joseph engraver
11-09-2025, 12:35 PM
Introduction
This is a part of my life’s story. It began with my birth on December ninth nineteen,
thirty-eighth I was born unwanted, illegitimate and sent to live with my Great Aunt on a dairy farm in New Hampshire
Part One: The Farm
The first thing I can remember was the two women that were standing over me they were talking about me while they examined my naked body. I recall the smell of Lysol, evaporating from the tub of warm water that my great Aunt Lillian and her sister Hazel had put me in. They had removed the urine soaked cloth covering the sores that extended from my waist to my knees. They then washed me, covered me with ointment and wrapped a clean white cloth around my waist, then put me in a white iron crib to sleep in the corner of the bedroom where my Great Aunt Lillian slept with her daughter Eva.
One night, Eva started screaming as my great uncle (her father) Andrew came into the room and grabbed her mother by her long hair. Eva’s screams awoke me and I watched Andrew hitting my aunt and dragging her from the bed towards his adjacent bedroom.
I could see them fighting like black shadows in the backlight coming from Andrew’s open bedroom door. From my crib I could see everything: Eva standing on the bed screaming; Andrew pulling my aunt by her hair towards the open door, raising his hand and slapping her; Her silently resisting, holding onto the top of her nightgown.
It was then I also started screaming and crying as they disappeared from my sight, when the door closed and I was alone in the dark. After a while Eva came to my crib and let the side down. I was still crying loudly as she climbed up beside me. We sat there in the dark holding onto each other, Eva repeating, “Shush Joey hush now.” until I stopped crying.
When my Aunt came back into the room she picked me up and held me in her arms and told me not to cry as she took me into her big bed. “Don’t cry Joey, God will take care of us” and I fell asleep.
It was the first time I slept in a big bed and the closest at that time I had ever come to feeling maternal love.
Great aunt Lillian was all to me. She was my protector, my educator and the mother I had not yet known, she was a tall, once beautiful and well educated woman who the hard life on a New Hampshire dairy farm had made into a woman of the earth.
At nighttime I would sit in my crib and watch as her daughter Eva. Brushes then braid, and then wind her hair into a bun and pins it in place with a tortoise shell comb.
When I was bigger, my Aunt would let me brush it for her. Always 100 strokes, no more, no less Joey” she would tell me, and then we would count each stroke together. “Ninety-eight,” she would say. How many do we have left Joey? I would say to her only two more strokes to go Auntie.” You are a good boy Joey.
I never did know at what age I arrived at that farmhouse, nor how I got there, but I remember the farm very well, as it was my home for over eight years.
It was a large white two story building with green trim around the north and east sun porch windows. It sat upon a foundation of fieldstone that had been picked up from the 160 acres that surrounded Andrew’s farm. There were four rooms on the main floor, and two separate bedrooms. One for Andrew the other for my Aunt Lillian, Eva and then me and four more on the second floor, It had a kitchen and a large dining room with a grate in the floor that let the heat from a furnace in the cellar warm the room there was a long wooden table where we would all eat the evenings meals in the middle. This room also served as a place to listen about the war in Europe and The Pacific over the radio and a parlor for family and guests.
The entrance to the dining room was through the busy hot kitchen that was always filled with the aroma of roasted chicken, pies, breads and muffins that came wafting out of the wood-fired black Majestic cook stove.
Each morning from the stone lined well, Aunt Lillian would draw water with a gray hand pump, build a fire with kindling and start the morning coffee, then fix school lunches for her three sons Andrew, Carl, and Bob and then prepare breakfast for everyone else before the roosters would begin to crow.
The kitchen contained a gasoline powered Maytag washer which stood by a window where the stinky and toxic fumes were to be exhausted outside by a flexible metal hose where I would sit and inhale the fumes. A small square green wood table for breakfast was placed against one wall with the chairs hunging on wooden pegs from the wall. In a corner close to the stove and wood box was a large oak butter churn where I would sit cranking the handle watching the beaters turn the cream to froth then to golden flakes? My arms would tire as the large nuggets would form. “Auntie, what will happen if I turn the crank backwards?” I asked.
