One of Many

By John Robinson

The book One of Many is a real-life portrayal of how the author lived as a child. The book explains what it was like to be the last of nineteen children growing up in rural Maine in the 1960s. The book was written through the eyes of a five- to seven-year-old child but with the commentary of an adult perspective. The reader is asked to realize that the worst things the author experiences were not written in this book. They were intentionally left out. There will be a second book following One of Many and a third and probably a fourth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524581039

John Robinson

John Robinson leads the Eden bus ministry, part of The Message in Manchester. He is author of NOBODY'S CHILD and is married to Gillian, a vicar in the Church of England. They have two daughters.

Book preview

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1: The First Day

It was about 4am, New Years Day morning, 1963. I was not yet 5 years old. I remember this because we had all–my family and I—watched the New Years Eve celebration on our new television the night before. We had just gotten the new television for Christmas, 1962. It was our first television. It looked like a big wooden box about 5 feet high and 4 feet wide. It had a small round glass screen about 2 feet across, with 4 big round knobs under the screen: one to change the channels, one for sound, and two more for what I did not know. There was a big oval shape in the front below the screen that was black–where the sound came out. We had all gathered around the television to see the celebration: my brothers and sisters, all 19 of us children, and my parents—even some of the neighbor kids, along with their father, Gerald Thompson. I remember the house being very quiet when the television was turned on. It seemed to take a long time for it to start after Daddy turned the ON knob. I could hear some kind of humming sound coming from inside the box.

I realize now why it was so quiet. The Kids were all captivated by this amazing machine that could make pictures appear out of the air! Moving pictures at that! I could not really understand how it all worked. It seemed like magic to me, and I did not understand where the picture came from. The pictures were all black and white, so I thought that all the people on the television were a different color than my family. Really, they all looked gray to me, not black or white.

I do remember my Dad calling someone on the television a Nigger. I didn’t know what that meant until my brother Pappy (Patrick) said that it meant the man had black skin. And that people with black skin were all called Niggers. I did not know before that, that people had different colored skin. I didn’t understand then, and I don’t understand to this day what the color of someone’s skin had to do with anything? And I did not know then that calling a man a nigger was calling him a bad name.

I was confused and kept asking a lot of questions- so many in fact that I got backhanded by my dad. He hit me without any warning right on the side of my face. My right eye immediately started to swell up. I started to cry. He grabbed me by the hair and said: If you don’t keep your goddamned mouth shut, I’m going to crucify you!

I did not know then what being crucified was but I had heard it enough times to know that it was something that really hurt. I lay down on the floor under the coffee table and tried not to cry.

So now I awoke early the first day of the new year to a feeling of being pissed on by my brother Dickey. It was warm and wet. He always wet the bed, and I was always the one who was forced to sleep next to him. There were five of us that slept in the one bed together: I, Pappy, Dickey, and I can’t remember which brothers were the other two.

I lay there for a moment just looking at the snow that had blown in through the broken window during the night. I remember that I could not see out of my right eye. I assumed it was because my dad had hit me the night before, for asking too many questions. My ear and the side of my face hurt too.

I remember this place where we all slept as being very cold. There was no heat source- except for the chimney that ran through the center of the open chamber.

The whole room must have been 30 x 40 feet. I know this now by conversations with my family since that time. It was an old timber frame house from the 1700s.

A few years later, my sister Bid burned it to the ground. We called her Bid, short for Biddy, because she was so mean to us. Bid put hay around the house and set it on fire. I remember after that fire my father held on to Bid, and my mother took wooden matches and burned Bid’s fingers for burning the house down. One match to each finger until the match burned out. They made all of us children watch, so all of us would learn never to play with fire again.

I remember being able to smell her skin burning. She screamed and fought, with my father restraining her and slapping her in the face, until finally she just stopped fighting and just looked to the side. After the first three fingers were burned she just had a blank look on her face.

The rest of us were crying except for Dickey. He was smiling. He liked it when someone else got a beating.

He would come and get me when someone in the house was being punished. He said it was fun to watch a fight. He led a tragic life and died at about 40, alone and in a drunken stupor.

