LITMIR.BIZ

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at the age of seventeen, quite a looker and with some money in her purse. My dad said both details were true. I never saw any photographic evidence of the former; the woman I knew was hard, cold, and bitter. Any traces of beauty were long gone, if they'd ever been there in the first place.

      Perpetually squinting through a haze of cigarette smoke, Jean uttered harsh commentary in a harsh brogue. She was always complaining about her lot in life or one or another of her eight children. I never met Dad's father. He lived with his second wife only a few miles away in another village, but he never cared enough to meet us.

      By the time Jean married Roy Williams, she had blown through whatever money she'd brought to America. I remain ignorant of how they met and why they married. When I think of Jean, in particular, and Roy, from how my parents described him, I can easily imagine them as unsympathetic and broken characters from the Grapes of Wrath.

      Roy and Jean scraped by while Roy managed a run-down farm in the town of Hampton, New York, which is across the bridge from Poultney. While our village had a population of twelve hundred people, the only thing that marked Hampton was a grocery store by the side of the road that ran north through the state to the Canadian border. Hampton was a town that wasn't. My father was born in an old bed in the sad old rented farmhouse in a town that existed only as lines on a map.

      My mother says that Jean was a sharp and unloving mother. The words “I love you” did not pass her lips, and she never held or hugged her kids. When my father reached ninth grade, Jean made him quit school and go to work to help support his seven younger siblings. She required that of all her children, each in turn. Before the others were old enough to help, my dad was the one who had to collect water from the farm's well every day for the family's needs.

      My father didn't live in a place with electricity, indoor plumbing, or bathrooms until he was seventeen years old, which was when he joined the navy, with his mother's permission. Until then, he'd always used an outhouse. I didn't know this until after he died in 2004, because he had been too ashamed to talk about it. It wasn't until then that his weird jokes about chamber pots, which he referred to as “piss pots,” made any sense to me at all.

      When they first got married, Dad told my mom that he would never, ever go camping. Not that I can imagine for a second my mother ever wanting to either. It isn't her style. He said that he'd camped out the first seventeen years of his life and he'd never do it again.

      My father was a kid when he developed his deep-in-the-gut hatred of inequality. In part it manifested itself through his profound dislike of the Republican Party, a dislike born in the grocery store in Hampton. He had the humiliating chore of going there to pick up the Depression-era support checks that helped the family survive.

      The store's owner and his sons happened to be Republicans; they also happened to be men who abused the system and took a cut of families’ support checks for “administering” the relief money. Those who dared to complain found even less money in their hands the next time. If they complained too much, there might be no money at all. And not only were those desperate families stolen from, they were treated like dirt in the process.

      For my dad, these men epitomized greed, corruption, and— maybe the worst thing in his estimation—a complete lack of regard for the common man. Or as he put it, the “little guy.” For his entire life, that family rode the waves of my father's psyche like wraiths. Whenever any of us accomplished something grand, something unexpected, he'd wish he could transport himself back in time and stride into their long-closed store, puff out his chest, and brag like mad. He'd show them. How could he possibly be trash if his family could do such great things? Imagine when I received the Nobel Peace Prize.

      A few years after Mom and Dad were married, they managed to buy a grocery store in Poultney from one of Mom's Italian aunts and her husband, who'd taught Dad to be a butcher in the store. As soon as it was his, my father defiantly hung Democratic Party posters in its two big windows, which faced directly onto Main Street. When Roy saw the posters, he rushed into the store and tried to take them down, fearful that people would no longer shop there. All those in Poultney who mattered, and most of those who didn't, were Republican in those days.

      Dad turned on his father. He didn't give a damn if no one shopped there. He was a Democrat, and he wasn't going to hide his beliefs from anyone. He didn't care what anyone thought. The signs stayed put. And no one stopped buying their food at my father's grocery store.

      I inherited that attitude from my father and from my grandfather Ralph. When I was younger I didn't realize, or couldn't acknowledge, that it had come from both of them. As I grew up, I increasingly identified with my Grampa Ralph. He was strong, confident, and didn't suffer fools lightly. He laughed as easily and quickly as he angered. Once the anger passed, also quickly, he didn't think about it again.

      I have Ralph's jaw and my dad's blue eyes. I didn't understand how much I identify with my father's lifelong concern for the everyman. Part of that is what helped shape me into the grassroots activist that I am today. That, and trying to protect my brother.

      CHAPTER TWO

      A Special Place in Hell

      When they took increasing pleasure in harassing Steve, I became certain Billy and Bobby, the boys who lived next door, merited a special place in hell. Certainly their souls must be dark if they could act like that toward my handicapped brother. He hadn't chosen to be deaf. He couldn't help it if he couldn't talk. The brothers morphed from simply irritating next-door neighbors into nasty nemeses we'd escape only with our move away from Poultney.

      Billy and Bobby etched themselves into my memory on a day that started out innocuously enough when Steve and I set out for a bike ride. We pedaled away from our house on Norton Avenue toward the hill at the end of the street, which seemed immense at the time. There, we turned left at the corner where our cousins lived and continued around the block and back to the front of the house. One spin around that small block was never enough, but we weren't allowed to venture farther into the wild reaches of Poultney; my mom could conjure up too many potentially dangerous scenarios. So we often went round and round the block until we got dizzy.

      That afternoon, as we rounded the corner for the third or fourth time and rode along the side of the hill, Billy and Bobby came charging at us from behind thick bushes. Running along the hillside above us, they rained down stones and empty tin cans on us. We were either too shocked or too stupid to swerve out of their range before a can caught Steve in the head, cutting a long gash in his scalp. Yelping as blood poured down his face, he managed a shaky U-turn and pedaled home as fast as he could, certain I was right behind him.

      If he'd looked back, he'd have seen my bike in the middle of the street, its front wheel spinning madly. Instead of my mousy self standing mutely by, shaking in my sneakers while they picked on my brother, righteous indignation overpowered my fear and I went after them, screaming like a banshee. I wanted to catch them and beat the crap out of them and make them pay for hurting Steve.

      It didn't occur to me at the moment I'd be the one who'd likely get the beating, but that was irrelevant anyway. Before I even reached the ambush site, they were crowing at me from the top of the hill. Panting, bathed in tears of frustrated impotence, I watched them disappear. As their voices faded away, I picked up my bike and, exhausted and deflated, pushed it home.

      Mom was standing in the front yard hugging Steve tight, pressing a towel to his head. She was looking at me as if some other kid had taken over my body. When I was young I never raised my voice. Mom swears that when I was a baby, I almost never cried. I was such a good girl growing up that I drove rebellious Mary Beth mad. She saw me as the boring, brownnosing, goody-two-shoes of the family. But I remember myself that day as a girl transformed.

      Once we'd left Poultney, the bullies next door became just a very unpleasant memory, less and less important with time and distance. Maybe my feeble attempt to defend my brother had been a once-only, out-of-body sort of episode, and now that he was safe and secure I'd never have to worry about coming out of my quiet shell again.

      · · ·

      I'd just begun second grade when our Poultney bubble burst. Dad sold the grocery store and our house, and right before my seventh birthday, we'd be moving to

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