Free Whatever Mother Says... by Wensley Clarkson Page A

This was the kitchen of a tiny, overcrowded house, and there was not even a gurney in sight. Instead, just a slab of floor where Suesan was told to lie in preparation for her surgery. A pillow was placed under her stomach so that it would be taut enough for surgery to commence.
    A couple of medical instruments lay idly nearby on the sideboard. Suesan was fed a handful of tiny green Mellaril painkillers, but it was a gallon bottle of Old Crow that would become the Knorr equivalent of anesthetic.
    Before positioning her daughter for what in anyone’s terms was major surgery, Theresa Knorr thrust that vast jug of whiskey into her daughter’s lap and ordered her to drink it. Unlike the macaroni cheese all those months earlier, this was one command that Suesan believed was actually in her own interests.
    Suesan rapidly swallowed back about half of the Old Crow before she was knocked out cold.
    Meanwhile, Theresa peeled on a pair of rubber surgical gloves, making sure to stretch them professionally before squeezing them over those short, stubby fingers. She ordered her two sons, Billy Bob and Robert, to hold their sister down. Then she grabbed a scalpel and a pair of pincers, and got to work. She had stolen everything from her earlier jobs in convalescent hospitals.
    Two hours later Theresa finally succeeded in digging the bullet out of her daughter’s back. Suesan had lost enormous quantities of blood, but that did not seem to concern her mother. Her main objective was to remove the evidence that could have resulted in her being prosecuted for attempted murder.
    From the moment she extracted that slug, she grasped onto it, not even daring to set it down for a second, in case it disappeared. She did not trust any of her children—she suspected they would turn her in if given half a chance.
    Suesan was still knocked out cold. Her face was twisted to the side, pressed hard on the cold kitchen floor. Her back arched at a grotesque angle. Somehow she was still breathing.
    Theresa said nothing. Her assistant, Terry, was so dumbfounded that she could not speak …
    *   *   *
    Luckily for Suesan, she did not recover consciousness until the next day. Although some members of the family believe that she would have been better off if she had never woken up.
    When Suesan did awake, she was still severely groggy and her body remained facedown on the floor, growing weaker and more feverish with each passing hour. Theresa Knorr ordered the other children to simply step around or over Suesan whenever they were in the kitchen.
    She would not even allow the rest of the family to help Suesan to the bathroom. Theresa Knorr simply ordered Billy Bob and Robert to place diapers beneath Suesan’s pelvis and change them when the smell of urine and feces got too overpowering in the summer heat.
    Theresa fed her daughter constant antibiotics to keep infection from setting in, and she gave her ibuprofen and Motrin for the inflammation.
    But Suesan was deteriorating fast. A week after the operation, she started hallucinating and began calling her brother William, “Grandpa.”
    “I can see my life passing before my eyes,” Suesan told her baby sister Terry.
    Then lockjaw set in …
    “She was dying. I just know,” says Terry today. “It was like a movie, you know…”
    The other sister, Sheila, was so concerned she actually plucked up the courage to confront her mother: “Suesan’s dying. We gotta do something.”
    “What d’you want me to do about it? I’ve tried to help her. There’s nothing more I can do,” came the terse reply from the only parent in that household.
    Theresa Knorr allegedly conceded that her daughter did need proper medical attention, but she strictly forbade any attempt to call in a doctor, for fear it would expose her. When she wanted to see if Suesan was still alive, she kicked her and listened for a groan.
    “She needs a doctor, she needs to go to a hospital, but if I take her to a hospital, she’s been