Page 6 - Homestead By Ann Newhouse

I was ten years old before I realised, I was living in a hellhole. No, that’s a lie. I always knew. At fifteen I had really had enough and felt I should do something to change things. There were a million reasons why. I was an only child . . . a thin, scrawny, sickly kid. The one thing I knew for sure was that my mother had had a very hard labour with me, as my father reminded me repeatedly! He was a big fat cruel bully of a man, with a fierce temper. My mother, a slim beautiful, fragile figure of a woman, had to tolerate his moods and try to keep the peace. She was very scared of my father, the man she claimed to have fallen in love with many years before. She was now very sick, so I realised I couldn’t leave yet.
My father claimed to love us both, but we knew otherwise. He abused me daily and if she tried to protect me, he would abuse her. I often heard them arguing. He had a lot of anger. Why? I don’t know. He never gave a reason, if there was one . . . he must have had many. There were always excuses for his behaviour. Ok, so we were poor, like most folk in the west. The west of New Mexico, that is, on the way to Santa Fe. We lived in the middle of nowhere. Our nearest town was many miles away. A place named Taos. We lived in a shack, built by my father’s hand, by picking up bits of wood and tin wherever he could to make and repair it. It was cold and draughty in winter, and stuffy and smelly in summer.
The summers were stifling hot and the nights could be very cold. The earth was burned bare and very little grew. We could get monsoon rain at times, which could last for days. We had a couple of cows for milk, two pigs and a few hens that occasionally gave us eggs. My father had an old mare which he hitched up to a small trap and rode into town once a month to get a few provisions. He would try and get work when he got there, for anyone who would pay him. Many of the trades people would look for men who could do casual work for a few dollars. They wanted a strong man to lift and toil for the day, and my father was tough. He would then make sure he bought his whiskey for his pleasure each night, which usually meant he would leave out an item for a meal, or medication my mother needed to get her through the day. She would keep us fed by making her own cheese, butter, and bread. We grew some vegetables and fruit, in a little covered area sheltered from the hot sun. My mother told me that, at one time, he would get occasional work on a ranch or farm, but it wouldn’t last long. He would do something wrong and get fired.
The occasions my father went away were happier times for us. I would sit with my mother and we would talk, or she would teach me something from the few books she had managed to hide from my Father. When my father was home, he would generally ignore me, unless he wanted an argument.
I didn’t attend any kind of school. My mother taught me the basics of reading and writing from home, with a few bits of arithmetic and an odd historical or local fact thrown in. She seemed to