Valley of Bones

Two

Just plunge in. Just plunge in, in my daddy’s voice, just plunge in, sugar pie, ain’t nothin in that river meaner’n you. I must have been four, the river was the Coelee in Caluga County, Florida, tea dark, with the Spanish moss and the live oak and palmetto overhanging. He was teaching me how to swim. So I plunge in and really I have no idea, I am a reader not a writer, I should have started with praise as Augustine did but of course I forgot and what vainglory comparing myself but perhaps God sees us all the same, He loves us though we are all beneath contempt the greatest saints and me. Augustine begins with I recall only the famous line You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. Of course, we don’t really know that, do we St. A? We think we want other stuff, more easily available and so when we remember to pray at all we pray as you did for so long?God make me good but not yet.

If I had not been so wicked, the possession of devout and God-fearing parents, together with the favor of God’s grace, would have been enough to make me good.I laughed out loud the first time I read that, in a priory library where laughter was not encouraged, and then I was sad because I would have liked so much to have had parents like that or to have been as little wicked as Teresa of Avila, and I could have started my confessions with that line as she did her Life. And I find it interesting how I am not in fact plunging in but filling the page with buzz to avoid it, my genuine and not chastely imagined wickedness. Now, for real.

I was born to Joseph R. and Ellen May (Billie) Boone Garigeau in Wayland, Florida. Billie was seventeen at the time, and my father, called Ti Joe by everyone, was twenty-two and a Cajun from Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana. I think neither of them feared God very much, and their devotion, though strong, was not to Him. Momma was devoted to Ti Joe, at about the same level as Teresa was devoted to Jesus (or so I later imagined), and Daddy was devoted to two propositions, first that owning and driving a Kenworth truck was the only life for a man worth having, and two, that being a good husband and daddy did not in any way preclude him from getting as much pussy as he possibly could. Oh, now it seems I can write what I decline to say. Bastard. Prick. Cunt. Fuck. An exhibition of hypocrisy now I must be prissy mouthed although I have known nuns who could strip the paint off a Buick. Or maybe this is a dispensation, in the service of absolute honesty.

We lived in a double-wide at the Karefree Trailer Park close by the Coelee River, about eight miles out of Wayland on Route 217 in Caluga County. It was a nice place as those kinds of places go, four neat lines of mobile homes, a playground, a ball field, some red picnic tables by a muddy beach on the river, a wobbly dock, and a small convenience store. While he saved for that Kenworth, Daddy drove a rig for an outfit in Panama City, and he’d be gone different lengths of time during which life entered a kind of limbo, us sitting around waiting for the second coming like the early apostles although without the Holy Spirit to keep us company. He was a handsome devil though, my daddy, and Momma thought she was lucky to get him, although she was no kind of dog herself, a towheaded skinny girl with long pale legs. She was a local person, a Caluga County belle, he was maybe a hair shorter than she was in his stocking feet, which you practically never got to see because he always had the cowboy boots on with the two-and-a-half-inch heels raising him as close to heaven as he was ever likely to get. That’s my Granny Boone talking, not me, I have to believe in the infinite mercy of God. After death, not now.

I say Granny Boone, that’s got to conjure up a picture of a bent crone in a faded flowered dress, maybe with a corncob pipe clenched in her toothless jaws, but Maureen Boone was about thirty-eight or so when I was born and not bent or faded at all. I guess Granny Boone was about the only what you could call a citizen among the whole Boone clan, being a bookkeeper for the Coelee River Lumber Company and a high school graduate, with two years of college, where all the other ones were what I guess they used to call white trash. Or trailer trash too, and as a matter of fact I guess Granny was the only Boone in the county who lived in a regular house, an old Florida frame house with deep verandas, painted white, with the gray pine boards showing through where the sun had faded it off.

What I got from Gran was the written word. That’s whatshe was devoted to. She taught me how to read, one of my earliest memories. Sitting on her lap on my daddy’s lounger chair, with the TV for once silent, we’re in our trailer and Momma is off with her high school friends, the prom queens a little bleached, the football stars just starting to go soft around the gut, and Daddy’s on the road with a load, and her quiet voice in my ear reading I can’t remember what it was Goodnight Moon or Are You My Mother? Poky Little Puppy. One of those. I must have been three or four. And watching her bookkeeper’s finger moving across the familiar black shapes that meant BOX, or whatever the word was, I suddenly realized I could make its sound in my head without Gran having to say it, and that meant that I could turn on the story in my head, just like when you turned on the TV. Andthat meant, I soon came to realize, that I could read anything, any book in Granny’s house, any book in the tiny town library in Wayland.

