15 Dad

One night upon his arriving home I was marched to the gray, dark basement of our house on Clarinda Avenue. As he whipped me with his belt I stifled my panic and realized I did not have to cry.

"You'd better cry," he said, "because I'm going to whip you until you do!"

I hollered and cried like crazy, unsure if I was acting or not.

He never spanked me again.

I was fourteen, I realize now, and not ten. I had stopped abusing Ronald when I had entered junior high two years before—for the same reason I had never abused our little brother Richard. I was utterly indifferent to their existence and could not have cared less about them. I loved girls, my friends, my mom and her family, and "Bob," my ownself.

Period.

"Get up, Robert."

Dad made me work Saturday mornings at Genuine Parts, where I swept the dust and dead insects from the store window displays, washed the windows, swept the aisles, floors, and the shop where Elmer worked, took inventory, stocked shelves, filled batteries, carried mufflers to the basement, and stored tailpipes in the attic.

"Get up, Robert."

I buried my head in my pillow.

By 1959 I hoped Dad would give me my weekly allowance, pay me for my A's, let me use the car, and leave me alone.

"Get up, Robert."

On these grounds Dad and I gradually developed cordial relations.

Détente.

My girlfriend Leigh and I had a long, nonverbal courtship which began when we were sixteen and ended when Leigh got pregnant in the early spring of our senior year in high school and we had to get married. When I was eighteen I spanked my infant daughter Donna because she would not stop crying. When she was a toddler I shook her not realizing how dangerous this was till I saw.  Donna remembers a time she had welts on her legs and buttocks from my whipping her with a Hot Wheels track. I felt shame first one afternoon and then dread as I spied on Donna in her room spanking the dickens out of her doll.

Mirror.

I asked my son Devon, a year and ten months younger than Donna, how many times I had spanked him. You can't imagine how relieved I was when he said he could count his spankings on the fingers of one hand. It was Devon who made me stop spanking. Ten years old, Devon refused to cry. When I gave up he went to his room and stayed there, silent, all day long, hating me I imagined. I didn't stop spanking immediately, though, and even after I had discontinued spankings I threatened them. I didn't know any different.

I was Dad.

14 Spanked

One afternoon I had struck my mother.

I don't know why.

"I'm going to tell your father you hit me," she promised.

From that moment on I played in dread all afternoon and into evening. On this night my mother waited until we were seated at supper, my father at one end of the table, she in the middle to my left, I at the other end.

"Robert hit me today."

My father's face turned suddenly pale and glowering he raised his right fist and gestured to me.

His arm shook and trembled with rage.

"If you ever hit your mother again," he said, "I'm going to hit you!"

Was I five years old?

Four?

My mother thinks so.

I believe I was three.

Did I hit her again?

In November of 1946 Ronald was born. In 1948 we moved to Shenandoah, twenty miles southwest of Emerson. After church every Sunday and on Christmas Eve, when we even stayed the night, we drove to Emerson to have dinner with the Andersons Ray and Vera. For two weeks in the summer Ronald and I vacationed in their modest home on Elm Street. When my cousin John happened to be staying with his grandmother Elsie and her husband Arthur, Grandpa Ray's brother who lived on the corner across the street, these were the happiest days of my life.

Every other day?

Knocks, commands, and whippings.

It wasn't long before I was using all of what Dad taught me and more on Ronald, who would tell Dad, who would whip me. Carroll had been "spanking" me frequently, almost every day it seemed. Later I'd take revenge, wrestle Ronald onto his back, sit on his chest, pin his arms to the floor with my knees, and do anything I wanted, from torture to tickling, and threaten to drool in his face.

Ronald remembers making a birthday wish.

"Please, God, for just one day let my brother Robert not pick on me."

A prayer.

Ronald also fought back, once knocking the breath out of me with a punch to my solar plexus, once hitting me with a croquet mallet for cheating, once jamming a door over my big toe, tearing off the nail. On one April Fool's Day Ronald and I decided to see what would happen if we just pretended to fight. I acted and Ronald whined and then howled in mock pain. Though Ronald explained to Dad that it was all just pretending, I got a whipping. On another afternoon Dad left the two of us boys alone for an hour, I don't remember why, and Ronald, throwing a ball, broke a ceiling light fixture. When Dad returned he demanded a confession.

"Ronald did it," I pointed.

"Robert did it," Ronald lied and I got a whipping.

Many times Ronald got a whipping, too. He received dozens though he remembers only one or two. Ronald was my adversary and, though four years younger than I, an equal.

Dad was my tormentor.

