#IF NOBODY PLAYS THE BULLMAN I WILL

[chthonickeys]

[ there we go hephaestus and asterius are here now ill add the about later ]

[kyleelisetht]

The Necessary Offense of Writing About Rape, Even in Fiction~KyleeliseTHT

The scenes about Ebonia’s rape in my book, SGG, and the “Goosefarm” chapter, the community’s response, and the character’s own words about the violation of young women and the way in which the offenses are handled is disturbingly forthright.

From “Easter Morning” Goosefarm by KyleeliseTHT

“Holland awoke at four Easter morning. Aunt Annie Mae had prepared sausage and eggs, with a dollop of molasses for the biscuits on the side. Holland wanted to talk about the dream she’d had during the night, but Uncle Bill was already in the kitchen, complaining that the girl might try to eat all his food if somebody didn’t watch her. She’d wait until after sunrise service, Holland decided. But the dream lingered, and she had trouble keeping her thoughts on the necessities of the moment, like flattening the ruffles on her underwear so they wouldn’t scratch, and heel-walking to keep her feet from hurting.

They drove slowly to Church on the Mount. The snow had started, and the road was iced over in spots. Uncle Bill turned the heat up high and the radio low so he could hear what he could barely see between the dark and the glistening. Holland saw the hints of spiraling red and yellow ahead that Uncle Bill had mistaken for a snowplow. But when they passed, they could see two people on stretchers, though neither received the attention of the men in white uniforms.

Uncle Bill said the people were fine and were just taking a rest while the police figured out what had caused their car to run off the road.

Holland closed her eyes to Uncle Bill’s dismissal of the scene and tried to sort things out for herself. She knew the colors from her dream.

When she’d slept the night before, she’d heard a push at the closet door, again. Then it flung open wild enough to shatter the silence of peaceful sleep. But no one else could’ve heard it because nobody rushed in to see the snow drifting from the closet, ablaze but not melting. Those same reds and yellows as the lights on the roadside blared, as if trying to confuse her mind out of hearing Ebonia screaming, clasped within a tangle of muscled arms molesting her little body. A man wearing denim overalls and a wool cap pulled over his eyes squeezed himself through the mayhem and taunted Holland, promising he’d have her to himself, too, one night soon.

Ebonia’s hands clawed through her caging and wrapped themselves about the man’s overstretched neck, as she mouthed in a whisper, “Go, Holland, don’t be still. Go!” But Holland couldn't move. She hadn't learned where to run from danger. There’d never been anyplace safe for her to go since her parents divorced.

At the church, there were no big hats or girls skating on the heels of their patent-leather shoes outside like Holland had seen in Monmouth Bend the Easter before. Just the men, huddled, and fingers pointing back toward the accident they’d all passed. Holland’s dream consumed her: “Go, Holland, don’t be still. Go!”

Aunt Annie Mae took the girl by the hand as they left the car and told her, “Something might not be so good, this morning. Stay close and be quiet.” MomMary was sitting in the back pew. She was crying, and the others could say nothing but how sorry they were. A policeman was talking to Sadie Roberts near the pulpit. Then an argument broke out between two of the men outside on the church steps.

Holland stood in the aisle, catching glimpses of the scenes, while the voices from her dream carried on in her head. Another policeman came in from outside. The fight quieted and the men gathered behind him. MomMary and Sadie glanced at one another, then at the policeman.

Sunrise and sorrow, that was all to be had that Easter morning.

Sadie’s oldest grandsons, Mark and Fatboy, had been the two “resting” on the side of the road. Ebonia was missing. There was no one left to tell where to find her or whether she’d be alive if they did.

It had started the night before. Holland and Ebonia had played the Supremes until their throats had gone dry. MomMary had invited Holland to spend the night, even though she knew that Aunt Annie Mae would never allow it. So, when it was time for Holland leave, Ebonia walked with her along a cloistered path, thick with maple and pine.

The girls skipped and laughed and dreamed about meeting princes and becoming princesses. Holland decided that hers would have red hair and blonde streaks, just like she had. That way, everyone would know they belonged together. Ebonia’s prince, she decided, would be tall and dark and educated. He’d have a nameplate on his work desk and get paid by check every two weeks—and he’d be allergic to white liquor.

Holland and Ebonia hadn’t noticed Mark and Fatboy out on their stoop, sitting back from a low-burning fire in a split tin barrel. The brothers were propped up by their ability to be unseen right out in the open and figured they could get away with almost anything that night.

