The Herdmans’ father was a quiet, almost responsible drunk. Unlike some people who change drastically when drinking, the father of the infamous Herdmans was what he always was… silent. All the Herdman aggressiveness came from their maternal side. The man who begot Ralph and Imogene Herdman had never been loud, or bossy. The man who produced Leroy and Gladys Herdman was bullied, not the bully. It was the same whatever town he’d lived in as a child, and there had been many. By the time he was 12 years old, he had been to nine different schools in nine different towns. His own daddy had been restless, never staying anywhere too long, and moving his family right before eviction. He could time it almost to a day. So maybe the Herdman children did get some of their street-smart savvy from their father’s side; but it had skipped a generation. His own daddy had a mean temper, too. He had learned early to be as silent and as invisible as possible. Unfortunately, he was an only child; so when his daddy got tired of beating on his mama, he was the only other target.
People at the time wondered out loud how those two ever got together. Imogene’s mother was just like her daughter. The apple did not fall far from that tree. Imogene’s mother was bossy and smart and other children stayed out of her way through her school days as well. They were both practically babies when they got married. Both dropped out of school their senior year to get married. She was 17. He was 19, having been held back one year by a particularly vigilant school. Everybody figured she was pregnant. And it was obvious after having six children in seven years, that they had SOMETHING in common.
Having been an only child, he had almost welcomed three babies in three years even hard as it was to feed them and put them in diapers. He had insisted on WIC. His wife had not wanted to take anything, but it meant the babies had enough to eat. The cost of diapers was ridiculous. After Leroy was born, there was not a quiet place in the house, indoors or out. It was time to begin drinking seriously, and to use birth control. The drinking stuck, but the birth control didn’t. Claude was born on the sponge, Ollie with an IUD, and Gladys came while his wife was on the pill. And so he had retreated into the calm of the bottle and let the chaos surround his bubble of alcohol induced serenity.
He had a drinking chair and an old TV that only got three channels, and only one of those wasn’t mostly fuzzy. It didn’t matter. It was just a focus point for the more serious task of getting mind numbingly drunk. He never missed a day of work, like was said before, he was an almost responsible drunk. It helped that he worked in a warehouse where his physical, not mental, strength was what was wanted. He didn’t have to deal with the public either, which suited him fine. Even with his boss, he barely said more than a few words, usually just a nod and a grunt to show he understood what he was to do.
The children, in some sort of weird respect, made him base in their games. You couldn’t hit, or bite, or spit on anyone touching the daddy. They would run from each other and crash into his chair (or lap) and turn around and taunt the pursuing sibling. “You can’t touch me! I’m on base,” was so often shouted at top volume in his ear that he should have been deaf. If he noticed, he didn’t say anything, just took another sip – maybe even put his arm around the child in his lap. Occasionally, they would linger there in the warmth of his embrace, Claude more than the others. He was, after all, not much more than a toddler. The Herdmans’ father left for good before Claude turned four. But sooner or later, whoever the child was would be tempted away by some mischief or another.
By the time Gladys was born, he was working first shift at the warehouse while his wife worked second at the shoe factory. They saw each other less and less, and the children ran at will through the house and neighborhood. Ralph was almost 8 when Gladys was born, so all but Gladys and Ollie were allowed to follow him wherever he led them. And the whole town could tell the rest of the story.
Gladys was one year old exactly when he left. She had her birthday on one day and he was gone the next. She’d been walking for a couple of months and would scream for hours when the older ones left her behind. They had managed a cake and some candles and that said cake was spread all over the floor and in one or two ears, including Glady’s. The kids were tired and grumpy and sugared up. Claude jumped in his lap to escape his baby sister but she bit him anyway.
And something snapped. He grabbed her arm and shouted, “You can’t bite him. I’m base!” It’s probably the only time in their lives when every single Herdman child was silent. Their mother came out of the kitchen and just stared open-mouthed. He began to tremble and shake so that he spilled the liquor going to his mouth down into his beard and the front of his shirt. Gladys recovered and let out an ear-splitting bellow. His wife reached down and tucked Gladys under one arm and Claude under the other. “You kids are going to bed!” she yelled.
