Nothing to Nine and Back

I am all the ages between nine and nothing; a kid made ready.

The roof slopes in a semicircle. The paint is thick and fresh, red and white like cartoons and coloring books. It’s summer in Missouri, at the entrance to camp, and I stand before the doors of the first real barn I’ve ever seen. A woman squats to my eye level and I look from her star-shaped earrings to her strap-on angel wings, from her bedazzled birthday hat to her bedroom slippers. “Wilson,” she says, “it’s time for the best and funnest time of your whooole life. Are you ready?”

I turn to my parents, who stand above us. They say they love me, and I know they do, but neither one wears a bedazzled birthday hat, no strap-on wings.

Christmas Day in Forsyth, Georgia, and I’m flying through the double doors into their bedroom. I’m pulling Dad’s eyelids. I’m tapping Mom’s comforter-covered hips.

The tree in the living room is real, pine and shedding. There are actual stockings over the fireplace, looped tassels strung through golden hooks. Even the baby gets a stocking with his name on it.

Here, an ornament my mom cross-stitched when she was eight, a girl with hay-yellow hair and blue-ink eyes. Here, a wooden doll nestled in a wooden doll nestled in a wooden doll nestled in the tree, the sovereignty and security of each painted person a conundrum of size.

Presents wrapped in red and green, printed with triangle trees and cartoon reindeer, piled across a plaid skirt that circles the pine. On the coffee table, Dad’s made an immaculate village of Lincoln Logs. Each of us takes our stations, for orderly opening.

My parents are building a business. Building a business means they are the bosses, and being the bosses means they’re busy.

Dorothy enters whenever they exit, and even though Dorothy isn’t building a business, she’s still my boss.

I can’t sleep, so Mom sits beside me on the bed and sings:

         Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing
         Onward! The sailors cry
         Carry the lad that’s born to be king
         Over the sea to Skye

Dorothy makes me go to Black Church and Mom makes me go to White Church.

Black Church—where we can talk while the preacher’s teaching, but only if we sing sentences that end in amen. Where we sway into one another and our sweat touches. Where the preacher yells about hell like he’s angry, but Dorothy says hallelujah.

White Church—where there’s no more than seventy Protestant southerners. Where the crinkle of a crackers packet booms like thunder and everyone can identify the owner of a cough. Where church is boring, but I’m excused from the sermon.

“And now,” Pastor Andy finally says, “our young worshipers can follow Mrs. Vaughn for their own special programming.”

I’m between two rows of young adults. I’m beneath a canopy of counselors’ stretched arms. I’m centered by ecstatic attention. These walls of welcomers are decorated with wacky hats, plastic jewelry, pool floaties, paint, and glitter. I’ve never met them, but they all know my name.

I can’t sleep, so Dad snuggles up next to me and says:

Once upon a time there was a boy who’d grown big and brave. He had an old tired horse, a polished pistol, and God’s assignment to seek the sun. Bandits and bad guys prowled the plains, but he and his horse began to be known by name.

An imitation toilet, plastic and painted the colors of a clown, which Dorothy puts beside the porcelain original.

She points, I sit. She says, “You come off that pot before you done your business and you’ll find out!”

“Dor-theee!” I plead.

Only a few minutes pass while she watches TV and listens for me, but it’s a baby-boy eternity without piss in the plastic pot.

Doing business is difficult and boring.

Dad doesn’t like Pastor Andy’s sermons because he doesn’t agree with them, so on Sundays he works in the yard or watches spaghetti westerns on TV.

I don’t like Pastor Andy’s sermons because they’re boring, but, “My son, keep your father’s command and do not forsake your mother’s teaching” (Proverbs 6:20).

If Dad gets pulled over by the police for speeding, it’s a secret. If I tell this secret (especially to Mom), it’s a lie. It’s Dad sitting me down at the card table in our kitchen, opening the adult Bible and showing me the verse I must learn before leaving the chair.

“Let me describe for you a worthless and a wicked man; first, he is a constant liar” (Proverbs 6:12).

The championships are repeated but never diminished. Our own house is on the other side of Johnston Street, the driveway declining to the top of our Rambler. Dad and I are on Mrs. Dews’s lawn and I hold my hands to my legs like I’m in a huddle. He drops to a knee. It’s just him and me but he looks to his left and then to his right and announces, “Men, it’s fourth down and three.”

I nod.

He drags the finger of one hand across the football in his other and says, “It’s gotta be a square-in. Wilson, can ya do it?”

I nod.

