I was quick to agree with Ryan’s decision, as I tried to conjure up the heartbreaking, even nauseating image of my boys bound to molded plastic boards, mouths rooting for the comfort of my nipple as a surgeon slit open their foreskin. Just as a paring knife cleaves a peach, right? I’ve been told these babies, fully restrained and screaming bloody murder, are offered a ration of sugar water, as if to placate their first experience with pain, but what purpose does this hazing ritual serve, other than some test of pain threshold? Even Dr. Spock, who once favored circumcision, based on myths that persisted for decades, advised against it, in the end, before he died. The nurse at Children’s Hospital of Milwaukee didn’t care about any of that. In her mind, my baby’s UTI was the result of my neglecting to have him circumcised. She and her fellow nurses chided me until we were discharged, but only after a forcible catheterization, which resulted in Leo crying thereafter every time we changed his diaper.
Truly the worst of our negligence, though, was our failure to tie up the tassels on our accordion window shades in the sunroom. One Sunday, when I was at the grocery store and Ryan was cooking dinner, Fern and Francis played Tarzan and Jane, swinging from the back of the couch, using the tassels as vines. In some fluke fashion, as Fern swung from her vine, she managed to wrap the corrugated strings around her neck just before landing on the sofa cushion. The deep red marks made Fern appear as if strangled, and still, to this day, in bright sunlight, the scars are visible on the soft velour of her neck. When we sent her to school, looking as if she’d faced near death, perhaps at the hands of a caretaker, nobody questioned us except to say, “You’re really lucky things didn’t turn out worse.” Teachers and other supervisors believed our story, but just as easily, they could have chosen to report us to CPS or any other institution of authority charged with protecting the lives of children.
At the preliminary hearing for Carl Schunk, Ryan was given an opportunity to cross-examine Jared Cabot about the beating at his stepdad’s bike shop.
“You testified that two people held you down while Mr. Pomeno struck you?”
“Yes.”
“But you do not know who held you, correct?”
“No.”
“You do not know if Mr. Schunk held you down?”
“No.”
“And you do not know what the other two people in the room were doing at the time of the beating, correct?”
“Yes.”
In his closing remarks, Ryan argued to the judge that the state was cherry-picking evidence from opposing statements to create a composite charge. The DA used Schunk’s statement about breaking up the fight to prove he was at the bike shop, combined with Cabot’s statement about being held down by two other men—even though the victim himself did not identify any of his assailants other than his own stepfather—to imply that Schunk was one of those men.
“I don’t find in reviewing the transcript in the testimony presented today that there’s enough of a nexus between what’s been presented here on this record and the charge as contained in the criminal complaint to bind over on a felony in this case,” the court commissioner stated, in an unusual turn of events. Cases are rarely dismissed as early on as the preliminary hearing. “So I don’t find that the state has met their burden of proof and will dismiss this matter without prejudice.”
Outside the courtroom, Schunk took Ryan’s hand in his oil-stained grip and said, “Going forward, you’re going to be one of the lawyers the club calls upon, son.” And sure enough, within the next few years, Ryan would help, among others, a member of Hell’s Lovers with his messy divorce. As a payment of gratitude, that biker gave Ryan a large black sweatshirt embossed with the bike shop logo, flames shooting from the Harley’s exhaust in a fire-orange blaze—a comical image, to me, as Ryan had only ever driven cars, his first vehicle a little blue Honda Civic.
Wayne Pomeno did not fare as well at his preliminary hearing. With plenty of evidence to bind over his case, he ultimately took his charges to trial, where jurors found him guilty of child abuse. The judge saw fit to sentence him to three years of probation and thirty days in jail, a token gesture of confinement. If punishment in the criminal system were dished out Hell’s Lovers–style, surely Pomeno would have preferred a couple of uppercuts and maybe a few broken bones.
Could Liberty Cabot have predicted her son Jared’s beating? Should she have foreseen his bloody face and bulging chin in her mind’s eye? Pomeno described himself as ballistic, after all, but he was not entirely bad. When their son Vaughn died, and Cabot was charged and found guilty of negligent homicide, Pomeno remained faithful to his wife. He even wrote a statement requesting leniency at her sentencing, reminding the judge of an accidental death by motor vehicle that the judge himself had been involved in as a teenager years earlier. Pomeno was resourceful, to say the least, and he was Cabot’s advocate. In fact, before Cabot reported for her eighteen-month prison sentence, he demonstrated his capacity for forgiveness and his readiness to begin anew. Cabot arrived at Taycheedah Correctional Institution pregnant with her third child, a baby girl in honor of the boy they lost, and prepared for the antiquated but still largely practiced process of birthing in shackles.
Celebrated midwife Ina May Gaskin reminds women, when giving birth, we are not lemons, squeezing citrus pulp into breakfast glasses, nor are
