Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007

Enduring abuse

My mother was whisked out of church on a Sunday morning in 1955 and taken to marry a man she had never met.

She was 13. My father, Herbert Lee Bailey Sr., was 39, born 13 years before the Great Depression.

She was one of 12 or 13 siblings her parents could barely feed. She owned two dresses and wore shoes with tops and no bottoms except makeshift cardboard linings that worked on sunny days but didn't hold up well on wet ones. My grandfather gave her away to a work colleague.

"I didn't even know what sex was,'' my mother said.

But at 13 she was a wife. Shortly into the marriage, she grew sick and exhausted walking up and down mile-long rows, bending to pick cucumbers and tobacco. She didn't know her sickness was a result of a miscarriage. She didn't even know she was pregnant. The resident family doctor in St. Stephen told her.

By age 18, five years into the marriage, Elizabeth (Bailey) McDaniel was pregnant for the second time. This time it was with Herbert "Moochie'' Bailey Jr. She had long craved a large family. Moochie would be the first of 11 kids, nine boys, two girls.

They lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the years before I was born. My father's modest checks weren't enough to consistently pay the bills. But they were enough to fuel his alcoholism.

Like clockwork, my father would walk into the house after work on Friday. He would be drunk. And angry. And violent. And he would beat my mother.

Escape impossible

Like many victims of domestic violence, my mother thought about leaving and tried a few times. My father hit her in the back of the head with a hammer one night as she tried to escape the marriage. The resulting migraines and blackouts eventually forced her to apply for disability.

My mother also retaliated. She told me that one of her brothers beat my father in a fist fight at least once, maybe more. And like a page out of a novel written by someone with an overactive imagination, my mother once waited until my father fell asleep, cooked a pot of grits and threw it on him.

"I never heard a man scream like that before,'' said my mother, now 65. "I couldn't believe how bad it was.''

She felt sorry for him and called an ambulance. On the way to the hospital, the EMTs asked what my father what had happened.

"It wasn't her fault,'' he told them. "I made her do it.''

Moochie tries to protect

The violence was continuous for much of the 25 years my parents were married, particularly early on. Sundays through Thursdays were mostly calm, though.

"After work he would go sit by the hog pen,'' my mother said of the weekdays.

The weekends were for fighting and cursing and drinking. My father would yell and scream in front of my oldest siblings.

Sometimes my parents would disappear behind the bedroom door.

Many weekend nights my sister begged my mother not to go into the room. She frequently heard fists connecting with flesh.

Moochie heard and saw it, too, but was too young to do much about it until he decided things needed to change. He got a kitchen knife. It was a Friday.

"Mama, if daddy comes back here tonight and bothers you, I'm gonna kill him,'' Moochie told my mother, tears running down his cheeks.

10-year-old kicked out

The skinny 9-year-old stood silently in a corner of the apartment, knife behind his back, waiting on my father to arrive from work. My father came home drunk and belligerent. My mother deftly whisked him away from where Moochie was standing.

"I couldn't let Moochie kill his daddy. And I couldn't let his daddy know what was going on,'' my mother said. "I played it down. I don't know how.''

She later told my father that things had gotten out of hand, that change was needed, that pending tragedy hung in the air.

"I said, 'Herb, you need to be careful, these churn are growing up, and they are not going to put up with that any more.'''

That warning only seemed to further ignite my father's rage. The beatings that had been mostly reserved for my mother were extended to Moochie. He recognized the threat a young but growing boy was becoming.

"Every time he started with me, he would be sure to tackle Moochie first,'' my mother said.

My mother had another boy, Doug. Days after she gave birth, my father beat 10-year-old Moochie again and kicked him out of the house.

He had on no shirt. He had on no shoes. A few inches of snow and ice were on the ground.

He ran to my grandmother's a couple miles away.

Teen takes on abusive dad

I was born two years later, the fifth of 11 children.

I don't remember the one-bedroom apartment. I remember the tin - tin exterior, tin roof - single-wide green and white trailer.

I remember some of the beatings. Moochie was big enough and strong enough to fight back by the time I understood.

I remember crouching in a corner of the kitchen while my father pounced on my mother. I remember Moochie, by then in his late teens and an accomplished athlete, running to her rescue.

I remember him grabbing my father, pulling him off her, pushing him down the hall. I remember feeling helpless and scared but oddly safe, because Moochie was there.

I don't remember the making of a murderer.

I remember us - Moochie and Doug and Willie and Josh - jogging down the highway to the high school football field and track without a care in the world. He was our Pied Piper. That was Moochie's way of teaching us how to get in shape, to toughen up, to be able to defend ourselves.

If he told us he could pick up a mountain, we would not have doubted him.

If he said he could hold back the Atlantic's crashing waves or leap a building in a single bound, we would have believed.

"He was a god to me,'' Doug said.

I remember he checked on me at school and was proud that I was doing well.

In and out of jail

I also remember he was kicked out of school for almost beating a fellow college student to death with his bare hands. He was arrested for petty theft and receiving stolen goods and other such crimes.

It became commonplace.

"It got so bad we would visit Moochie in jail, and he would be in the same cell with Uncle Harry,'' Doug said. Uncle Harry, one of my mother's brothers, was a public alcoholic with mental illness problems.

Moochie would leave the house and not come back until days later. My mother stopped letting him borrow the car. He got rides anyway.

My mother tried to get help for him, asked a few counselors to evaluate him. They all said he was too well spoken and too well groomed to have any serious issues.

He enlisted in the U.S. Army. That made my mother happy. But he was discharged early, honorably.

"He was different when he came back,'' my mother said. "The bad headaches that boy would have.''

Moochie dabbled in drugs. I remember seeing a bag full of colorful pills in his room. I was later told it included speed or PCP. And he was secretly growing marijuana in the backyard.

"We were listening to music, playing and dancing around,'' Doug said.

"Moochie kept throwing fertilizer over his head over the fence. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was working on his hook shot or something.

"I climbed on the fence and saw the marijuana plants. I screamed, 'That's marijuana!' He shushed me, told me to tell no one, and to never touch weed until I was 18. He then laughed and said I was smarter than he thought I was,'' Doug said.

Arrest becomes catalyst

A week before the murder that would change the lives of two families and a small town, Moochie was arrested for stealing from a store owned by James Bunch, the man who would be stabbed to death in his front yard days later.

My mother decided to let Moochie stay in jail that time.

It was a tactic she adopted for all of her children, believing if you had to endure the place for more than one night you'd grow to hate it.

But Moochie was persuasive, telling my mother he had a tax return check coming soon, that he'd pay back the bond money. Besides that, in the previous months he had begun paying the family's bills with the money earned from the Army.

My mother had lost her job because of medical issues, so she relented and bailed him out.

That decision - and what happened next - has haunted her for 25 years.