The boiling man

I'm six years old, hidden away in my make-believe cave reading books to get away from the world. Something isn't right, there is too much shouting going on in the other world and I'm no longer able to block it out. 

I run towards the noise coming from the dining area and see my sister huddled on one of the kitchen chairs, crying and cringing. Two people are arguing beside the kitchen stove, my mother and the man that lived there with her on the farm. 

The argument turns even more sour, the man loses. He chooses to continue the argument with alternative means; clenched fists and closed mouth.

It felt like a moment that would last forever but her screams awake me and I run towards them. A pot with boiling fat is bubbling on the stove, I grab it and splatter the contents upon the wife-beater shirt the wife-beater is wearing. 

The screams stop and I don't remember anything else after that. 

My next memory is of my mother changing bandages off his his swollen back while I and my sister hover uncertainly close by, trying hard to be both invisible and somewhere else in time. 

For a long time I hoped he burned to the point where it hurt but I no longer care enough about him to hate him anymore.

Many years later my sister told me she had been so relieved when I came in and made the beatings stop, that she loved me for it and my strength of will to be able to do that while she was paralysed with fear. She also told me he had abused her that day.

At that point I didn't know what to believe from her anymore as she was quite heavily doing drugs and alcohol at the time she told me and I had just picked her up from jail where she had been incarcerated overnight. 

She never talked about that day ever again nor ever will as terminal cancer took her life at the age of 40. 

I visited the man many years later at the farm while driving through the area enroute to someplace else, my six-year old daughter in tow. 

Seeing your oppressor as an old man without any power over you and you no longer a helpless child gives you perspective. 

He wasn't evil, just insignificant and weak. Not someone worth hating even if he wasn't worth forgiving either.  I forgave him anyway, not because he deserved it but because life is too short to spend it on hating anyone.