Valley of Bones

by Michael Gruber

  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’s dyslexic, 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 I can 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 midd
le 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.