Scars

I got this here scar in the middle of my forehead or maybe a little to the right just above the eyebrow and running long side my head right here to the sideburn what I got now, but didn’t have then. Lucky not to lose the eye, I suppose. It don’t look too bad now, or I don’t think it does, but you ought to have seen it when that shovel hit me and laid open my forehead and the skin flap hanging down over the eye, blood ever where, and me hollering bloody hell, “Momma, momma!”

My daddy were a mean drunk and either he were drunk all the time or he were just mean, drunk or sober. What I done to earn that shovel cross my head was sneak a mason jar of hooch outta his hidey hole and damned if he didn’t come up on me fore I had that lid off and me looking at him like he were a freight train bearing down on me and me staring in his fiery eyes like they was high beams and wham!

I survived that run in with daddy but daddy didn’t. My ma grabbed holt o me and hauled me in the house and wrapped my head with a dish rag or somethin and then grabbed the 12-gauge and while daddy were leaning over trying to save some of that there hooch running out the jar, mamma filled his butt with two loads of #4 shot. I think she did it as much fer what he done to my sister as fer hitting me. Anyways the second load I guess tore off his private parts and daddy laid out there in the yard and bled out. I’ll never ferget the moaning went on all night and I was doing some moaning of my own but like I said, I survived.