He stands and scans the defense. I make the stance he taught me.

He sees they’re gonna come for us; invisible enemies blitzing, violent and relentless.

“Hot,” he says, our secret code for the Bomb.

“Hut,” he says, little-boy language for run long!

Mom teaches me mugga-mugga and it goes like this: She leans down and I lean up, we turn our heads from side to side and the tips of our noses tap and tap and tap. Mugga-mugga can mean many things, but right now it means, “good morning.”

Standing in front of Dorothy’s chair in a fancy white shirt, brown buttons I can’t do on my own. Her fingers moving my fingers. “Doing mighty fine,” she says after each one done.

Halloween and the rubber band binding my mask pulls the hair from my head but I’m ready to go, go, Power Rangers!

Dad’s the ghost who will guide me from house to house. Mom’s made dirt for dessert: Oreo crumbles and brown pudding. Jello worms drape from serving dishes and webs of cotton tick and tack from candle sticks to napkins.

Baby brother is a dog with a homemade cloth tail, doing less barking than crying, angry and slapping his high chair. To rub it in, I karate the air with kicks, punches, and spins—killing unseen puddy-men.

The canary-green rain jacket Dorothy carries into and out of our house regardless of the sky.

As The World Turns, which Dorothy watches from a chair she shares with the laundry basket.

A white envelope, which Dorothy receives from Dad because she’s a paid employee who has her own real family.

I pick up a cup of juice and stand on the couch.

Dorothy goes, “Na’n!”

It’s a noise that means many things, but right now it means no.

The pants and the scissors are spread on our kitchen counter before me, Mom, and Dad. The scissors have a red handle and the pants have rents in the legs. They look like wound ribbons.

“Did you do this?” Mom asks.

“I did not,” I answer.

“Then who did?” Mom asks.

“The baby,” I answer.

“Your brother?” Mom asks.

“Maybe,” I answer.

Dad puts his head in his hands and shakes with giggles. Mom covers her mouth but she catches them, too.

Family photos from the author.

I’m in the back seat of my dad’s Chrysler convertible. To my left there’s a cardboard box full of phone books, higher than my head. My feet can’t reach the floorboard.

There’s a twisting cord extending from the black bag between his seat and the empty passenger chair. The cable swings forward and back like the loose string of an archery bow, and he holds the phone to his face as he yells. A voice on the radio yells, too. I don’t yell but I’ve said something or I’ve done something. Maybe it was “Dad,” or maybe it was turning the lever that lowers the window. I don’t know.

What I do know is what my body cannot forget. The frequently repeated story of a car moving onto the shoulder of the highway. The sound is also a felt sensation; tires over ridges passing through passengers like the marriage of a hiccup and shudder. Repeated four times, then two times, then once every second. The man on the radio is yelling but Dad yells louder, or closer, and the cabin of the car is raging echoes:

                                      need to                                 THINK         and

                         LISTEN.

                    Better                                                 repent.

                                                                              Don’t                           be

                   Stupid

                                                                                              Show

                                                             some

               fucking                    respect.

                                                                                             You

Our forward motion ceases.

The twisting cord between the phone and bag relaxes, but I am taut.

Dad doesn’t pause.

He is possessed. He is not yet the reliably kind father and grandfather he will one day become. He cannot perform as though he has control of himself.

The end of his own childhood, the end of his using booze as medication, the end of his first marriage, the end of the phone call, the end of our car’s forward motion—these are not conclusions. These are explosions that trigger explosions.

Boom—the phone is shoved into the bag and the driver’s side door is rebounding from the force with which it’s been thrown open.

Boom—he claps once, twice, thrice, and cackles while rounding the car’s trunk.

Boom—his nose presses into my temple and his breath spreads across my jaw. He chews his tongue; the sound is the wringing of a sponge.

Boom—his eight-year-old son sits stoically in the familiar face of screeching hate.

It’s the sound of rage too thick for the piping of his voice, the phrases wrought with clots of passion. There are millennia of silence between “Respect” and “me.” Great gaps of swelling fury separating “When I speak” and “you listen.” These are the silences of a plunger sucking at absent air. These are the making of my monster; the demon whose defense is to agree. I believe every single thing he says, and he has a lot to say about me.

Stepping through the barn doors I’m surrounded, a sensation like falling up. The barn isn’t a barn, but the painted gateway to “K-Country,” Kanakuk’s camp for the youngest campers. Inside, I see a seemingly endless place. An expanse of blue sky, a facade of cowboy accommodations, a waterpark, a river, basketball and tennis courts.

