Not much happened during the next four years. We settled down into the moderately well-off middle class and tried to keep a fairly low profile. Jane blended in just fine at school, made lots of friends, had a ball.
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Thursday June 5, 2013 Salem, Oregon
Jane here.
I'm a bit worried about Mama. She's been acting strange lately. She looks happy and then suddenly looks like she's about to cry. I'd think that she was getting hormonal, except that she's only 30. If this keeps up I think I'm going to have to sit her down and have a long talk with her.
OK, right, I'll do just that. I'll do it right after graduation.
Signing off.
Lately Jane's been acting fairly strange, secretive even. Heck yes, I know she's supposed to be secretive, given her security business, but this is stranger than that. No, it's not because she's a teenager and wants space without parental interference.
It started right when she began talking about graduation. Sure, she's 19 compared to most kids' 18, but nobody at school had ever hassled her about it. (When we first arrived, she'd told them that she'd been ill for most of a year with mononucleosis, and that'd been the end of that.)
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Well, Jane graduates in less than an hour. It's been a long time coming. I have to admit that I'm still looking over my shoulder for the Child Welfare people. So far I haven't seen any evidence that those in Oregon are any more enlightened than those in Texas or California, and believe me I've been watching for them.
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Sprague stadium, June 7, 2013, 7 PM.
I think I'm going to remember this date and time for the rest of my life. For one thing I cried. Yeah I know, many parents cry or at least get teary-eyed when their kids graduate, but this was a bit beyond the usual.
To call them great, wracking sobs would be a kindness. I soaked all three packages of tissues in my purse in the first 15 minutes. After that I just bent over, shook, and soaked my dress with my tears. Thank God that I wore black! I never saw Jane graduate. I was too busy staring at the floor and trying not to make any noise.
What was wrong you ask? Well nothing was exactly wrong. It just finally hit me. When I was 10 and my father beat me so hard that he ruptured my uterus and right ovary, and after the emergency surgery to save my life was over, I was told that children weren't an option for me. It was obviously true, even to a ten year old. No uterus, no kids. But that bastard of a surgeon could have at least pretended to be sympathetic.
The look on his face said it all. One more of those who won't be littering the town with kids who will grow up on welfare. I wanted to bash in his face, but I wasn't physically able at the time, and the opportunity passed while I was still healing.
I don't know about you, but most 10-year-old girls still have dreams of family and children. Even me, which I guess is rather surprising seeing that my mom died from falling down the stairs when I was 5. After that my father bedded every willing female he could find who was of legal age and maybe a few who weren't quite there yet.
While I was still in the hospital, they arrested him for what he'd done to me. Right before they discharged me, the hospital chaplain came to see me. After some meaningless conversation, he finally got around to the real reason he'd come. He asked me if I'd lost faith in God.
I think that my response upset him and surprised him at the same time. That was the first time I'd laughed since my mama was killed.
I told him that of course I had. I no longer had to worry about faith. I knew that God existed. If He didn't, how could anyone explain why my randy goat of a father never touched me? I think that shocked the preacher more than anything else. After all, little girls of 10 weren't supposed to know about such things.
While beating your wife might slide by (with sanctimonious comments by the more "upright" members of the community about how the "lower class" treats its womenfolk), the one thing you didn't do in our part of West Texas was hurt a child.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
It didn't take long until the district attorney re-opened the investigation of my mother's death, had her body exhumed, and had a full autopsy done. Shortly thereafter my father was also charged with murder.
The trial for what he'd done to me was about an hour long. Even the public defender seemed to be disgusted by him.
The murder trial the next week lasted all of 2 days. The jury deliberated for 20 minutes. They asked the judge only one question: "Which of the things he's charged with will get him the longest sentence?"
Right now he's serving consecutive sentences of 30 years to life. That's enough for me.
Naturally I ended up in foster care. That was a total disaster. I got stuck with a family of Born Againers who seemed to feel some overwhelming need to preach at me for about 15 minutes twice a day. They didn't seem to care when I told them that I'd already found God. I had to see Him the way that they looked at Him or it didn't count somehow.
