THANKS SO MUCH FOR LETTING ME PRACTICE. UPLOADING PHOTOS, ETC., IS ALL NEW FOR ME. MAYBE THIS SIZE WILL LET YOU READ THE COMMENTS BY JUDY BLUNT.

The following is an excerpt from my book. Any and all comments are welcome.















PROLOGUE


During my mother’s life with my dad, he gave her many opportunities to remember what her sister Virginia, or “Din,” told her when she first started dating him. “You don’t want to get serious about that guy.”
“Why not? I thought you liked him,” Mom asked.
“I thought I liked him, too, until someone pointed out that all his horses are head-shy.” Din said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom demanded.
Din said, “It means he beats them over the head with a fence post because he can’t do enough damage with a whip.”
“I don’t believe that!” Mom retorted.
“If you don’t believe me, ask a horseman,” Din said.
Mom laughed and told Din she thought that was a funny way to judge a man. “Anyway, what does that have to do with me?”


CATHERINE

It’s a cold, windy day in spring. Dad and I are trying to bring in some horses that have been running out all winter. They are thin, with shaggy, long winter hair. One mare has a new-born colt. He is in the pickup and I am on Minn, our old white kid horse. The horses are wild and won’t respond to my efforts to herd them toward the corrals. The terrain where we are is too rough for Dad to do much with the pickup, so about all he is doing is screaming at me from half a mile away. In that wind, I don’t know for sure what he is screaming about, or what he wants me to do.
Suddenly the horses start milling around in confusion, and I am able to ride right up to them. Bewildered, I see that the mother of the baby colt has her head down. She is bleeding through the nose, and I can hear gurgling. She nickers softly to her colt. Then the baby colt falls dead and almost at the same moment I realize that he is shooting. I don’t know if he is shooting at me or the horses. I am so scared that I just blank out. I see the rest of the slaughter as from a distance, through kind of a tunnel. Two more young horses hump up as the bullets hit them in the “guts,” and the mare is now on the ground, breathing her last. I’m paralyzed. I can’t even climb down from Minn to protect myself. Another horse goes down squealing in agony.
The rest of the day is forever erased from my memory, except for the never-ending scene of the dying horses and my conviction that I will never live to be an adult.


FIONA

She is six, and she and Catherine have been told to go bring in the sheep. She is trotting along behind the band, the yellow clouds of dust kicked up by their sharp hooves billowing around her and settling on her freckled arms and sun-bleached hair. She starts picking up pretty rocks and putting them in a pouch she fashioned in her shirt-tail. Suddenly, as she straightens up with a new treasure, there he is, looming huge right behind her. She hears, “Git them sheep on the run, you sonovabitch!”
She feels the big boot hit her in the spine. Her rocks go flying. As she comes back to consciousness, all she can remember is the terror. She’s on her feet, and they are moving, the sheep are still in front of her, but he has disappeared. When she looks back, she’s even more terrified. She is way down the coulee, a long way from where she was just a split second before when he kicked her. She realizes she has a big bruise on the side of her head, and her hands are cut and bleeding.
The awestruck fear stays with her all through the chore of watering and penning the sheep. She eats her supper in silence, her head aching, big round eyes watching him from the end of the table, wondering how he made her forget going all that way with the sheep. She doesn’t remember him kicking her down until a long time later.


PRIS

He is trashing the house again. He has already knocked Mom across the room, blackening her eye. He tips over the table, smashing the half finished meal and dishes, and rips down the soot filled stove pipe. The baby is screaming in her crib. The older girls are hanging on his arm begging him to stop. They go flying when he swings his big arm. Prissie runs and climbs up in the old rocking chair and starts rocking furiously. She slaps herself on the cheeks over and over with both hands, crying frantically, “You don’t have to beat me, Daddy. I’ll slap myself! See, Daddy, I’m slapping myself!” She’s three years old.


