My great-grandfather was named Martin and when he got to a certain age—somewhere after sixty but no one can say for sure now—he had to be locked up in the back bedroom of the house. He was mean and he would yell and beat on people. Martin died long before I was born. I’ve heard stories about his cruelty. I wonder, often, if I look like him in any way. I wonder if I’ll become cruel in my old age. Fate, it would seem, has always felt like a carrion bird to me. The word carrion has such a negative connotation for some, but for those who understand the importance of vultures, it sounds beautiful. In the case of my family, it is hard to find beauty in the face of fate. 

My grandfather, Martin’s son, presses his own shotgun shells. When he lived with his third wife, their garage was full of rows of presses. Boxes of lead pellets and red or blue plastic casings were neatly organized around them. On the other side of the garage, there were rows of Christmas villages. Reality split evenly: shotgun shells and the charm of domesticity. The presses sit in the garage of my childhood home now, lined up in a row. Even now, I remember the movement of making bullets. 

My father says we have a family curse: no matter how badly you might want something good to happen to you, no matter how badly you want happiness, you’ll never have it. He says that’s just the way it is. 

In December of 1898, John Henry Patterson sought to engineer the Uganda railway which would run through present-day Kenya. Before the railway could be finished, two male Tsavo lions killed and consumed thirty-five workers. Patterson, a former tiger hunter, took the responsibility of killing the “man-eaters”. Construction on the railway stopped for several weeks before Patterson could shoot the lions. In his 1907 memoir, he writes, “their man-stalking so well-timed and so certain of success that the workmen firmly believed that they were not real animals at all, but devils in lions’ shape.” 

The lions typically struck in the nighttime. Patterson writes, “at about midnight, the lion suddenly put its head in at the open tent door and seized someone—who happened to be nearest the opening—by the throat.” The man begged the lion to let go and tried to wrap his arms around the lion’s neck. After the man’s death, one of his fellow workers asked, was he not fighting a lion? That question stuck between my ribs, imagining when my father would be pulled out of bed late at night. Faced with certain death if the gun went off and yet he fought instead.  

Sometime after my youngest uncle was born, my grandfather began to wake his children up with a shotgun aimed at their faces. My father and his older brother were the ones who had to wrestle the gun away. My dad says his younger brother is too young to remember it. When I ask, that’s all he’ll say: He was a baby, he doesn’t know the half of it. 

Patterson wrote about how the lions had an “uncanny” ability to slip away, always near midnight, whenever he would stake out with his hunting party. Armed with guns and goats, he would hide in areas where the lions were known to kill or were spotted. Each time, silence would fall over the camp, and, in the distance, Patterson could hear the cries of the men in the camp as the lions attacked. They knew when he was away. 

It is said the lions knocked men off their donkeys, pulled them off trains, and even leaped onto tents, smashing them. Once they decided to take a man, nothing would prevent them from doing so, “shots, shouting and firebrands they alike held in derision.” A hiccup in the gene pool gave them jaws that closed around the lives of men like an inescapable sickness. 

Patterson instructed the men to build tall, thorn fencing around their camp. For a while, it worked. But despite every precaution, “the lions would not be denied, and men continued to disappear.” They found ways beneath, above, or around the fencing. Estimates of their death toll do not include the deaths no one knows about. The number of thirty-five is the number of men consumed. Not men attacked, not men killed, and not those left to die. No one knows the true number of the dead, but it is believed to be in the hundreds.

Before my father was my father, he tore down houses with his dad. From the time he was thirteen, he had a job. He followed his father from abandoned houses to condemned buildings, always tearing them down. In photographs, my father has a baby face. Nothing at all like the coal-black beard and hair I know. He’s covered in soot and dirt, standing between his father and an uncle. Smiling. Out of the four siblings, all three boys became ironworkers. They all picked a profession that required sparks, soot, and pain. 

Being part of this family, I’ve gathered, is much like being a plow horse. Retiring when the weight of the plow and its sharp edges are too much. Only to become a trail-riding horse, carrying the weight of other people. Nothing good. Only hard work. 

The first lion to be killed by Patterson, once shot, measured nine feet and eight inches long from nose to tip of tail. It took the strength of eight men to carry its body back to camp. It took ten shots to kill the second lion. 

