Child and Freedom

CHILD AND FREEDOM  

By Douglas L. Simmons 

ONE -- Child and Freedom

            This is a story of love. 

                It might even be a love story. I'll leave that for you to decide. If you seek truth you will have love, and if you seek love you will find truth.

                Shall I speak of little boys? They are timeless. They live in the forever of now. Not yet comprehending. There is tomorrow. Or not. They move of their own accord. 

                They embrace the power of the wind. 

TWO -- Illinois

                "Why the blazes would they put an intersection for two main highways out in the middle of a cornfield; I ask you?" my mother cursed as we headed off down Interstate 55, bound for St. Louis, when we were supposed to be on 57. Aimed at Chicago. 

                That's how my mother drove. She aimed the car and went; like a bullet fired from a gun. Now she had ricocheted off an unexpected intersection and was flying toward the wrong target. 

                She went on, "Would someone just tell me why?"

                She had to know that none of us were going to answer. We were just hanging on, and praying she would continue to vent her rage upon the road; leaving us out of it. 

                "Everybody knows you change highways when you come to a city. Damn; when you come to a city it wakes you up and you have to pay attention to the signs. Who the hell is going to be watching for signs out here in the middle of nowhere?" 

                She was right of course. But the fact was: the state had built the intersection of Intestate's 55, and 57 in the middle of nowhere and my mother, half asleep, had missed her turn, and we were headed the wrong way. Still, I admired my mother. She could cuss like a sailor and, whatever the circumstances, always managed to push on to her destination. One way; or the other. 

                That was the summer of my eleventh birthday. 

                The year my brother, my sister, my mother and myself went to Chicago. 

                Where I met the crazy white man. 

                It was also the year the monster died.

THREE -- Kansas

                I have lived in Kansas for many years now. 

                It doesn't seem that way to me most of the time. I wake up in the morning and still find myself surprised by my surroundings. 

                I walk into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee, lean on the edge of the sink and look out the window; expecting to see the rolling, tree-covered hills of my childhood and, instead, gazing out over the fields which appear to recede endlessly. But only make it to the horizon. 

                This is the Kansas I know. These are the sights I see with my eyes, if I chance to look away from the screen of my computer and rest my imagination for a moment. It is easy for me to forget reality while sitting in my study writing. It is not so easy to forget the past and reside here in today. 

                The eleven-year-old boy inside me, whom I spend much of my time remembering and writing about, does not know these endless plains of wheat and corn. He does not know the peace of this land. He knows only the monster.              I have tried. I truly have. 

                The endless tales of terror that have poured forth from my pen over the years; in which the children always triumph over the evil their parents cannot see, or comprehend (will not allow in their world) have protected me from my own monsters. They cannot protect me from that child. 

FOUR -- Mississippi

                We lived in Hermanville Mississippi. Actually, we lived south of town, back up off the main road, up among the trees. Which covered any part of the land that somebody hadn't taken a chain saw to and cut back for farming. The monster lived just a couple of miles down that same road at the Juke House.

                My mother; Dorthy Jean Robinson, said the monster had more control over my father’s life than he had of it his own damn self. That's why my father didn't live with us anymore, she said. He loved the monster more than he loved us. 

                At eleven years old, I could not figure out why, and I did try (because I loved that big, gentle man who was my father absolutely, without reservation, and wanted him to love me back) how--if something was a monster--could anybody love it at all? Let alone care for it more than one did for one’s own family? 

                Even though I secretly viewed my older brother Billy as someone to be held in the highest of regards, I always called him Billy; because I knew how much it irked him. 

                "My name is William," he would announce pointedly, to anyone who happened to call him otherwise. Especially if any of the older boys his own age were about. I was eleven years old. Armed with such knowledge about my older brother, I was helpless to control my actions. I called him Billy, at every opportune moment available to me, and usually got cuffed a good one for it. But it was worth it. 

                Billy was fourteen and claimed that three years difference had allotted to him a degree of wisdom I could not possibly possess at the mere age of eleven. He said, there was no monster at all. He said, Mama was talking about some crazy guy who lived down at the Juke House, and stayed drunk on the white man’s booze that Daddy liked to drink so much. He was a mean old "bastard", but he was just a man. 

