A Forgotten and Useless War

 ( Originally posted January, 22, 2014 )

They buried my stepfather, Chester, Saturday. I did not attend. Nor did I see him in the hospital before he died. Those two decisions haunt me. I felt I was doing the right thing, but now it feels like I broke some moral code that may cause bad karma to come my way. But to acknowledge that thought is to recognize that I'm really only worried about me, and not his death, nor the damage my absence might cause to my son and daughter, who were with him in the hospital when he passed, and stood shivering at the gravesite on that cold, gray January day.

I suppose I should've been there. It would've been the right thing to do. But I could not make myself go because of my stepsister, Maggie. I could not bear the thought of dealing with her again. There was actually a short, brief window of time when I could've seen Chester in the hospital without the worry of seeing her. Before she left the hospital that night, she even told my son that Chester was my step-father just as much was he was hers, and that I could come see him if I wanted to. But there's the rub, isn't it? In our family, or our family's business, she always felt that she had the right to call the shots.

Odd that she didn't know he was going to die that night. I knew it and I wasn't even there. My son knew it. Obviously, my daughter knew it: she drove more than an hour to be by his side during his final moments. Perhaps my sister did know it and didn't care to be there: she went home the night our mother died. She had to tend her cats. Or maybe she left the hospital in hopes that I could see Chester before he passed. For I had spoken to Chester a couple of times in the last few years, but it's been six or seven years since Maggie and I spoke. We had another one of our endless family arguments over the phone while I was on vacation in Florida. I don’t even recall the details. I do remember saying that’d be the last goddamn time she’d ever talk to me like that. I haven’t talked to her since. Nor has she talked to me. Upon the few occasions that I had to dial their house, Chester answered the phone.

To say the three of us had a troubled history is like saying the Vietnam War was only a skirmish. My mother was the fabric that held us together. She owned the business, and we were all dependent upon it. While my mother was alive, all the fights were generally quieted by her begging, moaning, crying, screaming and wringing her hands in torment until we all retreated and hid behind the mask called family. That shroud ripped to shreds when she died; the canker busted and the stench of decay still burns my nostrils.

In my opinion, Maggie always hated me, and Chester just wanted me gone. He was eight years younger than my mother. She'd been married four times before he put a ring on her finger. She was herself only a teenager and married to her first husband, Jay Lawrence, when she adopted Maggie. The reason, or reasons, for that adoption were, and are, shrouded in mystery: my mother took them with her to her grave.

I was four or five years old, and Maggie 11 or 12, when my mother married Chester. The first night I met him, he ran over my puppy, Pongo. I shouted out, over and over that I hated Chester. Not a good start to a relationship. 

My memories of Maggie are strange and cloudy. I really don't recall her being there much when I was a toddler, although she is in family pictures. There was a brief period of time when I lived apart from her in Indianapolis, with my mother and my real father. During that stint, Maggie lived in Kentucky with my grandparents, who ran the family business. Maybe this is where her hatred for me began. No matter how you paint the picture, her adopted mother left her and took me, her actual son, with her. My mother and father were too quick tempered and too strong-willed to stay together, so our stay in Indianapolis did not last long.

My first vivid memory of Maggie came sometime after my mother and I returned to Kentucky and moved back into my grandparent’s house. Maggie and I were in the living room. I have a vague recollection of looking out at the snow, which was plentiful during those harsh winters of the early 1960s. Maggie somehow tricked me into going outside on the front porch. When I did so, she locked the door behind me. The world was frozen, still and silent; it glowed with a soft, beautiful dull, blue hue. I was cold and shaking and had no coat or shoes. Our house was built like a duplex and had two front doors. I tried to open the other door, but it, too, was locked. I trudged through the snow and walked down our driveway to the back porch. My feet were frozen by then. The backdoors were also locked, so I returned to the front of the house. With each step, the snow swallowed the bottom half of my legs as I made my way back to the door Maggie had locked behind me. The door had a huge, rectangle glass pane in the center, surrounded by small, three-inch wide panes around its outer exterior. I could see her though the glass. She sat in the living room writing in her notebook, as if she'd done nothing wrong. I begged her to let me in. She sat unconcerned, never once acknowledging my presence, as if I did not exist at all. Finally, in desperation, I broke the outer pane with my bare fist, reached my hand through to the inside and unlocked the door. She pressed against it, trying to keep me out, but I shoved my way inside. She came at me with a pencil. In my anger and rage, I snatched it from her and jabbed it at her. She held up her hand to defend herself. I stabbed it with one, quick stroke. To this day, she still carries a mark the lead on the palm of her hand.