Turning from the concrete sink and the large pressure cooker full of kidney beans for lunch, she said, “If you do, that all the butter will turn back into cream, Joey.” Weary armed I would keep cranking until I had a large lump of butter in the chum.
There were two doors exiting this kitchen. One door led outside to the pair of quarried granite blocks that served as steps.
The other one led to the pantry, which was stocked with sacks of flour, salt, sugar, kept in bins. The wooden shelves were lined with preserved fruits, jellies, vegetables and meat
It had long wooden counters and tops upon which breads, pastries, cakes and pies were always being made by Eva and Aunt Lillian. This was my favorite room.
Walking through the pantry you would find other stairs, following those that led up; you would enter an empty open ballroom with dusty maple wood floors where at one time music and guests would mingle. It had been abandoned since the Great Depression. There, in one corner of the ballroom, was a small room that I was forbidden to enter.
It was the armory and contained many guns and swords, and a wonderful collection of model airplanes hanging from the ceiling. These belonged to Andy, who was in the army fighting the Germans for the war to end all wars.
The other stairs that went down led to the woodshed where huge piles of oak, birch, ash, and other hardwoods were drying for the kitchen stove and the monster furnace that sat in a small stone walled room in the basement next to the root cellar. The root cellar was a very dark and spooky place that contained the kegs of salt pork, smoked hams, bags of burlap full of Russet potatoes, mounds of straw and earth covering carrots, cabbages, and turnips that would see the family through the quiet and cold New Hampshire winter.
From the woodshed and to the right, there was a stone walkway leading to the family toilet and its unforgettable smell. Its seat was made of a single wooden plank with three well polished holes cut into it – two large and one small for the children. A can of lye sat next to the old catalogs that we used for toilet paper.
Past the wooden toilet door with a half moon cut into it for light, the corridor continued, to where the bridles, harnesses and rows of tools hung from spikes driven in the wall.
At the end of the corridor was the milk room with a large ice-filled cooler in which bobbed silvery metal jugs full of rich whole milk provided by a herd of twenty cows that provided money to maintain the Farm.
There was also an icehouse, which was built of thick hand sawn planks and then stuffed full with the sawdust to keep the precious ice, cut, harvested and then hauled by horses to the farm every winter from Lake Massabesic from melting
. That ice once stored, served as refrigeration for the milk, meat and the household icebox. The icehouse door was closed and locked to guard against anyone leaving it open and I had been warned not to go in there.
Beyond it was the huge red barn with the stalls for the animals. On one side were the stalls for the twin gentle enormous draft horses named Dolly and Molly.
On the other side, were the stanchions of the many dairy cattle and a large brown and white Jersey bull with a shiny brass ring in his nose. How I tortured the animal by whacking its balls with a stick.
Above the stanchions and stalls were the floors of the hayloft where the sweet red clover hay was stored when cut and dried; to be use to feed the animals through the winter.
I love playing in the loft and it was one of my many places to hide when I got into trouble. Large wooden grain bins full of oats for Dolly and Molly, and corn which was fed sparingly to all the chickens, ducks and geese and turkeys that wandered around the space reserved for the yellow school bus Andrew drove to school.
Two black and tan hunting hounds were chained to small houses nearby where they could remain warm and dry when the bitter winter settled in.
Lastly there was the collie dog that was allowed to enter the kitchen but had to sleep out at night. She slept in the crawl space under the porch. Her name was Lassie and she was my best companion and until Sammy came to live on the farm, He became my only friend.
The upstairs of the farmhouse had four large bedrooms, all with washbasins and chamber pots. To this day I remember the smell of those flower painted porcelain chamber pots as I would empty them into a slop bucket and carry it down the stairs to dump into the toilet.
Within this complex, my Great Aunt Lillian, her husband Andrew, their teenage sons - Carl, Bob and their youngest daughter Eva lived. There was also a hired hand. His name was Earl and he always dressed in bib overalls, had a long beard and chewed tobacco. He gave me some one day and laughed as a spit it out in disgust.
