joseph engraver
11-11-2025, 06:36 AM
The Farm Part three
The Knot in the Back
I was turning eight when I was taken from my aunt’s care and Vivian and I went to live with my mother and Ernest.
At our new apartment at Gill's Street in Nashua the whippings came on a regular basis, prompted by the curse of my bed wetting. I would wet and get whacked. They would wake me up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet. Ernest would stand over me as I tried to urinate. Once in desperation he came to the toilet with the butcher knife and threatened to cut it off. One night he took me in his car to the Canal Street Bridge, held me over the side. “You see that river down there? If you don’t stop pissing the bed, I’m going to throw you in it.” Then he put me back in the car and drove home. Ernest, who was Catholic, placed me in a school run by nuns, which ended my time at Gillis Street for a while.
I remember that house of God and the Holy cross on the top of it with clarity, it was a large two-story building made of red bricks and cold stone floors. There was a cafeteria with many wooden tables and benches. We were all boys who ate there and three times a day we would all kneel on those cold stone floors and say prayers. ‘Hail Mary full of Grace; The Lord is my Sheppard I shall not want.’ I remember looking up to a painting on the wall at the entrance of the school .It was of Jesus Christ and his exposed bleeding heart and I wondered why the nuns had killed him I hated the prayers. And I hated the nuns. I hated the nightclothes I was made to wear. And most of all I hated the dormitory because every night the nuns would tie a towel around my waist and make a big knot in the middle of my back. This was supposed to keep me from sleeping on my back, which was supposed to keep me from wetting the bed. No water after supper was also another of the nun’s rules. I would go to bed every night hearing the snickers and laughs of the other children. All of this misery and still I wet the bed like Old Faithful.
When I was returned to Gill's Street, I had a big surprise: a new baby sister. Her name was Vivian and she was born pre-maturely. She had spent many weeks of her tiny life inside of an incubator. Once in a while I would go with my mother to the hospital to see her. She was so tiny and weighed only three pounds four ounces. The arrival of Vivian changed my life considerably, for the better.
School was a few blocks away from the long gray apartments on Gillis Street. And I would walk by the corner grocery store on my way to it. School was also very difficult for me at that time. I had no trouble with the math, and everything printed, but at my new school nothing was printed. Everything was written in cursives and it was to me, the most incomprehensible bunch of squiggles upon a blackboard. As a consequence I was called the dummy of the class. One day on my way to school I stopped and bought a stick of chewing gum and popped it into my mouth. The teacher noticed it and took the gum away from me, admonishing me that if I could have a piece of gum, so should the rest of the class. I had seen money in a jar by the newspaper stand. People would pickup their papers and drop in a nickel or a dime into the jar and continue on to work. One day I stuck my hand in the jar, and took as much change as I could get out. I went into the store and bought as much chewing gum as my loot would purchase. I took the bag of goodies to school, and like a fat Santa Claus started handing out gum. Soon every kid in class had a piece, while I sat at my desk chewing happily away. My joy lasted all school day, but on my arrival home I was faced by my mother and the teacher. At school I had lied to the teacher and said that my mother had given me the money. The teacher had stopped by to check the veracity of my claim. I was caught red-handed. When Ernest came home I got my whipping. I was marched to the grocery store and confessed. I was reprimanded and had to work after school for week delivering milk and eggs to the people’s houses that lived nearby to repay my crime. It was a good lesson.
Adoption papers were filed. I stood in the Catholic Church while the black robed priest sprinkled Holy Water on me and christened me ‘Joseph Robert Lavarnway’ in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost Amen.
Ernest’s family was much larger than my mother’s which consisted of her mother Hazel, Waldo her husband, an older sister Ruth and Waldo Jr. a younger brother. Ernest had six brothers and four sisters. I acquired overnight a couple of dozen cousins, aunts, uncles, and a grandmother with one leg, a Godmother, two uncles who had fought the Nazi’s and a second Grandfather.
Grandmother Agnes was a small woman with thick grey hair and a matching beard caused by a hormonal imbalance. She never left the shade her home and had not for several years since she had lost one leg to gangrene. My new Grandma Lavarnway had a cold, white, wooden artificial one that she kept in the hall closet of her apartment. When I visited her, she would have me put it away or fetch it out for her so she could strap it on when she needed to go to the toilet. My Grandpa Oscar was rarely there, he spent lots of time in the workmen’s bar and because he gave me candy money I always looked forward to seeing him even though he reeked of beer and cigar smoke. There were good times for me on The Gillis Street apartments plenty of pals my age to play with no one knew of my past and I had no morning chores to do other than get myself ready for school
The residents of Gillis Street were all white and all spoke the English language, Even though it was in a French accent as Nashua had many Canadian French. Each apartment unit was identical in size and was rented to young couples recently married when the war ended in 1946, there was a place for every one to have a small garden patch in the back, but the kids around the neighborhood swiped the melons, strawberries.,and tomatoes when they matured but left the zucchini and broccoli alone. There was the Saturday movie at the church where for 5 cents I could watch Buck Rodgers, Gene Autry, Tom Mix and Roy, Dale, and Trigger
I slept in my own room upstairs, my bed wetting was sporadic, I was happy.
