Before we begin I would like to preface this chapter with a warning. There may be a few scenes of physical violence and strong language that may be disagreeable with some of you. Therefore viewer discretion is advised. Please Leave a Review!
I have a Mother and a Father, as most children my age do. I call them just that, Mother and Father. My teachers have always been rather off put by this insistent terminology. My classmates have moms and dads, mamas and papas, mommy's and daddies. But I have Mother and Father. There is a reason for this.
"You're a curse boy! You are an absolute, unending source of shame for this family!" Father yelled.
I don't see why he is so mad. What happened is in the past. We can't fix it now. Besides, I would think that he would have been proud of me, taking back what was mine. After all, he has always told me to stand up for myself. And that is what I did.
"Cosinga please," Mother timidly implored, "He is only nine years old. He had no idea what he was doing."
"The hell he didn't." Father hissed. He walked over to his "special cabinet" as Mother called it and took out a bottle of whiskey (he had already consumed a half bottle of wine by this point.) If Mother had looked alarmed before at my Father's ravings she now looked terrified. She knew what was coming. We all did. The entire family was sitting around the table, having finished dinner, except for me of course. Father thought that he could frighten me with loud words and the threat of no supper. After nine years I am mildly surprised how little he understands me. And so I was forced to sit at the table, watching the rest of the family have their dinner while I sat in my usual spot with nothing but an empty bowl and my Father's angry voice in front of me.
"Dear, you promised me you had gotten rid of that." Mother said, pointing a trembling finger at the now open bottle of whiskey. Father sneered in response, and began to drink. After five minutes of drinking he looked up at Mother, and then he glared at me. Then he turned back to her. His face was now a bright red.
"I wouldn't drink woman if it weren't for that boy." He snarled, pointing in my direction. "How else am I to cope with his disgrace?"
"I-it isn't that bad dear." Mother whispered. By now Father had drained the bottle completely (while it had been a small bottle I was sure that he had drained it in record time).
"ISN'T THAT BAD?" Father repeated his voice a mixture of rage and surprise at my Mother's naivety. With a speed that belied his intoxication he hurled the empty bottle at Mother's face. I did not know why she got hit. Maybe she had poor reflexes. Maybe her loyalty to Father was so great that she thought it her duty to withstand his abuse. Either way she took the bottle straight to the face.
The force of the impact caused the glass to shatter and sent Mother out of her chair. She landed in a heap on the floor by her chair, her face etched with scratches and cuts from the glass. Trickles of blood and tears came tumbling down her cheeks as she whimpered and cried. My siblings recoiled in horror. But I was as still as a statue. I was always proud of myself because of this. There were things that scared other people, even things that scared adults that did not scare me. This was one of those things. I always felt proud of this. It made me feel grown up. It made me feel better.
"Fifteen thousand credits you stupid woman." Father roared, turning his back on his agonized wife as he returned to the cabinet, this time pulling out a much larger bottle. Father was normally a dignified sort of man, or at least he liked to think of himself as dignified, and drinking straight from the bottle was many things, dignified could not be counted as one of them. At the moment he looked as uncouth and ungentlemanly like as any member of the working class that Father quietly detested. His hair was unkempt and wild looking, his robes covered with stains from spilt alcohol, and he had that wild look in his eyes that he got whenever he had started to drink.
Not for the first time I wished that I had a happier drunk for a Father. One of my associates at school had a father who drank even more than mine, but he did not yell or throw things at his wife. He would just sit there in the corner, laughing to himself at some unknown joke, occasionally giving his children some money for sweets so they wouldn't see him like this, not hurting a fly until he finally drank himself into a deep sleep. I knew this because I had been over to his house once on a visit.
I wished this because Father's bad tempers got stale rather fast as the entertainment value of his apoplectic rage diminished. I wasn't afraid of him like the others. Indeed, the angrier he got the more pathetic and contemptible he became as far as I was concerned. But listening to him yell for long periods of time and listening to my so called family scream in fear became rather grating after the first half hour.
"FIFTEEN THOUSAND KRIFFING CREDITS YOU STUPID BITCH! That is how much he has cost me today." He took another swig from the bottle, spilling some of the contents upon his chest. He didn't seem to care.
"Two thousand to silence his teacher. Three thousand to the kriffing principal to keep it off of his permanent record, and ten thousand to the damned kid's parents to keep them quiet." He turned his ire back to me. I'm sure he hoped the manic gleam in his eyes would frighten me.
