Burn Down the Ground Read online

  But this summer, I woke up every day with a sense of dread. I never knew what I was going to encounter when I took my place next to my brother on the couch each day to watch television. Would it be the cruel, domineering David or the endearing one, who gathered and cleaned dozens of mollusk shells for me during our hikes to Lake Creek because he knew how I liked their shine?

  The lack of punishment emboldened David. If my parents did impose a penalty, grounding him or banishing him to his room, they were rarely there to enforce it. When Mom and Dad were home his taunting became no less ruthless.

  One day I had reached my acceptable limit, which was averaging about thirty minutes of escalating torment. “Mama! Help!” I shrieked loud enough that my vocal cords burned. Knowing Mom had probably taken out her hearing aids, and Dad couldn’t hear my screams, I banged my heels on the carpet to make the floor vibrate.

  “Stop shaking the trailer,” Mom yelled without investigating. “Your daddy’s trying to watch TV!”

  “MUDDAH FUH!” my father would yell if David or I came anywhere near the television when a boxing match or a football game was playing. David and I avoided the TV area when he was engrossed; we were terrified of hearing his screeching curses.

  I broke free from my brother and ran to the living room. Mom threatened, “If you two bother me one more time, I’m going to get your daddy to whip you.”

  My father was known to dramatically unhinge his brass belt buckle as a gesture of an impending lashing, but there was never any follow-through. Convinced the threat alone would be enough to stop my brother, I returned to my room. David was undeterred, however, and attacked me again.

  “MAMA!”

  My father’s unmistakable footsteps came toward us. David and I were still tangled together when he burst into my room, his belt already unbuckled.

  “STAH!” he screamed as he gave the sign for “Stop!” making a chopping motion with his right hand into his open left palm. The sound of his hands coming together made a loud smack. “Why don’t you listen to your mother?”

  He swished his leather belt through the loops in one quick jerk. He then sat on the edge of my bed, bent David over his knees, and began whipping him.

  This was the first time I’d seen my father use a belt, and I was next! I panicked. A scene from an episode of The Little Rascals flashed through my mind where Spanky shoved a plate in his britches while his brother got a beating. My eyes surveyed my room for something—anything—to stick in my pants. The only item I found was my pocket-sized, hardcover Bible. If ever I needed God, it was now. I pushed the Bible into my underwear. My pants bulged, revealing a clear outline of where the Good Book was lodged.

  Dad released David, who ran out of the room choking back tears. He had often been paddled by the principal at school for misbehaving, but I had never been paddled or whipped, besides the one time Dad gave me a single swift smack on my bottom.

  I swallowed a big gulp of air as my father beckoned me over. “You better listen to your mama.” I bent over his lap and he came down with two quick strikes of his belt. I was relieved at how well the Bible took the blows, but then Dad stopped at two. I had counted David’s spankings and knew at least eight more licks were coming my way. I held my breath. Oh no! He can see my Bible.

  Dad abandoned his belt and came down with his bare hand. If by a slim chance he hadn’t seen the book, I knew he would feel it. When he stopped again and shooed me off his lap, I expected him to tell me I was in more trouble. Instead he stood up, retrieved his belt, and signed, “Be quiet. Your mama’s tired.”

  As my father left my room, I saw him force back a smile.

  Many Friday and Saturday nights, my parents went dancing at Gilley’s, a honky-tonk bar that was featured in the movie Urban Cowboy. The bar was in Pasadena, a ninety-minute drive from Boars Head. My parents usually stayed there until 2 A.M., closing time, leaving me home alone with David.

  My mom loved to dance and my father had better moves than John Travolta. He was better-looking, too, if you asked me. He grooved to the beat of the vibration and wasn’t distracted by all the lyrics. The thrill of a night on the town seemed to reignite the spark in their marriage. They came home sweaty and laughing and were still dancing around the trailer all through the next day.

  Evenings that they were going out started the same, with my mother trying to pour herself into skintight jeans.

  “Kambri, come here,” she’d holler.

  I’d go to her bedroom and find her on the king-sized bed, breathless and flat on her back. Her blue jeans were open and she’d be pulling on a wire hanger she had threaded through the hole of the zipper.