He was slender and strong, a handsome young man, and a powerful enemy. He had been changed in the army, according to my mother. For as long as and as often as I was able I stayed away from him. For company I made friends of the neighborhood kids—Pam and Cheryl, Becky and Stephanie, Larry, Duke, Jack, Mike and Sandy, Butch, Roger, Keith, and Calvin. In Shenandoah these Broad Street School friends and our teachers, all women, and my Anderson family circle in Stanton and Emerson, Grandpa and Grandma, Uncle Norman at Christmas, Ronald, and my mother were my whole world. Threatening this fellowship of family and friends—stalking me, it seemed, for eight years—was Dad.

13 Crybaby

From the night of my last spanking in 1957 when I was fourteen it took over ten years for me to like my father. As I was growing up, Dad addressed me in only two ways, angry and stern. I have talked with my brother Richard about Dad and the years of my whippings.

On his way to a spanking of his own Richard had questioned Dad.

"This hurts you more than it hurts me, right?" Richard asked, repeating something he had heard on TV.

"No, I like this," Dad had answered.

"From that moment on I hated him," Richard told me. "I don't know why he was that way."

Richard's words comforted me.

Corroboration.

In the 1940s and '50s I was afraid of Dad. When I first began thinking on this subject my memory was of being spanked almost every single day. Until the day in 1957 when I refused to cry I had no other image of Dad. He was twenty-six when I was born on March 27, 1943. While Dad was in the army I had been cared for and raised by my mother and by her mother and father Vera and Ray Anderson. The first man I remember is my mom's dad, Grandpa Ray, R. J. Anderson, the most lovable man who ever walked the earth.

My first memory is of Grandpa pointing up the block to a burning bridge.

"Look!"

Each morning on his way to work in Emerson I walked Grandpa to the curb at the corner beyond which I was forbidden to go.

The next man I knew was Dad.

Hurting me.

But my mother says Grandpa Ray was the first man to spank me. I had learned that if I made a scene Grandpa would take me home from church even in the middle of the service. This time he took me outside, spanked me, and brought me back in to stay till the very end.

I don't remember this.

"Everyone spanked in those days," Mom said. "Swats, hand slaps, and I would—"

With her thumb and middle finger she made the snapping gesture that Dad used on my head.

"On your hand to keep you from touching something."

My mother believed that I was being unfair to Dad to bring this subject all back up now that he was dead. Twice before Dad's death my brothers Ronald and Richard and I talked with him about his whippings. My first memory of being spanked is of Dad, furious, whipping me with his belt. Dad physically punished me from as far back as I can remember, more than once for giggling with Ronald in bed when we were supposed to be sleeping. I remember distinctly a whipping in the bedroom of our apartment on West Valley in Shenandoah when I was five. For punishment Dad marched me to the bedroom and closed the door so Kathryn couldn't see me scream—being deaf she couldn't hear me—and took off his belt. Gripping its two ends in his right hand and raising it about his head he whipped my naked butt, swinging as hard as he could, striking me more than two dozen times.

To make me behave, be quiet, or sit up straight, Dad thumped me on the temple, stoutly, with his middle finger, the way I snap an insect off my leg. He pinched the tendon between my shoulder and my neck, hard, and the tender bone right above my knee.

With the end of his thumb he jabbed me in the ribs.

"You knucklehead!"

"You little rummy!"

"You dumb bunny!"

"You knothead!"

"You dimwit!"

"You ninny!"

"You crybaby!"

"You big sissy!"

These epithets accompanied the powerful knocks and squeezes which I felt on a daily basis for over eight years and which made me jerk, lurch, cringe, squeal, and cry both from physical pain and from the just plain meanness of it. For crying from fear or from loneliness I was ridiculed, taunted, and threatened with physical harm.

"Do you want something to cry about?"

Many times I received a second whipping more furious than the first for not being able to stop crying when Dad demanded.

"Stop that sniveling!"

12 Oops

The spankings began in 1948, according to my mother, and ended in 1957. My brother Ronald remembers only one or two. He received dozens. Ronald got spanked a lot and I got spanked a lot more than Ronald. Why do I remember being spanked almost every day? Ronald says that's how he remembers me—

Abusing him every day.

It's true.

Every day I was slugging Ronald on the thigh, giving him "a charley horse," or on the arm, or doubling the knuckles of his little finger to the breaking point and squeezing, a handcuff I had learned from the local Wabash railroad clerk Jim Bozann. It hurt like crazy, but Bozann reduced the tension on the joint and let up if I stopped resisting and walked quietly to jail, the Wabash depot and telegraph office and hub of our weekly ballgames and tags. I used it on Ronald, who thought I had invented it. I was mean to my brother, and for that reason my mother believes, as my father did, that I deserved my whippings. But my mother never spanked me, not once that I remember. She says she just cried when Dad did.

