F
Field Ethos
Guest
By Kyle Wright
I had an idyllic childhood. It wasn’t quite a Norman Rockwell painting, but it wasn’t far from it, either. I rode my bicycle all over town. I stayed out every night until the streetlights came on. When I was hungry, I picked fruit from neighbors’ trees and when I was thirsty, I drank from their water hoses.
Just a couple of houses down, though, life wasn’t quite so idyllic. A cliche of an abandoned house, complete with broken windows and an overgrown yard, stood between my house and another family’s. That abandoned house signified a sharp departure from my idyllic childhood to the truly terrifying.
The family down the block had two boys about my age. Big Brother was a couple of years older than me, and Baby Brother was a year younger. I got along well enough with the two of them. We played basketball and wiffleball together. We built forts and traded baseball cards. When we got crossways with each other, we settled it the way kids on our block did. We had pecan fights. If you’re unfamiliar, a green pecan throws like a baseball and hits hard enough to bruise. After a few glancing blows from a rock-hard, green pecan, we were usually ready to go back to basketball.
But those two brothers didn’t always settle their differences so easily. All brothers fight, but these two boys had some real knockdown, drag outs. Baby Brother once knocked on our front door, blinded by tears and begging for help, because Big Brother had held him down and poured a bottle of their mother’s perfume in his eyes. Another time, I found the two brothers in their front yard arguing about which of them was tougher. To find out once and for all, they had agreed to play catch, barehanded, with a top water lure full of treble hooks. Last man standing would be declared the winner. Both boys must have known they were in for a long day because there was a brand-new box of Band-Aids ready and waiting on the tailgate of their dad’s pickup.
Those fights, though, paled in comparison to their worst. I was walking down to the boys’ house for a game of basketball one day and was in the middle of the abandoned house’s overgrown yard when I heard the front door bang open. I looked up just in time to see Baby Brother streaking out of the house, clearly running for his life. Big Brother, predictably, was hot on his heels. Baby Brother ran past the garage and then cut around the corner of the house.
Big Brother, losing ground, paused at the corner of the open garage and snatched up a frog gig that had been mounted on the end of a broom handle. He hurled that frog gig like a spear and caught Baby Brother square between the shoulder blades. The kid went down like he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning and screamed like, well, he screamed like he’d just been speared with a frog gig.
I didn’t wait that day for the streetlights to come on. I spun on my heel and went straight back home where I belonged.
The post Brotherly Love appeared first on Field Ethos.
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I had an idyllic childhood. It wasn’t quite a Norman Rockwell painting, but it wasn’t far from it, either. I rode my bicycle all over town. I stayed out every night until the streetlights came on. When I was hungry, I picked fruit from neighbors’ trees and when I was thirsty, I drank from their water hoses.
Just a couple of houses down, though, life wasn’t quite so idyllic. A cliche of an abandoned house, complete with broken windows and an overgrown yard, stood between my house and another family’s. That abandoned house signified a sharp departure from my idyllic childhood to the truly terrifying.
Old Fashioned Brotherly Love
The family down the block had two boys about my age. Big Brother was a couple of years older than me, and Baby Brother was a year younger. I got along well enough with the two of them. We played basketball and wiffleball together. We built forts and traded baseball cards. When we got crossways with each other, we settled it the way kids on our block did. We had pecan fights. If you’re unfamiliar, a green pecan throws like a baseball and hits hard enough to bruise. After a few glancing blows from a rock-hard, green pecan, we were usually ready to go back to basketball.
But those two brothers didn’t always settle their differences so easily. All brothers fight, but these two boys had some real knockdown, drag outs. Baby Brother once knocked on our front door, blinded by tears and begging for help, because Big Brother had held him down and poured a bottle of their mother’s perfume in his eyes. Another time, I found the two brothers in their front yard arguing about which of them was tougher. To find out once and for all, they had agreed to play catch, barehanded, with a top water lure full of treble hooks. Last man standing would be declared the winner. Both boys must have known they were in for a long day because there was a brand-new box of Band-Aids ready and waiting on the tailgate of their dad’s pickup.
Gig ‘Em
Those fights, though, paled in comparison to their worst. I was walking down to the boys’ house for a game of basketball one day and was in the middle of the abandoned house’s overgrown yard when I heard the front door bang open. I looked up just in time to see Baby Brother streaking out of the house, clearly running for his life. Big Brother, predictably, was hot on his heels. Baby Brother ran past the garage and then cut around the corner of the house.
Big Brother, losing ground, paused at the corner of the open garage and snatched up a frog gig that had been mounted on the end of a broom handle. He hurled that frog gig like a spear and caught Baby Brother square between the shoulder blades. The kid went down like he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning and screamed like, well, he screamed like he’d just been speared with a frog gig.
I didn’t wait that day for the streetlights to come on. I spun on my heel and went straight back home where I belonged.
The post Brotherly Love appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...