Daisy Chain - Chapter 3

The two children were homeschooled, which essentially amounted to not being schooled at all. The parents knew little of anything they could teach their children. Daisy had a natural curiosity about the world and how it worked to compel her to find things out for herself. She was good at teaching herself. Henry seemed to have little aptitude or inquisitiveness.

Two years earlier before moving to the city, the parents were compelled by the county in which they lived to have the children attend school. It was a dream come to for Daisy and a nightmare for Henry. Most of the teachers seemed more suitable as residents of an insane asylum than any other occupation. The women in particular were nightmarish. For all the talk he heard of 'maternal instincts' he found none in them or in his own mother.

Once, he asked a woman an inoffensive question about something he forgot as soon as the incident ended, for his question was met with a banshee scream and two hands at his throat, digging deep gouges of flesh from his neck. With no remorse, but an awareness that her job was in jeopardy, the woman wrote out a note, handed it to Henry, and told him to give it to his mother.

His mother was no better equipped for contending with people in an unfamiliar environment than was her husband, so rather than confront the woman who had assaulted her son, she punished him. The lack of accountability for her actions emboldened the teacher to have carte blanche in how she treated Henry, so she took her many frustrations out on him.

The indifference Henry faced at home and at school was a degrading experience that would affect the rest of his life. He spent a good deal of time trying to compensate for what had happened to him. But time was fluid and its flow went in only one direction, forward. There was no way back to remedy or mend offenses or injuries.

The events of that single semester of school bruised him in ways that would never heal, no matter what remedies he tried in his future life. His mother bought him the minimal and shoddiest supplies imaginable for his work at school. The shopping for them underscored a sick mind and the very clear message to Henry and anyone else who noticed the cheapness and lack of quality in the meager supplies he did have seemed a result of an extensive search for the crappiest material findable. The soul-wounded message was "I don't love you." The more degenerate of the teachers pounced upon this message, a few pitied the boy. Henry wanted neither cruelty nor pity, but what he wanted had nothing to do with what he got.

It's a peculiar thing how much just a little withheld kindness can affect a life. Henry was a slow learner. Once he knew something, he knew it well. But it's impossible to reach that second phase when no one is willing to go the extra step of helping you pass the first one. Being called to the blackboard to perform a mathematical calculation the teacher knows you can't perform and then to be told, "Sit down!" to laughter from the other students was tantamount to a gang assault, with everyone pitching in to deliver a punch or a kick to a downed victim.

His luck was consistent throughout most of his classes. In one reading class, he couldn't keep up with one of the brighter kids. The reaction of the teacher was "No. No! No!! Don't you know anything? He's not back there he's beyond that. Way over her past you." In one class, Henry remembered a lecture where the "crying baby syndrome" was mentioned. The underlying idea was that even babies had an innate instinct for survival. Babies who cried and yet were not attended to gave up on crying, instinctively knowing that the energy they spent was not worth the energy expended by their cries. There was no gain from the crying. That was the effect that that single semester of school had on him: why bother?

In another lecture, a teacher mentioned something Henry would never forget and that would forever remind him of his mother. It was a saying from Socrates, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Not only was the woman unwilling to search her soul for flaws, she took the slightest suggestion of error as a resolute repudiation of her as a person. The natural result of such an attitude was a stunted growth, the attributes of someone stuck in one particular place of moral, mental, and spiritual development that would forever stagnate. It was an nightmarish place to be�"or at the least in Henry's case�"to be around. The woman reveled in the morbid and sordid side of a situation. Henry never knew what she got out of it, or why she drew him into her nightmarish mind, but even being a short term traveler with her making vulgar an incident that most people would consider an everyday occurrence, and one of the things in life to move beyond as soon as possible, she lingered over. How she could stand it, Henry did not know. He only knew that the times away from her came as a relief.

She wasn't always stuck in that one mode of thinking. There were times when being around her could be pleasant, but someone in the grips of schizophrenia was someone who could turn on a dime, and there were many dimes on the path his mother walked along. What Henry liked the most were the times when his mother was exhausted, a not infrequent occurrence. It was during these times that she was withdrawn or simply too tired to turn, tripping over the dimes in her way rather than turning upon them.

Henry found his father to be remote and self-absorbed, however there were certain circumstantial characteristics they shared. Like his father, Henry was as vain and proud as he was poor. But he was unwilling to compensate for his sense of inferiority in the same way his father did. He saw is father as a kind of idiotic lunatic howling at the moon, and believing that somehow that made the moon more his personal possession than that of others. Henry saw the obvious: that the moon was equally remote and unknown to everyone.

There had to be some kind of way out of here, Henry began to seriously consider from the span between his fourteenth birthday and his fifteenth. With no real friends and his sister as his only confidant and friend, he was becoming concerned that he was in love with her not just as a brother, but viewed her as a possible mate. As he grew, he noticed the girls turn their heads toward him more often than they did other boys. He realized he was becoming a handsome man. His clothes quickly became his first priority. Whether he had to beg, borrow or steal them, he wanted clothes that made him appealing to girls, clothes that matched the man he was becoming. The thoughts about his sister were unhealthy, he knew. He also realized that with the unsullied quality of her character, she would be horrified if she were aware of his illicit thoughts.

The time to escape from the altered state of consciousness that his parents and their acquaintances lived in was rapidly approaching. The world held far more riches than the self-inflicted martyrdom his parents chose. Poverty, prayers, and promises of heaven seemed ludicrous to him. As he thought back on his father's ministry and the family's life, he could not think of a single instance where anything resembling a miracle occurred.

The most appealing prospect that he seriously considered was joining the military. He knew that everyone in boot camp had an equal status. They had the same crew cut, the same clothes, food, exercises, and challenges. Everyone had the same starting point from which to proceed. Henry wondered if it would seem like a continuation of the same restricted life he already had. That concerned him.

Still, there were other opportunities. Probably more than he realized. The world seemed like a big place, and the sky seemed the limit.

Reviews

[Donald Miller]

This isn't very good writing for several reasons, but I'm leaving it in because this is a first draft -- AND no one is reading this anyway. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a sound?