I’m between two rows of young adults. I’m beneath a canopy of counselors’ stretched arms. I’m centered by ecstatic attention. These walls of welcomers are decorated with wacky hats, plastic jewelry, pool floaties, paint, and glitter. I’ve never met them, but they all know my name.

A moment ago I was a boy in the backseat of his parents’ car, instructed not to play with the window. Now I’m a sports star charging from the tunnel. I’m a rock star riding the crowd. I’m a little boy who feels big, running through pickets of high fives meant for my hands.

Then I’m on a stage, wooden planks beneath my feet, beside a man with a microphone and a familiar smile. His name is Pete. He’s got a shadowed beard and strobing veins. He’s got big muscles. He’s asking, “Is it him?” And he’s answering, “It really is.”

There’s a crowd beneath us. More grown-ups in wacky clothes and kids my own age. They dance and clap and wave their arms and whenever Pete speaks, they listen. Whenever he pauses, they go berserk with applause.

There’s a pool behind them. It reflects a sky of blobs, trapeze, and diving boards. I’m wearing the T-shirt I call my “coolest,” because the letters on the pocket say fearless, but I’m afraid the whole scene is something I’m imagining. I’m afraid I’m being mistaken for somebody else.

Pete drops to his knees, he’s yelling my name and the crowd is screaming it back. He waves me toward him, and I step into the arc of his arm. He turns to the gathering and says, “Y’all, I’m losing my mind. Y’all, I’m so glad he’s here.”

His voice is hoarse, his breath is spoken by speakers, he looks at me and says, “This guy is important.”

All the hippos chomp, but we know purple Lizzie chews the fastest.

TJ and Jordan bite their cheeks, stick out their tongues, and the faces of our three hungry hippos clap asynchronous applause against the tray of pond-colored plastic.

It’s Children’s Church at White Church, a playroom where plastic balls sizzle and bounce.

To quiet us, Mrs. Vaughn holds a package of cookies over her head like an offering and crinkles the wrapping. They aren’t real Oreos, but we freeze and obey.

With his cookies, TJ does three perfect twists: cream on one side and none on the other.

One at a time he holds each of the non-Oreo cookies directly in front of his nose where it rests on his open palm. He arches his other arm like a construction crane, like a swimming stroke, like a surgeon operating on a too-tall table, and with the quickness of a scorpion his free hand strikes and twists…

                    Perfect.

                    Perfect.

                                                             Perfect.

Jesus Christ fed thousands with five loaves of bread and two fish, but TJ can make two hundred treats from one hundred cookies. Even Mrs. Vaughn says, “my god.”

A car the color I call purple with seats that feel fuzzy. Dorothy claims it’s “cloth kept new by rules.”

Dorothy, her grandbaby, and me, no windows down because her hair just got did.

Dorothy, her grandbaby, and me, one of us singing praise music and two of us trying to get the closest to touching Dorothy’s ear without actually doing so.

Dorothy, her grandbaby, and me, simultaneously shouting accusations, denials, and threats because a finger accidentally found her ear.

Mrs. Vaughn lets me go to the bathroom all on my own, but my braided belt confuses me. Buckle in my left hand, belt tongue in my right, ivory toilet behind. Mom knows how to do the belt, but she’s in Adult Church, and there are rules about going to the bathroom all on my own.

I am allowed to go from the playroom to the bathroom and back; I am not allowed to go into the kitchen and open cupboards or the fridge; I am not allowed to go into Pastor Andy’s office and sit in the chair behind his desk; and most importantly, I am not to disturb the adults in Adult Church.

I try to think: I dressed myself this morning, all on my own. Socks and then shoes, shorts and then shirt—but how had I buckled the belt? There are no holes to poke the pin through. No snap or latch to press or close.

If I go back to the playroom Jordan will laugh at me and say, “You don’t know how to do your own belt?” and TJ will do and undo, do and undo, fastening and unfastening his belt over and over to show me how simple it is.

“It’s okay, honey,” is what Mrs. Vaughn will say, but that’s exactly what Mrs. Vaughn says to babies.

The belt won’t tie like a shoe, and the belt won’t stick like Velcro, but I’m thinking before I’m acting, and thinking made an idea.

Beside Dorothy’s house is a real school bus—parked in the grass, yellow with a black streak as seen on TV. Dorothy’s husband drives it, and we’re all supposed to call him Pop whether he’s our dad or not.

A pitcher without a handle holding the best treat—Dorothy’s special Red Drink.

