Michael Loderstedt

Cat Scratch Fever
1974

When the soul suffers too much,
it develops a taste for misfortune.
                                                ––The First Man, Albert Camus

My stepfather Hallie Johnson kept his fingernails long, which I always thought odd for a grown man. At first, I felt sorry for him. I thought maybe his family hadn’t taught him good personal hygiene skills like mine had. I knew he could barely read, I’d watch my mother open all his mail and read it to him. He didn’t play guitar, some boys I knew who did might keep longer nails on their right hand for fingerpicking. All of Hallie’s fingernails were long and dirty; how could my mother like that I thought?

But the night he reached across the dinner table and grabbed me by my long hair, feeling the burning of it ripping out, the sound like pulling two pieces of Velcro apart; it started to make sense. And as he had me down on the linoleum, my mother screaming to let me go, digging those dirty fingernails into my face and pulling downward, tearing pieces of my cheeks so they dangled like bloody flaps. I finally got it. Those long fingernails were weapons for fighting.

Hallie was not a particularly athletic man. He once stopped his Olds 98 next to the island’s only basketball court near the pier and took a couple of shots with us. His jump shot was pathetic, balancing the ball on one hand and missing the rim completely. Hallie was almost comically uncoordinated, and would never beat another man in a fight who could stand and throw a punch. But in close quarters, against a young boy half his size, he could rip up your flesh like a wildcat.

When I ran to the neighbor’s house, Junior’s mother Roberta cleaned up the blood with a cool wet dishrag. I looked a mess, patches of bare scalp bleeding, my cheeks nearly cut through, skin flaps hanging open and raw. She said she was calling the police. I was always a little afraid of her, she was Cherokee and drank a lot. It was rumored she had a bad temper and once cut two fingers off the hand of her own sister with a hatchet on a dare.

When the police showed up, they asked what I wanted to do. I didn’t understand, but they explained because I’d just turned sixteen I was no longer a minor and could press charges against my stepfather for assault. After a little consideration, I filled out the paperwork with the officers. The officers walked me back to my house, Hallie had left in a drunken rage; my mother was crying.

The police asked me if there was anyone else I could stay with, I told them my grandparents lived nearby. I went to stay with them for a couple of days. When I came back home to get some clothes, bandages were still wrapped across my face like a mummy. My mother asked me to sit down, she wanted to talk. She started to cry and asked if I’d consider dropping the assault charges against Hallie. She said he was sorry, and that he was going to quit drinking. I didn’t want to do it. He’d beaten us all so many times over the years since she’d let him into her life. This was my chance to end it, to maybe put him behind bars, other people had seen it all along–– my friends, their parents, school teachers, and now the police.

But in the back of my mind, I knew he’d never serve any time and would most likely come back to kill me, or hurt my brother and sister. I’d suspected there would be more hell in our house, maybe something worse would happen to our family if I took him to court? I couldn’t risk it, so with my mother looking over my shoulder, I signed the papers to drop all charges.

A wrecking ball only has one function, and that is what Hallie brought to our island home. The beatings continued, more frequently including my mother. But I was growing bigger, stronger and less afraid of Hallie. He’d stopped paying the loans on his paving equipment and our house, so it all went into foreclosure. A dump truck here, a road grader there would disappear, having gotten repossessed. Amazingly, he’d go to another lender and buy them back again.

I started spending much more time away from home, working in restaurants until late at night. I stayed high all the time. Somehow, I’d managed to complete the SAT, driving to my high school hungover to take it one Saturday. When I got the letter of acceptance to the only college I applied, I thought it a sign. It was time to leave the island.

When I think about all the turmoil we faced back then, it’s a miracle that me, my brother and sister have survived to this day. No one ever thinks; I think I’ll get my ass kicked so I can write a good story later. Forever will be the nagging remorse; could I have done more to stop it? And for this, I have no good answer. I keep coming back to the fact we were kids. We were kids abused by a horrible man my mother brought into our home, for reasons I’ll never understand. But I continue to speculate–– was it her loneliness, her deep desire for some financial security, a long-held vision she held that being a wife made her complete? I’ll never know, she can no longer answer, and we were just kids.

Michael Loderstedt was recently published in the NC Literary Review. He has also had poems published in a recent anthology entitled neighborhood Voices (Literary Cleveland/Cleveland Public Library) and received an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in Literature in 2020.

Photograph by Michael Loderstedt