"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" This seemed like an appropriate image to represent the failed reasoning that basically took a hike when my step-father rationalized that it was OK to have sex with an eleven year old girl.
Today is April 1st. I wish I had a joke to tell or a prank to pull. I was never good at that anyway.
Today would have been my step-father's birthday. I’m not sure what year he was born—no hate, I was barely sixteen when I left home and, at the time, barely sentient—but I think it was 1954, which would have made him 63 years old. He died of unknown causes sometime on February 22nd or 23rd. For a time, he was the most important person in my life next to my mother.
I was on a plane, heading for Winnipeg at the time he was supposed to be going to the first day of his trial. When he didn’t show up, police were sent to his home, where they found him dead. He’d apparently called his lawyer a couple of days before, asking, ”What would happen if I don't show up? I’m... not feeling well.” He was told to see a doctor and that he’d better be there for his appointment for what was probably going to be the worst day of his life.
I suspect I know something of how he felt—it was going to be the worst day of my life, too.
His family will remember him as a father who cared about his two sons—me and my oldest brother will likely be forgotten, if not hated—and as a man who worked hard to support his family. I’m not sure what other feelings they’ll have, but I’m sure they will be positive and grieving where he is concerned.
As for me, I’ll remember him as my childhood terror, my rapist, the man who treated me as his personal punching bag when his life got to be too frustrating to bear. Seems he was easily frustrated, if the frequency of his abuse of me was any indicator.
Yet, when I was informed of his passing, I broke down into a crying fit the likes of which I’ve never experienced before. So many conflicting emotions, so many explosions of pain, hate, loss, grief, anger at having my vindication and justice-to-be-had ripped away… and even sadness for his fears, wishes that he had actually cared about me, disillusion at having my childhood parent steal what little trust and innocence I had left...
I was his accuser. I was the one who set up the huge amount of stress that could have been survivable, if he had not had so many health problems that I barely knew anything about. He wasn’t a well man, I knew that much. His family blame me for his death, forgetting that he’d been obese, a lifelong smoker with only one working lung, diabetes, an enlarged heart and who knows what else. He likely would have died soon, in any case, even if there had been no accusations of rape to the authorities.
My middle oldest brother (the oldest of my step-father’s two sons) has disowned me over this, angry at me for bringing his father’s crimes to the surface. I think he believes me, that his father really did rape me repeatedly over a period of years, but having it be public? Oh, no, that was the greater crime to him. His father was a rapist, a child-abuser who beat all of us, including my middle brother, and an opportunistic paedophile, but his reputation and that of his side of the family’s was more important to protect. Who cares about his sister and the life his father all but ruined?
My brother's wife hates me and thinks I’m a liar who only wanted attention, a bit of a turn-around from her earlier hate-filled opinion that seemed like she believed me, but that I should forgive her father-in-law. Her reaction to my outing the man, and later, his death, is muddled, at best, in my opinion. How could I possibly forgive a man who showed no remorse, who seemed to feel he was justified in doing what he did because my mother had her own problems dealing with her childhood rape and abuse and wouldn’t “put out”? How would my forgiveness help anyone?
I remember a towering presence in the dark halls of my mind. A presence I both feared and cared for, one I desperately wished would love me and protect me. I remember times when we went fishing as golden spots of happiness in the darkness. Catching my first fish. Laughing with my brothers and father—he was “Daddy” then—goofing around in the water while he shouted at us to “Get back here, you wanna drown?”
Colours overlay my memories of my past. The dark, strangely-glittering green from The Matrix comes very close to how some things appear in my memory.
I remember wrestling in the living-room with him and my brothers. My then-youngest brother laughing like a loon… until he fell badly and broke his elbow. No more wrestling after that. I missed it. It was how I found out how physically strong I was. Picking up a man who stood five-foot ten inches and weighed 210 pounds was amazing to me. I was only five feet tall, at the time, maybe 110 pounds, and I lifted him off the floor. It was hard, but only because my arms could barely go around him.
I still remember his smell, musty and dry from working long shifts at the auto-body shop. He always came home tired and grey with dust, a bright smell of sweat under the grime. My little ginger cat, Khalea, absolutely loved his scent and would steal his shirts to roll and rub her face in the armpits to savour his smell all the more. We kept finding his t-shirts behind the furniture or simply dropped on the floor around the house. She loved his sneakers, too, but stealing them was harder.
My father's hands: sometimes hurtful, sometimes gentle.
