Benjamin and the Family Gathering

Ben was six years old when he heard his mother weeping, snarling, and, to his amazement, she seemed to be gnashing her teeth. He sneaked downstairs and heard the screams. All his brothers were either in their rooms or out of the house. Why hadn't they heard this or done anything? The door from which the screams were coming was definitely his parents’ room. His older brother Reuben grabbed his shoulder and clasped a huge, callused hand around his mouth, preventing him from crying out.

“You don't want to see this,” Reuben said, his tone scaring Ben even more than the screams coming from that doorway. “You don't want that scene in your head, little man. There are some things I think I need to protect you against, and this is one of them.”

Ben said nothing but allowed himself to be carried away to his room, where he shared a bed with one brother, and the room held five others—all brothers. Since Ben was the youngest, and Joseph was the next youngest, they had to have seven in their room while the other bedroom held the older five boys. Even though he was too young to really understand it at the time, it dawned on him in retrospect just how unsanitary the place he lived in really was. It wasn't like hoarders you see on the television shows nowadays, but it had a certain amount of filth that Ben recollected only years later.

The screams abruptly stopped, and at that point, two of his older brothers scrambled into the bedroom and led those boys outdoors.

The place they lived was miles from anywhere, as he liked to say years later, so the older brothers dragged them all into the wooded area and waited. The bugs were nasty, and the humidity was unusually oppressive that evening, but the older brothers warned them sternly to shut their mouths if they wanted to be safe.

Later, Ben heard his older brothers snapping at each other—something he never learned to delete from his memory. It was an undeniable feeling of tenseness that moved him to his core, like a drug. Of course, he never knew what drugs were at that age, but he witnessed his older brothers drinking and smoking something that smelled particularly icky compared to the cigarettes his father and mother smoked. The words he heard he knew he should never say in school, but the anger was palpable, and if he could have done something about it, he would have.

When he asked when they could go back to the house, his oldest brothers presented sleeping bags and bug spray. Ben wasn't too sure about this, but he figured his brothers knew what was best and that they would take care of him better than Mom and Dad could.

When he woke up in the cold and dew of that October morning, he turned his aching neck to his left. What was his mother doing there, lying next to them? She wasn’t there last night. Hadn’t his brothers seen her? Ben tried to move but was paralyzed, and he could feel his eyes brimming with tears. A shadow loomed over him, and Ben saw Reuben had finally woken up. Why couldn’t he take his eyes off his mother, who was still lying face down on the ground? He stuck out a tiny finger, poking his mother. She did not move. After several sob-filled cries of “Mom” repeated over and over, Reuben quickly scooped up his little brother, tears filling his eyes as well.

Reuben woke up the rest of the brothers and shooed them toward the rusty Ford Econoline. Ben could hardly believe they were leaving his mother face down in the cold grass.

For a couple of days, Ben could never be too certain about how long it was, as the days seemed to melt into each other like snow and rain on a November day. They stayed in the small town in Montana, where most people just minded their own business and never talked to each other too much. Reuben had been asked by the local sheriff what brought them into town, and Ben remembered Reuben telling him that their father had been drinking a lot lately and they thought it would be better if they just stayed in town for a bit.

“I can go out and check on him and your ma,” he drawled in a western accent that seemed more natural to Wyoming than Montana.

“You know how he gets,” Reuben told him. “Mean as a rattlesnake and stupid as a thirteen-year-old retard in a kindergarten class.”

“You sure about that?” the sheriff replied, sounding quite concerned.

“Yeah,” Reuben said, his eyes only shifting slightly. “Ma can handle herself when the old man starts drinking. Always has.”

“Yeah, I guess you're right. Just let me know if I can help, and I'll throw the old buzzard in jail a few days to dry him out.”

“We'd appreciate that, and if we need it, we’ll give you a call.”

Ben took a step forward and was about to blurt out what he’d seen, but Simeon gripped his arm painfully and pulled him back. Ben shut up.

When they finally returned to the house a week later, their mother was no longer lying in the same spot, and even though Ben had an inkling of what happened—as he had seen a few pets of his die or be killed, particularly by his father when he was on a raging drunk or acting wild when he took or smoked some kind of stinky powder—he couldn't quite understand that his mother was never coming back, and that they didn't have some kind of funeral disturbed his young mind, though he had no idea how to articulate that feeling to his brothers.

For the next three weeks, just up until Thanksgiving, Ben kept away from his father and was thankful his brothers were there to feed him and to keep the ranch running.

Ben knew his father had guns and wondered why his brothers never took them. Maybe he would find a gun and use it. He knew where they were kept. He knew where Dad kept the key to the cabinet. That’s what he’d do, just like the comic book heroes his brother Joseph read to him all the time. He pictured his father on one of his drug-fueled rampages and Ben squeezing the trigger, the gun knocking him to the floor as the bullet tore a huge hole in the man.

When he considered all the crazy things his father had done, Ben realized the rampages he could handle; it was the quiet, evil things his father would do that scared him the most.

It was a day before Thanksgiving, and he was watching his father in the kitchen, all by himself, while all the older sons were out doing their chores and taking care of animals, hunting turkey or something so that they'd have fresh meat to eat. Father stood at the oaken countertop, holding a knife—one of those Ben had seen his father and his brothers use to cut meat when they butchered a steer or skinned a deer or something like that. His father started talking to himself. At first, the words were not discernible, but then Ben began to recognize what he was saying.

“Our father,” his father said in a strange monotone, eyes bloodshot and glazed, nose dripping, and spit drooling out of his mouth. “Which art in heaven.” And then he would laugh. “Yeah! In heaven! Too far away from here. Too bad Mamie wasn't there with you!”

Mamie, Ben knew, was his mother's name.

