Timekeeper Chapter One

Photo Art By Chris Meadows

Book Cover By Sheri Mallory

Timekeeper By John Atkinson

It’s more humane to face a firing squad than a classroom, humiliated because of illiteracy. One is swift, the other leads to a lifetime of isolation and hardship. Timekeeper is my triumph over letters. Parts of my journey are no longer clear. Forty-eight years later, I have re-imagined events that seem most consistent to my memory.

In 1959 ground swept under my feet like a starving man scrambling for his next meal. I’d fled a dysfunctional family in Virginia. I met many people along the way, but no one could compare with Chief in Oklahoma. He filled a void in me and taught me how to join together the many pieces of life. Chief wasn’t surprised that I’d crossed the country at the age of fourteen. I was a big kid and had become hardened to the ways of the streets. Right away Chief understood why I didn’t fit in. The main thing was, I couldn’t read. He looked into my soul and saw the suffering I’d endured in the white man’s world. He also saw into my future. Anyone with a lick of sense would’ve been frightened of Chief, an old medicine man with strange powers. But after everyone else had given up on me, he saw how I could help myself. At first I thought he was foolish as a fish flopping on a riverbank when he said I should go north to a place he’d visited as a boy. Hell, that was back before we had automobiles. But he said I would go with a great power. I couldn’t imagine where the power would come from. I thought it had to be a strong car, a big Buick Road Master. Every boy my age wanted a car. But the old man gave me a name, Timekeeper. I was no longer Johnnyboy, the affectionate name my Mama had called me. But the gift of the new name stayed a mystery for forty-eight years, the time it took me to figure out Chief ’s predictions. For all those years I’ve searched for his meaning, and now I know.

Chapter 1

Veins bulged on my father’s forehead while his spitting cobra stare held me frozen. He yelled, “If you leave, Johnnyboy, don’t come back!” The viper was ready to strike. I didn’t show fear, but I knew enough not to flinch or I would have hell to pay. Mama sat face down at the kitchen table too scared to speak. I felt for her but never more than when her Cherokee eyes met mine. Mama’s eyes set me free, free to leave. I had turned fourteen the month before. With seven children besides me, she was stuck with the monster I called bad names under my breath.

I wanted to yell, Hell, no, I’m not coming back. Mama, you leave too. I don’t have a choice. Bugdaddy will kill me one of these days and get away with it. Be like me, Mama, run. Run like a wild horse. Nothing here but misery piled high. But, like Mama, I said nothing.

My father abused the other siblings, but plain as scuffed shoes it was me he loved to hate. Mama saw that too, so she sent me away in the summers to work on a cotton farm. I was the fourth child of eight and the first to be born in a hospital. Bugdaddy argued with the nurses the day I was born that I wasn’t his child. He said I looked like a monkey because my arms were too long and claimed the hospital had given him the wrong damn baby. The only thing I had in common with Bugdaddy was neither one of us could read. Trying to please him only made matters worse. At one point, I too thought I was from another family. This heartless man couldn’t be my father. He was cruel. He started taking me out of school at the age of ten to work with him. By the time I was twelve I was forced to labor alongside lowlifes who had nothing to live for but their next bottle of booze.

Newt, a brother five years older, and I shared an army cot in an eight-by-eight unheated shed where Mama washed clothes on a scrub-board. The room’s dingy gray walls had no windows. What light there was came from a pull chain fixture in the center of the ceiling. When it rained, water came up through the cement floor drainpipe. The door didn’t hold off bad weather either. Sometimes we’d wake up to wet shoes. Nevertheless we thought it was worth the trouble since the room gave us a little space away from Bugdaddy.

Everyone had chores. In the winter Newt and I switched turns every other day filling up the coal bin. I remember the night Newt forgot it was his turn, and the fire went out in the furnace. We couldn’t tell there was a problem because our room was detached from the main house. We only knew something was wrong when we heard our father throwing chairs out of his path as he charged toward the backdoor. He was spewing foul words and that cut to new depths of fright into my soul. I heard him yell my name. Earlier he had come home drunk, but now the good glow of alcohol had worn off. That always made him meaner.