  “Help me,” she’d grunt. “I can’t zip up my jeans!”

  She’d press down on her belly as I yanked on the zipper with both hands, the way you might zip closed an overstuffed suitcase.

  “Finally! Now, help me up.” I’d pull her arms, as she’d rock back and forth a few times to gain momentum to get off the bed. “I used to be so skinny, till I had you.” She’d jiggle the roll of flab that spilled over the top of her jeans and add, “After I had David, I was back to wearing my same old jeans. Now I’m fat and it’s all your fault.”

  Clearly, the heaping bowls of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream and plates of fried potatoes she was so fond of had nothing to do with it, nor did the bags of M&M’s she kept hidden in her middle dresser drawer.

  She wasn’t fat, if you asked my father. He seemed to like her just the way she was, judging by the look on his face. I got that same expression when I was eyeing the dessert section at Luby’s Cafeteria.

  Dad was wearing Wranglers equally as tight as Mom’s, with a shiny brass belt buckle in the shape of a Texas longhorn. He smelled like a mix of Lava soap, Jovan Musk, and freshly applied hairspray. Dad groped her butt and kissed her all over her neck and cheeks.

  Mom batted Dad’s hand away and signed, “I’m ready.” She tiptoed around in a circle to show him the 360-degree view of what he couldn’t have just yet. Dad pinched her butt and Mom squealed. As she grabbed her purse and keys, Mom called over her shoulder, “Don’t stay up too late.”

  I nodded even though I planned to stay awake through the end of Saturday Night Live. No matter how hard I tried, I always fell asleep during the musical act.

  The headlights of the Chevy flickered out of sight. As I watched Diff’rent Strokes, I heard David menacingly call after me, like we were in a country-and-western version of The Warriors: “Kaaammmbriiii, come out and playyy-aayyy!”

  A chill ran down my spine. When I turned my head around I saw David calmly approaching me clutching his 20/20 rifle.

  My parents had bought the shotgun for David’s thirteenth birthday, a rite of passage for most Texas boys who lived in the woods. The gun was perfect for a young kid since it was powerful enough to kill but didn’t have the pesky kickback of a bigger gun. My brother hunted rabbits, squirrels, and birds for no reason other than to skin them and hang their dried hides on his bedroom wall along with his turtle shell and snake skin collection. He’d dig up the skinless corpses he’d buried, scrape off the remaining flesh with a pocketknife, and clean them with different agents like nail polish remover, rubbing alcohol, and gasoline. Mom bought him a three-tiered plastic corner curio shelf that snapped together so he could display the teeth and skulls like trophies.

  He peered down the barrel of the gun and said, “I’m gonna kill you.”

  I had no idea if he was serious or just playing with me, and I had never been more terrified.

  I ducked down below the couch and screamed, “That’s not funny, David!”

  That’s when I heard him cock the gun.

  I peeked over the sofa to see David aiming the shotgun at me. I bolted outside without shoes, dove under the front porch, and crawled under the trailer. Judging by David’s wheezing laughter, the prank had exceeded his expectations. I was sure my brother could hear my heavy breathing but I tried to make myself smaller, wrapping my knees tightly to my chest.
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  “I’m not gonna hurt you,” David called out. He could barely speak, he was laughing so hard.

  He pleaded with me to come back inside, probably feeling guilty about how I overreacted. His stunt had worked, but he hadn’t meant for me to spend the night in the woods. I didn’t trust him, though, especially after he had recently shot my pet salamander point-blank in the head with a BB gun. I stayed crouched in the darkness under the trailer.

  The front door slammed behind him as he retreated, but I could still hear his muffled laughter.

  OKLAHOMA!

  Days after David aimed his gun at me, Mom was on the telephone with a travel agent, but she was clearly exasperated. She shoved the phone in my direction. “Here, Kambri, you talk to her. I can’t understand a thing she’s saying!”

  Mom saw me balk and waved the receiver at me again. “Kambri! I need your help, now take it.”

  Mom was in the middle of booking round-trip flights to Oklahoma when I took over. Fed up with my calls to her at work to complain about David and the battles at home, she was sending my brother and me to spend part of our summer vacation with our two sets of grandparents. After thirty minutes of relaying available options, I finally purchased plane tickets.

