Chapter Sixteen
Patience Beyond Reason
“And now I’m glad I didn’t know the way it all would end, the way it all would go.”
--- The Dance, lyrics and score created by Tony Arata and sung by Garth Brooks
“ ... as our competitors take their places for … the final dance. And music, please ... ”
For all the conniving done to finagle good – looking marital splits in the course of history where
one or the other or the both of the parties comes out of the divorce looking pretty good and
certainly like the fine, upstanding christians they initially and allegedly wed as under the priest's
raised – hand blessing, why, it soon became very apparent to me that Herry, atheist though he be,
had been thinking, too all right, and planning. This event, the book – that – broke – my – camel's
– back event, wasn't part of Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s master scheme; he may have known it or
something like it was coming but probably not. When it did show up that last May day of 1988,
however, Herry jumped with lightning speed at his good fortune and worked the whole Chicago
paperback / Creighton diary’s oral, diarrheal essay right in to it.
Here were the pieces, two quite real things that Legion could actually hold in her hand which
would surely cause her to carry nearly the full weight of the accountability for the divorce, if not
all of it. She would, by all, always be viewed as The Evil One. Legion would be the one who
undid and uncoupled that most perfect of Genesis unions, Legion's and Herry’s marriage of the
picture – perfect professionals! And Herry would not be.
"Why, of course," Herry rapidly put the subplot together, "Legion will be the one to bring on the
divorce. She'll freak out over the Zhang thang, especially if I help it along with my diary. Then
she'll kick me out and no one will believe her as to why. She has no proof to show anyone that
anything at all existed 'cause I've got the two culprits with me. It'll only be what she said against
what I say did not happen. O jyeah, it'll only be toooo easy to say she's crazy, quirky as everyone
already knows she is. And ... an’ as if that isn't enough, then I'll just accuse her of being the whore
for saying ... that I am! She's a damn fine - lookin' cunt who’s got the means and the access to be
out there and, if she’s not really turning tricks, well then, I can at least raise that probability in
everybody's minds! I could certainly make it seem like she's been screwing anything in sight.
What, with her not working and, instead, being home alone all the time with the Boys waaay, way
off in school and her being around all those dads with her soccer stuff? I can make it look like
she's the one covering up by her coming after me with her unfounded accusations which I'll just
deny 'til frickin’ forever! She'll have no proof ... so her allegations'll only make her look vengeful.
And me? Fuck! I'll be home free lookin' and smellin' in front of my Boys, my dad an’ all of my
family and everyone else as a matter of fact, like the innocent but o – so wronged rose I want to be
lookin' and smellin' like! And the absolute best thing of all? I'll be clean, slick free o’ the Bitch!"
Slick Herry. An ages – old play – out of events. What is it Homer said? "After the event, even a
fool is wise." With just the littlest bit of panache and inveiglement to this whole thing ahead of
time, why, Herry'd look like more than just the victim that I, the so – evil one, had turned him, the
poor, poor Herry Daddy, into after our divorce; he would actually emerge from it appearing ...
accountably wise!
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I was suffering. Wednesday morning was only, for me, more of the evening before. I felt no
difference, least of all, most certainly not as if I'd just experienced refreshment after slumber.
There had been two previous periods in my life when I had actually not slept for five days straight,
both related to John and to his leaving some 17 years previously for points east, I mean points
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reeeeally off east – as in off east to Europe and then to northern Africa ... never to be seen by me
(... that I’m aware of ...) ever again.
One of those two times Dr. Waterston, the local and town's only doc, had had to come out to
Mehitable’s and AmTaham’s apartment in Williamsburg and actually inject my behind with
something right there in the back bedroom that in such small order stopped me up truly short and
put out my lights for the next three days straight.
It'd been stupendous, that sleep. Not so great, though, its aftermath. No, not so much. Never
again as an adult since, whether living or only visiting in Mehitable's home, was I ever allowed
about town out of her sight or control alone. I had either to be taking her with me, accompanying
her wherever she was headed or somebody else of the household had to be ... chaperoning me.
And I can tell you that this shadowing was not mandatory because Mehitable was the least little bit
worried that I was going to do myself in. She was fearful of that not at all but of only what the
townspeople knew, could know, might be able to find out or may have overheard while waiting in
Dr. Waterston's outer office when Daddy’s call came in to his receptionist there that the doc's help
was urgently needed over at AmTaham True's house.
