A Book of American Martyrs(23)

I asked Felice weren’t they afraid, not to go to church, maybe God would be angry with them and punish them, and Felice said shrugging her shoulders that that had already happened.


ONCE, IT WOULD BE the last time, though I did not know this at the time, we were in one of the old freight cars, where I knelt on dried leaves and debris, and Felice Sipper cursed me kicking at me with her bare legs. The flash of her bare, white belly was exciting to me, and the thin fuzz between her legs. When I was finished I could not move but lay panting on my back amid the leaves and litter stunned as if an electric current had run through me leaving me paralyzed.

It was not clear to me why, why at that time, and not at another, earlier time, that Felice Sipper became disgusted and angry with me, and after she was dressed again, and her face wiped and her eyes glaring, out of some pocket she took a jackknife, I saw just the flash of the blade in her hands before it sank into my leg at the thigh, and the pain of it was such that I could not comprehend what was happening, and was scrambling to escape when the blade came again, this time in my side, between my ribs, and Felice was crying at me what sounded like Hate hate hate you pig and then she was gone, jumped out of the freight car and ran away.

From four stab-wounds I was bleeding. The pain was like a loud, deafening noise, I could not comprehend it but tried to sit up whimpering, staunching the blood flow. The wounds had come swift but shallow, and had not severed any vein or artery (so it seemed). I was panting hard. My hands were shaking. It took some time to soak up the blood. By pressing against the wounds, I could stop the worst of the bleeding.

When I crawled out of the freight car it was dusk. I would be late for supper and would enter the house by the rear, in a way to avoid my family in the kitchen, and upstairs in the bathroom I would wash the wounds, and try to put bandages over them, and hide away the bloodied clothing where I could throw it out at another time. When I came downstairs my mother said, “Luther! Are you ill?—your face is so white.” My father saw that I was ill, and did not chastise me. My brothers Norman and Jonathan would have laughed but saw that something had happened to me. While trying to eat I felt a wave of nausea and dizziness come over me, and became very light-headed and would have fallen onto the floor if one of my brothers had not caught me.

My mother believed that I had the flu. Often in Sandusky when you did not feel well, when you felt sick-to-death and wanted to die, it would be said You have a touch of the flu.

I did not hate Felice Sipper but was eager to see her again. Yet I would not ever see her again for the news was, the Sippers had had to move away from Sandusky, their relatives in the tar paper house had evicted them. And only much later, I would realize that the stab of Felice Sipper’s blade into my (sinful) flesh had been a warning of Jesus, that I had gone too far, and if I did not desist, a worse punishment would follow.


THERE WERE BOYS we chased, and knocked to the ground, and kicked, and rubbed their faces in the dirt. A boy (from the special class at school) we chased along the creek, into a patch of mud, pulled down his pants, rubbed mud and little stones and grit onto his groin, his penis, until he screamed and wept for us to stop.

Another time, after a boy had reported one of my friends to the school principal for stealing out of lockers we chased him into the railroad yard and “hog-tied” him—wrists tied behind his back and his ankles tied and connected to his wrists and a noose looped around his neck so if he tried to free himself he’d be strangled.

Didn’t we care that he might die, somebody might ask.

After we left, and the guys went home, I doubled back to the railroad yard to untie Albert Metzer and remove the filthy rag we’d stuffed in his mouth. I said for him not to tell anybody or he would be killed and Albert could scarcely speak, but whispered Yes.

So grateful for me saving him, he almost kissed my hands.

But then the next evening police officers came to my house, and were met by my father, who called me downstairs, and they asked me questions about Albert Metzer and I said no, I didn’t know anything about it, whatever had been done to him, I had no idea. But I was stammering so they could hardly understand me and it was obvious that I was lying.

Still, the police went away. Out by their patrol car my father stood talking with them and whatever he said to them, or they said to him, they did not arrest me but drove away.

In the doorway of the room I shared with Jonathan my father stood regarding me with eyes of disgust. He asked me what I knew about the boy who’d been “almost strangled” and “had had to be taken to a hospital” and I repeated that I didn’t know anything, I had had nothing to do with it.

I was stammering so badly now, tears started from my eyes.

My father was holding something in his hand, at about the level of his thigh. I did not want to look at it too closely but it appeared to be of the size of a hammer, and wrapped in a towel or cloth. When I tried to slip past my father, to run down the stairs, he struck me with this object, on my back, on my buttocks, and as I fell, on the side of my head. I fell heavily, and a thought comforted me—Now it is over. I can die.

In the place where I had fallen Jesus awaited me. I saw that Jesus was displeased with me but he would not speak harshly to me, as my father did, to reprimand me.

My father did not ever explain to my mother (who heard us from downstairs) why he had “disciplined” me in this way and why for a long time afterward he would not look at me, and did not wish that I would enter any room in which he was; why I had to eat my meals alone in the kitchen after the rest of the family had finished. It was not the behavior against Albert Metzer that infuriated him so much as the fact that I would try to lie to him.