Probably it is a fabrication that this happened, I am backfilling to make a story, as perhaps St. Augustine made up the famous story of his conversion in the courtyard, the child’s voice calling take up and read and he took up and read the verse that allowed the Holy Spirit to enter his heart, but so it is with memory. Who knows whatreally happened and really, who cares? It’s what we make of it now that counts, and the truth is by the power of the Holy Spirit burnt into our bodies, so even now I can recapture the elation, the quivering joy I felt when I discovered what reading was, the second most important spiritual event of my life.

I kept it secret from Momma and Daddy, because I was I am trying to think honestly here. Because I was either a controlling monster even then, like kids you hear about who hide their poo, or because I figured out even as a little thing that neither of them would be happy to learn that I was going to be smarter than them. Both of them could read somewhat, but there was not a book in the house, so that keeping the secret was no strain, even for a four-year-old.

(You don’t believe this denial of accomplishment? You think kids want to be praised, why would I hide my gift? Why is there the perversion of gifts at all? Or their salvation? St. Ignatius Loyola wanted to be a conquistador, Hitler wanted to be an artist. Let’s call it satanic while we wait for the final revelation of psychology.)

Gran had a lot of books, of course, and for the longest time I thought that this was what was meant when she called herself a bookkeeper. Momma did not like me staying over at her mother’s place, or maybe she was just being mean to Gran because Gran always wanted me to, or to me because I did too. She was a jealous person, Momma, although not particularly interested in me when she had me to herself. Mean jealous, may God forgive her as I have.

By the time I was five and starting in school I was reading Black Beauty and Misty of Chincoteague and could use a dictionary to look up words I didn’t know. I thought I had invented looking up in the dictionary, as a matter of fact, that I had discovered that all the words in this fat book were arranged inthe same order as the alphabet! I recall being annoyed when I saw Gran look something up and asked her what she was doing and discovered that it was an open secret. Or maybe that is another fabrication.

In the first grade at the Sidney Lanier Elementary School they were doing the alphabet and I said I knew all of that and I could read but the teacher didn’t believe me and that was when I first heard the voice in my head. Pay attention, Emmylou, she was saying, because I was looking out the window wishing I was reading something, she was saying what comes after H and I said I know all this already, this is stupid. She got red across the cheeks, Mrs. Barrett her name was, and I could feel the kids get excited, a murmur like wind in the grass, and she said don’t be rude if you know so much say the rest of the alphabet and the voice told me no, you don’t have to, you’re smarter than all of them put together. I even looked around it was so clear, like one of the other kids was talking, but it wasn’t, just a nice soft voice, you couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. If this never happened to you you don’t know what I’m talking about, and if it has you may tremble at the memory of it.

Anyway, that was my first crime that the devil made me do, I had to sit in a corner for half an hour and miss recess but when they all left and I could hear the screaming of play outside I got off the chair I was in and went to the shelf where Mrs. Barrett kept the storytime books and took down a copy of Alice in Wonderland and started to read it. How I explained it to myself was that keeping the secret kept me in control of things, it seemed to me, and even at six I knew that my poor parents were not all that good at controlling stuff. Momma came to school a time or two and let Mrs. B. lecture at her and then she stopped coming entirely and I was on my own, a problem child, slow. And bad. Momma said, honey child, you better turn out pretty because it don’t look like you’re gonna be no big brain.

After first grade I was in the dumb kid class. On most fine days I would run away at recess and go to Gran’s and read. Gran would take books out of the library for her to read to me, and I read through whatever was on the hall table, mostly animal stories and Nancy Drews, and Judy Blume stuff, and Madeleine L’Engle. The hardest part of all this was keeping it from Gran. She did want me to be bright like her, and it was sad her trying to teach me how to read and me not learning. I believe that was the worst thing I did before I got in with boys later. But the devil is all will and hardness of heart and the pleasure I got from being in his favor and the power of fooling the whole world was to me better than pleasing someone who loved me, and the way he did it was to say imagine the pleasure on her face when you finally show her who you really are, and that comforted me in my evil. And he also made me understand that if I showed, they would put me in the gifted and talented where the rich kids were and they would despise me for my clothes and my cracker ways. So many excuses for doing bad!

