This is a spanking recollection that I did not witness and only heard about after the fact. It involved the older of my two younger brothers, who was around 13 at the time. When this incident took place, I was already married and out of the house, but my sister Cara, who was around 16 then, was there and witnessed it. I asked her to share her recollections of an episode she says was both memorable and surreal.
Spankings in our house were not uncommon. Both my folks believed in their effectiveness and all of us got them into our mid-teens, mainly from mom, but sometimes from dad, who only used the strap when he did spank, and that was an experience to be avoided!
We had a set of cousins, the children of mom’s sister, and like us, they were also subject to spankings, always from their mother. My aunt and uncle raised six kids: Judi, was my sister’s age, followed by fraternal twins, Jackson and Jordan, who are around my age, then Julia, a year younger, and Jason, a year younger than Julia and around the same age as the older of my two younger brothers. My aunt and uncle later adopted a boy from Vietnam, Jeremiah, who is about 5 years younger than Jason.
My aunt and uncle lived about four blocks from us, but their house was on a dead end street that backed up to woods. They had a large lot and a pool and a built out recreation room with ping pong, air hockey and a pool table. It was a fun place to hang out, but as the cousin counterparts my age were boys, and candidly, both kind of jerks, I did not spend nearly as much time over there as my sister or brothers.
When this event took place it was between Christmas and New Year’s Day. My brother Patrick, who was 13, had stayed at my aunt’s for a couple days after Christmas, immersed in some new game that Jason had gotten. During that stay, Jackson, one of the twins, got into serious trouble for causing some major problem with his dad’s computer. This was at the dawn of the home computer age, and the COMPAQ Presario (!) was kept in a basement office that my uncle ran a couple of side businesses out of. The office was strictly off limits to all the kids, as was his computer. As relayed to my sis from our cousin Judi, Jackson had been busted a couple times before for going in the office. She thought he was looking for cash that my uncle sometimes had in there. The last time he was caught in there, my uncle’s computer turned up not working right.
So, because of his priors in this area, Jackson was presumed to have gone into the office and, again, screwed up his dad’s computer. My aunt, who was judge, jury and executioner, sentenced him to a paddling. This would have been a huge deal there. My aunt definitely played favorites, and Jackson was the golden boy who she always gave every benefit of the doubt. It was extraordinarily rare for him to be punished, let alone paddled. To the rest of us, he was smarmy, sneaky and deceitful, but to her, he was the clear favourite.
I truly wish I had been there to see that spanking, not only because it was so rare that he got one, but also because, according to Judi and my sis, Jackson was very generously endowed. I should mention that because my sis had run off and gotten married so young, my folks kind of kept tight reins on me. I was not yet allowed to date at that point and so my only exposure to male anatomy came when I saw one of my brothers or cousins have to pull down their pants for a spanking.
Fast forward to a couple days later. My aunt calls my mom and relays what had happened and how she had punished Jackson. It seems about a day after that, Julia had come forward and told my aunt she had seen my brother Patrick coming out of the office that day and looking very nervous. You have to understand the relationship dynamic between my mom and my aunt. There was a very weird competitive thing they had around the kids, not just for things like academics or sports, but also around behavior. If my brother had indeed been guilty of this crime, it was making mom look bad as a parent and woe unto you if you were the reasons for that.
I was upstairs, but I could hear mom talking to my brother. She started out asking some innocuous questions about his stay at my aunt’s, then she subtly shifted the conversation to the computer incident and Jackson being punished. I knew from years of experience with these kind of interrogations that she was laying her traps and eventually, if my brother was guilty, he would trip himself up.
“You don’t go in Uncle John’s office, do you?”
My brother says no.
“And you weren’t in there any time when you were over there this week?”
Again, my brother denies.
“OK, well why would Julia tell your aunt that she saw you coming out of there?”
My brother mumbles an ‘I dunno’.
Mom starts to press and panic sets in and slowly my brother starts to crumble. Mom brings it back full circle.
“I am going to ask you again. Were you in that office and did you touch your uncle’s computer, and I better get a straight answer.”
By this time, I have made my way to the living room and can see into the kitchen where this conversation is taking place. My brother hems and haws some, shifting from one foot to the other. Well, yeah, he may have been in the office, but he doesn’t know about the computer. Mom stares at him, arms crossed.
