My older brother was a talented kid with a lot of patience, who could build, and then fly, the most beautiful and perfectly constructed model airplanes. My favorite of his models was a 'Buccaneer' powered by a tiny gasoline powered Canon model airplane engine. He flew these models in local fields, schoolyards and in the summer, on the fields adjoining my family's summer cottage at Conneaut Lake.Most of these model planes were carefully built on a work bench in our Pleasant Hills basement. For many years, a few of these magnificent model planes hung, proudly displayed, from the basement ceiling.
Above the planes and nearby in the basement, carefully placed in the rafters, were several of my father's rifles and his engraved military sword from his 1920's years as a student at Stanton Military Academy in Staunton Virginia. (Supposedly Dad,had beat up his high school principal and Granddad P had sent him off to Staunton to learn some discipline). Also stuck up in those rafters, a Japanese sword somehow belonging to my mother, its history or how she came by it unknown.
Below the rafters, next to the hughe old gas furnace were some chairs (later a couch and bookcase), and a small table. In front of the chairs and furnace was a large open area. In the middle of that open area was a 4 inch round steel post supporting a steel girder which spanned the length of the basement supporting the first floor above.
With metal roller skates strapped to my shoes and my dad's old 78 rpm victrola blaring 'Roaming In The Gloaming' I loved to skate round and round that center pole. That was one of my favorite indoor sports during the long and harsh winter months.
Suddenly he fired.
The pellet, about 4x the mass of a BB, sunk into my left leg just above and to the right of my left knee and is still there. And so is a discolored scar.
Crying, I kicked the skates off and ran up the steps to my mother who gave me little comfort other than telling me to go upstairs and put a bandage on it and to stop being such a cry baby.
This woman, who once rocked and cared for me with feelings and compassion, now seemed to have lost her capacity to respond, to feel, to love**. I was about 8 then and abusing me was slowly becoming something of a family sport, at least by my brother and sadly my.mother. Or so it seemed.
No one took me to a Doctor that day. In later years, as an adult I realized mother would have had a hard time explaining how the pellet ended up in my leg.
Seems like when one person in a group is bullied (or abused), others in the group might join in. That seemed to be happening in my home. After witnessing some of my mother's abuse of me, my brother seemed more prone to join in. If I would break free and run away from a serious whipping , my brother was sent to drag me back. And somehow, for reasons I never understood, he seemed to enjoy it.
A few years later a similar event happened again. This time my brother was sitting on the floor near the furnace playing with my octagon barrel 1906 .22 Winchester rifle which had been given to my father when he was a child by his dad. in turn my father gave it to me.
The rifle had a very short barrel and was a perfect first gun for a young man. It was a 'pump' rifle. You armed it by pulling a sliding pump handle located on the bottom of the barrel. My father had given it to me on my recent 10th birthday. I never kept that rifle loaded. I was not allowed to have it loaded in the house.
As I walked across the basement, my brother called me over. Now he was squatting, almost laying on the floor with the rifle pointed towards the ceiling. As I approached, he asked me to look at the pump handle. As I bent over the gun fired. The bullet grazed my right forehead and continued, passing through the double planked ceiling above, through the rug and ended up stuck in the bottom of the coffee table in the living room above. As far as I know the hole in the ceiling is still there.
Fortunately I was badly scared and frightened but wasn't seriously hurt. But when I complained to my mother that I could have been killed, she basically ignored me. What if anything she said later to my brother, I don't know.
Most parents would have been furious. Most would have removed the guns from their storage area in the basement ceiling rafters and locked them up. Mine did nothing.
Was it jealousy on my brothers part? Or was it just an accident? Possibly. By then I was becoming my dad's favorite. My sister had been his favorite, but she was going off to college soon.
But my brother was clearly his mother's favorite, so I don't know if he really was jealous.
Maybe he felt the rifle should have been given to him. Maybe he had a darker motive. I don't know. In any event, he had loaded the gun. He had pulled the trigger. At the time, he claimed it was an accident. Maybe it was.
He would often taunt me by telling me bad bad things were going to happen to me. Early in the year my sister left for college I was pretty sick with some kind of virus. My parents hired a baby sitter to watch me as they took my brother somewhere for the evening. I woke up just before dawn with my still dressed and scowling brother standing over the bed, telling a bizarre story about someone tied to a bed, in so much pain, that they had chewed off their arm trying to get free.
Then even more sadistic, he told me that as a good "club" member, he was going to tie me to the bed. The threat seemed real and I was really scared. That never happened of course, but this type of psychological abuse from both my mother and brother was common in our house.
My brother, no matter how sadistic he appeared, actually did have a lot of talents and interests including woodworking. In about 1948 or so he even made a pair of water skis before water skis were generally available where we lived.
I didn't see him much during his college years. He had tried as a chemistry major at Penn State but didn't do well. Then he went off to another school the University of Arizona and majored, of all things, in psychology. After graduating he went on to graduate school at Florida State.
My wife and I journeyed to his wedding in Tallahassee 1960. He married Ingrid, a beautiful, very bright and very talented woman, who was a fellow student, and who was fluent in six languages. He and his wife later visited us for Christmas 1962. He had matured and seemed much more civil, even polite and talked positively. His marriage seemed to have helped him in a good way. He claimed we should be 'closer' as brothers. But I was a bit leery and noticed he was drinking what seemed to be an excessive amount of wine.
Finishing up his Phd in 1963 and seeming much more rational, he and his charming wife eventually convinced us to move near them so I could finish my own education and we could do things together and be more of a family. With more than some hesitation, I did that. We ocasionally played golf, went on a few weekend camping trips and visited on holidays. During those positive times and events I watched sadly as alcohol and drugs slowly consumed him and eventually destroyed his first marriage. He remarried in 1973 but alcohol, drugs and women quickly ended that marriage also. He began filling his house and yard with what many would call junk. Hoarding I guess you call it. The booze contined to rule. Friends told me he often failed to show up for classes he was teaching.
Some 20 or so years after the Winchester rifle accident, on a deer hunting trip with friends Tom Binkey, Ed Hollier and my brother near Ranger, Texas, my brother fired toward me again. Later he claimed he saw and was shooting at a deer. I was standing nearly 200 yards away and there was no deer near me. This time a 30.06 bullet cracked a branch off just a few feet from my head. By then my brother, even though a tenured college professor, was a serious alcoholic and worse. I guess the near fatal incident could have been carelessness by a drunk. I'll never know.
Shortly after the near accident while hunting I began phasing out most contact with him. After another questionable accident in the summer of 1973 and his verbal pledge, made during an alcoholic stupor, that "he would see me dead", on the advice of professionals, I cut most ties.
There were and had been many other abusive and even criminal events by him over all the years. They continued much of my lifetime.
Finally in the 1990's, on discovery of some large insurance policies and acting under advice from legal folks including lawyers trying to help me, I authorized them to contact him and permanently terminate all further relationship with him.
Notes:
My grandfather had shown me by example and carefully taught me by example that family was the most important thing in life. But my dysfunctional immediate family didn't seem to absorb or comprehend the wisdom of granddad's ideals.
Sadly my mother and brother and much later but to lesser degree, even my sister, often and for affect, repeatedly echoed the words 'family' to the world alleging their younger brother (me) didn't care about his family. For me their private actions speak and spoke much louder and more honestly than their words..
How could I care or associate with the very people that had abused me? How could I possibly undo the stories they told others to protect themselves? I simply chose to walk away and tried to forget that part of my family.
Lawyers, acting in my behalf, notified each of these sadists not to contact me again.
