You Only Get One Family

My Granddaddy had always walked slowly with a little bit of a limp and rocking motion from side to side. For the first time in my short life, I noticed that he wasn’t walking with a limp, but was actually moving rather swiftly, more swiftly than I had ever seen him walk in my young life. He walked straight up to the apple tree that was in the yard and reached up and grabbed a branch and broke it off the tree with one quick jerk. He took his other hand and gripped the branch at the base where he had broken it off and with one quick motion; he stripped every leaf off the branch then with the same quick motion twisted all the smaller branches that were on the bigger branch around it so that it was one long tapered branch.
My sister was frantically digging me out trying to free me before he could reach us. Just as I was getting free and could stand up, he struck my sister across her legs with the switch he had just prepared from the apple tree, and she fell to the ground squirming in pain. I tried to jump over her and run but he caught me in mid-stride with the switch across my legs and it felt like a combination of fire and acid was ripping through my flesh. I fell to the ground in pain landing beside my sister. My sister tried to get up and run but fell over me as he struck her again. The pattern of us falling over each other and trying to run carried on for several more lashes before he would stop, and for all of our trying to escape this man who never walked faster than a penguin, we managed to get all of 5 feet away from our starting point. He only struck us about 3 times each but it felt like a million lashes. As we sat there on the grass crying and trying to console each other and rubbing our welts we were just given, my Granddaddy yelled out to one of his workers that was in the truck, who had just witnessed the entire incident. He instructed him to go get a tarp to cover up the cement so that it wouldn’t get messed up in the rain. We had no idea that what we thought was sand, was actually dry cement.
Still huffing from crying, my Granddaddy told us to go in the house and get that cement cleaned up off of us. We cleaned up, changed clothes and went back outside, still unable to look Granddaddy in the face. He had never put his hands on us, but then again we had never almost killed ourselves either. He told us to go get in the truck and we did. Still silent, mad and huffing, he took us to go get ice cream and without saying a word, that ice cream was his way of saying that whipping us hurt him more than it hurt us. By the time we finished eating our ice cream, we were still mad, but the ice cream seemed to make the anger subside.