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