It is apparent to me that Mehitable needs Herry's priestly author's help, too! The one who wrote
Why Am I Afraid To Tell … Maybe more than Herry needs it! And not just Doc Waterston's
help! Mehitable, like I've said before, is all about image and face and the saving thereof. To this
day, Mehitable calls this façade maintenance of hers 'protection'. This is Mehitable's meaning of
protection. Not to be confused, you see, with the definition or type of protection that Yanira's
brother wanted to know from their Quaker parents when he and Yanira were growing up!
If there is one thing about which Mehitable has never wanted to learn, her being a teacher of the
Always – A – Teacher genre anyhow and seemingly never ever a student of anyone else's herself,
it is enmeshment and related boundaries. She knows where she ends and the other person, that is,
a child of hers, begins. Let alone, an adult child of hers. She just refuses to relinquish parental
supremacy. Verisimilar her lifelong countenance in this regard is to that of male dominion and
domination over females. Grace has tried, in Grace's warm and totally non – threatening way, to
teach Mehitable Listening, Silence and Breathing so that Mehitable can learn to let go of her
control addiction; but as we see all the time and know so well, men and women such as Mehitable
just haven't the Willingness to give it up! Even though they know …
The woman is now 86, and still going strong into enmeshing herself in all that is none of her
business. She broke first one hip and then the other six months later in the same 12 – month
period that was her 82nd year, both times after tripping over something when getting up from a
card table where she and several of her girlfriends had just been gossiping all afternoon as they
played with decks whatever games these women play. I would have felt charitable, like actually
assisting her in her recoveries if she had been befallen these elderly misfortunes, O say, while
serving up soup at a homeless shelter. Or if, after she had tried to rise out of a chair when done
feeding and rocking to sleep the hospital nursery unit’s AIDS or crack babies, she'd lost her
balance and gone down. But. The reality here is that, indeed, she had not. I have never known
this person, Mehitable, to have done these giving sorts of things in her youth, much less during
any of her retirement from whatever occupation it was she claims to have worked in years past.
I felt no obligation to help her out whatsoever. She can natter on and on and spread rumors about
others of us all she wants to, this being a free country and, therefore, all about her entitled rights
therein, yada, yada, yada. Just as dominating men act entitled, particularly when called to account
for their supremacy anywhere. Except in Mehitable's trashing of others at which she is so, so deft,
and, furthermore, so amazingly and mightily eager, she will get no help from me.
Anything, absolutely anything, that any of her four children – – and their spouses – – thinks, feels,
does or says Mehitable wants to monitor – – and to edit … if not appropriate according to her.
Still. Especially those thoughts … since, unless the person is nigh unto comatose, nothing she or
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he feels, does or says gets felt, done or said except that it was first thought up. This, of course,
is the ultimate in dominion and control. So when Dr. Waterston's home visit and my 72 – hour
snooze were both concluded, why, it was not only well understood tacitly, Mehitable simply stated
it right out loud that Legion True was again under what amounted to house arrest and that my
mobility status, whenever I was in Williamsburg at the least, would remain as such.
The second time I was awake for five days straight Doc Waterston was out of town, and I ended
up in the emergency room of Angels of God Hospital about 30 miles east of Mehitable’s and
AmTaham's, 1972 – June, the time with the babe's tears in the Grinnell General Hospital Nursery.
I was about to meet Dr. N.C.J. Black, my first experience with psychiatrists where I wasn't an
attending nurse but was the patient … instead. Unfortunately for her, Mehitable couldn’t keep all
of the locals who worked at Angels of God out of the loop although she certainly tried. I, quite an
adult many years by now of course and wherein, therefore, hospital personnel should not at all
have paid one bit of attention to anything she wanted or didn’t want as it concerned me, was not
admitted to a psych ward … specifically at her behest – she trying to keep up those all –
consuming appearances of hers. Three weeks I was doped and dormant on just an ordinary
internal medicine ward in an ordinary room with a regular bed. No padded cell with a barred
window and only a bare mattress on the floor. Yet.
Three to four weeks, I have come to find out, is about the standard and usual length of time that
sleepless individuals – particularly when they are female ones … we DEhumans … such as myself
which is solely the reason why, I am convinced of it, that Mehitable was able – at all – to get away
with any of her dicta to hospital staff about an adult patient of theirs over whom she had
absolutely no say nor jurisdiction and about whom they, its personnel, displayed no honor nor
respect as an entire and complete human being all unto herself alone – seem to be kept swallowed
up inside scrubbed and highly patrolled walls like Angels of God. When we, by happenstance of
whatever it is that causes us the nights and nights of sleeplessness, all come to fall under ‘the care’
of such medics, such … ‘angels’.
