MEMOIR--"Daughters of the Shadow Men" Chapter 24 When Daddy drank rub alcohol

Chapter twenty four

(I announced I would not post any more of the chapters of my memoir, Daughters of the Shadow Men Volume 1, in my blog. I waited and waited for inspiration to come off line. I have waited in vain. Apparently I am all done with writing in isolation until I have enough material for Volume 1 in order to spare the family from the public humiliation of seeing our family history in my blog going out to the whole world, although I estimate only about 30 people might be reading on a daily basis. So now I am back to putting my memoirs of my life in the wild west of yesteryear online as well as aiming for a book. I think my family would rather I did this than not write my memoirs at all)

I was always in a quandary about my dad who was my teacher in the art of cow punching. I generally divided him into the good dad and the bad dad, who mainly existed on weekends which he reserved for getting drunk. During the week he was an admirable hard working dad who knew how to do everything on a ranch, knew when it was time to clean the ditches and get ready for planting, when it was time to cut the hay, how to train a horse to work with cattle, and when to round up the cattle on the winter range in the big spring round up. He even knew how to tell funny stories and for years he would tell some of his stories to my girlfriend Connie when she came to visit from Escalante. As I recall she was the only one who was privileged to hear them, and this was not very long before I was taken out of that home to be sent away to school a year early because I appeared to be cracking up over my dad's drinking.
It was true I did start to crack up, but not before I developed chronic fatigue syndrome the year I turned twelve. We lost our precious hired girl that summer, Leah Coleman, who said she was going to stay home after working a month and get ready to move to Salt Lake to find a job and maybe go to school. I groaned at the very thought of the fruit and vegetables coming on and Leah not there to help us. I was not really surprised when I began to drag half way through the season and got worse and worse until I could barely drag myself out of bed in the morning. I tried to think what could possibly be wrong.
I tied it to that strange scarlet fever attack, as diagnosed by my mother and teacher, Jean Hansen, who finally decided it was not bad enough for scarlet fever. I was determined it was the worst thing I could possibly have. They were not going to rob me of that distinction. I had a bad feeling about that virus, and now I was dragging, no doubt going into rheumatic fever or possibly leukemia. Could I tell Mother and Dad? Best not, as nothing else had manifested yet and it took an awfully lot to impress either one of them. I knew it was probably bad to wait for something worse, but they would just think I was trying to get out of work. Get out of work? Who could live in that household and get out of work.
I thought well, I will just go ahead and die before I will become an invalid in this house unable to ride horses and punch cattle. That is what I lived for.
I can't tell you how relieved I was when my fatigue started to ease up when I had to stop bottling all day and go to school. I could sit down most of the blessed day and just do light school work, which tended to tax no one. Of course I still had to bottle in whatever hours I was home and on Saturday, but my work burden was considerably lifted. I did however think I probably still had whatever it was, it had just receded a short distance into the shadows, ready to strike again in some alarming fashion if provoked into it.
This turned out to be when my dad drank his second bottle of rubbing alcohol that winter. This infuriated Mother and she said she simply would not take him to the hospital, he could die for all she cared. He did lay on the couch unable to get up for several days. I was forced to go check on him every little while to see if he, indeed, was still alive. He turned sort of gray and beads of cold clammy sweat broke out on his forehead at one point. My theory is that this constituted more stress for me than I ordinarily experienced when he was drinking. He usually did not threaten to die right on our couch.
I knew Mother would never change her mind. She probably hoped he would die and was disappointed when he began to rally, because then he started to beg her to go into the bedroom for sex! Yes. I was not used to seeing my dad act like this. I could almost read his mind, “I am too sick too go find the hired man, so she is going to have to accommodate me like any good wife should.” We children were privy to this conversation which infuriated my mother more and more. Finally she cursed, “All right come on, you son of a bitch, and get it over with!”
They went in the bedroom in the afternoon, and since the bedroom door was warped and did not entirely close, by coming near it I was able to see and hear this bestial act of sex, which consisted of curses from my mother until mercifully it was over with. I vowed right then I would never have sex with a man, husband or not, unless I wanted to. This was going to be my rule.
I suppose the stress of wondering whether my dad was going to rally and then this violent act of sex on top of everything else did somewhat unhinge my mind. When Margie and I were washing the supper dishes after my dad and mother retired into the bedroom, I really despaired. I remember I broke down crying simply because I thought this grim state of affairs in our house was never going to end.
My sister Margie took one look at me crying and ran screaming into the bedroom, “Mother, Dad, Gerry is crying for no reason!” She meant I had not been struck and I was still crying.
They both ran out but I just ignored them. By that time I was sitting down at the table. Finally they all went to bed and left me there. I eventually just got tired of crying and went to bed.
I swear to you that is all that happened, but pretty soon I was told that I had suffered a nervous breakdown and Aunt Nethella had petitioned her sister Aunt Neta to take me into her home a year ahead of time, I presumed before I cracked up entirely , whatever that might consist of. She also told Mother and Dad not to work me so hard. I don't know how she knew how hard Mother, especially, worked us, but Mother must have been scared into doing more of the work herself. That is how I know I lived through the summer without dying of whatever ailment had manifested. Again, I knew somehow that ailment was pretty lethal, and had only been persuaded to retreat into the shadows but would come out again if I were the least bit severely stressed.
I obviously needed to be treated like a child, not like the children of alcoholics are often treated with no regard for the stress and strain inflicted every time the offending parent gets drunk. Mother was so frustrated with her life she thought nothing of escaping her unhappy lot, leaving her children to do all the labor required to keep a household going without the benefit of electricity or running water. People have no idea how much work that requires. Mother had become the master escape artist who set her children up to do a five hour bottling job and then ran away to play. I am sure that is how she kept from going crazy and murdering our father. I knew he was even more guilty of violating the marriage than she suspected, so who was I to blame her? She had gotten herself into a fine mess with such a husband, and there was no way out until we children were older. Until then she was determined we would at least do the household tasks she had come to hate. She did still do the ironing and cooked breakfast and was around to keep us safe when Daddy and his buddies invaded our territory on a drinking party.