BARBIE

She is screaming, dancing and side-stepping around the table; I can see her back through the window facing the camper trailer where I slept until the crashes and screams launched me to my feet, trembling in fear; the light cold and gray like the terror, landing on her and me through our respective windows. Please Daddy; Please Daddy; Please Daddy Honey; the refrain so familiar, repeated daily, weekly since I've been able to understand words. “Please Daddy, don=t kill anybody else”, her voice is a shriek, keening like the cold wind racing between the trailer and gray shabby house.
Oh, God, no, please. He didn't. Oh, God. He's done it, finally done it. But they're not all dead yet. I must help, it's my job, he likes me best. I have to hurry--into the nightmare. He hates Naomi, but she's not dead, dancing behind the window, so it must be Mom who he hates or Fiona who he also hates. I will hurry maybe I can save Pris or Catherine or maybe the other one who is not dead yet.
My stomach is knotted, sick. Cold. stiff fingers try to zip my jeans, feet resist thrusts at my tattered sneakers; no need to be quiet this time, shaky legs carry me through the kitchen door. Cautious now, senses flaring testing the scene: heating stove on its back, contents of the pot belly regurgitated, black soot, gray ashes, framing scuffled footprints on cabbage flower linoleum. Table legs turned up, smashed dishes, food stuck on walls. No blood; no prone body. White faces, trembling lips, no tears--too much terror for tears--Mom's black eye. Dawning relief. Two walls and the whistling wind transmuting her words, “Please Daddy don't hit anybody else,” into the certainty that this was the day we have awaited for years, our last on earth. If he kills one he will kill us all. No, not today. The terror continues.


NAOMI

Breakfast is over; Mom and Dad are sitting at the table finishing their coffee. Naomi, age five, quietly sidles up to Mom, hoping for a touch or hug, any small show of affection. As she approaches, she rolls her feet to the outside edges, so her footsteps won’t make noise. Her shoes are run over from her established style of walking.
Trying to stay far away from Dad, she gently leans on Mom’s shoulder. Mom’s arm slides around her waist. Dad’s head jerks up from his newspaper. “Quit hangin’ on yer mother, you sonovabitch!” Mom starts guiltily and snatches her arm back. Dad swivels in his chair, and planting his boot in Naomi’s small chest, shoves her with his foot as if she was an obnoxious dog. She goes flying, scrambles to her feet and scuttles out the door, still rolling her feet outward for silence.


MOM
March 18, 1952

My, I hope no one ever reads this journal but me. They’ll sure think I’m a chronic complainer if they do. Really it’s just letting off steam in a place where it won’t hurt anybody. I have sense enough to know that to go around all the time with that stuff in your head and to be eternally choking it off and not letting any of it escape is unhealthy and liable to lead to many bad things, but I can’t go around taking it out on the family. My girls don’t deserve such treatment. How it tickles me to watch them when they are engrossed in something the way they were with that calf this morning – and then coming out to wash their hands and so eager to tell me all about it. I hope they will always eagerly tell me every little detail of what interests them.
And Catherine! I wish I could tell her or let her know in some way how well I know what she thinks about, and what bothers her. I‘m sure I could help her to see plainly –Oh well –Anyway, she knows I’m always here for her to call on when she needs me, and I’m always for her – and all my little girls, one hundred percent. That helps some, I hope. I guess I’m not really a very good and wise mother, but I do the best I know how, and my love is unlimited. And they do have a good father. That much I managed to do. In fact, he is a wonderful father. I hope they will always remember what he has given them -– not money and things, but love and understanding. It makes a lump in my throat to see him carefully and patiently explain something to them, when they come to him for information So many men are so completely uninterested in their children.
Oh dear! My fountain pen is running dry and I’m afraid I’ll wake him up if I get up to hunt for ink, and that would be bad. More later.

My first book, titled "Dancing on His Grave" has been self-published, and is available at www.Trafford.com/06-0409. The website contains excerpts from the book and details about myself, my mother and my four sisters' lifelong dealings with a narcissistic sociopath. I'm putting the finishing touches on a sequel, titled "Walking Wounded," and have the third book in the trilogy, tentatively titled "Chasing Ghosts," in skeleton form.

I'd love to hear from people who share with me the tragedy of domestic abuse including sexual abuse and incest. My emphasis is on the strength and endurance of the human spirit, and the need to break the chain of abuse before it passes to the next generation.

Barbara Richard