With Herry before we married, I made a massive mistake about this knowledge and about myself
in relation to it and Angels of God: I told him of it. I actually told him about my two ‘episodes’,
shrinks call them. Herry was very soon to be my loving, lawfully wedded husband ( … whatever
the fuck that meant at the time). After all, shouldn't he know?
Now if one is a Hollywood celebrity or a national sports figure or that nation’s president or a
televangelist or a famous person of any type really – and is on the road touring with shows and
games and concerts and campaigns and press entourages and policies to hawk and thousands of
souls to save from damnation and hellfire day after day and night after night, one can get a bit
stressed out. And end up not sleeping very well. Worse, a lot of these persons, in addition to their
conducting extracurricular, ehrrr, extramarital sexual expeditions through their own hotel suites,
start cycling uppers and downers in attempts to get the sleep that they need. Quite often …
without not – too – fine a result. Witness Elvis and Tina!
Just an ordinary, common everyman without even a bit of her gray matter eviscerating, Legion
True was. No funky, out – of – steam celeb, she! Overworked and out of breath, maybe, from
laboring at my so youthful a life with all of its accountability, alone and minus my first mate,
John, whom of course Mehitable and AmTaham had both also loathed but who had, at his very
least in all of his 23 years of life to date, been loyal to me always and a helpmeet. Until he
decided in less than an hour's roundtrip to the corner breadbasket inside one of the many,
nondescript New York City markets around our hood approximately a year and a half earlier than
my June 1972 ‘episode’ that he was, indeed, much too young to be so accountably married and
instead elected to be from it, the marriage – and his full – time job as well … undone from it all.
And gone. That very day. To Amsterdam – and then North Africa – gone. That far gone, that is.
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Although I am thinking it is exactly like that, my ending up incarcerated at age 24 within Angels
of God was apparently not the same thing at all as one of these famously overextended rockers and
pulpit – thumpers taking an off – road sabbatical and admitting himself into a hospital somewhere
due to the diagnosis everyone reads about the next day in the newspapers. That, of course, is the
one known as … "simple exhaustion."
My diagnosis Dr. Black and colleagues weren't really sure of and never have been sure of since
– – except for one small and not – so – helpful facet to it: I couldn't possibly have only been just
simply exhausted. I must've most certainly had some major – – near critical, really – – mental
atrophy or neurological disorder far, far more serious than merely, "She isn't sleeping too well,
Doc," and I must be, therefore instead, mightily near psycho, about a totally mad whacko actually,
and in immediate, desperate and long – term (if not for my whole lifetime, probably!) need of the
most stringent of mental health care that Angels of God and any other ‘legal’ white – jacketed, key
– carrying dope dealer I was to ever meet up with later on could possibly administer to me, not?!
Why, we all know Legion to be certifiably bonkers now! No doubt about it. Well, maybe some
doubt. A little anyhow. Some. Well, maybe. She is an everywoman anyhow. Not a man at all.
And we all, at least, do know, don’t we, what happens to females, when they are unhitched and
without a man to give them meaning and purpose? They're nothin'. They're the sicker for it.
Made sick they are by their separation from the purpose – conferring masculine domination.
Even uncontrollable if there's no man about to do that duty.
Like witches they are.
And we really, really need to take ‘care’ of them. So. So if he, the present husband, the past
husband, the boyfriend, the father, the brother, the uncle isn't gonna or won't, why then, the cage,
the good, good, omniscient medicine man and all of the popped, yummy colors he prescribes will.
Or, the Taliban – type indoctrination or tribal mutilation or high priest’s shatteringly shaming
‘absolution’ will. The acid thrown in the face, her clitoris chopped off in youth, the union not
valid unless sanctioned by a certain bunch of only – male – ‘scripturally’ – written words and a
certain robed man’s waving his arms about in a certain dwelling only he dictates as proper and
certain: whatever mandate of man will break her down. And keep her down and broken.
O, this is truly hard … so, so hard … to write … down … now.
Down goes all of that nebulous whispering over me at staffings and barely legible scripting about
what I behave like and which illness I have and how sick I be into something amorphously known
as Legion True's 'medical record'. And almost exactly word for word Grace compassionately
exhorted to me and to her mate Lionel, “This percolating cesspool of mother – fucking swamp shit
gets passed on and passed around from hospital to hospital, ward to ward, doc to doc, nurse to next
social worker to next occupational therapist without even a one of them all ever stopping to notice
– or to care – that you are not sick! That you’re maybe a few days short on sleep, yeah you’re
rather sleep deprived – same as refuges in war zones’ve been for just eons of battles! But that after
a couple of days straight of blissful and uninterrupted zzzzs both times, why you’ll, voila, be right
as rain. You’ll be refreshed and restored again! It’s no magic! It just is! Nobody ever stops to
notice that – that after the sleep you need and then get, why you are just fine again! Just fine!”
