The Eastern Knoll

Everything about me has been defined by two marriage proposals.

The latter of the two was to Marjorie Kent, née Waldron with whom I have trudged through fifty-eight years of a shared life of mediocrity, banality, predictability and relentless disappointment.  Together, we have raised four tolerable though unexceptional children (Theodore, Thomas, James, and Vanessa) who have in their trifling ways provided minimal gaps in the inexorable trivialities and monotony of our family’s existence together.  Some of them have been pleasant (Ness’s surprise admittance to university) and some of them tragic (Tommy’s death at ten years old at the hands of a schoolmate).  However, even the most monumental of occasions and experiences that should fill any father with passionate joy or explosive rage or desperate sorrow have been nothing to me but exercises of formulaic ceremony, laboring through the various conventions and motions, all the while emoting the expected sentiments, but internally feeling nothing but boredom and impatience.  Everything from births to first steps to graduations to marriages to grandparenthood, even the funeral: all just nuisances to endure.

The first of these exercises in apathy was my courtship and eventual proposal to Marjorie in the late spring of 1968.  While technically the proposal was on bended knee overlooking the ocean at sunset in as perfect a storm of perfunctory clichés, it was performed in the most half-assed, formulaic manifestation possible.  It took place on a concrete crabbing pier near Fort Freemont, South Carolina, the location the United States Navy had discharged me; the crappy little outjut I chose for the proposal had no importance to us.   It was just crabbing pier that was close to the boarding house that I had been at since my discharge.

Beyond that, the East Coast of the United States faces away from the setting sun (as I suppose all east coasts must) so the traditional image of the splendor of day’s last light mirrored against the ocean spray was absent.  Instead, the sun peaked through a grove of white pines opposite me, making me squint.  Even worse, it was a working pier, so the rackets and clangings of the crabbers and dockworkers shunting in the day’s haul invaded the whole sorry affair.  

I didn’t care, nor did I have the imagination, energy or inclination to put together anything better.   Any fellow with a shred of self-regard would never have embarrassed himself with such a pitiful spectacle and no girl with other options would have put up with it.  But it was me and it was Marjorie and we had already both given up. In retrospect, we were both justified in our mutual resignation; the following five decades have been as clichéd, shallow and desultory as my apathetic proposal. 

When I proposed to Marjorie, I gave her a ring that I had purchased with some fraction of the bonus I had been paid at my discharge. The ring, plated gold with a square sapphire, was adequate and nice enough for the time.  I had never even considered giving her the ring that actually meant something to me, the one that I kept to myself then and have still never revealed to anyone to this day.

That ring, a tarnished faux gold band, probably mostly lead and brass, was given to me ten years earlier by Tina Walsh (“Tiny” just to me), as she pleaded with me, tears running down her eyes, to please please please marry her.  We were both twelve years old on a small knoll on the eastern grounds of Jefferson Elementary School in High Plains, Georgia.   With sixty years of hindsight and regret, I now understand that proposal on that hill on that frozen morning was to be my last chance at a life worth living.   Tiny was, is, and will always be truly the one that got away, the one for which my souls yearns with longing and hunger and sorrow and regret.  My deepest fount of pain, of distress, of remorse and of undying regret.  If my twelve-year-old self had had the courage or the character or even just the compassion to accept Tiny’s tearful, groveling entreaty, my existence could have been saved from the atrocity it became.  

Back then, Tiny was my best friend, my only friend, a miniscule girl remarkably skinny even by the unhealthy and undernourished standards of rural Georgia in the Fifties; the twig-like bones protruding from her lanky frame were the product of the persistent malnutrition and constant abuse inflicted by her mother.  Tiny had sallow auburn eyes and dirty straw blond hair with loose strands constantly obscuring her eyes in the intentionally unkempt fashion common to our rural community. She only had a couple of outfits, which she would cycle through every few days; some were homemade, but most were recovered from the chapel’s donation box or some lost and found.  The one commonality of all her outfits was that they all included ankle-long dresses and long sleeves, which she would wear even in the sweltering southern summers.  I figure, through all her confusion and mental issues, Ms. Welsh had it together enough to make sure Tiny kept all the bruises, welts, cuts, scars and burns covering her arms and legs out of the sight of other adults. 

…. And that’s what we shared.   Like her, I was an only child being raised by a vicious single parent dedicated to relentless abuse.  Tiny and I had the hell beaten out of us physically, mentally, emotionally and in every other way they could conjure up with the same unbroken frequency and merciless fury.

Though alcohol often served as a catalyst, impetus, accelerant and post hoc justification, the violence against Tiny and me arose from fundamentally different places in our parents’ damaged psyches.  My mercurial, sadistic father opportunistically attributed his uncontrollable violent temper to shellshock that he had developed in the War.  I didn’t buy it then and still don’t today.  It wasn’t about the war.  He was just a fucking bully and all the sadistic impulses he indulged against his defenseless kid were never anything but the product of his inate meanness.  