“For God’s sake, Mama, it’s only nine o’clock and it’s your day off and Glady’s birthday,” Imogene complained.
“I said, go to bed!”
Now most folks think the Herdman children never listened to anybody, much less obeyed; but when their mama told them to do something, they did it. Maybe it was because she so seldom did; but whatever the reason, they went to bed, grumbling but obedient. There were no hugs or kisses, just an ungently shut door.
She turned back to her husband, who was draining the bottom of the bottle. He said nothing more, and for once, she kept her mouth shut as well. He had told her about his father when they were dating. She left him to the TV and returned to the kitchen.
The next day he never made it to work. He hitched a ride on the first train leaving town, not even knowing where it was going. It was going away, and that’s where he needed to be. All those nights, nursing the wounds and bruises his daddy had given him, he had promised himself that he would never, ever hit a child of his. He had seen the imprint of his strong hand on Gladys’s tiny arm. If he couldn’t keep that promise, he couldn’t; he wouldn’t stay.
Truth was that he had loved being base, loved being a place of safety for his children – even if it did take a pint to manage it. But the rot-gut, dirt-cheap whiskey had not worked the day of his youngest child’s birthday. He couldn’t take a chance on that happening again. Being base was all he had ever really been able to give them. His wife made more at her job than he did at his. Together, it was just enough to keep them from government help. “We don’t need their help,” she always said. But she would take it when he was gone. No way she could take care of all those kids without it. “Hell,” he thought as he gazed out the boxcar door, “She’ll be better off than she was with my paycheck.” He would miss his children. He would miss his wife. But his absence was the only gift he had left to give.
* * * * * *
Gladys’s birthday gave her mother an unusual two days off together. When her husband was an hour late, she didn’t worry. She knew he had probably stopped to stock up on his cheap bourbon. There was a bottle in their medicine cabinet that he kept for emergencies, but he had never forgotten yet to replenish his supply. She, herself, had never had a drink. She had never wanted one. It smelled nasty and she figured she’d never get everything done if it subdued her into the lethargy of her husband every night. He could sit in that chair drinking for hours. He might pet a child that sat in his lap, running his fingers gently through their hair, untangling as he went. Or he might just sit, gazing at the TV or nothing, seemingly content wherever the booze took him. She couldn’t sit still for a commercial break.
She did occasionally envy the calm he seemed to have toward the children. No matter how loud or boisterous they got, he just stayed in his bubble of drunkenness and silence. It had never been broken until last night, and it didn’t really worry her. These kids were enough to drive anyone crazy. What was so hard to understand was how he had gone so long without hollering at them. Bopping one or two upside the head was not abuse in her book. She’d certainly had her share of whippings and more. She knew what he had experienced was worse, but she was pretty sure that he didn’t have it in him to break a child’s arm or beat them bloody. She wouldn’t begrudge him his drink if that’s what he needed. She’d probably drink to, if it could do the same for her… but she figured it wouldn’t. She was more likely to be the nasty drunk his father had been.
After the second hour, she began to worry. After the fourth, the fear began to creep inside her. By midnight, she knew that she would be missing another day of work. They’d lock her up if she left one year old Gladys in Ralph and Imogene’s care. She’d have to move to third shift and find someone to spend the night when all the children were asleep. God was merciful in that not a one of them was a sleepwalker or a bedwetter. They might not go to bed before ten or eleven; but once down, they slept soundly until morning. It shouldn’t cost her much just to have someone sleep over. Because it was clear, at this point, that her husband was not coming home.
She sat in his chair, a place that still held his smell. She thrust her fist as far into her mouth as it would go to suppress the scream that was trying so hard to escape. A mess of crying children was not going to make things better. She was not one to take comfort in the soft arms of a child and her children had never been the cuddling kind anyway. Too much like their mother.
One thing she knew. She would not take their damn money. They’d love that, all these people that had looked down on her her entire life for growing up poor. She would work her way through this. She’d work double shifts if she had to, but she would not give them the satisfaction of whispering behind her back how their taxes were supporting her and her troublesome children. She and her children would make their own way.
