White Rubber Boots

I leaned tightly into the corral post, trying to be as still as possible without being noticed. I knew Wendy was going to get it. The red whiskered man had told her to stay out of the puddles. There she was, with mud right up over the top of her boots and running down the insides, her pudgy little arms sticking too far out of last years sweater. She was just singing to the sunshine and enjoying the sweet pleasures of a muddy puddle on a warm spring day.

I listened toward the barn for the singing sound of the milk going into the bucket. As long as he was still milking old Jenny, Wendy still had some time to get out of her predicament. She seemed oblivious to the dangers though, and was now reaching into the mud up to her little elbows trying to get one of her boots unstuck. Nice new white rubber boots. Boy was he gonna be mad!

All at the same time, it seemed, the milking sounds stopped and Wendy plunked down on her butt in the mud and started wailing. I grabbed onto my post even tighter and held my breath.

”Stupid little Wurpet! I told you to stay out of the mud.”

Whisker man wasted no time getting from the barn door to the mud puddle, cussing and yelling at Wendy all the way. She wailed even louder as she tried to get up and fell back in the mud again. He yanked her up by an arm and raised her high above his head, then flung her to the ground, right into a pile of horse poop. He commenced to kicking her with his big boots, just kicking and kicking until it really started to bother me that he was getting horse poop all over her, even in her hair. She had stopped crying and wasn’t even wiggling now. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t breathing either. She must be dead.

I hung onto my post and tried to get my eyes to shut but they just wouldn’t cooperate. I just wanted him to stop kicking her and getting more poop on her. I tried not to make a sound.

Then, as suddenly as he had started, whisker man stopped kicking her and picked up her limp little body, cradling it as though she was his precious baby and something terrible had just happened to her.

”It was the horses,” he was saying, as he headed for the house with his precious cargo, yelling for mama and cussing the horses, using all kinds of bad words my ears didn’t like to hear.

I glanced around to see where the horses were. They were grazing peacefully on the far side of the pasture. I stood there, still clinging to the post and trying to make sense of it all, while hot, silent tears streamed down my cheeks.

”That was real dumb on Wendy’s part,” I thought. “Real dumb!”

You could never tell what was going to get you in trouble with whisker man, but she should have known to listen to him when he said to stay out of the mud puddles. Now last week, when I got a good punching, that was different. I was still figuring on that one.

Whisker man had been driving down the lane in his pickup truck, me riding alongside of him, standing up so I could see out the window since I was a little small for a five year old. All of a sudden a bunch of sheep ran into the road in front of the truck. He hit the brakes hard and my head hit the windshield hard. A big crack went all the way across -the windshield- not my head, though my head wasn’t feeling too good right then either.

He stopped the truck and grabbed me before I even got the first sound out, punching me and cussing at me for busting the windshield.

Well, I’d sure try never to do that again, though I wasn’t exactly sure what it was that I did that I should never do again. Life is hard like that sometimes. Just so hard to make sense of things.

Epilogue

The accuracy of this memory has been verified in two ways. While my sister was undergoing unexplained rib problems and attributing it to something whisker man called “rabbit punches”, she was also working on a sculpture exhibit, which was based on white rubber boots. We lived thousands of miles apart and this was nearly thirty years ago, so we communicated by snail mail. When I shared with her the memory I had upon which I wrote the above story, she went for xrays and sure enough, had several unexplained healed broken ribs.

The rabbit punches happened to whomever was allowed to sit by whisker man in the truck. He chose. While driving along, without any warning he would suddenly elbow the child beside him in the ribs. Hard! It was similar to the hot spoon torture. You did not have to do anything to deserve it. Just be there!

The second way the memory was verified was when I told our mother about it. She remembered the horse having trampled Wendy and that they had to keep Wendy sitting up even at night because she couldn’t breathe lying down. They did not take Wendy to the doctor.

I am unable to explain this incident except to say that abuse does not just affect the child it happens to. It also affects the children who see what happens. I was unable to tell my mother what I saw and did not completely understand what happened. I could not comprehend dishonesty. The communication difficulties of autism along with being easily overwhelmed made it extra hard to make any sense of these happenings. My response was to retreat into my own safe world.

Coming next: Paper Horses