In the closet there I found several books written about Hercules and the riddles of the Sphinx and would spend hours reading from them. It was than that I decided that I wanted to be like Hercules to withstand any force and conquered any obstacle placed before me.
On Saturday night Ernest’s brothers and their families would come to our apartment. They would fix hamburger sandwiches, hot dogs, make popcorn, drink beer and then play penny ante poker, sending me to bed with Hercules and his stories.
In the hall was a vent that let the heat from the kitchen warm the upstairs. The hole was over the kitchen table where the gambling was going on and I would crawl out of bed and tiptoe to the vent, lay on my stomach and watch.
Mother was a good player and sometimes I would see her rake in a mountain of pennies and nickels. I did this for many weeks without being noticed. One night as I was watching I could see the cards. My mother was holding four Aces. I got so excited that I said out loud “four aces.” And that’s how I got the gambling bug and got caught.
It was while I lived there I started earning money in the summer by riding the running boards of a big green produce wagon that serviced the homes of the working class neighborhood. Mr. Garibaldi would drive his truck slowly up and down the streets with me and the other kids sitting on the front fenders or standing on the running boards. He would stop at the curb and we would all take off running, going from one apartment to another selling bananas, melons, potatoes, fresh corn, everything he had in the truck. We would run up the sidewalks yelling, “Fruits and vegetables for sale,” take the people’s orders and run back to Mr. Garibaldi. Singing, ten cents worth of onions and fifteen cents of potatoes. He would fill the orders and we would run back yelling, “Fruits and vegetables,” pockets full of pennies. Then in the winter I would shovel snow. Mother kept my money. When school ended I was not advanced.
The Farm
Part Four, the Killing of Frenchy
My mother and Ernest my two half sisters and me moved to a 30-acre wood lot Ernest had purchased not many miles away from my Aunt Lillian’s farm. Here on this wooded land I learned the meaning of hard physical work, but I was up to it, as Hercules was my mentor, and he had cleaned the Aegean Stables.
Ernest had been building a home there and it was now fit enough for us to move into. The house was made of logs cut from the property, there was no chainsaw and all the cutting was hard manual labor. I learned how to notch a tree and drive in the wooden wedges that kept the large two man saw from binding. Once the tree was felled then I cut away the limbs and put the brush into a pile then helped Ernest to saw the trunk into logs to be sawed at Andy’s mills into boards, 2 x 4’s, and 2 x 6’s.
When we moved into my home for the next eight years, it had walls covered with tar paper, windows and a door and a green shingle roof and was heated with a kerosene stove. There no electricity to the property, the open kitchen had a sink, ice chest, makeshift counters, a small eating and cooking area , a combined living room and bedroom and a narrow room with space for a double military- surplus bunk painted olive drab. Water was carried from a spring located a short distance from our outhouse under a pine tree.
I was given the top bunk and my two sisters slept on the bottom one. My bed wetting became more frequent, my nightmares returned and again I became a real problem to everyone. ”I wish I had never had you Joseph “my mother said -It wasn’t long before the mattress was stained and soaked and the whole house smelled of urine. The mattress was hauled off to the dump, replaced by a blanket. This turned out to be a bad deal for my two half sisters. I can still hear them crying “Daddy, He peed on us again!”
I would sleep, dream nightmares of white tigers, dead girls and then wet. It would soak through dripping on them.
Ernest would then swear “Lilian you got to do something about that God damned kid!” I knew what God damned meant. I looked it up in a dictionary. “Doomed to endlessly punishment, condemned to eternal hell”. That was me and my destiny, but I did not know it at twelve years old.
Finally a solution to the problem was found. A rubber sheet was stretched across the springs and a blanket on top of that. The knots of the wires that made up the bed springs were very uncomfortable, especially on the back of my head. It was on this bed that I finally started sleeping on my stomach and using my arms as a pillow and my sisters Helen and Vivian slept in dry comfort. I was proof the nuns were completely wrong with their “knot in the back” theory. The nighttime spring continued to flow. I started chewing up the headboard. I would gnaw on it like a red pine squirrel, chew up the pieces and swallow them. Little by little I ate up most of my bed.
