The Red Flannel Rag

head. I didn’t see the rest of the fight because I ran into the bedroom and got under the

bed. The fight went on for a while. Mom told me later, “I beat the shit out of him. I was

hittin’ him so fast; he couldn’t get a lick in on me.” My Dad waited many, many years

before he came home drunk again. One evening he drove his car up on the bank and fell

over in the passenger seat. He slept for several hours and finally came in the house to

eat supper. He sat at his seat at the end of the table and said, “If my son was here, we

would beat the hell out of all of you.” He was referring to my brother John who was in

Vietnam at the time. Dad worried in silence while John was at war since he could relate

to what war was like better than anyone in the family. Dad never came home drunk

after that last time.

Our first house was heated by a coal stove in the living room and by Mom’s wood

cooking stove in the kitchen. There was no bathroom and no running water. Mom

carried water from a cistern at the end of the back yard. We all went to the bathroom in

a chamber pot that Mom faithfully emptied every morning. As my brother, Larry, and

sister, Brenda, got a bit older we invented our own competitive game around our bowel

emptying needs. There was a chicken house right next to our house. Pop May had built

slanting roosts for his chickens to roost on at night. We went to the bathroom in the

chicken house, three of us at the same time usually. We climbed up on the roosts and

pooped. We each had our own spot. The competition was about seeing how high the

pile could get before it fell over. Whoever lost that game had to find a new spot on the

roosts and start building his or her pile from the floor up again.

There were holes in the floor of our house; and, in the wintertime, big rats would

stay under the house and occasionally come up through the floor. I was only three years

old when I awoke to the sounds of Mom and Dad struggling and my tiny baby sister,

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