Planet Purgatory by Benedict Martin Read Free Book Online Page B

block most of them.”
    “I don’t know; I counted at least four or five clean shots. All I have to say is you must have one hell of a hard head to break a spoon in half.”
    I started laughing again. My mother’s sudden bouts of rage were a fact of life for me. As long as I could remember, she would lose her temper, and heaven help anyone who got in her way. And the worst part was, there was never any consistency to her behavior. Something she found amusing or merely annoying one day could see you on the receiving end of a whack to the head with a frying pan the next. I don’t know how many times I had to invent stories to explain a black eye or a cracked rib. My mother even tackled me through a sliding door window when I was a teenager, slicing my forearm right down to the muscle.
    The violence occurred less frequently now, but it still happened, and the best I could do was shake it off and attribute it to mental illness. What else could it be? I’d heard stories about her own mother, and her mother’s mother. It was the reason I didn’t want children. I recognized that rage in me, and there was no way I was going to risk subjecting a child to the same abuse I was.
    That’s not to say my dad was the gentle parent. He whipped me plenty growing up, using switches cut from our farm’s hazel trees. But his was a controlled violence, used to instill discipline in a boy he felt was lacking. It might very well have been warranted; I wasn’t the best behaved child growing up. That didn’t stop me from hating him, though. I remember that feeling in my gut I got when he watched me doing my chores. He was just as nasty with his words as he was with the switch, and half the time I would end up making mistakes out of fear of doing something wrong. My relationship with my dad could be summed up in two words: fear and loathing.
    But somewhere along the way, something happened. We became friends. Oh, he still bullied me, usually over my drinking, and there were occasions when we were close to knocking each other’s teeth out, but a bond was forged, one that comes from the strain of running a family farm. I don’t even know when it happened. Somehow I went from being unable to speak in my father’s presence to trading insults as we labored in the dark fixing a tractor that had broken down in the field. There was only one person I trusted to run things when I wasn’t there, and that was my dad. And I’m proud to say that sentiment ran both ways. I still remember the shock of hearing my dad tell my mother’s brother, Fat Old Uncle Earl, that he could die in peace knowing the family farm would be in good hands. In fact it was the same conversation that I first heard him say I was a better farmer than he ever was. And it was the way he said it. He might as well have been talking about the weather, that’s how matter-of-fact his tone was. It threw me, and I ended up excusing myself so they wouldn’t see the resulting tears.
    It was the proudest moment of my life. But it was also a turning point. I finally saw my dad as an equal, who in many ways was just like me. But it also enabled me to recognize his biggest flaw. Behind that cranky veneer was a man who craved authority, and he was not above changing his opinion if it meant being on the winning side of an issue. I used to see it all the time growing up. The mayor or some other bigwig would be invited for dinner at our house, and the whole time my father would be proclaiming what a wonderful thing it was that this guy was in charge. But the moment there was a change in the political wind, my dad would be out there, badmouthing the incumbent while throwing his support behind whoever looked like they were going to take his place. It didn’t matter what the new guy stood for, as long as he showed up at our house for some stew.
    I used to think my dad was a well-respected mover and shaker. But I eventually came to understand he was nothing more than a wily opportunist who would