They always thought they were so much better than her, with their fine houses and their spotlessly clean children. They wanted to think she’d HAD to get married, but Ralph Herdman was born a full eleven months after their wedding date. Couldn’t no one do the math and pass that gossip around. The Ladies Aid Society would just have to find someone else to talk about, and someone else to help for that matter.
It was just like her husband to leave without a word, without a note or any explanation. He probably figured she’d just know. As if. Well, she would just take a page out of his playbook and play the silent game, too. If he couldn’t tell his children why he left, then it wasn’t up to her. He left without a reason and she wasn’t going to make one up. Let the children think what they liked. Their guess was as good as hers anyway.
Morning wasn’t far away. She leaned down and let his smell invade her senses again. She would miss spooning beside his warm, if unconscious, body at night. His presence had been substantial without saying a word, and tomorrow she would begin a long life without him.
* * * * * *
Claude spent his whole life in school confused, and therefore mostly angry. His teacher would ask him to do things and it would be like she was talking another language. He never knew what she wanted from him, so mostly he just punched the kid beside him to start a fight. That always ended him up at the principal’s office or in the corner or SOMEWHERE they didn’t ask you such stupid questions. How was he supposed to sound out something from a book that never made a single sound unless you threw it at something? He thought everybody at that school was crazy.
He got along fine when he wasn’t at school. He had his brothers and sisters with him and he always knew what to do… generally when to run and hide and when to stay and fight. Imogene was always good at explaining things to him when he didn’t understand. And she never made him feel like he was the only one who didn’t know things. Imogene was also good at telling him everybody’s secrets so if any of the school kids tried to tell him something he didn’t know, he could just tell them what he DID know. It didn’t take long before no kid paid any attention at all to what he didn’t know about school stuff.
But today, he was sure he got it right. All he had to do was to bring something from home and tell about it. The really hard part was thinking of what he could bring. The garage door was the best thing they had, but he didn’t think he could talk the others into helping him tear it down and bring it in. He finally decided on the cat. It was a fascinating creature that long years ago had sometimes sat beneath his daddy’s feet. He barely remembered either his daddy or the days when the cat had sat still beside any living creature. They were always chasing it, and mostly it got away; but when they did catch the cat, they couldn’t hold it for long. That cat could scream louder than Gladys and scratched worse than she did.
So the problem was how to get the cat to school. Unlike the garage door that was attached, the cat could be moved; but he also knew that he could never hold it all the way to school. Finally, Claude thought of putting it in a box. The trick was getting the cat into the box. He was helped by the fact that neither he nor the cat had had a lot to eat the last few days. His mama’s last check had been mostly used up for bills and there was another two days before she would get another one. Generally, the cat got some of their bologna in the days before payday; but he had seen Ollie eating most of the cat’s share. Claude was actually able to sneak up on the cat while he was licking his paws. He threw the box on top of the cat and sat on top of the box. Ralph helped him turn it over and shut it with the cat still inside.
But Claude never did get to tell about his cat. It got out of the box and he’d followed the rest of the children out in the hall while his teacher ran around the room screaming. He didn’t think it was fair of her to be yelling at his cat when she didn’t say a bad word about anybody else’s stuff. It just went to show that all the teachers were crazy; and just when you figured out what you were supposed to do, they changed their minds about what they wanted.
It wasn’t all bad, though. When he went back into the classroom, the cat was so full of goldfish that it didn’t even protest being put into the box again. Claude looked around to see if anybody had left out anything for him to eat, but he didn’t see anything. He snatched some gum from under one of the desks, but it really didn’t have any flavor left in it. He dumped the cat out of the box into the house and went back to school. That would be the last time he tried to do what the other kids were doing. It just didn’t make sense. Still, it was good that at least one of them got fed.
* * * * * * *
Leroy couldn’t stop thinking about those stupid presents they were bringing to the baby Jesus. Imogene was right. “What kind of present was oil?” The Herdmans knew a lot about disappointing presents. A Christmas basket with some presents was the only help his mother allowed from the Child Welfare. Her stubborn pride might refuse any daily help, but she knew that if the children were going to get Christmas presents, it was not going to be from Santa. They never got much, and what they did get was soon broken. Cheap plastic toys made by Chinese children didn’t last an hour with the Herdmans. The monopoly game was worse. They thought they were rich, but they couldn’t spend that money anywhere. No one would take it. And one year, they all got socks. What kind of present is socks?
