| OCR Text |
Show that his father had given him, the guilt over putting him in a nursing home just weeks before gathering in a puss-filled bump on the back of his head that my mother drained every 200 miles while the car never slowed, possibly at that same time, my father's sister, Donna, described the decades of sexual abuse she suffered, how the purple bedroom I had always coveted, the one specially designed for her, was a place of terror, how her own father, a man she should have trusted and loved, would force her to please him, would make her body move in a way no child's should ever know, how she had gone to her mother and been told to keep silent, been accused of lying, willed into further submission, and how Donna's allegations were followed by the stories of others in the family, my father's sister-in-law, Sondra, someone he loved more than his own siblings, a young bride living with her in-laws, struggling to keep her husband's father from grabbing her in the kitchen, the shed, the long rows of corn, raping her, and then her daughters, the next generation, my cousins, with stories of their own, stories that were maybe told for the first time while we sped through Indiana and Iowa, my grandfather dead less than a week, the night concealing the fields of wheat and corn, my father buying McDonald's coffee by the thermosfull, his family breaking apart. 99 |
