The Cellar

The Cellar


My mother’s idea of discipline consisted of shrill screams, threats, and an occasional slap upside our heads. Maybe if she had been taller than four feet ten inches, my brothers and I would have taken her more seriously. As it was, when six children ran away from her in six different directions, her authority remained in question. But to our dismay, the day came when she decided to tell my six-foot, two hundred pound father our many sins of the day, and let him take care of the disciplining. Oh my God! Her threats had turned deadly!

Dad was raised on an Alabama farm where a good "wuppin’" was necessary for any "yungin" to be properly "brung up." His own father had taught him the proper way to discipline a child; make them go out and find their own switch (that was the name they gave a young willowy limb)—better be good and thin and long. If a good switch wasn’t chosen, his pa would find a bigger one (at least that’s the story as told to us by our father, the same guy that claimed he walked ten miles to school each day.)

When a switch was not available, a good old leather belt would do just fine. I am sure my dad was no angel and got plenty of “good ole boy” discipline from his dad. I am also sure that is why dad lied about his age and joined the Air Force at seventeen.

So, having learned from the best in the department of corrections, dad did the same to his six children, but only with a small and very cruel twist - the cellar!

Our rented villa in Italy near the base where dad was stationed, was old. So old, it still had a wood-burning stove to cook on, and a cellar to store the wood. (I learned a very important lesson with the stove. I stuck a milk carton with its top open and facing me into the fire and kept the door to the stove open so I could watch it burn. Yes, it was admittedly one of the stupidest things I had done to date, but I did learn that a wax-coated milk carton surrounded by fire will spit an incredible amount of melted wax right out of the stove door and onto your face! Ouch!)

The villa was also heated by petroleum heaters. Dad would bring home huge barrels of the “petro,” then, to be manageable, he would have to siphon out small amounts into smaller gas cans with a rubber hose. (Did you know that if you sucked too forcefully on the opposite end of a rubber tube stuck down into a barrel of nasty tasting liquid the force of the suction would get that crap going so fast you hardly had time to take the other end of the tube out of your mouth without first getting a mouthful? Trust me on that one!)

The cellar was dark, damp, and musty, and smelled like an old lady’s underwear drawer. (I’m guessing.) Only a small amount of daylight could find its way through the very small, dirty window which sat level with the ground outside.

The cellar was the perfect critter motel. Spiders, scorpions, and their buggy relatives battled for prime real estate down there on the woodpile. It was a spooky place, especially for kids, with its cold winding stairway and damp walls that seemed to breathe, cough and moan. Then it became "the dungeon" where we were sent to wait for the dungeon master to come and inflict bodily harm upon us with his belt or the switch we had picked out for him!

I don’t know if we dreaded the room, the wait, or the "wuppin’" more. Junior even tried stuffing his pants with books so he couldn’t feel the switch— which only made dad angrier, but it gave me a chance to quickly remove the catalogue from my panties. Usually, it was me or Junior that got the bulk of dad’s wrath. Once the crying and pleading and wailing began (and that was before the first contact with the attitude correcting chastisement tool of the evening), it was a sure bet that our mother would come running down the stairs yelling at my father to stop. Dad would look at her in disbelief, then stomp up the stairs, usually talking to himself.

We stared at our mother like the Benedict Arnold she was, held our sore butts in our hands, and gave her the most pitiful display of guilt inducing sobs we could muster. But as she turned away from us to follow my father up the stairs, she would say, "See what you made him do…." Made him do? What was she thinking? It was the most confusing time of our young lives and one of the many events in our childhood that would never be understood or "sorely" forgotten.