Besides those books I read her World Book Encyclopedia. In the second grade I got from Aardvark, a large nocturnal burrowing mammal of Africa, to Dysprosium, a rare earth metallic element found in certain minerals. It wasn’t until the third grade that I got to Eidetic Memory and found out what I was and that not many people were like me. And the devil said it was his gift, making me so that I wouldn’t forget, so that all the treasures of the world’s knowledge that he would show me would stay in my mind always, and poor fool that I was then I thought that not forgetting was a good thing instead of what it is, poison acid and gall, but I am a true witness with God’s help.

So of course I remember it perfectly, a day in fourth grade after lunch sloppy joes carrots fries white cake with banana frosting, a rainy day so I’m in the classroom lounging with the dummies and there is Gran at the door of the room wearing her long yellow slicker and a plastic kerchief on her head pressing her dark curls like grapes in shrink wrap at the Winn-Dixie. She spoke to the teacher, who gave me a sympathetic look that sent a chill down into my belly, and then we got my little plastic raincoat with the hood and went out to the Dodge and drove off. The car smelled of cigarettes and the cologne she used lily of the valley and we drove in silence for a while and then she said there’s no easy way to tell this sugar but your Daddy drove his rig off a bridge in Alabama and he’s dead. I took it pretty calm considering, a lot calmer than Momma anyway who was screeching and banging her head on the arm of our sofa when we got home. I just watched her, feeling blank as the back wall of a garage. A good thing about being in thrall to Satan is you don’t feel much of the pain of human existence. He doesn’t care so why should you?

Daddy’s people came in from Louisiana to bury him, a bunch of dark-skinned, black-haired people I never met before, the Garigeaus. They were Cajuns but they are not part of this story, since I never did them any harm, nor were they much interested in me. Along with the Garigeaus came a heavyset girl who turned out to be the first, and I guess only, Mrs. Garigeau. That was a cruel blow to Momma, to find out that way she wasn’t a true wife, and I was a bastard. They let us all come to the church though, St. Margaret’s, the first time I had ever been in a Catholic church and the last for many years until I was whipped into it kicking and screaming by God, like the dumb dog I was and am. I remember liking the incense and trying to get up and follow the rest of them to communion and Momma pinching my arm and making me sit still. They had the mass and cremated him and took him in a little box back to Plaquemines Parish, where they all came from. They have their graves in stone boxes above ground there, because of the floods, this fact told to me by a little cousin I never saw again.

The other wife meant there was no survivors’ money for us, and the insurance company wouldn’t pay the insurance the shippers made Daddy carry because they claimed negligence in the accident, which was what they called getting a blow job off a fifteen-year-old whore he’d picked up in Decatur and in the midst going off the Tennessee River bridge on 20 east.

Well, we were stony broke after that. Momma went back to work at the Tasty-Freeze, and we all moved back with Gran. When I think of the torments of hell, I often think of it like that, two women and a girl in a small little house, all the time fighting both ways, hot and cold. I guess I hated the cold kind the worst, the banging of doors, nobody talking, food slammed down on the table, silent meals. Gran was a good woman, I guess, or started out good, but she had put all her hopes on her daughter and then on me, that one of us would get out of this what she called the stinky armpit of Florida and amount to something, and it was pretty certain by then that one of us was a man-crazy slut without a lick of sense and the other was a retard, me.Retard was Momma talking, not Gran, and for days at a time when I’d done something she didn’t like she would call me that, or Ree, or Emmytard.

But a few weeks into the summer after fourth grade, Momma started taking better care of herself and cleaning and cooking, because of Raymond Robert Dideroff, who came one warm summer Sunday night to supper. Ray Bob, as he was known, was the chief of police of Wayland. He had been married to Louellen Pritchard for a long time, and had two boys?Jon Dideroff was in my class at school and Ray Jr. was a year ahead of me?but a couple of years back she had run off, no one could figure out why, because Ray Bob it was agreed in Wayland was quite the man. Which he was, a big, broad-shouldered, square-jawed fellow with slick-back sandy hair and crinkly blue eyes. The Dideroffs had been in Wayland since the year zip, had plenty of money, what they call prominent citizens, which the Boone family was definitely not. Ray Bob was also a deacon in the Amity Street Assembly of God Church. I believe that when we sat down that night it was the first time anyone had said grace over food in our house, and I got a wicked kick under the table from Momma just as I was about to grab a drumstick beforehand.