I held my breath when the backdoor creaked. He was coming closer and closer, making time crawl. In a split-second he kicked our door open with the rattle of wood splintering the doorframe. What did I do wrong? I thought as chips hit walls, floor, and bed. Is it me he’s after? I tried to hide my head under the bedcovers to become invisible. Oh, Moses, help me, please. But he snatched me from our cot and dragged me outside in my underpants into the snow. I couldn’t imagine what I had done wrong but I knew what was coming. I could only hope that the weapon he used wouldn’t be too harsh; a stick, his beltâ?¯but my luck had run out. He held a fan belt, the most dreaded whip of all. Yelling was pointless so I gnashed my teeth and waited, but not for long. The belt squalled like a demon. A deep moan warned of its punishment as it cut its way toward its target; bare skin. The pain began like giant bee stings. After so many lashes I couldn’t tell when the stings turned into a raging fire. I begged to know what I had done, but he wouldn’t tell me. Before I blacked out, he mentioned the furnace in his ranting. “You let the goddamn fire go out. I ought to kill you!”

“Oh, I won’t forget again! I promise I won’t forget again! I swear I won’t!” I had to stop playing into his hands. Moses, I’ve got to quit yelling but the fire is too hot. Oh. Moses, please help me.

I wouldn’t tell on Newt because he had taken a couple of beatings for me. We had to hang tight against our father. Telling wouldn’t have done any good anyway as the old man was out to get me. There was no escape from the hurt. Peeing was my only relief from the torture. He would only stop when the pleasure of hurting me had faded in the night’s winter air. I don’t remember him stopping or walking away. The snow silenced his footsteps and I lay still. The cool snow relieved some of the fire on my back and legs. Folks lie when they say you can’t remember pain. I remember pain very well. I remember pain that can only be described as burning hell. Snow could help pain like that a little, but snow could never help me forget. Only death could do that.

While I was outside, Newt had started a new fire in the coal furnace and made out like he was busy until Bugdaddy was out of sight. I was too scared to get up so I stayed put until Newt thought it was safe. That beating left me with a rekindled hatred of my father. It’s not good to want to kill someone, but the hatred helped take my mind off the hurt, the raging hell on my skin.

After Newt went to sleep, I lay on bloody bedcovers on my side of the cot, thinking about the day I would leave. I was too young to know there was another world out there, a much kinder place. I only knew something had to change. I’ll be fourteen come spring, maybe big enough to get away. Oh, Moses, let that day come.

Snow was blowing around our room so I put the chair that held our clothes against the door. Still, tiny flakes came through a broken panel. Newt shivered in his sleep while I watched snowflakes swirl about. It came to me that they were like friends visiting a lonely soul in the dead-quiet prison of a room. I didn’t say a word to them . . . just watched the specks searching for places to land until I was swallowed to sleep by the sight.

It took spring a long time to come, and the abuse never stopped. My father would shake his penis at me and tell me, look at your daddy. He’d say, “Johnnyboy, you could’ve been shot up a nigger’s ass.” That spring, after I’d turned fourteen, a little stray dog started hanging around the house and took to me. The words, “He’s my friend,” slipped from my mouth in front of Bugdaddy. Right away I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. Using hand pliers and copper wire, he tied a tin can with gravel to the small dog’s tail. Then he beat the little dog bloody. The bad man laughed when he turned the dog loose, saying he would run himself to death. I wasn’t strong enough to stop him and I couldn’t have hated him more, but I could leave and choose better company.

Bugdaddy fancied himself an Old Testament man. His favorite quote was about work. He’d say, “If the ox is in the mire, get him out.” That meant I had to work Sundays too. I’d learned about Moses from Sunday school. For a while, he was a make-believe friend. I knew about Jesus, but I thought He had His hands full helping so many people, so I used Moses to pass on the little I had to say to the Big Guy in heaven. I would say, “Moses, tell God if I’ve got to live with Bugdaddy another day, just strike me dead and send me on to hell. I don’t care. That man needs to be shot with sheep shit and sent to hell for stinking. Got that?” I listened but I never heard a word back.

Bugdaddy had me sanding a car to prepare it for paint, but after the dog beating I couldn’t do anything right. I’d wanted to help my little friend but I’d done nothing. Now only silence came from the woods where the poor innocent pup had run yelping. I couldn’t stop crying inside but only Moses knew that. I stopped sanding a second to listen for the dog hoping the can had come loose. Bugdaddy yelled, “Johnnyboy, don’t make me tear your ass up. Get to work!” I got back to work, but I never stopped listening for that little dog.