The outhouse was located some distance behind the house. It was much smaller than the one on the farm but it smelled exactly the same, it was a one hole
There had been a lot of talk about a cougar that had made off with a child up country, and one dark night as I sat on the **** hole I took into my mind that there was a cougar sitting on the roof waiting for me. The more I thought about it, the surer I was he was there. I got my overalls up, opened the door and peeked outside. It was dark as a well and I could see nothing but I thought I could hear it sharpening its claws. I got ready and made my heart-pounding dash to the safety of the house.
I had read of Hercules and how he diverted a river to clean the stables. I would make believe I was him as I worked at my chores.
Life on Derry Road was an equal amount of hard work for all of us. Ernest would leave early for his twenty-mile drive to what was called “The Card Shop.” And my mother and I spent the days cleaning up a patch of woods for a garden space. The tools that I would become very familiar with were the ax, sledgehammer, pick, shovel, splitting wedges, bucksaw and the two-man felling saw. I resented the fact that my after school hours were mostly absorbed by digging the septic tank, then the well, then the basement.
The well was located a hundred yards behind the house at the edge of the fern and skunk cabbage filled logging area. I would dig, Ernest would dig, and eventually we had cement lined well about sixteen feet deep. It was a good well and the water from it was cold and pure. Next to dig was the ditch for the waterline. A ditch had to be dug from the house to the well. Sometimes we would use dynamite, a half stick or a quarter of a stick embedded under the stump and packed with clay would be enough to remove most of the stump and its roots. Then with axes, we would cut away the remaining roots, once the way was cleared, stakes and twine marked the route for the pipeline. Ernest took a shovel and put a wrap of tape around the handle, thirty inches up from the point and showed me how he wanted the ditch dug---as wide as the shovel and down to the tape.
I dug everyday after school, no exceptions, no time for homework or school activities. Get off the bus, change clothes and go to work until it was time to eat supper. It mattered not what I encountered in the ditch. Rocks, big or small, were removed until the black tape mark was to the correct depth. Areas of ledge were drilled and blasted. Day after day the ditch progressed forward. While I dug out the hole for septic tank Ernest worked on the house and by the time winter started, we had a bathroom complete with flush toilet and a bathtub.
A foundation under the house was the next project I was put to work on. The house needed a foundation, and a basement space for a furnace, storage for canned goods, and a freezer for venison, vegetables and also for wood storage. Everyday after school, it was down the ramp, with pick and shovel, wedges and sledgehammer. Dig, break, rock, with the wedges, fill the wheelbarrow, push it up the incline, then out to a knoll behind the house, dump and then start over again.
If I was not breaking rock, I was cutting firewood, or splitting it, then stacking it in piles to dry. Oaks, maples, birch, walnut all fell to my axe. Then the cellar needed to be dug. Wheelbarrows full of rock and dirt I filled every night after school,.
For entertainment while working, I would find the seams in the ledge and try to split off bigger and bigger pieces. The nice thing about digging the cellar was that I was away from Ernest.
Twice I ran away from home and walked to my aunt’s farm. Twice I was returned. By now I had finished the fifth and sixth grade of school. Everyday at school recess I would go off by myself and play a small harmonica. One day the school principal noticed me and complimented me on how nice my music sounded. So I started playing it around the other kids. I made a friend, a boy named Donald who lived down the road from me, a mile or so. Don and I became fast friends and when I had free time we would climb trees, ice-skate, fish, swim and later on in junior high school, talk about girls and go hunting squirrels together.
School still had its problems. The scent of my urine clung to me like cheap cologne. As a consequence I got into lots of fights. The difference was that now I no longer took it. I dished it out. All the muscle building, digging and chopping, turned me into a boy as hard as the rock I split and the oak I cut. The fat was long gone and I had no fear of being punched. I fought close-fist end by the end of the sixth grade, no one would fight with me any longer.
There was one fight. It was with a bully whose name was George. He was big and came from a rough family that lived near the railroad tracks. I never liked him because he would push the smaller kids and rough up the girls. One day at recess, the class was playing dodge ball. George got the ball and threw it intentionally hard into the face of a girl. It knocked her down; she was crying and had a bloody nose. I jumped on George and he swung at me and we went at it, tooth and nail. Down the embankment we rolled. I ended up on top and started pounding away; I kept at it until George said uncle, which was the expression we used when one had had enough. When I got to the top of the hill, all the girls started cheering and chasing after me. I ran away and went and hid in the pines near the school. This was my first defense of womanhood, but definitely not my last.