It did not take Carl and Bob long to learn that with a small amount of teasing I could be brought to tears. They would tease; I would run to their mother. She would console me and scold them. Then she would fix for me what was called a sugar-titty, which consisted of a large dollop of butter mixed with sugar wrapped in pieces of gauze which I would then suck on. I never experienced a day of hunger on the farm and I became a very fat child.
I loved life on the farm when I was with my Aunt. I would accompany her to collect eggs every day and soon knew where every hen and goose had made its nest. I would help her peeling apples for pies. We would go for walks to find berries and concord grapes for desserts and jams and as I grew she would send me on those adventures alone.
Earl showed me how to peel a birch tree and make small bark canoes and to make a flute from a tree branch.
At night in the parlor, there was the big Phillips radio with its glowing dial where I could sit in front of it and listen to the adventures of ‘The Lone Ranger’.
I would stay up and wait for the announcer to say ‘And from out of the past comes the thundering hoof beats of the great horse Silver. The Lone Ranger rides again.’ Sometimes I would also listen to The Green Hornet, The Shadow and others that are too dim in my memory to recall.
There was a small square game table in the parlor, with eagle’s claws grasping round balls of green glass at the ends of its spindly legs. I would sit there for hours working on picture puzzles, playing games, pick up sticks, Chinese checkers, and Tic-Tack-Toe with Eva and sometimes my Great Aunt.
Uncle Andrew taught me how to play checkers and I would sometimes play with him on the sun porch. In the afternoon he always sat in his white wicker rocker, reading newspapers and smoking Bugler tobacco from a corncob pipe. I don’t ever recall seeing him cut or split wood, wash a dish or help my aunt. His job was to drive the yellow school bus and oversee the farm.
It was Uncle Andrew’s custom to get shaved every Saturday afternoon, when I was three or four this was a great entertainment for me.
. Every Saturday afternoon when it was time for Andrew’s shave, a pan of water would be put on the stove. White towels placed on the kitchen table; a chair set up in the middle of the room. Andrew’s cup of shaving soap would be brought down from the cupboard next to the sink. His razor strap hung on a nail, and I had learned great respect for it. The straight razor was stropped, the hot towels readied, and heated water was put in to his shaving mug. Then Auntie would tell me, “Go and get Andrew from the sunroom.”
The thing I remember most distinctly of Andrew was his huge nose. It protruded from his big head, had pimples and looked like a zucchini. He always wore blue bib overalls with a silver pocket watch in his breast pocket.
I looked at that nose every Saturday for all the years that I was there.
Me and the other children who came to live on the farm, one a boy named Sammy would gather on the top step by the warm cook stove and watch Andrew get lathered. Auntie would dip the brush into the cup and soon she would cover his face with lather, then she would take the straight razor and start to shave.
First his side burns and then his jaw while we waited for the best part of all. Andrew’s nose was so big that in order to shave under it my Aunt had to grab it and lift it up. Then she shaved his upper lip with the straight razor making us all giggle while Andrew would glare at me and Sammy as he sat with shaving soap still on his face. We would never dare laugh at Andrew for he was very big and mean and we were afraid of him.
So it came to be one day as the year went by, when Saturday came and it was time for Andrew’s shave, I would sit on that step and pray to God with all my might, that Auntie would slit his throat while she held him by the nose, but she never did
As I approached school age, life became more difficult for me. The first incident that affected me seriously, was when Andrew coaxed me into his bedroom, took off his clothes and mine, and then he started playing with my privates, and had me do the same to him. When he got on his hands and knees and tried to put my penis in his rectum I got very scared as I ran out of the room.
He grabbed me, made me put my clothes on, and then told me never to tell anyone. I promised, “Swear to God” he commanded, and I did swear.
I never said a word about it until now. I was about six when this happened and the incident became a shame on childhood memory.
Time on the farm passed and I had lived on the farm for almost nine years, one evening while I was getting grain for the chickens. Andrew accosted me in the barn where he offered me 10 cents if I would let him put his penis in my mouth.
