Barbed Wire and the Violent Vegetarian

We are in Texas. It is winter. I am nine and being kept out of school by my father Adam who does not believe in school. He is building the first of a number of ranches and often puts us to work stripping cedar posts. It is complicated. Some of the bark comes off easily, in big flaps, but the rest has to be cut off with a knife in jagged, small sections, leaving your fingers feeling arthritic and gnarled. I'm not sure how it gets into my father's head for my brothers and me to be unpaid, outdoor slave labor. Retribution for running away the summer before? Does it qualify as our home schooling? We are sent off early each morning with someone else driving us since our father is too busy screaming on the phone to strip cedar posts.

When we arrive at the ranch I often steal the keys to the pickup truck and lock myself inside, refusing to peel posts. I wonder when someone will think to get an extra set of keys but they never do. We need hundreds of stripped cedar posts, thousands it seems like, to use for the barbed-wire fences that circle the acreage we are calling home that month. This is why I want to go to school, this is the kind of day labor I want to avoid. It is like sweatshop work without the shop, and what the government has in mind in the early twentieth century when they ban certain child labor practices. The only relief is losing myself in the grim satisfaction of ripping apart the bark, peeling it back like flesh, stabbing it with my knife, seeing his face.

I really can't imagine what my father is thinking. Maybe he is farsighted and getting us ready for the new global economy, for foreign outsourcing, though now that it is here, I think rather than outdoor work I would prefer being on the phone in India for America Online. I already have the skills to be as unhelpful as any of their customer service reps.

Many years later I become friends with a woman who is a childhood friend of my half-sister's, who is born when I am eight. Her friend is a witness to the Bernstein household long after I have any contact with it. Apparently Adam goes vegetarian at that point. My sister's friend laughingly tells me how when her mother first meets Adam she comes away saying he is the most violent, psychotic vegetarian she has ever met and refuses to be in the same room with him ever again.