The room we cannot go in. Pictures burnt onto plates hanging on walls. A crystal dish with candies for seeing and not eating. “Why can’t we go in your living room?” I ask. “Cause it’s a drawing room,” Dorothy says, “but don’t you get no ideas about that neither.”

The bedroom is allowed. The bedroom that’s the playroom that’s the TV room, where Pop watches The Price is Right.

The television is a mantle for framed photos. There is one of me; but the rest are of Dorothy’s real family.

I can’t sleep, so Mom sits on the bed beside me and sings:

            Though the waves leap, soft shall ye sleep
            Ocean’s a royal bed
            Rocked in the deep, Flora will keep
            Watch by your weary head

I can’t sleep, so Dad snuggles up next to me and says:

Once upon a time there was a boy who’d grown big and brave. He had a green helmet that didn’t fit, brown heavy boots that did, and no matter how witless their orders were, he always saved all his men.

I open the secret sanctuary door just like I closed the bathroom door—twisting the handle all the way before pulling. Silent as a mouse.

The Choir Closet is an oversight. A room too small for the rules of adults— dismissed despite being the best and only room with a secret door to the sanctuary’s stage.

I slide my unfastened belt through the loops of my shorts and hold the length of leather like a prized fish. My lips and nose spread against the door as I fit its twisting brass knob between my chin and puffed chest. This way, my other hand is free to hold my beltless bottoms to my hips.

The door smells like attic, the room sounds like sermons, my mouth tastes like non-Oreo cookies, and bits of cracker are stuck to my back teeth. I’m sending my mom a secret signal for help, and I can only see the door between me and the congregation, but God can see everything: Little Boy Wilson in a closet for chorus robes, he hoists his belt, through a crack in the door, into the sanctuary.

As Pastor Andy lectures and reads, behind his back but in front of his audience, a belt flaps like a silly snake. Conspicuous. Ridiculous.

The belt spasms and then is still. It flies up and down, up and down, then side to side, side to side. A wave whips through it and then another.

The congregation does not simmer or stir. No laughter, no wink or nod to alert Pastor Andy. Instead, they stiffen. And without the slightest consideration for acting, everyone thinks, shouldn’t this be stopped?

But one woman doesn’t wonder because one woman knows. She ducks her head and slips from the sanctuary to the hallway, stalks from the hallway into the closest, and while the preacher keeps teaching the belt abruptly stops bouncing. Limp. Dead. Sucked back into a crack between the Choir Closet door and the stage.

“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” the woman says to her son.

“Sending you a signal!” the son says to his mom. “And. It. Worked!”

Her anger’s an impenetrable act of inaction. A sudden absence of affection. And she leaves him without lifting a finger; a boy beside his mother but alone.

“This guy is important,” he said into the microphone, and then Pete whispers, “Wilson, me and God are so glad you’re here.”

I’m on a stage, and Pete believes I belong on it. He knew my name before he met me and because he likes me, the crowd loves me. I am no wider than the span of his hand on my back, and I’m finally the “him” someone’s been waiting for, not the “you” who “needs to.”

I want to trust but can’t repair my faith in the truth. I want to remember but can’t find a reliable real. I ask my mind to travel back to the walk across the country still called Kamp. I go there as my mind-made avatar of me and sometimes I see the version I call memory.

It’s a quiet ride in the car from White Church to home, then a quiet “time out” in my room. The belt is simple. A braided band of many woven strips, leather looping in and out of itself. It’s a waist-wrapping rope of ropes and if you push the brass buckle into any crevice between cords, it pops through.

I didn’t know. I didn’t think.

In my room I do and undo, do and undo the belt that has a hundred hidden holes for the buckle.

I say, you’re so stupid! And silently, the sentiment echoes.

It’s the tenth day of Kamp and I am, as the winged lady at the gate prophesied, having the best and funnest time of my whooole life.

I am beside a fire and a river and a flat grassy expanse, and I am beside all of them all at once. I am not supposed to be here after bedtime, but I’m allowed to be anywhere, at any time, so long as Pete is with me.

Pete is so prized an employee that rules like “bedtime” don’t apply. Pete is the son of an NFL team’s chaplain. He is the brother of an ordained minister. He’s a star among campers and admired by staff. He is the logistical, spiritual, and commercial master of this country that starts with a k, and he is my friend.

We go on secret raiding parties to the kitchens, we go on secret swimming adventures in the lagoons, and we come here, to the fire beside the river, on secret “man-of-god missions.”