I agreed to the 10 cents, which was more money than I had ever held in my hand, but it was the shining angel of Mercury I saw on the face of that coin that made me say yes. He pushed himself into my mouth, he hurt me and I started gagging. He grabbed my hair as I tried to escape, then I vomited and he let go of my hair.
The filthy taste is something that still makes me sick now, and the disgust and shame of incident has haunted me even after all those years. I broke free, ran across the yard, Andrew close behind me. I flew up the stone steps and into the kitchen with tears streaming down my face and vomit on my chin.
I told my Aunt what had happened, what I had done; Andrew entered the kitchen at that point. She accused him, and he called me a God dammed lying bastard.
I showed her the silver dime with the Angel of Mercury that had put wings on my feet I still had in my hand. She believed me, grabbed the nearest thing handy and threw it at him saying, “Don’t you touch this child again.” It was his coffee mug and it hit him in the head. He went out the door and never touched me again.
But it did no longer matter, as Uncle Andrew had put his mark on me. I was contaminated and God damned, for God would never want a boy like me.
My affection for my great aunt was boundless. But my confession to her was not the end of my troubles. Soon the brothers Carl and Bob found out about it, and they blamed me for Andrew’s problems. After that day, any time they caught me outside and alone, the torture would begin. Vicious knuckle rubs on the top of my head, wrist burns – what children in those times called Indian Burns, not to mention the kicks and cuffs.
It is odd how some incidents are so stark that you can still remember their smells and tastes seventy five years later.
One taste that the memory of those brothers brings to my mind so sharply is that of raw horse radish. Big white horse radishes used to grow behind the kitchen where the sink drain water flowed. They were very hot and I did not like them.
There was kept on the kitchen table, a jar of ground horseradish. The brothers Bob and Carl way-laid me in the kitchen, got me down on the floor and started stuffing tablespoons of ground horse radish in my mouth. I fought, I bit, I kicked, and spit and I swallowed several spoons full of horse radish.
Over the years I have forgotten and forgiven the roughhousing, but never the horse radish. Strangely, I love the stuff, and always have it available as a condiment.
To be continued
This is a part of my life’s story. It began with my birth on December ninth nineteen,
thirty-eighth I was born unwanted, illegitimate and sent to live with my Great Aunt on a dairy farm in New Hampshire
Part One: The Farm
The first thing I can remember was the two women that were standing over me they were talking about me while they examined my naked body. I recall the smell of Lysol, evaporating from the tub of warm water that my great Aunt Lillian and her sister Hazel had put me in. They had removed the urine soaked cloth covering the sores that extended from my waist to my knees. They then washed me, covered me with ointment and wrapped a clean white cloth around my waist, then put me in a white iron crib to sleep in the corner of the bedroom where my Great Aunt Lillian slept with her daughter Eva.
One night, Eva started screaming as my great uncle (her father) Andrew came into the room and grabbed her mother by her long hair. Eva’s screams awoke me and I watched Andrew hitting my aunt and dragging her from the bed towards his adjacent bedroom.
I could see them fighting like black shadows in the backlight coming from Andrew’s open bedroom door. From my crib I could see everything: Eva standing on the bed screaming; Andrew pulling my aunt by her hair towards the open door, raising his hand and slapping her; Her silently resisting, holding onto the top of her nightgown.
It was then I also started screaming and crying as they disappeared from my sight, when the door closed and I was alone in the dark. After a while Eva came to my crib and let the side down. I was still crying loudly as she climbed up beside me. We sat there in the dark holding onto each other, Eva repeating, “Shush Joey hush now.” until I stopped crying.
When my Aunt came back into the room she picked me up and held me in her arms and told me not to cry as she took me into her big bed. “Don’t cry Joey, God will take care of us” and I fell asleep.
It was the first time I slept in a big bed and the closest at that time I had ever come to feeling maternal love.
Great aunt Lillian was all to me. She was my protector, my educator and the mother I had not yet known, she was a tall, once beautiful and well educated woman who the hard life on a New Hampshire dairy farm had made into a woman of the earth.
