Valley of Bones (5 page)

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, what
are
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.

Lorna Wise: Now about this voice you mentioned to the police officers. Are you still hearing it?

Emmylou Dideroff: No.

W: Did you at one time?

D: Yes.

W: And this voice identified itself as a saint?

D: Yes. St. Catherine of Siena.

W: I see. Any besides that?

D: No.

W: No other hallucinations at all?

D: They’re not hallucinations.

W: Yes, well, do you still hear voices or sounds that no one else can hear? See people or things that no one else can see?

D: Not since the day of the murder. But sometimes before I drop off to
sleep I hear the sound of my gun. And sometimes during the day too. Is that what you mean, stuff like that?

W: Tell me more about it, please.

D: Well, it’s not exactly hearing it, like I can hear you, like I hear the noises in the jail, or people talking and like that, but like an extra-sharp memory. Like I
just
heard it, so I get startled out of whatever I’m doing.

W: What kind of gun? Like a pistol?

D: A pistol is a pistol. A gun is an artillery piece.

W: You thought you had an artillery piece? You mean like a cannon?

D: Yes. It was a L-70 Bofors gun. A forty-mm automatic cannon.

W: Mm-hm. Can you describe this sound?

D: It was very, very loud. [laughs]

W: Well…yes, cannons are very loud.

D: Uh-huh. And it’s hard to describe, if you’ve never been near gunfire, um, how loud it is. It’s louder than thunder, louder than a jetliner flying low. It’s louder than one of those pneumatic drills. The only thing louder is bombs. A lot of noise. Of course, we all stuffed rags in our ears, but you can hear a sound like that through your nose. Through your elbows and feet. [laughs] After you’ve been firing on auto for a while, the sound takes you over, like God, in a way. I mean you’re completely deaf, but it seems you can still hear things
inside
the noise, like the clang of the breech closing, a kind of hammer-on-anvil sound, and the rattle of the pawls and rammer in the autoloader, like a train on railroad tracks? And the brass falling, tinkle tankle, like bells. You shouldn’t be able to hear any of that, but you do. Or seem to. And then there’s the sound of the shells, the roar in the air and the bang of the explosion, but you’re not so aware of that so much, except when you’re firing single rounds. Are you bored yet? [laughs]

W: Not at all. You make it sound very interesting. Where did you learn all this about…what did you say it was? An automatic cannon?

D: Yes, a Bofors gun. From the manual. Foy always said read the f…read
the dah-dah, manual, RTFM. And I did. Plus I had some help from a friend.

W: Who is Foy?

D: Percival Orne Foy. The late. A teacher I had.

W: In school.

D: This was more extracurricular. He taught me a lot of stuff, and I just sucked it in, never mind if I thought it was worth anything. I just gave myself over, I was so tired of thinking for myself. That was before I joined the Bloods and God found me. I was real surprised when so much of it came in useful. His providence is sometimes extremely strange in its working out.

W: By Bloods—do you mean the street gang?

D: [laughs] No, I meant the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ. The Bloods. Which we’re not supposed to call ourselves, but we all do. Did. I did.

W: Excuse me, are you saying that you’re a nun?

D: Oh, no. I was only a postulant. I never took vows. And they threw me out, needless to say.

W: Why was that?

D: Because we’re a medical order. We…I mean they take the Hippocratic Oath on top of their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. To do no harm. And I did a lot of harm, may God forgive me.

W: What sort of harm did you do?

D: It’s in my confession.

W: Yes, but Emmylou, this, what we’re doing here, is not part of the criminal case. We’re dealing here on a basis of confidentiality. What you tell me won’t be part of the court record and can’t be used against you.

D: You’re supposed to find out if I’m crazy or not.

W: Well, really, if you’re fit to stand trial, to aid in your own defense.

D: You wouldn’t understand.

W: Try me.

D: Do you believe in the devil?

W: The important thing here is do you believe in him?

D: Oh, I’m so tired! I am so tired of this. I thought it was over, that he didn’t have a use for me anymore, that I’d be let alone to live in peace, and now it’s all starting again, and people are going to get hurt.

W: Who’s using you?
[Silence, thirty-two seconds]

W: Who’s going to be hurt?

D: Anyone. Anyone around me. Maybe you.

W: And…the devil is going to make this happen, to hurt people?

D: Or God. It’s a crossfire. You can’t understand this. It won’t fit in your kind of head.

W: Then help me to understand.

D: It’s right in front of your eyes, but you can’t see it. I’m sorry. That detective did, though…Oh, Christ, oh Christ have mercy!

W: Emmylou? It’s very important that you talk to me. I just want to help you.
[Silence, one minute, twenty-two seconds]

W: Emmylou, what is it? Did you see something?

D: Could I go back to the jail now? I don’t feel like talking anymore.