It still did not.
"What do you have to say for yourself boy, huh?"
"He cut in front of me at the lunch line and got the last of the blue milk." I said calmly. "I should have gotten it, not him."
"You stole the milk from him and threw him out a window on the fourth floor." My seven year old sister whispered, horrified by my callous description of what happened. I turned to her and shrugged.
"He got what was coming to him." I said.
"Do you have any idea what you have done boy?" Father spat, his face now turning from red to purple. "The doctors say he broke two thirds of the bones in his body and ruptured half of his organs. He was lucky to survive. He'll be even luckier if he is able to walk again."
"Why is this a big deal?" I ask. "This isn't some primitive stone age society. The doctors should be able to fix the damage, and if he can't walk again they can give him one of those fancy exoskeletons that he can wear underneath his clothes that will allow him to walk." I paused, surveying Father's rage contorted face. I do enjoy getting under his skin. He deserves it. "I don't see why you are so mad at me Father. He took what was mine, I retaliated and taught him not to meddle with me. Isn't that what you do with your enemies?"
The comparison I made between him and I only made him angrier.
"We are nothing alike boy!" He hollered, his voice cracking as more whiskey spilled out of the bottle, sloshing onto the once pristine carpet. "I wouldn't try to murder someone. Don't you understand? He nearly DIED!"
"Of course I understand. I just don't care." I responded. That set him off. He threw the bottle at me. I of course am not my Mother, and so I dodged it with ease. However, while I ducked Father ran around the table, stumbling as he went and grabbed me by the collar. He pulled me up close so that we were face to face. My once impassive face now changed expression, but instead of the fear that Father had hoped to instill he instead saw a look of pure loathing. That just made him angrier, and perhaps a little desperate.
In the back of his mind, the unbridled contempt etched in his son's face unnerved the aging noble. It was his right after all as patriarch and head of the family to have the absolute support and obedience of his family. And yet his son had the nerve and the mental strength to so openly defy him. What followed next was in his mind justifiable. The unspoken chain of command that was a noble house had been defied. Order had to be reestablished.
Pain was the method by which order would be restored.
*SMACK!*
"You don't care? How about now?"
*SMACK!*
"How about now, huh?"
*SMACK!*
"What about now?"
*SMACK!*
"NOW!?"
*SMACK!*
"This will teach you to respect your elders."
*SMACK!*
"And this will show you to obey the rules."
My face stung, my eyes watered in pain, but I blinked back the forming tears. I didn't know why, but deep down I knew not to give in, not to show that I was hurting.
I knew not to show weakness.
All of my life I had hated Father. My earliest memory was staring at him, hating him. I don't know why I hate him. There has always been something about him, some aura of false superiority and stupidity that made me yearn to claw out those conceited eyes and tear apart arrogant skin. Every single faculty now screamed to fight back, to slash, bite and rip. But I knew something that few people my age could understand. I knew that physical pain was temporary. Bodily wounds would heal with time. This was a game of thought. He was trying to scar my mind and bend me to his will. He was trying to use fear and anger to subdue me.
This had worked well on my Mother, and the mental scars inflicted upon my siblings by Father's violent mood swings had been enough to keep them in line. They were all so contemptible. I hated their weakness. I also feared it. I saw them for what they were, terrified animals following a vicious, yet stupid, Master like Nerf to the slaughter. And so a part of me screamed to resist, to remain defiant, or else I would end up just like them. And so I tried to ride the pain out, to block out the blows and imagine myself somewhere else.
I never cried once.
He eventually stopped. I tried to control my breathing, which came in ragged and hoarse bouts. My face hurt. Nothing was broken. Father may have been drunk but he was sensible enough not to break anything (it would be difficult to explain such injuries away to a doctor).
He had thrown me back into my chair. I looked around. My siblings were staring at me, awestruck that I had endured such a vicious assault without uttering a single yelp. They all would have started shrieking after the second strike. They were all weak. Mother had her eyes covered. She was crying. Not once had she tried to stand between me and Father. She was as incapable of revolting against him as rocks were incapable of flying.