Just like in the fairy tale when Prince Ch’g kisses Snow White’s prostrate and comatose carcass
and, presto / change – o, she arises as if new again. Only I accomplish this minus the so –
majestic man and any of his messing around with me. And so long as I make sure that I manage
to net some hours of deep REM in any next, upcoming 24 – hour chunk – o’ – time, well, I remain
precisely … fine. Same as almost all individuals forcibly denied the rest they require – due to war,
outward problems, inner strife, injury, any number of things. No one wants to notice that either.
That it is what it is – this same phenomenon – for all manner of stressed – out … men! The good
ole’ Flip / Reverse! But. It, the mere noticing of that, would not bring in the money, the profits,
the so – vital mainstay, the core, the life blood – which Gerry Spence states in his Chapter Nine of
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From Freedom to Slavery: The Rebirth of Tyranny in America rules and propels the corporate
health care industry and nearly every other – especially as these industries administer to …
us DEhumans.
And, I, inside my own skin of course, cannot be trusted to know how to keep myself keeled. After
all, twice already in my youth I've fucked up and been found awake about 120 hours. They of the
Angels of God squads make certain that I comprehend at least this much. These strangers all
about, they’re the ones, decades later, assuring all of 'the courts', the judges, the lawyers, all of the
custody evaluators, the soon – to – be – ex – husband Herry, Mehitable the control – freak parent,
and even all of Legion’s very own minor (male) children, that they are the ones who do know
Legion's body, Legion's life, Legion's brain and that their judgments are the ones to be taken as
Truth, as proof, as … “legal evidence”. Years later, though she's still there somewhere inside of
her own integument and has matured long into her fifth decade of Breathing, she still cannot be
trusted to know her own self, much less, come up with a plan of what's best for her and the fruits
of her own womb. But they can be, these strangers.
Grace has always had something to say about this every time she comes across folks holed up,
many times legally straight – jacketed they literally are and inside psychiatric wards. Mostly
women, often mothers of course, and especially those who have been made suddenly single or are
about to be made so by the judge's decree whenever he finally crashes it down from his most –
high bench. Saddened, stressed, uncoupled and – sleepless – women are the bread and butter of
psychiatry and psychology and appear to have been so for the several decades and centuries that
has been this field of man – made, manly endeavor. And, most especially, during and since the
witch – hunting periods after the papal bull that that most holiest, purest and blameless of popes
of 1484, Pope Innocent The VIII (what a name, huh!?), who, in keeping with his name ‘safely’
married off his own illegitimate youngsters into princely families of the times, issued which
initiated The Women's Holocaust and The Burning Times. If taught in textbooks at all, these
centuries are known to most folks since such times as only The Inquisition. Never a focus, an
emphasis on the women in such books. Only on da’ man. And then on a ‘holy’ one – at that.
What wasn't taught to me but has, instead, been kept nearly secret – as if unimportant enough to
mention really – from the majority of us students of history for roughly 360 years or more since
the nearly three centuries that it was occurring is the fact that whole generations upon generations
upon generations of female people were born, then born some more, then born as granddaughters
and great – granddaughters some more and, still, … still … all of these female people lived all of
that time – – day to day, day in day out, every single day – – in fear of being named. Named as
a witch. Then hunted down. Then tortured. Then burned. Burned alive. A woman's entire day,
week, month, year, lifetime – her entire lifetime – was spent, for generations upon generations,
falling asleep and then awakening again beleaguered like this. You, your mom, your adult
daughter, your grandmama, all of you traversed 24 hours and then the next 24 Breathing this
supreme papal and masculine hegemony in and out all of the time. More than a pulmonary pox,
it was a plague of pogrom proportions on female peoples.
Not only in fear for their own safety these women were; but their children often enough were also
under threat of capture and assault, torture and death as well. The very same as Herry's
assignation to The Witch of her ownership of all of the Truemaier Boys when Legion had pissed
him off one time too many too soon. And … he, therefore, knew himself entitled … to rush Zane
down to the river’s edge that fine springtime afternoon in order … to terrorize my entire family.
Know, too, this: These hundreds of years of male persons did not arise from the earth that is that
of the allegedly darkest of land masses, Africa, nor from tribes in the remotest areas of the Chilean
Andes nor from nomadic Asian, desert tents far from colonialism and civility. This, for christ's
sake, was life on the continent of o – so white Europe! Life for Europe’s … majority … peoples!
