a quart of every day to ensure the baby grew healthy bones. He did and maybe I helped. And maybe if I call my hometown Beulah I can ensure that my life, and now his, won’t sink back into an evil nightmare. Donald wonders if I should even use our names, his and mine, or if I should mask us further; I’m giving everyone else different names. He asks, “ Do you want to help end the silence of abused children, or do you want to walk up to your Dad and uncle on Main Street and kick them in the nuts while everyone in town watches?” The former, and only occasionally the latter. I don’t need to hide my face in shame. All I want is to live in clear light, without the people who hurt me. Still I wonder if I should tell my story, name the secret or continue to I don’t need to hide myface in shame. A ll I want is to live in clear light, without the people who hurt me. cloak it with silence. I wish I could tell you about other things, but this is the life I've got. The line between revenge and the simple right to own without shame the details of my life is difficult to traverse. I will try to tell only my story and not trespass into the lives of those who are still afraid or uncomfortable with publicly stating that they were abused. The decision is imperfect. I hope the reader will understand that abuse does not take place in a vacuum. It doesn’t begin or end with one child some thirty years ago. I don’t want to fictionalize the story, because it is not a story; it is my childhood, my recovered life. Nor do I want to be cautiously polite in revealing the pattern of a childhood I did not choose. The result of taking too great care to protect everyone’s privacy, including my own, would be continued silence. It doesn’t matter where the story takes place. It’s a common though not frequently told story. I’ll show you my childhood home and the people I lived with; you won’t need a map and photographs. n the summer of 1984 I went K back to Beulah. This was the year by which Orwell predicted we would no longer know the truth: love would not be allowed and the government would rewrite history. I believe he wrote to document the history of his time. Most people from my extended childhood family of uncles and aunts, cousins, brothers, stepfather would say I write to tell lies, if they were aware and cared that I do write. Believing they are being kind, a few would say I write to exercise an overly dramatic or confused imagination. I do like to tell a good story, a skill picked up from my mother. The thing is, her stories were true and so are mine. My relatives would disagree. They would discredit my words as the fiction of a mentally ill woman. As my older brother, Gene, informed me back in 1984, he thinks I’ve had a nervous breakdown from which I sadly have not recovered. The story has gotten ahead of me. On Wednesday, July 4, 1984, Donald and I were driving from our homein MinneapolistoWinnipeg. We weren’t intent on celebrating national independence, but did plan to watch fireworks that evening with my cousin and her husband in Fargo, North Dakota. Our final destination was the Winnipeg Folk Festival. We planned to make the drive in two days, allowing time to visit my cousin and to route ourselves through Beulah for a stop at Mom’s grave. She had been dead for two years and we hadn’t seen the grave since the day of her funeral. We hadn’t been to Beulah since we last visited Dad, two months after Mom died. The closer we got to Beulah, the less we spoke. Farm houses, bends in the road, billboards became familiar. Donald was driving and I tried to tune our radio to the Beulah AM station. I knew I would recognize names of businesses in the ads and I wanted that kindred feeling, the way rural kids want to belong to the sequined glitz of big-city nights and turn their dials to find KOMA Oklahoma City or WLS Chicago .in the midnight airwaves. The car windows were rolled down, forcing wind across the front seat. We sang loudly with the radio. I smelled a skunk, the sweet stink of skunk. “ Did I ever tell you about the time Dad shot the skunk?” I shouted above the wind. “ No.” I never ask if he wants to hear my stories. I was five or six years old. We were staying at Grandpa George’s cottage, Dad’s father. I woke up to the sound of a gun. Mom was up. “ Stay in bed.” One of Dad’s sisters was there, I think, and some other adults. I heard them talking. “ I got her.” “That’s great.” “ She tried to hide. Sprayed after I got her. First shot. Can’t find the babies.” “ Shhh. The c h i ld re n are sleeping.” From my bed I listened. The last voice was Mom’s, irritated, angry in a way that fed my fear. Why had Dad killed the skunk? There were cottages nearby, all around the lake. The skunk should stay away from people. I couldn’t understand why it had come here. When I dared to get up, I asked Mom “Where is it?” The possible sight of a furry dead body, the unwashable stickiness of blood coating my feet: these thoughts made me whiny and I insisted on standing very near my mother. Dad volunteered from behind her something about a box, a bag for the babies, but now the odor. How could he get the smell out of the car? Mom was angry. Dad was happy. I wanted to know why he had k i l led the skunk. My ques tion rece ived no rep ly o the r than “ Because it was a skunk.” This felt like a lesson in logic where A equals B, B equals C, and therefore, A equals C. A was me, and C was the skunk. What was B? I knew, yet my mind saw blank. I sensed a connection my young mind could not understand. I felt a secret that I let myself push away. Skunks became my allies. Now I can complete the equation. I know what I couldn’t let myself face. I know what B stands for. Statistics vary. Some maintain that one in four