“You want to try again?”
My brother has not yet developed the skill of total denial to the bitter end. He caves and fesses up to playing with the computer. Mom says nothing, but the glare she is giving radiates anger. Now she will have to call my aunt and concede that it was one of her kids who not only caused this problem but let one of her kids take the fall for it.
She dispatches my brother to an empty corner in the kitchen, a precursor in our house to an imminent bottom warming. I fully expect her to light up my brother’s backside, but I am not prepared for what happens next. I hear her on the phone with my aunt telling her what she has uncovered. The call is brief and ends with: “OK, I’ll be here. See you in a few minutes.”
About 15 minutes later there is knock at the back door. Mom tells me to answer it. It is my aunt and she has Jackson in tow, looking even smarmier than usual. As they enter, the first sight they see is Patrick with his nose stuck in the corner and hands at his side. Mom comes in the kitchen and asks if my aunt wants tea. She puts on the kettle and my aunt dispatches Jackson to our living room to watch television. It is an odd conversation they are having, minor chitchat about this and that, all the while paying no attention to the boy standing in the corner.
They have finished their tea and mom calls me down to the kitchen. She tells me to get my little brother and go to the living room. I give her an odd look, but I can sense that she is on edge and I don’t want to risk getting crossways with her. I find my brother Kevin, who is 10, and tell him mom wants us in the living room. He starts to fuss with me, but I cut him off.
“Dude, Patrick is in huge trouble and mom is in a mood, so I would just do what she asks right now.”
Kevin and I get to the living room and find Jackson there, sitting in the chair that is usually reserved for my dad and aimlessly watching sports on TV. He does not acknowledge us. Kevin and I sit on the couch. My aunt makes her way from the kitchen to the living room, followed closely behind by mom and Patrick, who has that ‘condemned man’ look, equal parts morose and anxious.
There is a hassock in the living room that goes with one of the easy chairs. My aunt moves it to the center of the room and sits on it. My mom is in the alcove between the two rooms, with her arms folded and a look on her face that I am not sure is satisfaction that justice is being served or irritation that my aunt is making this such a production.
My aunt focuses her attention at Patrick.
“All right, young man. I need you to go get the paddle.”
Though my brother had to know this was coming, he is nonetheless deflated, and, looking quite sad and pathetic, trudges upstairs to retrieve our paddle, a firm plywood ping pong paddle that had the rubber removed from one side and that had been sanded and varnished. Ironically, mom had discovered it at my aunt’s house one time when she was spanking my sis, and she took it home with her.
Patrick shuffles back down the stairs and glumly hands over the paddle to my aunt, who is still seated on the hassock. My brother had on the official uniform of winter when we were at home; sweat pants, a long sleeve shirt, socks and slippers. With a wave of the paddle, my aunt tells him to get his pants down. Every spanking at our house and at my aunt’s house was given on a bare bottom, so ‘get your pants down’ was understood to mean pants and underwear. My brother’s face was flushed and his ears turned bright red as he slid down his sweats and boxers in one motion. He was at that age where the embarrassment of the spanking ritual had surpassed the physical discomfort of the actual spanking.
It was bad enough being exposed in front of mom, but now here he was on full display in front of his aunt, sister and other witnesses. The puberty fairy had completed her work since the last time I saw him spanked. The stray wisps had given way to a thick mat of black curly hair above his penis and a thin rat tail of hair went from above his public line to his belly button.
My aunt was really dragging out the lecture and prolonging Patrick’s embarrassment. Just when I thought she was finished, she made him turn and face Jackson and apologize to him, in what had to be complete and utter humiliation. My brother mumbled out some apologies, but Jackson did not respond, just stared at him with that shit-eating smirk.
The preliminaries were over and now it was show time. Now, most of the spankings we got from mom were given over her knee. The exception was when she used the strap and then should make us bend over and grab the seat of a chair. My aunt, though, always spanked with you bent over, whether it was for their paddle, the strap or the vinyl mini-blind wand called ‘The Stick’. I don’t know why she decided on having Patrick go over her knee, but it was definitely a big departure from her usual procedure. The hassock was lower than a chair and Patrick’s hands and feet easily touched the floor. He may have been around 5 feet at this time, but he had picked up the body type of dad’s side, sturdy with broad shoulders and a wider butt. Even though he had the dark hair and eyes of my mom, he definitely had the fair white pasty complexion of the Irish side (dad).