At last the ditch was finished. The basement dug. The inside plumbing was completed, with a bathtub, water and a flush toilet. My daily chores were reduced mainly to cutting wood, doing dishes, hanging laundry and tending to the weeds in our garden. There was time for fishing and swimming at Beaver Lake. I hunted there for frogs. I loved frog legs and would cook them myself, flour them, add some salt and pepper drop them into a skillet of hot oil and watch them twitch as they began to cook. Mother was not really much of a cook, mostly macaroni cheese, or pot roast. Once in a while she would fix a pie or a pineapple upside down cake. So in order to satisfy my sweet tooth, I started making my own cookies, walnut cakes, muffins and things.
I was given a puppy from my uncle Waldo, I named him Frenchy.
Frenchy and I were inseparable and when we were unleashed, him from his chain and me from my chores, we roamed everywhere. Ernest had a .22 rifle, which was kept loaded and ready for defending the garden from invading woodchucks. Woodchucks were cute brown animals with short tails but for us they were edible pests. In a very short time they could devour our entire garden which was to sustain us through the winter. They were shot on sight. The younger ones were dressed and roasted in the oven. Gray squirrels were also shot and brought to the table. Rabbits, partridges, pheasants, woodcock and deer were also part of my childhood diet.
My mother’s family was hunters. My great, great grandmother wore buckskin dresses and moccasins. My grandfather Waldo was more Indian than white. He was a carpenter but spent more of his time trapping in the winter, fishing during the summers and hunting in the fall, rather than carpentering.
As I grew older, I would sometimes go hunting with him. It was only natural that I learned to shoot Ernest’s rifle and I became an excellent shot as it was expected that all animals hunted were to be shot in the head so as not to ruin the meat.
There arrived a time when I was given access to the rifle and was allowed to roam our property. Squirrels were my favorite sport, and Frenchy and I would hunt for them among the walnuts and oaks.
One day, as I stepped off the school bus, Ernest was waiting near the driveway, holding his rifle in one hand. “Here,” he said. “Take this.” I did as he told me. “Your dog, your God damn dog went up to the neighbor’s farm and killed two of his chickens, and I had to pay him 25 cents apiece. Your dog cost me fifty cents. Do you know how hard I work for fifty cents?” he yelled. “Now you take that dog down to the woods and shoot it and bury it.” What could I do? He was adamant and I was thirteen. “Yes, sir,” I said and went to where he had tied up my dog, took the rope off his neck and said, “Come Frenchy, let’s go.”
More than a half a century has passed and can still see Frenchy running along the path, left by the ditch that I had dug, that led to the well and onto the logging road that I had helped cut and cleared the stumps from.
There was a huge oak that marked one of the boundaries of our property. It was the largest tree on the property and had been on this earth before the stone walls were built. It was so large that its girth extended out beyond the width of the stone wall. It was my favorite place to play. Donald and I had nailed pieces of wood to its trunks so that we could climb up into the huge branches. Frenchy was in front of me busily searching for the scent of a squirrel, his white feet running through the fallen oak leaves. The tip of his tail waving back and forth about twenty feet in front of me. When we reached the oak I called my dog by his name. “Frenchy,” I called. He stopped and turned to look at me. I put the cross hairs of the rifle on a spot centered between his trusting eyes and I pulled the trigger. My dog fell to the ground, his legs kicking, his body jerking. I ran to him, tears bursting forth and ever-mounting misery consuming me. He was flopping amongst the autumn leaves, specks of blood flowing from his nose and mouth. I was sure he was suffering but could not shoot him a second time. So I placed my foot on his neck and pressed down until he was still. I picked him up and carried him to the base of God’s oak and buried him there. He was my friend, he trusted me, I loved him and yet I killed him and I learned to hate God even more, and the whippings continued. The last one I received was given to me by my mother. it was my own doing.
I discovered and killed a large black snake behind our house and placed its body for revenge on the stairs so Ernest would step on it when he left to go to work.
Early In the morning he stepped on it. My revenge was perfect for it frightened him so badly that he needed to change and it made him late for work He told my mother to whip me and left for his job
I was told to remove my belt, pants and underwear and bend over... She hit me hard on my naked butt, again and again as she did she said. You caused me pain you caused me grief and, I wish I had never had you It hurt but I never flinched or cried out. When she stopped I said, Mother, I hope that hurt you more than it did me and I pulled up my pants and left for school. That was my last whipping
The day I turned seventeen I dropped out of school, enlisted in the military and left Ernest and my mother to dig the next basement for the beginning of a new home without my help
I am an old man now and have long ago made my peace with God.
Life turned out very well for me in the last five decades but the start was a *****.
It has been painful for me to recall and type parts of this, but I thought someone else may be struggling and might find some value in the effort.
