I was doing a bit of reflecting on my past and my overall life recently, and every time I fall into such a deep thought process, I always remember what an important role both my Grandmothers played in my life — my Grandfathers too, but it was the Grandmothers who gave me the love I ultimately needed.

I don’t know if there’s a place for such a piece at The Federal Observer or not, but This is a TRUE STORY and autobiographical in nature.

It is a story of surviving child abuse and neglect, some of which continued even after my parents came to get me, since my father, a career military man, had a god-awful temper, much like his own father, and I too often bore the brunt of it. At times, this made it worse, since it sometimes felt as if I never had escaped the monster. The only thing that made the difference is the real love he also showed me through all those years. Yes, he was too much of a disciplinarian, but he also had a good loving heart and tried and did his best to correct his excesses as the years went by.

The old man sat down in a slow slump against the birthing tree, a great white oak that stood eighty-one feet tall and spread a hundred and thirty feet wide at its crown, a widely known landmark in his hometown. He was tired, bone-numbing tired beyond belief, and as he labored to breathe his eyes misted over a bit and the memories came rushing back in a torrent, and he marveled at how far he had traveled in this journey called “life”, that he’d even made it into his twilight years.

He closed his eyes as the dark man entered the room and he heard the crack of the whip, felt the cord cut into his flesh and the excruciating pain that seemed to go on forever just like it was happening all over again. The child had been barely sixteen months old, and the whip was actually an electrical cord that whipsawed and wrapped itself around his little head twice before the tip bit into the flesh at his temple, relentlessly and mercilessly repeated until every inch of his tiny body had been scored and bruised by the vicious, inhuman attack.

The child was completely naked. His mother had been changing his diaper just before the monster had entered the room. What provoked it to attack is inexplicable to this day, but as the child’s feet hit the cold, bare concrete floor, the monster slapped him so hard it knocked him senseless to the floor in utter shock. He stood eventually and that’s when the whip — the cord — began to crack, making him hop and jump and scurry across the room screaming in agony at the top of his lungs trying to escape each biting lash, lightning coursing through his tiny little penis and testicles, neither of which escaped the lash. Over and over until he fell to the floor again on his stomach; and the lashes fell as his cries turned into a choking muffled sob and his small little chest heaved mightily from fear, while he wet the floor and himself.

He heard his birth mother screaming out, “Stop! You’re killing him” as she made no move to actually move between him and the monster that now had lived in his nightmares for many more years than he should have allowed, coming to visit at the most unexpected times for reasons inexplicable. No effort was made to stop the monster. No help came. It stopped only when the monster’s sadistic sickness was sated by his screams and visible pain.

For years, he had simply assumed it had been his natural father, who was this monster that visited him in nightmares. But it wasn’t. It was his twenty-year-old birth mother’s boyfriend. She had left the small motel across from her in-law’s house in Baca County, Colorado, while his father was serving in the Army in Korea, only to end up living hand-to-mouth with someone who had no business being around children, a ne’er-do-well from Walsh, bouncing from one motel to the next.

He heard the story when he was twenty-three from his favorite aunt, when he went to visit her in Hutchinson, Kansas one summer. She told of how concerned his grandfather had become when he and his mother disappeared, and he sent a message to the child’s father by way of the Red Cross, which prompted his father to return to the States on an emergency family leave in order to find him.

And when his father did find him, nearly every inch of him was covered in welts and bruises. Sometime later, his father caught up with the monster and very nearly killed him.

This knowledge had soothed his mind to some great degree.

The courtroom was an odd place to the child. All the people bustling about. The strange new suit his GranMa had dressed him in felt unnatural and he felt something his little mind couldn’t quite yet identify, a taut, coarse tension. He sat on one side of the courtroom with his father and the woman he would come to know as Little GranMa, who carried her 4′ 11″ frame straight and erect like the proud, decent woman she had become, one who would love him like no one else. He caught sight of his mother across the room, dressed so nicely that he almost didn’t recognize her. A man at a huge “table” at the front of the room uttered a lot of words he didn’t understand and slammed a big wood hammer against it.

His father told him to give his mother a kiss. He walked self-consciously across the room as too many eyes in the gallery followed, as his mother made a half-hearted attempt to come to him. She leaned over barely far enough for him to kiss her on the cheek, making him have to stretch to reach her and not bothering to hug him or even touch him in any way to suggest that she cared one wit she had just lost custody. And that was the last time the child saw the woman who had given birth to him one cold winter’s night at Fort Riley, Kansas.

