CHAINED

By Susie Hirschi

They say family is where you find solace, a safe haven, but what if the same people who are supposed to protect you, are the ones who abuse you? Chained: The Lives of Six Children tells the sad but bitter reality of pain and suffering that starts at home. Abuse can forever mark the abused, but some are remarkably strong. Witness the essence of survival and true strength amidst the darkest of sufferings

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781628386868

Book preview

Prologue

I begin my story with the fifth generation on my father’s side, starting with my great, great-grandfather Samuel, born in Kentucky, August 1828. He married Catherine Hickman from Missouri in 1851, and then eleven years later he took on another wife and married a full-blooded Indian woman from Illinois named Mary Chadwick in 1862.

Samuel, with two wives, had thirteen children with his first wife, Catherine, six girls and seven boys, and with Mary, his second wife, they had twelve children, six girls and six boys, totaling twenty-five children. Samuel moved to Utah with his two wives and children where they later bought some adjoining property in Bingham Canyon by Tooele. The other landowner was Gabriel Cotton and his family. The Cottons were looked upon as a terror to the quiet settlers in that region. There was an old existing grudge carrying on between the people of Bingham and old man Cotton, along with his two eldest sons. After a prolonged feud, Samuel had a showdown with old man Cotton and his two sons on his property on July 24, 1873. Old man Cotton and his two sons would on occasion visit Samuel’s place on business; fearing harm might befall their father, the two eldest sons went with him. Arriving at the house, Samuel invited one of the young men to enter in, Gilbert, the oldest son, he was twenty-one; at the same time the young man walked in he made an insulting remark. Samuel seized a gun and shot him, and young Gilbert Cotton fell to his knees. Samuel shot him again and then hammered him on the head with the butt of his pistol and stabbed him several times with a knife. Young Gilbert was shot in the body five times with a revolver; he died right there in the house. The father and the youngest son, Gabriel, who was twenty, commenced firing into the house without doing any harm. When Samuel got the opportunity, he fired again, killing the father instantly. The youngest son, Gabriel, was shot in the body five times with a revolver and once in the side of the head with a shotgun loaded with buckshot, but he was still breathing. He died the next day. A boy on horseback, believed to have some connection to the Cottons, was riding by, and he also was shot at, but the ball missed him and hit the horse, and the boy was thrown off, and his arm was badly broken. There was another man in Samuel’s house at the time of the killing, but he was never charged, and the sheriff only arrested Samuel. He found Samuel in his house; Samuel made no resistance. The fight had been a result of an old grudge.

Edward, the seventh child born to Samuel and Mary in April 1882, was my great-grandfather. He married Mattie in April of 1903; they had ten children together. The third child born to Edward and Mattie was my grandfather or my father’s father, Al, born April 1908.

He hated his Indian heritage from his grandmother, Mary, who was a full-blooded Indian, and he refused to talk about it. He preferred to think she had never existed.

Al married Irena in May of 1930. Al was a hardworking man with a side job of selling ice cream in the summer months and his full-time job at the railroad of thirty years. My grandfather was an atheist and didn’t believe in God. There were never any true teachings of the Bible or any other religion, for that matter, taught in this family. Instead, fishing and deer hunting became their way of life, and in his early years Al would take his family to the mountains all the time. He loved it; they couldn’t get enough of the great outdoors, any of them. They sought the hunt for the food to feed the family. Irena, my father’s mother, was born in August 1912. She came from a family of twelve. She was the fourth child born of ten children in this family. Her father, George, came from England and her mother, Electa, from Florida. Irena came from a very well-educated and wealthy family background from the Civil War, with plantations and eleven slaves in her history. Her mother, Electa, came to Utah and later married her father, George, in March 1905.

My father is the third child born to Al and Irena in December of 1937. There were four girls and four boys born into this family of ten. The children were not born that close together, and one of the boys died shortly after his birth. He was the firstborn, and he did not live but only for a month or so. The family lived in a very small house for being such a large family. There was only one bedroom to this house, and that’s where the children slept. The dining room was turned into the parents’ bedroom, and the house had a small, enclosed back porch, which later they made into one of the boys’ rooms. My father was one of his mother’s favorite children. Neither one of his parents knew love or knew how to show love either, especially his father. He was a very cruel and verbally abusive man to his own wife and children. His father was a drinker, and he liked to chew tobacco as well. He would put raw eggs in the bottom of his glass of beer and then drink it down quickly and say, I like it this way. Although alcoholism is a problem in this family, you never saw him falling down drunk. Unfortunately both of his parents passed their problems on to their own children. His mother was a stay-at-home mom, but she was physically and verbally abusive to the children, calling them names and beating on them all the time, and because of her husband’s abuse to her, she would always take Valium and lie on the sofa and yell at the children to take care of the house, verbally abusing them and beating them into shape if they didn’t mind her.

