Chapter 1
Rachel was terrified. Her heart thudded in her breast as she peered through the slats of the doors separating her parents' bedroom from the hallway. The double doors had Venetian blind slats in them that supposedly prevented anyone from seeing in because they slanted upward from the outside looking in, thereby affording any peeping tom or thomasina a vague view of the ceiling and nothing else. But the bottom two slats of the left door was broken some time earlier, and tonight the young teenage girl wanted to see what was taking place in her parents' bedroom. There was always so much noise coming from there.
Rachel was the oldest of five children. The other four, two girls and two boys, had been drugged and put to sleep. Had her father had his way, Rachel would have been drugged, as well. But last week, Rachel had only swallowed half her cocoa, and as a result had only been half-drugged. So she had been somewhat awake when the people had started filing into her parents' bedroom. She had been too woozy to get out of bed, but she had been wide enough awake to understand that a lot of men were laughing it up and having a lot of fun, while her poor mother was weeping and even crying out loud. Now she had to see for herself what was going on.
The house in which they lived was in a fairly rundown section of town. Black people had once lived in this neighborhood, but when the welfare benefits up north became so much higher than they were here, in the middle of the Ozarks, all the blacks had moved out, and the poor white trash who had been living in other counties began taking over the abandoned homes.
The home in which Rachel and her family lived was not much more than a shack. It had a large common room that served as a living room, dining room, and kitchen. There was a bathroom of sorts, and two large rooms at the rear of the shack. The two rooms served as bedrooms. The larger room was occupied by her parents. The other room was where Rachel and her two brothers and two sisters slept.
Rachel's father walked nakedly about the house during the day, and so modesty was something that didn't exist here. But Rachel herself, once her breasts had started developing, and the faint lint began growing on her pelvis, had developed a modesty of her own. Against her father's wishes she had gone to school, and she had learned about what was right and what was wrong. She also learned that her father had no morals and didn't subscribe to right or wrong, save that was good or bad for himself.
When she had been younger he used to grab her and rub the flat of his palms against her small nipples, grinning and telling her how she would one day develop big boobs and he would be the first to sample the fruit of her. He talked crazy for a father, and Rachel wasn't able to understand why he was such a slob, and so cruel toward his wife and the five kids.
Jack Kane had once been a migrant worker, but ever since moving into this little shack in Arkansas, he didn't want to work any longer. Just where he got what little money he did accumulate Rachel never did know. At least, she didn't know it until that particular night.
Now he would just lie around all day, doing nothing, occasionally grabbing their mother and dragging her into the bedroom where he did all kinds of things to make her scream . . . things neither Rachel or the other kids wanted to know. Had it been up to her father, Rachel would have been made aware of what he and her mother did in that bedroom. But her mother was a modest woman, a helpless little bit of a thing, with red-gold hair and almond eyes. Rachel didn't look at all like her.
In fact, Rachel didn't look like either of her parents. Her mother had a short, upturned nose, and she had a straight, almost flat nose. Her mother's lips were thin, but hers were full. Her father had a broad, piggish snout and very slim, slavering lips. Whenever he looked at Rachel the overweight man seemed to be drooling. Rachel often wondered why.
At the present time, she was only half-developed. Her breasts were slightly more than bumps, though when they were full-grown they would be immense. Her waist was thin, but then so was the rest of her. She didn't have that much to eat, and it was amazing that she was starting to round out the way she was, all things considered. She had wide hips, very wide hips, and long, slender thighs and calves.
Her hair was a ratty brown, not red like her mother's, nor black like her father's.
Every week, once a week, on Wednesday nights, Jack Kane, out of the so-called goodness of his heart, gave his kids a cup of hot chocolate to drink. Since it was the only sweet thing he gave them, all five usually greedily drank it, and all five usually fell into a stupored sleep, afterward. But Rachel had only taken a half cup this previous week, and so had heard the goings-on in the other room.
This week, she had managed to throw her cocoa out the window, pretending she had swallowed it all, and after the other kids had fallen asleep, Rachel had lay awake in her bed, waiting. When her mother had peered in to make certain the kids were sleeping, she had pretended to be asleep. Then the woman had returned to the other bedroom, and Rachel lay there, listening as her father greeted the men who were coming in.
From the sounds of their voices, Rachel knew who these men were. There was Zeke Weiss, whose mother had slept with a German one night, and so had conceived Zeke, a short, rat-faced man with a squiggly mustache. His mother's last name was Holcomb, but she insisted Zeke be named after the man who had slept with her, and so he was called Weiss. There was Al Danfield, the old man who had always dreamed of being someone important, and who would die being a nobody, and not even a married nobody.
There were others, but Rachel didn't remember their names because she didn't like them. About the only person in these parts, other than her mother and her brothers and sisters, that she did like, was
Manford Kelly, the son of the big landowner, nearby. The Kellys gave whatever work there was in the neighborhood to the former migrant workers who now lived in what was called Shanty Town. What was more, Manford liked her.