The end
Joseph,
Former Master Engraver for the Winchester Arms Co
The Knot in the Back
I was turning eight when I was taken from my aunt’s care and Vivian and I went to live with my mother and Ernest.
At our new apartment at Gill's Street in Nashua the whippings came on a regular basis, prompted by the curse of my bed wetting. I would wet and get whacked. They would wake me up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet. Ernest would stand over me as I tried to urinate. Once in desperation he came to the toilet with the butcher knife and threatened to cut it off. One night he took me in his car to the Canal Street Bridge, held me over the side. “You see that river down there? If you don’t stop pissing the bed, I’m going to throw you in it.” Then he put me back in the car and drove home. Ernest, who was Catholic, placed me in a school run by nuns, which ended my time at Gillis Street for a while.
I remember that house of God and the Holy cross on the top of it with clarity, it was a large two-story building made of red bricks and cold stone floors. There was a cafeteria with many wooden tables and benches. We were all boys who ate there and three times a day we would all kneel on those cold stone floors and say prayers. ‘Hail Mary full of Grace; The Lord is my Sheppard I shall not want.’ I remember looking up to a painting on the wall at the entrance of the school .It was of Jesus Christ and his exposed bleeding heart and I wondered why the nuns had killed him I hated the prayers. And I hated the nuns. I hated the nightclothes I was made to wear. And most of all I hated the dormitory because every night the nuns would tie a towel around my waist and make a big knot in the middle of my back. This was supposed to keep me from sleeping on my back, which was supposed to keep me from wetting the bed. No water after supper was also another of the nun’s rules. I would go to bed every night hearing the snickers and laughs of the other children. All of this misery and still I wet the bed like Old Faithful.
When I was returned to Gill's Street, I had a big surprise: a new baby sister. Her name was Vivian and she was born pre-maturely. She had spent many weeks of her tiny life inside of an incubator. Once in a while I would go with my mother to the hospital to see her. She was so tiny and weighed only three pounds four ounces. The arrival of Vivian changed my life considerably, for the better.
School was a few blocks away from the long gray apartments on Gillis Street. And I would walk by the corner grocery store on my way to it. School was also very difficult for me at that time. I had no trouble with the math, and everything printed, but at my new school nothing was printed. Everything was written in cursives and it was to me, the most incomprehensible bunch of squiggles upon a blackboard. As a consequence I was called the dummy of the class. One day on my way to school I stopped and bought a stick of chewing gum and popped it into my mouth. The teacher noticed it and took the gum away from me, admonishing me that if I could have a piece of gum, so should the rest of the class. I had seen money in a jar by the newspaper stand. People would pickup their papers and drop in a nickel or a dime into the jar and continue on to work. One day I stuck my hand in the jar, and took as much change as I could get out. I went into the store and bought as much chewing gum as my loot would purchase. I took the bag of goodies to school, and like a fat Santa Claus started handing out gum. Soon every kid in class had a piece, while I sat at my desk chewing happily away. My joy lasted all school day, but on my arrival home I was faced by my mother and the teacher. At school I had lied to the teacher and said that my mother had given me the money. The teacher had stopped by to check the veracity of my claim. I was caught red-handed. When Ernest came home I got my whipping. I was marched to the grocery store and confessed. I was reprimanded and had to work after school for week delivering milk and eggs to the people’s houses that lived nearby to repay my crime. It was a good lesson.
Adoption papers were filed. I stood in the Catholic Church while the black robed priest sprinkled Holy Water on me and christened me ‘Joseph Robert Lavarnway’ in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost Amen.
Ernest’s family was much larger than my mother’s which consisted of her mother Hazel, Waldo her husband, an older sister Ruth and Waldo Jr. a younger brother. Ernest had six brothers and four sisters. I acquired overnight a couple of dozen cousins, aunts, uncles, and a grandmother with one leg, a Godmother, two uncles who had fought the Nazi’s and a second Grandfather.
Grandmother Agnes was a small woman with thick grey hair and a matching beard caused by a hormonal imbalance. She never left the shade her home and had not for several years since she had lost one leg to gangrene. My new Grandma Lavarnway had a cold, white, wooden artificial one that she kept in the hall closet of her apartment. When I visited her, she would have me put it away or fetch it out for her so she could strap it on when she needed to go to the toilet. My Grandpa Oscar was rarely there, he spent lots of time in the workmen’s bar and because he gave me candy money I always looked forward to seeing him even though he reeked of beer and cigar smoke. There were good times for me on The Gillis Street apartments plenty of pals my age to play with no one knew of my past and I had no morning chores to do other than get myself ready for school
The residents of Gillis Street were all white and all spoke the English language, Even though it was in a French accent as Nashua had many Canadian French. Each apartment unit was identical in size and was rented to young couples recently married when the war ended in 1946, there was a place for every one to have a small garden patch in the back, but the kids around the neighborhood swiped the melons, strawberries.,and tomatoes when they matured but left the zucchini and broccoli alone. There was the Saturday movie at the church where for 5 cents I could watch Buck Rodgers, Gene Autry, Tom Mix and Roy, Dale, and Trigger
I slept in my own room upstairs, my bed wetting was sporadic, I was happy.
