“I’ve got a good mind to shoot her right now,” he told my sister. He owned a nightclub in Owensboro and always carried a gun on him.
“Stop talking like that,” I could hear Marty pleading. Although Marty’s husband didn’t drink, his anger was terrifying, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. My grades, which were usually good, understandably went downhill. My conduct at school wasn’t the best either.
When my behavior was not to his liking, Father O’Bryan would say, “Henderson, take a walk!” The classroom had a large glass window. From the outside, I could peer in and watch what was going on during my detention. One of the students would be sent to get me after a while. Father O’Bryan loved my singing, so his message to me would always be the same. “You can come back in if you sing an Irish song.”
Many years later, I received an honorary doctorate at nearby Brescia University in Owensboro. All my old teachers from St. Francis came and some as well from my elementary school in Rockport. During the ceremony, I talked about my time at the high school, especially of the extraordinary kindness of the teachers and the enormous impact it had on me. They remembered what I had been through during that time of my life. They all were crying, but Father O’Bryan cried the most. When I left for New York, he gave me a beautiful crucifix he had made. It still hangs in my house.
One of the other duties I had as a child was to sing at funerals. If there was anything that wounded my childhood faith, it was the death experience. The poorer Catholic families usually had the viewing of their deceased family member in their living room. The rosary would be said, and I would sing the funeral mass. As part of it, they always wanted me to touch the dead body, which scared me half to death.
I’ll never forget the time when two men and a woman were killed in a gangster war in Chicago and dumped in a field near our town. Everybody lined up outside the mortuary, adults and children alike (including Oscar and me), waiting to view the bodies and see the bullet holes up close. Their deaths were turned into a festive carnival in Rockport. It gave me nightmares.
No matter how much I believed in prayer and saw its power in action, it could not defeat death. My beloved brother Carl had survived World War II only to come home and die of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix a short time thereafter. He left behind a wife who was eight months pregnant. How shocking it was to see his once handsome, curly dark hair turned suddenly straight as I viewed his corpse laid out in his home. I didn’t know him as well as some of my other siblings, given our age difference and the fact that he had been gone for a greater part of my childhood. But that didn’t diminish my grief, just as the standard line that he was going on to heaven only comforted me so far. That body didn’t look anything like him in real life. But the child finds a way to shut the thought out and keep going.
Not so long after Carl’s passing, I had a personal introduction to death myself. I was riding on the bus home from school with Oscar when I started to get a horrible stomachache. I rushed home and waited for my father to arrive. “Daddy, my stomach hurts so badly. I’m so sick.” There was little response, so I had no choice other than to try to ride it out. A short time later, Billy Richards, the cutest boy in the school, came over. I let him only into the hallway. We were both in the Catholic Youth Organization through our church, and we were planning a dance and looking into getting a bus so the kids from Owensboro could also come. Finally I said, “Billy, I’m really sick. You’re going to have to go.” As soon as he left, I passed out from the pain and collapsed. To make matters more dramatic, I hit the back of my head hard on the floor and was bleeding.
“What happened, Gal, did you slip up?”
“Daddy, I think I fainted.” Such a thing had never happened to me before, but it was a safe assumption.
My father proceeded to do the next worst thing. He went into the cabinet and brought out a bottle of patent medicine, a.k.a. “snake oil.” It was some cure-all elixir he had mail-ordered. He gave me a teaspoon of it. I promptly threw up.
“I think we need to go over to Pauline’s house,” my totally helpless and clueless father concluded, alarmed at seeing my rapidly deteriorating condition. Walking was the only option because we didn’t have a car. My sister lived at least a mile away.
“Daddy, I don’t think I can make it.” But I walked all the way hunched over. By the time we got to Pauline’s, I was in sheer agony.
Pauline decided that it was surely something that a good old-fashioned enema could fix. It was a close runner-up to my father’s earlier “next worst thing” intervention. They all went to bed after the deed was done. I remained on the sofa writhing in pain. After a few more hours, I called out to Pauline and cried how I couldn’t take it anymore. By this time, the pain had moved down to my right side. She finally called the doctor in Rockport. He came and examined me and