His hands were like rocks, cracked and callused, the crazing of the skin filled black with dirt he could never get out, no matter how often he washed and scrubbed. When I look at photos of dried, cracking earth, or images of Death Valley’s salt pans, it brings to mind his scaly hands, thick and strong, powerful and armoured. He tried so hard to be clean, as if he wanted to leave the signs of his job at his workplace.
I remember these things, but all of them tinged with fear and his odd, whispering voice that could never really get loud after having his neck and vocal chords severed from an accident in his youth. I believe his father remained a sad and bitter man until his own death because he’d been excommunicated from the religion he loved that forbade the blood-transfusions he’d needed to save his son’s life.
I’m sure Grandpa had fun in his life, though, he’d worked many fulfilling years with CN railways and he was so proud of his Santa Claus beard that won him so many first-place prizes at the Festival du Voyageur beard-growing contests. I loved that beard, so neat and full, pure white, just like his hair. I liked my step-father's beard, too. An interesting, out-of-place red in the centre of the brown-black of the sides. Being half-Japanese made for fascinating genetic legacies.
My step-father probably had sour memories of his own from never being allowed to celebrate his birthday as a kid, or allowed to attend parties with his friends, or a myriad other activities his father’s religion deemed as sinful. Why wouldn’t he hate being made to wear a dreary suit, stand on street-corners holding the religious propaganda of his father’s faith while he’d probably wanted to run and play like any other kid?
I do remember that Christmas was seemingly fun for him. I know he seemed so happy to see the glee of his son opening the gifts he’d gotten him. His attention to my reactions and that of my oldest brother’s though? Muted, at best, not that we ever actually noticed through the joy of getting a new shirt or pair of pants, maybe an orange or two, some candy. I only remember after the fact.
There were good memories as I’d said, small golden, pink, blue or green spots surrounded by the deep gloom of purple-grey, or the red-black of my rage at those rough, well-loved hands on me, lifting me by my hair from the floor, the bright, bloody red of his leather belt whipping me. That creepy, whispering voice calling me stupid, retarded, a cunt, a moron who never seemed to learn... while I screamed, wondering how “talking back”, not doing the dishes, or finishing my homework, or getting yet another D in math was a crime deserving such agony. I know my punishments were sometimes well-deserved, but the scar on my right hand from one beating, and his admonition to lie about where it came from, tells me different...
He was a paler memory later in my life. The soft grey overtaking the dark. He was going greyer, too, salt and pepper replacing the strange red of his beard and the black of his hair. Sad pastels were softening him as he aged, as I aged and drifted away after fleeing the soul-eating dark of my family.
My mother was always brown. Nicotine brown, Cree brown, dark brown hair, brown eyes and golden brown skin. Old photo brown. Brown circles under her eyes that she blamed on an allergic reaction to eye-shadow, even though she never wore eye-shadow, let alone under her eyes. Her anger at my failings and insistent strangeness was pink-brown, fast, hot and unpredictable. I never knew when the “rules” would change and she would sentence me to sit on our basement stairs to “wait until your father gets home”. Sometimes the wait was hours, often well past my usual bed-time if it was a school night. Occasionally, my sentence would be delayed because my step-father hadn’t come until two A.M. and I would be sent to bed, my punishment moved to a later time.
Wearing shorts could only invite unpleasant questions about the red-purple bruises running down my legs, so I usually wore pants for the next few weeks after a whipping until they faded—or kept wearing them due to a new set of welts covering the old ones, layers upon layers of “you’ve been bad and you need a spanking”.
I hated skirts, then. They always reminded me of the rape behind the Knox Cathedral when I was six years old. That monster was never caught. Somehow, I could bury that memory. I could easily recall the details of the event, of course, but it didn’t seem to affect me as much as having the same thing happen at home.
Home is supposed to be a haven filled with love, sharing dinners, birthdays, holidays, illnesses gentled away by a mother’s hands and kisses, the bright greens and golds of happy families. To have dreams only made the realities ever more painful, re-enforcing the fact that I didn't have that, didn’t deserve that, would never get it, no matter how I tried to fit in and conform to my parent’s expectations. I fought hard to do what they wanted, to shoe-horn myself into the boxes other people kept insisting were the proper containers for a little girl who wanted to be so much more. I never could, try or no. Why couldn’t I have an octagonal “box”, a round one, even a free-form blob to curl up in and fill with soft nesting materials gathered by a fuzzy wee rodent?
Why wasn’t I allowed to be safe?
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