One day, about 2 or 3 months after I'd been "placed," I was hanging out at the strip mall, just to put off going "home" to my foster family. There was only so much preaching I could take, and lately they'd looked like they might up it to three times a day. While I was busy doing nothing in particular, one of the kids that I sorta knew from school ran up to me, all excited like.
"Karla. Karla! Did ya hear about it? Huh? Everyone's talking about it! He went an' got hisself killed!"
"Watcha mean Greg? Who was it got killed?"
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"Well, anyways, it was that there doc at the hospital. You know. The one what operated on ya."
"Woah! How'd it come down?"
"Well Karla, what happened was this, leastwise tha's what ah heered."
He rubbed his hands together briskly. Good gossip was a very rare commodity in small towns, and he wanted to savor it as he told the story.
"You know Mr. Smithers, the one what works at the cement plant? Well, what happened was he hurt his leg an' got sent home early. Seems that he decided that he weren't hurt all that bad though, so he went an' picked up a new shotgun that he'd ordered and went to the range to try 'er out.
"Afterwards he headed on home, seeing's as it was only about 3 PM, an' the bars wasn't open yet."
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"So here's whut happens next. He got hisself home an' heered noises from the bedroom. So nacherly he went to see whut was whut. An' guess what he seed?"
Greg didn't wait for me to answer, he was in way too much of a hurry to hear himself talking. "His wife, she was in bed with that Doctor Howell. I guess that they hadn't done much yet, cause they was still wearing their grundies.
"Well, that doc he got out of bed and tried to jump Mr. Smithers. Turns out that was pretty stupid seeing as how Mr. Smithers still had his new shotgun in his hands. He shot the doc right about the time he landed on him. Least that's what I heered from the guys what picked up the body.
"See, one of them perrymedics is mah cousin, an' he tells me evry'thing."
(Greg was preening a bit. Stupid boys. They think that showing off will get them attention. Well, I guess it will, just not the kind that they want.)
"Turns out that the doc, he was working his way through the gals what works at the hospital. Tole 'em that iffen they didn't sleep with 'im, he'd get 'em fired. An' you knows how bad things are hereabouts right now.
"Seems that the body was right where Mr. Smithers said it was. There was blood, lots of blood, but it was all by the door and all over Mr. Smithers too. So that's that. No more Doc Howell. Ain't that summthin?"
"Surely 'tis Greg. How 'bout that?"
All the details were in the paper that week. Yes, a weekly paper. It's not a big town, but they did put out a special edition so as not to make folks wait on it. Besides, I expect that they sold a helluva lot more copies than they usually did.
Seems that Greg had it just about right. Several women came forward and told essentially the same story as Mr. Smithers' wife, only they'd not been saved at the last moment like she was.
It also seems that, just maybe, the doctor had been trying to run away, seeing as how his pants and shoes were lying next to his body. Maybe he wasn't attacking Mr. Smithers at all.
Of course, that didn't matter much to the folks in town. What they knew was that he'd raped several people's wives after threatening them. They were so angry that there wasn't much of an investigation. The County Attorney decided that someone attacking a man in his home deserved whatever he got. Much later it turned out that one of the County Attorney's second cousins had been one of the women the doc had raped, but by then nobody cared any more.
I can't honestly say that I was bothered much by it. What I really felt, when I had the leisure to look at my feelings several years later, was relief. Relief based on the realization that he wasn't going to be doing to anyone else what he'd done to me.
What do I mean?
When I'd turned 18, I'd gotten ahold of my records from the hospital and had a good surgeon review them. I hadn't needed a hysterectomy at all. The damage could have been repaired. Either he was too lazy to do the surgery right, or he'd just figured that he had a good excuse to sterilize a black woman. Considering his attitude toward me in the hospital, I didn't really need to guess which it was.
Well, so much for that. Afterwards I put up with foster care as best I could. At 12 I decided that I'd learned enough about how to get by, so I left. Besides, if I hadn't left, I'd have either gone crazy or killed someone myself.
Three years later I found Jane, and you know the story from there.
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