I’M NOT SURE HOW LONG I STAYED ASLEEP, OR IF I SLEPT AT all. But I was startled fully awake by a noise behind me, near the bedroom door. Lying on my stomach in bed, I quickly opened my eyes and flipped over on my right side.
It was morning, and a bleary-eyed Tim was standing in the sun-drenched doorway of my bedroom. He was a mess. His eyes were bloodshot. And he was holding the gun in his right hand.
I immediately sat up in my bed. My heart began pounding faster, loud enough that I could hear it.
Tim glared at me, but neither of us said a word.
My eyes darted back and forth, looking at the gun, then at his face, then back at the gun, and back to Tim’s face. I could see rage building in Tim’s bloodshot eyes. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to do something. I made a snap decision. I sprang from the bed like a cat and ran toward Tim full force, with both my arms extended forward. But as light-framed as I was, my effort only pushed him back slightly, toward the wall in the hallway. I could see the gun in his right hand, and it was aimed right at my heart.
I rolled left, away from Tim, out through the living room, and bolted out the front door, running with all my might toward Grandpa’s trailer. I knew my life was completely out of my control now. There was no way Tim could miss if he decided to pull the trigger. He’s gonna shoot me in the back, I thought, as I ran for Grandpa’s front door. But for some reason, Tim didn’t fire.
I burst into Grandpa’s trailer and to my surprise discovered that Mama had spent the night there. When I saw her, I immediately began pouring out my story of the events from last night. “Mama, you won’t believe it. Tim shot up Charlie Barber’s trailer, and then he tried to shoot me!” I showed her the blood on my shirt from where he’d hit me in the nose.
Mama didn’t seem angry; she didn’t even appear concerned. She just nodded and acted like it was no big deal. “He’ll calm down sooner or later,” she said.
I waited at Grandpa’s half the day before returning to our trailer later that afternoon. I hoped that by then Tim would have had enough time to sober up. Maybe he was back to being “good Tim”—at least, I prayed he would be.
I slowly opened the front door and stepped inside the trailer, careful not to make any noise. It was ominously quiet, so I tiptoed toward the bedrooms. I looked to the left and saw Tim’s shoes hanging off the bed in the back bedroom. I moved farther down the hallway toward Mama’s and Tim’s bedroom. I flinched instinctively when I saw him, ready to run again if necessary, but then I saw he was asleep on his stomach, still wearing the same clothes he had been wearing the previous day. I quickly surveyed the room, looking for the gun, but I couldn’t spot it.
On the dresser sat a box of bullets, surrounded by another handful of bullets strewn on the dresser, along with some change Tim had apparently been carrying.
I slipped into the bedroom and gathered up the bullets, being extra careful not to make any noise by dropping any bullets onto the dresser top. When I was sure I had them all, I toted the bullets to my bedroom, where I closed the door behind me. I got down on the floor and crawled on my stomach all the way under my bed and hid the bullets in the far right corner against the wall. I quietly crawled back out from under my bed and hurried outside.
By nightfall Mama went back to the trailer to reunite with Tim. When she didn’t return to Grandpa’s, I figured it was relatively safe to go home, so I followed behind her a few hours later.
She and Tim were in their bedroom having a conversation when I walked in. Neither Mama nor Tim said one word about the events that had taken place the night before, so I didn’t either. It was as if nothing had even happened. It was totally weird.
I spent the rest of the evening in my bedroom, trying to figure out what was going on and what, if anything, I should do. I didn’t really have a lot of options.
My choice was made by default later that night when I woke up to the sound of glass shattering in our trailer. Someone had thrown a rock through the living room window.
I glanced at a clock on the wall and noticed that it was close to 1:30 a.m. Whoever had broken our window hadn’t done so by accident.
Then I heard Mama yelling out the front door, “Charlie, you need to leave now!”
At first I thought Mama was talking about Charles, Tim’s son, but then I heard the voice of my older brother, Charlie Barber. “Come on outside, Tim,” Charlie Barber taunted. “We’ll see how tough you are.”
By now Tim was awake and up. He ran down the hallway and burst into my bedroom. “Where’s the bullets?” he snarled at me.
“I don’t know,” I said defensively.
“Don’t mess with me, Jimmy,” Tim yelled. “Give me the bullets—now!”