                My older brother could cuss almost as fluently as my mother could. Of course, he did have an excellent instructor. He had, however, managed to gather up enough good sense from some hidden reservoir--which the rest of my family did not have access to--that he knew enough to reserve such language for occasions when he and I were well out of earshot of Mama. She would have cut a hickory switch for his behind, if she had ever caught him at it. 

                My sister Martha--who had outlived the both of us, attaining the ancient age of sixteen--said, neither one of us knew what we were talking about. We would be better off staying out of the way, and minding our own business. She told us that about virtually everything we poked our noses into. I think mainly she was concerned that we didn't become too informed about her activities with her boyfriends. My brother and myself had the both of us told on her, on more than one occasion, for being off at the movies with some boy, when she had led Mama to believe she was going with one of her girlfriends. Later I learned it was more profitable to keep my mouth shut. I made a quarter; here and there, a candy bar; every now and then. It was easy. I only had to threaten her once or twice a week, and I was good to go. 

                At the time I could not understand why, but my sister would spend hours talking with the boys who came by the house, to sit on our front porch and drink lemonade with her. It wasn't my sister Martha whom I didn't understand. I knew what she was up to. 

                She was practicing hypnotism on those boys. 

                Oh yes. I understood girls completely. They were all a part of the advance forces of some kind of alien life forms. Things made up to look like girls on the outside and then, somehow, spirited into families as babies, and left there to grow up disguised as normal children. Until the moment was ripe for them to strike. Their purpose was to pave the way for the full-scale invasion to come. 

                I knew such practices existed in nature as I had, not too long before, watched a show on the discovery channel about these birds who would lay their eggs in some other birds’ nest so the other bird would hatch them, thinking they were its own. Then when the intruder fledglings had hatched, and grown big enough, they would push the mama birds’ babies out of the nest and take over. It was simple logic to apply this observation to girls and, from there, develop my own theory about the origin of my sibling sister. 

                Their primary purpose was to seek a means whereby the invaders to come could exert some form of hypnotic control over little boys, and program them to assist in taking over the world. It seemed they had, as yet, been unable to perfect the technique, and were only able to use it well enough to exert a marginal control over teenage boys. On adults however the system worked perfectly. How else to explain the ease with which sisters could get away with activities any boy would have paid severely for even attempting? 

                This power seemed to fail when used on boys who were younger than fifteen, or sixteen, so I surmised my sister was attempting to develop a method which would someday allow them to enslave the entire male population of the world with their power. 

                It was the boys I couldn't understand. Why would they want to spend so much of their free time with my sister? I could only conclude that they too were aware of the sinister alien plot and were trying to discover the source of her power over my parents. If they had only confided in me: I probably could have been of immense assistance to the counteroffensive. Perhaps as a spy; or an assassin? But they never said a word. They just kept coming by; the boys and Martha would sit on the porch for hours, staring into each other’s eyes. Trying to hypnotize one another. 

                On several occasions, I attempted to discuss this belief with my brother, but I could not get him to see the significance of this sinister plot, and about a year and a-half later he too succumbed to their power. Becoming forever lost to the world of total freedom from oppression, we younger boys still enjoyed. I was left with no other choice but to write him off as a casualty of war and fight on without him. I had heard someone say "War Is Hell" but, until that moment, had not fully understood just what they had meant. I was only grateful they hadn't got to him before the monster finally died. I don't know if I could have endured those days without Billy at my side.

                All claims made by my elders to the contrary, I knew the monster was real. I had seen him twice, with my own eyes. Once in my own living room and, the other time, down by the Juke House. Where I had gone to look for my father. That time I didn't get a clear look at the thing, just a fleeting glance, as he threw some poor slob through the front window of the place, then dove out himself and ran off into the woods. But later, the time at our house, I saw the beast close up. Not more than five feet away from me.

                He was very real.

                We all knew when the monster was coming. Mama would be nervous all day long, pacing through the house, and cussing at anybody who got in her way. Then when night came, and she tucked us in bed, she would tell us to stay in our rooms, and not to come out for anything at all, until she told us we could.