After the burning my father grabbed Bid by the hair and forced her out in the shop. The shop was where we had all the farm tools. She did not fight anymore at all. She just had this blank look in her eyes. I followed them to the shop, out of curiosity. I thought he was going to kill her and I just had to see what was going to happen. He didn’t kill her. He dragged her in front of the bench and put axle grease all over her fingers. She didn’t even flinch. She just stood there with that blank look on her face. Then he took a burlap bag and ripped it into pieces and wrapped her hands in it. She just stared.

Then he told her to get out of his sight. To go upstairs. She slept in the room above the shop and walked silently up the stairs. Bid was never the same after that. I don’t think any of us were- except for Dickey. He would run around laughing about what he had seen.

The windows in the old house were missing a few panes of glass. And you could see the curtains flop around when the wind blew. There were about 2 inches of snow on the covers of the bed. We had several blankets and quilts over us and we would huddle together to keep warm. We slept with our clothes on. I know now that the snow actually helped to keep us warm.

The bright moon was shining and it was light enough so I could see to get the matches, as I got up to light the kerosene lamp. My feet hit the floor to the shock of snow. Immediately I started to get very cold. I lit the lamp and took off my pants. They had already started to freeze before I got the lamp lit. I had no underwear on, only a shirt and pants. I took it all off and hung it on a wooden peg in one of the beams. The room smelled like pee. It always did. My clothing was already frozen. It was cold in there! I saw my older brother’s coat hanging on another peg and put it on. It smelled like smoke more than piss.

I remember starting to be afraid. I knew that I would again be blamed for wetting the bed. I knew it would mean getting a liking. My fear went away because I knew that when I got a beating it really did not hurt anymore. I had gotten used to being hit with a stick my mother called the Gourd Stick. I think it was a stick made out of oak, used in the past to break gourds, but I’m not sure how it got its name. I was used to getting a least a few whacks on the back of the legs and butt, every day now. They only stung for a little while.

I looked around for my sock. The one I kept to put the dog food in. I kept this sock with me most of the time. I found it and decided to go downstairs to get some dog food. I was hungry. I would get up before anyone else and fill the sock with dog food from the big bag that was behind the door downstairs. It was like Purina dog chow is now. It was that hard dry dog food. and it was good!

I had learned from watching my sister Bid how to hide it in a sock. She didn’t tell me that it was ok to eat. I just learned from watching her do the same thing. I kept the sock down inside my pants and up around my belt to keep it hidden from my brothers.

My pants were always very big. Clothes we younger ones had were hand me downs, from the older kids. My mother would roll up pant legs and sew them in place until I outgrew the length. Then she unrolled the legs a little at a time. So there was always room to hide things in the baggy pant legs.

I headed down the stairs. As I went down the stairs I noticed my cat, Smokey, at the bottom of the stairs. He was lying on his side. I thought he must be sleeping. I stopped for a moment to pet him. It was strange but he was very cold, hard as a rock. I did not know until later that he had frozen in the night. My father said later that it was 27 below zero last night. No wonder I was cold when I got up! I stood Smokey against the wall and opened the door to the kitchen. It was hard to open as usual. My father had put a leather felt around the jam, so the cold would not come in the kitchen. There was frost all around the door. The kitchen was much warmer than upstairs. I could still see my breath though. I tried to get a drink of water from the metal milk can–that’s what our drinking water was stored in—but it was frozen solid. I put the cover back on and walked quietly across the kitchen.

My father was sleeping on top of the wood box again. He slept there a lot, because It was the warmest place in the whole house. He would get drunk nearly every night, and usually would end up sleeping there behind the stove. I could hear his loud snoring. He always slept with his mouth wide open and snored loudly. I stubbed my toe on the chopping block as I walked by it. My father would split wood right there in the kitchen when it was cold, so we had a pile of wood stacked against the back wall of the kitchen.

Usually on the weekend, my father would play a game with us. He would get drunk and draw a line on the chopping block with a crayon. He would then make us boys try to hit that line with an ax. I would use the hatchet, since I was too small to swing the big ax. Whoever hit the closest to the line with the ax would not have to eat one of the hot cherry peppers he always had. Or sometimes the punishment would be to eat pickled tripe, nasty stuff that was also very hot from the red pepper he would make my mother put in it.

The first time I had to eat a cherry pepper. I started to cry and he laughed so hard at me. He said are you going to be a man or not? And he always called me Johnny Bin