The Day I Hit My Little Brother in the Head with a Rock

The Day I Hit My Little Brother in the Head with a Rock

I remember the day I hit my little brother in the head with a rock. It was a hot afternoon in the summer in southern Arizona, in a small town, named Sahuarita. It’s a copper mining town, mostly, and there’s a big pecan orchard that a lot of people work in, the biggest pecan field in the world, they say. And then there are also the people who drive to Tucson to work in the city. My father didn’t work in the copper mines, or in the pecan fields, or in Tucson. He worked, and still works to this day, for US West, the phone company, which is actually called Qwest now, because it was bought out by a phone company called Qwest. Sometimes my father has to climb telephone poles, and that worries my mother, but Dad hasn’t had a fall yet. My mother stayed home to take care of us kids and take care of the house. My Dad made enough money so Mom could stay home with the kids.

The day I hit my brother in the head with a rock was one of those lazy, carefree days of summer, when the sun comes up early and heats up the ground so that you can’t stand on it barefoot for too long. We children had nothing to do. No school, no work.

This was in the days before computers and TVs and video games came along to gobble up childhoods. Well, to tell the story truthfully, we did have a television set. It was a hulking wooden thing that sat on the floor in our living room. It only got a few fuzzy channels, and the only thing on in the long stretches of late morning and afternoon was soap operas and talk shows and other programs that didn’t interest little boys. I remember one station was in Spanish.

In those summer days when we children had nothing to do, we sometimes rode our bicycles around the neighborhood and on trails in the desert, not too far from our house. Sometimes we built tree-forts in the desert, too. Now, this wasn’t the type of desert you might be thinking of, this wasn’t the Great Sahara desert where water never runs and bushes don’t grow higher than a foot. No, this particular desert had some Palo Verde trees, which is a type of tree with green bark for those of you who aren’t familiar with the plants that grow in southern Arizona. And other types of trees, trees I don’t know the names of, grew to be at least twenty feet tall, I’d say.

Now, my memories of this time of my life, my boyhood, blend together. I can’t remember when exactly it was that me and a friend of mine went down to Anamax park one morning, found a big piece of cardboard lying around. We held that thing in front of us, ran with it, and dove on the ground and tried to see how far we could slide on the grass of the baseball field. We must have liked the park so much because there was grass there. Green grass. Everywhere else in Sahuarita there was just dirt and rocks. Oh you know, except for the golf courses, and except for some people’s lawns, but they really had to work to keep those things green.

But I remember that on that day when a friend and I slid on the ground on a big piece of cardboard, we ended getting little scrapes on our forearms. I only bring this up to tell you that I can’t remember when exactly it happened. Was I short then? Was I, say, five feet tall by that time? Was I in elementary school or in middle school? Had I got my glasses yet? No, I don’t think I had my glasses yet. But, about the other stuff, I can’t be sure.

Anyway, the day I hit my brother in the head with a rock was hot, I remember. Only a few wisps of cloud hung in the sky, close down to the horizon, but the rest of the sky was a brilliant, rich blue. It was a sky that seemed to get bluer the more you looked at it. The heat that day seemed to wrap around us like a wool blanket, and it made us sweaty. Me and a friend of mine, Kyle, were jumping on the trampoline in my back yard.

The trampoline was situated in the wide spot of a wash, just behind the house that I grew up in. It just occurred to me that you might not be familiar with the word “wash” if you’re not familiar with southern Arizona. A wash is a basically a natural ditch that gets formed from water flowing through it. There wasn’t much water that came through Sahuarita - Sahuarita was a desert, after all – there were no rivers or lakes or anything like that, and when there was enough rain to make puddles, the puddles didn’t survive very long before the thirsty earth soaked them up. But rain did come heavily during the monsoon season, usually around late July and most of August. I guess you could call a wash a streambed without the stream.

I remember that there was a tree that helped us get on to the trampoline, too. A Palo Verde tree. We would grab on to the skinny trunk of the tree and hoist ourselves up that way. And when we children got older and taller we could get on to the trampoline by just running and making a leap for it. Part of the tree, in fact, would hang over the trampoline, so if you jumped too high in one particular part of the trampoline, you’d get some small leaves and branches and maybe even some thorns in your face.