In the closet there I found several books written about Hercules and the riddles of the Sphinx and would spend hours reading from them. It was than that I decided that I wanted to be like Hercules to withstand any force and conquered any obstacle placed before me.
On Saturday night Ernest’s brothers and their families would come to our apartment. They would fix hamburger sandwiches, hot dogs, make popcorn, drink beer and then play penny ante poker, sending me to bed with Hercules and his stories.
In the hall was a vent that let the heat from the kitchen warm the upstairs. The hole was over the kitchen table where the gambling was going on and I would crawl out of bed and tiptoe to the vent, lay on my stomach and watch.
Mother was a good player and sometimes I would see her rake in a mountain of pennies and nickels. I did this for many weeks without being noticed. One night as I was watching I could see the cards. My mother was holding four Aces. I got so excited that I said out loud “four aces.” And that’s how I got the gambling bug and got caught.
It was while I lived there I started earning money in the summer by riding the running boards of a big green produce wagon that serviced the homes of the working class neighborhood. Mr. Garibaldi would drive his truck slowly up and down the streets with me and the other kids sitting on the front fenders or standing on the running boards. He would stop at the curb and we would all take off running, going from one apartment to another selling bananas, melons, potatoes, fresh corn, everything he had in the truck. We would run up the sidewalks yelling, “Fruits and vegetables for sale,” take the people’s orders and run back to Mr. Garibaldi. Singing, ten cents worth of onions and fifteen cents of potatoes. He would fill the orders and we would run back yelling, “Fruits and vegetables,” pockets full of pennies. Then in the winter I would shovel snow. Mother kept my money. When school ended I was not advanced.
The Farm
Part Four, the Killing of Frenchy
My mother and Ernest my two half sisters and me moved to a 30-acre wood lot Ernest had purchased not many miles away from my Aunt Lillian’s farm. Here on this wooded land I learned the meaning of hard physical work, but I was up to it, as Hercules was my mentor, and he had cleaned the Aegean Stables.
Ernest had been building a home there and it was now fit enough for us to move into. The house was made of logs cut from the property, there was no chainsaw and all the cutting was hard manual labor. I learned how to notch a tree and drive in the wooden wedges that kept the large two man saw from binding. Once the tree was felled then I cut away the limbs and put the brush into a pile then helped Ernest to saw the trunk into logs to be sawed at Andy’s mills into boards, 2 x 4’s, and 2 x 6’s.
When we moved into my home for the next eight years, it had walls covered with tar paper, windows and a door and a green shingle roof and was heated with a kerosene stove. There no electricity to the property, the open kitchen had a sink, ice chest, makeshift counters, a small eating and cooking area , a combined living room and bedroom and a narrow room with space for a double military- surplus bunk painted olive drab. Water was carried from a spring located a short distance from our outhouse under a pine tree.
I was given the top bunk and my two sisters slept on the bottom one. My bed wetting became more frequent, my nightmares returned and again I became a real problem to everyone. ”I wish I had never had you Joseph “my mother said -It wasn’t long before the mattress was stained and soaked and the whole house smelled of urine. The mattress was hauled off to the dump, replaced by a blanket. This turned out to be a bad deal for my two half sisters. I can still hear them crying “Daddy, He peed on us again!”
I would sleep, dream nightmares of white tigers, dead girls and then wet. It would soak through dripping on them.
Ernest would then swear “Lilian you got to do something about that God damned kid!” I knew what God damned meant. I looked it up in a dictionary. “Doomed to endlessly punishment, condemned to eternal hell”. That was me and my destiny, but I did not know it at twelve years old.
Finally a solution to the problem was found. A rubber sheet was stretched across the springs and a blanket on top of that. The knots of the wires that made up the bed springs were very uncomfortable, especially on the back of my head. It was on this bed that I finally started sleeping on my stomach and using my arms as a pillow and my sisters Helen and Vivian slept in dry comfort. I was proof the nuns were completely wrong with their “knot in the back” theory. The nighttime spring continued to flow. I started chewing up the headboard. I would gnaw on it like a red pine squirrel, chew up the pieces and swallow them. Little by little I ate up most of my bed.