My mother was adopted in 1937. Her biological parents were Louis Bargo, born December 1902, from Iron Mountain, Michigan. Later Louis came as a miner in quartz mining to Park City, Utah, a mining town of the 1930s, where he met Phillis, my mother’s biological mother, who was born in August of 1912. Louis was ten years Phillis’s senior; they were later married and had two children prior to the birth of my mother. She was the third child born to Louis and Phillis in April of 1937.

Phillis was a housewife and Louis a miner, and something ended up going wrong in the marriage, and Louis went back to Iron Mountain, Michigan, where he had come from, with the two older children. And my mother, who they called Madine, was left behind in Park City, abandoned by her mother as a baby. She was put up for adoption right away, and Henry and Rhea Colbert, who would become my loving grandparents, adopted my mother.

Henry, her adoptive father, was born July of 1907. Rhea, her adoptive mother, was born April of 1903. Henry and Rhea were married in March of 1930. After seven years of marriage they wanted a child of their own, so they adopted Madine and changed her name to CJ, the only child the couple would have because they didn’t think that they could afford any more children, and they didn’t think they could give the life that they wanted the child to have if they adopted any more. They couldn’t have children of their own; my grandmother had to have her female organs removed at the age of seventeen for medical reasons. My mother came with some problems. She doesn’t have a subconscious mind, with little to no feelings. She doesn’t know how to give love or show love, even though she got plenty herself from her adoptive parents. She is a loner, and she doesn’t like people. She has a sadistic personality, and she’s a very shy and quiet person. That’s just who she is and how she became, with a devious mind going all the time. She is nothing like her adoptive parents, and she didn’t like growing up as the only child either. She would always try to get my grandparents to adopt another child, but they told her, No, one is all we can afford.

My father met my mother when they were young teenagers still in high school back in 1954. She went to South High; he went to Granite. In the beginning, when my mother’s parents met my father, they treated him like he was their own son, especially my grandfather. He just loved him. He was like the son they never had, and my grandfather would take him fishing all the time at the cabin over by Tabiona. But on the other hand, my father’s parents didn’t like my mother at all, and she would say that she didn’t know why, that’s just the way it was from the very beginning. My grandfather Al would take my father and the rest of his sons deer hunting all the time as well. They would go over by Tabiona and run the mountainsides during deer hunting season. My father couldn’t get enough, and after a while that’s all he wanted to do: fish and deer hunt. His parents had a cabin there as well. My mother’s parents let my father and mother take their cabin when they got older so they would have a place of their own to go when they wanted to get away from the city for hunting or fishing. My grandparents exchanged their cabin for a pickup truck and camper for the great outdoors. My grandfather loved to fish. His sister and brother also had a cabin over by Tabby. Even though the river runs out front where the cabins are, that’s not where they would fish, except for my grandfather. Once in a while he would get out in the middle of the river with his hip boots and cast his pole while the rest of them would go out in the wilderness to the fishing hole and do their fishing.

My mother soon became pregnant, so my father and mother were married in January of 1955, right after my father’s seventeenth birthday in December; my mother would turn eighteen come April of that year. They also would apply for welfare services; they needed the money and medical help for the new baby. Neither one of them worked nor did either one of them want to. They were still kids in high school themselves.

In their very beginnings, after they were married, they stayed with my mother’s parents until after my sister Sherry was born in August of 1955. After a while the two of them moved out of my grandparents’ house and into a place of their own while my grandparents would pay for their rent and utility bills or their living expenses. Sherry would stay with my grandparents for the first year of her life because neither one of my parents wanted the responsibility of a child. My mother became pregnant again with my brother Jake. He was born in the early part of February of 1957. When he was born, his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck, almost choking him to death. There was little to no oxygen going to his brain, and he was so dark in color at his birth that my mother said that he was born black, and she didn’t like that, so she disliked him from then on, and when he got a little bit older, she would call him the black bastard. My parents were still receiving welfare and medical help from the state, and whatever welfare didn’t take care of, my grandparents did, still giving them money and taking care of their living expenses.