girl children and one in ten boys grow up victims of sexual abuse. Others put the figure for boys closer to one in five. One in five boys, one in four girls, sexually abused by the age of nineteen with fifty percent of the abuse forced upon them by family members. I believe these statistics though I can’t explain why abuse pervades our culture. Stooping to sarcasm, I propose that our culture encourages bland, stoic, naive children who know how to be quiet and keep secrets; they grow into better employees, soldiers, and victims. They also can grow into better abusers. Our society believes children lie, that they create stories of abuse. I don’t know why; maybe because adults who lie mistrust themselves and find it easy to mistrust everyone else. They assume all people share their deceit, even children, and they teach them to lie by forcing them to keep awful secrets, thus ensuring many will grow up and teach their children to lie by keeping the same secrets. Abuse is taught and learned and travels through generations. Because abuse surrounds us, we are violent. Because we are adept at hiding and denying the prevalence of family violence, we can with increasing ease deny racism, sexism, genocide. We are skilled in denial of reality and I would like to blame someone, something for that sk ill—perhaps fundamental religion, any organized religion that tells people what to feel, conservative politics, centralized education, Freud. I’m shadow boxing, swinging aimlessly in the air. Let’s blame Freud for the ramifications of his seduction theory. The *theory states that women who claim they have been abused are imagining scenes they wish had happened. My brother Gene seems to have bought this logic. “ You must have wanted people to do those things you imagined. Do you know what rape is?” Even in the psychiatric community many refuse to question Freud’s dogma. When abuse victims dare seek help, some are further abused. “ I believe that you believe this happened to you. Let’s examine why you would want to create these stories about your family, shall we?” We are cruel with our insistent desire to believe everything will be okay. We want to believe the doctor on televis ion news when he says the eighteen-month-old girl trapped in an underground well with her legs pinned alongside her head for thirty- six hours will “ forget all about it;” she will not suffer and have trouble coping with the trauma of her accident as she grows older. We do not want to believe we are a society obsessed with power, a society where children must routinely cope with rape. We do not want to hate ourselves. But hating Freud doesn’t help. It isn’t that simple. If we can’t blame some source for our violence, I fear we cannot purge ourselves. I want a clear solution. I want to heal our culture and fill that lonely hole in me that was taught perversion in the name of love, that part of me who cries at the sight of a TV commercial where a father and young daughter sit side by side drinking lemonade. I could blame Dad. A few years ago I read a newspaper article about a young woman who sued her father for fraud, for sexually abusing her from the age of eleven through seventeen. Fraud because the adult provides mores for the child. If the adult misleads the child by saying incest is okay, secret but not wrong, the child is defrauded. , A county judge awarded this woman $243,000—$200,000 for damages and $43,000 to cover therapy needed because of the abuse. The case went to court years after the abuse. She proved her charges because once, when she was legally a minor, she told someone what was happening. In most child abuse cases the charges must be pressed within a year of the child reaching majority, but with fraud you have up to six years after the abuse was discovered or should have been. Although I didn’t tell anyone, a lawyer friend says that if a person was abused and suffered memory loss to cope with the trauma, charges can be pressed for up to seven years from when the person’s memory returns. I could press charges against Dad if I did it soon. I don’t want to pull Dad back into my life. A pile of his money isn’t worth having to be in the same room with the bull glare of his flat eyes or having to see the rolls of fat where the back of his head meets his neck. I don’t want to contend w ith him, his b ro the rs and s is te rs , w ith my brothers’ denial in courtrooms. Yet, if I do nothing, Dad and his family and friends continue to hurt others. If I do “ something” , if I take Dad to court, will anything change? I don’t believe I can protect the Beulah community from itself. One morning, over ten years ago, I drove into town from the lake cabin with Dad. We were driving to work. I was clerking at his store for the summer, before another year at col lege. A deer ran across the road in front of our d u s t - f i l le d s ta t ion wagon. Dad pointed into the field. “ Look Liv.” The I f I keep the place alive in my life, the old violence might in some way continue. deer stood beside a larger deer in the young, low corn. Doe and fawn? Dad was pleased. I wanted to pray, let God know I appreciated the moment. They were beautiful. Brown, thin, agile legs. A contrast to the constant fields of cows. These animals were wild and wise, not stupid. Their eyes saw us. Their eyes looked into us. They had to know us to survive; yet I knew they were naive and in danger unless they hid well. If our car didn’t accidentally kill them, friends of mine with bows and arrows and guns would. For now, they were safe. I felt I could see in their eyes. They were just like me: okay, right now. I wanted to 14 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988
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