“By the way,” he slurred, “I didn't actually mean for that to happen to her. Just got a little out of hand and wished I could take that one back.” And then he laughed uncontrollably for a few seconds, coughing wildly, spitting viciously right on the floor.

Ben wanted to run, but found he could only watch in great horror and unquenchable fascination.

His father spun around once, fell to the floor, got up again, still holding the knife. For a second, it looked like his father was glaring straight into Ben's little brown eyes, and just before Ben was going to avert his gaze, his father blinked and seemed as though he were looking beyond or even through him.

“Hallowed by thy name,” he said and looked at his pinky finger on his left hand. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And at the word heaven, he laughed so maniacally that Ben started to walk away, but still he just stared as though he were powerless to pull himself away from this horrible scene. For a moment, he was certain his father was going to collapse from laughing so hard.

“Give us this day our daily bread! Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors! Come on, you know that can't ever happen!” At that, he stabbed the knife into the oaken countertop only fractions of an inch from that pinky finger.

Ben screamed silently, not even letting out a breath, though he badly wanted to screech aloud and make the whole countryside hear him. Why didn’t his brothers come home? They had to see this, but Ben could not move, and he could not say a word, and he wondered if he was even breathing. He felt the pulse of his heart inside his head like a rock drummer.

“Ahh!” His father screamed quietly but with such effort that Ben thought his father's eyes would either pop out or start bleeding. His father finally pried the knife from the counter but sent it flying across the kitchen in the effort, hitting pots and pans, making a terrible racket. Still, Ben did not move.

“And lead us not into temptation!” His father laughed again. “So, does that mean you will lead us into temptation? C'est la vie? Why would you lead your own people into temptation? Wait, here's the answer. But deliver us from evil! Yeah! Lead us into temptation so you can deliver us from evil.”

Father stood quiet for a moment, staring at his hand, then back to the knife, then back to his hand, wiggling his pinky with the left hand. Then he placed that hand flat on the countertop.

“Oh God,” his father said more as a desperate, sick prayer than an oath. And he laughed for a moment, then scowled for a moment, and then he seemed to cry for a moment. “Deliver us from evil? What about delivering me from myself? How do you do that? Tell me. TELL ME! Is that your ploy, oh God? You lead me into temptation so you can deliver us from evil—be the knight in shining armor? What kind of spiritual scam is that? You get the glory, but you're the one who got us into the trouble in the first place! What a crock! Is that what you did to the Pharaoh? Didn't you harden his heart? Again, what kind of God does that kind of thing? You make the Pharaoh harden his heart and then you get a chance to show off your powers? That's pretty cheap if you ask me. If the Pharaoh had relented, you wouldn’t have gotten to show off and kill all those people like you seemed to really want to do when you were in the Old Testament, huh?

“You get all ticked off at people and instead of finding a way to change them, to make them see your goodness, you commit genocide by wiping out the entire planet except for a dysfunctional family who spawned some nasty people themselves, like Lot.”

Then he peered at his hand again and slammed the point into the wood so close to that pinky, Ben swore he could see his father make just a little slice into the flesh, enough to make some red dribble.

“And the Catholics just end it there, don't they? Deliver us from evil. The Lutherans and other crazy Protestants who actually recite this little prayer end it with 'For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen.' What a cute little ending; I like the Catholic version myself.”

He pulled the knife out of the wood again and lifted it to his face. He touched the point to his cheek, and it looked like Father pressed hard enough for the point to draw a little blood. It was then Ben realized the sight of blood did not bother him at all; in fact, just the opposite—it fascinated him, even excited him.

As he watched, mesmerized, hypnotized, unable to withdraw, barely able to breathe, barely able to move, his father began mumbling to himself.

Ben thought about demons and wondered if Father hadn’t been listening to one as he mumbled unintelligibly. As his father's voice increased in volume, his diction became clearer and quite understandable.

“I'm gonna cut my pinky off, and I'm gonna wear it round my neck. I'm gonna cut my pinky off, and I'm gonna take a bite. I'm gonna cut my pinky off, and I'm gonna wear it round my neck. I'm gonna cut my pinky off just for spite.”

In one swift motion, Ben’s father brought the knife down on that pinky, and Ben watched in horror and fascination while his father sliced it off and placed the pinky in his mouth. The man bit down hard, trying to tear off a piece of flesh. Ben stared at the blood slowly flowing from that finger and from that now pinky-less hand. What was his father doing? What made him do what he was doing? The man’s eyes were still glazed over, and when his father began vomiting, Ben’s six-year-old brain had had enough, so he left.

Later that evening, when his brothers finally came home from the fields, Ben looked for Reuben because he really wanted to tell him what he had seen their father do.

Ben thought about running the incident by Dan and Asher, but he didn't want to tell them because there was something weird about them that Ben was a little suspicious of. He loved all his brothers, but there were those he observed taking after their father a little too much. They too would drink that stinky liquid and even take some of the powdery stuff Father put in his nose. They would sometimes put the powder in a glass thing, take a match to it, and smoke it like it was a pipe, and then they would act like they were completely out of their minds, and they would swear and yell and threaten to go looking for their father. No, Dan and Asher were not the right brothers to tell.

“What happened in here?” Ben heard Reuben yell as he finally got into the kitchen. “Ben? You shouldn’t be seeing this.”

“But Reuben,” Ben said quietly. “I saw it.”

“What do you mean, you saw it?”

“I saw what happened,” Ben said, wondering if he was smiling slightly. He forced himself to stop.

Reuben looked at him, the expression on his face showing disgust layered with concern. Ben couldn’t be sure about what he was concerned about, but he figured it had something to do with him, and maybe something else.

“You need to tell me exactly what you saw,” Reuben said. “Don't leave anything out.”

Ben told him the complete story, leaving nothing out.