                The second and (I believed) the last time I would ever see the monster was on a Saturday night; about a week before we all came up to Chicago. My father had stopped by the house that morning to bring Mama some money. He usually only came by for one of two reasons.

                He would come sometimes on a Sunday afternoon and take us kids fishing down at the creek, which ran through the woods a mile or so back up from where we lived. My sister refused to go along with us, complaining there were too many snakes in the woods. Not that Billy, and I cared, we thought of those fishing expeditions as our exclusive territory and didn't want any girls hindering our treks into the wilderness in any event. So it all worked out just fine as far as we were concerned.

                I think I mentioned that my father liked to drink, but us kids had never actually seen him drunk. Mama said she run him off when we were babies; because she could damn well see what the hell was coming from the way he acted back then, and she "sure as those goats runnin' around out there in the yard stink to high heaven" wasn't gonna wait around until he had drug his mess into the lives of her innocent children. He might as well just go on and live down there at that flipping (that's not the word she used) Juke House, if he liked it so much. And keep his no good damn friends down there with him!

                Us kids didn't remember any of that, but she made sure we heard about it every time my fathers name was mentioned in that house. Most of the time, we did good just to stay out of her way. I didn't know about my sister Martha, but Billy, and I had concluded that Mama was the crazy one in the family. Of course, neither of us ever voiced that opinion out loud.

                As it turned out, that weekend we didn't go fishing. I don't think we would have been up to it, if we had. Daddy came by, and brought Mama some money for groceries, and as I sat in the swing made from an old tire which Billy, and I had roped to the limb of this big oak tree in the back of the house, I could hear the two of them having their regular Saturday morning conversation.

                "Now Dorthy. You know that this family could make out a lot better if we all lived up under the same roof. There isn't any need for all of this foolishness. You know I barely make enough money to afford one roof over a families head, and here I am all these years, trying to keep my self alive and still be able to take care of you and the children too. Just how much longer are we going to go on living like this? Why, it's downright embarrassing on top of everything else!"

                That was my father. His name was William--same as my brother's--but nobody ever called him Billy. Not when I was around to hear it anyway. He was this great big old giant of a man. It might have been because I was a lot smaller in those days, but he seemed to be about seven feet tall to me at the time. You never, even after you knew him, expected that soft gentle voice to come from that massive frame. Don't get me wrong; he could get just as loud as the next man if the situation called for it, as I had found out on the few occasions when Mama had reached her very wits end with me and Billy, and called my father to come and take us in hand. Billy, and I avoided that contingency to the best of our abilities.

                My father came every Saturday morning, and said virtually the same thing to my mother, after he handed her the money he had come to give her. He said it all at once, and never paused for breath, until he had got it all out. He knew that, if he did, whatever word he stopped on would be the last one to leave his mouth until the next Saturday, when he would have one more opportunity to express himself for those few brief moments.

                He must have paused, for a tenth of a second or so, after that last sentence, for here came Mama right on cue:

                "Now you listen here William Robinson. I don't need you to take care of me, and I damn well told you enough times already, that it should have soaked through that thick skull of yours by now! If it weren't for those children of ours, you wouldn't so much as step one sorry foot on this property until the end of time! As long as you got nothing better to do with yourself than hang out down at that Juke House, with all of your drunken buddies, there will, absolutely, be no talking about you moving your sorry black ass back up into this house!"

                I didn't have to look to know that by now my father was backing toward his car, already pulling his keys out of his pocket, and steady backing as she talked. This was a feat which never failed to impress me, even though I had witnessed it a hundred times. My father could walk every inch of our property backwards, without running into anything, or tripping over some hidden obstacle, and falling. Not once had I ever seen him have to look back over his shoulder to see where he was going. He just knew. I couldn't figure out how he did that. I tried it more than once, and always ended up on my back, with my feet up in the air. It must have taken him years of practice. I do know that the one time I saw him try to just turn around and walk away her shoe hit him in the back of the head before he could get to his car.

                My mother could have entered the Olympic shoe tossing competition, and taken the gold medal hands down, had there been such an event. Billy, and I never failed to impress upon our friends, whenever they came by to see if we had discovered any new form of mischief they were unaware of, that our mother could knock a bird out of the air in mid-flight. Were she of a mind to do so. Nobody else we knew had a mother half as crazy as ours. We sure were proud her.