My aunt drew back the paddle and brought it down with a solid smack to Patrick’s lily white bum. He let out a small grunt and then counted the swat.
“One.”
“One, ma’am,” my aunt corrected, insisting on a protocol that we did not use at our house but that she used at hers.
She settled into a cadence of swats. THWAK, count, pause, .pause, THWAK, with a force that seemed to intensify as she went on. My brother croaked out the swats in an increasingly higher voice, often with a leg kick or a bucking or writhing motion that flashed his privates at my brother and me seated on the couch. My aunt, like my mom, always gave swats in groups of 12. After 24 swats, with Patrick’s bum now transformed from lily white to flaming red, she paused.
“That was for disobeying a rule and breaking the computer. This is for letting your cousin take the blame for it.”
With that, a fresh round of swats commenced. My aunt was quite thorough in the application of the paddle and covered every inch, top to bottom and side to side. The last six swats seemed to be delivered with much gusto, prompting loud grunts and leg kicks from Patrick. After the 48th swat had been dispensed, Patrick was ordered up and he immediately began a vigorous rub trying to put out the fire on his back porch, which had now gone crimson. Mom told him to get back to the corner, and with pants and undies still around his knees, Patrick shuffled back to serve his embarrassing public corner time, his blazing red bottom on display.
Mom and my aunt headed to the kitchen for more tea. Jackson made no move to leave, so I bolted to my room at the first opportunity. I was up there maybe 15 minutes when I heard mom calling me. I ducked in the kitchen.
“Honey, would you go up and get me the strap?” she said in a way that was so casual, like sending me up to get some towels.
I saw Patrick slump when he heard her. I said nothing because I was still fearing I might find my way into her crosshairs. I had not been spanked in about six months, but my sis had gotten one at past 16 and I was under no illusion that they were off the table for me.
The strap was kept in the upstairs hall closet where all the spanking tools lived; wooden spoon that was now only used on my little brother, wooden hairbrush and the paddle my aunt had just used. The strap had its own hook on the back of the closet door. It had been a tool belt used by my grandfather. All the pockets were long gone and now it was doubled over and permanently creased, about 18 inches long, 2 inches wide, thick but supple. I had been on the receiving end a few memorable times and I remembered the welts I had carried with me for a few days after.
I brought the strap to mom and handed it to her. In the time I was gone, she had gotten Patrick out of the corner and made him bend over and grab the sides of a kitchen chair. I had a profile view and I noticed that from anxiety or embarrassment or some other reason, Patrick was in a state of arousal. It was not a full erection but it was definitely pointing out more and looking bigger than what I had seen earlier.
I made a hasty retreat from the kitchen and took up camp in the living room, where I could see Patrick but stay out of mom’s sightline.
Mom said little beyond: “This is what you get for lying to me.”
I did not see the first lick, but I definitely heard it, a loud crack that sounded like a pistol shot. I did see Patrick lurch forward, making his equipment bob up and down. He let out a low moan and counted the lick. Eleven more followed, all evenly paced and delivered with the same level of intensity. The exception was the seventh or eight, which must have been the one to find the top of Patrick’s thigh. He let out a howl and took a couple of breaths before counting the swat.
After the 12th lick was delivered, mom banished Patrick back to the corner. She called for me to come to the kitchen and put the strap back upstairs. I caught site of Patrick’s bum, now a mass of flaming red horizontal stripes. The mark at the top of his right thigh looked especially nasty and would no doubt turn into a bruise.
I put the strap away and headed to my room. I heard my aunt leave with Jackson about 15 minutes later. Mom released Patrick from the corner about 15 minutes after that. It was one of the longer corner sessions that I could recall in our house. He was restricted to his room the rest of the break, except for the list of chores mom was making him do to pay for the repair to my uncle’s computer. The only break he caught was my dad being out of town on a project or he no doubt would have caught the strap from him as well.
Epilogue: My brother was still sporting marks from that spanking five days later. I asked him to show me his butt and he did.
LC