Ranch Homestead book created for Boulder Heritage Festival by Sister Ann, and neices, Camille and Cheryl

The scenes are from a page featuring my mother and her store, government corral scenes west of the store, and my Grandfather King building 'rip gut' fence. Click to read print.

I just got my copy of this impressive book, the subject of much research by the authors, my nieces, Cheryl Roundy Cox and Camille Griffin Hall, and my sister Ann K. Roundy. The photos are all in color whenever possible. I thought this was a very original idea to trace the ranch history back to the original homesteads up to property owners of the present time. I am sure many will want to keep a copy of this book around. My sister Ann had the foundation send me one for my birthday. I will treasure it.
I also got a newsletter to which I subscribed listing other original books that will be available this summer to the festival. One is a cookbook with original paintings that features old pioneer recipes (I love those). The other book is a series of sketches of pioneer women of Boulder submitted by relatives and others. Cheryl said she got a good number of contributions so that should be another book of memory for people who have an interest in Boulder history. My sister Ann is also hurrying to see if she can finish a book she has been working on called The Escalante Staircase Monument and Me, featuring photographs along the way and her text. I can hardly wait to see that one!
I am very pleased to see publishing these books become an important part of the Boulder Heritage Foundation activities, especially since I am working on my memoirs about growing up there. I don't know that they will publish mine, but my niece has certainly encouraged me to overcome all the obstacles in my way and continue my writing of them.
My son Raymond King Shurtz is the other member of the Heritage Foundation who has been working on it from the beginning. He will emcee the music part of the 3 day festival held on the grounds of the Anazazi Indian Center, a lovely spot. Some of the history features will be done outside as well as inside the center in conference rooms. This year a Smithsonian roots of music display exhibit will be shown this summer. A Bake oven cook off dinner is always featured which is just delicious.
I have been very sorry not to make it up there this summer, but I have been involved in so many conflicts about the issues I am addressing in my memoirs that I decided to give it one more year or so before putting in an appearance. I don't want to run into any unpleasantness since I have been featuring my memoirs so far in my blog and have also been writing other pretty controversial entries. I wanted more people from Utah to read my blog but I expected there to be reactions.
My neo counter as you can check and see (click cities) suggests that a number of people from Utah have tapped into my blog. In fact my neo counter registers 85 hits from Cedar City, Utah, which puzzles me, as I know my relatives are not reading my blog to that extent, who live there.
But I grew up on ranches in Boulder and I did quite a lot of cow punching with my dad and Grandfather King. I was a child of the times when horses were even more important than they are now in the ranching world. Since my dad had no sons I had more opportunity to do boy's work than most girls, which was a mixed blessing for me and my sisters. We had no electricity or running water in the house when I lived there, so our work was double what it would be today or more, having to build fires all the time for heating, washing, cooking, and bottling. It's no wonder I developed chronic fatigue as a child which I attribute more to the stress I experienced from my dad's alcoholism which had tragic consequences in the King family.

