Her Daddy

Teresa Martin and I collaborated on her Orphan Train biography, which became the popular Mail-Order Kid. As we worked, Teresa at times implied that her foster father, Bappa Bieker, had molested her. When I pressed her for details, she fell silent.

At last she told me, and I understood why she'd refrained. With Teresa's consent, I opened Mail-Order Kid with her Bappa story. Here it is, below, in poetry form.

He's My Daddy

An Orphan Train Tale

I met him at the station

when I was three 

He put me in his wagon

took me to his store

sat me on his lap

lifted my dress

touched me everywhere

bounced me up and down

roared

gave me a licorice stick

He's my Daddy

I ride his pony

eat his candy

I live with him

learn his language

Volga German sounds 

like barking dogs

I go to his church

Nuns teach me

in his school

His wife slaps me

He eats with his fingers

He calls me to his store

bounces me on his lap

He's my Daddy

I ride his pony

eat his candy

He's an old man but agile

bigger than me

When I turn thirteen

my breasts burgeon

He grabs my nipple

twists it

I slap him

He yanks my hair

right out of my head

I scream

hide in my bedroom

The sheriff comes

to take me away

"No, no,

I won't go"

He's my Daddy

I ride his pony

eat his candy

Barney Baker

He's big

Two-hundred-eighty-four pounds, they say

Big enough to be a strong-arm man on New York's docks

Big enough to be a prize fighter with cauliflower ears

Three-hundred and-twenty-five pounds, they say

Big enough to dope horses, to bounce folks into line

to pull down bleachers at a circus, killing three

Big enough to be a hash-house voluptuary

gorging on Teamster dough from Chicago to St. Louis

Four-hundred pounds, they say 

Big enough to receive a bright red Caddy convertible, 

Big enough to wear a top coat large as a tent

sweat from his shiny pomade hair wilts his white collar 

A blubbery man with one pudgy hand on his shotgun

Five hundred pounds, they say 

Big enough to toss a nonTeamster taxicab into Wichita's

Arkansas river, to execute dynamite bombings there

ex-con, stink-bomb tosser, underworld enforcer, scum of the earth

Why is he knocking on my daddy's office door?

Nonfiction Poetry

Academics define "nonfiction" as writing based on facts, real events, or real people. As a rule, authors write nonfiction as prose but it can be poetry.

I wrote "Barney Baker," above, as a nonfiction poem, based on a real man with known traits. I learned about him from various news stories, including Time.  

My prose version of Robert Bernard "Barney" Baker appears in That Punk Jimmy Hoffa! Coffey's Transfer at War with the Teamsters. Baker played a major role in that war.

Bulging Calves

My mother despised physical exercise.

She found it distasteful.

I remember watching TV ballet with her. As delightful ballerinas in soft bell-shaped tutus danced on pointe, Mom said, "Look at her calf, the way it bulges. That's disgusting!"

Mother also picked at her food, eating much less than I did, keeping herself femininely slender with a narrow waist and calves that dared not bulge. 

In her eighties, mother developed osteoporosis, that disease of porous and brittle bones. 

Her fragility made her fall. She broke bones. After a hospital stay, she returned to the Home where she lived, to do physical therapy—exercises to strengthen her body.

Exercises!  

How she hated them. 

She did them grudgingly. 

When she became stronger, she returned to her room. Predictably after a  week or two passed, she fell again. Once more the hospital and the loathsome exercises.

Repeatedly she fell.

She saw that the rest of her life would continue like this, and she couldn't stand it. 

She stopped eating. That was easy enough for a picky eater like herself; she just looked at her food to remember where it would take her:  fall, hospital, those horrid exercises. That quelled her already finicky appetite.

The doctor called me. "She has stopped eating." He paused. "Now we can feed her intravenously, but I really wouldn't recommend it." He paused longer. "She really doesn't want to live, but it's your call."

I slept on it, then I let her go.  

Did I kill her? Or was it suicide? Or just a strong case of will.

From the example of my mother's life, I learned to eat well, with plenty of calcium, and to exercise. 

Unlike my mother, every morning I voluntarily work through a sequence of 15 exercises: squats, twists, tucks, stretches and the like. Then and only then do I allow myself to eat breakfast, a hearty meal for me.

I'm almost as old now as my mother was when she died, and I'm used to nurses telling me what good physical condition I'm in. Periodically, my doctor tests my bones. They're fine, sturdy.

I don't tell Mother about this. I don't want her turning over in her grave at the thought that her daughter might have actually chosen calves that bulge.