Now this part might be hard to believe, but all around the trampoline was a bunch of cactus. Jumping cactus, prickly pear, pencil cactus, and some other cactuses I forget the names of. So if you were to accidentally fall off the trampoline, you might not only get a twisted ankle or some bruises, but you’d get a bunch of stickers in you, and somebody would have to yank those stickers out of you with a pair of tweezers. And if you’ve never had cactus needles yanked out of you, well, let me just tell you, it hurts.

Maybe you think my parents were bad parents for placing that trampoline where they did, so close to the cactus. Maybe you think that we would have been better off without a trampoline at all.

But why don’t you just ask anybody who came over to our house to jump on the trampoline, and see what they say? You’ll see that all our friends who came over to jump on the trampoline had a good time. Even the ones that fell off the trampoline and got a bunch of stickers in them ended up having a good time. It sounds crazy, but if you ask the people who were there, you’d come to understand what I’m talking about, and you would come to understand the appeal of that trampoline, and the people who jumped on it.

These days it seems like parents are overprotective in some ways but too permissive in other ways. For instance, there’s a house in my neighborhood with a trampoline in the backyard, and this trampoline sits right in the middle of one of those new, manicured, green lawns, no cactus anywhere near it. And no kidding, the trampoline had these big nets all around it - held up by bright orange, foam padded poles, so that there was absolutely no way the kids could fall off. Whenever the kids jumped on that trampoline, it was like they were trapped in that big net. Not that I actually ever saw the kids jumping on the trampoline. I’ve only seen that trampoline empty, probably because the kids that live there spend most of their time inside the house with their nice air-conditioning.

You might think that the parents in this family are great parents, that they care about their kids safety and they don’t want them to fall off the trampoline and get hurt. Well, I’m sure that’s true to a certain extent, but this same family, (and I won’t name their names - I’ve never been the kind to gossip) this family with the super-safe trampoline, doesn’t seem to have any problems leaving their big-screen TV on all day, and letting their kids just sit there all day watching the TV from the moment they roll out of bed in the morning until the moment they drift off to sleep at night. And their TV gets over 500 channels - 500 channels! - I heard from a very reputable source, so those parents are letting all that profanity and sex and violence into the house through that TV set, and they’re just letting their children sit there and watch it!

That’s modern society for you. Parents won’t let their children jump on a trampoline that hasn’t got nets around it, but they’ll let their minds and their morals go to rot from watching TV all day. Now that’s hypocritical, if you ask me. Hypocritical or just backward-thinking.

But back to the day when I hit my brother in the head with a rock. That’s the story I told you I would tell you. My friend Kyle and I were jumping on the trampoline, soaking in the afternoon heat of southern Arizona, having a good old time. I was scrawny at the time, and shorter than a lot of the other boys my age, and Kyle was average in height, but our appearances don’t matter much, I suppose.

He was a Catholic and I was a Mormon, though we didn’t really know what those words meant at the time. It was only when we were much older that we learned that our religions were different. Later in life Kyle and I wouldn’t see eye to eye when it came to the correct path of a disciple of Christ, and it turned out that our religious differences would actually get in the way of our friendship. But on that day when I hit my little brother in the head with a rock, when we were jumping on the trampoline in the heat of the southern Arizona afternoon, Kyle and I merely knew that we were young, and that we had the whole summer to ride bikes in the desert and make forts in Palo Verde trees and jump on the trampoline. We were young, then, and we were boys. And that’s important, you see? It’s important that we were young, and it’s important that we were boys.

I don’t remember much about the events leading up to the time when I hit my little brother in the head with a rock, but I remember that my little brother Paul, named after Paul in the New Testament, started jumping on the trampoline, too.

“What are you doing here, Paul?” I said.

“Nothing.” He said, avoiding eye contact with us two older boys. “Just jumping on the trampoline.” He took small jumps around. I remember that when he landed on the black, stretchy material beneath him, the dip that he made was smaller than the dips that were made by Kyle and I.

Kyle and I kept jumping, trying to ignore my little brother. We were probably talking about comic book superheroes or something like that. And somehow I got an idea.
“Let’s play dodge-the-rocks,” I said.

I jumped off the trampoline, picked up a few dirty pebbles from the ground, and then used the Palo Verde tree trunk to hoist myself back on the trampoline. I let the pebbles drop from my hand to the black stretchy trampoline surface beneath us and let them bounce around. We laughed as we dodged the pebbles bouncing around. If any of you have jumped on a trampoline before and done this, you know what I’m talking about. You know the way the rock bounces around in an unpredictable manner. You have to keep your eye on it, and if you get touched by it, you’re out, and you have to get off the trampoline, and the last person to be on the trampoline that hasn’t been touched by the rock is the winner. Some kids were good enough to purposely land on the trampoline a certain way, when the rock was in a certain spot, and bounce the rock off the trampoline altogether, and it would land in the cactus or in the dirt.