Well, it was pretty clear to me what was going on, and as I sat there eating chicken I began to think about what I could do to mess things up for Momma without getting caught out and killed. Toward the end of pie and coffee I had thought up a few good ones, but then something strange happened. Ray Bob leaned back in his chair after his second hunk of key lime pie and looked around the room, as if he was planning on buying the place and remarked to Gran about how many books there were in the room and asked if we were all readers. Gran said she had always like to read and she talked about writers she liked for a little while and Ray Bob and her agreed on how they liked some of them, and Momma said she loved to read too but never got the chance because she was working double shifts to keep the money coming in, which was a lie, but Gran knew better than to call her on it just then, and then…it is hard to explain but something came into the room with that lie, like a smoke, like Satan himself was there and we were his little dolls he was playing with and having just the best old time.

Ray Bob turned to me and locked those blue eyes into mine and the hair stood up on the backs of my arms and on my neck because I saw that he could see right into me right through to my deepest secrets, that he could see the evil working deep in me and that he thought that it was kind of cute. And I saw that what was looking into me was something that not even Ray Bob knew about in his own heart, which was the scariest thing about it, like you’re playing in the river and all of a sudden you realize you’re not where you thought you were, not on a safe sandbar but out in the main current and there was no bottom under your feet and the river had hold of you. I had thought I was the wickedest thing going but right then I knew I was just paddling in the shallows of it.

He had a deep, pleasant voice like a TV announcer, and he said how about you, honey, you a reader too? Momma broke in and said oh she wants to so bad but she’sdyslexic, we tried everything, and where she dug up that word I don’t know, maybe retained against need from one of Mrs. Barrett’s lectures, but he paid her no mind, just kept boring inward and stripping me with those eyes, and he said, oh, I think Emmylou can read pretty good when she wants to. Gran spoke up and started to say no, really Ray Bob, she can’t read a lick but I cut her off and said Ican read, my own voice seeming to come from some other little girl. He said go read us something honey.

Now as part of her act Momma had gone up into the attic and brought down her grandfather’s family Bible and dusted it off and sat it on a doily on the sideboard next to the table, like we had Bible reading every day, and so I just had to reach out and grab it and I opened it at random with the blood pounding so hard in my head that I saw red spots. It was I Kings 14 that the book opened to and I read At that time Abijah the son of Jeroboam fell sick And Jeroboam said to his wife, Arise, I pray thee, and disguise thyself that thou be not known as the wife of Jeroboam and get thee to Shiloh: behold there is Ahijah the prophet, which told me I should be king over this people.

I read the next verse too about the cracknels and the cruse of honey and then Momma yelled real loud and said that it was a miracle that she had prayed for so long and came over and dragged me off the chair and gave me a hard furious hug. Over her shoulder I could see the look on Gran’s face, the shock of betrayal. I guess she had really wanted to make me into a little her, someone who would enjoy the things she did, books and good music, and might attend the limited cultural events available to the Caluga County bourgeoisie, maybe a girl to take on trips to Atlanta or Miami, who’d go on to a four-year college like she did, only not get pregnant in junior year and have to drop out, and here I was, all what she wanted but keeping it hidden, and then trotting it out for the likes of Ray Bob Dideroff. She aged about ten years while I was looking at her. After a while, me showing off my reading prowess to Momma and Ray Bob, she kind of busied herself with clearing the supper things away. Of course, she never read to me anymore, or called me on how come I did that to her. She kind of faded out of our lives after that, nothing violent, but Ray Bob didn’t much care for her, stuck-up was the word mostly used and also she wasn’t church and she was a member of the ACLU, which was more than enough to put her in his bad books. Actually, now that I think of it, nearly everyone Momma knew from before was in Ray Bob’s bad books, an imposing set of volumes, and I guess that should’ve told us something, but did not, Momma being so happy to finally be on easy street.

Gulf Avenue was the actual name of the street we were on, a big two-story brick on a five-acre plot that me and Momma moved into after the wedding. Momma was in her glory those first couple of months, I have to say, Ray Bob could not do enough for her, and the rest of us might as well have been invisible. She got rid of her old Ford truck and drove around in a yellow Mustang convertible that had belonged to the first Mrs. Dideroff and that Ray Bob had kept nice and clean in his garage. I had my own room and on the other side of the wall was their bedroom, from which nightly I could hear them going at it, which even at nine I knew what it was. I guess he had not got much nooky since Louellen had left, him being a pillar of the church and all and Wayland being a small place, so he was making up for lost time and Momma was certainly willing enough. However, around six months into the marriage, when I guess Ray Bob’s tank had been pretty much drained to normal, I noticed a change around the place. There was a night when the sounds from the other side of the wall were not what they had been, Momma yelling real loud and high not the kind of words you would expect from a saved church lady and the low rumble of Ray Bob’s voice. (I never heard the man raise it once, he was the kind who you do what he says without him ever having to.) Then her voice went up real high and cut off and I heard some thumps, not the thump of the bed but other kinds of thumps. Momma stayed in bed the whole next day, and the day after that she walked kind of stiff and didn’t say much. Ti Joe had whapped Momma once in a while when they were both drunk, but this wasn’t like that. There was not a mark on her I could see and I peeked at her in the bathroom. So I was mystified, but they did not have the answer in the World Book that I could see.

