Accidents Happen

The basement, often a place of refuge for my daddy, smelled not unpleasantly of sawdust and cigarette smoke. The furnace rumbled on and off, producing a sweetish oil scented outpouring of heat that nicely countered the natural chill of the sterile brick walls and in the background, sometimes drowned out by hammering or the steady whine of a saw, WGBH broadcast the evening jazz shows my daddy so loved and rarely missed. Bix Beiderbecke was playing the night my brother had his tantrum and tumbled down the stairs, screaming obscenities and clutching a baseball bat.

“Foul mouthed little bastard!” I heard my mother yell from the top of the stairs, “I'll give you something to cry about!”

And with that, the door slammed with a shudder and even over the noise and mayhem, I heard the key turn.

“You'll learn some manners or I'll know the reason why!” my mother shouted hoarsely through the door, “Vicious little son of a bitch!”

How he wasn't killed - and I confess, I was hoping desperately - was a mystery. He did have a badly broken arm, one leg was shattered in a couple of places, and both cheekbones were fractured but he survived. When my mother refused to unlock the door, my daddy was forced to carry him out, blessedly unconscious, through the back cellar door to the old station wagon and then to the ER where we spent the rest of the night. My daddy, pale and anxious, spent most of the time pacing, avoiding the eyes of the ER staff, and arranging with my grandmother for her to pick up my other brother and then come and get me. Everyone accepted the explanation of an accidental fall down the cellar stairs without question. It was 1958 and if the doctors were suspicious, they kept it to themselves. I thought there was an excellent chance that he'd been pushed but I was a well trained child when it came to keeping family secrets and besides I was already regretting he hadn't been pushed harder.

After a week or two, he was sent home and while I don't remember how long he was bedridden, it was a long time and he was held back a year in school. My mother waited on him hand and foot all that late fall and winter, never showing the first sign of either hostility or remorse, and certainly never admitting it hadn't been an accident. There was never any proof and he never accused her so it became just one more thing we didn't talk about.

“Accidents happen,” my grandmother said on one of her visits, “Boy's lucky enough to be alive and it don't make no sense to dwell on how it happened.”

That was when I knew my daddy had told her about what we'd heard my mother shouting in the seconds before the fall. More, I understood that it was not to be brought up again and never shared outside the family. Just like that, silence became conspiracy and conspiracy became cover up.

Accidents happen. Sometimes they have a little help. Sometimes they don't have quite enough.