My life

I was glad to be going home, where at least I’d have old friends and my beloved hot summer. I had a job waiting for me at Camp Yorktown Bay, a Navy League camp for poor kids mostly from Texas and Arkansas, on Lake Ouachita, the largest of Hot Springs’ three lakes and one of the cleanest in America. You could see the bottom clearly at a depth of more than thirty feet. The man-made lake was in the Ouachita National Forest, so development around it, with the attendant pollution runoff, was limited. For several weeks, I got up early every morning and drove out to the camp, twenty miles or so away, where I supervised swimming, basketball, and other camp activities. A lot of the kids needed a week away from their lives. One came from a family of six kids and a single mother and didn’t have a penny to his name when he arrived. His mother was moving and he didn’t know where he’d be living when he got back. I talked with one boy who tried unsuccessfully to swim and was in bad shape when he was pulled out of the lake. He said it was nothing: in his short life, he’d already swallowed his tongue, been poisoned, survived a bad car wreck, and lost his father three months earlier. The summer passed quickly, full of good times with my friends and interesting letters from Denise, who was in France. There was one last terrible incident with Daddy. One day he came home early from work, drunk and mad. I was over at the Yeldells’, but luckily, Roger was home. Daddy went after Mother with a pair of scissors and pushed her into the laundry room off the kitchen. Roger ran out the front door and over to the Yeldells’ screaming, “Bubba, help! Daddy’s killing Dado!” (When Roger was a baby he could say “Daddy” before he could say “Mother,” so he created the term “Dado” for her, and he used it for a long time afterward.) I ran back to the house, pulled Daddy off Mother, and grabbed the scissors from him. I took Mother and Roger to the living room, then went back and reamed Daddy out. When I looked into his eyes I saw more fear than rage. Not long before, he had been diagnosed with cancer of the mouth and throat. The doctors recommended radical, and disfiguring, surgery, but he refused, so they treated him as best they could. This incident took place early in the two-year period leading to his death, and I think it was his shame at the way he’d lived and his fear of dying that drove him to what would be his last bad outburst. After that, he still drank, but he became more withdrawn and passive. This incident had a particularly devastating effect on my brother. Almost forty years later, he told me how humiliated he’d felt running for assistance, how helpless he felt that he couldn’t stop his father, how irrevocable his hatred was after that. I realized then how foolish I’d been, in the immediate aftermath of the episode, to revert to our family policy of just pretending nothing had happened and going back to

“normal.” Instead, I should have told Roger that I was very proud of him; that it was his alertness, love, and courage that had saved Mother; that what he did was harder than what I had done; that he needed to let go of his hatred, because his father was sick, and hating his father would only spread the sickness to him. Oh, I often wrote to Roger and called him a lot when I was away; I encouraged him in his studies and activities and told him I loved him. But I missed the deep scarring and the trouble it would inevitably bring. It took Roger a long time and a lot of self-inflicted wounds to finally get to the source of the hurt in his heart.

Though I still had some concerns about Mother’s and Roger’s safety, I believed Daddy when he promised he was through with violence, and besides, he was losing the capacity to generate it, so I was ready when the time came to go back to Georgetown for my second year. In June, I had been awarded a