My Family: Chapter 37

My girlfriend had a male cousin who would visit them from the North. He’d go into Logan and pick up women then bring them back to her house where they would stay until the cousin got tired of them. This one night, my girlfriend and I were on her back porch and the window to one of the bedrooms was open. We could hear a woman in there with him, they were arguing. He tried to get her into bed with him but she didn’t want to go. I decided to take a peek through the curtains to see who the woman was when I saw that it was my mother! She was so drunk she could hardly stand up! I went through the window so fast they didn’t realize I was in the room until I had dragged Mom out of it.  I continued to drag her out of the house, scolding her all the way. The girlfriend’s cousin followed us, cussing and hollering at me all the way. He told me Mom owed him because she drank all his whiskey up. Finally, he grabbed a hold of one her arms and I had the other. We were fighting over her. I called him all the bad cuss words I knew while he called me bad cuss words. Then when he seen I wasn’t going to give her up, he hit me with his fist in the face. There we were on the side of the road with everyone in the hollow watching us fight over my mother when I spotted my cousin. I hollered for her to go and get her dad’s shot gun because I decided to kill him. She, however, was too afraid to get the gun. I would have shot him and she knew it. The man let mom go and ran back into the house as soon as I hollered for a gun. I yelled to him I would be back with my dad and he would kill him for me.  

My mom weight next to nothing as I dragged her home but she kept falling down so I had to pick her up and carry her - about ten houses above my girlfriend’s house. That was the first time I ever saw my mom visit my girlfriend’s house - she always could smell whiskey a mile away. Dad wasn’t home when we got there. We were sitting on the front porch when he finally came home with a bushel basket of corn - he had been out with friends stealing it. It took so long for him to come home I had calmed down and changed my mind about telling him about the man hitting me. But Mom didn’t know this and she knew if I told Dad where she had been then she would be in trouble. So as soon as Dad sat the basket down on the steps, she told him about the man hitting me. This pull the attention away from her and put it on me. Dad got real mad, he checked to make sure he had his knife on him and then we all went down to my friend’s house (my dad wasn’t drunk). 

My girlfriend’s mom grabbed me and held me back as soon as we barged through the door - Dad hadn’t knocked. She begged me to tell Dad I had lied and the cousin hadn’t hit me; she didn’t want anyone to get hurt in front of her small children. I ran outside to the back porch where the cousin had gone when he heard us come in the house. Dad had him by the front of his shirt and he was denying he hit me. I stepped in and told Dad I lied that he hadn’t hit me. My girlfriend’s mother was also pleading with Dad; saying she was had been there the whole time and hadn’t seen him hit me. Dad told the cousin he was lucky this time but if he ever found out that he really did hit me he would be back. No one ever hits his girls. The cousin was gone the next day.