The outhouse was located some distance behind the house. It was much smaller than the one on the farm but it smelled exactly the same, it was a one hole
There had been a lot of talk about a cougar that had made off with a child up country, and one dark night as I sat on the **** hole I took into my mind that there was a cougar sitting on the roof waiting for me. The more I thought about it, the surer I was he was there. I got my overalls up, opened the door and peeked outside. It was dark as a well and I could see nothing but I thought I could hear it sharpening its claws. I got ready and made my heart-pounding dash to the safety of the house.
I had read of Hercules and how he diverted a river to clean the stables. I would make believe I was him as I worked at my chores.
Life on Derry Road was an equal amount of hard work for all of us. Ernest would leave early for his twenty-mile drive to what was called “The Card Shop.” And my mother and I spent the days cleaning up a patch of woods for a garden space. The tools that I would become very familiar with were the ax, sledgehammer, pick, shovel, splitting wedges, bucksaw and the two-man felling saw. I resented the fact that my after school hours were mostly absorbed by digging the septic tank, then the well, then the basement.
The well was located a hundred yards behind the house at the edge of the fern and skunk cabbage filled logging area. I would dig, Ernest would dig, and eventually we had cement lined well about sixteen feet deep. It was a good well and the water from it was cold and pure. Next to dig was the ditch for the waterline. A ditch had to be dug from the house to the well. Sometimes we would use dynamite, a half stick or a quarter of a stick embedded under the stump and packed with clay would be enough to remove most of the stump and its roots. Then with axes, we would cut away the remaining roots, once the way was cleared, stakes and twine marked the route for the pipeline. Ernest took a shovel and put a wrap of tape around the handle, thirty inches up from the point and showed me how he wanted the ditch dug---as wide as the shovel and down to the tape.
I dug everyday after school, no exceptions, no time for homework or school activities. Get off the bus, change clothes and go to work until it was time to eat supper. It mattered not what I encountered in the ditch. Rocks, big or small, were removed until the black tape mark was to the correct depth. Areas of ledge were drilled and blasted. Day after day the ditch progressed forward. While I dug out the hole for septic tank Ernest worked on the house and by the time winter started, we had a bathroom complete with flush toilet and a bathtub.
A foundation under the house was the next project I was put to work on. The house needed a foundation, and a basement space for a furnace, storage for canned goods, and a freezer for venison, vegetables and also for wood storage. Everyday after school, it was down the ramp, with pick and shovel, wedges and sledgehammer. Dig, break, rock, with the wedges, fill the wheelbarrow, push it up the incline, then out to a knoll behind the house, dump and then start over again.
If I was not breaking rock, I was cutting firewood, or splitting it, then stacking it in piles to dry. Oaks, maples, birch, walnut all fell to my axe. Then the cellar needed to be dug. Wheelbarrows full of rock and dirt I filled every night after school,.
For entertainment while working, I would find the seams in the ledge and try to split off bigger and bigger pieces. The nice thing about digging the cellar was that I was away from Ernest.
Twice I ran away from home and walked to my aunt’s farm. Twice I was returned. By now I had finished the fifth and sixth grade of school. Everyday at school recess I would go off by myself and play a small harmonica. One day the school principal noticed me and complimented me on how nice my music sounded. So I started playing it around the other kids. I made a friend, a boy named Donald who lived down the road from me, a mile or so. Don and I became fast friends and when I had free time we would climb trees, ice-skate, fish, swim and later on in junior high school, talk about girls and go hunting squirrels together.
School still had its problems. The scent of my urine clung to me like cheap cologne. As a consequence I got into lots of fights. The difference was that now I no longer took it. I dished it out. All the muscle building, digging and chopping, turned me into a boy as hard as the rock I split and the oak I cut. The fat was long gone and I had no fear of being punched. I fought close-fist end by the end of the sixth grade, no one would fight with me any longer.
There was one fight. It was with a bully whose name was George. He was big and came from a rough family that lived near the railroad tracks. I never liked him because he would push the smaller kids and rough up the girls. One day at recess, the class was playing dodge ball. George got the ball and threw it intentionally hard into the face of a girl. It knocked her down; she was crying and had a bloody nose. I jumped on George and he swung at me and we went at it, tooth and nail. Down the embankment we rolled. I ended up on top and started pounding away; I kept at it until George said uncle, which was the expression we used when one had had enough. When I got to the top of the hill, all the girls started cheering and chasing after me. I ran away and went and hid in the pines near the school. This was my first defense of womanhood, but definitely not my last.
