The Owl Killers

agatha

tHE LAUGHTER OF THE CROWD in the church roared in my head. Over and over I felt his hand yanking my hair, my head jerking back and forth, the heat of his groin against my buttocks, the trunk of his arm against my ribs pulling me tighter and tighter to his stinking, scalding breath. He crushed me into him until I couldn’t breathe as the hardness of his prick swelled up and uncoiled against me.

And still I didn’t understand the reason for my cold sweat of fear. I couldn’t put a name to the choking panic rising inside me until suddenly the reek of wild onion burst in my head and mingled with his sweat. And then I knew. I knew and I couldn’t wipe the knowledge from my mind. It was not the demon who raped me that night. It was him. My own father.

I’d been dragged back down into the tangle of his forest and nothing could lift me out. I stank of him and I couldn’t wash it off. I’d doused myself with the little water they gave me to drink. I scrubbed my skin with the coarsest straw I could find in the cell until my skin was raw, but still I smelt him, felt his damp paws gripping harder than a wolf’s bite. The stench of onion filled the cell, choking me. Even though the wind howled through the open bars I couldn’t gasp in enough air to breathe.

Fornication is the wickedest of sins, my father declared, but all along he had been the fornicator. He knew that night as he forced me down among the ramsons and the brambles exactly who it was he violated. He knew the next morning in his hall when he saw the marks on me. He knew when he hit me and called me a whore. He called me a whore. He made me feel filthy. He made me filthy. He put his seed inside and made me pregnant with his monstrous child. But he felt nothing, no guilt, not then and not since. The shame has all been mine and he will never feel it.

I scrubbed my lips until they bled, but the blood would not wash away the hundred child-kisses I was forced to give his mouth. Hating, hating him even then and feeling the guilt of Hell because of it. Evil child. Wicked child. Child of Satan. Honour thy father. Honour thy father the priest. Honour thy Father God. Obey them. Love them. And what is the duty of a father to a child? Beat it, chastise it, bend and break it to his will, and call it love. Then call the broken thing obedient, redeemed in blood. Is this what our Father God wants-the cringing, fawning, faithfulness of a whipped dog, the frightened tears of a child crying in the night? Does He pleasure Himself on our fear?