At nighttime I would sit in my crib and watch as her daughter Eva. Brushes then braid, and then wind her hair into a bun and pins it in place with a tortoise shell comb.
When I was bigger, my Aunt would let me brush it for her. Always 100 strokes, no more, no less Joey” she would tell me, and then we would count each stroke together. “Ninety-eight,” she would say. How many do we have left Joey? I would say to her only two more strokes to go Auntie.” You are a good boy Joey.
I never did know at what age I arrived at that farmhouse, nor how I got there, but I remember the farm very well, as it was my home for over eight years.
It was a large white two story building with green trim around the north and east sun porch windows. It sat upon a foundation of fieldstone that had been picked up from the 160 acres that surrounded Andrew’s farm. There were four rooms on the main floor, and two separate bedrooms. One for Andrew the other for my Aunt Lillian, Eva and then me and four more on the second floor, It had a kitchen and a large dining room with a grate in the floor that let the heat from a furnace in the cellar warm the room there was a long wooden table where we would all eat the evenings meals in the middle. This room also served as a place to listen about the war in Europe and The Pacific over the radio and a parlor for family and guests.
The entrance to the dining room was through the busy hot kitchen that was always filled with the aroma of roasted chicken, pies, breads and muffins that came wafting out of the wood-fired black Majestic cook stove.
Each morning from the stone lined well, Aunt Lillian would draw water with a gray hand pump, build a fire with kindling and start the morning coffee, then fix school lunches for her three sons Andrew, Carl, and Bob and then prepare breakfast for everyone else before the roosters would begin to crow.
The kitchen contained a gasoline powered Maytag washer which stood by a window where the stinky and toxic fumes were to be exhausted outside by a flexible metal hose where I would sit and inhale the fumes. A small square green wood table for breakfast was placed against one wall with the chairs hunging on wooden pegs from the wall. In a corner close to the stove and wood box was a large oak butter churn where I would sit cranking the handle watching the beaters turn the cream to froth then to golden flakes? My arms would tire as the large nuggets would form. “Auntie, what will happen if I turn the crank backwards?” I asked.
Turning from the concrete sink and the large pressure cooker full of kidney beans for lunch, she said, “If you do, that all the butter will turn back into cream, Joey.” Weary armed I would keep cranking until I had a large lump of butter in the chum.
There were two doors exiting this kitchen. One door led outside to the pair of quarried granite blocks that served as steps.
The other one led to the pantry, which was stocked with sacks of flour, salt, sugar, kept in bins. The wooden shelves were lined with preserved fruits, jellies, vegetables and meat
It had long wooden counters and tops upon which breads, pastries, cakes and pies were always being made by Eva and Aunt Lillian. This was my favorite room.
Walking through the pantry you would find other stairs, following those that led up; you would enter an empty open ballroom with dusty maple wood floors where at one time music and guests would mingle. It had been abandoned since the Great Depression. There, in one corner of the ballroom, was a small room that I was forbidden to enter.
It was the armory and contained many guns and swords, and a wonderful collection of model airplanes hanging from the ceiling. These belonged to Andy, who was in the army fighting the Germans for the war to end all wars.
The other stairs that went down led to the woodshed where huge piles of oak, birch, ash, and other hardwoods were drying for the kitchen stove and the monster furnace that sat in a small stone walled room in the basement next to the root cellar. The root cellar was a very dark and spooky place that contained the kegs of salt pork, smoked hams, bags of burlap full of Russet potatoes, mounds of straw and earth covering carrots, cabbages, and turnips that would see the family through the quiet and cold New Hampshire winter.
From the woodshed and to the right, there was a stone walkway leading to the family toilet and its unforgettable smell. Its seat was made of a single wooden plank with three well polished holes cut into it – two large and one small for the children. A can of lye sat next to the old catalogs that we used for toilet paper.
Past the wooden toilet door with a half moon cut into it for light, the corridor continued, to where the bridles, harnesses and rows of tools hung from spikes driven in the wall.
At the end of the corridor was the milk room with a large ice-filled cooler in which bobbed silvery metal jugs full of rich whole milk provided by a herd of twenty cows that provided money to maintain the Farm.
