Born Shawn Patrick Harris, he wasn’t the biggest but he was one of the toughest, most hard-nosed bastards that anyone could ever run across. Unlike Jesse, there was nothing remotely charming about the man. His features and attitude were as hard and chiseled as his body. He wasn’t unattractive. He simply looked tough even when he smiled. Part of that was due to a gift his stepfather gave him when he was twelve: a one-inch-long scar at the corner of his right eye extending down to his cheek. His hair was wavy and dark brown; he let it grow much longer than the military allowed. He had a square jaw with ears that were small and pressed to the side of his head, deep brown eyes, and an unbroken nose that was perfectly sized and shaped. Some women found him extremely attractive, and others he scared to death.
Because of his fearlessness, lightning-quick moves, and never-give-up attitude, he earned the nickname “The Mongoose” from the members of his unit at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Shawn grew up in Middlesboro, Kentucky, where Tennessee and Virginia meet at the Cumberland Gap National Park. If you were blessed with money and came from a good home, it was a beautiful place to live. But for Shawn’s mother, Cindy, that wasn’t the case. From the day she entered this world, her life had been filled with misery and despair. The layers of sadness and hopelessness she felt nearly every day overshadowed the beauty and serenity of the hills. Shawn didn’t know his real father, and his mother came from a dirt-poor family with too many mouths to feed and absolutely no hope for the future. Her uneducated father found work wherever he could, although they mainly relied on the county or charity from a local church for their meager existence.
They lived in a five-room shack southwest of town that backed up to the railroad tracks that was once used by hobos and ne'er-do-well’s that rode the rails during the depression of the thirties. Her father made his own moonshine and was drunk most of the time. Cindy shared a bedroom with her older sister of three years, although it was more like a lean-to on the side of the shack then a bedroom. Many nights she would hear her father come in drunk and force himself on her older sister Sandy. Her sister would remain quite until after her father was finished and gone before she would softly begin to cry. Cindy would sometimes go and lie next to her and hold her until they both fell asleep, covered in their own tears.
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When Sandy became pregnant, her father drove her to an old woman in the hills who took care of these things. The procedure didn’t go well, and Sandy was forced to walk home in a cold spring rain because the old woman’s car wouldn’t start, and she had no other way home. Feeling cold and nauseous, Sandy stopped along the dirt road, walked over to an old oak tree, and sat down to rest. After a while, she couldn’t feel the rain or cold any longer, and her uncontrollable shivering suddenly stopped. Then, a great calm washed over her, and she felt warm. Sandy knew she was dying, yet she had no fear. She embraced it. She knew that she would be free from the horror she was living every single day of her life. Sandy had contemplated suicide many times, but she never possessed the courage to carry it out. She had never gone to church much, yet she inwardly knew that taking her own life would displease God. She hoped there was a heaven because she had already seen and been through hell. Finally, Sandy slipped into unconsciousness and died from blood loss on that rain-soaked hill at the tender age of fourteen.
She was finally at peace.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
When Cindy came of age, her father turned his sick, twisted lust on her. Many nights, she would wake up with her father’s foul breath in her face, even though she tried to barricade her bedroom door. Depending on his state of inebriation, she sometimes could fight him off, but not always. Her cries went unanswered by her three younger brothers, and her battered mother turned a blind eye to the abuse of her daughters. Like her sister before her, she contemplated suicide many times, and like her sister, she never carried it out. Depression and guilt filled her soul. She had asked God many times for the nightmare to stop, but her prayers seemed to fall on deaf ears. She often asked herself why some of her school friends had such good families while hers was something out of a horror movie? For Cindy, life simply wasn’t fair. It was cruel.
Cindy often contemplated running away, however she lacked the courage or means to do it. She was a very attractive girl with plenty of male suitors vying for her affection. But when they tried to get close, she would go into her defensive mode and drove them all away. That is until she met him. He had a reputation for being tough, but when they were together, she found that he was exactly the opposite. He was kind, gentle and caring, and what really mattered was that he listened to her. When she became pregnant, her father didn’t make the same mistake he did with her sister. Cindy dropped out of school and gave birth to Shawn just before her sixteenth birthday. One thing was certain, though; her pappy was not the father of her child. Shawn had no resemblance to the vulgar, disgusting man in any way, shape, or form.
Shawn brought her amazing joy and gave her something to live for. She loved her sister, but this was a different kind of love she had never experienced before. Shawn belonged to her, and she promised she would not let anyone hurt him. Shawn’s father was three years older than Cindy and wanted to marry her, but his father wanted nothing to do with her and her no-account family.
Shawn’s father was a tough little bastard of Irish ancestry whose daddy was a local county Magistrate and owner of a lumber mill where he worked part-time loading trucks. One day, the Magistrate paid a visit to Cindy’s father to end the matter. He handed him an envelope filled with money in return for keeping his daughter away from his son. For him, the matter was closed despite what his son thought.
With little prospects, Cindy married Jack Thomas shortly after she turned seventeen. Jack was five years her senior and an auto mechanic by trade who sometimes fixed her daddy’s piece of-shit pickup truck at his shop.
Cindy’s father died one year later in a tragic logging accident when he was securing a trailer full of logs. One of the sides of the trailer he was assigned to help load broke loose, and the mass of logs crushed him to death. Immediately following his demise, cold, dark shadows flowed over and engulfed his body. His soul was carried away by unseen hands, and the trip to hell was a very short one for the man who had caused so much pain and suffering to this family.
The young man who was loading the trailer got out of the Caterpillar 930 Log Loader and walked up to the pile of logs that contained the dead, twisted body of Cindy’s father. A thin smile came to his face as he peered into the log pile and spotted the man. He walked over to the trailer with its broken side and looked underneath it. Next to a tire, he found what he was looking for: a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels that he had given the man who was now dead. Several men working in the area ran over to help, and they quickly realized the hard truth. The young man didn’t attempt to move the logs with the log loader. He walked to his pickup truck and drove off the site as cold rain started to fall. Cindy’s father was buried three days later and with only a handful of people present at his gravesite. There were no tears shed by anyone.
In the aftermath, an inquiry into the accident showed that Cindy’s father had been drinking and that the side rails on the trailer were faulty, thus clearing the young man of any liability, even though the trailer was obviously overloaded. The young man never worked at his father’s mill again. He had accomplished his mission.