MEMOIRS--Chapter 15--I try to warn another girl about the molester and Mother gets pregnant again

DAUGHTERS OF THE SHADOW MEN

Chapter fifteen

After Bill quit working for Daddy I did not pay attention to what he was doing until Mother or somebody noted that he was 'courting' the widow Baker. I was horrified, but it was true. Bill was driving to Boulder in his old vehicle and stopping to visit Maggie. Now he had somehow got into her good graces enough to be allowed in the house among her whole flock of tasty children, three little girls, under ten, and three boys, older. If he should get a chance I thought he would mess with either girls or boys, but who I figured attracted him the most was not Maggie, with her long stringy hair and her careworn face, but Cleo, her ten year old daughter who looked exactly like Shirley Temple!
I had not even warned anyone what a bad character he was. If anything happened to one of those children it would surely be partly my fault. Cleo was best friends at school with Marilyn who lived in Salt Gulch. Marilyn even stayed there occasionally when there was some reason she wanted to stay all night in Boulder. Since I had also made friends with Marilyn and even gone to visit her a time or two, since she lived just beyond the Coleman place, I decided I would try to talk to Marilyn and tell her what danger was lurking in Cleo's mother allowing Bill even close to her children.

I got Marilyn's attention at school at recess and then realized I would need to tell her what Bill had done to me in order to get her to believe she must warn Cleo. I started to tell her about the molesting but at the last minute I just could not bring myself to say what Bill had done to me. It was just too big a thing for me to do, too full of the possibilities of dire consequences. So instead I found myself telling her that Bill had molested Cleo! She looked at me startled but didn't say a word while I described everything Bill had done to me, only I said he did it to Cleo! Marilyn never did say a word. She just turned and left.
I was horrified at myself for telling such lies. As if Marilyn was going to believe me. She knew very well that Cleo never talked to me. She was picky about her friends and I was not one of them, since I was only eight. While I was pondering the possible consequences of these lies I had told for a few days, Marilyn apparently got a chance to tell Cleo what I said. One day Mother and Dad went to Boulder for the mail and some other business. They left us older children home in Salt Gulch. Cleo must have seen them pass the Baker place and she got on the phone and kept ringing until I answered.
When she got me on the phone she started screaming at me that she would tell my mother and dad and have me arrested for slander if I did not stop telling these horrible lies about her. I apologized and said, “I am sorry. I will never do it again.”
She hung up, and I wondered how I would ever face her again in school. I just did not know what to do next. I was still thinking about it when I realized that Bill was no longer stopping to her place, in fact he did not even seem to be still in town. It was true! I made a few careful inquiries, but nobody confessed to knowing anything. Still Bill had disappeared as though off the face of the earth!
Naturally I had to conclude his leaving town had something to do with what I told Marilyn he had done to Cleo. I waited for Mother and Dad to say something to me, but they did not act like they knew anything about my horrible lies. I thought and thought and decided Cleo in her great indignation surely said something to her family, and her oldest brother who was around 20 or so and I believe worked for Grandpa King probably put two and two together and decided if I was talking about Bill and molesting, something was not right. Hayward could have been the one who said something to Bill to cause him to high tail it out of town.
I never heard another thing about Bill until I was a lot older. Probably sixty years later a man told one of my sisters that shortly before Bill disappeared he tried to come into a drinking party one of his relatives was throwing and he said somebody took a shot at Bill! I thought for sure that person must have heard what I was telling. Who shot at him? I did not know. My dad? He could well have been to that drinking party. Did Bill ever get to leave town or was he killed and thrown into a canyon somewhere he would not be found?
I could not worry now about what punishment Bill had finally gotten for his acts of sexual aggression with a five year old. I just felt relieved that I did not have to worry about him catching me alone any more or about what he was doing to some other child in Boulder.