I started fifth grade with a new name, Emmylou Dideroff, since Ray Bob said that we were all one family and should have the same name. Two weeks after school started, on a Friday, I came home in the afternoon and Momma was not there, and the yellow convertible was missing from the garage. She was still gone when Ray Bob got home. He was real calm about it and gave me one of his looks that you better not lie to me and asked me if I knew where she was and I said no sir I do not. Then he made some phone calls. Later that night I heard sirens.

They found Momma down in Dixie County, she was speeding and a local cop pulled her over and called Ray Bob because of the registration and he went down and brought her back. I didn’t see her then or for a while after, because Ray Bob said she had a nervous breakdown and it was sad but we all had to pray real hard for her to get better. Ray Bob’s uncle Doc Herm Dideroff ran a kind of rest home in Wayland Beach, they called it a rest home, but what it was was a place where rich people could kick the habit while not running into anyone they knew, one advantage of it being in a no-account place like Caluga County, Fla. So Momma was put in there for her nervous breakdown and got the electric shock treatments to straighten her out, or so I overheard, and I imagined Doc Herm making her stick her finger in a light socket with her feet wet, a picture I kind of cherished because I was pretty mad at her for running off and not taking me and didn’t think even for a minute about what might have been the reason for her to do a stunt like that. What I was thinking about then, may God forgive me, was how I could turn this event to my profit, and at first I was worried that because Momma was no longer around I would lose my position in the family.

But the next day, Ray Bob took me aside, actually he came into my room and sat on the frilly rocker Momma had bought, and said that God sometimes sends travails into our lives to test us to see if we be worthy for the kingdom, and that he wanted me to know that whatever happened he would be there for me just like I was his own natural child. Then he asked me what I was reading and it was Kidnapped by R. L. Stevenson and he said that had been a favorite of his when he was a boy, and he asked me if I liked people reading to me. The answer to that was no, but I sensed that the answer that he wanted was yes, and he picked up Kidnapped from where it was on my bed and said come sit on my lap and I’ll read to you and that’s how it started.

I never did figure out whether Ray Bob could see and hear the shiny man like I could, or whether he had his own route to the power of Satan. I write shiny man now because that is what he seems to me in retrospect, although I don’t recall calling him that as a child, no more than you would call your conscience or your bodily needs by names. He was just there in my head or sometimes something bright would cross my field of vision, bright as sunlight on dark waters, beautiful as a tiger, and I knew it was him. And he is here too, now, attached to me, by cords of steel, you are supposed to be exorcised when you enter the church but maybe it doesn’t work the way it did once, maybe even the priests don’t believe in him. You saw him I know and then you decided to forget like most people do, he’s learned how to slide off the memory. Can he break me even now, while I am in God’s hands? Only if I let him and God help me God help me I still want to, my intention to resist is rotten it always has been I want to slide down into it again away from the crushing light. He doesn’t want me to

No stick to the story, little Emmylou.

Anyway Ray Bob had the devil in him of some kind. Momma sure knew it, and after she got back from her six weeks in the rest home she never gave him a lick of trouble until the very last. They sent her home with a big white plastic bottle of Librium caps so she would not cause any more problems, and with that one exception, she did not. She seemed pretty happy, all told, not that I cared at the time.

The sounds on the other side of my wall resumed, although not with the frequency of before and also with a few new ones, one a long grunting wail that it was hard to recognize came out of Momma, kind of a surprised sound like she had not expected whatever it was to hurt so much. Ray Bob told me at the time that he couldn’t believe something as sweet as me come out of a wicked woman like Billie Boone, and if he had known about her beforehand he never would’ve given her his sacred word and married her in the Amity Street Assembly of God Church.

