A person can see a lot of a town from between those slats on all four sides of a church bell tower, without being seen from below. Oh, by that I do not mean to imply that I shot at people with my BB gun. I’m not vindictive, after all. No, I just used it to target practice. It was fun to play army sniper. I couldn’t do it with my .22, of course, but the BB gun was safe. So when reading got boring I would perch at the open slats of one of those windows, find a piece of fruit on a tree below and across the street, or some kid’s ball left in a yard, or a tin can laying at the side of the street, and plink away. If I heard cars coming or people walking below I would wait until the sound retreated and go back to plinking.
Well, I got off track again. The fact was, in Quincy I had my little hiding place in the church bell tower, but I certainly didn’t have to retreat to it for solitude. Quincy is a beautiful little town nestled in the mountains of Northern California up the Feather River Highway from Oroville.
If Trinidad had some sweet places along the Tuolumne River for me to explore, this was Heaven by comparison. I could walk out my back door and up the side street by the parsonage, and within five minutes be out of town and into the trees and on a trail going on some new adventure. In this sense it was coincidentally much like the location in Trinidad, except here the mountains were higher, the trees thicker and the air cooler. I loved this place more than anywhere we had ever lived.
That was a good thing, since by that time I really needed to entertain myself. My parents, Don and Darlene Everman, were more wrapped up in themselves than I had ever known them to be. And in saying that I do not mean that they were wrapped up in one another. Ever since the incident back in Trinidad, where my dad had been accused of sexually assaulting a woman in the church, and our family subsequently being sent to a new place to live, life around the Everman house was quiet. They spoke to one another in quiet, polite tones, they tip-toed around the house as though they were afraid to create normal footfall noises, and for the most part they seemed to stay pretty involved in their personal pursuits. Dad had the church, of course, which meant visitation, deacons meetings and planning for the next Sunday.
Mom got active in the women’s group. I never really knew what all they were up to, unless they were borrowing an empty building on Main Street to set up the annual church bazaar, or having a bake sale at the church on Saturday or some visible public function like that. Other times they were just doing lady’s Bible studies and the like and I wasn’t interested enough to ask for details.
There was one major change I took notice of, even though the arrangement was never talked about in my presence. I observed that mom occasionally accompanied my father on his visitations which was something she had not done previously. Over a period of time I picked up on the pattern. It was always when he was going to be visiting a woman who might be alone at home.
Otherwise, Darlene Everman stayed at home and canned fruit or read her Bible or piddled with flowers in the rear yard. That is, during the appropriate months of the year. When winter came to Quincy it really came. Winter snows were deep and the days were cold. I loved that part also, even though the winter weather severely cut down on my time in the woods. But there was my room, and if the house got too active there was the bell tower. It wasn’t exactly warm up there, but it was enclosed and if I wore my winter jacket while sitting up there reading, it was tolerable.
As far as school went – well, it was school. I’ve already told you how I felt about school. But I was going into my last three years so I could see light at the end of the tunnel. Fact was, as much as I’ve always liked keeping to myself, most of the people I went to High School with there in Quincy were friendly and pleasant to be around. Everyplace has its jerks. Everyone knows that. In retrospect, looking back so many years and having had some limited contact with some of them, I’ve discovered that some of those jerks stayed jerks. So I guess not investing my time or energy in pursuing friendships with them was good judgment after all.
Anyway, as I said the first twelve or eighteen months there were relatively uneventful with nothing to report as pertains to the purpose of this record.
Ok, time to get to the point. It was in my Senior year of High School that I was awakened to the hard truth that even in nice, quiet little mountain towns where everyone supposedly minds their own business and lets other folks be, there can still be soil to nourish and bear the dark fruit of evil hearts. Here is story as it played out.
There were two brothers there, neither of whom was ever going to win any prizes for deep thinking. They were Ricky and Frank Dornan. Ricky was just a little younger than I was and a year behind in school, so when I was a junior, he was going into the tenth grade in September, and his brother, Frank was going into the ninth.
Now Frank had a twin sister. It is very much to God’s credit and by His mercy that she did not look like Frank. That is not to say she was super model material; the point is that Frank was breathtakingly homely. Eileen was cute. The striking thing about her though was that her natural demeanor came across as rather sultry. For a very young girl in a small town in the late 1960s, she had a little too much sex appeal, and although I never saw anything to make me think she earned a bad reputation, she had one nonetheless. It was a kind of unspoken bad reputation. By that, I mean it just seemed like people shied away from her and didn’t include her in much because they had made up their minds about her just based on that aura she carried around.
It was mostly her eyes. This was something I didn’t realize about her until I got to know her personally, that the mind behind the eyes was not calculating. She was just a quiet, straightforward girl raised by her father, between two gregarious boys who overshadowed her with their presence. Their mother had died shortly after giving birth to the twins, so she had no memory of her and never knew what it was like to live with another woman in the home. The only time Eileen got to be herself was when she could find a social situation in which they were not involved. But the combination of a perky, straight-backed figure, shyness, and Elizabeth Taylor eyes caused those who did not know her to tag her as a flirt and a tease. She was neither. The fact was, Eileen had a bit of an inferiority complex. She did not see her physical self as others did, and she had discovered no inner talent of which she would be especially proud. So Eileen was an observer. I guess I was also. That’s how we inadvertently found one another in the fall of 1967.