The Ghost and The Darkness, as the workers called them, live behind a glass case now. Scientists still study the skulls and teeth of the lions. Trying to ascertain a true number and a true cause for their killings. The only way to make sense of the uncanny is to explain it. They have many theories as to why the lions ate humans. Some think they had severe dental damage or they were accustomed to the bodies of men left behind by caravans carrying enslaved people. Some of the men were practicing Hindus and created funeral pyres for their dead, something scientists suggest could have attracted the lions. They keep trying to find a definitive answer. Identify the causation of the killings, number the bullets, count the teeth, and someday you will have an answer. Someday you will understand. 

If you asked me what my relationship with my father is like, I would tell you about the time we were passing a football around in the backyard and his throw landed in my face. I would tell you how bad it hurt, how the tears were instant. I say instant because, normally, I would not have cried in front of him. He was devastated his daughter wasn’t a volleyball player or a softball pitcher. I would tell you the only thing he said to me after that was to stop crying like a girl. 

I should tell you my father loves dogs. Every dog we’ve ever had has loved him too. When he comes home from work, he often walks through the door and says, “Where’s my girl? Where’s my baby girl?” When I was born, my parents both had Rottweilers. Greta and Bear both belonged to my parents prior to their marriage. I grew up with them. My mother tells me often now how much she and my father loved those dogs. How they wanted to have more of them, but having children changed their plans. 

One evening, Bear got tangled in his chain, tied out in the yard. Someone tried to help him get loose but got bit in the process. The way I remember the story is that the man demanded the dog be put down. 

My father took Bear outside and shot him. 

I’ve never asked, but I know the place where the dog was shot must be where our storage building is now. Sometimes, if I think about it and close my eyes, I can see that spot of land before a building stood there. Bear is buried in the hollow where all of our dogs are buried. My dad says he’ll never do it again. He says he would never shoot a dog again, even if his life depended on it. 

As a graduate student, living states away from my father, I drove to Chicago to see the lions in the Field Museum. Two maneless, male lions. Their paws and heads were larger than I imagined they would be. When I went to the museum, I looked at the maneaters in wonder. I felt as though the lions were always calling for me to see them, like we were meant to meet. Like I was meant to understand something after seeing them. 

Now, I believe that those lions are a sadness. The maneaters live behind glass and were it not for a Michael Douglas movie, they would be forgotten. 

Worse still, was the fact that there was a display of a mother lion and her cubs. Meaning a lioness and her cubs died. Their fate isn’t listed on the case—they weren’t violent like their male counterparts. They ended up in the glass boxes at the same museum. I came to Chicago without knowing the mother lion and her cubs were even there. But now I think about the small, hand-sized cubs often. They must have weighed nothing in life and now even less in death. 

When my mother was nine months pregnant with me, my uncle held my father at knifepoint. He held a knife to his throat and his then-wife yelled at my mother. Do something! My mother looked at her, her hands folded over her stomach, over me, and said no. He doesn’t know I know this story. When he held the knife to his brother’s throat, he was eighteen. He didn’t know who I was. He couldn’t have guessed I would ever know about that moment. But I was in the room with them. I always have been.

When my father was a teenager, he held his father at gunpoint. No one remembers why and he doesn’t know that I know this story. All my mother said was that he changed his mind and thought better of it; he put the gun down. 

When I was around the age of five, the same uncle made a visit to our house to take the guns away. He took away every single gun in the house, because my mother thought my father was going to kill himself and maybe even us. If I was five, my brother would have been a newborn. 

I don’t remember this story; I only know I was there. 

The state of Ohio used to have no laws or regulations about the ownership of exotic animals. It was, in fact, a hot spot for animal auctions, a wild Midwest. Tim Harrison, a retired animal control officer, is one of the people who got the calls about tigers in basements or vipers in garages. In Zanesville, you didn’t have to go to Asia to see a tiger. You didn’t even have to go to the zoo. 

In the earliest years of Tim’s career, the animals had nowhere to go. A lioness named Tabitha ended up living with Tim for that reason. Lions reach the age of sexual maturity at around three to four years old. Before that deadline, Tabitha stayed in the house. Whenever she roared, the sound rattled the windows of the house. 