Not too many months after this happened the widow Maggie felt galvanized to move to Richfield, a town that fit her family and their talents much better than Boulder did. They did well in Richfield. Sometimes Margie and I would ask Mother to take us to see her younger girls who were more our age, May and Nell. We kept contact with them for years, but naturally Cleo never spoke to me again.
As for Marilyn, I am sure she felt traumatized by the part she played in the drama. She told me several times that as soon as she reached the 8th grade and had to go away to school she would go back to Salt Lake and live with her Aunt Lillian and would never return to Boulder again!
Her stepfather Morias was a rough old country bumpkin, and I think she was horrified by her mother staying pregnant for years by him until she finally had a child with severe muscular dystrophy who never made it out of his wheelchair before he died. Her mother moved her and the children by Morias to Escalante and at one point, Morais was not even allowed to visit. When he got old and his health broke down, the younger children persuaded her to let him stay there until his death.
Marie said Marilyn only came back once to see her in Escalante. I don't think she ever had any children. Well, I understood because I was pretty traumatized by my mother's inability to keep from getting pregnant either. I found out another baby was coming soon when Ann only turned one year old! I knew Mother did not want or need another child at this point. Daddy always cussed when she got pregnant as though it was all her fault. I remember Mother saying something about her diaphragm breaking! It certainly could not have been a very reliable means of birth control.
I did not want another baby brother or sister to tend. I might go mad myself. You could put a molester in jail but a husband like Daddy who got drunk and demanded sex you could do nothing about. I had heard him. Well, Mother had the baby, another girl of course, but this time she went to Salt Lake because her very life was at risk. I found out that Ann had to be delivered with forceps and Grandpa told Mother her child bearing days had better come to an end if she was going to stay in the country to try to have these children.
He could not even tell her what to do to stop having children. Everybody in the country must have told her what to do to prevent pregnancy, but I guess the main thing that caused it she could not end, the sexual intercourse, or the marriage itself might have come undone leaving her with five children to raise. Well, she would have to work, and guess who would be tending the kids? It was already very hard to keep track of Mother. She would take the youngest one with her, but I always felt in charge of the ones at home. It was going to be a contest as to who had the nervous breakdown first, Mother or me.
I came home from school one day when we were living in Salt Gulch, the fall after Linda was born in June, and I couldn't find Mother. I finally found her crying out in back of the house. She said she was pregnant again and was having a miscarriage!
Well, somebody took her to Richfield. I guess it was Daddy since he helped cause it. I don't know where we five children were deposited, probably with Grandma King. They had to do a D and C and Mother persuaded the doctor to tie her tubes. He agreed, finally, even though she was only 29 years old. It was obvious she could not control her child bearing situation.
Mother came home looking considerably happier. And at last we could turn our attention to spoiling this baby sister. I doubt if I even noticed her up to then, we had so much work to do. Like gardening, bottling, washing the clothes with water heated outside in a big tub, making soap, cooking meals, making bread, washing dishes--all had to go on no matter whether there was fifteen babies or not.
I know Mother had a lot of migraine headaches, and she complained about being tired all the time. When I started getting chronic fatigue, how could I expect her to be concerned? She had a worse case than I did. In the meantime, Mother hired Leah and Fern Coleman at times to come and help us. They were god sends. But they grew up and left home, got married, and somebody still had to do the work. And many men came and went working for Daddy, after Bill, as he labored from the crack of dawn until it was dark to keep up with his growing crops and expanding herd of cattle.
Oh did I remember to tell you, Grandpa paid for him to have the Kiely Cure for drinking at the state mental where he was even able to see and visit Uncle Reed. Daddy stayed there a month being cured before the spring work started, and Linda would be born, and two months after he came home he started drinking again!