"It was the biggest rift between us," Mother told me.

Many years later my father did apologize.

"Robert, that was all wrong. I shouldn't have done that."

Ronald, that was all wrong. I shouldn't have done that.

When I entered junior high in 1955 and stopped picking on Ronald, who was nine, my father and I developed cordial relations based on our love of Kathryn, my good grades, my allowance, and at sixteen my need for a car. When my girlfriend Leigh got pregnant in the spring of our senior year in high school, Dad helped the two of us get married, in 1961 the only respectable solution to premarital pregnancy.

"We had to get married."

Leigh had planned to attend college in Greeley, Colorado, but now her job was to be a wife and mother, a destiny Leigh cheerfully fulfilled. I was "the man of the family." My father was determined to see me through college, bless his heart, where I would become an engineer, he thought. Once I was supporting a wife and a family "of my own," through school loans and the generosity of both of our families, my father helped me and Leigh and Donna and Devon in every way he could.

I was beyond help.

Leigh felt Carroll was domineering but by this time I had become even more domineering than he. Leigh loved me so much that she didn't notice or didn't complain and I didn't care.

From Carroll my family and I received an open invitation.

"You can always come home no matter what," Carroll told me more than once.

By 1968 I had forgiven him for whipping me but it took sixteen more years for me to work up the courage to ask him about it. Eventually he regretted what he had done just as I regret abusing my brother Ronald.

Regret, apology, forgiveness, knowledge, understanding, love.

Stairway to heaven.

Thank god.

When my father's diabetes worsened and he realized it might kill him he talked and cried at the kitchen table for over an hour one evening at my brother Richard's home in Denison.

It was the first time I had ever seen my father cry.

I didn't know he could.

As a child I had been forbidden to cry I reminded him.

"Yes and look at me now!" he laughed through his sobs and tears.

My mom, "stone deaf" we called it then, her baby son, and their safety—I'm trying to imagine Carroll's side of it. Ronald was born in '46, and in '48 when I threatened Ronald's safety and well-being I was punished. Carroll, Ronald, and Kathryn have all three agreed on this construct of our early family history.

Dad did love me, I never doubted that.

Once he even told me so, an afternoon in 1985. I had written a first draft of this memoir and as he and my mother sat in my living room here in Omaha I read it to him, including the fact that he had never once actually spoken the words and said he loved me. Nearly blind from diabetes he groaned in sorrow and remorse and, wobbly, rose from the davenport to hug me.

"Oh, I do, I do!" he said crying.

Feeble, infirm, he staggered forward and stumbled into my arms and the arms of my mother, who had been standing nearby in the event of just such an emergency.

"Carroll, be careful!" she cautioned a moment before he and I bumped shoulders in a short, bony hug.

"Oops!" he smiled.

11 Suicide

My father took his own life. Blind, feeble, dependent on medication and on my mother Kathryn, Carroll was told his kidneys had failed and that he needed dialysis. He shot himself the next day. My mother was attending a funeral in Stanton, a tiny Iowa town organized around its beautiful Lutheran church ten miles east of Emerson. Carroll had planned his death around the funeral so that his older brother Harvey and not my mother would find his body, sparing my mother but upsetting Harvey terribly. Coming over as usual for coffee my uncle pushed open the front door and called:

"Carroll?"

Hearing no answer, Harvey searched the house and found my father in the garage where he had no doubt gone so as not to make a mess inside the house. My mother's housekeeping is immaculate and my father's was, too. My father had changed into a pair of coveralls so as not to soil his clothes. On the floor he had laid down a tarpaulin under the cheap folding lawn chair he sat in to do the deed. First he fired one shot up into a rafter to insure that his rifle was operating properly. Then he set the butt of it on the floor of the garage, he bowed his head until his forehead rested on the muzzle, and with a wooden paint paddle he tripped the trigger. A close friend of the family told us there wasn't much blood since the .22 bullet did not exit after entering Carroll's forehead between his eyes. A professional machinist and a fine carpenter he had engineered that, too.

My father died as he lived, a responsible, respected, and decent man.

