THE DIFFERENT VERSION by Penny Knight

There was a different version of my childhood challenge of sex abuse and the true version.

The different version was the story of my brother, two-and-a-half years older than I, beating me up all the time. This usually occurred when my mother left me at home alone with Toby while I baby sat my baby brother, Fate, who was 10 years younger. Mother used to say, “I was afraid to leave you at home with your brother for fear he would kill you.” I often wonder now, “Then, why did you leave me at home alone with him?” This was true but the different version. The true version was something my mother never knew.

For some reason my brother had gotten off to a bad start in his life. Well, maybe I did too, but I didn’t behave as aggressively as he did. He was a baby when a housekeeper gave him gonorrhea. I never did learn how that happened. I can only guess. My parents divorced when I was 4 and Toby was 6 or 7. He had already headed down the road labeled “difficult child.” I can sort of understand my mother’s wiping her hands clean of him and getting him out of her hair at times. I never had that luxury.

By the time he was nine, he was sent off to military school to set him straight. I didn’t know why. I thought he was the privileged one and loved more than I. Years later, I dreamed of going to a boarding school (maybe to get away from him or to have the same opportunity). As a therapist today, I have my own ideas about his being sent away. I think he needed more love than he received. I also heard stories about my grandmother, with whom we lived, chasing and beating him with a broom. I don’t remember ever witnessing that, but, then, I don’t remember much of my life at that time anyway.

My step-father to be, Miles Christian, was an instructor/teacher at Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, Tennessee. My grandmother, mother, and I went to visit Toby once during the year he was there. I think we stayed in something like a bed and breakfast. I don’t really remember. But I do remember mother coming back from a date with Miles one night and saying, “Miles asked me to marry him.” I was probably 7 or 8 at the time and asked, “Did he get down on his hands and knees to propose?” As I’ve said in another story of mine, Miles was one of handsomest men I’d ever seen, next to Clark Gable.

In the summer following, when I was 8, I was visiting my cousins in Mansfield, Ohio. Joyanne, two years younger, and I were walking across the back of the couch while playing tight-rope walkers, when I lost my balance and fell on the floor on my back, pulling her right to the spot that broke my arm above the elbow. I was in the hospital a whole week for that injury. (Healthcare was different then.)

During my convalescence there, my grandmother appeared every day, but there was no visit from my mother for 3 or 4 days. Again, I didn’t feel very important to her. When she did come, she announced that she and Miles had gotten married. In those days, before any conflict between us, I called him dad because my own father did not seem to care enough to be in my life. I sometimes think my mother kept him away. Anyway, I was gifted with a puppy after the hospital stay for what I had gone through.

So we, now a family, found a house to rent in Shiloh a short distance away from Plymouth. We had an ice box and a cistern from which we pumped water. There was an abandoned building next door that was infested with fleas, and I ended up with bites all over my legs from playing there.

My brother’s introduction of sex to me first came, as with many children, innocent enough I would guess at the time, but when I reflect on our ages, we were past the age of “show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” But that’s how it started at 8 and 11. It transitioned from that to, “Let’s draw pictures of each other.” Somehow he made it clear we were not to tell mother.

Perhaps, I did get a temporary reprieve from the progression of the abuse. It was the start of the United States’ involvement in World War II. Miles joined the Navy as an officer, and following his training near Chicago, he was stationed in San Diego, California. So he and mother packed up Toby, and they all left me behind with my grandmother, abandoned and separate from my family. I didn’t understand why or what I had done to be left behind. Later on, when I was told and understood that it was due to Toby’s bad behavior, the damage to my psyche had been done. Still, what kind of excuse was that? Mother couldn’t handle us both?

They were there somewhat less than a year. It certainly didn’t change Toby for the better, just as military school had not,. I was excited when mother and Toby returned and bought a house in Plymouth, Ohio. Miles was not to come home for about 2 more years. When their furniture arrived, I was trying to untie a package when Toby hacked my hand with a knife. I still have the scar from it on my hand. That was just the beginning.

He was always beating me up when he felt like it, but sometimes, like other brothers and sisters, we were chums and sneaked out the door of my room onto the roof and climbed down a trellis to go see friends in the neighborhood, or sometimes during the day, we sneaked off with bathing suits under our clothes to go swimming (I couldn’t swim yet) in the creek of other school chums, where I almost drown. That occasion made me all the more determined to learn to swim.

When did the molestation begin? Most all of it is a haze in my mind. I think it began as I went into maturity and started developing breasts. He would always grab at me when no one was looking. I can’t tell you what actually happened, but I know it did. I remember his erect penis. Nothing else. There was a large old barn on our property that we played in. My memory of what took place there seems only to be imagined. But, what I think happened was that Toby invited some of the town boys to watch. In my mind’s eye, I see them lined up against the barn wall on the second floor watching us demonstrate sex. I don’t know if this actually happened, but I think it did.

What I do remember is being left alone with him and running for the bathroom to lock the only door that locked in our house. I didn’t want him to touch me. I ran and I screamed in terror. He refused to leave me alone.

Somewhere around 15 years of age, I got another reprieve when he dropped out of school and joined the military. I had peace for the next couple years, and when he returned after getting out before his time was served, he didn’t bother me anymore.

Years later, I have tried to figure out what happened to him to make him so unhappy and aggressive. He became an alcoholic and died young at 45 after choking on food in a restaurant. I learned how to forgive him. On another day, I will tell about a past-life memory that explains why he victimized me.