Scapegoat
One day, when I was 10 and out past dark but barely, I knew my father would be furious. My father worked all day in a machine shop. He came home evenings, his skin black with graphite, his mood molten steel.
When my mother told my father to beat me for some infraction I’d committed during the day, he would. When I disobeyed him, staying out past dark for instance, he answered with violence.
My father loved me, but he was always afraid something terrible would happen–kidnapping, murder, a car accident–such is the weight of love. A few years before, my father, believing I was cocky around water and would one day drown, took me to a public pool and threw me in the deep end. Afraid I would drown, my father showed me drowning. Even now I stay out of the water.
My father had been in war. His knowledge and fear of violence made him violent, I think. His desire to protect me was so intense he beat it away with a belt. The belt he used had a G engraved on the buckle. I didn’t understand this for years, since my father’s name was Walter. It turned out my father hated the name Walter, and long before I was born, he decided to go by his middle name, Gerald, instead.
Maybe it was Gerald who beat me, not Walter. Maybe that’s how he reconciled things.
Either way, out past my curfew, I was asking for it. Outside the house, I could see the TV flickering in the living room and knew my father was watching the news, which stoked his anger and fear. I didn’t have an excuse for my lateness, not that it would have helped. I needed a story, something that would save me from the beating I knew was coming, so I played on the one fear my father had that would make him lash out at someone other than me.
I ran home fast enough to knock my breath out. I burst through the front door. Before my father could move from the couch, I exploded into fake tears.
“A man,” I said, pointing, hands shaking. “A man came out of the woods and tried to grab me.”
I embellished from there.
The man had long greasy blonde hair. He wore flannel. He was tall and thin and moved fast. He was probably homeless, on drugs, dirty and crazed like that.
My father asked where the man went.
“Back into the woods, I think,” I said.
My father had a gun. I didn’t know this until I did. He went and got the gun. He put it on the kitchen table next to my mother’s collectable salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like poodles.
I stared at the gun. I’d never seen a gun before, not up close. I didn’t dare touch it. I felt sick, metallic bile rising, bullets in my throat.
Then my father called Mugsy. Mugsy, the police chief, was famous around town for his sweetness. He was more like a sit-com cop. Mugsy hated to see people get a parking ticket, and so he walked around with a bagful of change and put coins in expired parking meters.
But even Mugsy knew a drug-crazed long-haired stranger coming out of the woods and trying to kidnap an innocent young girl on her way home—a good and honest daughter who was absolutely not out after curfew–was a call to action.
Mugsy showed up. He had his gun, too.
Mugsy and my father went out into the woods. It was full-on dark by then. My mother sat at the kitchen table, smoking her Kool cigarettes, eyeing me up.
“You’re lying,” she said, and pointed her cigarette at me like a laser. “I can see it,” as if my lie were a spot on my forehead, something visible like the thumbprint the priest left on Ash Wednesday, proof of my deadly sins.
“I am not,” I said, in that puffed-up offended way liars do.
“Jackass,” my mother said, and stabbed out her smoke.
What if my father and Mugsy found someone in the woods that night, or stumbled upon some kids having a party, drinking Iron City, like I would be before long?
My mother tapped her fingernails like razor blades on the table. She lit another cigarette.
“Admit it,” my mother said.
I didn’t. I wouldn’t.
I could have gotten someone killed.
I could have gotten someone killed, but I didn’t think about that then. What I thought: someone has to take the blame for this. Someone will have to pay.
I was just relieved, in the manner of all liars and false accusers, it wasn’t me.
Lori Jakiela is the author of eight books, most recently the essay collection ALL SKATE (Roadside Press, 2025). Her author website is http://lorijakiela.net. She (still) lives in Trafford, Pa. with her husband, the author Dave Newman, their nearly-grown children, and Dinkus, the poodle.