How boring now the rape of children is and I’ll try not to take up too much time with it. There was nothing crude about Ray Bob’s seduction of a nine-year-old child. I was entirely in his power, but he moved very slowly and I have to say gently, and at no point did I ever think or say to myself this is bad or wrong. Of course, there is hardly anything I would have called that, except something that frustrated me in any of my many desires. I had not had any moral instruction from my poor parents, and although Gran surely tried to lead me right, I think I did not have enough exposure to her thin liberal teachings or maybe her one clear principle, do what you please as long as you’re not hurting anyone, is not armor strong enough to ward off the Prince of this World, if he takes an interest.

Did I enjoy his tickles? I have to say that I did, although I understand that we are not supposed to acknowledge that debauched children feel anything but horror and fear. I had much to do with raped children later on, and this is the story they tell?they hated it and the men who did it to them, and ran away from home because of it. But I never heard of anyone who was as good at it as Ray Bob. I think it is worse if the child enjoys it, actually, because then it’s a rape of the heart and not just the body. In my case, the shiny man told me it was all right and that I had power over Ray Bob because I let him and wasn’t it pleasant to have and just for letting him touch me there and give me that funny warm shivery feeling. I have heard that men who do this often make dire threats so that the girls (or boys) won’t tell, but Ray Bob never did that, being way too smart, since if you make dire threats and all, the victim will know it’s a bad thing and get all guilty and tell anyhow, or else wait and then call the cops years later. He said he loved me the best of anyone alive, and I pretended to believe him, as I knew that I was beyond the love of anyone, least of all a piece of shit like Ray Bob Dideroff. And anyway, why would I tell? I didn’t think it was anything special.

On my tenth birthday, he bought me Solera, my darling mare, and taught me how to ride and also how to work his penis with my hand and mouth so that it squirted, which I privately thought was pretty amusing but didn’t say. Little Ray was its name, and it made him cry out to the Lord and take his name in vain, also amusing considering he was a deacon and often slapped his sons on the head when they would do likewise. Did I mind? Maybe a little, but for that horse I would have let him fuck me on the steps of the Assembly of God. I was a perfect whore at ten.

Sometimes I would catch Ray Bob looking at me, and there was something in his eyes, not fear exactly, but a kind of worry, like maybe he wasn’t all that much in control as he thought. I believe that was the best part of my ruin, seeing that look.

Meanwhile, Ray Bob’s shaking the bed a couple of times a week finally produced a result. Momma got pregnant and bore a little girl, which Ray Bob named Bobbie Ann. Well, I believe something popped in Momma when that child got born, some dammed-up slough of love from which never a trickle came my way finally broke open, because she truly loved that child. Of course, she only got to love it when she came off the pills, which was rarely. We had a girl from the migrant camp, Esmeralda, to take care of the little thing. I could go on, but this is not a novel, so you don’t need to know anything about what life was like for us. Aside from Momma’s unfortunate breakdown, we must have appeared like a normal family to Wayland society. We went to church and participated in community events. Every summer Ray Bob took us Gulf fishing and every fall we went out and shot doves. He bought me a 16-gauge just like Ray Jr. had and taught me to shoot it.

About two years after Bobbie Ann was born I got my period and Ray Bob made me understand that now that I was a woman I would have to take Little Ray inside me, which I did one April night in my narrow bed, lowering myself down upon it, with not much discomfort I must admit, which owed a lot to Ray Bob’s fingering over the years plus all the horse riding I had been doing. This could have been part of the reason he got me the horse, I don’t know. He was pretty smart that way, although not smart enough, as it turned out. He got me a heart locket with a real diamond in it for my twelfth birthday, with a little picture of him in it in his police chief uniform.

Shortly after I became a real woman, Ray Jr. started to hang around the stable when I was grooming Solera, he must have been fourteen then, a real ox, red-faced and dull. I asked him why, and he said he thought he’d like some of what I was giving his daddy, and he grabbed me and threw me down in the straw, ripping at my clothes and I said for shit’s sake you creep you’ll scare the horse and rip my clothes and then what will Ray Bob say? And he came to his senses when I said I would yank him off if he helped me muck out, and I did. Mucking out was one thing I definitely did not like about having a horse, and I figured better to do one messy thing that lasted eight seconds than another that took an hour.