Well, we played that game for a good while, but soon enough we got tired of it, and I got off the trampoline and looked for something else to do. Kyle got off the trampoline too, and we stood around by the back of the house. (The house was only about fifteen feet away from the trampoline) Somehow one of us, I don’t know which one, got the idea to start tossing more rocks on the trampoline for Paul to dodge. Little stones. Nothing too big or heavy.

Now, this is the part of the story that I really remember well. To be honest, some of the story I told you so far is a little bit made up. It’s all basically true, you know, but I can’t remember exactly what was said- I don’t remember the exact words that came out of our mouths that day. But this next part of the story I remember really well.

Instead of just putting rocks on the trampoline for Paul to dodge as they bounced around, I started throwing rocks closer and closer to Paul, and I remember Paul saying something in protest, like, “Cut it out,” or, “You’re throwing the rocks too close to me!” But I kept looking around the dirt, digging into the earth with my fingers, finding more little smooth rocks to throw at him.

And then this is the part of my memory that I’m most sure about. The sound and the smells and the sights of this time are very fresh to me. I can tell you this part of the story straight, as if it happened yesterday, or as if it was happening right now.

I remember the look of the tennis shoes and socks that set on the small back patio. (We would take off our socks and shoes whenever we jumped on the trampoline and set them behind the house, so that’s why I remember the tennis shoes and dirty white socks so well sitting there behind the house.) I remember very distinctly the back wall of the house, the texture of the vertical wooden boards painted dark brown, boards that had gotten worn and splintery from the sun beating down on it for so many years.

I don’t know why I was throwing rocks at my little brother at the time. I guess I was annoyed that Paul would tag along with me and my friend, who were much older, and at the time I’m sure Kyle and I thought we were much cooler.

I was standing next to a water spigot that leaked very very slowly, nothing more than three or four drops a minutes. I remember watching a droplet of water slowly collect on the mouth of the spigot, on the lower lip, and then when the droplet got heavy enough, it would drop to the ground and make a tiny little splash. There wasn’t any hose hooked up to the spigot at the time, on this afternoon, when I hit my brother in the head with a rock.

Next to the water spigot, next to the pipe that emerged from the ground and rose about a foot and a half, my eyes found a jagged, white stone. It was the peculiar shape and smell of this stone that sticks out in my mind so vividly. It wasn’t an ordinary rock, it was more like a crystal, parts of it were milky white and smooth, but more of it was jagged, and harsh. I picked up the rock, felt it in my right hand, and I remember getting the feeling that I should stop throwing rocks at Paul.

That feeling was the Holy Ghost telling me that I ought not to pick on my little brother so, that I ought to put the rock down and do something else. But I ignored the Holy Ghost, I guess, and with a sunken feeling in my chest, I looked at Paul, saw his little body bouncing up and down, and saw that he was close to tears for the way we were treating him, for the rocks we had already thrown, and for the harsh words we had said to him. I threw the rock underhanded, the white stone left my right hand, and I watched the rock go towards my little brother.

The rock struck Paul in the middle of his forehead, right where David must have hit Goliath.

But that’s a bad comparison. David was an Israelite with the Lord on his side, and Goliath was a wicked Philistine, whereas I was just a boy, throwing a rock at a younger boy, my own brother.
Immediately Paul wailed in pain, and blood gushed out where the rock had hit him. And I was scared. I didn’t mean to hit him. I only meant for the rock to get really close to him without actually hitting him. That sounds dumb now, but boys don’t think things through the way that adults do.

I knew I was in deep trouble. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I thought that maybe Paul would need to go to a hospital in Tucson and get a doctor to stitch up the hole in his forehead.

I remember seeing the blood come out of the middle of his forehead from where I was standing by the back of the house. The dark, red blood oozed out of Paul’s face, ran onto his nose and onto his lips. He sat down on the trampoline and held his little boy hand in front of his wound, and wailed. Kyle looked at me in shock, and I stood in shock, and the sinking feeling in my chest compressed and deepened. Never before had regret had such a physical effect on me. Before that moment, I had only felt regret in my mind. Before I had only mentally understood that I had done something wrong, but at that time, when I watched my brother wail in pain, from something that I had done, I felt the regret, physically, in my body.