Some people, especially learned men including those of the cloths of the various populous
religions, feel 'the courts' of the United States today are so not like this at all, of course. Maybe,
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they exhort, the courts, the legal systems, even the religions elsewhere are – – but … not here in
America! As a young, 20 – something woman I would have thought them correct, that I would not
even be able to start to imagine what living under this siege, let alone, without so much as an
inkling of when closure to it would ensue, could ever be like. Much less, some 300+ years of it.
But I do know what it is like. Just as millions of other women, again, the World over know this,
too. It isn’t any different now – and hasn’t been. Not even in America.
O, the physical killing is allegedly stopped in America with statutes in place to protect. But the
slayings haven’t really ceased with all of those laws after all, have they!? And American men
supposedly cannot throw acid into her face – and get away with it. American men are not allowed,
I suppose again by some specific law, to saw off their daughters’ clitorises either. But they have!
They most certainly have. Pillared American men such as the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther
King Jr, and his colleagues amassed into cabals of even more pillared men – such as those of his
southern christian leadership conference? Not so reverent – any of them! Nope, not so much.
Just exactly how many clitorises up on his ancestral mountaintop has the talking, talking, talking
and so – speechifying King saved exactly!? When, in accountable Ancestoring, he soooo …
could have! ! ! How many of us DEhumans of the World’s Majority – anywhere – have he and
they, just in their friggin’ dreams alone, stopped from ‘legal’ and from ‘religious’ subjection to
lashes and to death – by – stones – to – our – heads when men have raped us!? When, in
accountable Ancestoring, they soooo … could have! ! ! How much nonviolence, how much
peace and how much freedom – just exactly now, how much ?! – have he and his men brought?
Has the talking, talking, always teaching Dr. Herod Edinsmaier brought – to mothers fucked!?
Brought to us … the Majority!?
The key, though – as I have pointed out before: Full – well knowing of their ability – and of their
accountability – to do so? Of their accountability in becoming true Ancestors, for sure!? As also
Professor Stoltenberg states in regard to so – called “men of conscience”? They are not … and
never were … going to! Are never going to bring to us, the Majority, the peace, the freedom and
the nonviolence – the rights – of full and complete … human beings. Our rights. Because?
They do not want to. They do not want us DEhumans to have what it is … they have.
Independence! Pure and simple this is. Still. In the 21 st Century. Still.
“Evidence” You the Reader demand? This, the following, is evidence of that – pleeeeenty of it:
Even in America, men convicted of murdering their own children’s mothers can – and most of
them do! – from behind their bars within prison, legally force those mortal mothers’ mothers to
deliver the loves of her dead daughter’s life, her babies, that grandma’s grandchildren, to the
penitentiary ‘to honor’ their own mama’s killer, the father. What more torture and soul – murder
is there to a woman whose daughter has just been slain – – has just been slaughtered by this son –
in – law of hers? Than for her to have to drive or provide conveyance for her grandchildren over
to the slammer out of ‘respectful compliance’ to some so – called judge’s ‘court’ order! Much
less, the killer’s children having to live every single day of their lives without the life their daddy,
the taker, destroyed: that of their own mother’s!? Supposedly at one time at least, his belovéd
wife? That’s … a holocaust. Patience beyond reason.
More “evidence”, Reader: If the tables were turned, if the sexes of the killers and the dying were
flipped and reversed, – if even just one little kid’s penis was being lost to a woman’s knife or her
scissors, to any ol’ glass shard she retrieved from off the desert floor! – well, what an uproarious,
continual – and righteous – brouhaha there would result, huh!? There would prompt an all – out
war the likes of which had never been known anywhere before. Until the gendercide was halted.
And justice done.
So. So – – it was high time.
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Herry returned from work on the 06th, to find a wife who hadn’t slept for another five, six days.
Straight. Really slept. Of course, most of those hours are only a haze to me now, and already
were only that shortly after that first week of June. Mirzah, Jesse and Zane had one more day of
school left, Tuesday, and then … The Summer! Moxie, mettle and éclat were never Mehitable’s
favorite subjects for her daughters’ life lessons so I can honestly say that none of us True sisters –
Legion, Endys or Ardys – had any of all three. At the time.
I was president my senior year of the Williamsburg High School Drama Club, love, love, love the
movies and dabbled in acting, dancing and singing during my two undergrad years at Iowa State –
before eloping with John to New York City – so I had had the lines and the lyrics fairly down pat
by the Boys’ bedtime that Monday night. Just the steps of The Dance was I really, really afraid of
stumbling through. But it was time.
My integrity and my dignity were in the toilet and about to be flushed if I, again, did squat. Again.