Do you think this could be the source of my pathology? Sexual abuse in childhood leading to religious fanaticism later in life? It’s a theory. Only it’s hard to explain, but kids accept as normal whatever is going down in their families. Momma burns you with a red-hot poker, you don’t like it much, but that’s life, and you figure every kid gets the poker too, and you never ask or tell because why would you? It’d be like saying Momma pours milk on her cereal or goes to the bathroom. My error was my god, as Augustine says, although I hadn’t read Augustine then. I read nearly everything else in that town though. The library was only open three days a week, and I got through the skimpy shelves pretty quick, except that Mrs. Oster the librarian wouldn’t let me take out any really adult books. There was a place in town though, Jake’s Junk, which bought up dead people’s houses, and he had a whole back room full of books. He’d strip out the good stuff and sell the rest for small change. There I bought Nabokov’s Lolita because of the girl on the paperback cover sucking a lollipop with those heart sunglasses on. A key book that told me finally what I was and then I fell in love with his language. I read the rest of Nabokov, nearly, Pnin and Pale Fire and the stories and essays, although there was a lot I couldn’t understand, and from there I did all the big Russians, or all that ended up in paperbacks in Caluga County. War and Peace, Brothers K., Crime and P., Dead Souls, and strangely enough Babel’s Red Cavalry in a ratty hardbound edition from what seemed like a lefty book club. Strong stuff for a twelve-year-old you will say, but the chewiness of those fat books and their exotic people

(I am avoiding again. I mention my literary intoxications to avoid writing about the denouement of our family drama. Although the word denouement doesn’t go very well with this cracker voice I am using, and how about a long digression on voice in fiction, in memoir, which voice is the real Emmylou. How the voices in fiction inhabit us, those of us who read and for those of us who don’t there are the movies and TV. That’s who we are. Yes, our parents form us, we who are so fortunate, or unfortunate as the case may be, to have any, but they were formed mainly by what they read or saw all the way back to stained glass windows and Bible stories and tales of saints and heroes and monsters. Stories teach us how to live, says Anatole France. And he also says, The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. Never read the man, have no idea who he was, that and much more is from the Collier’s Book of Quotations, Jake’s Junk, seventy-five cents.)

Now I was in middle school, in the gifted and talented, since I was now rich. God in His great mercy gave us middle school so that we could see what hell would be like and learn to avoid it in later life, although like so many of His good ideas it has not worked out all that well. I of course was one of the demons of that hell. Having money and looks and things and not giving a shit what anyone thought of me and being smart enough so that I could both ditch school whenever I wanted and keep my grades up enough not to disgrace Ray Bob, all that put me in the fastest clique. I was a cheerleader too, naturally, and naturally was able to make life hell for those girls who desperately wanted to be and never would, and I had a mouth on me too, what with all the reading I was doing, so my cruelty was more refined than the usual your-momma’s-so-fat-she-got-her-own-zip-code middle-

school insults.

And there I met Randolf Hunter Foy. Hunter was in Ray Jr.’s class, and my, he was all totally gorgeous in that Elvis-Jimmy Dean-Brad Pitt way and the biggest dope dealer in the school and I decided I would have him. He was trash like me, there was always a Foy or two in county jail, and Raiford was full of them by report.

In seventh grade I produced a burst of smarts so that I would qualify for advanced placement, and as a result I got to Wayland High a year early, a fourteen-year-old freshman just a year behind Hunter, who I guess was seventeen at the time. In any case he was old enough to drive and he had a vehicle, a late-model Ford-250 pickup with a camper back, and funny enough nobody wondered how a kid with a mother on welfare and a father in state prison could afford a rig like that. I lost no time in seducing Hunter. Jake’s Junk had a substantial number of cheap porn books, the kind where they use lots of capitalization to indicate the money shot (I’m cooooooommmmming!), and these were my instructors along with Ray Bob, who truth be told was a meat-and-potatoes kind of pedophile, nothing exotic. I was sort of scared of being in the bed-pounding position, having heard all that stuff through my wall, but it turned out the pounding aspects were only for Momma. With me he was really almost delicate and concerned about what I was feeling. (Answer: not much. I always sort of drifted away while he was doing his thing, although not so far away that I couldn’t answer his questions or fake the required responses. Do you love it, baby? Ooh, yes, daddy, jam your big love pole in my cunt! For Ray Bob had read his share of the same books, life following art down into the dank cellar.) I really think he wanted to turn me into the love slave of his toxic fantasy world, but I was never that. Now that I think on it, he was more like mine, although we did not actually discuss the subject.

Truth to tell, Hunter Foy didn’t take much seducing. One day he pulled up in his truck and said hey and I said hey and got in and we went to Sand Creek County Park close by the sluggish flow of the tea-colored water and we smoked a couple of numbers in the camper back. After the second joint we started in chewing face and I tore my T-shirt and bra and panties off like they was on fire and then I leaped upon him and like they say in the bodice-ripper paperbacks I slaked my lust, although it wasn’t until the second time we did it that afternoon that I felt more or less what you’re supposed to feel on such occasions, and it surprised me so much that I yelped like a puppy.