Carroll's lifelong love and concern for his wife Kathryn, my mother, was protective, practical, and intelligent, just as it was for me, for my wife Ruth and for our two children Mary and Michael; for my first wife Leigh and for our two children Donna and Devon; for my brother Ronald and his family; and for my brother Richard and his family. Carroll's love of his three sons and nine grandchildren, my many memories of the laughter and amusements they so often brought him, the twinkle in his eye, the fun in his smile, the immense satisfaction and great pride he took in their achievements; his generous and ready acceptance of every responsibility; his organized shop and many mechanical skills; his competence, his stubborn determination, and his common sense; his courage; his personal integrity; his stern sense of public decency; his absolute faith in the trinity of nature, science, and conduct; his work for the church and for the cities of Emerson and Shenandoah—this my father's example has supported and guided me for sixty-seven years.

"These are my three boys, Robert, Ronald, and Richard," he would proudly introduce us, "and this is my wife Kathryn. She's deaf and reads lips so you have to look at her and speak slowly."

My father must have been terribly tired, sick, and sad to have done what he did.

No one loved life more.

10 Guts

When I was in junior high and high school my father had warned me never to let myself be sucked into a street fight. Boxing was fine with gloves in a ring and a referee present.

But street fighting was stupid.

"A big man will always whip a little man," my father told me, "in both the ring and the street, and in the street you may never know until it's too late if a man is carrying a knife as an equalizer and is willing to use it."

Late one Friday night at the tavern one door west of Genuine Parts, my father's auto parts store, a local man, probably drunk, had harassed a party of Mexican seasonal workers employed by the local nurseries until one of them had pulled his pruning knife from its sheath on his belt and in one quick motion opened a gaping eight-inch wound in the abdomen of his persecutor.

I overheard as I swept floors at the store the following Saturday morning.

His intestines had all spilled out onto the filthy barroom floor.

The victim had died.

But my father was typically less interested in the racism and the homicide than in what he could learn from the matter that might possibly be of some practical use one day. Dad trusted the revelations of science much more than he trusted the revelations of God. Doctors could have stuffed the guts back in, Dad told two friends in the store, and just sewn the man back up.

"That kind of wound by itself is not fatal," I heard him explain, "and if he had not gone into shock he would still be alive."

If the victim had just had the sense to have kept his wits about him, my dad suggested, he could even have bent down and picked up his intestines himself. Though my father conceded that for any man it would be a terrible shock to see his own intestines slide out of his gut and onto the floor that way, it seemed quite clear to me as I listened that that was what my father believed he would have done.

I did not doubt it.

9 Ed

At Boldra's Barber Shop one Saturday morning Rick suddenly tackled me, wrestled me onto my back, and pinned me. He was pissed about something. I don't know why.

"You son of a bitch!" he hissed.

He was stronger than I and he cared more. I struggled only briefly. I realized quickly that I couldn't win so I didn't really fight back. I just gave up. When I relaxed, Rick got off of me and let me up. Dennis Boldra didn't know what in the hell was going on. He looked on with a mixture of confusion, amusement, and alarm. I think Rick just needed to show me that he could whip me, and that came as no surprise to me. I think it was just ego and envy. Our daily banter was competitive and our taunts could be cruel. I'd probably made some hasty, thoughtless offhand remark that I had practiced and rehearsed in private, imagining it witty, and struck a nerve.

That was my modus operandi.

Playing basketball at Central Elementary one day when I was sixteen or so, frustrated with my own ineptitude, I slugged Willy as hard as I could in the side of the neck.

It hardly fazed him but it stopped the scrimmage.

"Jesus, Robert!" he said.

He and Lunt, Powell, and Kaat looked at me like I had lost my mind.

I felt stupid, weak, and ashamed.

"I'm sorry, Willy," I said as we walked to the car. "I don't know why I did that."

"It's okay, Robert," he smiled.

I was immensely grateful to him then for the speed and ease of his forgiveness.

I still am.

In high school several good friends of mine hinted on occasion that they wanted to beat me up. Larry Kelly often insinuated that he wanted to fight me. Duane did, too. Nothing ever came of it. Early in our junior year Tim Kaat had heard from someone that his girlfriend Sally Nowiski had been in a new relationship her freshman year at college. I'd heard the rumor, too. It was true, I guess. Kaat was jealous. He asked me if I had heard it—

If I knew.

"No," I lied. "I don't know."

"If I find out you're lying to me," Tim said, "I'll kill you."

He thought he meant it.

Later he learned that the rumor was true, Sally had dumped him, and he got over it. But Tim remembered his threat and he wanted to remind me. He sidled up to me one afternoon across the street from George Jay Drug.

"You knew, didn't you!" he declared.

It was an accusation.