I ran inside to get my mother.

“Mom?” I ran through the house. She was in the kitchen, her hands bubbly with dish soap.

“What?”

“I hurt Paul. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to. He’s outside. On the trampoline”

“Did you hurt him bad?” Mom said. She was scrubbing a white glass plate with a soapy rag.

“Yeah. He’s bleeding a lot.”

Mom looked at me and saw that I was crying.

Mom went out to the back yard, out to the trampoline, and found Paul, still on the trampoline, holding his forehead and crying. A small puddle of blood collected on the trampoline’s surface. Mom went to the edge of the trampoline, reached her arms out to Paul, and motioned for him to come to her. Paul crawled over to his mother, who took him in her arms and started carrying him towards the house. Mom walked over the concrete slab of a carport, and I silently followed them. I remember seeing the blood drop from Paul’s forehead onto the gray concrete, making dark red stains wherever the blood dropped.

And that’s pretty much the end of my vivid memory. That’s the end of the part that I remember like it happened yesterday. I’m pretty sure, though, that what happened next is Mom took Paul into the house and into the bathroom, where she was able to stop the bleeding and clean up the wound. And then what probably happened, what I seem to remember happening, is that Mom sent Kyle home and it turned out that Paul didn’t need to go to Tucson, to the hospital, to get stitches.

I don’t remember apologizing to Paul, although I’m sure that I must have. I don’t remember what my father said when he got home from work, although I’m sure he must have had some stern words for me. And I don’t really remember the scab that formed on my little brother’s forehead, the scab that must have slowly faded away as weeks passed, but I’m sure there must have been a scab, an ugly and itchy one, right in the middle of his forehead, for a good while.

Here’s another crazy thing about the story, though. Nobody remembers it but me.

See, I distinctly remember talking about the day I hit my brother in the head with a rock years later, when I was a teenager, in high school. I was a senior in high school, and I only had a few months before I was going to head out of the house and attend school at Eastern Arizona College in Thatcher, Arizona, which is another small Arizona town, where cotton, cattle and copper provide most of the work there. It’s a town where a lot of Mormons live, and actually one of the Mormon prophets, Spencer W. Kimball, grew up there.

Anyway, one night, years after the day I hit my brother in the head with a rock, I was hanging around the house with Paul, who was much bigger at this time, and probably would have been in middle school. I asked him if he remembered that day I hit him in the head with a rock, and, I know this is hard to believe, but he said he didn't remember it.

“Yeah, you remember,” I said to Paul, “I hit you right in the forehead with a rock. It was in the summer and you were jumping on the trampoline and Mom carried you into the house and the blood was dripping from your head onto the carport. Remember? My friend Kyle was there.”

“No, I don’t remember that,” Paul said.

I got my mother too, and asked her if she remembered it, but Mom just frowned and wrinkled her forehead.

I started talking louder. “Remember, Kyle was there, and he was jumping on the trampoline and
I threw a rock at Paul and it hit him right in the forehead?”

“How long ago was it?” Mom asked.

“I was maybe ten, or eleven… or maybe I was twelve.”

“No, I don’t think I remember that,” Mom said, shaking her head.

“He was bleeding everywhere. I saw the blood come out of his forehead and I saw it drip on to the carport. How can you not remember that?”

“Well, look, I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I’m just saying that I don’t remember it,” Mom said.
That night after Paul and my Mom told me they didn’t remember anything about it, I went outside to the carport to look for the stains of blood that I had watched fall the earth so many years before.

But I couldn’t find any. No obvious blood stains, anyway. There were some smears that could have been blood, but they could have been something else. There were little splotches of paint here and there, and some oil stains from where one of our vehicles had leaked oil. It's a really old carport, so it had lots of different smears and stains and such. But maybe, I thought, some of those oil stains covered up the blood stains. Or maybe bloodstains on concrete don’t really last that long, anyway. I don’t know.

And that’s the end of the story. I’m the only one that remembers it, and now as I look back on it, I wonder if it really ever happened.

I think it did. I remember that rock, that crystal-like, jagged rock that I threw at Paul. Honestly, I remember the way it felt in my hand like I was holding it in my hand right now. Although, it doesn’t matter a whole bunch, I guess, in the grand scheme of things, whether the story really happened or not. Paul wasn’t permanently hurt, and our family is doing pretty good these days. The story’s just one of those funny things that an old man wonders about.