At last the ditch was finished. The basement dug. The inside plumbing was completed, with a bathtub, water and a flush toilet. My daily chores were reduced mainly to cutting wood, doing dishes, hanging laundry and tending to the weeds in our garden. There was time for fishing and swimming at Beaver Lake. I hunted there for frogs. I loved frog legs and would cook them myself, flour them, add some salt and pepper drop them into a skillet of hot oil and watch them twitch as they began to cook. Mother was not really much of a cook, mostly macaroni cheese, or pot roast. Once in a while she would fix a pie or a pineapple upside down cake. So in order to satisfy my sweet tooth, I started making my own cookies, walnut cakes, muffins and things.
I was given a puppy from my uncle Waldo, I named him Frenchy.
Frenchy and I were inseparable and when we were unleashed, him from his chain and me from my chores, we roamed everywhere. Ernest had a .22 rifle, which was kept loaded and ready for defending the garden from invading woodchucks. Woodchucks were cute brown animals with short tails but for us they were edible pests. In a very short time they could devour our entire garden which was to sustain us through the winter. They were shot on sight. The younger ones were dressed and roasted in the oven. Gray squirrels were also shot and brought to the table. Rabbits, partridges, pheasants, woodcock and deer were also part of my childhood diet.
My mother’s family was hunters. My great, great grandmother wore buckskin dresses and moccasins. My grandfather Waldo was more Indian than white. He was a carpenter but spent more of his time trapping in the winter, fishing during the summers and hunting in the fall, rather than carpentering.
As I grew older, I would sometimes go hunting with him. It was only natural that I learned to shoot Ernest’s rifle and I became an excellent shot as it was expected that all animals hunted were to be shot in the head so as not to ruin the meat.
There arrived a time when I was given access to the rifle and was allowed to roam our property. Squirrels were my favorite sport, and Frenchy and I would hunt for them among the walnuts and oaks.
One day, as I stepped off the school bus, Ernest was waiting near the driveway, holding his rifle in one hand. “Here,” he said. “Take this.” I did as he told me. “Your dog, your God damn dog went up to the neighbor’s farm and killed two of his chickens, and I had to pay him 25 cents apiece. Your dog cost me fifty cents. Do you know how hard I work for fifty cents?” he yelled. “Now you take that dog down to the woods and shoot it and bury it.” What could I do? He was adamant and I was thirteen. “Yes, sir,” I said and went to where he had tied up my dog, took the rope off his neck and said, “Come Frenchy, let’s go.”
More than a half a century has passed and can still see Frenchy running along the path, left by the ditch that I had dug, that led to the well and onto the logging road that I had helped cut and cleared the stumps from.
There was a huge oak that marked one of the boundaries of our property. It was the largest tree on the property and had been on this earth before the stone walls were built. It was so large that its girth extended out beyond the width of the stone wall. It was my favorite place to play. Donald and I had nailed pieces of wood to its trunks so that we could climb up into the huge branches. Frenchy was in front of me busily searching for the scent of a squirrel, his white feet running through the fallen oak leaves. The tip of his tail waving back and forth about twenty feet in front of me. When we reached the oak I called my dog by his name. “Frenchy,” I called. He stopped and turned to look at me. I put the cross hairs of the rifle on a spot centered between his trusting eyes and I pulled the trigger. My dog fell to the ground, his legs kicking, his body jerking. I ran to him, tears bursting forth and ever-mounting misery consuming me. He was flopping amongst the autumn leaves, specks of blood flowing from his nose and mouth. I was sure he was suffering but could not shoot him a second time. So I placed my foot on his neck and pressed down until he was still. I picked him up and carried him to the base of God’s oak and buried him there. He was my friend, he trusted me, I loved him and yet I killed him and I learned to hate God even more, and the whippings continued. The last one I received was given to me by my mother. it was my own doing.
I discovered and killed a large black snake behind our house and placed its body for revenge on the stairs so Ernest would step on it when he left to go to work.
Early In the morning he stepped on it. My revenge was perfect for it frightened him so badly that he needed to change and it made him late for work He told my mother to whip me and left for his job
I was told to remove my belt, pants and underwear and bend over... She hit me hard on my naked butt, again and again as she did she said. You caused me pain you caused me grief and, I wish I had never had you It hurt but I never flinched or cried out. When she stopped I said, Mother, I hope that hurt you more than it did me and I pulled up my pants and left for school. That was my last whipping
The day I turned seventeen I dropped out of school, enlisted in the military and left Ernest and my mother to dig the next basement for the beginning of a new home without my help
I am an old man now and have long ago made my peace with God.
Life turned out very well for me in the last five decades but the start was a *****.
It has been painful for me to recall and type parts of this, but I thought someone else may be struggling and might find some value in the effort.
The end
Joseph,
Former Master Engraver for the Winchester Arms Co