• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 312 0

at the same time, until my mother would insist that the beating stop. Usually the punishments were the result of small matters—for example, one of the boys forgetting to mow the lawn behind the backyard tree—but just as often they seemed to occur as the result of my father’s bad whims. Frank Jr. gave me an example of such an occasion. “One time,” he said, “when Gary and I came home from school, Dad was hiding behind the door and we didn’t even know it. We got in the door, we heard the door shut, and the next thing we knew we were getting razor-strapped across the back. He really went wild that night, because we were something like five minutes late—and I’m not kidding when I say five minutes. I don’t even remember why we were late, maybe the schoolteacher stopped us and talked, or maybe we visited with a friend. I can’t remember. I just remember he was hiding behind the door with the razor strap. We didn’t even get a chance to give an explanation, and we got whacked I don’t know how many times.”

On another occasion, some money had been stolen off my father’s desk. He gathered Frank and Gary before him and asked which of them had taken it. Frank knew Gary had stolen the money, and though he was angry at his brother for doing so, he wasn’t about to tell on him. “If that’s the way you want it, then you’ll both get the whipping,” my father said, with the logic of a gym teacher or army sergeant or some similar smalltime despot. That night he doubled up the strap—it could do more damage that way—and flailed his sons until they bled through their jeans. With each thrash, he called them thieves. Later, Frank asked my father if he would still have whipped him if he’d said that Gary had stolen the money. “Of course I would have whipped you,” my father said. “Nobody likes a damn squealer.” That night Frank learned that, one way or another, he was bound to pay for his brother’s crimes.

“When Dad would grab the razor strap and go haywire on us,” Frank told me, “he wasn’t talking to us about anything that we’d done wrong, nor was he telling us how we needed to improve our behavior. It was simply that we had upset him. He was angry with us and this was his way of getting revenge. He wasn’t doing it to teach us anything, except possibly to fear him. That was the reason he punished us: not to make us better, but to make us sorry.

“But when you get punished like that,” Frank continued, “how are you going to be sorry for what you did? If you were to take some guy that shoplifted a loaf of bread, and you took him out and castrated him, is he going to feel sorry about the loaf of bread, for crying out loud? He’s not going to care about it. It’s not going to impress him at all what he did, because he wasn’t punished in a way that would make him stop and realize: Well, hey, I deprived somebody of their loaf of bread. All he’s going to think is: For a lousy loaf of bread I was mutilated. He’s going to have hatred. And that’s what built up in us, resentment, because even as kids you know you are being overpunished for simple things. Like dropping something from the table, cleaning up the yard but not doing the immaculate job you were supposed to, or being a few minutes late from getting home from school.”

Frank Jr. now believes that the beatings had as much to do with the relationship between my father and mother as with any desire to discipline rowdy children. Frank Gilmore would beat his sons until his wife intervened. She would come in and let him know that she was angry, that he had gone far enough, and then he’d start a fight with her. Frank Jr. recalls that as he was getting beat, he would pray for his mother to work up her nerve to put a stop to it. “I’d count the lashes. It would be seventeen and eighteen razor straps across the back, which was pretty fucking painful, before she’d finally get her ass up off the chair and come and say something.

“Sometimes,” he added, “it felt like all the aggression was really just between the two of them. Gary and me were in the middle, waiting for one of them to pick on us, so the other one could