Violence Takes Terrible Toll On Kids

If I recall, their names were Shirley and Alfred, but I was younger than 10 years old then, and the memories are hard to dredge up. I know they had two children, a boy and a girl.

And I know that one night, Shirley ran shrieking to our door, with Alfred close behind her with a carving knife in his fist. My father went out to calm him down.

They moved away not long after, and we didn’t hear anything of them until a few years later.

Mom came home from the supermarket looking stricken. She had run into Shirley, and Shirley had told her a horror story.

It seems Alfred had come in one day as she was standing at the sink with her back to the room.

“How are the kids?” he asked.

“Hungry,” she said. “I’m trying to get dinner.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he told her. “Where they’re going, they won’t ever be hungry again.”

A freeze. An instant for the unthinkable to be thought. And then it all happened at once.

She wheeled around. He already had a gun in his hand. The children were just coming down the stairs. She screamed at them to go back upstairs.

“He killed my babies,” she told my mother. He shot Shirley, too, but she survived with a bullet in her skull.

I’ve been thinking about those children a lot lately. Thinking about a girl I knew whose parents once brawled on the front walk - he was holding her by the hair, caveman-style. Thinking about my friend Walter and the time I was over at his house when his father went on a rampage and Walt was humiliated until I told him it was nothing I hadn’t seen at home.

I’ve been thinking about all those old times because of a boy I will call Johnny.

He’s young - not even kindergarten age - but it’s easy to forget that looking at the way he carries himself. He meets strangers with a direct look and an emphatic handshake, and it’s not hard to believe you are in the presence of some future Fortune 500 executive.

Johnny’s family - a little sister, a mom and dad - moved into our neighborhood last year. They were an attractive young family.

We never suspected the child’s father was beating his mother. Never guessed he slammed her against walls and choked her. Never dreamed that behind closed doors, he threatened to kill her.

When she confided in my wife, we were stunned. The couple is in the process of divorce now, but the woman still is terrified. The other day, she dropped off a copy of her will for safekeeping.

As she did, I found myself staring at Johnny. The child is tiny and tough and determined to be a man about it, even as his world spins end over end. I can’t help wondering how I must have been at that age, back when my old man was using his fists on my mom.

“I’ve never forgiven him,” I said to myself as much as to my wife. And it’s true. The man has been dead 20 years, and long ago, I made peace with his distance and his drinking. But I can’t forgive him for being a bully.

He committed the violence as Johnny’s father did and as I suspect many abusers do - in front of his children, as though, because they are young, they also are blind and deaf, unable to understand. Or to ache.

I’ve long wondered how a person can choose to bring horror into his own home. But Alfred and Shirley’s children never grew to wonder. And do you know, no matter how hard I try, I can’t quite remember their names? Just the fact of their deaths.

Little Johnny’s father is legally prohibited from entering their house. His mom has new locks, a new alarm system and a new surfeit of fear.

Sometimes, I look over there and breathe a prayer for all the children of domestic violence, a whispered lament for the things we have suffered and seen.

xxxx