I nodded.

"Yes."

"I'll bet you were scared," he smirked.

"No, I wasn't scared," I said.

Tim stared.

I was telling the truth, though I couldn't have beaten Tim in a fight. I wouldn't have fought back. But I wasn't afraid of Tim. He was a friend who had never said a negative word to me, really, he was a person I liked and trusted, and I'd done nothing wrong. Why would he punish me for his problem? It didn't make sense. That's why I wasn't scared—not because I thought I could successfully defend myself in a fight with him.

All of this remained unspoken of course.

Implicit.

"So you weren't scared," Tim stated incredulously, disgusted.

It was important to Tim at the time to be thought passionate, fearless, perhaps even dangerous, in matters of the heart. He tried to stare me down. I gazed back. We just stood and looked at one another for several silent seconds.
I think he understood.

"Okay," he said.

Smiling ironically he shook his head and feigned incomprehension at my innocence and folly. Together we walked across the street to see if anyone we might want to see was in Jay's.

At the soda fountain there was nobody to talk to but Ed.

Boys.

8 Nose

Many of my students are fighters, young men and young women, too, nearly all between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, and in their required first-person narrative essays they regularly describe their involvement in street fights and wrestling matches, in beatings, in brawls, and even in shootings, all of them fueled by ignominy, failure, loneliness, depression, pride, sex, and—almost without exception—alcohol and drugs. I myself have never been in an actual physical fight. But in high school some of my friends and acquaintances fought.

I was present when Gene Dell broke Greg Lunt's nose in a fight out at the Old Highway one night. They'd agreed to meet and duke it out. I never knew exactly why, perhaps a taunt, a dare, a challenge.

"Do you think I can beat him, Robert?" Greg asked me confidentially before the fight.

Greg was the kindest, gentlest, most generous person I knew. There seemed a lot I had to consider. I thought for several seconds before I answered.

"No," I said.

"You son of a bitch," Greg said grinning.

They circled one another, boxed, punched, bumped into parked cars, staggered, fell, and then rolled and wrestled around on the hard gray pavement for several minutes. There were eight or nine cars there, maybe a few more, a fairly large circle of spectators, most of them friends of one or the other of the two contestants. I was with Greg, Kaat, Voitenko, and Powell.

Someone pointed at Dell and yelled, "He's got something in his hand!"

It turned out to be a roll of nickels.

"How'd we know Lunt wouldn't have something, too?" Ron Conley yelled, defending Dell.

This evoked several seconds of booing and hooting. Witnesses from opposing sides exchanged catcalls and taunts. As I watched and listened, Wayne Conley, Ron's younger brother, strolled up to me, his lips and his eyes narrowed in a caricature of menace.

"I hear you been lookin' for me, Robert," he said.

This was code language for picking a fight.

"No," I said. "I haven't been looking for you."

I met Wayne's stare.

I had no idea what he was talking about. My answer confused him. Someone else had probably put him up to it—I don't think we had even ever quarrelled—and Wayne wandered off.

The fight was over.

Our small circle drove back to the funeral home where in the summer Greg lived with his grandparents. We gathered around Greg in the bathroom as he stared soulfully into the mirror at his nose and we stared soulfully at him. With a facial tissue Greg dabbed delicately at the blood trickling only slightly and slowly from his nostrils. The bridge of his nose was horribly bent and bruised—purple, blue, and an unnatural white—and clearly broken.

It was an ugly moment.

7 Fire

When I was twelve years old, on one of the three shelves of our small family bookcase I discovered a copy of Hiroshima by John Hersey, and I read it like an obsession in just one day and one night. The click and clatter of one victim's shin bones—his ankles and feet having been severed in the atomic blast—on the concrete city sidewalk as he ran who knows how or why or where kept me awake in my bed late many a night and turned me and tossed me in recurring nightmare. Certain for forty years that this image had come from Hersey's book but wanting to check the text to be certain of it and perhaps to quote the description exactly, once, twice, three times I thumbed through the book, my eyes scanning each page for the passage I remembered, and I could not find it. Had I made it up? Had I confused the terrible reality of Hersey's subject with a panel from one of Mike's comic books? Dimly, gradually over the passing months, I conceded reluctantly that I had.

            But not this:  

There were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks…. Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of a teapot.

