The Sweet Husband

The Broken Windows

This could be considered a tale of old fashioned revenge I suppose. The revenge of a little sister paying her big brother back for the great crawfish caper.

First, a short explanation, not only was I the baby of the family, and my mother and dad knew I was the last baby, but the child that was born 18 months before me died at 4 days old. In our family that meant I got away with a lot, not only with mama and daddy, but with the older 3 , already married and gone from home, as well.

However, that meant nothing to my brother Milton, 6 years older than me, or my sister Wanda, 4 years older than me. The middle child, 12 years older than me, well he is a different story in many ways, that one will have to wait for another day.

We did not have television, my daddy believed they were the work of the devil, but we knew what television was, because the older couple that lived next door to us had one. However, they had no young children at home and apparently iked it that way, so we never got invited over to watch theirs.

My brother Milton figured out that we could look through their living room window because their curtain did not go all the way to the bottom and watch it from there. He and Wanda would patiently watch for hours, but you could not hear anything, and I wanted to hear it as well as see it. Sooo, when I saw them leave, I took a rock and a stick and broke one of the lower panes out of the window, never telling Wanda and Milton, but that night we could hear the tv show.

It took them a couple of days to notice it, the man fixed the window, two days later I broke it again. This time, when the man notice it he came outside and looked around and I don't know what he saw, but he went to talk to daddy.

My daddy was a very strict man, and he didn't punish us often, only for talking in church normally, mama took care of any other discipline. But he was highly ticked off because the man told him that his children had broken the window with a rock, not once but twice.

He called us into his and mama's bedroom one at a time, starting with Milton, asking who broke the window with a rock, two different times. Milton told him he didn't know, it wasn't him. Wanda told him, she didn't know it wasn't her. I told him, I don't know daddy, and turned to walk out then I turned back and said, but I have seen Milton with a rock before.

Daddy kind of choked up and started coughing and said Ola, you better take care of this, and mama said Tommie Lee, Milton would have broken out the whole window, Wanda wouldn't have broken it at all, only you would have held a stick up and hit the stick with a rock to keep it from making a big hole that they would catch right away.

Ok, so I got a spanking, but she was giggling too hard for it to hurt much anyway.