In contrast, Tiny’s mom wasn’t cruel by nature and in her good times was one of the sweetest people in town.  In her bad times, she would become genuinely delusional in the nastiest, most violent ways.  Her mind would conjure up horrific ideas and show her things that just weren’t there; she heard voices demanding her do terrible things; she even believed that God spoke directly to her and that demons walked around town disguised as people.  While just as harsh my dad’s beatings, her abuse of Tiny was more of a product of unbridled panic, a twisted defense mechanism struggling to protect her soul against Satan.   

Another difference between us was that I always did my best to fight off my father.   My father’s abuse could sometimes be tempered by my feeble and impotent attempts to stand up for myself.  I suppose maybe something about his time in the Army produced a glint of respect for someone fighting back, even if it was the kid he was abusing for entertainment.  Tiny was different.  She never struggled. 

Our broken souls had found each other five years earlier and had shared every class together at Jefferson Elementary, a broken down, sickly schoolhouse for the dredges of society in one of the rottenest communities of the worst areas of all of northern Georgia.  High Plains was small enough for just one class per grade, so we were inevitably always in the same class.  While Georgia schools were technically integrated by then, Jefferson Elementary had remained exclusively white.  This was in part due to the overt racism of the school and the community (the town had indulged a little thinly disguised Southern defiance in naming the school Jefferson, which everyone knew referenced Jefferson Davis, not Thomas Jefferson).  The other factor that kept the black folks away was the sheer lousiness of the school.   Lynching was still going on in northern Georgia back then and there wasn’t a black person alive that would risk their neck to get their kids into Jefferson.  

Tiny and I always arrived to school early to talk behind the knoll on the eastern side of the schoolyard, partly because it was the only time we could truly be alone, but mostly because we both knew to retreat from our homes before our parents woke up in a hungover fury.  During these mornings, we would talk about everything and nothing.  We’d talked about school, about growing up, about getting out of High Plains, about what our futures were going to look like, even about the kind of parents we were going be some day. We inevitably ended up talking about home.  Usually, we would try to work through how we were going to get through it all, but sometimes we would just sit there holding each other and crying.  

One frosted March morning, I arrived to find Tiny had already been sitting on our hillside for hours, scared in a way I had never seen, muttering to herself and rhythmically swaying.  She often recollected her mom’s episodes to me.  Sometimes they were kinda’ funny, but most of the time they were just plain scary, like when she tried to beat demons out of Tiny with a fire poker screaming accusations in some fictional tongue.  Of all the stories she told me on that knoll, that morning’s was the worst. Both her eyes were red and puffy with exhaustion and she was curled into a ball, her arms clasped around her knees.   From what I could discern from her anguished mewings, Ms. Walsh had been shouting down hallucinatory menaces all night long, screaming violent threats at the walls and the furniture, and pacing around their little two room house brandishing various weapons and other implements with which to defend herself.  Every once in a while, her fury would turn to Tiny, who she suspected was possessed or maybe even the devil itself.  Around daybreak, Ms. Walsh had armed herself with a carving knife and curled into a fetal ball next to the refrigerator and whimpered herself into a trance-like sleep.

I touched her hair and at once Tiny came to, addressing me in an articulate determined adult voice. 

“Jay, I don’t want to do this and don’t know if we can get away with it, but it’s the only thing I can think of.  If we’re married, it’s the only way we can get out.” 

I stared at her incredulously.  “Tiny, we’re twelve yea…”

“I know it ain’t right us being as old as we are, but if we was to get married, that means you and me, we wouldn’t have to go back to our parents ever again.” 

For all the ignorance we shared about just about everything, Tiny was correct.  She had recently spoken to someone over in Magistrate’s Office and knew this one legal fact  The common law of the State of Georgia clearly allowed a man of any age to take as his wife any woman who has reached the age of twelve years or more without her parents’ permission and, in doing so, both spouses would be legally emancipated from their respective parents.  Years later, I came to understand that the law had remained this way in order to accommodate unfortunate cases in which some prepubescent girl found herself with child, usually by way of a family member or neighborhood creep (I guess lawmakers in Georgia wanted to retain some avenue to make an “honest woman” of such girls).  None of that mattered to Tiny or me then; at twelve years old, neither of us had any intentions, desires or even knowledge in that arena whatsoever.

“Listen…” she interrupted with a snap. “Before you say anything, I wanna make sure you know that this ain’t a joke or a kid thing.   If we was to go down and get married, they couldn’t stop us and that’d mean we wouldn’t never have to go back.  My momma needs help she ain’t gettin’.  I’ve been hoping that she was gonna get better or that someone’s gonna come help, but Jay I can’t stop her and there ain’t no one comin’.”

