They lived in the tent for the summer, then moved to Vestal, N.Y., with his mother's sister. But having nine people under one roof, including five kids running afoot, became too much, and the family moved to a house nearby. When they couldn't afford the rent, they were forced back into the tent. It was colder now, and Isaiah remembers how seven people in one tent was a little tight but their bodies kept each other warm for those tough three weeks.
Through it all, Isaiah still went to school, and sometimes the kids would notice the grass stains on his pants from their playground football games. For weeks at a time, the family had no means of washing their clothes. "I didn't volunteer that information," he says. "Only my best friend knew we were living in a tent, and he respected my privacy."
They moved into another house, in nearby Endicott, but they couldn't afford a television, and David would sometimes search trash bins for food. "The thing you wanted to find was something unopened," Isaiah says. "Bread that only had a little mold."
The Cider Mill Playhouse on Route 26 made its own cider and doughnuts. Sometimes the doughnuts would hit the ground, and the Mill had to throw them out. A half-hour before the Mill closed, the Kacyvenski kids would stand outside and wait for them. "They'd put them in cardboard boxes," Isaiah says. "Some were good, and some were stale. But to us, it was one of the few treats we could have."
Most of the doughnuts were plain, and, to be honest, they didn't taste like much. "But if you found a cinnamon one or a powdered one," he says, "that was the mother lode."
The kids would also eat popcorn for days at a time. "To break the monotony," he says, "I'd put water on it, to make it like a cereal."
It was a tough way to grow up, but the beatings were worse.
David has struggled with low self-esteem all his life, scarred by an abused childhood of his own, and was still suffering the trauma of losing his firstborn suddenly.
His father, John, was a raging alcoholic who regularly beat his mother. One night he got in the way, and his father threw him across the room. His mother ended the marriage that night.
"It was a cycle," Isaiah says. "Without realizing it, he was doing the same thing to his own kids."
Isaiah would be afraid to ask his father for simple things, like money for a snack, "for fear that he'd blow up on me, that he'd haul off and whip me. I didn't realize 'til I got older; 'Wow, that's pretty messed up, to be that afraid.' "
One day Dan, the oldest brother, flunked a seventh-grade math class. "I was in bed, sleeping," Dan says. "I woke up when my father pulled me by my ankles, slammed me to the floor and beat me with his belt."
David says he had not been drinking that night; he had given it up in 1976, after identifying his father in a morgue. "But I was a dry drunk," he says.
"My dad wasn't the best father," Isaiah says, "but my mom always said he did the best with what he had. She would never let us talk bad about him."
Everybody has their breaking point, and David and Margaret divorced when Isaiah was 9, the year he discovered football. He listened on a battery-powered radio as Chicago beat New England in Super Bowl XX. When he was 13, his mother left to do missionary work.
"She had so much faith in God's will for her," Isaiah says. "She would leave New York for missionary work in San Francisco with $50. Maybe she would stop and work somewhere. Maybe she'd have to hitchhike. But she wasn't afraid because she had faith."
With their mother gone, their father returned. "We didn't want him to come back," Isaiah says. "It was a rocky time."
When he turned 15, Isaiah became obsessed with one simple goal: earn a football scholarship to Notre Dame. He began rising at 5:30 a.m. to lift weights. He threw himself into his schoolwork. He became an honor student and an outstanding football player. His peers named him homecoming king in his senior year. He was football captain. Then, the morning of the state semifinal game, there was that awful feeling he would never forget.
Isaiah had risen that morning to use the bathroom and passed his father. By the look on his face, Isaiah knew something was wrong. When David told him his mother had died, Isaiah's knees gave out and he fell to the floor in tears. Isaiah says that within five minutes his girlfriend and the woman he would marry, Lauren, was at his side.
Margaret had been walking by the highway at 2 a.m. when a tractor-trailer struck her. "It's pitch black out and she's walking by herself on the side of a highway in the middle of nowhere, and she's not afraid," Isaiah says. "No fear, but she had faith in God. Think about that."
The semifinal game was in Syracuse, a 1½-hour bus ride away. Isaiah sat in the back of the bus. Everybody left him alone so he could cry in peace.
"Ask my wife. I can remember every stupid little thing from every game I've played, even from my sophomore year in high school," Isaiah says. "But I don't remember much from that game. Honestly. I know I had some touchdowns and an interception and lots of tackles, but that's it. I just lost myself in that game. I didn't have to think about anything. I could just be."
Even now he feels the pain of loss. "Nothing compares to losing your mother, especially sudden like that," he says. "You can't put it into words. It just wrenches your heart. I had a roommate in college who lost his mother when he was young. We talked about how a part of you dies. That was the case with me. Something died inside me."
At the funeral, all the children talked about a letter they received from her on Mother's Day. Each letter was different — some were written on paper towels, like a scroll — all personalized, and each one said, "You have always been my favorite child."
"We didn't know she said that to each of us," Isaiah says, "until she was gone."
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