  “See, that wasn’t so bad, Kambri.”

  I slammed down the receiver. The excitement about the trip, especially the flight, had been spoiled by the annoyed sighs from the customer service agent on other end. Humiliation pulsed through me. How was I supposed to know “layover” didn’t mean staying overnight like a sleepover? I was ten.

  “Kambri, you’re gonna have to learn how to handle things like this.”

  As I stormed off to my room Mom trailed after me. “Why don’t you want to help me? David does it all the time and never complains.”

  I hated that my mother always compared my brother to me. I did get frustrated when she used me as a translator. David was more enthusiastic for a reason. He was almost fifteen years old and his signing and ASL vocabulary were better. If he was home, Mom automatically chose him to be her interpreter. He relished the responsibility of being indispensable to her, swelling with exaggerated pride and cockiness. I knew I should assist when Mom asked, but I dreaded interpreting phone calls. My signing wasn’t particularly fast, even when I wasn’t holding a phone with one hand and signing words I didn’t understand. No customer service agent wanted to talk to a kid, either.

  However reluctantly, I helped when Mom needed me. I made appointments, called the utility company for late-payment extensions, and in this case, booked two economy class tickets out of Boars Head to the sweeping plains of Bowlegs, Oklahoma.

  Since moving to Texas, we only visited Dad’s parents about once every year or two, in part because of the distance but also because my father wasn’t comfortable there. His parents were salt-of-the-earth types seeming to have stepped out of the Depression era.

  His mother was called “Mee-Maw” by her dozens of other grandkids. Mom, David, and I thought the name made us sound unrefined, so we called her a more formal title, Grandma Crews. Her skin was a leathery tan from toiling in her garden. She boiled and canned ripened fruits and vegetables in mason jars and stocked them in a cellar that once doubled as sleeping quarters for her eldest daughters, and as a storm shelter to protect the family from tornadoes that barreled through the fields, long devoid of crops.

  Then there was Grandpa Crews, built up by my father to be a man fond of using cherry tree switches and razor straps for corporal punishment.

  On the way to the airport, Mom reminded us about the rules on the Crews farm. “Remember they’re very strict,” she stressed. “No cursing, don’t say God’s name in vain, and no talking back. And don’t forget …,” she added with a wag of her finger.

  “We know,” David and I recited in unison. “Don’t tell them you smoke marijuana.”

  Guilt swept across her face. “Right.”

  Bowlegs, Oklahoma, located a good hour-and-a-half drive on a two-lane road southeast of Oklahoma City, was a simple place. It was as isolated as Montgomery but had a different landscape. Instead of the moist air, lush forest, and natural springs, the land surrounding the Crews farm was an arid, endless horizon of plains dotted with pumping oil jacks that looked like giant robotic grasshoppers pecking the ground.

  Off the main road, we followed dirt paths marked by cattle guards and rusted mailboxes. At the entrance to the farm an aluminum metal gate in the fence was meant to keep out more than to keep in. The only farm animal they owned was an aged horse named Clipper. In the distance, I spotted their two-bedroom home covered in gray slate roofing tiles. Nothing there changed except the height of the trees.

  Life on the farm was as dull as Boars Head. Grandma woke us every morning just after dawn. “Brush your teeth, then come get your breakfast.”

  At home I never brushed my teeth unless my gums were puffy and bleeding. I remembered Mom’s instructions: “Do what you’re told.” So I did, careful to save water.

  On the farm, water was as precious as it had been when we were stealing it from Webb’s Grocery. We filled their porcelain tub with claw feet with one inch of water, no more. They had a toilet, but we were encouraged to use their outhouse. They used a well with a hand pump that collected rainwater. David and I took turns trying to jack it and judging the water level based on how many thrusts it took before we were rewarded with ice-cold, clear water. Grandma Crews made sure we washed up before every meal. Instead of running our hands under a faucet, they kept a bowl and pitcher of water in a mudroom. With teeth brushed and hands cleaned, I joined David in their cramped kitchen, where a plate of food awaited me. I slid into one of the silver metal chairs with the bright teal vinyl cushions that matched the Formica table. David signed, “Look,” and pointed up to the wall.

