turned 6, his father came home one night from the hospital and
broke Jacky's arm. He almost killed the boy. He was drunk.
Jacky was sitting on the front porch reading a Combat Casey
comic book when his father came down the street, listing to one
side, torpedoed by beer somewhere down the line. As he always
did, the boy felt a mixture of love-hate-fear rise in his chest at the
sight of the old man, who looked like a giant, malevolent ghost in
his hospital whites. Jacky's father was an orderly at the Berlin
Community Hospital. He was like God, like Nature-sometimes
lovable, sometimes terrible. You never knew which it would be.
Jacky's mother feared and served him. Jacky's brothers hated him.
Only Jacky, of all of them, still loved him in spite of the fear and
the hate, and sometimes the volatile mixture of emotions made him
want to cry out at the sight of his father coming, to simply cry out:
"I love you, Daddy! Go away! Hug me! I'll kill you! I'm so afraid
of you! I need you!" And his father seemed to sense in his stupid
way-he was a stupid man, and selfish - that all of them had gone
beyond him but Jacky, the youngest, knew that the only way he
could touch the others was to bludgeon them to attention. But with
Jacky there was still love, and there had been times when he had
cuffed the boy's mouth into running blood and then hugged him
with a frightful force, the killing force just, barely held back by
some other thing, and Jackie would let himself be hugged deep into
the atmosphere of malt and hops that hung around his old man
forever, quailing, loving, fearing.
He leaped off the step and ran halfway down the path before
something stopped him.
"Daddy?" he said. "Where's the car?"
Torrance came toward him, and Jacky saw how very drunk he was.
"Wrecked it up," he said thickly.
"Oh..." Careful now. Careful what you say. For your life, be
careful. "That's too bad"
His father stopped and regarded Jacky from his stupid pig eyes.
Jacky held his breath. Somewhere behind his father's brow, under
the lawn-mowered brush of his crew cut, the scales were turning.
The hot, afternoon stood still while Jacky waited, staring up
anxiously into his father's face to see if his father would throw a
rough bear arm around his shoulder, grinding Jacky's cheek against
the rough, cracked leather of the belt that held up his white pants
and say, "Walk with me into the house, big boy." in the hard and
contemptuous way that was the only way he could even approach
love without destroying himself - or if it would be something else.
Tonight it was something else.
The thunderheads appeared on his father's brow. "What do you
mean, 'That's too bad'? What kind of shit is that?"
"Just...too bad, Daddy. That's all I meant. it's-"
Torrance's hand swept out at the end of his arm, huge hand,
hamhock arm, but speedy, yes, very speedy, and Jacky went down
with church bells in his head and a split lip.
"Shutup" his father said, giving it a broad A.
Jacky said nothing. Nothing would do any good now. The balance
had swung the wrong way.
"You ain't gonna sass me," said Torrance. "You won't sass your
daddy. Get up here and take your medicine."
There was something in his face this time, some dark and blazing
thing. And Jacky suddenly knew that this time there might be no
hug at the end of the blows, and if there was he might, be
unconscious and unknowing ... maybe even dead.
He ran.
Behind him, his father let out a bellow of rage and chased him., a
flapping specter in hospital whites, a juggernaut of doom following
his son from the front yard to the back.
Jacky ran for his life. The tree house, he was thinking. He can't get
up there; the ladder nailed to the tree won't hold him. I'll get up
there, talk to him; maybe he'll go to sleep - Oh, God, please let him
go to sleep - he was weeping in terror as he ran.
"Come back here, goddammit!" His father was roaring behind him.
"Come back here and take your medicine! Take it like a man!"
Jacky flashed past the back steps. His mother, that thin and
defeated woman, scrawny in a faded housedress, had come out
through the screen door from the kitchen, just as Jacky ran past
with his father in pursuit. She opened her mouth as if to speak or
cry out, but her hand came up in a fist and stopped whatever she
might have said, kept it safely behind her teeth. She was afraid for
her son, but more afraid that her husband would turn on her.
"No, you don't! Come back here!"
Jacky reached the large elm in the backyard, the elm where last
year his father had smoke-drugged a colony of wasps then burned
their nest with gasoline. The boy went up the haphazardly hung
nailed-on rungs like greased lightning, and still he was nearly not
fast enough. His father's clutching, enraged hand grasped the boy's
ankle in a grip like flexed steel, then slipped a little and succeeded
only in pulling off Jacky's loafer. Jacky went up the last, three
rungs and crouched on the floor of the tree house, 12 feet above the
ground, panting and crying on his hands and knees.
His father seemed to go crazy. He danced around the tree like an
Indian, Bellowing his rage. He slammed his fists into the tree,
making bark fly and bringing lattices of blood to his knuckles. He
kicked it. His huge moon face was white with frustration and red
with anger.
"Please, Daddy," Jacky moaned. "Whatever I said ... I'm sorry I
said it..."
"Come down! You come down out of there take your fucking
medicine, you little cur! Right now!"
"I Will ... I will If you promise not to ... to hit me too hard ... not
hurt me... just spank me but not hurt me..."
"Get out of that tree!" his father screamed.
Jacky looked toward the house but that was hopeless. His mother
had retreated somewhere far away, to neutral ground.
"GET OUT RIGHT NOW!"
"Oh, Daddy, I don't dare!" Jacky cried out, and that was the truth.
Because now his father might kill him.
There was a period of stalemate. A minute, perhaps, or perhaps
two. His father circled the tree, puffing and blowing like a whale.
Jacky turned around and around on his hands and knees, following
the movements. They were like parts of a visible clock.
The second or third time he came back to the ladder nailed to the
tree, Torrance stopped. He looked speculatively at the ladder. And
laid his hands on the rung before his eyes. He began to climb.
"No, Daddy, it won't hold you," Jacky whispered.
But his father came on relentlessly, like fate, like death, like doom.
Up and up, closer to the tree house. One rung snapped off under
his hands and he almost fell but caught the next one with a grunt
and a lunge. Another one of the rungs twisted around from the
horizontal to the perpendicular under his weight with a rasping
scream of pulling nails, but it did not give way, and then the
working, congested face was visible over the edge of the tree-
house floor, and for that one moment of his childhood Jack
Torrance had his father at bay; if he could have kicked that face
with the foot that still wore its loafer, kicked it where the nose
terminated between the piggy eyes, he could have driven his father
backward off the ladder, perhaps killed him (If he had killed him,
would anyone have said anything but Thanks, Jacky"?) But it was
love that stopped him, and love that, let him just his face in his
hands and give up as first one of his father's pudgy, short-fingered
hands appeared on the boards and then the other.