After Herry’s stellar staged performance – and he knew it. O, I do not in the least pass on any of
the accountability that is mine in demanding the marital separation. Actually, I welcome taking it
on. Out of nothing – truly, I felt – out of nothing – not even out of the ashes that were Herry’s
smashed and broken promises of cherishing me forever, my fiery phoenix rose; and I created the
courage I had never been taught to assert for my own self’s protection, to face Doctor Wonderful
and my life as the lie it was. And to stop it as such. Rather a miracle it is for us women who
accomplish this tour de force, I must say, given our earthly human status as nonbeings. I was no
more a Mrs. Wonderful than Dolores Huerta, Aunt Jemima or Betty Crocker were ever going to be
United States Supreme Court justices or our Secretary of State – and I had never been. The blue
Creighton journaling that had begun years before I existed for Herry and just another one of those
nth nights of his in a hotel room at a no – name medical meeting which I was allowed to only know
of as its being held “in Chicago” proved that.
Dr. Patrick Carnes, the sexual addiction expert of Out of the Shadows acclaim, has quite a
different identification for me, too, than Mrs. Wonderful. I am not only not even The Wife but
I am really only one of, any one of, The Stash. Not Herry’s first of course, but, for me, for my
safety and for my sanity more importantly and most assuredly, not his last. That’s just it, the long
and the short of it: there isn’t … “a last.”
Some people are physically addicted; some are emotionally addicted, the brain of course with its
endorphins and such, being the largest of human copulatory organs. Both genres of addict
mainline epinephrine which their own adrenal glands produce and release endogenously into the
bloodstream – adrenalin. Junkies they have become – of the momentary highs of the chase and the
capture and the attention fawned and lauded upon them. Either type of addictive behavior and any
demeanor of the addict in between the two poles of his countenances is an attempt to slake the
addict’s overwhelming insecurities by quenching them all in the neuronal adrenalin baths of
others’ accolades instead of going inside of himself after his own inner strength, to his own best
friend there, in order to accomplish that job.
Of course, as with any addictive chemical, it takes more and more hits of epinephrine to get out
the same effect, that is, more and more ‘episodes’ of an addict’s actions to come to the same level
of assuagement of his insecurities. And if the amount of them – the insecurities – in the individual
rises, so then also must the number of actions and activities increase even more so as well. It’s
the same ol’, same ol’ story that most people know about as a matter of fact. Until, of course, …
The Crash. The inevitable crash. Because the levels of everything, of everything from chemicals
to insecurities to time to get in these episodes of hits to whatever else is necessary for ‘the care and
maintenance’ of the addict, are just so, so high that they become simply … unsustainable.
My level of everything heinous about Herry had been reached, too, and was no longer sustainable
either. I had tolerated and endured enough – with patience beyond reason – and, now after five to
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six days without sleep and more than a dozen years without Herry’s love and fidelity, I had also
practiced the lines and the lyrics and the steps. Still, I was soooo scared to really and truly
perform The Dance in front of him. But I did. Anyway.
Hesitantly of course, “Herry, we need you to leave.”
“Huh?”
“We need you to leave this house. Tonight.”
“What are you saying, Bitch? What do you mean? What do you mean, “we”?”
“Aahh, the Boys and I need for you to go. And to live elsewhere. An’, aahh, and to go tonight.
Aahh, we’re not kicking you out. Please, please understand that, Herry. We’re not.”
“Not … not kicking me out, you say?!”
“Well, um, it’s just thatum, you can’t live here, you see. Around the Boys and me. Ya’ know, and
continue to stay the way that you are. So. So, I have decided that you have to go away and then,
umm, and then you can come back when, … when you are changed and when you have chosen
instead not, umm, not to be around them and … an’ around me like you have been all this time.”
“Been? Just how do you think I’ve been, Bitch?” Herry was remarkably restrained I was
thinking.
I truly expected after this much of the discourse to really be punched, not just pinned and merely
threatened with being beaten up. And I was quite surprised, too, at his not striding right off to their
bedroom and waking up Zane, Jesse and Mirzah demanding to know from their very mouths, right
then and there, their interests in this entire matter, my having used the pronoun “we” and referring
to them as well in this, The Dance. Which I specifically did do because I meant it: I could not any
longer –not one minute more – have my sons growing up around Herry and learning to become
such boyfriends and such husbands as he was any longer. Not any longer. Not a moment more.