  I glanced up at the hanging knickknacks. “What?” I signed back.

  With her back to us scrubbing dishes by hand, Grandma Crews kept talking. “Kambri, I don’t know how you like your breakfast, but there’s ketchup, salt, pepper, and jelly right there on the table.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I answered, noticing the condiment caddy. I looked back at David, who was waving his hand to get my attention.

  “Look,” he persisted. “See that leather thing?”

  I nodded and signed, “What is it?”

  He spelled out, “R-A-Z-O-R S-T-R-A-P.”

  My body went stiff. A “razor strap” was the instrument of terror from my father’s childhood. Some fathers might have a “big fish” story they liked to tell, but my dad’s recollections were filled with tales of torture. His beatings with a razor strap now had evidentiary proof, hanging a mere foot from my grandmother’s grasp.

  Grandma Crews turned around and I darted my eyes from the wall back to my food.

  “You must be hungry. You two aren’t making a peep!”

  After breakfast we played in the dirt sandbox built next to a broken-down Chevy pickup just like ours, only older.

  “Why do you think they keep that strap hanging in the kitchen?” I asked David.

  “So they can grab it in a hurry, I bet.”

  Watching Grandpa Crews shuffle around the property with the arthritis paining his joints, I couldn’t imagine him hurting anyone or anything. His voice was soft and steady. He sometimes whistled when he said an S, making my skin break into goose bumps. I watched as he gently brushed and saddled Clipper, then helped boost me up into the seat. As he led us at a slow pace, he shared stories of tornadoes destroying crops and how the old pieces of farm equipment that were rusting away used to work in the olden days. I took pictures with my first camera, a windup Kodak with a flashbulb, which I had received for my seventh birthday.

  My favorite part of the farm was Grandpa Crews’s pet cemetery. He had buried each animal with its own handmade tombstone and had a special memory to recount about them all. “This old cat liked to kill mice and leave ’em on our doorstep. A snake got to her. This boy used to bite my tires till he got too close to one an
d got run over. And you remember him. He was a good ol’ dog that died at a ripe ol’ age, like I’m going to.”

  “When Clipper dies, will he be buried here?”

  “Nah,” he chuckled. “He’s too big a boy. I don’t know what we’ll do with him when his day comes.”

  When we turned back to the barn to unsaddle Clipper, I was overcome with sadness. Grandpa Crews wasn’t the tyrant Dad had made him out to be. He had taken so much time with me and made me feel like his only grandchild even though he had dozens. He was my pen pal and we even had a running joke between us about how I could beat him in a spelling bee though I was only a fifth grader. This convinced me that I was his favorite grandchild, a fact I decided to keep to myself so my cousins wouldn’t get jealous.

  Religion permeated every aspect of life on the farm. It controlled musical taste and television programming. Attendance at weekly church services was mandatory. Even our language was censored. The word hate was strictly forbidden, enforced vigorously by Grandma Crews. Lectures about God’s goodness crept into every conversation no matter how banal. As members of the Assembly of God church, Dad’s family devoted themselves to the Lord’s work and relentlessly recruited new members.

  At holiday gatherings, the family swapped stories of miraculous divine healing. The wheelchair-bound walked, blind men saw, broken bones mended, and even cavities disappeared. Inexplicably, no deaf person was ever cured, a fact not lost on Dad.

  “They’re hypocrites,” he signed when the subject came up. “They lie and gossip. They judge. They aren’t true Christians.”

  Dad could hardly tolerate this aspect of his family and never attended church. Being on the farm made him visibly uncomfortable.

  At home in Montgomery, I could only remember going to church twice. Mom’s relationship with God was born out of fear of the unknown, and although she didn’t attend services she sent money instead. Not supporting the church would be like not mailing a chain letter. “Good things always happen when we pay our tithes,” she said as she filled out a check for fifty dollars. “Once, after I stopped, your daddy lost his job.” She ripped the check out of the book, stuffed it in an envelope, and sealed it shut. “Let’s hope they don’t cash this till Friday, because that’s when we get paid.”