Remembering Daddy

It was never easy being the daughter of Cas Barnett...

Trapped in His Nightmare

It was never easy being the daughter of Cas Barnett. He was an angry man with a violent temper and when he drank, which he often did, it was worse.

He didn’t grow up easy. His life as a child was filled with evil and wicked things—people who hurt him instead of loved him, anger instead of joy, and suspicion in the place of innocence. He grew up believing he was unlovable and he spent his life confirming that.

The Bible says that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. Daddy’s heart was filled with pain and wrath. He knew little kindness and even less compassion in his childhood and as he grew into adulthood, the darkness that haunted his soul filled his heart and displaced any vestige of kindness and mercy.
He drank to dull the pain in his heart. As so often happens, he needed more and more of his drug of choice—beer—to keep the pain at bay. But when he had drunk enough to no longer feel the pain, the demons that he wrestled with his entire life were no longer constrained.

No one knows the horrors that were visited upon a small boy named Cas in the woods of Mississippi. But knowing that the future of a man is shaped by his past, it’s not hard to imagine that he must have suffered terribly at the hands of those who should have been his protectors—his mother, step-father and maternal grandmother.

Having on rare occasion glimpsed the true heart of my father, I know that he was able to hold on to a small piece of who he was meant to be. But the crushed spirit of a little boy who was the product of an extra-marital affair, was hard-pressed to hold on to any tenderness or compassion. His mother was apparently unwilling to risk losing her husband. Acquiescing to his refusal to raise her "bastard son," she gave him to his maternal grandmother to raise. The grandmother was dirt poor, as they say in the backwoods of Mississippi. There was never enough money or food to go around. As his world became more harsh, his heart became harder until finally the only relief he could find was in inflicting that same pain on someone weaker or smaller or more innocent.

My mother was an easy target. For reasons I still don’t understand, she was drawn to men who were emotionally unavailable at best and, at worst, to those who would either abuse or abandon her. Daddy never abandoned her—at least not in the physical sense—but he was abusive to her in every other possible way. As children, it was not uncommon for my brother Mike and me to witness the two of them engaged in the most harrowing fights. They always started over something insignificant, but could rage on for hours and sometimes days.

Most of their fights eventually escalated from screaming and name-calling to physical violence. I remember Daddy pushing my mother into the wall or onto the floor. Sometimes that was enough of a show of force to satisfy his need to dominate. Those were the times when we all three—Mike, Mom and me—breathed a ragged sigh of relief and quietly hid away for the rest of the night while Daddy drank himself into a stupor until finally passing out on the floor or the couch. At other times, the yelling and pushing weren’t enough. Those were the scariest of times, when Mike and I watched in horror, unable to rescue our mother as Daddy hit or choked her until his rage was spent.

We knew better than to get in the way or to draw any attention to ourselves. That was a sure way to get a beating--although we never really had to do anything to provoke Daddy’s anger. A loud noise, a wrong word at the dinner table, being too happy—all could invite his wrath. We were lucky if all we got was a smack in the teeth by one of Daddy’s huge hands. And we knew better than to cry. That just made him madder.

We always knew when we had done something that tipped him over the edge. Once when we were only four and six-years-old, respectively, we argued over some childhood grievance, forgetting for a moment that Daddy was in the next room. I chased Mike down the hall, both of us yelling as children will do. Suddenly, Daddy was behind us in the hall, swinging wildly with his belt—buckle-end flying. Our screams of childish play turned into screams of anguish as he chased us into our bedroom at the end of the hall, pelting us with his belt all the way.

When we got into the bedroom, we were crying, begging him to stop, saying we were sorry, we could be quiet, we would stop fighting. But he slammed the door shut and yelled at us to bend over the bed. He braced his foot against the door, holding it shut while our mother pounded on the other side, screaming at him to open the door. He whipped our legs, our backs, our arms—anywhere he could reach with his belt until his rage was spent and we were bruised and bloody.

He finally threw open the door and yelled to our mother to put us to bed. We hadn’t had any dinner; she started to protest, but one look from him silenced her. She came into the room, cleaned us up, bandaged our wounds and helped us into our pajamas—all three of us crying quietly as she put us to bed. Mike and I cried ourselves to sleep.

The next morning, it was business as usual, as if nothing had happened. That “business as usual” thing was always the worst part. It made us realize how little we mattered. Daddy went to work, without a word to any of us. Mike and I gingerly dressed in long sleeves and anything else that would cover our cuts and bruises and went to school where we were both particularly quiet that day.


The Good Daddy

Certainly, there were days when it was indeed better. There were days when, for whatever reason, my father wasn’t drunk and angry. Instead, he was the “good Daddy.” I remember a football game in the parking lot of our apartment building, of all places. An asphalt parking lot wasn’t the ideal playing field for a game of football, but Mike and I were so enthralled by Daddy’s kindness and good mood that we didn’t care where we played. It could have been on a field of broken glass for all we cared. All that mattered was that we were playing a game with our dad and we were having fun.

My father had a brilliant mind, which is amazing considering the millions of brain cells he must have killed during his lifetime. Daddy was a dedicated newspaper reader. He read every single line of the paper, every single day. Sunday was the day he reveled in the luxury of reading the paper. No matter how early I awoke on Sundays, I would find him settled into his chair in the living room, hunched over the newspaper, with various sections spread out on the floor all around him. He always sat in the most peculiar way. He would settle into the chair, plant one foot on the floor and the other on the chair cushion which made that leg fold double against his chest. He would fold a section of the paper into a small rectangle, rest his arm on his knee, holding the paper in that hand and his coffee cup in the other. On Sundays, he drank coffee the way he drank beer on other days, guzzling pot after pot of black coffee as he gave himself over for the day to the reading of the newspaper.

When I got older, I would settle into the nearest chair and read parts of the paper too, just to be near him. At first, I read only what interested me, but eventually it wasn’t enough just to sit near him reading. I craved interaction with him so I began to read what he was reading. Hesitantly at first, but enthusiastically as time wore on, I began asking him questions or making comments about various articles in the paper. As with all interactions with Daddy, there were successful ones and not-so-successful ones. I learned to test the waters first before diving in headlong. I still joined him in reading the newspaper, but would only venture comments or questions when I believed my attempts would be well-received. On those occasions when he seemed receptive, I gave it a shot and sometimes I struck gold. There was no greater thrill for me than that—at those times, he was clear-headed and congenial—but best of all, he seemed to be interested in what I had to say.

Yes, there were good days with Daddy too. Although just as it was with Mom, there were not enough of them—and the darkness always came back to claim his soul as well.