Of all the other cabins and campers, and even though he has his own bathroom, Pete comes to my cabin to shower with us in the morning. And at night, after “lights out,” he comes to my cabin and we mime important signals to my counselors so they know it’s okay for me to leave. Then we shuffle and slide through gravel, down the hill beside my bunkroom. We “shh,” and “shh,” so other campers won’t feel left out, and then descend the hundred stairs between the bunks and riverbank. We sprint across soccer, football, and baseball fields, we scream as loudly as we can, and we spread our arms until we are here. Beside the fire and the river and the fields. Beside one another.

I don’t know yet that Pete has done all of this before or that he’ll do it again. I don’t know that Pete is a superpredator or that he’s only one of the pedophiles to have been employed by Kanakuk. I don’t know that Pete will remain employed despite Kamp administrators knowing he gets naked with little boys, and I don’t know that for dozens of little boys, this method of grooming transitioned into sexual abuse.*

What I know is Pete is important, and he’s holy, and he’s fun. What I know is it’s never before been fun to be holy, or important to be me.

So when Pete says, “This is the best moment of my life,” I say, “mine too.”

When Pete says, “Wanna know how to make ’em all like this one?” I say, “I do.”

I can’t sleep, so Mom sits on the bed beside me and sings:

              Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing
              Onward! The sailors cry
              Carry the lad that’s born to be king
              Over the sea to Skye

I’m not silly or stupid, but not knowing of the island Skye, I lay in my blue bed and think the song is about a real route to heaven, a path on some specific part of the ocean that leads to the sky. I see the horizon line as the link, like a faraway ladder that leads from my Harrowing Here to the Hallowed There. I see sky meeting sea, seemingly right in front of me, and I think, almost there. Just a little further.

Unlearning this impression, or these other lessons, will prove impossible.

“Okay, say what I say,” says Pete, and I close my eyes like he closes his, then say I’m a sinner like he says he is, and ask for Jesus to forgive me like Pete asks Jesus to forgive him, “And THAT!” Pete shouts into the black bowl of a cloudy sky, “is all it takes.”

Pete’s pointing at me and smiling a familiar smile. Pete’s dancing a jig. Pete’s voice is heaving “thank you” after “thank you” toward heaven, and Pete’s writing today’s date and my name on a rock.

“Proof you’re the newest member of Christ’s holy flock,” he says. “Delivered from damnation to eternal salvation. Wilson, you’re SAVED!”

And I believe every single thing he says.

I’m a boy in a grown body, trying to be brave, twenty-eight years old, on the phone with a reporter.

She says there are survivors who wish to share their stories, but Kanakuk litigiously quiets them. There were symptoms of abuse surrounding Pete; signs Kamp may have preferred the profits of prestige to child protection. She asks me to remember on record.

I scramble to find or fill the hole or gap: to recollect the little-boy strides I must have taken from the fire beside that river to the barn where my bunk was.

     I have done this before.

     I did it when Pete was arrested.

     I did it when Pete was sentenced.

     I did it when my dad said, “Did anything happen?”

     I did it when each lost love of my life held my head between their hands and said, “trust me.” I did it when each teacher or preacher said, “have faith.” I did it the day before yesterday and the day before that.

I want to trust but can’t repair my faith in the truth. I want to remember but can’t find a reliable real. I ask my mind to travel back to the walk across the country still called Kamp. I go there as my mind-made avatar of me and sometimes I see the version I call memory: We’re silent and reverent across baseball, football, and soccer fields, we’re ascending one hundred stairs between the bunks and riverbanks, and then we’re shuffling and sliding through gravel. I watch his hands, his hips, his eyes, then we separate, and I am safe. Alone. A boy in the bunk of his first real barn, sleeping with a marked stone of salvation.

Other times, I watch what I fear I’m too afraid to see. Just me and Pete beside the fire and the river and the fields.

* Despite a preponderance of evidence pointing to Pete Newman’s egregious behavior with campers—including being naked with underage boys on more than one occasion—his employment at K-Kountry wasn’t terminated until 2009. A year later, he was convicted on multiple counts of child sexual abuse. When asked in a deposition why he hadn’t fired Newman earlier, Kanakuk’s CEO, Joe White, responded that, amid the “waterfall of appreciation” Newman received from the community, the incidents were the equivalent of “two drops of water that we did not think were poison.” According to survivors, Kanakuk, which is one of the biggest Christian summer camps in the US, is using NDAs, manipulation, and aggressive legal tactics as means to silence them.