The best thing they got in their basket was the ham. It was the one thing in their basket that wasn’t canned. A pig farmer in the county donated smoked hams to the welfare every year. It was sweet and tender and the children practically went into a coma from eating so much. He bet Mary and Joseph were hungry. They had come all that way and were sleeping in the barn. How were they supposed to find food in a barn? He also remembered how hungry his mother always was with a new baby. She said it was because all her food went into nursing the baby. “Forget that stupid myrrh,” he thought. “I’m going to give them our ham!”
* * * * * *
Imogene held the doll by the leg battering it against her own as she listened to Mrs. Bradley tell her once again what she was not doing right. “… and for tonight, anyway, it’s the baby Jesus,” she finished and walked away. And suddenly, an image came to Imogene out of her very distant past. Gladys was a baby, screaming as she always was, and her mother had given her to Imogene to take to her father. She was only six but she knew to get rid of this screaming brat as soon as possible. None of the boys were around or her mother would have asked Ralph. Ralph would have been more careful. She dumped Gladys into her daddy’s lap and waited to see what he would do.
He didn’t speak to her but he put her on his shoulder and began to gently pat her back. She miraculously calmed a little and after several more thumps let out a burp that Imogene would have been proud of herself. He held her there gently rubbing her back for a few more minutes while she completely quit crying, and then he cradled her in his non-drinking arm and began to jiggle her gently. (There had never been a rocker in the Herdman house.) She was soon fast asleep. Imogene had watched in wonder as if a miracle had taken place… which it had.
She thought of that moment now and missed her father with a fierceness that she had not allowed herself to feel in years. She looked at the doll still bouncing against her leg. She lifted it slowly into a cradle of her arms and tried to mimic the gentle bounce of her father’s arm.
That’s the way Ralph found her. Like his father, he was a man of few words. If he was moved by the scene, he would not comment. “It’s our time” was all he said. She followed him still looking down at the doll as if she were the long ago Gladys in her daddy’s arms.
********
The Herdman’s mother sat on Christmas Eve with her husband’s bottle of bourbon in her hand. She had worked second shift but had a paid holiday for third shift on Christmas. She had returned to an empty, strangely quiet house. Where were her children? She didn’t even know. It was Christmas Eve and she had no idea where her children were. What kind of mother was she anyway? Gladys was only seven years old. She was so tired. She was always tired. She had brought home some deeply discounted candy from the convenience store for the kids, and now they weren’t even here. Where could they be?
She looked down at the bottle with its amber liquid and wondered if it could take her away from this constant struggle. It had seemed to work so well for her husband. He had sat in this chair, which had long ago abandoned his smell, and had been seemingly content. It was so tempting to want to escape into that drunken haze. Would it make her feel less ashamed, less inadequate? She unscrewed the lid and sniffed. It still smelled nasty in the bottle. But it had tasted differently on his tongue, subdued and sweet. She closed her eyes and tried to remember his embrace, to remember a time when she was not so alone. It had always been a struggle to take care of her children, but she hadn’t been alone before. And that made all the difference in the world.
She stared down at the bottle again and was angry. It wasn’t enough though, was it? The bottle just held the lie of contentment. It hadn’t kept him from leaving. It hadn’t really helped them in any way. It just isolated him from how hard their life was, how hard his life had been. Somehow, she knew that it was this deceptive liquid that had stolen her husband from her and from his children. She made her way to the bathroom sink and started to put it back in the medicine chest. “No,” she thought. “I will not leave this poison in my house.” She opened the lid again and poured it down the sink. She almost threw the bottle away, but then put it back on the shelf… a reminder.
* * * * * * *
The children found her asleep in the chair, holding their convenience store candy in her lap. They were so quiet coming in that they hadn’t awakened her. They gathered around her as they never had. She opened her eyes to the astounding feel of their hugs. “Merry Christmas, Mama.”