There was also an icehouse, which was built of thick hand sawn planks and then stuffed full with the sawdust to keep the precious ice, cut, harvested and then hauled by horses to the farm every winter from Lake Massabesic from melting
. That ice once stored, served as refrigeration for the milk, meat and the household icebox. The icehouse door was closed and locked to guard against anyone leaving it open and I had been warned not to go in there.
Beyond it was the huge red barn with the stalls for the animals. On one side were the stalls for the twin gentle enormous draft horses named Dolly and Molly.
On the other side, were the stanchions of the many dairy cattle and a large brown and white Jersey bull with a shiny brass ring in his nose. How I tortured the animal by whacking its balls with a stick.
Above the stanchions and stalls were the floors of the hayloft where the sweet red clover hay was stored when cut and dried; to be use to feed the animals through the winter.
I love playing in the loft and it was one of my many places to hide when I got into trouble. Large wooden grain bins full of oats for Dolly and Molly, and corn which was fed sparingly to all the chickens, ducks and geese and turkeys that wandered around the space reserved for the yellow school bus Andrew drove to school.
Two black and tan hunting hounds were chained to small houses nearby where they could remain warm and dry when the bitter winter settled in.
Lastly there was the collie dog that was allowed to enter the kitchen but had to sleep out at night. She slept in the crawl space under the porch. Her name was Lassie and she was my best companion and until Sammy came to live on the farm, He became my only friend.
The upstairs of the farmhouse had four large bedrooms, all with washbasins and chamber pots. To this day I remember the smell of those flower painted porcelain chamber pots as I would empty them into a slop bucket and carry it down the stairs to dump into the toilet.
Within this complex, my Great Aunt Lillian, her husband Andrew, their teenage sons - Carl, Bob and their youngest daughter Eva lived. There was also a hired hand. His name was Earl and he always dressed in bib overalls, had a long beard and chewed tobacco. He gave me some one day and laughed as a spit it out in disgust.
It did not take Carl and Bob long to learn that with a small amount of teasing I could be brought to tears. They would tease; I would run to their mother. She would console me and scold them. Then she would fix for me what was called a sugar-titty, which consisted of a large dollop of butter mixed with sugar wrapped in pieces of gauze which I would then suck on. I never experienced a day of hunger on the farm and I became a very fat child.
I loved life on the farm when I was with my Aunt. I would accompany her to collect eggs every day and soon knew where every hen and goose had made its nest. I would help her peeling apples for pies. We would go for walks to find berries and concord grapes for desserts and jams and as I grew she would send me on those adventures alone.
Earl showed me how to peel a birch tree and make small bark canoes and to make a flute from a tree branch.
At night in the parlor, there was the big Phillips radio with its glowing dial where I could sit in front of it and listen to the adventures of ‘The Lone Ranger’.
I would stay up and wait for the announcer to say ‘And from out of the past comes the thundering hoof beats of the great horse Silver. The Lone Ranger rides again.’ Sometimes I would also listen to The Green Hornet, The Shadow and others that are too dim in my memory to recall.
There was a small square game table in the parlor, with eagle’s claws grasping round balls of green glass at the ends of its spindly legs. I would sit there for hours working on picture puzzles, playing games, pick up sticks, Chinese checkers, and Tic-Tack-Toe with Eva and sometimes my Great Aunt.
Uncle Andrew taught me how to play checkers and I would sometimes play with him on the sun porch. In the afternoon he always sat in his white wicker rocker, reading newspapers and smoking Bugler tobacco from a corncob pipe. I don’t ever recall seeing him cut or split wood, wash a dish or help my aunt. His job was to drive the yellow school bus and oversee the farm.
It was Uncle Andrew’s custom to get shaved every Saturday afternoon, when I was three or four this was a great entertainment for me.