After a lion reaches the age of sexual maturity, instincts kick in. An ancient need to be the leader drives the cat to dominance, to violence. This isn’t “turning.” Lions and tigers are born to hunt and kill. Even if they live in a house in rural Ohio, instinct cannot be replaced or removed. 

The lion will fight to assert dominance. To prove they are the ruler of the family, the center. Just like tigers living in basements, pacing back and forth. They know on a cellular level what is and what is not wild, what should and should not be. At an animal sanctuary in upstate Indiana, the tour guide told me the animals remember the people who abused them. A baboon has lived there for fifteen years but because of whatever her owner did to her, she never bonded with another animal or human. Sometimes, when they move her to her outdoor exhibit, she pulls the grass up by the root and throws it. 

When I interviewed Tim, he said the animals experience trauma the same way we do. It changes their brain, their body even. But they can’t tell you in our words how it feels. Tigers make a specific sound when they feel happy. It’s a sound deep in the back of the throat reminiscent of an exhaust pipe on an old truck. At the sanctuary, when the tour guide comes, some of the tigers walk up to him and they make that sound. Over and over again. The guide says if an animal makes it to their facility, it means they’ll be there for the rest of their life. They got out of their toxic homes, out of the basements in Ohio, and roadside attractions in Texas. Now they live better lives, not quite free, but sometimes happily. 

On October 18th, 2011, a man in Ohio named Terry Thompson let fifty-six exotic animals out of their cages. Forty-nine of the animals were “put down” on the spot: eighteen Bengal tigers, seventeen lions, six black bears, two grizzly bears, three mountain lions, two wolves, and one baboon. Prior to their release, Terry was sentenced to prison for illegally selling guns. He told the judge if he went to prison, his first act as a free man would be killing himself. But only after he let his animals loose. 

When the news broke of the animals being shot and buried, I was a freshman in high school. I remember saying, “it really is a zoo over there in Ohio.” The bodies of the animals were buried on site, at Terry’s home, even though officials were warned the animals were worth more dead. The black market thrives on the selling of pieces of exotic animals. Terry’s wife left town with some of the surviving animals. I wonder what her new life must be like, free of a gun-running husband. I wonder if she ever thinks about the deaths of forty-nine animals. 

I can’t remember what my father said, even though that was the biggest thing to happen in the tri-state area for a long time. It would have still been the biggest news story for years to come, until a family was murdered execution-style in their Kentucky home. We didn’t talk about guns or violence in our home, but we always talked about animals. 

I watched the story of Terry Brumfield play out in a documentary. I was twenty the first time I watched it and I return to it often. Terry lived in Ohio. Across the river, as I would have said, the river which separates my home from his. In the film, he’s introduced as a man who owns two large, African lions. 

Lambert, the male lion, and Lacey, the female. Two lions bought off of a friend after a trucking accident left Terry disabled. With every appearance, I felt endeared to him. After a second viewing of the film, I realized why. Terry Brumfield’s hair and bear-like looks are akin to my father’s. His voice, and his work ethic, all matched my father’s. 

In the film, Tim Harrison offers to help Terry with his lions. They have been living in a horse trailer after an accident caused Lambert to chase cars down the interstate before he was captured and brought home again. As Terry speaks, he tells Tim about a time when he thought local law enforcement would take Lambert away.

He said do you remember that thing that happened down in Waco, Texas? Well, if you try to take my lions, what I’ll do won’t even compare to that. That was when I knew whatever cloth my father had been cut from, Terry came from it too. He wouldn’t start it, but if his lions were lost, he would certainly finish it. 

Over the course of filming, a freak accident involving an electric current kills Lambert. He was five years old and weighed over five hundred pounds. Terry, with camera in hand, lies on the ground petting the lion as he takes his last breath. Terry cries I’m done, I’m done. 

Tears always welled in my eyes when I thought of Terry. He was a stranger I felt I knew, a stranger I know. The lions, he said, brought him out of a deep depression. They gave his life a purpose he had never known before. He cried in the film, something my father rarely ever did. The love he felt so deeply for Lacey and Lambert was the kind of love I always wanted my father to have for me. It felt so strange to be so envious of a dead lion, so envious of all the dogs we had when I was growing up. It also felt like one of the deepest sadnesses I have ever known.

