Those Winter Mornings
by Gil Hoy
On those windswept weekday mornings, asphalt driveway crusted with snow, my father would get up early, put on his secondhand boots and coat, and exit through our front door into the blue hour to get the motor running. That fifteen year-old station wagon would stall if not warmed up properly and might not start again. My father would sometimes have to push it down the hill to get the engine going, with my younger brother Bill and I already in the back seat, smelling alcohol already on my father’s breath.
My mother would have left for work by then. She cleaned other people’s homes in the next town over and took three buses to get there. I’d be tired from the night before, unable to sleep due to the cracks and slaps and my mother’s muffled screams coming through the kitchen door.
The last time I was in that rusted car, I brought a can of beans with me to school. It was carefully hidden in my backpack with my school books, my homework and the jelly sandwich my mother had made for me. I’d been storing up cans of food in my school locker for months, planning my escape.
I’d pulled up neighbors’ weeds, walked their dogs and wiped the car windows of passersby to save up enough silver in an old, dirty sock in my bottom dresser drawer to buy a one-way ticket to the next state over. It took me the better part of a year to save up enough quarters and half-dollars.
I got on a Greyhound bus after school that day, my backpack filled with as many cans of food as I could carry, a one-way ticket in my trembling hands. It took me four hours to get across the State line, and I never returned to West Virginia.
I once told a neighbor about my mother’s beatings. I was twelve years old, and it was about a year before I left. My father punched me in the stomach that evening when he found out, so hard I had to spend the night in the local hospital. They thought there might be some internal bleeding.
My father told the doctor that my older brother and I had had a fist fight while he was at work. But I didn’t even have an older brother. And my father wasn’t working. I never told anyone else about the beatings, I was just too afraid.
I wrote to Bill about two years after I got on that bus, and he’s been coming to visit me every few years for the last forty years or so. Bill still lives in West Virginia. He says he’s not angry with me for leaving him, but I don’t really believe him.
My mother never responded to any of the many letters I wrote to her after leaving home. I think she expected me to protect her somehow. Bill says she never left my father before he died but that the beatings stopped after he had a heart attack and then a stroke.
Bill says Mother passed away a few years ago and was still cleaning homes on the day she died. My father never stopped drinking and lived for only ten more years after I left.
And as for me, I’m a lot older now. I don’t know how I made it after I left West Virginia. I don’t like to think about it, and I won’t tell you much about it now. I will tell you that I’ve lived alone since then. My current neighbors call me “that old man.” I rarely speak with them.
Most mornings, I go downstairs and make myself a pot of coffee. It takes me the better part of the day to finish it. I’ll sometimes have a piece or two of toast with jelly. I may dunk it in my coffee. I like to watch the children walking to elementary school on the sidewalk in front of my house, their backpacks strapped tightly to their little backs. I wonder what their fathers and mothers are like. Their backpacks are filled with books, their homework and the lunches that their mothers have made and packed for them. I wave at the children through my kitchen window as they hurry on by.
I never married and have no children, I think it’s better that way. I wouldn’t have known what to do if I had. I stay alone in my house most of the time. I prefer things that way.
Copyright © 2024 by Gil Hoy
