Charles Manson Now Read Free Page B

kept breathing.
    My mother didn’t die in a car accident. That day, she’d walked down into the basement and shot herself. Throughout my childhood, which she’d made exceptionally happy, I don’t remember seeing my mother sad. There was no indication she would do what she did. My mother was beautiful, and whenever people spoke of her they always said how lovely she was. She was a homemaker who sewed her children’s clothes from scratch. When I was small, I had very bad feet and a difficult time walking, and she would lift me up and carry me around. It took tremendous patience, physical and emotional strength for my mother to get me through that time. She had a lot of love, and when she left us, it felt completely out of the blue. It didn’t sink in that she was gone until the next day, when I answered the phone to hear a man say he was sorry for my loss and would I authorize the donation of my mother’s eyes, so someone else could see? I didn’t understand what he was asking and I hung up on him mid-sentence. But that was the point that I realized my mother was really gone. I was eight years old.
    I didn’t go to her funeral. My dad didn’t think I could handle it. I was too young, and it had been difficult enough to lose a few pets. I was the type of kid who found a dead bird on the road and made a point to give it a proper burial. My dad did allow me to read the note my mother had left in her delicate blue handwriting,on a plain, white, crumpled piece of paper. It was a short note. I think it said something like, “I’m in a better place.” She wanted us to go to church. I don’t know what happened to the note, but I can still remember holding it and reading it over and over again, as if it were the most important thing in the world.
    Because it was the last thing she’d asked ofus, my siblings and I went to Sunday school. I’d been to church before and had learned some things about religion in school. But I didn’t know much, and what little I’d been taught hadn’t made much sense. Class was held in the basement of Rosemont Church where we recited the scriptures, learned the order of the gospels, and sang songs. Every week our teacher brought us little gifts, things like bookmarks, prayer cards, or stickers. We sat solemnly at long tables and were expected to be serious and studious. Above all, we had to stay silent, something at which I have never been very good.
    One day, a quiet, timid boy approached me and summoned the nerve to ask, “Did your mom really shoot herself in the head?” I just looked at him. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think anything except that he already seemed sorry for what he had said, very aware he couldn’t take any of it back. When I didn’t answer, he looked down in embarrassment. Behind him, I noticed three older boys, laughing nervously, trying to shake off the awkwardness that had ruined their joke. I could tell they’d put him up to it. That day in class I would learn that suicide was the worst sin a person could ever commit. It was considered murder, and if you did it, you would go to Hell for all of eternity. That day was my last day at Sunday school.
    The idea of my mother burning in Hell gave me nightmares. In the middle of the night, I’d wake up to see a witch watchingme from my bedroom door. She wore a black gown that seemed much too large; it completely covered her feet and her hands. She was ugly, hideous, older than any person I had ever met, transparent with a colorful, static quality, like the texture you’d see on a television when it wasn’t set to a station. There was a consciousness about her, an energy that mocked me, terrified me. She gave off her own light in a room that was completely dark, but sometimes I could feel her before I saw her. She didn’t have a voice, but somehow she’d send me thoughts. She’d project ideas like, “You’re such a bad kid,” and, “You make me sick.” Or she’d repeat the things I’d say in my head. I