volume 2
Remembering Freeze
by John Schluenz
Such a rage, such a force, a second in time that lasts for minutes, hours,
plays in my head over and over in slow motion. My mind’s camera switches
angles again and again like the super slow mo of some football game on Sunday,
zooming in and out, closer and further away. I cannot remember the few minutes
that led up to my Dad hitting my brother, only me at a distance, watching
deep inside myself as dad’s fist came down hard, harder, hitting my
brother square between his cheek and neck, right behind his ear.
It was a bright and cold autumn morning on the farm. The air was crisp and
the grass was slick with dew. The gravel dust on the driveway was settled
from the light rain of the night before. The air smelled clean, stripped
of everything. Mother was walking up the steps that led from the back porch
to the driveway, that dad and us had built from the falling silo at the side
of the chicken coop. Her hair was in a big messy bun and she seemed in a
hurry. She was wearing light blue jeans and a too big flannel shirt not tucked
into her pants. Her big woven grass purse swung wildly around from her shoulder.
She was loading bags into our light green Volkswagen rabbit. Someone was
going somewhere, I think it was my brother Mike.
I sat on a cold damp metal lawn chair. At a bend in the chair where the
back part met the seat, there was a little rusted crack that I was always
catching my finger in, and numerous pairs of garanimals. You could sit in
the chair, but you could never lean back too far and get comfortable, or
you would get bitten. The chair and I rocked back and forth, and back and
forth, making little snipping noises as the tiny rusty jaws of the chair
snapped back and forth, waiting for little fingers or corduroy.
I still am not sure why my brother was leaving. My father and him had always
fought, but then, so had my brother and mom too. For some reason, it seemed
to have gotten worse, and dad’s temper was worse than usual, and my
brother was spending a lot more time in his room .He had just put a combination
lock on his door. He used to spend hours and hours in there, Styx, Boston,
Journey, Led Zeppelin, and more and more teenage angst drug induced music
blaring through the woodwork, and rattling the windows in a large portion
of the house. Mom and Dad used to take the door off its hinges, and go into
his room when he was off at school, searching through drawers and under mattresses.
When he would come home, the yelling, the shouting, each time a little longer
and louder, always ending the same; my brothers hard footsteps sounding up
the new wooden stairs, his door slamming, locks sliding fast into place,
music blaring, more yelling downstairs, always more yelling downstairs.
Little birds chirped and fluttered above my head in the silver metal bird
feeder made from a Hawaiian punch can. Inside the house, muffled words could
be heard being yelled at each other. Every time mom would open the back door
with another bundle or bag in her arms, the yelling would become more bassy,
more clear. It was all the things I had heard before. A lot of “god
damn It” and “you never...”, blah blah blah, then back
to the muffled yelling. I preferred that. Mom didn’t really stop to
look at me, I don’t think she really knew how to, or what she would
say to me if she did. She just kept walking in the house, up the stairs,
down the stairs, and out the door, over and over. Then I heard her yell for
my brother.
My brother was about 16 when he went to live with his father. My mom took
him there that morning. My mom had been married to my brothers dad for about
10 years or so, and had three kids, including my brother Joe, my sister Lisa,
and my brother Mike. I think it must have been a shock for everybody when
they divorced 1 don’t really know what it would be like to be young
and to have your parents split. My parents didn’t divorce till I was
about 15 or so, so I think I sort of understood it all a lot better. My brother
Mike had been the youngest, I think he was about 5 when my mom divorced his
dad, and he never seemed to get over it. I think because he went from being
the youngest, cutest, little doll to being the second youngest, cutest little
doll, when I came on the scene. I can see it in the pictures they took of
us when we were little, me in somebody’s arms, my brother, just a little
bit older looking up from down below, a look of strange disbelief in his
eyes, a look of fear, a look of loss. Me and my brother spent a large portion
of our lives beating the hell out of each other, and looking back, I can’t
help but wonder if it was just two kids going through normal kid stuff, or
some real emotional turmoil working itself out. We were all full of that
crap. A lot of us still are, I don’t know if you can ever really get
away from it.
My brother came fast out of the house, face red, his hair a wild storm of
a grown out bowl cut. He was wearing a thin dark blue T-shirt, torn blue
jeans, and old running shoes. My mom was walking behind him, almost shielding
him from my father’s voice, the booming thunder that came from dad’s
chest when he was angry and yelling at someone. Dad’s face would turn
red and a big vein would appear out of his forehead. He was coming out the
door right after my brother, still yelling. My brother was still yelling
too, their voices flowing out behind them and leaving a trail of emotional
smoke still in the air, that flowed up into my nose, as I got up to follow
behind them. I think I knew better than to try to stop them from fighting,
but I do remember my point of view when my dad hit him.