                Mama spent the rest of that day pacing and cussing and going through her "getting ready for battle" routine. That very night the monster showed up on our doorstep, and I got a good look at him in person.

                I should have been in the bedroom with my brother, but I had got up to use the bathroom and, on my way back to bed, had slipped under the big old couch--which Mama had found on sale somewhere and drug up into our living room--to lay in wait. I loved that couch, and used to hide under it for hours, spying on my sister.

                From the listening post that my bedroom became on such occasions, I had heard all the battles raging over the years on those varied Saturday nights the monster had shown up at our door. I had become somewhat of an expert at calling the blows, as if I were a ring announcer at a heavyweight boxing match, or some news reporter hiding in a burned-out building, while describing a horrendous battle to unseen listeners thousands of miles away. That night I decided I had based my beliefs long enough on rumor, and innuendo, and set out to see firsthand if the monster was indeed a living creature, or just some horrible invention conjured up from the deep dark depths of my own imagination.

                Mama came out of her bedroom, where she had gone to do something or other--which was why I had been able to secure this choice vantage point from which to view the upcoming battle--normally she never left her post on that couch until the sun came up on Sunday morning. Or the monster showed up to engage her in a match of screaming and yelling and pounding on the door. Whichever came first.

                I couldn't discern what it was she had gone in there for as I was squeezing back against the wall trying to avoid being crushed when she landed her considerable mass once again on the couch and returned to sentry duty. Then I heard the breech of my grandfather’s old shotgun come open and I knew Armageddon must be approaching our door this night. That old gun hadn't been down off the wall in years. It was an antique; one of those old double barreled jobs farmers used to hunt rabbits with. I hadn't even known it still worked. I guess that was a good thing because Billy, and I would've probably killed each other messing with it had we known.

                So, there we sat well into the night, Mama defending her home and me backing her play, without her knowing I was there. As much as I didn't want to miss any of the action, I fell asleep and would likely have laid there until morning had I not been awakened by the sound of something massive crashing against the front door.

                I tried to sit up and banged my head against the bottom of the couch and fought with some imagined attacker until I came completely awake and remembered where I was. The noise of my struggles must have been drowned out by the cacophony coming from outside our house as Mama didn't discover me hiding there. If she had, she would have made me get back in the bedroom and blistered my tail for it later. She was otherwise occupied at that moment.

                She jumped up facing the door and began to cuss at whatever horrible creature it was out there that was trying to get in, "I'm only going to tell you once you sonofabitch! I've got a gun and if you don't take your ass on back where you came from, I'm going to blow a hole through you, and this damn door! So, help me! I will!"

                I hadn't realized it had begun to storm while I was sleeping until right at that moment. There came a brilliant flash of light outside the windows, followed by a tremendous clap of thunder. Mama must have pulled the trigger on the gun at that same instant. The door splintered under the impact of the double-ought buckshot and swung open as the rain began to pour into the room. Then the wind grabbed that door and ripped it clean off the hinges like it was made of balsa wood.

                I guess Mama had never fired that big old gun before. She hadn't been holding it tight up against her shoulder the way you're supposed to do and the recoil from that old cannon knocked her backwards and she fell over in the floor and lost her grip on the gun. I wasn't too much concerned about Mama; there wasn't much I could have done anyway. She was going to be all right or she wasn't. Either way she was sure to come up cussin' a blue streak. Gravity was in charge of her life for the time it took for her to hit the floor and I was tucked up under the couch; safely out of the way of any secondary impact damage. I think that old couch could have withstood even such a massive blow as Mama could have delivered, had she fallen on it.

                Satisfied that Mama was beyond any assistance I could lend, I scooted far enough out from under the couch to keep my eyes on that old gun, which sailed up into the air, turned completely over one revolution then landed butt first and discharged again, blowing out the light fixture in the ceiling as it went off. Then the both of us just lay there in the dark for several heartbeats until there was another flash of lightning from outside and for that brief microsecond of time it takes a strobe light to flash; I saw him silhouetted in the door.

                In that terrible moment I knew.

                And have never doubted since.

                The monster was real.