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.