I stood up from my chair. My legs shook like jelly and threatened to give out. I placed my hands upon the table to steady myself. I would not look weak in front of this fool. He would not break me. I looked up at him, and I supposed that the ferocity of my glare must have shaken him, for he stumbled back in shock and, was that fear? Yes, yes it was fear! How positively delightful. To see that fear written in the lines of his face almost made the pain worth it. It is strange. It must have been a trick of the light, or perhaps it was the blood rushing to my head distorting my vision, but for the lifetime of a blink I could have sworn that, when I saw my reflection in Father's eyes that my eyes, those sky blue orbs of piercing ice, had suddenly flashed yellow.
I gave the matter little thought.
Without a word being spoken I turned and limped into the kitchen that stood adjacent to the dining room. I returned a moment later with tonight's dinner, a pot of soup, and a ladle. I set the pot down, took off the lid, and spooned out a large helping of soup. My brothers and sisters stared at me, practically murdering me with their eyes. Father had tried to punish me by giving me nothing to eat and forcing me to watch the rest of the family eat. And yet, here I was defying him in the most overt manner possible. I was doing the one thing they had longed to do all their lives, the thing they had dreaded to do. I thumbed my nose at the creature they feared most, and in the back of their minds they knew that I would get away with it. Mother burst into a fresh round of tears, as she often did. I was only making the situation worse for her and she knew it.
Tough luck on her part.
I set the ladle down, took up a spoon, and without taking my eyes off of Father I began to eat. The tension was thick and hung about the room as oppressively as the humidity on a hot summer's day. The silence must have been horrific for them to endure. I no longer cared. Our eyes, Father's and mine were locked onto one another, his were of helpless fury, mine a cold, mocking triumph.
I finished the first helping, had a second, and then a third. When I was full I stood up. I had never broken eye contact with Father. And then I spoke.
"Why should I obey the rules? You are always going to bail me out. You need me Father. You can't disown me or hurt me too badly. What would your opponents think of you if they found out? What would your allies think? It would be the end of your career and you know it. You are stuck with me whether you like it or not Father."
I turned to Mother, who was shaking, her eyes as wide as saucers as she stared at me. "The soup was adequate, but if I was you I would spend more time trying to make it taste better."
With that I turned and left. But instead of going up to my room or going out to meet up with my "friends" I waited on the staircase in the main hall. I heard Father speak again.
"The boy is a demon." He said softly. I heard him take another loud slurp from the bottle. "Where did he get it from? Certainly not from me. This is your fault!"
I could hear Mother's inarticulate spluttering, but Father's voice picked up steam once more as he found a new target to vent upon. If I could not be successfully bullied tonight, then she was a moderately acceptable substitute.
"Something happened during the pregnancy!" He yelled. "I always knew that your family was strange in the head, but my father insisted that I marry you. Think of the social standings son, he would say. Think of the money. Think of the money indeed. That boy is a drain upon my account and a constant headache. He'll be the death of me."
"Please don't say that dear, it, it isn't my fault." Mother responded. I could hear her crying louder now as she tried to defend me in her own weak way.
"Oh so it's my fault then?" He asked darkly.
Mother tried to protest that it wasn't his fault either, but I knew what was about to go down. I peeked through the door frame. Father was advancing on Mother, my siblings still frozen in their chairs. Mother was trying to protest that it was the fault of neither of them. Father would hear none of it. Her protests and cries for clemency became shrieks and cries for mercy. He slapped her this way and that. My sisters were sobbing. My brothers were white as ghosts.
I smiled. It was nice to have dinner and a show.
I have a Mother and a Father, as most children my age do. I call them just that, Mother and Father. My teachers have always been rather off put by this insistent terminology. My classmates have moms and dads, mamas and papas, mommy's and daddies. But I have Mother and Father. There is a reason for this.
The aforementioned titles have a sense of closeness and affection. Mother and Father are formal titles that imply a distance and an officialness. That can sum up or relationship easily. We are estranged from one another, family in name only. We are together not because we want to, but because fate has brought us together and circumstances demand that we remain under the same roof. It is an arrangement that none of us enjoys. And yet we tolerate each other as best as we can. Maybe that is what family is all about, learning to tolerate one another without resorting to murder.
On that last note I don't know how long I can hold out. If there was one thing that I learned from Father today it was not to respect my elders or to obey the rules as he had intended. Instead, without knowing it, his actions proved to me that violence and fear in tandem with one another play a very effective role in getting people what they want.
Perhaps going out racing with some of the people from school will salvage this evening for me. I may only be nine years old, but that has never stopped me from breaking the rules before. As I walk out the door I can hear the faintest echoes of Mother's cries and Father's yelling.
Another night at the Palpatine Household.