. Every Saturday afternoon when it was time for Andrew’s shave, a pan of water would be put on the stove. White towels placed on the kitchen table; a chair set up in the middle of the room. Andrew’s cup of shaving soap would be brought down from the cupboard next to the sink. His razor strap hung on a nail, and I had learned great respect for it. The straight razor was stropped, the hot towels readied, and heated water was put in to his shaving mug. Then Auntie would tell me, “Go and get Andrew from the sunroom.”
The thing I remember most distinctly of Andrew was his huge nose. It protruded from his big head, had pimples and looked like a zucchini. He always wore blue bib overalls with a silver pocket watch in his breast pocket.
I looked at that nose every Saturday for all the years that I was there.
Me and the other children who came to live on the farm, one a boy named Sammy would gather on the top step by the warm cook stove and watch Andrew get lathered. Auntie would dip the brush into the cup and soon she would cover his face with lather, then she would take the straight razor and start to shave.
First his side burns and then his jaw while we waited for the best part of all. Andrew’s nose was so big that in order to shave under it my Aunt had to grab it and lift it up. Then she shaved his upper lip with the straight razor making us all giggle while Andrew would glare at me and Sammy as he sat with shaving soap still on his face. We would never dare laugh at Andrew for he was very big and mean and we were afraid of him.
So it came to be one day as the year went by, when Saturday came and it was time for Andrew’s shave, I would sit on that step and pray to God with all my might, that Auntie would slit his throat while she held him by the nose, but she never did
As I approached school age, life became more difficult for me. The first incident that affected me seriously, was when Andrew coaxed me into his bedroom, took off his clothes and mine, and then he started playing with my privates, and had me do the same to him. When he got on his hands and knees and tried to put my penis in his rectum I got very scared as I ran out of the room.
He grabbed me, made me put my clothes on, and then told me never to tell anyone. I promised, “Swear to God” he commanded, and I did swear.
I never said a word about it until now. I was about six when this happened and the incident became a shame on childhood memory.
Time on the farm passed and I had lived on the farm for almost nine years, one evening while I was getting grain for the chickens. Andrew accosted me in the barn where he offered me 10 cents if I would let him put his penis in my mouth.
I agreed to the 10 cents, which was more money than I had ever held in my hand, but it was the shining angel of Mercury I saw on the face of that coin that made me say yes. He pushed himself into my mouth, he hurt me and I started gagging. He grabbed my hair as I tried to escape, then I vomited and he let go of my hair.
The filthy taste is something that still makes me sick now, and the disgust and shame of incident has haunted me even after all those years. I broke free, ran across the yard, Andrew close behind me. I flew up the stone steps and into the kitchen with tears streaming down my face and vomit on my chin.
I told my Aunt what had happened, what I had done; Andrew entered the kitchen at that point. She accused him, and he called me a God dammed lying bastard.
I showed her the silver dime with the Angel of Mercury that had put wings on my feet I still had in my hand. She believed me, grabbed the nearest thing handy and threw it at him saying, “Don’t you touch this child again.” It was his coffee mug and it hit him in the head. He went out the door and never touched me again.
But it did no longer matter, as Uncle Andrew had put his mark on me. I was contaminated and God damned, for God would never want a boy like me.
My affection for my great aunt was boundless. But my confession to her was not the end of my troubles. Soon the brothers Carl and Bob found out about it, and they blamed me for Andrew’s problems. After that day, any time they caught me outside and alone, the torture would begin. Vicious knuckle rubs on the top of my head, wrist burns – what children in those times called Indian Burns, not to mention the kicks and cuffs.
It is odd how some incidents are so stark that you can still remember their smells and tastes seventy five years later.
One taste that the memory of those brothers brings to my mind so sharply is that of raw horse radish. Big white horse radishes used to grow behind the kitchen where the sink drain water flowed. They were very hot and I did not like them.
There was kept on the kitchen table, a jar of ground horseradish. The brothers Bob and Carl way-laid me in the kitchen, got me down on the floor and started stuffing tablespoons of ground horse radish in my mouth. I fought, I bit, I kicked, and spit and I swallowed several spoons full of horse radish.
Over the years I have forgotten and forgiven the roughhousing, but never the horse radish. Strangely, I love the stuff, and always have it available as a condiment.
To be continued