Rocks and Justice

The problem with being only eight is that your access to legal counsel is limited.

I was out in our back yard, playing out in the high weeds with my childhood friend, Steven Gallagher. The oat grass would grow to three or four feet high, and you could make a kind of fort by flattening a small circle. It was fairly private, sheltered from the wind and the ideal spot to just enjoy a sunny afternoon, talking about whatever eight year old boys talk about. Suddenly, I felt something hard hit my forehead. It didn’t hurt all that much, it just kind of surprised me. You know, the way you feel surprised when something unexpected hits you in the head.

I think I said something memorable, like, “Ow! What was that?” Steven didn’t reply, he just stared at me and pointed. I reached a hand up to my forehead and it came away covered in blood, which was now streaming down into my right eye.

My next and most immediate destination was the house, which was fortunately nearby. I screamed for my mother and ran up the back porch steps toward the living room. She intercepted me just as I reached the landing and I remember her response vividly: “Stay right there! Don’t you dare come in the house!” That really wasn’t the reception I was expecting. No, “What happened?” No, “Oh, you poor dear.” No, “The ambulance will be here in seconds.” Just an emphatic, “Don't come in!”

I stood there on the porch, feeling faint and bleeding out, as she exited into the house, looking over her shoulder to make sure I was staying put. She returned quickly with a towel that she applied to my forehead, telling me to apply steady pressure to the wound. Steven was still there in the background, white as a sheet. Only then did she calmly explain herself to both of us. Head wounds, she said, usually bleed a lot and seem worse than they are, so I was probably okay. Then she apologized for her abrupt reception, but she didn’t want me to bleed all over the living room, when I could bleed just as well outside. That’s what I got for having a mother who was also a doctor.

Next we got down to what, exactly, happened. Steven gave a reasonable accounting. The only missing piece was, who had thrown whatever hit me? Surprisingly, my sister, Kathy, was able to answer that one. She had. Then she offered her brilliant disclaimer: She had only thrown the rock “…to see if I was there.”

“To see if I was there.” I remember that quote verbatim, since it made as much sense then as it does today. Naturally, I expected my mother to challenge my sister’s flimsy alibi, but she let it go without a word. Perhaps she thought that Kathy already felt bad enough for what she’d done, but that’s seldom the case with kids. We definitely feel a lot worse when we get punished.

I was bandaged up, Steven was taken home, and the rest of my day was spent lying down on the couch as I contemplated the vagaries of familial justice.

Now, I have to admit that I was routinely getting in trouble at home, mostly for leaving my father’s carpentry tools somewhere in our vast yard, where he would eventually track them down by following the destructive trail of my latest “project.” Then I would get to listen to yet another reprise of the immensely popular “I don’t care if you borrow my tools, just as long as you return them” lecture series.

Even worse was when a tool went missing and couldn’t be found. Then I would be sent to my room “till I remembered where I left it.” Of course I had no idea where that would be – if I had, then I might have remembered to put it away in the first place. I would mope and cry as I paced the floor of my eleven by twelve foot cell, bemoaning the injustice of it all. Eventually, the tool was either found or my dad would have to make the six-day journey down to Goodman’s hardware store where he would trade three goats for the missing item.

I’m not saying that I wasn’t usually the guilty party, because the odds were good that I was. But in the rare instance when it might have been my brother’s fault or (gasp) even my father’s, there was no recourse. No Miranda rights, no public defender looking for loopholes, no plea bargaining. I was left “swinging in the breeze” by the cruel hands of justice. So terribly unfair, says the repeat offender.

I would like to add that, as an adult, I have changed my ways – but I haven’t. I still sometimes leave tools in the garden. Usually I pick them up before they have gone all rusty, but I have had to replace a few as well. And when I do catch myself mistreating my valuable possessions so shamefully, I react just as my dad used to. I send myself to my room. And I take a nap.