On a Rainy Morning in Spring

Warning: Domestic Violence

“But why do I have to clean Bruce’s mess? It’s his mess not my mess?” Martha stomped, whined and writhed in turmoil, twisting her body dramatically. Her jaw grew slack and her eyebrows stitched together creating what looked like permanent frown lines on her six-year-old face. 

“Because I said so!” The well-worn phrase fell out of Fiona’s mouth like a brick onto a flower bed.

“I hate Bruce!”

Fiona grabbed Martha’s face pinching her slippery cheeks together and sternly looking into her bratty eyes. “Don’t you say that word… ever!”

Martha knew Fiona meant the word ‘hate’. That word was taboo. The words ‘Jesus Christ’ were acceptable, especially after Fiona rejected the Catholic church. Fiona partially blamed the church for being in this mess. It meant she herself had a dozen siblings and lived her young life with the impossibility that extreme material scarcity brings.

Martha was sick of cleaning up her baby brother’s messes. She resigned after the fight with her mother, begrudgingly grabbing a cloth to clean up the spilled orange juice on the kitchen floor. She sobbed and moved the cloth around. She did a sub-par job, leaving sticky residue where the spill was, and spreading the sugary liquid out to an even broader area.

The family had just escaped from the drunken, violent grips of Martha’s father, Dwayne. One rainy, spring morning, they left for Hamilton the second Dwayne stepped out to go work at a parts factory in Windsor. They stayed with aunt Lila, Fiona’s step-father’s sister. The family was like a patchwork quilt made of stained rags.

The morning they left; the rain was coming down in sheets. Fiona didn’t care. She rushed Bruce out to the car under a towel and buckled him into his seat, kissing his cheeks a dozen times. Bruce cooed sweetly. She stood under the eve for a moment after the first big act of moving and inhaled the musty smells of spring. She could not remember the last time she was able to take a full breath. Fiona and Martha loaded the car with possessions that Fiona had been secretly stashing away for weeks. Both Fiona and Martha were soaking wet, together in the front seat, when the car started rolling away from the neighbourhood they were both so familiar with.

“Where are we going?” Martha asked.

“Aunt Lila’s.”

“Where’s aunt Lila’s?”

“Hamilton.”

“Where’s Hamilton?”

“It’s where aunt Lila lives.”

“You already said that!”

Holding the steering wheel, Fiona smiled as big a smile as would fit her delicate face. “Yes, I did.”

Planning the escape from Dwayne was terrifying for Fiona. There were few people she could trust. Aunt Lila was one of 'the good ones'. When Fiona was a teen, aunt Lila made the long trek from Hamilton to ‘drop by’ several times a year. She did this to check in on the girls in the family, knowing full well what, Luiz, her brother, also Fiona’s step father, was capable of. “Are you girls okay? How’s Lu been? How’s his drinking?” Were the kind of questions aunt Lila asked. Her old-world family had its own share of troubles dating back to the old country, generations before its emigration from Poland.

Fast forward. Fiona found herself with men just like Luiz. One morning it dawned on her that she had to leave Dwayne for the sake of her children. It was already so complex. Waiting would only make it worse.

Martha was her daddy’s ‘Teddy Bear’. He called her Teddy Bear after long nights of drinking. Martha would purposely fall asleep at the foot of her own bed so that her daddy would come in to move her to the head of the bed and then tuck her in. She was pretending to sleep. She thought her daddy believed her. Martha could hear him silently chuckling as she took a peek at him through a small but obvious slit of her eye.

What made feelings complicated was that Martha often heard her father express hatred toward Bruce saying things like, “that bastard is not my son!” Martha knew she was his favourite.

One time, Dwayne, fed up with Bruce’s crying, placed him roughly in his crib and closed the door. He went to the back yard for hours, with Martha and a case of beer. By the time Fiona returned from work, Bruce was laying down, silent and despondent and covered in his own feces. He had spread shit all over his crib railings and the wall itself. At this point Dwayne was well into his cups and would not tolerate even warranted criticism from Fiona.

Fiona came to the back yard with her shit-covered son perched on her hip. “Please tell me what the hell happened here?” She was on the edge of tears, but too angry to cry.

“Did he wake up from his nap?” Dwayne said limply from his patio chair before taking a long drink from his beer.

Fiona glared at Dwayne turning on her heel abruptly and with rage.

His jaw clenched and he bolted from his chair to follow her. Martha also followed. Once inside, Dwayne said. “Go back outside my Teddy Bear.” Martha heeded her dad’s request. She could hear the sounds of fighting and yelling. Martha held her breath and did nothing but sit on the edge of the chair. Waiting. She could hear her mother’s shrill screams. There was a passage of time unaccounted for.

Fiona's left eye looked puffy and shiny after the fight. Her hair was a mess, though she attempted to pat it down. Fiona looked shaken. The police came. Was it the neighbours who called? No one knew.

“Would you like to press charges mam?” The taller officer asked Fiona in front of Dwayne.

“No.” was all she could press out under the weight of Dwayne’s stare.

This is how it went in the 1970s.

~

After Martha ‘cleaned’ Bruce’s mess, she stomped off to the basement of aunt Lila’s to where her makeshift bed was in the corner, beside numerous boxes of junk. She flopped down, belly first, onto the air mattress and screamed into her pillow.

“Hate! Hate! Hate! I hate you! I hate you!” It brought her relief to repeatedly scream the word her mother ironically hated. Martha’s convulsive sobbing began to slowly settle after about 15 minutes.

Martha, once calm, gingerly crept up the basement stairs. Her mother was on the phone in the kitchen. Aunt Lila was standing with her in anticipation making a face as her bare foot met with the sticky floor. Lila cleaned the orange juice residue, and her foot, as she listened to Fiona for clues of what she was up against regarding Dwayne. Both women had their back to the basement stairwell. Martha retreated silently to a place in the stairwell where she could hear the conversations clearly without being seen. Fiona was relaying relevant information to Lila as it came in.

“Dwayne called my mom.” Fiona returned to the phone conversation.

“He called Katherine.” Fiona paused again to listen.

“I’m going to stay here as long as it takes.” Fiona spoke impatiently into the phone, answering a question, presumably that her mother asked.

“I don’t want to get a restraining order. Then he’ll really kill me.” Fiona sighed resentment at her mother's directives.

“Okay Ma. I’ll call you tomorrow. If he shows up, call the police.” Fiona hung up the phone abruptly.

Sensing Fiona’s frustration with her mother, aunt Lila chimed in. “She loves you honey. She just wants to see you safe and sound and happy.”

Flatly, Fiona looked at Lila and shook her head with fatigue.

“I know.”

Martha entered the kitchen. Fiona hugged her. “Hey kid. You okay now?”

“Is daddy going to kill us?”

“God no!”

“I heard you say that he will kill you. Is dad going to kill only you?”

“No, no. He’s just really mad right now. Things will calm down. Now go wake your brother up from his nap.”

“I don’t want to. Can we let him sleep a bit longer?”

“No! We can’t. He won’t sleep tonight if we leave him. Now go wake him up!”

“Why do I have to?” Martha’s resistant face returned.

“Because I said...”

“Because I said so! Because I said so!” The sarcasm was as thick as peanut butter as Martha said the predictable words back to her mother.

Martha knew she had crossed the line.

Too depleted of energy to engage, Fiona turned toward the kitchen sink, gripping the outer edges of the basin tightly with her hands. Her shoulders pressed hard up towards the sky as her head sunk into something like an invisible turtle shell. She looked out the window into the back yard, focussing her bleary eyes on the fresh daffodils and crocuses brought overnight by the rain.

It’s going to be alright she whispered inaudibly.