As I stare into the glowing flame of my candle I find myself back in the living room of my childhood home on Milwaukee Street. I am eight. Baby Steve is choking on his bottle. Mom and Dad are fighting. Dad says "what's the matter with that kid, why won't he drink right?", Mom says something's wrong with his throat. Dad says Steve is stubborn. He's less than two months old. Steve turns blue when he drinks his bottle…I have learned about God in school, I've just made my Holy Communion…"please God let the fighting stop…Don't let Steve die. Don't let Dad kill him…Mom, let me feed Steve. I can make him stop…
I am freezing on Gallows Hill. My toes are numb. "God let our fighting stop..let us find our way to each other."
A man dressed all in black leads us in a long prayer of contrition and repentance. I am so cold. An elderly woman whose son is in prison out West for abusing kids in a day care tells me he didn't do it and offers me one of her mittens. She puts her other hand in her pocket and says I should do the same. "Then we can each hold our candle with our warm hand," she says. I accept. Human kindness may be harbinger of the justice we are praying for on Gallows Hill tonight.
A woman who has been released from prison, her verdict for having abused a child reversed after many years, is singing like an angel now. We learn that the song she wrote in her cell kept her going twelve years. I'm shivering. I don't know if I can stand still much longer and I don't know if I can move either. I find myself back in the garage on East Platte in Colorado where I grew up. My brother is leaning over the trunk. Dad is making four of us watch while he beats him with a board for ruining film of our family in the early days. I close my eyes back then…and now.
If I was cross-examined on Gallows Hill tonight and the lawyer asked me if I "saw" my father hit Steve, I'd have to say no. "How did you know then, that he hit him if you didn't see it?" would be the next question. I'm shaking now from the cold just like in the garage only back then it made my body hard as nails so outside I was still. Still as I am standing here tonight. Afraid I can never move again like in the garage. "Never show you're scared. Nothing bad is happening. He shouldn't have played with the film in the trunk. Steve should have found me. I would have hurried and fixed the reels before Dad got home." I didn't want to see the board break on my brother. So, I closed my eyes I'd tell the cross-examiner. In fact, I left the garage and never remembered what happened in the garage until my forties. That was only one of hundreds of things I didn't remember and then did in a flood.
Amazing Grace. That's what we're singing now in closing. "Through many dangers, toils and snares we have already come…" I am remembering the dangers: Dad coming into my bedroom nights; him hitting us; Mom letting him. My shaking for years as I remembered those events in my forties and the long, dark underworld that was my childhood. Losing my brothers over the lawsuit and public exposure of our family secrets. My own six children ravaged by my not reckoning sooner with my childhood trauma. My husband and I missing each other because I put up lead inside my body to keep everyone out.