Sound Of Gravel, The (24 page)

Like Maria’s, my breasts were growing and my body was changing. Over the past several months—ever since Elena had been born—it seemed as if Lane had been seeking me out more and more. I tried to avoid all contact with him, but he was always asking me to accompany him on errands or to help him with tasks around town. Then he’d take me for a ride to a place where no one could find us: a barren parking lot, under a bridge, or into a dark alley that reeked of garbage.

“What are you doing all the way over there?” he’d ask in his high-pitched, nice-man voice, a voice I never heard him use with anyone else or in any other situation. “Come sit closer to me. I’m not gonna hurt ya.” He’d pull me onto his lap, his grimy hands reaching under my blouse for my developing breasts, which felt so tender and painful in his hands that I wanted to scream. I’d feel his penis stiffen beneath me, and then he’d grind his lap violently against the seat of my jeans. I felt so humiliated and powerless that I couldn’t even recognize how much worse it would have been if Lane had unzipped his pants.

Hearing that Maria wanted to run away, and thinking it was because of Lane, I began to feel disgusted. I started thinking about what he might be doing to my beautiful stepsister. What awful experiences would lead a thirteen-year-old girl to stuff dollar bills behind family photos and run away into a world of strangers?

“Why … do you want to run away?” I asked Maria reluctantly.

Maria noticed my serious tone, looked at me with concern, then smiled.

“If I stay here or in LeBaron, I’ll never get to do what I want to do.” She sighed. “I’ll just do what every other girl does: get married at fifteen. I don’t want to do that, and I don’t want to be somebody’s third wife. I’d be too jealous to share like that. You know?”

I nodded silently.

“I don’t want to suffer the way my mom did when my dad took his other wives. Does your mom like it?”

“No,” I said quietly. “She cries all the time.”

“Mine does too. I don’t want that!”

I watched her stuff the last of the dollar bills in her jeans and worked up the courage to ask her the question that had been plaguing me. “Maria, does your dad ever kiss you on the mouth when you’re alone with him?”

She looked up at me alarmed, as if she thought I was crazy. “He’s my dad! Why would he ever do something like that?”

“I dunno,” I replied as quickly as possible.

“Well, does he ever kiss
you
?”

“No,” I replied without a moment’s hesitation. “Of course not.”

“Then why’d you ask me?”

“I dunno.”

As much as it would have hurt to hear that Lane had been subjecting Maria to the same indignities he’d been inflicting on me, it hurt more to know that he hadn’t. Why had he only chosen me? I was consumed with a new and powerful desire: I wanted to run away too. But first I’d have to save up my money.

28

We lived in Albuquerque selling pine nuts for two months. Lane didn’t have many jobs hauling loads during that time, and he pursued me as if he had missed me. He found every excuse possible to take me on errands: to sell pine nuts to local markets, to pick up additional loads of nuts, to look for parts to fix his truck or the single-wide, and to find more supplies for our stand. I did everything I could to avoid him, but in our three families’ cramped space, there was no place to hide. Mom was distracted with the baby and my younger siblings and didn’t even notice the extra attention our stepfather paid to me. Each morning I’d wake up and vow that today would be the day I’d tell Mom what Lane was doing to me, but each day I’d find a reason why I couldn’t share my secret: Mom was too tired, the babies had been up all night. Every time I came close to saying something, a small voice in my head would tell me to keep silent, that it would only make things worse if I told the truth, and what if Mom didn’t believe me?

But I was starting to feel desperate. Whenever Lane touched me, I felt he left fingerprints that stained my skin. His marks were everywhere, on my arms and chest and legs and private parts, and to see myself naked was to see a body covered from head to toe with these welts. I stopped looking at myself in the mirror, even when I was fully clothed, a strategy that helped me live with my shame, for a while at least. When the mirror was unavoidable, I would become so nauseated I had to look away. I could hardly keep from retching every time I combed my hair, so vivid were the stains of my stepfather’s desire.

As I hid from mirrors, I hid from Lane too. I slept with the covers over my head and hoped against hope that a blanket could protect me. I thanked God for my brothers, who had been forced by circumstance to sleep sandwiched next to me in the same bed, which made Lane’s nighttime advances impossible.