The child’s father soon left too, returning to duty, leaving him to be passed from one relative to the next.

Staying with GranMa and GranPa was like a new wonder filled with little adventures each day. He was shown real love for the first time in his short two years. Fed Cheerios with buttered toast and jelly, sometimes scrambled eggs, in the mornings, he was set loose on the outside to play with the cicadas swarming the bigtooth maple in the backyard, that had come out in hordes that year, and to explore at will. Often, he would wander over to the adjacent farm to sneak into the barn and visit the horses, going back whenever he got hungry or the sun was going down. It was part of what he came to call his “feral years” after he grew to adulthood.

A heart-attack forced GranMa to send him to an aunt’s home in Waterloo, Nebraska, as another temporary fix. He loved his aunt. She was so sweet and kind, when she wasn’t sick. Maybe that’s why he grew up liking the smell of beer and cigarettes. But she had five children of her own to deal with, which often meant he spent most days alone to wander the farm and play with the cow, the hogs and the chickens. Or to fight with his twin cousins who were a year older and prone to picking on him. Here, he came to know hunger, going many mornings without breakfast until he learned from the twins he could spread butter on white bread for a morning meal, adding sugar when there was any, or dip into a five gallon bucket of peanut-butter for lunch. On the good days, there was cinnamon too. Good dinners were prepared, but they were just too few and too far between.

For reasons he never investigated further after he reached adulthood, he was finally sent to live with his aunt in Hutchinson. His father sent her $86 a month for his care, which was a good amount for the times. He was left locked in the house each day, until his cousins — two young elementary age girls — returned home from school each day. His aunt had long been a widow after a hunting accident killed his uncle. And it left him to search every nook and cranny and many times to arrive at some devilish mischief, like the time he pee’d in every corner of the bathroom never making the first step toward the toilet; sometimes, after he found he could unlock the door by himself, he would go outside to play all day long, returning and locking the door when he knew it was close to time for everyone to come back home.

Nearing his fifth birthday, he saw a man he thought he recognized. He did. It was his father in his dress greens coming down the walkway with a lady by his side. She was quite pretty, with dark hair and hazel eyes, the woman he would come to know as his mother. They had come to take him home, finally.

All these years later, the old man knew he was already psychologically damaged by that point in time, never allowing his new “mom” to ever really get close to him, refusing to let her hug him for quite a few years; but he did have fond memories of her trying to teach him to box and tossing him off the front porch into the deep snow drifts in Detroit, where his father was teaching military science. In fact, he grew up shying away from any physical contact from others, except for the few rare people who somehow reached something within him. His new GranMa was one of those people, dark-hair with grey spackles, thick glasses, a front tooth missing, round as she was tall and an infectious laugh that made him want to run to her every time and jump in her lap to hug her tightly as if his life depended on it.

The child was asleep on the couch. And the crack of the whip cut deep into his thigh and then his knee. The dark man had come in a new nightmare, and the boy came wide-awake in the pitch-black night in a lot of pain from a knee injury he had sustained during one of his boyish misadventures. Off in the distance, the crack of M16s and AK47s filled the night, and he remembered they were in a blackout with two wives and their children staying with them, until they could evacuate back to the States. The Panama Canal Zone had descended into a good bit of chaos, and attacks against Ft Davis were becoming common place, sometimes violent, sometimes as simple as sneaking on post at night to run a Panamanian flag up the pole. The shadows played tricks with his seven-year-old mind and he felt a familiar fear rise in his small chest as he saw the monster in too many of them.

But then he saw Little GranMa bending down to give him one of her big wet kisses on his little lips, handing him one of the peppermints she always carried. He saw her in his mind’s eye from the days she would sit with one hand on his head as she closed her eyes and prayed, sometimes slipping into a foreign language as Pentecostals were known to do. And he saw his maternal GranMa, happy and smiling and coaxing him to eat a piece of her world famous blackberry cobbler, when he was smaller, and taking him to shoot squirrels out of the trees in the backyard with a .22 rifle from the back veranda, and all was right with the world for one more hour, as a smile came to his own lips.

Many fine men came into his life to influence and guide him on this journey through life, to help him grow into a fine, decent, strong and independent young man, but each time he reflected on the path he had chosen in life and what had transpired from his earliest years, he knew that it was his grandmothers’ love and the grace of God that had saved him.

And all was right with the world for one more hour…

He knows his days are growing short, his time on earth soon to be done. But he’s whole now, complete, and healed. And it’s been forty years since the monster came to visit.

June 28, 2025

~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.