A neighborhood bully, three years older, heard the old man threatening me. He said, “Let me handle him. I’ll beat his ass for you.” Bugdaddy gave his blessing and, like always, began rooting for the other guy. But this time was different. I told the old man that I aimed not to let anyone kick my ass again. And on that day, I didn’t. When the bully finally staggered off, badly beaten, I saw fear, something I’d never seen before on my father’s face. I liked seeing his fear. That sight was the turning point in my decision to leave home.

I waited for dinner to let everyone know what I was fixing to do. After I had crammed in all the food I could eat, I said I was leaving for good. Bugdaddy said I’d been eating white bread. That meant I’d had it easy at home and it would be real hard out there in the cruel world. He was trying to scare me, but he could see it wasn’t working. That’s when he yelled for me not to come back and I would burn in hell forever. Mama looked at me with loving eyes, the blessed glance I’ll carry to my grave. She couldn’t have said it with words any better than this, “My Johnnyboy, it’s time for you to go.” From her eyes she gave me the strength I needed.

I wanted to hurt Bugdaddy so he wouldn’t be mean to Mama, hitting her with a fly swatter. I wanted to spit on the floor in front of him to get things started, but I didn’t. I’d never spit on Mama’s floor. She scrubbed those floors on her hands and knees. All I could see were her kind eyes, eyes that always taught peacefulness was better than hatred. With her love in mind, I slipped out the back door.

The minute I was outside I spat the hatred for my father onto the ground, and stomped the spot with my feet like it was his body being ripped to pieces. Then I ran for all the good I had in me. I needed a head start and Mama had taught me not to take anger along, especially on a journey to find where I belonged. I had run away before like a baby bird trying to leave its nest and had wandered back after a few days, but this time Johnnyboy would fly. It would be my last goodbye to Mama. I had the clothes on my back and 38 cents in my right front pants pocket, the one with no holes in it.

Why hadn’t I left sooner? That thought kept reverberating in my mind as I put one foot in front of the other. No matter. Now I can be anybody I want and nobody will know the difference. I’ll call myself something good, not Johnnyboy, a foolish pissy-ass name. But I couldn’t think of one right yet.

I thought about stopping to say goodbye to some neighbors when I passed their homes, but I kept going. Unlike my family, they had good jobs and decent cars. I didn’t mind though because they were good to me, making up for my father’s ill treatment. They liked me because I was a little bit like Mama . . .willing to share what I had, my labor. I didn’t want them to know I was running away. I had tried to leave so many times before and failed. Maybe they were tired of hearing about it. Just get the hell away from here, Johnnyboy. Worry about that kind of stuff later.

When I passed the dreaded school bus stop, I recalled some of my teachers talking about me, saying how I couldn’t learn to read and never got anything right. The Atkinson boy has taken me to the brink. What’s wrong with him? That child is condemned to a life of menial labor. What a shame he’s dimwitted. I defended myself like always. Who are they? They don’t know anything about me. I’ll prove them all wrong. Moses, tell God to damn them all. I hate their guts.

Bugdaddy always said something was wrong with me too. My school grades were F’s and, compared to my siblings’ grades, proved him right. No doubt something was wrong with me. It didn’t help that I couldn’t hear in one ear because he’d popped my eardrum with a hard slap. My left ear never stopped ringing. If any outside noise came along while the teacher was talking, I couldn’t hear what she’d said. I could only hear one thing at a time and, if three people talked, it sounded like gibberish. Nothing made sense. I didn’t like classmates whispering about me. Nobody had better call me names again. Saying I’m stupid. I hate that and I’ll hurt ’em if they say bad things. I’ll do hard labor… anything as long as it gets me the hell away from Glen Allen.

But where would I go? I didn’t have a plan. I needed time to think, so I hid in the woods about a mile from our home place. I knew those woods better than anyplace, yet I felt lost, so lowdown lost. I needed someone to talk to, a true friend who would take me as I was. Then I remembered old Chicken Bone, a black man who lived not too far from where I sat. With my head slumped between my legs, I jumped to my feet and headed for his shack.

Chapter Two & Three are in Older Posts

John Atkinson is the author of TIMEKEEPER, a magnificent book about a young boy who fights to overcome illiteracy. Timeekeeper, ISBN 978-0-9776076-5-5, is available in hardcover or paperback .To order your copy call 1-800-228-9316. International orders call: 00-1-831-238-7799 or visit: www.fisherkingpress.com