Terry buried Lambert on his property at home and agreed to give Lacey and her cubs up. He became a champion for legislation that would change the way people interact with animals. He began writing a book about his life with the lions. His pain was twisted into purpose, not swallowed or echoed. 

Shortly after the release of the film, Terry died in a car accident right outside of his home. When the paramedics arrived, Tim said, they found him lying on top of Lambert’s grave. Terry is now buried with Lambert. When I read about his burial in a local newspaper, I cried. It felt like losing a chance to meet someone I had grown fond of. Then it became a reminder: someday my father would die, and I may never know him well at all. We may never be bonded or endeared to each other the way Lambert and Terry were. 

When my father was a child, my grandmother swears there was a mountain lion that lived in the woods behind their house. When they talk about this lion, they call it “her.” My grandmother says her because the lion never bothered the children or the dogs, a supposed gentleness. Now, I marvel at this. Gentleness is still somehow wild but feminine all the same. Whereas masculinity is violent. They saw her often and heard her even more often. My grandmother told me if I ever saw a big cat, I should run. You better run faster than it can. You never want to be caught alone with the cold clip of claws and death. 

Once when we were camping, I heard one. I was sleeping in a small tent with my younger cousin. The sound was a woman screaming for her life. It had been so silent then, like a crack of lightning, all silence and safety was lost. Fear kept me from crying out. Then my uncle talked to us from his own tent. He said to be still and not to worry. I can’t remember if we held our breath, but I’m certain we thought it couldn’t hurt. I trusted what he said. He survived a lion when he was a child and through him, we would do the same. 

Eventually, we fell asleep. 

Tigers kept in unfit conditions are prone to having ingrown claws and decaying teeth. They are found with urine burns on their skin too, from the inability to escape their own waste. Once, in Ohio, a building caught fire, and a tiger jumped out of a window. No one had known it was even there, but when the flames began to lick the home, it leaped. A tiger, in the wild, can consume up to a hundred pounds of a carcass in one sitting. In an American basement, the best they’ll get is frozen chicken or a dead deer. 

People with money buy exotic animals for show, breeding, and trading. They do it because they can. Isn’t that the way most bodily violence happens anyway? Because you can. In one case, a young girl set out to play with a family friend’s “pet” tiger. The cat swatted at her head in play, and it broke her neck instantly. 

My neighbors have a ceramic, white tiger on their porch. The color white is a genetic hiccup for tigers. Once in the wild, a cub was born white, and someone stole it. Now white tigers are inbred for their color. Those tigers have the potential to suffer from a multitude of pains. Some have spines that never grow past their hips, so they can’t use their back legs. Nearly every white tiger has crossed eyes. The thing that makes them beautiful—that sets them apart from their brethren—kills them. I often wonder how heavy the ceramic tiger is, if I could steal it, and then how badly would the neighbors miss it. Then later, I think of the math—the statistics really—and wonder if they have a tiger in their basement. 

Our grandmother kept water guns in her garage. The biggest one, a Super Soaker, belonged to my youngest uncle. When we would have a water gunfight, he would always hide in plain sight. Except, it never seemed that way. Armed with smaller guns, we would run and aim for each other. The entire time knowing he was somewhere. Waiting. Then, as if he were a shadow all along, he would turn to face us and chase us down. He would empty the entire tank of the gun in your face, while we laughed and ran. My father, during a similar fight, was sitting on the roof of the house with a bucket of water. Like his brother, no one knew to look for him in places like that. No one noticed until it was too late. They knew where we were, and what ammunition we carried, and they soaked us to the bone every time. 

One Halloween, I snuck around the side of the house to scare my dad. When the heavy door swung open, I yelled BOO! And watched my father’s hands smash into a fist and saw his arm pull back. When he saw that it was me, he shook his head. Later, my mother said you scared him. You’re lucky he didn’t punch you. I thought it was odd that in our family luck did not equal wealth or laughter, it meant not getting punched. 

