At that moment his mind, his emotions and his soul shattered into twenty-four parts.

(3)

Kathy, Jimbo and Challa later confirmed the Teachers memory of their mothers first beating. According to Dorothy, Chalmer had become enraged after he saw her talking to a black coworker on the job at a nearby bench. She had been operating a tape-controlled punch drill, and when she noticed the man was starting to doze on the assembly line, she went over, shook him and told him it was dangerous. He smiled and thanked her.

As she went back to her work table, she saw Chalmer glaring at her. All the way home he was silent, sulking.

In the house she finally said to him, “Whats the matter? You want to talk about it?”

“You and that nigger,” Chalmer said. “What’s going on?”

“Going on? What in God’s name are you talking about?”

He hit her. The children watched from the living room as he beat her. Billy stood there, terrified, wanting to help her, wanting to stop Chalmer from hurting his mother. But he smelled the liquor and he was afraid Chalmer would kill him and bury him and tell her he ran away.

Billy ran to his room, slammed the door shut with his back against it and covered his ears with his hands. But he couldn’t shut out his mothers screaming. Crying, he slowly slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor. He closed his eyes tight, and in Shawn’s deafness everything went silent …

That was the first of the bad mix-up times, the Teacher recalled. Life became tangled as Billy wandered about, losing time, not knowing the day or week or month. His fourth-grade teachers noticed his odd behavior, and when one of the personalities, not knowing what was going on, would say something strange or get up and wander around the room, Billy would be sent to stand in the comer. Three-year-old Christene was the one who kept her face to the wall.

She could stay there for a long time and not say anything, keeping Billy out of trouble. Mark, who had a short attention span for anything but manual labor, would have wandered away. Tommy would have rebelled. David would have suffered. “Jason,” the pressure valve, would have screamed. “Bobby” would have gotten lost in a fantasy. “Samuel,” who was Jewish, like Johnny Morrison, would have prayed. Any one of them or the others might have done something wrong and gotten Billy into a worse mess. Only Christene, who never got older than three, could stand there patiently and say nothing.

Christene was the comer child.

She was also the first to hear one of the others. She was on the way to school one morning and stopped to pick a bunch of wildflowers in the field. She found sumac and mulberries and tried to put them into a bunch. If she brought them to her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Roth, maybe she wouldn’t be put in the comer so much. When she passed the apple tree, she decided to bring a fruit instead. She threw away the wildflowers and tried to reach the apples. She felt sad they were too high, and tears came to her eyes.