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me. The coach gasped. “Oh, my…” After checking my hip, he pulled my pants up and never said another word. In those days, whatever happened in the home stayed in the home. I remember feeling so embarrassed that someone had discovered my secret.
    Despite everything, I loved my parents. It wasn’t entirely their fault they were uneducated and didn’t know how to nurture children. It was all they could do to put food on the table and keep four kids clothed. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we never got up to self-actualization because we were still on the bottom of the pyramid—trying to feed and clothe ourselves. For the most part, my parents never used bad language. They were God-fearing people. Mom took my sisters and me to church every Sunday. They saw nothing wrong with their child-rearing skills.
    Because I was the older brother, Dad expected me to take care of my sisters, Rebecca, Tammy, and Sue Anne. Tammy was always the bigmouthed, crap-stirring troublemaker. From the time she started elementary school, I lost track of how many times she ran her mouth and I had to stick up for her. When I was in the fifth grade, she mouthed off to a guy in the eighth grade. The eighth grader cleaned my clock, giving me two black eyes, a broken nose, and a chipped tooth. When I got home, my dad was the proudest man there was. Never mind that Tammy had done something senseless and provoked a fight. I looked like road kill. No matter how badly that kid beat me, though, if I hadn’t stood up to him, my dad would’ve beaten me worse.
    *   *   *
     
    At the age of seventeen, the summer of my junior year in high school, I returned home one afternoon from working all day in the watermelon field, took a shower, and sat in the living room wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. A little while later, Tammy came in the door crying.
    My hair was still wet from the shower. “What is it?”
    “My head hurts.”
    “What do you mean your head hurts, baby?”
    “Feel right here.”
    I felt her head. She had a knot on top of it.
    “We were playing volleyball at the church. When I spiked the volleyball, Timmy picked it up and threw it at me. So I threw it back. He grabbed me and put me in a headlock. Then he punched me on top of the head.”
    I went through the roof. Now I was a bull seeing red. Possessed. I ran out of the house, off the porch, vaulted the chain link, and ran down the road one block to the First Baptist Church. Kids and parents were coming out of church from summer Bible school. Deacons stood out front. I spotted Timmy, a boy my age—the boy who’d hurt my little sister.
    He turned around just in time to see me coming. “Howard, we need to talk.”
    “Oh, no we don’t, you son of a bitch.” I nailed him right in the face, plowing him. I got on top of the boy, straddled his upper body, and pummeled him half to death, cussing up a storm. All I could see in my mind was my baby sister crying with a knot on her head.
    A deacon tried to pull me off, but I was seventeen years old and had worked like a dog every day of my life. It took several more deacons to separate me from the boy.
    Brother Ron appeared. “Howard, stop.” I believed in Brother Ron and looked up to him. He was like the town celebrity.
    I stopped. Brother Ron had exorcised the demon.
    Unfortunately, the incident started a feud. The guy’s dad was kind of a psycho, and my dad was a hothead who wouldn’t back down from anybody.
    Psycho drove to my house.
    Dad met him outside.
    “If I see that bastard son of yours somewhere, he may not be making it back home,” Psycho said.
    Dad walked into the house and grabbed a shotgun. As he exited the front door, my grandfather met him outside. With my grandfather stood Brother Ron. Dad was about to put a load of double-aught buck in Psycho’s ass. Grandfather and Brother Ron calmed Dad down.
    The next weeks were tense for me, looking over my shoulder for a grown man everywhere I went. Timmy had two brothers,