Maggie denied locking me out of the house. She told my mother and grandmother that I had gone berserk, broke the window and stabbed her for no reason whatsoever. I'm not sure if Chester was there that night, but he tended to always believe Maggie. I'm sure her accounts of that night might be somewhat different; but nonetheless, in my opinion, that night set the pattern for our relationship. 

For the next 40-some-odd years, we all endured one another. There were countless fights with Chester’s usual threats: "I'm gonna call the law on you." And the police were called. They always left, shaking their heads, thankful they did not belong to this war-torn tragedy. There are so many battle stories to tell, such as the time I was playing drums with my eyes closed and Chester backhanded me off the drum stool, and the time he thought he was going to get on top of me and beat me, but I broke his arm when he went to hit me, or the time he slashed my head open with a belt buckle, requiring several stitches. I can't remember the lie my mother made me tell the doctors at the hospital. And then there was the night that he hit my mother; I didn't say a word to him, I just picked up a kitchen knife and threw it at his head. He ducked and it stuck in the wall directly behind him. I was impressed with my accuracy. He was not. “That goddamn crazy son of yours could’ve killed me,” he shouted to my mother. “He needs to be locked up in the damn loony bin.” That was always the line: I was crazy. But … he never hit my mother again.

I’m sure there were fights I started, too. Especially during my amphetamine laced years. My mother had a “diet doctor” in Louisville who supplied the best speed I’ve ever taken. Chester rightfully called me out on stealing her pills. So I, too, was no saint.

Maggie, at times, was helpful. I remember her loaning me money to go on vacation once. I never had any money to speak of. I was paid only a pittance from the family business. I often felt like a beggar. And there were times when I was married to my first wife that Chester would bring several boxes of groceries to my house at Christmas. That was nice, but it never escaped my attention that I worked just as much as he did and that he and Maggie and my mother had the money to buy groceries, and I did not! My mother always insisted on big birthday dinners, so whenever any of us blew out the candles, we put on the façade of a family. And I worked in the wrought-iron shop daily with Chester for years. But everything that was done was damn sure done his way. He always made it crystal clear that he was in charge. But in actuality, he wasn't. My mother owned the business. She inherited it from her mother and father, who had started it. Neither Chester nor Maggie had any blood connection to it, but I did. Anytime I tried to discuss the legalities of business, such as suggesting that my name should be included in the ownership, or how I should be able to buy health insurance through the business, or expand the business, I always got the same reply: “Don’t you come up here starting that shit,” Chester shouted, sometimes slobbering at the mouth. “I’ll call the law on you, you goddamn crazy little son-of-a-bitch. You get the fuck out of here or I’m gonna have your ass arrested.”

I’d go home. My mother would cry. Then the next day a job had to be put up, and I’d go back to the shop.

As soon as my mother died, the fake facade of family immediately fell away. She left the business to all three of us. Before my mother was buried, while she lay inside the funeral home, Chester came up to the car as I was pulling out of the parking lot. Maggie stood directly behind him while he informed me that he and Maggie were not going to abide by my mother's will, and that they were not going to share the business with me.

I think that was the breaking point. I'd had it with them then. I should've fought 'em. As a matter of fact, my attorney later told me that their attorney had not correctly interpreted the will. It actually read that they had to pay me a percentage even if I opted not to work in the business. But after one of the meetings in the law office, the two of them gave me a ride home in their truck. Maggie spoke in a soft, smooth drawl, insisting that they were doing what was best for me.  That was always their line when they wanted to shut me up. They offered to buy me out. I sold my part of the business to them for a song. Some five or six years later, the business that had worked several employees, fed and clothed us, and sent us on countless vacations finally closed its doors. Now the old shop stands as a tomb, a monument to a forgotten and useless war.

I suppose I should have gone to the hospital and the graveyard and bid farewell to my old enemy, but I could not make myself do so. For that I still feel saddened and troubled and heartbroken. Perhaps someday Maggie and I will speak. Perhaps not.  

                                        Bernard M. Plumlee, Jr.

                                        January, 22, 2014