I walked into the house knock-kneed on account of my soggy underwear, but with my head in a spin, thinking oh this is love all right like in the songs and movies and I am the star. It was just like me then to go from a pedophile abuser who at least liked me to a boyfriend who put me a little lower than his dog. The devil likes to break his tools, it’s the most fun thing for him, but did I know that? It all made such sense to me, the shiny man whispering in my ear every time I thought Whoa, girl, whatare you doing? By that time he wasn’t a shiny man anymore like when I was small, but more like my own self talking to me with my own voice.

This has happened to you too, hasn’t it?

Well, we carried on like that for a couple of months, every afternoon practically, but sadly our idyll could not last, like they say in the romance books, or used to back when I read them, and one Saturday night when I walked in around ten or so, Ray Bob was waiting there with a look on his face that I hadn’t ever seen directed at me, and he asked me where I had been, and when I repeated the lie I had told about being out with a couple of my friends studying, he whapped me across the face so hard I flew halfway across the room. Then he told me all what I’d been doing with that Hunter Foy, in some detail. I don’t know, maybe Ray Jr. tipped him off and he had been spying on us with his police night-vision scope, and then he dragged me into my room, knocked me facedown on my bed, yanked my shorts and panties off, put his knee on my back, and beat me to ribbons with my own riding crop. I made a lot of noise.

When he got tired of whipping me he started in cursing me for a slut and how could I go with that trash after all he did for me, bringing me up like I was his own flesh-and-blood daughter and buying me anything I wanted, and things were going to change around here he’d been Mr. Softy but no longer, missy. And he said how he was going to arrest Hunter and send him to state prison. I said if he did that I would tell about what he’d been doing to me all these years from the time I was nine and it would be him who went to state prison and he said no one would believe a little white trash slut like me and if I said anything at all he would say I had lost my marbles and get Doc Herb Dideroff to lock me up in his rest home forever and give me the electric shock treatment. And I said we’ll see about that, and I pulled on my pants again.

He tried to grab me then, but despite all my pain and suffering I dodged past him and ran out in the living room, and there was the whole family, because of all the noise, Momma holding Bobbie Ann, and Ray Jr. looking so pale his zits stood out like stars, and Jon, who was always half a step slow, but looking real interested. And I screamed out he’s whipping me because I wouldn’t fuck him anymore, he’s been fucking me for years. And he tried to grab me but I ran around and hid behind my momma and Bobbie Ann, me now yelling out all the intimate details of our sex life together so she would know it was true. But he said, she’s lying, Billie, you know that. She’s lying, she always was no good just like you said. I saw him give her that look and while I couldn’t see her face I could feel the spine shrivel right out of her. Bobbie Ann just got the side blast of it, but still it was bad enough to make her start in wailing. Momma said I got to go lie down now, and she took the girl up in her arms and walked away from me, and Ray Bob yelled at his boys to go to their room and snatched me by my hair and dragged me out to the yard, and locked me in the big red toolshed from Sears. That was Saturday night. He kept me in there two whole days with no food or water but plenty of palmetto bugs and spiders. No one came out to comfort me or bring me anything to drink, not one human creature, and it was like an oven in there stinking of chemicals and manure, and it was like an oven in my soul too, cooking away with thoughts of revenge and violence and how I could get back at them all and get away with Hunter Foy.

On the third evening I was in there, and starting in to wonder if he was going to keep me there until I died, I heard Ray Bob’s voice say, you gonna be good now, Emmylou, and I said, I will if you promise not to arrest Hunter, and he waited a long time, I thought he’d gone away and then he said well I do believe in giving people another chance, but you better keep your dirty lies to yourself from now on and I said fine, okay. He let me out then, blinking into the end of the day. I thought to myself that it was a good deal if that was going to be all my punishment, plus I wouldn’t have to fuck Ray Bob anymore, but it wasn’t. While I was in the shed, Ray Bob had gone and sold my horse and he wouldn’t tell me where. Ray Jr. said he sold it to the dog food place up by Preston. I cried for a week on and off far longer than I had when my real daddy died partly from the loss and partly because I couldn’t get them all and grind them under my foot like cockroaches. But then I found that he’d moved the rocking chair out of my room and into Bobbie Ann’s, and I started my plan.