Shortly after that, my grandfather contracted cancer and got divorced. My dad, always so committed to his father, couldn’t let him suffer. So my grandfather came to live with us. He too would resort to swinging when afraid. He lived with us for fourteen years before I moved out. Even now, when it’s time for dinner, we yell from across the room. We motion with our hands, pretending to scoop a spoonful of food into our mouths. This is the safest way to get his attention. This is how we are lucky. 

When I was twenty-three, my brother got into an argument with our father in the driveway. My father taunted him and dared him to throw a punch. They fought until one of them ended up on the ground. My mother and grandmother pulled them apart. After it was over, my father said to his son you’re lucky your mom was there. 

I knew, without asking, that this was not the first time my grandmother had separated a fight between father and son. 

My uncle, on the day I graduated college, told me to leave and never return. When I was eighteen and upset after a fight with my father, the same uncle provided me solace. My father followed me and yelled and cursed. I hid in my uncle’s garage; when my father finally left, my uncle came to talk to me. He had been building a shelf and wood shavings were everywhere. He sat across from me. 

He said I had to work hard to graduate, to leave. I was the first one in the family to do that, so it meant more. This was what made me stand out from the rest of the family. I was the hiccup in the family line, at least I was trying so hard to be. He said I had to look at my father as an example and decide to be better than that. Decide not to hit my kids or yell or be distant or curse like that or seethe. I had to learn to forget. 

In all the books I’ve read about trauma, psychologists have discussed how trauma lives in the body. Strangely, how trauma travels through bloodlines and rears its ugly head in many ways. I poured over these books in the same way the scientists pour themselves over the teeth of the Tsavo lions. I’m trying to explain the uncanny to myself. Up until now, the uncanny could not be explained. This haunts me, knowing I may never know. 

When I started college, I began to have intense night terrors. Sometimes waking up screaming and crying. Sometimes waking up standing in the kitchen and having no idea how I got there. When you have a night terror, everything seems and feels real. Like it would if you opened your eyes. However, something sinister will be waiting. Sometimes, I’ve seen people sitting on my chest or standing at the foot of my bed. More often than not, I don’t remember what happened. I only know I wake up and I’ll be sitting up in bed and sobbing so hard that I question if it’s even possible to cry any longer, any harder. 

While being diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I talked a lot about my symptoms with my mother. She had a hard time understanding how it could be possible for me to have such a disorder. Like everyone else in my family, she overlooked the history. She missed the forest for the trees. I still have night terrors when I’m excessively tired or stressed out. I have long accepted that it is simply my reality. When I stay in foreign places for work trips, I create walls of pillows around me and I stay up as long as I can. I worry that it’ll happen and the person in the next room will wake up in terror too. Although I had accepted it, I had never thought much of it. Until I learned my father would wake up with a gun shoved in his face. Then I understood. 

After my father assaulted my mother, the police officer responding to the call had them standing apart from each other in the driveway. The officer was loud and perhaps shaped that way. He yelled a lot and assumed a lot. My mother explained she is separated from my father and has been for years, but didn’t divorce because she has kids and needs health insurance. 

The officer looked at me and said, “She’s an adult, so that’s solved.”

For the rest of my life, I will always think of that man and think how lovely it must be to not understand what a legacy of pain was. He kept his thumbs hooked into his belt, next to his gun. 

He asked, “What can we do tonight about what just happened?” 

Unable to hold it back, I started to cry and said, “Officer, he has a history of aggression and abuse.” Meaning: Officer, if you do nothing and you keep yelling at us, he’ll think the behavior is okay. He’ll eat us. He’ll put us in a big, glass container so everyone can stare at what’s left. You have to reprimand him, you have to tell him if he ever does it again, he’ll go to jail. 

My dad spent the night somewhere else that day. I don’t remember where. In the years to come, he would cheat on my mother. He would break my heart so many times over that it felt as natural as breathing—as pacing. I’ve tried to understand it in the only way I can: Through the lens of what is wild. Instinct. I count backward and find there are three generations of violence alive in me. Rather than flounder in the revelation, I’ve thought about it like this: I’ve transitioned from the basement of someone’s house to living in a sanctuary. I’ll never be the same but I’ll be free. I wish my father could see it that way.