Chapter Eleven
One evening when I came home from playing in the woods and wading through the river, I found mom at the burn barrel and it was blazing. I immediately started to worry about whether or not I forgot to take the trash out. I really didn't think I did, but that was the only thing that went through my mind. Maybe the barrel was fuller that I thought it was and so she was just burning it now. Then I walked up to her and saw what she was burning.
I yelled and asked he why she was burning my toys. She turned to me and glared at me and told me I needed to grow up. I didn't take care of them like I should have if I wanted to keep them. She said they were all torn and had holes ripped into them. Since I didn't take care of them, she was getting rid of them.
I begged her to stop. I was crying and begging hard. I was telling her I would fix the holes and take better care of them. She just turned her back on me and kept throwing them one by one into the fire. I went running into the house. I wanted to see if she had taken them all or just the ones I had not sewn back up after taking the money and all out of them. If she left the ones that were still sewn then that meant I still had the ones that still had stuff hidden in them.
As soon as I ran through the front door, there sat dad in his recliner. He looked at me and gave me a menacing smile. He was enjoying this. He loved seeing people miserable for some reason. I ran to my room and looked at my top bunk where I kept my toys. She had taken all but five of them. I frantically grabbed them and checked them to see if they were ones that still had stuff hidden in them. Three of them did, the other two didn't. I quickly grabbed the ones that did and shoved them under my mattress. Then I laid down on it and them and cried.
I cried not because of losing some of the money and all, but because I knew my mom only acted like this when she and dad didn't get along. This meant the hell was returning. I always knew it would, but secretly hoped it wouldn't. Mom came into my room and I just laid there with my back to the door. She didn't say a word, she just grabbed the two toys that were left and went back out to burn them too.
I didn't leave my room until the next morning. I grabbed a jacket, threw it on and grabbed the three toys I had left. I shoved them into my jacket and zipped it up tight to hold them inside. Then I quietly peeked around to see if mom or dad was there. When I saw they were already gone I ran as fast as I could to my shed. I grabbed the metal box and the key from the chimney and quickly opened it and locked myself inside.
I took my toys out of my coat and put them on the table along with the metal box. I grabbed the big coffee can and my knife off the shelves and sat them beside them. At this point I didn't care about the toys anymore. I grabbed the knife and started cutting them open.
Once I had all the stuff out of them I threw them to the ground. Then I dumped all that was in the metal box out too. It was all hundreds, fifties and jewelry. I knew from my mattress I pulled nine hundred and fifty dollars before we moved. So I knew there was a lot there. First I took all the jewelry and put it in the metal box by itself. Then I separated the hundreds from the fifties. Once they were separated I just sat there for a moment and stared at it all.
I was shaking, some from fear, and some from excitement. The fear was from both knowing the fighting was back and that the hell was going to take over again. Also from having all this and the possibility of it being found or me being caught with it. The excitement was also from having it and knowing if I didn't get caught with it or if it didn't get found, I would be able to use it to leave one day. Being able to leave one day seemed like a far away dream, but with all this, it looked more real than ever. I took a deep breath and started counting.
I put the hundred dollar bills into stacks of ten so it would be easier to count once separated. Then I did the fifties in stacks of twenty so they would be the same. If I had some left that didn't make stacks of a thousand I sat them to the side to add to the count at the end. Then I went back three times and counted each stack to make sure each one had exactly a thousand in it. Then I counted all the stacks three times before adding in the "left over" money that didn't make enough to stack in a pile like the rest. All together in the stacks of a thousand each I had twenty four thousand dollars. Then with the other added in the grand total of cash was twenty four thousand, six hundred and fifty dollars. That was just in the cash alone. I had no idea how much any of the jewelry was worth.
I sat there in shocked silence for a long time just staring at it all. Then I placed it all neatly in the coffee can so it would all fit. I then wrapped the can in old rags and two plastic bags. I did the same with the metal box of jewelry. Then I took them to the chimney and dug a hole where a fire would be and placed them in it. I covered the hole with dirt and then placed a few random bricks from the chimney on it so it looked like the rest of the remains around it. It was completely unnoticeable.