I had followed them to the car, and was standing behind our little Volkswagen
rabbit, my mom was next to me at my side. My brother and dad made it to the
car, still yelling, still fighting, the air around them thickening with words
and electricity. My brother opened the trunk of the car to put in his last
bag. I can’t remember who said what to who, but then it happened. My
brother cowered over as the fist approached him, and looked up at it. I remember
he looked at the fist, not at my dad. My dad looked so angry and enraged;
I had never seen him that angry before and never have seen him that angry
again. The red from his ripped flannel shirt seemed to throb and flash heat
in the cold dewy air. His old jeans were stained and caked with the same
mud as his tan work boots. He had been out in the early morning chasing cows
and fixing fences and trying to make it all work. It was a blind rage. My
father had never hit anybody; he was not that kind of person. Into that fist,
I think was all the frustration, all the years of hard work that will never
pay off, all the times he knew he wasn’t my brother’s and sister’s
real dad. All the yelling, all the banging of heads against the wall, everything
in that fist, came flying out of control on a cold autumn morning in rural
Wisconsin, breaking through the calm of the crisp morning air and shattering
it like glass into so many little pieces we will never find them all. The
hand came down clenched and hard, harder, fingers and skin pulled tight,
hairs pushed out hard, and then, that’s all I can really remember.
My father’s fist came down and hit my brother hard, right on his neck,
by the back of his ear. And I think my brother crumpled, and scrambled to
get away to the passenger’s seat in the car, my mom following close
behind in the driver’s seat.
An engine started and the car backed off down the driveway, a blur of lime
green and whining motor sounds. I can’t remember where I was, or who
I went with after it happened. The part of me that remembers was still in
the white metal lawn chair, clicking back, and forth, back and forth from
thirty feet away, birds playing over my head in a metal Hawaiian Punch can
bird feeder that I made in my kindergarten art class, sharp edges and bent
metal, thin wire. The lime green and pink, blue enamel paints, flaking off
into the thin air and blowing across the back yard and into the hay fields
and woods. The lawns cut even and crisp, with the occasional oil stain from
our old greasy lawnmower. The birds suddenly fell silent and scattered. The
sounds of my family past echoing off the green moist grass of a country valley
where we lived, where we left.
For a long time, I couldn’t remember a lot of my late childhood and
early adolescence. A lot of that time and memory has been held back, but
I know it is still there. I know that I need to trust my memory and learn
from what I have seen. I need to let it flow out of me so I can see the things
I didn’t want to remember, and deal with them.
This semester in school, I painted my room sky blue. The same sky blue as
my brother’s room, the room where I spent a lot of my childhood, a
lot of his, before all the rock music, before the lock on the door, before
me and my brother drifted apart, before we all did. I thought that maybe
going to bed every night looking at the same color I did when I was young
would help me to somehow get in touch with that part of me. So much of that
is all tucked away deep inside me. The result has been a lot of turbulent
sleeps, a lot of memories coming back that are very vivid. Maybe I am just
at the point in my life where these things come back to me. Maybe it is the
blue. I want you to know I am not writing this to condemn anyone or to get
sympathy. These are the images running around in my head, this is just what
I am thinking about.
It is strange to be writing about only a single gesture, a moment in time,
perhaps less than a second. There is so much more to tell, there is so much
that needs explaining. I do not understand it all, and I could take a million
pages to finish writing about the things that brought my family where it
is today. I do not look at these things in my life as good or bad. They have
all gotten me to where I am now. I don’t want you to think that my
dad is or was a big abuse maniac because he wasn’t. I don’t want
you to think my brother or my mom were escaping him because they weren’t.
The things they were driving away from, they are still trying to get away
from today with the help of self medication. I was there, and so were they,
but even now we don’t all have the same story about the same things.
My dad is writing a book about our life on the farm, and I bet he leaves
this chapter out, not on purpose, but because he really doesn’t remember.
Nobody seems to remember this happening at all. Not my mom, not my father,
not my brother. Maybe it is too hard to remember, maybe it is too painful,
maybe it was too long ago.
This image has haunted me forever, and maybe it always will. It is a little thin screen in my head that everything seems to filter through. I see it all the time, over and over, so much that I have almost accepted it and dealt with the fact that things like that happen. It is the memory that made me doubt my sanity, made me doubt the sanity of my family, made me realize that I am not crazy and neither are they. We are all remembering all the time. We are all dealing with our pasts every day, as fast as we can, as much as we want to. Some of us want to remember what happened to us so we don’t make the same mistakes again. Some of us want to remember only the good times, although it always seems that the bad times come through the loudest. Some of us live in the past in an attempt to make it all right. Some of us are haunted, unwilling, trying to understand.
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