That is the reason, exclusively, for the conclusive action I knew I needed to take and about which
I had mustered enough cognizance during my extended early June wakefulness. I fully believe it
most likely to this day that, except for Jesse, Mirzah and Zane and except for their being male
children of mine and not female children, I would not have heeded the call commanded forth by
whichever Ancestor, probably Detanimod, probably Herry’s own mother herself, for this man – for
this actual blood son of hers – to leave our household. I now know: many, many, many mothers
feel and believe exactly as did I then! That very night. Especially those whose children are …
sons.
June the 5th or June the 7th was the day of Juggern’s and Detanimod’s wedding anniversary, after
all. I can’t remember which of the two, for sure, was the anniversary exactly because the other
one of the two dates was Detanimod’s birthday. And today? Today was June the 6 th.
On a very snowy, late December day in 1984, I had been sitting alone with Detanimod in her
warm kitchen nestled on a gentle slope six really rural miles east into the white countryside from
Fatlantic. Someone had moved out into it her overstuffed rocker from its usual spot in the living
room, and 74 – year – old Detanimod, bundled with blankets wrapped around her, sank back into
it quite feeble and often barely audible to me. This being late 1984, Detanimod was now a good
three years into her diagnosis of and chemotherapy for primary ovarian carcinoma.
“When I get better in the spring, Legion, I will have the strength to tell you,” she managed.
We had been discussing a favorite subject of hers, just the two of us alone. Detanimod always had
been fully free with me, only one of her six daughters – in – law, about her abuse at the hands and
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mouths of Juggern’s parents and siblings. Long before any of us knew of her cancer, she had
shared with me, always only the two of us alone, time and time again the episodes of violent
wrong she, too, had endured. From the mulberry – picking chore not only okayed but actually
promoted by Juggern’s mother and sisters and whereat Detanimod had slipped awfully – and,
subsequently, aborted her first known pregnancy as a result to the four babes in cloth diapers
always during primitive laundering times on any given day for, O, just years … and years …
and years … starting along around 1935, and not concluding until 1956 or so, a couple of years
post the term birth of, by then, her 14th gestation, Murielle. “When I am feeling better, I will tell
you something that’ll help you understand why Herry’s like he is – it’s something about Juggern
and about Herry’s brothers. And, an’ … about Herry.” She fell silent and sad – looking
apparently remembering a far – off time. Plus … she was so very, very weak.
The twang of Detanimod’s blazing innuendo in that conversation just before New Year’s led me
to believe most fervently that this forthcoming spring revelation was to have been her Truth
behind the real – life banishment of the great lay priest and county political party chair, Juggern,
down to the milkhouse to live out each day. All through each day and all through each night.
Clean socks and three meals couriered down to him on a 24 – hour basis. The time of some two
weeks to possibly as long as two months when almost all of the Edinsmaier male children were
solidly into their adolescences and young adulthoods that there was so much rurally isolated
familial boinking going on that Detanimod had had her hands full every single day with not only
just changing babies’ dirty pants but also trying to figure out where to separate the older ones who
now wore long pants from everyone else at nighttime. Let alone, during any down times of the
dog – day afternoons when hidden – away haystacks abounded and school classes to occupy her
sons and consume their ‘activities’, because it was summertime, did not. I still believe this now as
ardently as I did then. So much so that I sought out the counsel of women’s advocates for
knowledge and understanding on the frequency and isolation of incest, of the commonness of
brothers against sisters, out upon the farm; I did this, of course. Herry did not, of course.
As much as I believe her Truth to be this – and that she was also going to help me to know it, too,
… Detanimod died May the 10th, 1985. As AmTaham used to quote Tennyson about folks’
passing, she “crossed the bar.” One month shy, Detanimod was, of 50 years married to this small,
supposedly godly, white man known as Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier. And 49 years and
11 months total she had lived in his bed and borne his crowd of children and never, never, not one
time, ever heard from his lips to her precious eardrums, “Detanimod, Deta … Deta … I love you.”
As I write this down, my mind is again stoned by this – this incredibly depraved Mr. Edinsmaier.
Prophetess Rosalind Miles writes on page 215 of her Chapter Nine, The Rod of Empire:
Dominion and Domination in her Women’s History of the World, “Abigail Adams to her husband,
John: ‘Put not such power in the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they
could.’ They could, and they did. The machine of the patriarchs ground on, crushing women,
children and native races as it went, consigning the flower of its youth to dusty death miles from
home, making those same women, children, youths and natives the excuse for all of its own self –
serving, self – deluding obsessions.” Not only was this Mr. Edinsmaier’s legacy; it defined him.
This is the legacy that certainly Herry, for one at least, inherited and learned so well during his
youth and that every one of his immediate family, literally every single member of that swarm
to the day Mr. Juggern Edinsmaier also died, which was just last week, Friday the 13th, excused.