Chapter 1

My life begins. I’m born in the late spring of May 1958. Sherry and Jake were at my grandparents’ house while my mother is in the hospital for the first week with me. After her release, we go over to my grandparents’ house, and Sherry is playing with her dolls and giving them all the nickname of Susie, and when my mother hears her calling her babies Susie, she decides to give me that name and call me Susie. I’m a happy child, like most children, oblivious to the abuse that I will find myself in and be witness to in a few short years. I don’t know I will have no happy childhood and find myself growing up without love or respect and be starved and have to fend for my own life at a very young age and have to watch my siblings do the same. My earliest memory of life is when I’m about a year old and we live in my father’s aunt Louisa’s red brick house in South Salt Lake. As I walk on the wooden slatted walkway out front of the house, a small earthquake hits, and the slat breaks out from under my foot and knocks me to the ground. It’s no big deal, so I just get back up and keep walking. For the first year of my life I feel like I’m the only child because my mother locks my sister Sherry and my brother Jake outside of the house together all the time, and she started doing this at very early ages with them. Because of this I don’t get to know them, and I’m not able to get close to them, but since they have each other, it’s like I’m the only child in the first year of my life.

My father prefers to live close to his parents, so we don’t live too far from their house, just a few blocks or so. His parents have disliked my mother right from the beginning, but she doesn’t know why. We later end up moving to Chesterfield, about eight miles from my father’s parents’ house. It’s not the best part of town, but we move there anyway. We move into a small gray house on the north side of the street. The house only has two bedrooms, and it’s very small but clean; my father makes sure of that. We have red-brown chickens living in the shed out in the backyard, and there are about five or six chickens out there, and my parents always get plenty of fresh eggs from them. I try to play with them like pets, and as they peck the ground around me, I reach out and try to touch one while my father throws out the feed, and I stand in the middle of them while they peck the food.

In August of 1959, my sister Kate is born. We’re just fourteen months apart, and I love her. She’s like my new baby doll, and she’s mine for keeps. She becomes my best friend. Once she gets a little older, we do everything together, and most of the time we even wear the same styles of clothing, just a different color. Our hair is even cut the same. We’re almost like twins; most people think that we are, but she’s taller and a little bigger in size than I am. For the first few years my grandparents buy for the two of us on each other’s birthdays because we are so close in age and so young at the time we just can’t understand when it’s the other one’s birthday and why one will get presents and the other one doesn’t

On one of our birthdays my grandparents bought Kate and I matching strollers with baby dolls. We both walk our new babies up and down the sidewalk in their strollers while my grandparents cheer the two of us on; it’s a wonderful moment for us right then, making good memories for the two of us. Before Kate came along I had nobody to play with, I was alone in the house for the first year of my life, and I didn’t see Sherry or Jake, except at night just before bedtime. Sherry is three years my senior, and she and Jake are only eighteen months apart, so the two of them have each other to cling on to while they’re locked outside all day.

When it comes to our toys, my mother won’t let us keep them for very long, only a week or two before she takes them away. She either hides them or takes them back to the store for a full refund. If we were to play with them for too long, they would start to look old and used, so behind my grandparents’ back, she takes most of our toys back to the store where they have come from or hides them and keeps them for herself. My mother is a collector of dolls, and she keeps any doll that might be worth something while the rest are taken back to the store.

In the warmer months, or when the weather is better, we all go to our cabin over by Tabiona so my father can fish. There’s a little country store on the main highway, and the road is not so busy coming into the small town of Hanna, and we always stop there on our way down to the cabin, and my father fills the large stainless steel milk can with our drinking water. There’s no electricity or running water in the cabin, so my parents have to use Coleman lanterns for light and a Coleman stove to cook food on right outside in front of our cabin on a table across from the picnic table that we use to eat on. And right out back, across the dirt road, is a community outhouse that we have to use for the restroom. When our family goes to the cabin it’s usually on weekends mostly; it’s not that far of a drive for a weekend fishing trip for my father. I lie on the floor in the backseat of the car, and I listen to my parents talk and listen to the road noise. As it gets dark out, I stare at the moon and stars; it’s soothing to me. The moon is big and bright, and I stare at it, and then I give my baby bottle to my mother and ask her to give it to the man in the moon. I think that he needs something to eat too because, in my world, I think everything is starving because I’m always hungry. I don’t get much to eat, I never do, and that’s just the way it is. After giving my bottle to my mother, I fall asleep while my parents talk and my father drives, and as soon as we get to the Tabiona cutoff, my father starts to drink beer until we arrive at the cabin. My mother doesn’t drink much. She isn’t much of a drinker, but she smokes cigarettes and a lot of them. My father doesn’t care too much for cigarettes, only once in a while, but he consumes a lot of alcohol. My mother reaches into the backseat and into the cooler on the floor behind him, gets a beer, and pops the top and then hands it to him. After we arrive at the cabin, we get ready for bed so my father can get up at 4:00 a.m. to go fishing in the river. Our cabin is small with just two rooms, a kitchen area and a bedroom. There are two double beds right next to each other in the small back room. The bed that has a shelf above; it is where my siblings and I sleep together in the same bed, while my parents sleep in the other bed right next to ours.