I was by myself one day soon after the start of my junior year, eating my sack lunch in the shade of a tree on the school ground and Eileen walked by. I happened to look up as she was looking down, I smiled and she smiled back. That was our first meeting.
The next day I again carried my lunch to that spot along with a novel I was reading by author Edward S. Aarons, about a Louisiana Cajun who was a CIA Agent. The title was “Assignment: Moon Girl”; his newest book in a series I was following.
Feet stopped in my peripheral vision so I paused my reading to find out who owned them. It was Eileen. She just said “Hi” and sat down. I put the book away, and we chatted, and I discovered my first love.
Over the next few months and through the holidays and into the early spring, Eileen and I got together often. We were never together much at school and I don’t think anyone considered us an ‘item’. She was, after all, a Freshman and I was a Junior, so we had no classes together and our schedules didn’t allow for much interaction. But we enjoyed the company of one another and found ways to be together on many weekend days, either in the park or on the back porch swing at her house.
One day I showed her my bell tower hideout and we sat up there for quite a while until my dad came into the church and heard voices.
We heard the ladder creaking and he stuck his head up into the attic. I said “Hi, Dad, this is Eileen” and she said “Hello Mr. Everman” and he looked back in silence just long enough for it to get awkward. Then he said, “Hello, Eileen. You kids be careful up there.” I said we would and she nodded her agreement and he left. Later that evenin
g, my dad gave me a quiet talk about how I had to be careful about appearances and being alone with a young girl in the church belfry. That was all that was said, but it was our only visit together in the church attic.
We understood each other. I got to the point where I couldn’t stop thinking of her – but Eileen was a complicated person. There was something mysterious about her. There was sadness in her. With all the time we spent together, walking, talking, holding hands, kissing on a few occasions, I never shook the feeling that there was a part of her she wasn’t going to open up about with me or anyone.
I think the day I ruined things was when I told her my plan to go in the military after High School. I hadn’t decided on the Army, Marines or Air Force – never wanted to be in the Navy – but I knew I wasn’t headed for college and since I knew I was likely to be drafted I made up my mind to join before that could happen. As I’ve said before, I don’t like plans being made for me. I don’t like not being in control of my situation.
Well, one evening in the park, sitting on the swing set and watching the stars begin to come out, Eileen announced her decision to stop spending as much time with me. In shock, I asked why and she said it was because she was afraid of falling in love with a guy who was probably going to end up in Viet Nam. She didn’t want to go through that. I tried to convince her that I would not go to Nam, but we both knew I might not have a choice. I tried to convince her that even if I went I would come back just fine, but she had thought it through and I finally had to come to the realization that the topic was never open for debate.
So we saw each other once or twice after that night but it was always strained; always brief; then I was alone.
The school year came to an end in June and my summer was spent either alone, or with a couple of friends. When we weren’t camping we were swimming in the Feather River.
There was, and probably still is, a spot just about 11 miles outside of Quincy. If you leave town on Highway 70 toward Oroville, you come to a ‘Y’ where Highway 89 branches off to the right going to Greenville. But if you stay left on 70, about one more mile down the canyon you’ll see a place on the left hand side of the road wide enough to park your car. If you get out there and walk up and down the embankment a little bit you will find a narrow, steep trail that winds down toward the river. Take that down to the river’s edge and you’ll find the sweetest little swimming hole ever. There is a wide area of the river that is shallow and nice for wading. If you cross through that and ascend the rocks on the other side, you will come up over a pool that is very deep. It is at the bottom of a short waterfall. We used to jump into it from outcroppings fifteen to twenty feet off the water. Some guys actually dove and there was never a danger of hitting bottom. I decided to see how far down I could swim one day and it got darker and darker, and I still wasn’t finding bottom, so I became frightened and went back to the surface. It was a great spot for sunning and picnicking and swimming. So we went there about once per week.
Other than the swimming, and as I said, camping, and a few days plinking around in the woods with our .22s, I continued to find my quiet place and spend much time alone, reading or just watching the town go by out the slats of the belfry of the United Methodist Church.
My senior year was exciting from the first day of classes. There was something magical about being an upper classman. Teachers were suddenly treating us more as equals, speaking to us as adults, and there was less pressure than had gone with being in the lower grades. The senior class had their own section of lawn upon which to sit. It was rimmed by low concrete curbing and chain rails and had a sign. “Senior Lawn”. It was located at the side of the big building on the hill by China Rock. I recently Googled Quincy and as far as I was able to determine that building is no longer there. That saddened me. It was a great old structure.
After the first day or two of classes I began to keep an eye out for Eileen. I wasn’t seeing her at all, even when everyone was passing on the campus between classes. My first thought was that our schedules were keeping our paths from crossing. Then I began to wonder if her family had moved. But I saw Ricky, then I saw Frank. I didn’t know them well. Actually, I didn’t like them. But they knew who I was because of the time I had spent with Eileen so I didn’t feel out of place asking about her.