I began to take refuge in a world of fantasies. I imagined slicing my wrists open and watching my soul escape through my wounds, floating up to heaven as my arms were bathed in blood. When I was seven years old, a half brother of mine—one of my father’s sons with one of his other wives—had committed suicide. I had vivid memories of attending the funeral and watching so many people mourn the death of such a young, troubled soul. A few months after that half brother died, another of my father’s children followed suit, hanging herself with her husband’s belt. It came to seem that suicide ran in my family, and by the time we were living in New Mexico, I had become fixated on how I might be able to follow in my half siblings’ footsteps. I fantasized about slicing up my skin, cutting myself in all the places where Lane had touched me.

I felt that my skin had betrayed me. Something on it must have been different that invited Lane’s touches, something that indicated I wanted him, regardless of whatever I said otherwise. I had goodness and virtue in me, but it was wrapped in a skin that was evil. Because my skin was all the world knew of me, it gained the upper hand. The tug of suicide grew stronger each day, and as it did, I started thinking about what might be waiting for me in the afterlife.

The afterlife, as had been explained to me in Sunday school and by my mother, was run by men who had been polygamous on earth, men like my father and Lane. “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become,” the church elders would remind us. Women who had been faithful and loyal wives would become goddesses—heavenly servants to the men who ruled over them. But no one had ever explained what would become of girls like me. When I asked Mom what would happen to dead girls who hadn’t been anyone’s wife, she said my soul was sealed to my father, and if I died before I married, I would go to my dad’s kingdom, not Lane’s.

This should have been comforting, and for a while it was, though gradually I began to doubt Mom’s certitude. After all, I had already been born into my dad’s kingdom, but that hadn’t protected me from slipping into another one. How did I know that the same thing wouldn’t happen in heaven? That I wouldn’t slip into Lane’s kingdom again and be stuck there for all of eternity? Or perhaps I would end up in hell. The thought of spending all eternity with Satan terrified me almost as much as the prospect of spending it with my stepfather.

The more I thought about all this, the more terrifying Lane seemed. One afternoon, as I sat in the back of his pickup with Susan’s daughters Sally and Cynthia, I watched as Lane parked the truck and walked into a convenience store with his crooked step. From behind, I could see dirty pink hands at the end of forearms filthy from grease stains. When he got to the door and turned briefly to smile back at me, deep crow’s-feet stretched from his eyes, intersecting the wrinkles etched across his brows and cheeks, making his face look as if it were formed of globs of clay. I met his smile with an angry glare.

Once Lane was gone, I wrapped my lightly freckled arms around my legs, pulled my knees up close to my chest, and moved away from the gunnysack of pine nuts I’d been sitting up against.

“Are you okay, Ruthie?” Sally asked.

I slowly turned to face her. She wore her hair in short bangs that lay flat over her dark eyebrows and milky-white forehead, with a straight part down the middle and brown barrettes on either side. Then I glanced at Cynthia, who, despite being my age, wore her hair in exactly the same style as her sister, right down to the brown barrettes. From there, my gaze floated down to Cynthia’s face. She stared at me with a frightened look in her eyes. For a moment I thought that the angry look I’d given Lane had scared her. But it wasn’t a face of fear, I realized; it was a face beyond fear, a face like mine.

I turned to her older sister. “Sally, does Lane ever kiss you on the mouth when you’re alone with him?” I felt the hot sun beating down on us, and the smell of toasted pine nuts filled the air. Sally’s eyes widened; so did Cynthia’s. They turned to look at each other, then back at me, their expressions blank. Then tears began to form at the corners of Cynthia’s eyes. She turned her head down, pulled her legs to her chest, held her face in her palms, and began to sob. Sally too began to cry, her twelve-year-old body trembling as the truth struggled its way out of her, and she looked at me with an expression I had seen before, in the mirror.

“All right, then. Thanks, have a good day,” said a deep, dreaded voice in the distance.

Our eyes darted up. Lane stood in the door of the store, looking back at the manager. My stepsisters and I straightened our backs against the hard metal cab and pulled ourselves together. I sniffled and pinched my runny nose with my fingertips and wiped my hands on my jeans as Lane appeared beside the truck and poured the pine nuts from a Dixie cup back into the bag beside me.

