Judy P's Tickle Trunk

For many years I thought that it was only about me, that it was my story to tell, but now I realize that it was just as much their story too; as much Phil’s story as mine, after all, he was the intended target in the incident. You couldn’t really call it an accident because the rock was thrown with the very clear objective of doing as much damage to Phil as possible, which makes it Roma’s story too even though she didn’t stick around long enough to see what damage ensued but turned tail and ran for home the second she saw her missile make contact, the outrage which instigated her assault now eclipsed by fear as the melee erupted. Surely it was my story because I was the victim, however inadvertent. They were my own five year old ears which heard Kirk holler “She split Judy’s head open!” just as my thalamus was relaying the sensation of the crack of stone on skull to the pain centres of my brain and it was my skinny little stick of an arm which was being pulled out of socket as June piloted me across the Sunday-school property towards our house, stumbling and tripping across the no-man’s land of thistles and buttercups and small erratics just high enough to catch the toes of my scuffed and shapeless Mary Janes. It didn’t matter that my glasses had been rescued and were being carried by Mary because I couldn’t see a thing anyhow, blinded as I was by a cascade of warm blood and now that I was visually impaired my hearing was super-acute: “What’d she do that for?” “Did she git ‘er in da eye?” “If she got her temple hit she’s goin’ ta die fer sure!” I knew I was almost home when I felt the hard packed gravel of Beaumont Street underfoot and as soon as I could feel the bounce of the wooden back steps, I used what was left of my breath to up the volume of my wailing.

My mother tells the story as if it were hers; how she looked up from the sink where she was putting dishcloths to soak in Javex as the back door opened and we all four tumbled in, me sucking mouthfuls of warm blood and tears and snot with each gasp for breath, June blaring “She didn’t mean to do it” in defence of her best friend and Pete clarifying “She was only trying to hit Phil”, meaning Roma not me but the details were lost in the fracas while Mom cut my sweater off and my siblings fleshed out the story in ragged bits while they fetched towels and clean clothing, all the while catastrophizing about their poor little sister, now blind, at least in one eye, or at best permanently maimed, and they were already rehearsing what they would tell their friends at school: “She got hit right in ‘da eye and she bled buckets and buckets of blood and we was sure was goin’ ta die and now she’s blinded and we might ‘ave to get a seein’ eye dog”, we always wanted a dog, and I felt the cold steel of the scissors slide up my chest, splitting the front of my white pullover like the belly of a cod-fish. It was my favourite top, as soft and white as a winter bunny with two pearly buttons at the neck. No matter that it was two sizes two small, which is why they had to cut it off in the first place, it was my very favourite and now it was all red and sticky with congealing blood and cleaved into a macabre cardigan.  Mom would tell her friends later “You wouldn’t believe the blood my dear, you’d swear she was scalped”

Before I got the stiches, I lay across two wooden chairs in a dark wood-panelled waiting room with my head resting in my father’s lap, staring at the ceiling, stained from twenty years accumulation of tobacco smoke and glowing majestically in the evening light. I was queasy from the excitement and the sweet smell of the pipe tobacco radiating from the pocket of Dad’s brown and yellow plaid short-sleeved shirt as it mixed with the aroma of Breeze laundry detergent coming off the facecloth he held pressed firmly to my forehead. He joked with the receptionist, his laugh lines crinkling as his eyes lit up though she was probably just humouring him, thinking “I’m starved ta death, when am I goin’ to get out of here?” And soon I was sitting in Dad’s lap in an office where there was a calendar picture of busy little pixie-like folk with exotic slanted eyes and pointy hair on the tops of their heads. The long black thread Dr. Pollock was pulling through the soft skin of my forehead was somehow comforting despite the needle’s prick because it reminded me of Mom’s wooden spool of black thread with the round paper label on top saying J&P Coates Cotton Boilfast, which I loved to look at because it had my initials, J and P, on it, and I didn’t cry at all because the nice doctor teased me and called me a “little rascal”. Dad smiled and laughed the whole time even though he was missing his supper and I was smiling too, all the way home, because he and I were the only two in the car and I got to sit up front like I never do because Mary always gets to sit there because she gets car sick, so doesn’t that kind of make it Dad’s story too?

In all fairness, I should give the story to June. It was she who, just before I got smote, was taking my turn for me playing rounders because they needed enough kids to make a team but I was small and afraid of the ball and would close my eyes before I swung the bat so she would always step in to bat for me but as soon as she hit it, I had to run the bases myself, all the while trying to tell which voices to heed out of the confusion of coaching and jeering and I would run on to second because I was too overwhelmed to hear her calling “Stop” when I touched first base and I would get tagged “Out” but she never ever got mad at me. It was she who saw me delivered safely into our mother’s hands before she jumped on her bicycle to go find Dad. She who peddled vehemently all the way down to the east end where she had only ever been a few times before to sell flatties to the lobster fishermen for bait or to inspect someone’s bonfire boughs, and never alone. She who purposefully climbed the steps to the heavy wooden door of the Masonic Hall, which was way more intimidating than church or school because of the big room inside with the polished hardwood floor and the all-seeing eye in the ceiling which we had seen and feared at the Mason’s family Christmas party, and  knocked loudly. When the puzzled grey-haired man opened the door and looked out and saw no one, and then down to see a little pony-tailed girl, June asked without hesitation “Is Harold Parsons in there?”

In this story I was but the casualty. June was witness, field medic, courier, and defense laywer all rolled into one; a young Florence Nightingale who kept calm and carried on until it was all taken out of her hands by the adults. I may have had the goose egg  and stitches but she had the glory.

I reach up now to feel for the scar but it is long gone.

(c) Judy Parsons 2013