Throwing Stones

One day when I was ten I went to my friend Johnny’s house to play. His family lived in the house that used to be my dad’s office and my Auntie Anna had lived in the back before she got so bad my dad had to take her to the Oak Lawn old peoples’ home.

She was Auntie because she wasn’t my dad’s mom.  She had been his foster mom, but her son took off for Dallas and my dad took care of her.  I remember watching her give herself shots in her legs for diabetes.

At one time she had lived with us over my mother’s objections, but that ended when my mother discovered that Auntie Anna used the hand towels to wipe her bottom.  That was something of which my Dutch mother certainly wouldn’t approve. That’s when she went to live in the apartment behind my dad’s office on Halsted Street before she went to Oak Lawn.

I remember going to see her in Oak Lawn. She didn’t have a room. She had a bed in a long row of beds. My dad told me it was called a ward.

My dad and mom built a house on the street behind my dad’s office on Halsted and my dad sold that office to Johnny’s folks.  They made the office into a convenience store and lived in the apartment behind it.  I would go into Johnny’s house and think about my Auntie Anna.

She had been a really big woman with stockings that came up to her knees.  She would lift her house dress a bit to give herself the shot in the side of her thigh. I don’t think she ever winced. She didn’t mind spreading her legs apart and sometimes I could see the edge of her underwear.  Mostly I just stood to the side and watched.

I remembered my mother saying to one of the neighbors that my Auntie Anna was no virgin when she got married and had tried it out before getting married. She said that was the way it was in Sweden.  I wasn’t sure what trying out marriage meant, but I couldn’t imagine my Auntie Anna ever being married.  She was so old and fat and had big bushy eyebrows and hair over her lip and hairy legs and she took her teeth out every night.

Johnny and I were bored that day that I went over to play and we decided to throw stones at the big, eighteen-wheel trucks that roared down Halsted. Before we knew it, a car was pulling into the parking lot in front of the store.  A man got out and started yelling at us.  He said we had broken his windshield.

We ran back to the house and Johnny’s mom came to the side door to talk to the man.  She asked us if we had been throwing stones. We said yes, but that only at the side of big trucks.  We didn’t think we had missed a truck and hit the windshield of the car. The man said he was going to report the incident to the police and sue us.  Johnny’s mom yelled at him as he walked to his car.

Later, Johnny’s mom said the man couldn’t be trusted because he and his kind killed Jesus.

Johnny’s sister said, “Oh, mom. Jesus was a Jew.”

“No he wasn’t. He would never be a Jew. He was a Catholic.”

Johnny’s mom insisted it was true and that the killer of Jesus would say anything and they were always trying to get money and that he probably got the crack in his windshield from a stone kicked up by the tire of an eighteen-wheeler.  She crossed herself.

I went home to tell my dad.  I didn’t think I had hit the car windshield and I didn’t know if Johnny had. But I wasn’t sure. I told my dad and he looked me in the eye and told me that I wasn’t supposed to throw stones at trucks and we would do what was right by the man with the broken windshield.

I told my dad that I thought Jesus had died a long time ago. My dad agreed. Then I said that Johnny’s mom said that the man with the broken windshield and his kind had killed Jesus.

My dad looked at me and said, “We all did, son.  We all did.”