If you grew up in a family with more than one child as I did, you were part of a pecking order. (I apologize in advance to any chickens who may be offended by this vernacular.) To put it another way, there is no such thing as equality among children, no matter how fair parents try to be or how noble we envision untainted childhood. Providence and circumstances, or nature and nurture if you prefer, conspire to ensure that the vacuum of leadership is always filled, particularly when parents are not on the premises. Birth order obviously has an impact. The younger you are, the less clout you have in childhood until the late teen years mitigates the advantage older siblings have. Then there is some shifting in the peckological order, but it never goes away. Adults are right now thinking about their last family get-together and nodding their heads.
In our family, I was number three on the depth chart, ahead of only one brother. The roost was dominated by our two older sisters, one nearly three years older than I, the other nearly four years older. When you are in the wonder years of elementary school, anyone that is a teenager seems vastly older, smarter, more powerful. That was my sisters. When Mom was gone, they ran the show. My younger brother and I were just peons scarcely worth consideration in the realm of home life.
There was a constantly simmering feud between my sisters. It was not pretty. If you’ve ever seen girls fight - physically or verbally - well, they don’t call it a cat fight for nothing. (My apologies to cats, of course). The best my younger brother and I could do when things got hot was stay out of the way. My second sister was endowed with a forceful personality which collided with the assumed natural rights of the first born. Still, there was no denying she was a born leader in the mold of the great dictators of history. If you did what she wanted, life was at least tolerable. If she ignored you, life was a bit better. If you crossed her, then life was horrible. There was more than one literal knock-down, drag-out session when I tried to get out of my obeisance. Once pounded into submission, I grudgingly toed the line. In the grand scheme of things, when Mom was gone, Renee was queen.
What made matters worse was that both sisters doted on my younger brother, who was two and a half years younger than I. He was little, he was cute, he needed attention. While I was big enough to fend for myself, his adorability unleashed all the nascent mothering instincts of two teenage girls. Woe to me if ever one of them caught me asserting my rights as an older brother to pick on my younger brother. Did I resent this? Of course.
Against the sheer force of the dictator-queen, my eldest sister and I had in our favor that we were rule-keepers. So, when Mom came home, we had a glowing report of our accomplishments, while Renee and Philip were often found wanting. Renee simply had other priorities than the rest of us and Philip was too small to do much that was useful. So, that tended to put Denise and I into an alliance of necessity which pushed Renee even more into favoring Philip.
This somewhat volatile mix of home life left me with the basic assumption that my queen sister despised me, that I was just an inconvenient organism in the petri dish of our tiny trailer. (Apologies to bacteria). My oldest sister tolerated me as that helped with the balance of power. My younger brother always wanted to play with me, while the same immaturity that made him so sweet to my sisters meant he was just annoying to me. Most of the time, I was isolated in a crowd of siblings.
One weekday evening during this era, Mom was gone. Which was odd because she didn’t go many places during the work week other than the Wednesday night prayer meeting at church. I have no recollection where my eldest sister Denise was. It is likely that dear baby brother was with Mom. Since I fell into the category of being less than no company at all, Renee had brought a friend over. Renee always had friends in our neighborhood. And enemies. There were no neutrals. This minion was a guy about her age named Mike. He had straight brown hair all one length hanging down near his collar, typical of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Mike was a big, stocky, dark-complected kid and, by virtue of his bulk, inclined to being a bully.
They were hanging out in the living room listening to the rock ’n’ roll music that would never be played when Mom was home and I wandered up from the back of the trailer out of curiosity. I knew that Mom didn’t want anyone in the house when she was gone and I also knew that Renee disregarded most rules as a matter of course. Still, it always fascinated me to see this in action. Here was an obvious breaking of THE RULES. I never quite grasped how it was that Renee could thumb her nose at the rules and not worry about consequences. Oh, there were consequences, but she didn’t seem to care. In the trade-off between consequences and freedom, some pick freedom, others chose to avoid consequences. I was the latter.
As I came in, Mike’s alpha male instinct inspired him to start picking on me. He unloaded all the humiliating things he could think to say about a scrawny and quiet underling. Why I stayed to endure it was a wonder. As he continued along this vein, Renee came to my defense. I am not sure who was more surprised, me or Mike. Well, Mike’s bullying nature overcame his good sense and he challenged Renee to do something about it. While Renee was physically the dominant person among the children in our home, Mike was a different matter. He was imposingly large in my view of things. He smiled the confident smile of a person who is used to getting his way.
How the kitchen knife happened to be sitting within Renee’s reach, I don’t recall. But she picked it up. It wasn’t too big or too sharp, but it was a knife. Renee implied that she wasn’t afraid to use it if Mike didn’t back down. How to describe that moment when the stakes have been raised to a crucial point and someone has to fold? My gut churned with an onslaught of adrenaline. Even though I had been on the receiving end of Renee’s fisticuffs, did not think she would go that far. Nor did Mike. So, he just kept on pushing.
And Renee threw the knife at him.
Now, there are all sorts of ways that could have turned out. Since it wasn’t a particularly heavy or sharp knife, if it had hit him in his torso it probably would have bounced off his clothing. Or it could have hit him in the eye, which would have been a far worse outcome. As it happened, it hit him in the forehead where even a blunt knife at high velocity can do some damage.
I had a fleeting glimpse of the shocking realization on Mike’s face before he howled in pain when the blade struck him. Blood began running down Mike’s face as he instinctively grabbed the wound.
“Are you crazy?” he bellowed.
“No. You just don’t mess with my family,” she replied with remarkable calm, considering the circumstances.
“I’m bleeding!”
“Calm down. It’s only a cut.”
Head wounds, even small ones, can produce a lot of blood, a sight Mike was apparently not fond of. The half-inch gash was leaking quite a bit. A red line was running down his hands and a few drops had hit the carpet. Renee found a dish-towel and pressed it to his head.
“I gotta go home.”
“Yep. I’ll go with you. And don’t be such a baby. You’ll be fine.”
I remained frozen in place throughout the entire incident.
Then they left. I may or may not have ever seen again Mike after that day. I am sure there was some kind of fall out that both Renee and Mom had to deal with. I mean, you can’t assault someone with a knife and go unnoticed. But, that night, there was birthed in my mind the realization that when push came to shove, Renee had my back.
With that realization came a novel idea: my sister loved me. And still does.
Bear in mind that this event happened about 45 years ago and the only video recording was the one that wanders around in the dusty archives of my memory. The dialogue in particular is imaginative at best. I am thankful to have Renee on my side after all these years.
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