At Large Business Briefs Cartoons District Court Report Editorial Gone Fishin' Letters to the Editor Real Estate Transactions Sports Sports Highlights

Art Bestsellers Dance Edibles Film In Print Music Theater

This Week's Happenings Save That Date Ongoing Events Groups Libraries Museums and Tours Children's Resources Hotlines 12-Step Programs Religious Services Volunteer Opportunities

Achievements Astrology Birds Births Community Shorts Dean's List Engagements Garden Notes Honor Roll Obituaries Off North Road Short Subjects Town Meetings Visiting Vet Weddings

Aquinnah Chilmark Edgartown Oak Bluffs Tisbury West Tisbury

---

Directories

---

---

search the web www.mvtimes.com

The Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
December 30 - January 5, 2004 Edition
Web Comments - Email Submissions

Off North Road December 30, 2004 By Russell Hoxsie, M.D. This piece was first written as an assignment at Nancy Aronie’s Chilmark Writing Work Shop in 1995. At Christmas-time I like to look back on family things. The year also dates the time I started telling the truth.“THE LIE ASSIGNMENT” I’ve never told a lie! Come on — what a first assignment! Never lied! Dad said, never lie, son. Always the truth, like Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt. Well, that’s a long time ago, and when our teacher asked for a lie it was just too much. Here in her house — in a circle — I’ve already taken off my sweatshirt. What more do you want? A lie, she said. I’ve really got a whole collection almost catalogued. Now, if I go to the catalogue, I’ll have to pick in sequence, better not to start with a really big one. But, if I start with a really little one, everyone will know I’m lying tonight. How to tell the truth about a lie? That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? If you tell about a lie you told, you’ve had to tell the truth. Is this some kind of a crying game, some kind of “tell-it-all” session, a confessional that ends up with hugs and tears? I’m getting nervous. My hand cramp’s starting up. The flow I felt earlier above has slowed like molasses or that honey I spilled all over the cellar floor — sticky, gelatinous, its gold color spoiled against the gray cement — it moves, but slow — missed going under the washing machine or I’d be there yet. So — you’re having trouble telling about a lie you told. Well, why not start with a medium one to try it on for size? May not be so bad after all. It was when you — wow! I even started using the second person — probably safer. No — courage now! — tell it like it was. It was when I was probably eight and my kid brother, Donny, was six — we’re sixty-eight and sixty-six now, imagine! And we lived on Tremont Street, number 14 — all these years, imagine 14 — and it was a nice neighborhood, middle class, working people. Cement strips, two of them, under the dining room bay windows for a driveway, and a long back yard to a stonewall separating us from the rich folks, the Reeds — imagine all these years, the Reeds. A real estate. But I’m getting away from telling about the lie. Donny was being the usual brat, and I was supposed to be baby-sitting him. He never did think I was a good baby-sitter. He’d done something to aggravate me — aggravate my condition as a baby-sitter, I guess — and I was chasing him up those cement strips, down to the Reed wall and back. I forgot to tell about the cellar-way — we called it a bulkhead — with a slant door at the top and a vertical door into the cellar at the bottom of six or seven steep steps. Water often dripped down and formed a big puddle at the bottom, sort of a well. Whatever Donny had done, I was sure mad and he knew it, and he made for the bulkhead. Before I could get there, he’d flung open the top slant door, flown down the steep steps and into the cellar, slamming the lower door behind him. And he locked it. I was paralyzed with rage, and I couldn’t budge the door. Damn! Probably didn’t say damn then. We were a little retarded back in the thirties. But, damn anyway! I still feel that frustration, and I can feel my shoe kicking through the bottom corner of that oft-wet cellar door. Before long there was a hole kicked right through big enough for two rats. Donny had scampered off upstairs to safety as the light dawned on me that my rage had left a tell-tale sign, and my dad would see it when he came home from downtown at the phone company on Acushnet Avenue. In those days, Dad hung his leather razor strop at the foot of the inside cellar stairs, and whenever I watched him strop his old straight edge razor, back and forth, back and forth, I got kind of tense. Mostly because I was probably thinking of the strop’s other use: on our bare bums when we needed a licking. No Department of Social Services in those days. No need to say too much about it. Dad used it in this alternate fashion very rarely. Usually one good whack was enough. Except when all three of us, Donny and sister Joan and I, flooded the bathroom with our riotous play in a very full tub one afternoon. But that’s a different story. I guess the sight of the kicked-out hole in my dad’s cellar door and the knowledge of what hung at the foot of the stairs conditioned me to fall into the lie I’ll finally tell. Donny and I were eating in the kitchen when Dad came home. Mom had returned earlier from the A & P and made a trip to the cellar to put away some apples she’d bought. Dad came in the door and, right off Mom said, Dad, we’ve got rats in the cellar. (There’s a reason I laugh at that TV ad every time I see it!) We all trouped downstairs to see what she meant. The next day, Donny and I looked in awe at the great trap Dad set just inside that yawning kick-hole. The trap would have snapped my wrist. Must have been a big rat, I said. And we trouped down cellar night after night with Dad to inspect the always-empty trap. I was 35 years old before I told the truth. And Donny kept the secret for me. Funny, what a good kid he turned out to be.

©The Martha's Vineyard Times 2004 - www.mvtimes.com