It was a strange moment. Ricky was with a couple of other guys in the junior class during lunchtime. I approached him in the hallway as he was shutting his locker and said, “Hey, Rick, how’s it going?”
Now, Ricky had just been laughing with his friends, but when he heard my voice and turned toward me the smile disappeared and his eyes went kind of dark. He grunted his own greeting back, so I got to the point. “I haven’t seen Eileen since school started. Is she around?”
Ricky’s eyes darted to his left as though he was checking to see if anyone was standing behind him, then in a lowered voice he said, “Eileen isn’t in school anymore.”
In the moment it took my mind to register what he had said and begin to form a follow up question, he just turned with his books and headed for the stairs. I got the hint. I wasn’t going to get more answers. But neither he nor Frank had any cause to be upset with me, so I figured his aloofness had to be attributable to whatever the reason was that Eileen was no longer in school.
That Saturday I got up early and left a note on the kitchen table saying I was going to hike around for a while. Then I made my way out to East Quincy and found a spot to watch the Dornan residence without being spotted. It was getting close to noon and I was getting hungry and tired of sitting still, when finally I saw some activity around the house. It was Eileen. She had been in the rear yard out of my view probably on the porch swing where she often liked to sit. She came around the corner into the side yard calling their dog, Buford, and my chin almost hit the tree stump I was perched behind. Eileen was very pregnant.
I made my way home in a daze. I was hurt, I was confused, and I was very suspicious. Eileen and I had spent a lot of time together and we had talked openly. I was very sure she did not have another boyfriend, and her reticent personality made it unlikely she had met someone; especially since she really didn’t have a social life and was rarely seen anywhere without her brothers or her fath…
It suddenly hit me like one of Ronny Clay’s punches in the gut. I didn’t want to believe it, but the more I thought about it the more disgustingly likely it seemed.
By the time I got home I was no longer feeling hunger. I was only feeling rage – rage against Eileen’s stolen innocence – and hurt for my own loss. It was as I sat in the belfry and went around and around the subject in my mind that I finally realized I had not let Eileen go. Subconsciously, I had clung to the possibility that before I graduated and went in the military, Eileen would change her mind and declare her love for me and promise to wait.
Now, that was never going to happen. And it was never going to happen, because of what her father or her brothers had done to her. I was certain of it. The way they shielded her, the way they avoided talking to me when I was at their house, the way Ricky slunk away from me at the school as though he was afraid I would ask too many questions; there could be no other explanation. To this very day, as I write this all down, I cannot know if only one of them was guilty, or all three. I only know that their mistreatment of her had to be the cause of her introversion, and now it was the cause of her ruined life.
I had a few rough days as I dealt with the shocking truth I had discovered. Mom asked me on Sunday afternoon if I was sick so I said I had a stomach ache, took some Alka Seltzer and stayed in my room. Over the course of the coming weeks I slowly came out of my fugue, and then it was time to do some clear-headed thinking. I had to be patient. Careful.
One day late in January of 1969 I saw Eileen on Main Street. By then I was driving my parents’ 1961 Plymouth Fury and had just parked it when I looked up and saw her going into the Post Office. She was walking away from me but when she turned to the doorway and I saw her from the side I could see t
hat she was cradling a very small bundle in her arm.
“Well. I guess they had to let her out in public eventually.” I thought as I seethed in the driver’s seat of that car. I wondered what the family’s cover story was. That moment is one of those snapshots that stay in the mind because for me that was the moment I was over Eileen. But she deserved justice.
I wasn’t in a hurry. I could not be. I have never been an impatient person by nature but even so, for the sake of the success of my mission and surviving to do future good elsewhere, I determined to take very slow and deliberate steps.
First I planned in my mind. I never wrote anything down on paper. That was a lesson I learned early in life. When I was in elementary school, which we used to call ‘grammar school’, I was passing notes one day in class and was caught by the teacher. I had been trading off-color jokes with a kid across the aisle. Nothing shocking of course, we were nine years old. But I was embarrassed to have my female teacher read the note and I was doubly chagrined to hear her say she was going to pass the note on to my father the Pastor. Yes, she said the word in italics. Well, the chewing out I got at home was not as life-threatening as I had expected it to be. I figure my dad probably saw the mortification in my eyes as I came through the door and he took pity on me. But although I no longer can remember the teacher’s name, or the name of my friend across the aisle, or the content of the joke in the note, the one thing that has stuck with me is the mental picture of my dad standing next to me as I sat at the dining room table, hands clasped in front of me, staring at the wood grain between my forearms, and hearing him say, “Cole, this is something you need to remember for the rest of your life. Never write anything on paper that you don’t want people to see. Because once it is written down it could wind up anywhere, being seen by anyone. So never commit anything to writing until you are very certain that it is something that you want someone to read, and it will not incriminate nor embarrass you”.
The Everman Journal Page 11