“I’ll see you before the rooster crows,” Ebonia told Holland when they reached the Barlong house. “‘Up the Ladder to the Roof on your way back,” Holland told Ebonia. “As loud as I can,” Ebonia promised. Then they parted.

Ebonia didn’t hear Mark sneak up behind her, but she tasted the white liquor on his hand when he pressed it against her mouth. And she felt the sweat on the rag Fatboy wrapped around her eyes. Each brother whispering/make her shush/tie her hands tight. Ebonia heard both car doors slam and a thump above her head. She’d guessed she’d been locked in the trunk. And she knew when her wrists were tied to an old tree because its bark crumbled against her skin. She remembered that the weatherman had predicted snow when the cold flakes chilled her bare thighs and nearly froze her feet.

Ebonia hurt each time the men used themselves then bottles to grow her up. The car doors slammed again, and she detected their speeding away. She wasn’t in the trunk this time.

Within a glint of a flame’s flicker, horror echoed in the distance—hood crashed into trunks of trees, distraught voices screaming, pleading, then surrendering to quiet, just as Ebonia’s had done moments before. Hours after the brothers’ bodies were cleared from the crime scene, Ebonia was rescued and taken to the hospital, then secreted forty miles away at another relative’s home.

Come Easter afternoon, Ebonia’s defenders—Walter Dixon, Moses, Uncle Bill, and a broken Daddy-George, who’d been summoned to her roadside Hell to claim her—lined themselves on both sides of the border between Goosefarm and “out there.” Bullman Roberts, eighty-five then, and eighty-three-year-old Sadie, their middle-aged daughters, and the two surviving grown grandsons crossed over without protest, carrying everything they owned.

“Make sure these here two boys know that it ain’t safe for them here no more,” Moses warned the family, nodding at the two grandsons. He scraped a line of dirt from his fingernail with his blade and the others flashed their own special “tools.”

Holland sat alone in the fourth car on the train ride back to Penn Station. Her dream was the closest thing to knowing what had happened to her best friend.

Ebonia Explains: Some Surprises Don’t Shake

Don’t feel bad for me. Every girl gets raped. You know that. If it hadn’t been that night and in the snow, it would have been some other day. Maybe on a spring morning while I was distracted by the beautiful changing leaves overhead. Some man, one I’d known a lifetime, might have called me to his porch, offered me a soda and run his hand across my breast before trying to pull me in. Or, maybe it would’ve happened on a first date gone wrong. It could have been an uncle, or the worst of possibilities, a brother—or a father. It could have been the preacher who’d been told to give me a job in his office so I’d be safe from the world the time between school and MomMary’s coming home from work.

Summer camp would have been a perfect place. I know, because Sally McNeil told me that our counselor, John, had a habit of rubbing her thighs whenever he found her alone by the lake, writing one of her silly poems. When Sally wasn’t at the lake, he looked for her. I remember that because he asked me once where she was hiding.

When they found Sally, stretched out on logs and leaves in the woods, and her mind gone, I wanted to tell them. Counselor John had a sweet wife named Nancy. I was a child with nothing but a story. And children don’t go around defaming happily married men with pretty wives. I wasn’t allowed to return to camp the next summer.

My friend Janice Pullton told me she couldn’t sleep at night because her stepfather night walked and always to her room. She tried to tell her mother, but the woman just turned around and accused Janice of trying to break up her marriage. Her stepfather laughed. Janice got pregnant. Her mother put her out.

I could tell you more, but I promised them I wouldn’t.

About what happened to me that Easter Sunday—I don’t need your pity. And I don’t appreciate your being embarrassed for me. Every girl has had to fight off a hand unwanted. You know that.”

Readers have remarked that they are so uncomfortable reading this section of Saint Gabriel’s Girls (2013) that it’s difficult to move forward. Most surprisingly, those same readers might suspect that the fictionalized account is my own, which makes them more uncomfortable. It is not. I made the whole thing up-FICTION. But, it is intentionally uncomfortable.

Rough as it is, one might share this excerpt from “Goosefarm” in SGG with young people they know and have a real discussion about molestation and rape and the frequency with which young women and young men are subjected.

Maybe you’ll decide that my depiction is too graphic. Nevertheless, I do hope you’ll be open to having the talk.

This tragedy is commonplace. And, as Ebonia might have exaggerated the occurance, there’s something woefully haunting about the truth in her words, “Don’t feel bad for me. Every girl gets raped. You know that. If it hadn’t been that night and in the snow, it would have been some other day.” ~KyleeliseTHT