They all excused it with such a silent flourish even – one on the order of the evil uses of Silence
taught about at Grace’s college. Ten years last Friday, 13 October 2000, was to the very same day
when Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier’s reproductive organ finally bled out enough to cause him
to quit his earthly breathing that that Ryder truck manned by his legacy, Herry, had pulled up to
6143 Havencourt in 1990, and spirited away inside of it – by an American judge’s ‘court’ order –
my three Truemaier Sons. Well on their way, the Boys, to becoming the next generation of men
raised up according to Herry’s and Juggern’s plans, that is, their blueprints and formulae for
growing Mirzah, Jesse and Zane into this exact same type of husband and father. The exact same
type of Ancestoring husband and father that the World has known through 120 centuries. The
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mother and her feminine influence be damned. The mother and her maternal teachings be kept
invisible. The mother be fucked. Juggern and Herry, the Ancestors. Their Ancestors.
Herry hardly ever raised his voice to any of us. He didn’t need to. Not with his method of
aggression was there any need of his pounding out his points. And he loved, absolutely loved, to
detail this fact. To make positively certain everyone knew that Legion was the screamer, not he.
He, after all, was not the crazy one, I was; and that his not yelling was utter and final proof that
only I of our twosome was the nutcase and that he, whenever there was a disagreement between us
which was often, was the reasonable, refined and decent dissenter. Not I. He especially wanted
this made quite well – known to the Boys and to his parents’ family, that he was ‘gentle’. I am
talking, of course let’s remember, about The Voice on which I have written earlier.
The passive aggression of Herry’s o – so calm voice, well, that he always failed to point out.
He deceitfully declined to explain one iota about the fact that this aggression of his is classic –
textbook maddening – just as he and countless other men mean it to be. So. Dr. Herod
Edinsmaier wasn’t loud now either. As I’ve said, he didn’t need to be: Da’ Man, he is especial.
When Herry speaks, all others listen. Not?
Only difference now though: I was the one speaking this time. So. Daunted but determined to
make safe my Boys and myself, I continued, “Herry, we are not able to continue to live around a
husband and a father who does not respect us and who does not honor us. The time in Chicago, all
the times you’re out on the road and don’t want us to know where you are and all the other women
you’ve, well, that you’ve given your intimacies to. That, ah, that, that needs to stop. Umm, right
away, Herry. And, and, to, to, umm, to do that you need to be away from us. Ya’ know, to get
that done. To … to decide to get that done. When you’re not this way anymore, when you choose
to be different with the Boys and with me than you are, well then, umm, then you can come back
and, an’, umm, be my husband and, an’ the Boys’ … the Boys’ father.”
Herry was smirking the whole time. Baiting me with that derisive grin of his through my entire
monologue of The Way Herry’d Been. And his head was shaking side to side just ever the
slightest. Off – putting I knew it was meant to be; Herry’d assumed this snide countenance soooo,
so many times with me before. But I’d struggled through The Dance of my resolve right through
to its ending of when it was to be that Herry could come back to us.
Snarling through that contemptuous sneer I heard, “Fine!! That’s jus’ fine by me!!” Soft – and
gentle – like though … the threatening growl came through to me as. For sure. Mehitable’s kind
of soft. Herry didn’t need to raise his low, rumbling grumbling in order to be heard. Only I had to
do that.
Dr. Edinsmaier nearly flew to the back, to his hand – picked, forest – vista bedroom. I stared
straight ahead, a brown kitchen closet door my view, trying to formulate now what words I would
use to tell Zane, Jesse and Mirzah the next afternoon when I picked them up after their last day of
their first school year at Kate Mitchell. Tomorrow at breakfast I would have a bit of a reprieve.
Herry hadn’t joined us four for the morning meal for quite some time – let alone, cooked it! –
so I wouldn’t even need to explain that, as usual, Herry was gone off to work already. A fairly
common phenomenon this daily routine of the morning time is for many of America’s mothers
and children, I fear. And probably often elsewhere in the World as well.
Herry returned from the bachelor pad’s southwest corner with a brown, paper grocery bag stuffed
full and pressed against his chest. Without so much as a sideways glance in my direction Herry,
still smirking, aimed straight for the front gate in the manner of an arrogantly entitled Kentucky
thoroughbred chomping at his bit. Also now about 11 pm and with my brilliant brain still stinging
from what betrayals had been chiseled into it some six days before, that Othello door was swung
open wide and, in one more of his marital – fleeing flourishes, Herry Edinsmaier was out of it.
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