THE RAPE

My maternal grandparents lived on a large dairy farm out in the country and they raised nine children there.  One of my uncles who visited from Toronto happened to be the "funny uncle".  My mother must have known he was a rapist perhaps by firsthand experience or maybe from the warnings of an older sister.  In any case, my mother always strictly supervised us when this uncle was visiting the farm and she would never allow us near him or alone with him when we were visiting my grandparents.

My young female cousin, daughter of uncle Paul, who was 5 or 6 years old at the time, was not so lucky.  She was raped by her mother's brother in our grandparents' barn.  Once again I overheard bits of adult conversations to gain this knowledge.  They never got any help or medical attention for the little girl, nor did they ever again talk about it, like it never happened.

A few years later, when the rapist was killed in Toronto under suspicious circumstances, I overheard my father say to my mother that the rapist had probably been erased by an angry father of one of the rapist's victims.  If I were writing a movie script about this story, it would have been uncle Paul and uncle Larry or maybe just my father himself who took that trip to Toronto all those years ago.