“Tiny, we’s just kids.  We don’t got money to run off or to feed ourselves with.  Only thing we could do is be homeless and beggin’ and if the law found us, they’d bring us right back.”

She paused, drew in a breath and steeled herself to reveal the only secret she had ever kept from me.  “Jay, I’ve been thinking this through and planning it a long time.  I never wanted to go through with it, but now I gotta and I can’t do it without you.  I have a twenty dollar bill and it’s mine, not stolen or nothin’.  We can just leave right now.  That’ll at least get us away from High Plains and a couple weeks rooming while we find a way to make it longer.“   

She shoved the bill in my hand.  Folded inside it was the tarnished gold ring; I guess that was her way of proposing to me.  I stared at the ring and the bill, my brain furiously spinning.   

“Is it really that bad?  You don’t think your mama can get any better?  I’ve seen her nice a lot of times.  It’s just her bad spells…”

“Jay, she ain’t getting better and she’s getting more dangerous all the time.  I mean not dangerous like she always been. I think she’s gonna hurt herself.”

“I wanna protect you and I wanna get you away from your mama, but this ain’t the way, Tiny.  We can go talk to someone.  There’s gotta be someone that’ll help us.”

“I’ve tried everyone, Jay.  Every kid at Jefferson gets beat up by their folks sometimes.  No one thinks I’m special.  They just think I’m complaining and that I probably have it comin’.  Not even Mrs. Tompkinson.  She don’t even care.”

I rolled it over in my mind. On one hand, the idea was insanity, the impossible grasping at a hopelessly unreachable straw.   Other than the twenty dollars, we’d have nothing - no clothes, no food, no place to stay, no jobs, nothing.  On the other hand, Tiny had clearly thought things through about how to make our way.  Back then, child labor laws were anathema to rural Georgia; plenty of farms, factories, storehouse, packing plants, and harbor houses, among many, many other off-the-books enterprises of every sort would happily hire kids of any age.  If we combined whatever pitiful salary each of us could muster, we very well may have been able to survive.  It’d mean the end of our schooling and of our families and of everything and everyone we knew in the pathetic little town of High Plains, but maybe we could do it. 

“Jay, please!  Please do this.”

In the end, life comes down to one or two big decisions and, as with all decisions, they are made by the most trivial of measures.  In our case, the most important decision of our lives was made by sudden ringing of the 8:00 school bell. 

“Tiny…. I ain’t saying no, but let’s get to class and we can think all this through when we have some time.  If we’re gonna do it, let’s get together all the stuff we need tonight and see if we still feel the same way tomorrow mornin’.”

… and with that we walked silently to Jefferson Elementary and Mrs. Tompkinson’s fifth grade class, the ring and twenty dollar bill still in my hand. 

_______

No one besides the two of them really knows what happened that night, but from everything that was put together afterward, it had happened in the early evening.  They think Tiny had been knocked unconscious with a blunt instrument (maybe a thick glass bottle half-full of whiskey) and later dragged into the washroom to be drowned in the bathtub of their two-room shack.  A three-inch crack was found in the back of her skull under tangles of blood clotted in her straw blond hair.  That and a large pool of blood in the kitchen indicated that Tiny had probably been left unconscious for a couple hours prior to her death.  She hadn’t struggled.  

The next day, March 16, 1958, was the last time I felt anything genuine.  The last time I authentically cried.  The last time that I sincerely cared about anyone or anything.  The last time my soul was consumed with rage or sorrow or helplessness or more than anything regret, regret, regret.   

Exactly, four years and sixty-three days later, I left High Plains for good.  My father happily signed enlistment papers on my sixteenth birthday indenturing me to the Navy for the following three years.  Tiny’s death hadn’t stopped his beatings for more than a couple days.  They came and went and escalated as I became able to take more.  I lost teeth, had my nose broken and rebroken, had things shoved up me, lost most of the hearing in one of my ears…   

And I took them.  Like a man, I took all the beatings and abuse he could throw at me.  There was just one difference after Tiny died.  Tucked hidden away in a small space only I knew about between my bedframe and a broken heating duct was my father’s loaded service revolver.

Through all the years since High Plains, through all the wasted decades with Marjorie, through all the apathy, boredom, monotony, compromises, mediocrity, ennui, and never-ending series of disappointments, I have over and over pled to the universe: 

“Why?”  

Why did my life have to be so far from what anyone has a right to expect?  Why has it been so devoid of love or passion or authenticity?  Why did I have to be so alone?  

Each time I already know the answer before the universe whispers back in a faint, melancholy echo: 

“You had your chance.”