The other kids got punished too.
It was rare, but it happened.
Mallory was hardheaded. She’d been caught stealing once or twice and was beaten for it. The whippings would have been shortened, of course, if Mal only had fessed up. But she was stubborn and refused to admit anything.
My mother spanked her as we huddled at the top of the stairs. The first few strokes came easy and hard, but after a few more, my mother’s heart did not seem in it. Still, her head was as thick as Mal’s, and she punctuated each smack against Mal’s behind with the hopeful question, “Now, will you admit you took that money?” Mal kept saying no and my mother kept going, each slap against Mallory’s behind sinking into our own skin as we listened, until we could take no more and shouted, “Just admit it Mal—just say you stole that money!”
But Mallory admitted nothing. And in the end, only my mother’s tired arm curbed the whipping.
The baby, Rachel, might have had something taken away for not sharing, or for succumbing to an overall sour mood. But she was chubby-cheeked and sand-skinned, so much like the little girl on the fund-raising postcard for the Indians of Oklahoma that no one could stay mad at her for long.
Steph was rational, kind-hearted, and the biggest helper my mother had, but even she was occasionally punished for something minor. Fighting, say, or swearing.
My mother had her vices, but besides her occasional over-reliance upon the word “damn,” my mother didn’t swear. Except for the night Steph and I wouldn’t fall asleep. After telling us ten times to be quiet, my mother was ready to burst. Had our bedroom been on the first floor with hers, she’d have hit us, but as it was, she was too tired to do anything but yell, which accomplished nothing, so she finally shouted at us to “shut the fuck up” which tore us up with laughter. We laughed so hard at the sound of our mother saying “fuck” that we had to shove our faces into our blankets to choke the gobs of air that came up from our guts.
Though my mother did not normally swear, both Steph and I cultivated a certain appreciation for the sound of bad words. We liked the way they felt on our tongues, loved the power of the forbidden, and sometimes made the mistake of saying “goddamn” or “Jesus Christ” while my mother was within earshot and she’d usher us into the bathroom and insert cracked bars of Dial soap into our mouths. Tears of humiliation and laughter ran together at the sight of orange bar soap in the other’s mouth.
One time, Steph got the idea of squeezing lines of Orajel into our mouths. Orajel numbed babies’ gums, so Steph figured it would block out the soap taste. We smiled to ourselves and waited for (perhaps even courted) the next incident of swearing, then squirted the stuff onto our tongues while my mother went on about no child of hers using that kind of language.
It turned out that Orajel cut the taste of nothing, but simply numbed the tongue some, so that watery suds trickled down our chins as our mouths flopped open.
Another time, Steph joined me in pushing the open mouth of an empty jelly jar into slices of white bread to make gooey communion wafers. We pressed crosses onto the circles of bread with a butter knife, then used the round slices to play Mass on the back porch. My mother stepped onto the porch at the moment I held an oversized wafer to Steph’s mouth, saying, “Receive the body of Christ.”
My mother said it was sacrilegious to act out communion. Then punished us. We laughed. Her rules seemed to come out of nowhere. What was laughable one day was a mortal sin the next. We tried to tease her into easing up, but she’d had a lousy day and wouldn’t give in.
“Keep arguing with me, and I’ll give you a few more days’ punishment,” was all she’d say as we trudged up the stairs, shaking our heads at having such a crazy mother.