“Anyone want to ride home up front with me?” he asked in his nice-man voice. We shook our heads and said no thanks. We didn’t look at him. He climbed back into the truck and drove us home.

My stomach twisted as I sat on the thin living-room carpet in Alejandra’s trailer that night with an untouched bean-and-cheese burrito on a paper plate over my lap. Sally, Cynthia, and I had gone for a walk around the trailer-park loop trail once Lane had parked the truck, where I’d discovered that their experiences had been almost identical to mine. Like me, each had thought she was the only one who’d been harmed, but unlike me, they had never told their mother. My stepsisters and I were afraid that our moms wouldn’t believe us, or that we might be punished. Then again, it would be a lot harder for our mothers to doubt all three of us, so we vowed to go together to tell them the truth that night. My stomach balled up and the skin on my face felt hot. I was no longer alone in my suffering, but still I dreaded the night’s confrontation.

It was Alejandra’s turn with Lane that night, and as we walked back to the camper, I asked Mom if I could talk to her in private. It felt crazy to be asking this of a woman who was carrying one baby in her arms and felt another tugging at her pants, but Mom said sure, we could talk before she put the little ones to bed.

We hadn’t been inside the camper two minutes when we heard a light tapping at the door. As I opened the door, Micah climbed up onto a seat near where Mom had laid Elena.

“Mind if we come on in?” said Susan sweetly. Sally and Cynthia were just behind her. The two seemed as nervous as I was, with tight faces and closed, straight lips. I made room for them all as they stepped down the narrow space between the stove and the tiny fridge and sat at the table.

Mom put a pink baby blanket over her shoulder, covered her nursing breast, and lifted her blouse beneath it so that Elena, still just a month old, could nurse. The camper grew completely silent except for the sound of the baby’s sucking.

“What’s goin’ on, girls?” Mom finally said. Susan stood in the narrow hall with her forearms folded between her pregnant belly and her chest. She nodded as if she’d been about to ask the same question.

My stepsisters and I looked at each other as if wondering who should speak first. I decided it would be me.

“Mom, do you remember what happened with Lane in El Paso?” I said, my pulse pounding in my neck and my eyes boring holes into the tabletop. I looked up at her. She nodded. “He never stopped.” I fought as hard as I could to keep from crying.

“Are you sure?”

I looked up, surprised to hear the deep skepticism in her voice. She was squinting from the glare of the bare lightbulb over her head, but I no longer felt intimidated. I told Mom and Susan everything, describing all the times Lane had pulled me onto his lap and put his hands on me when he had asked me to run errands with him. Then Sally and Cynthia explained that he had done the exact same things to them.

Susan looked wide-eyed, obviously stunned, and turned to Mom, who appeared shocked and perturbed.

“Well, how come you girls haven’t said anything before?” Susan asked.

“He said that if we told anyone,” Sally answered, “it would make you mad and you’d feel bad.” She put her elbows on the table next to mine, drew in the stifling air, and held her chin in her hands. Mom and Susan looked at each other again, their faces unchanged.

Elena had stopped nursing, and not until Mom looked down as if she’d completely forgotten a baby was there did I realize I’d gotten through to her. She put Elena on her shoulder and patted her back, the rubber sole of her shoe tapping at the same time. For a while I thought she might be at a loss for words, but then came the torrent of questions.

“Are you sure you’re not just saying this about Lane because you girls don’t like him?”—“When did all this happen?”—“If this really did happen, why didn’t you come to us with it sooner?”

I corroborated Sally’s story in a tired voice, sounding like a teacher who’s told her student something a hundred times.

“Lane told us not to tell you because he said we would hurt your feelings, and we thought we’d get in trouble and he’d whip us with his belt.” My stepsisters nodded in agreement.

“We were embarrassed,” Sally added. “We were afraid that you wouldn’t believe us. But now there’s three of us…”

As her voice trailed off, I watched Mom closely, afraid that she thought we were lying. Finally she put her hand over her mouth, bowed her head, and caught a few tears on her fingertips as they fell down her cheeks. As hard as I tried to be calm and grown-up, the sight of Mom crying was too much for me; my eyes welled up and my throat tightened.