I got down on the floor and crawled under my bed and grabbed the box of bullets. As I did, I heard more glass breaking and men talking loudly outside.
Charlie called out condescendingly again. “Come on, Tim. Come outside, Tim.”
Another window shattered. Suddenly, rocks rained in through every window in the trailer.
I slid out from under my bed with the bullets in my hand, stretching my arm toward Tim. He handed them back to me, along with the gun, and growled, “Load it!” A weird thought flitted through my mind; it occurred to me that maybe Tim didn’t know how to load the gun himself.
But I knew he was serious, and something bad was getting ready to happen. My hands shook while I frantically loaded the gun. We were standing in the hallway under a small window. Mama was in the kitchen, yelling at Charlie, telling him to stop throwing rocks and to leave.
I was shaking so badly, I couldn’t get the cylinder to close, so I handed the gun to Tim. He took a bullet out of the cylinder and reinserted it, and the cylinder snapped shut. Tim walked toward the kitchen with the gun in his right hand.
I heard a noise and looked toward the front of the trailer. From my position I could see that Charlie had climbed up onto the tongue housing the hitch of the trailer, and he was leaning forward, crawling through the broken kitchen window.
“Get down, or I’ll shoot you in the top of the head!” Tim roared at Charlie.
Mama turned around and yelled, “Tim, please don’t shoot him.” Mama then turned back to her eldest son. “Leave, Charlie! Please, leave,” she begged. But the tone in Mama’s voice told everyone that she knew nobody was leaving anytime soon, and we may not leave alive.
Charlie retreated from the windowsill, so Tim turned and strode back down the hallway to where I was trying desperately to be brave. He crouched under the small hallway window, stuck the barrel of the revolver out the broken window, and bellowed, “You better get outta here.”
Charlie yelled back from somewhere, now on the front side of the trailer, “Come outside, Tim. You ain’t gonna come shoot up my house and git by with it. Come outside and let’s handle this like men.”
“Charlie, please! Let’s go.” I recognized the woman’s voice outside; it was Cathy, my brother Charlie’s wife. Cathy was a mousy woman who never dared to contradict her husband. What was she doing here with this bunch of thugs?
“Shut up!” Charlie railed in return.
Those were the last words I heard before Tim pulled the trigger. Bam! The shot reverberated through the entire trailer. But since it was almost the Fourth of July, and many people in the Carolinas enjoyed setting off fireworks at night, the crackling sound of gunfire probably went unnoticed by the neighbors.
Tim fired again and again. The first few shots didn’t faze Charlie or his comrades; they continued throwing rocks into our trailer and cursing at Tim, demanding for him to come outside while Cathy begged, “Charlie, please, come on. Let’s get out of here!”
Mama warned Charlie to leave too.
I heard people yelling and more glass breaking. Moments later Tim fired three more shots.
A horrible wailing sound pierced the night air in the trailer park.
The rabble-rousers stopped in their tracks, and everyone outside got extremely quiet—everyone except Cathy, that is, who had been sitting in the car, calling out to Charlie. Cathy continued screaming hysterically. It was a horrific sound, the most painful cry I’d ever heard.
Then Charlie yelled, “You shot my wife!” He punched the front door of our trailer one more time and ran to his car, where Cathy was lying on her side in the front seat. Charlie and his cohorts piled into the car and roared out of Sante Trailer Park. Tim kept watch out the window for a couple of hours, in case Charlie might return, but everything remained calm for the rest of the night.
IT WAS ALMOST DAYBREAK BEFORE MY HEART STOPPED RACING. “Pack your things,” Mama said. “We’re getting out of here.” I tossed some clothes and my prized possessions into two cardboard boxes. We immediately abandoned the trailer and fled to Tim’s uncle’s place in Crowders Mountain, where we waited for daylight.
We learned later that Tim’s shots had missed Charlie and his friends but not Cathy, who had been sitting in the car directly in Tim’s line of fire. Ever the meek wife, she had waited behind the wheel of the car, just as Charlie had instructed her. At least three of Tim’s bullets ripped into Cathy’s body. She was shot in the shoulder and neck, and she must have tried to reel away or had lunged forward because Tim also shot her in the back.
Although none of us were ever the same after that night, Cathy’s life was irrevocably changed. She never walked again. Thanks to Charlie’s and Tim’s macho nonsense, Cathy was paralyzed from her waist down for the rest of her life.