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