           Yet despite my years of daily whippings from my father, the trauma of my learning of the Holocaust and of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ugly anecdotal gossip of World War II and the Korean War that trickled down to us children in the schoolyard and locker room, to me it seems no contradiction to call my eighteen years of childhood—the first five in Emerson and the rest in Shenandoah—idyllic. Often followed by my dog Boots, I rode my used bicycle all over town, I played Peewee and Midget baseball, I competed in all junior high and high school sports, and on almost every day of every summer it seemed I spent two hours or more with friends at the big blue public swimming pool. Less than a strong swimmer and afraid to dive head first off the high board, I mastered the Canadian cannonball.

            Kaboom splash sprinkle—

            Again!

            Kaboom splash sprinkle—

            Again!

            Kaboom splash sprinkle—

            Again!

            I'd stop at Jay Drug and ask Ed to make me a cherry Coke or a lime freeze.

            In the evening—

            Girls.

            "I'm a lover, not a scholar, not a fighter," my friend Rick often said and I'd repeat.

            "I'm not a fighter."

            No.

            I did not fight.

6 Jew

In grammar school, at Broad Street Elementary, it was my custom to leave home at least half an hour early in the morning to walk the two blocks to school in order to meet my friends at the playground and—on every day that weather permitted—to play softball.

In 1953 when I was ten years old and in fourth grade one day was different.

The ball diamond was empty.

Puzzled, I entered the old red brick school and walked to my classroom to investigate this mystery. There I found my good friends Jack, Duke, and Larry all huddled around a single desk and, curious, I hurried over to join them. For Show and Tell, my good friend Mike Overbey had brought to school A Pictorial History of World War Two. My circle of friends at his desk and I all looked over Mike's shoulder and stared at the hills of gray, emaciated corpses at the liberated death camps, their black mouths slack and agape, and at the bulldozers pushing piles of the dead into huge pits, their dead eyes staring into the void.

Eyes.

We were awestruck, stunned, speechless.

We stared too.

Eyes.

For this I had not been prepared. I was not ready. I could not stop looking. I could not not look. A child, I was resilient, as most children are, and from that hour forward my life as a child moved on, but this experience imprinted itself upon my memory and upon me and changed me in a way that I could not and did not realize for twenty years and more. It was only in my fifties and sixties, when upon request I tried to explain to others the origins of my lifelong interest in and commitment to nonviolence, that my memory of this incident arose from the depths of me and demanded to be the story first told and then—when I arrived at the moment I had looked over Mike's shoulder and had seen the horror in the big book open wide before him—at each and every telling hot tears would rush to my eyes and the words of my anecdote would snag like fish hooks in my throat and swell to a lump and for a few seconds I would cry. One image in particular has never stopped haunting me.

Eyes.

On the side of one of the hills of the dead, near the bottom where it had tumbled and slid and come finally to rest when it had been flung, lay the emaciated body of one man in particular, his arms and legs grotesquely twisted and bent in attitudes possible only in violence or death, all muscle absent, wasted, beneath the pale gray skin, his limbs no bigger round than axe handles and broomsticks and—most horrible and for me the most unforgettable of all—his hairless bony head turned and twisted at a broken angle on the skinny bone of his scrawny neck, his bony chin and jaw a-hanging, his black mouth open wide in an eternal and silent moan, scream, howl, and groan, and his open and enormous black and white dead eyes staring at me and meeting my own in this incomprehensible enormity of suffering, prejudice, hatred, cruelty, murder, genocide, war, death, and void. Though I tried and tried then, though I try and try and try now, I could not and I cannot find light in his dead eyes, I could not and cannot meet mind in his dead stare.

Nothing.

In my mind and memory at age ten his body and face displaced the tortured and murdered Jesus to whom my Lutheran family and Christian community had introduced me and for years, as sure as if I had worn his image around my neck on a chain of tooth and bone, this nameless dead man became my own private and personal crucifix.

Jew.

5 Butterfly

My father had brought home from WWII as a memento of his military service in the South Pacific a Japanese sword and scabbard which for years he hid mysteriously somewhere in the house and only on rare and special occasions brought out to show guests.

He owned and also hid a .22 rifle, the existence of which I learned only decades later. I never saw it. After his death my mother told me that he had packed it with them in case of trouble, the very slight possibility, she said, that they might encounter drunken young men on the few occasions when my parents parked overnight alone in public campgrounds in their later years after we boys had grown and left home. Nothing ever happened.

In case of robbery he also kept a revolver under the front counter of Genuine Parts, his small auto parts store and shop. So far as I know neither he nor his three or four employees ever had occasion to use it. I knew where it lay and in junior high and high school I saw it each time I swept and cleaned the store but I was never even tempted to disturb it.