My mother stores a few dark-colored quilts on the shelf above our bed, and when we climb into bed, my mother puts two of the quilts on us and asks if we are warm. It sure is nice and warm and cozy.

Then, come 4:00 a.m., my father gets up and starts getting ready to go fishing in the wee hours. He gets the wood-burning stove going with wood and coal with a little newspaper to get it started then uses a fuse to light it with, so when the rest of us get out of bed, the cabin will be warm. My father has some coffee that he’s made off of the stove before he leaves and goes out the door, and he won’t return until around midmorning or before noon for something to eat. If he brings back fish, then my mother will fix that for their breakfast. For our breakfast my siblings and I get a pancake or some cereal shortly before my father comes back after fishing. On his return, he has his fishing basket full of fish hanging off his shoulder. He is wearing his fishing vest with tied flies pinned on it that he has tied at home prior to our trip. I would watch him tie the flies that he used to fish with. They were bright and colorful with a dark background, and I thought they were very pretty. Eight was the limit on how many fish one person could catch, so both my parents would buy a fishing license so he could catch double the fish to take back home. If my father doesn’t clean the fish that he’s caught before coming back to the cabin, then he will clean them out in front of our cabin right out at the river’s bank. When my father brings fish back, my mother fries them up with eggs, potatoes, and pancakes with coffee for their breakfast, and once in a while my father would tell my mother, Give the children some fish, so she would debone the fish and give my siblings and me a piece. She would always say to us, Be careful and watch for bones. Once in a while I would find a bone in the piece that she had given to me, and I didn’t like it, so I didn’t care too much for the fish because of the occasional bone that I would find in mine. My siblings and I always eat at the picnic table first, and as I sit here with my back to the river, facing the cabin, I eat and listen to the soothing sound of the river flowing out front just behind me along with the sound of the birds chirping. I watch my father pace, walking around and getting ready for his breakfast that my mother is preparing on the Coleman stove for them. When she’s done making their food, I watch them eat. After they have eaten, my mother heats the water on the stove outside and washes the dishes and cleans up the mess. This is a very serene, quiet, and peaceful setting that my siblings and I enjoy very much.

It’s 1960, and my mother has had a miscarriage. It had been a boy. My mother needs rest and to get to feeling better after losing the baby, so my grandparents take Kate and me with them on their trip to Yellowstone National Park along with my father’s two younger sisters so they can help take care of us. My aunt Lynn is sixteen, and my aunt Jan is twenty. Jan helps to take care of me, and Lynn takes care of Kate. Later, when I get a bit older, my aunt Jan will tell me the story about the trip to Yellowstone, about the time when my grandparents were ready to leave and wanted to head for home, but the two of them wanted to go over to the gift shop, and my grandfather told them to hurry up or he would just leave them there.

They said they would be right back and that they wouldn’t be gone long, but they took longer than they thought because when my grandparents were all ready to go, Lynn and Jan weren’t back yet, so my grandfather started driving. He drove down the road and out of the park, heading for home and leaving the two of them behind. My grandmother asked him to go back, but he just kept right on driving. She told him he couldn’t just leave the two of them there, but he was stubborn and didn’t want to turn around. He had already told them, and if they couldn’t listen, then they would have to learn. It took my grandmother a little time to talk my grandfather into going back to get the two of them, but he finally turned around and headed back. Happy to see us, they got into the camper, and they had been scared because they thought that we had just left them there. Then we all headed for home.

Whenever my parents want to go out without us, they leave us with a sitter. My mother has Dotty, the teenage girl that lives