much as possible with my neck. I figured if Brian was going to kill me, I would make it as hard as possible for him.
Suddenly, I heard Samantha scream, “You are killing her, NO! NO!” Her voice came to me as if through a tunnel.
I heard Mamma’s voice, “Samantha, don’t; leave him alone. She deserves it.”
But Samantha ran at Brian and jumped on his back, wrapping her arms around his throat and trying to choke him. The sheer force of her weight threw him off balance enough that he lost his grip on my neck seconds before everything went black. As I fell to the floor, Brian threw Samantha across the room and over the table, where there were some canning jars. I heard Samantha hit the floor with a tinkling of broken glass. Brian ran over to her angrily calling her a “meddling little bi*ch.”
Mamma stood calmly watching us being beaten. Samantha screams were ear-shattering. I struggled to my feet, dizzy. I could not believe I was still alive.
In a sudden panic, terrified of what Brian might do to her, I tried to divert Brian’s attention away from Samantha by racing up the stairs and yelling down, “I am leaving now. I am going to the police, and they are going to enjoy all the evidence you guys are leaving for them.”
I knew I had trapped myself upstairs, but I did not know how else to get them off of Samantha. Her screams suddenly stopped and I heard running. The whole house seemed to shake as Mamma and Brian both ran up the stairs. I looked around frantically for a way to escape, but of course there was none, so I jumped up on my bed and backed into the corner, hoping that I was out of their reach. I balled myself up, putting my head between my legs in an attempt to protect myself, to no avail. Brian grabbed me by the feet and pulled me to the edge of the bed. I kicked at him, catching him in the forehead; it stunned him for half a second and I took advantage of the situation and scrambled back into my corner. He reached for me again and this time managed to yank me off the bed. Brian shoved me into the wall, and I saw Mamma standing there again with her arms folded. “Mamma,” I screamed. “Help me get this j**k off of me.”
“Why should I protect you when you want to betray us?” Mamma shot back.
“I am your daughter,” I shouted as I fell to the floor, trying to shield myself from Brian’s open-handed slaps.
Suddenly I saw a way to escape. I quickly rolled onto my stomach and slithered my small frame past Mamma’s and Brian’s legs and made a dash for the stairs. I flew down the stairs. Mamma tried to grab me, but I slipped past her. When I got to the bottom, I heard Samantha yelling for me to run. I raced out the door and down the drive.
I heard Mamma yell at Brian to get the truck, but I just kept running as fast as I could. I was scared, and I did not know if there was a rifle pointed at my back or not.
I did not get far when I heard the truck barreling down the road. I did not know how I was going to get past them to get into town; it was six and a half miles to the pavement in the back of the orchards, and another mile to the tiny police station. How was I going to get into town without them spotting me and taking me back? As the truck came up behind me, I dove off the road and into the sagebrush and continued walking toward town. I heard Brian’s voice floating to me on the spring air.
“Get in the truck right now.”
I did not answer and just kept walking.
“Misty, get your a*s up here and get in the truck before I come down there and make you!”
I kept struggling through the brush and shouting back defiantly. But after a while I began losing my drive to try to get into town. My head was pounding so badly I could not think. I felt nauseous and could not go another step. I decided I would go back with them and try to make a run for it in the night or some other time when I could get a head start.
I climbed up the embankment and into the truck. Although I am sure it is hard for you, the reader, to believe any girl would return to these people, you must understand that I was not a normal girl. I was clothed from head to foot in plain clothing; I did not have any knowledge or experience with carrying on a conversation with outside people; I did not understand anything, except our daily life on the mountain. And I needed to get back to check on Samantha.
When we returned, Samantha seemed disappointed that I had come back with them. Brian told everyone to get in the house.
“You know he was for real trying to kill you, right? He was just about ready to snap your neck when I jumped him,” Samantha whispered.
“Yeah, thanks for that, Sam.” I rubbed my now swollen neck.
I scanned Samantha from head to toe. My heart sank as I saw a dark bruise on her cheekbone and the many tiny cuts on her arms from where she had fallen on the glass. I felt so sick from the headache, I could not think clearly. I kept blinking my eyes, trying to clear my h
ead—this was not the time to have a foggy brain, I told myself. But my thoughts didn’t help, and with every step the pain got worse.
“All right, sit down,” Brian ordered as we walked through the door.
Mamma was standing there, arms crossed again, with a frown on her face. I looked her directly in the eyes, and she looked back at me for a moment, and then looked away, her frown getting deeper, if that were possible.
“All right,” Brian said again. “I knew this day was coming, so I have been writing to the Bishop. A few weeks ago, he sent me the address of one of their Amish communities in Minnesota, which is closer to us than Pennsylvania would be. He knows the bishop there and the community would be willing to take you girls in so you can join the church. They are in desperate need of new bloodlines, so you would be an asset to them,” Brian stated as if we were livestock.
Samantha and I looked at each other in shock. This was the first we had heard of this. Mamma snorted in contempt and Brian stared at us as if we were bad little girls whom he was shipping off to boarding school.
The news was amazing to us; we could not believe we were actually going to get out of this horrible place. Even more shocking was the fact that Brian was thinking of letting us go. I often wondered why Brian agreed to give us, their two slaves, to the Amish community.
The only explanation I could come up with at that time was that they were really afraid that I would make good on my promise to turn them into the police. In the Amish community, we would be trapped and would not be able to bring any harm to Mamma and Brian. The Amish did not usually allow their people to contact the police.
I would later learn that Brian and Mamma expected Samantha and me to fail at joining the Amish. They expected us to fail and to realize we could not survive without them.
A few days later, it was decided that Brian would drive us to the Amish community. The plan Brian had made with the Bishop was that Brian would bring Samantha and me to their church service once every two months. Then in September, I would move to the community. Samantha would follow a few months later. I was nervous about leaving Samantha on the mountain without me at first, but Samantha scolded me, saying,
Tears of the Silenced Page 7