When I was still in elementary school my father bought me a big bag of green plastic army soldiers—little dolls for boys, really, though then I would have been shocked and embarrassed to hear them called dolls—with which my friend Jack and I played games of war in his sandbox, pretending to blow them up along with the small box turtles we purchased at the five and dime and heartlessly, mindlessly, mistreated.

When I was still too young to leave our yard by myself I remember that as my mother worked in the garden I entertained myself by chasing butterflies and batting them out of the air with a board I swung like a paddle. When they fell, stunned, crippled, or dead, I collected them in canning jars and thought nothing of it until years later at Iowa State in my required course in Shakespeare I read this passage in Coriolanus and remembered my childhood:

I saw him run after a gilded butterfly: and when he caught it, he let it go again; and after it again; and over and over he comes, and again; catched it again; or whether his fall enraged him, or how 'twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it; o, I warrant it, how he mammocked it!

To this day I can recall with disgust the repulsive, distinctive sour smell of the colorful corpses at the bottom of the canning jars I had forgotten to empty after my innocent morning amusement of a day or two earlier.

As far back as I can remember on my strolls to school or to the home of a friend I seldom failed to kick to dust and destroy any anthill I might discover raised up from the crack between two slabs of concrete sidewalk and to mash with my sneaker any ants that tried to scurry away.

Many years later, out for a summer walk with my grandchildren, just toddlers, no older than three or four, their soft, precious, tiny hands in mine, we'd stumble across a colony of ants just as I had. First, Dylan or Katy would hunker down, curious, and peer at them, then with a kind of scientific detachment they'd perhaps dare to touch one or two, maybe poke at them, and then finally with a shudder, real or pretended, they'd move to destroy them. Though I always tried, rarely could I deter them from doing just as I had done as a child.

"Ants can't hurt you," I whined. "Just let them be."

"No!"

4 Boy

In sixth grade Jack and I also began drawing female nudes at school, pencil outlines of the body, naked paper dolls, to which we added hair, eyes, lips, navel, breasts, and nipples. Then we would ask our classmate Connie to contribute the genital detail Jack and I could not, having never seen it, and Connie would add the tiny vertical line, only an eighth of an inch long, at precisely its proper place on the smile of the pubis. One afternoon on our short walk home from school, I remember, Jack and I carefully loosened from a lawn near the sidewalk a small slab of sod, dug a shallow hole, and in it we buried two of such drawings we had just completed at school that day. Then we covered our buried treasure with its rug of green grass.

Who might find it?

For me at least the strange, secret thrill this gave me had nothing to do with sex—at that age I still had not experienced sexual feeling—but only with the mysterious taboo surrounding the female anatomy. The oldest of three sons I had no idea what girls had down there and no good way of finding out. Much more interested in comic books, games, and sports than in girls, it was not until I entered seventh grade that I discovered sex and even then only because in order to be accepted and to fit in I felt compelled to imitate the interests and behaviors of my friends and of the new boys and girls I had met in junior high. In elementary school I much preferred cartoons. Tales from the Crypt, a comic book of horror my parents did not permit me to buy or even to borrow and bring home, was also available in the Overbey collection, and to me it was the most thrilling of all.

Two of its tales of the macabre I have never forgotten.

In one of them a man accepts a wager that without harm he can walk sideways through the twisting narrow corridors of a labyrinth, its walls lined and set with horizontal rows of razor blades. Just two or three turns into the maze, not long after the gambler has begun the test, his every step a baby step, slow, careful, wary, his antagonist releases a frothing, rabid doberman pinscher into the maze, and the panicky gambler, screaming, turns in his terror to run in order to escape the mad dog, the fine keen blades slicing the flesh of his upper arms and shoulders now squared to run, too wide for safe passage, their skin striped and laced with thin red lines of blood in the final frame of the story.

"No, no, no, nooo!" he cries, running, bleeding, his face a grimace.

In another tale a boy, playing baseball with his school mates in the sandlot beside the mansion of a sinister, reclusive, hideous old man, clubs a home run which breaks a window in the house. The boy's worried playmates demand he go alone to retrieve their ball. There the old man introduces him to the undead, demons he calls the boy's "friends." They perform magic and treat the boy to cookies and ice cream, and the man also grants the boy three wishes which he swears the boy may exercise at any time. The man returns the baseball, and he sends the boy home. Almost immediately the boy finds reason to access the first two of his three wishes, but they go horribly wrong. When he hears his parents quarrel over money, he wishes for wealth. Instantly a fortune appears on the doorstep of the family home—but the money is soon discovered to have been stolen from the local bank, and the boy's father is arrested and jailed. The boy's second wish, made in hope of correcting this misunderstanding, only compounds the problem and, when to his mother the boy confesses his role in this incomprehensible family predicament, she disbelieves him yet nevertheless blames him and even scolds him and punishes him for the tragedy that has befallen the family. Finally, isolated, lonely, guilty, crying alone in his room, the distraught and distracted boy thoughtlessly makes his third and final wish.