Both graphics made my Connie

Chronic fatigue keeps me practically bedridden for a week

I hate when that happens as I always like people to be able to rely on me, but Jack's eviction and his condition afterwards was enough to send me into that week of mourning manifesting in extreme fatigue. Now it was alcoholism pure and simple on his part. Everyone has a different pattern of drinking, and when Jack started drinking you would want to run for the hills. I don't really blame management for his eviction. In fact, if anything they might have waited too long on his last binge. I thought he was about five days from death then and it turned out that he developed a raging case of blood poisoning from infections due to his scrapes and cuts while drinking and would undoubtedly have died if they had not caught it in time and treated him for 11 days in the hospital.
Now I have found out that the cause of his second inexplicable meltdown was getting the news that one of his kids had died. Well, that's a big one, so now I can sort of understand a lot better why he stumbled again after so many people had rallied to try to help him sober up. Jack has lived here ten years and a lot of people felt they had a connection to him. That was the kind of guy he was. But I think he thought he was superman or something. Not even he could come back from such heavy bouts of drinking without being evicted, rendering him homeless, and hardly even able to cope, which at the time seemed like it might be a death sentence.
I have not heard what happened to him, but I hope he is on the road to recovery somewhere rather than dead.
In the meantime I was going to have a period of mourning, inevitably, for the kind of person he was when he was sane and sober. I always paid tribute to him for that. He kept the monster at bay for five years. And I could see at times what a struggle he was having to do it.
Which tells me we can never stop studying alcoholism which has a grip on so many people.
Then on top of that I had to poison myself with my own out of date food. I have learned my lesson about eating out of date food I hope. I drank just milk yesterday and finally ate a little bowl of oatmeal last night. I am going to have to be careful what I eat for a few days, but I am pretty much recovered.
I eventually have to tell people that if I disappear for a few days that just means I had to take some recovery time for something. My chronic fatigue is connected to probably scarlet fever in childhood as well as an inordinate amount of stress due to my Dad's drinking and coping with molestation by two of his hired men. It compromised my stamina and would start manifesting whenever the stress was extreme. This was undoubtedly my body's way of saying limitations had been reached as to the stress a human can stand.
The fact that too little is known and understood about what different kinds of extreme fatigue can mean can be very dangerous. The worst thing that can happen when you are already compromised is to experience extreme stress from some new source. This you try to avoid at nearly all costs. It's like having a car accident when you are already very sick. So when I am in quite a long period of recovery I try to avoid any new stresses like the plague.
Everybody comes to understand the fatigue pattern that goes with their own diseases and health conditions as with MS and diabetes. Any disease is going to involve fatigue. Serious fatigue. That is the body manifesting limitation. It's saying, "you can't do this any longer without rest." Whatever it takes, retreat, distancing to relieve the demands on the body to react.
Just because I don't know the exact point of origin of my condition, I have had a time with doctors. I am better off treating myself. I have talked to quite a lot of people who say mono started all their problems with chronic fatigue. Mono is their point of origin, even when doctors were saying there was no medical evidence of it. That just means they have not researched it, and are not likely too as long as a great many more people are sick with something else. AIDs, diabetes, alcoholism, cancer, heart disease, these are all conditions about which a great deal is known because so many people have these diseases attention must be focused on them. So I had to be content with the idea that there were mostly no answers about my condition, just speculation. But I remember whining to everyone for months, "What do I have? What could this be? Surely I am not the only person in the world to be knocked out for two years and not know what it is!" This was when I was having some long terrible bout of it that never seemed to end. Chronic fatigue for months, which is why I had to seek disability. I finally figured out that work was doing it, something in my body was burned out, so if I worked very long I'd soon be running on empty. Oh, it gets difficult at times being your own doctor. But I figured that is why God gave me a brain, to figure out what was mysterious, and what about it was real and what wasn't.