“This…jar…is here now,” my mother said to us, her voice terse.

On the counter next to her was an empty peanut-butter container with a slit gouged into the metal lid.  She’d taped a white paper label to the front that was marked ‘stupid/shut-up Jar’.

“Any of you say either of these words, you pay the jar a quarter.”

She glared at us for several moments, letting this new edict sink into our feeble young brains, then stomped out of the room.

A quarter was a lot. Even the tooth fairy only gave out dimes at our house.  A quarter was so much that Tara Murphy and I stole candy from Hawkinson’s Grocery one day on the way home from school rather than part with one. We stood at the candy display for what seemed like hours, each of us waiting for the other one to go first.  Finally, we simultaneously grabbed packets of m&m’s and quickly bolted for the door.

We were almost over the border when the clerk whirled around and barked “Hey.”

We froze.

“You two put anything in those bags?” She was a beefy, androgynous girl with sweat circles under her arms, no makeup and short, tightly curled hair.

I felt the bottom of my stomach drop into my legs.  I shook my head. I think Tara was clinically dead for a few seconds.

“Hokaaaay….” she sighed skeptically.  “I don’t want to see either of you in here again, unless it’s with your moms,” she said.  We ran out the door.

We both felt so sick with shame by what we’d done, we ended up burying the candy under the snow in one of my neighbors yards. We did mark the spot with an ‘x’, just in case we changed our minds later and wanted it.

We also promised each other we’d confess our crime the next year, when we’d be in second grade and would make our first reconciliation.  Carrying the weight of that sin for a whole year took its toll on us both; by the following spring, either of us could’ve passed for nine.

For some odd reason, though, to us, cussing simply didn’t have the guilt-inducing heft of shoplifting; hence, the birth of the ‘stupid/shut-up’ jar.

My mother had had it with trying to wash our mouths out with soap. The last time she’d tried to do that was with my older brother Billy. He dove under the kitchen table and ricocheted from end to end for twenty minutes before she finally gave up.   

He went on to become a star running back in college.  Chances are, she wouldn’t have had as much trouble trying to catch one of his slower siblings, but the ‘stupid/shut-up’ jar appeared soon after the Billy Incident. The jar was named in their honor because they were the bad words in heaviest rotation around our house.

We figured out pretty quickly that putting money in that thing was basically just buying the right to swear. We spent days scrounging through couch cushions and car seats for change we could toss into it and yell “shutup, stupid!” 

Even more gratifying was saving up for a truly heinous and imaginative blue streak. We even had a price breakdown:

1 quarter: “Shut-up!”

50 cents:  “Shut-up, stupid!”

75 cents:  “Shut-up, you stupid ass face!”

I won’t even tell you what a dollar would buy.  Sometimes, if Billy or Andy said they had a “really good one” but not enough money to say it, we’d all pool our money just so we could hear it.

We were careful not to do it when mom was around, of course. Surely she would’ve taken our new toy away had she known what it was really teaching us. It was a win/win situation, really; she didn’t hear any more bad words, and we had countless hours of fun.

But like all childhood games, we eventually grew bored with it. We’d exhausted every combination of disgusting insult we knew and had tired of all our hard work lining the pockets of our oldest brother Woody, who helped himself to the contents of the jar every time he ran out of gas money.

Woody was eleven by the time I was born, so for me, he always had an air of mystery about him. 

For starters, he got his own chair at the dinner table. It was a big farm table in the kitchen, flanked by two long wooden benches and armchairs on each end. My dad took one chair, Woody, the other.  Even my mom sat on a bench. I once asked my mother why she didn’t sit in the other chair, like a mom on a television show would.

“I like to sit next to your father,” she beamed.

It was never brought to motion that someone else take Woody’s chair.  Sometimes, if he had baseball practice late, one of us would try it, but the second his Mustang turned into the driveway we made haste to get out lest we be greeted with his signature put-down, “beat it, worm.” This was always met with much-relieved delight to everyone who wasn’t the target of his contempt. Mom would say with an indulgent smile, “Oh, Woody.”

His bedroom was right next to the main ‘kid’ bathroom, which had a sign on the door featuring an angry hillbilly with his pants around his ankles and a dial you could turn to explain “what in tarnation you were doin’ in there!”

The choices were “washin’ ” “goin’ number 1 or 2” and “None a yer bizness!”

The sign hung on a single nail, so it would make a BANG-clackitty-clack noise every time someone opened the door, and with nine of us all sharing one toilet, that sound and the constant chorus of “Shutup, stupid!” provided the background music of our home.

Billy, Andy and I used to spend countless hours at night sitting in the hallway outside the bathroom door, waiting our turn. 

There were only two things to look at opposite the wall we sat against to wait: The first was a portrait of Jesus that got creepier the longer I looked at it. I would often see how long I could go without looking at it, then I would feel compelled to give it a good hard stare, but I was never able to stare down Christ. (It didn’t occur to me until I was an adult that Our Lord and Savior hung in strangely close proximity to the toothless hick showing off the stubbly hairs on his ass…around the same time I finally figured out what the “None a yer bizness!” choice implied.)

The alternative to Jesus was to stare at Woody’s bedroom door.

I don’t remember him playing music or anything, which is not to say he didn’t, but I always thought it was eerily quiet in there, which added to his mystique.

Sometimes, if it were open a crack, one of the three of us would venture inside.

It was always dark. The first thing I’d do was check the bed, and if Woody’s feet were sticking out of it, make a hasty retreat.  No feet in the bed usually meant he was gone.

“Didja see him? Is he in there?” The others would ask, and the brave explorer would give as complete an update as they could remember.

“He’s not there. His baseball hat is on the dresser and….”

And he’d appear, standing behind us in his blue denim shirt and hardhat, glaring at the three of us.

He was a full-time student and also played baseball for the state University, and worked construction. His young siblings acting like big game hunters around him was surely not on his list of concerns, but he’d give us something to bring back to the neighborhood kids; a grumble, possibly the threat of a pounding.

It was incredibly thrilling, and since he never did lay a hand on us, surely he knew how much we counted on his disdain for our own “street cred”.  The threat of a beating from Woody was like a badge of honor.

Stories about him took on a Loch-Ness monster or Yeti quality; they became more and more outlandish with every re-telling. 

Whenever us younger kids would order snacks from the local pool concession stand, the order was always so big the girl behind the counter would think we were pulling her leg.

“You want 15 corn dogs and 5 hamburgers? Are you serious?”

“Good thing Woody’s not here, he could eat all that by himself,” we’d say proudly.

Any act of athletic prowess by anyone in town was countered by us with “Woody can hit it three times that far” or “Woody can make it from half-court” or “you should’ve seen Woody play.”

Any time my older sisters’ friends were tittering about our lothario brother J.P., one of them would inevitably whisper, “you think he’s cute, you should see his older brother.”

If Woody did happen to walk by, he’d never even look at them, causing them all to go weak-kneed and giggly.

To us, he was a seven-foot tall giant with 36-inch biceps, not a college kid burning the candle at both ends. We were not going to quibble with him about a few illicitly gained quarters.

 As for the stupid/shut-up jar, my mom started using it to hold bacon grease.  In the years that followed, every time I saw it under the kitchen sink, the label streaked yellow and barely readable, I’d smile to myself, and remembering all it had taught me, whisper fondly,

“Motherf*****.”

© Katie McCollow, 2006