"I wish my friends were here," he pleads.

Instantly the demons, legions of ghouls, rise from wet graves, from hell, to feast on living human flesh. Shuddering inwardly, I reread this story every time I visited Mike to explore his collection of comics, and its plot and its images privately haunted me and secretly thrilled me for many months.

Horror.

3 Cartoon

Mother was my comforter, invariably selfless, generous, loving, kind, gentle, playful, fun, tender, and sweet. As soon as I was able to hold a crayon, she taught me to color, to draw, later to read and to spell. Mother bought me coloring books, dozens of them, and sitting or lying on the floor beside me she coached me and instructed me to color.

Light, soft, always inside the lines.

Careful.

I loved comic books and I owned at least two hundred of them maybe more. In the beginning my mother bought them for me and then later when my father began giving me a small weekly allowance I bought them myself at Woolworth's or McClellan's, the local dime stores. I exchanged them with those of friends some of whom owned many more than I. Only ten cents each my early favorites were of Donald Duck and his cousin Gladstone Gander, who reminded me of Norman, my mother's brother, Donald's Uncle Scrooge McDuck, the nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Mickey Mouse and Goofy, Tom and Jerry, Popeye, Wimpy, Olive Oil, and Bluto, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Mighty Mouse, the magpies Heckle and Jeckle, and later the teenagers Archie, Betty, and Veronica, Superboy and Lana Lang, and the superheroes Superman and Batman and their respective evil nemeses Lex Luthor and The Joker.

Kid stuff.

I read them again and again.

Just a few blocks up the street from my home lived Mike Overbey and his brother Sandy, two years older, who possessed by far the largest and most diverse collection of comic books in the neighborhood. From the first issue on, they owned every copy of Mad, the satiric comic book magazine to which I myself soon subscribed. On the floor of their bedroom I often sat for hours and read the comics of darker genres I didn't have at home, stories of crime and of combat in World War II and Korea. By 1953 Jack Barry and I were making detailed pencil drawings of Reds and GIs lying wounded and dead on battlefields and in foxholes or dying in armored tanks and personnel carriers, their arms thrown upward in their agony as bullets passed through their chests and heads in straight gray lines, the dot of the bullet at one end and the machine gun barrels of the fighter planes of the USSR or the USA at the other end up above in the white sky.

War.

2 Mortal

In an issue of the National Enquirer or in some similarly crude tabloid I saw a photograph of a heavyset woman who had been struck and killed by a car as she crossed a street in New York City. Her legs had been broken in two, completely severed just above her ankles an inch up into each shin. Her ankles and feet, still tightly laced and shod in hightop shoes, lay three feet away from the stumps of her thick, muscular legs, heavy, thick hips, her body otherwise normal, dressed in a woman's dark suit. The odd lights in the picture I assumed were shards of broken glass illumined by the flashbulb. There was no blood. This made the scene peculiar and strange, the clean geometric break in the two cylinders of her lower legs, the inner circles of bone visible at their centers, as if the woman's legs had been chopped in two by the blade of a guillotine.

I felt nauseated.

For days I could not stop thinking about it.

Broken.

The human body so vulnerable, so fragile, the bone so brittle.

It haunted me.

1 Animal

One morning less than half a block from home on my way to school when I was just eight years old I came across a fat squirrel stopped and alert six feet up the trunk of a huge tree maybe ten feet away from me. I stopped too. The squirrel and I looked at one another silent and still. I decided to throw something at it, I don't know why, and I looked around me for a suitable projectile.

Aha!

Right beside me, just off the sidewalk, lay a discarded, heavy, red paving brick. At best I thought I might startle the squirrel and scare it on up the tree. I could only heave the brick—with a grunt—from my shoulder as a shot putter might.

Thud.

To my complete astonishment the brick hit the squirrel flush in the back. It did not fall, it did not move—nor did I. Guilty now, sorry for what I had done, I just stood and watched to see what would happen. Stunned, hurt, perhaps seriously injured, the squirrel appeared to rest and to collect itself and then slowly, ever so slowly, it climbed, just one slow, tentative step at a time, up the tree and, contemplative, sad, I resumed my own slow stroll to school.

Animal.