Chapter 2

My name is J.J. Wallace - Jon Robert Wallace, Junior, actually. I was named for my father and I consider myself lucky to be called J.J. and not Jon Bob or Jonny Bob. I’m twenty-five years old and I live in West Virginia in coal mining country, in the same county where I was born and grew up. My father, John Robert Wallace, Sr., is a miner, as were his father and grandfather before him. He expected me to follow him into the mines, but I didn’t. Instead I went into law enforcement, a profession that causes him more than a little discomfort. He doesn’t like cops, which may be part of the reason why I became one.

Even though I’m named for him, I don’t like my father. I don’t hate him, either. He isn’t very likeable. He was a good provider, but not of any sort of love or affection. We’ve had several major battles over the years. The first came when I decided I wanted to finish high school. Nobody in our family ever got a high school diploma and my father didn’t see the need to change that tradition. I didn’t need one to work in the mines, he said. When I got a job as a counselor in a youth program run by the local sheriff’s department, he became even more upset. He told me it shamed him to have his son doing “sissy social work” stuff.

Our second and even fiercer battle came when I told him I wanted to go to college. “No fucking way am I paying for fucking college,” he told me. “You already got way fucking more fucking education that you need.” He didn’t pay for my education; I did, with student loans, scholarships, and hard work at many part-time jobs.

I especially didn’t like the way he treated my mother. He married her when she was fourteen and she had me the same year. Her family lived in South Carolina, in an area even more rural and impoverished than where we lived, and she was one of seventeen kids. Dad somehow knew about the family, went down, and negotiated with her parents to be allowed to marry her. He gave Mother’s family a two-year old pickup truck to seal the bargain. It was something he’d occasionally throw up in her face. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard him say, “I wish I still had that goddamn truck I gave your folks, it worked a helluva lot better than you do.” Every time he says it, I want to deck him.

He brought Mother back to the little house he’d built way back in the hills, and although he never beat her, he pretty much treated her like a servant. She was expected to wash his clothes, cook his meals, and bear his children. Unfortunately, something happened when she had me that kept her from having any more children. That was something else he threw up in her face quite a bit. I later learned that Mother’s not being able to have children did have one benefit. After a few years without any more kids, my father stopped trying to have any more.

Other than to go to the doctor a few times during her pregnancy with me, Mother never left our home once my father got her there. She didn’t know how to drive and he never wanted her to know how. I think he also preferred that she not have any close friends. As I said, once he knew she’d bear him no more children, he kept her because she was a hard worker and kept a good house. She washed, cooked, and split and stacked wood against the winter. My father didn’t feel obligated to help because, he said, “I work and pay the goddamn bills.” He did do the grocery shopping, mainly to keep Mother isolated, I think. He expected mother to make most of her clothes, and what store-bought clothing she got came from mail order catalogs.

As soon as I was old enough, I was expected to help my mother around the house, and did so gladly. I enjoyed being with her. She loved me without question and her love more than made up for the love I didn’t get from my father. Although my father didn’t have a lot of regard for Mother’s intelligence, I learned when I was very young that she was a lot brighter than my father thought she was.

Mother was forced to quit school in the sixth grade and conditions around our house weren’t exactly intellectually stimulating. Mother did try to help me with my schoolwork, though. In a sense, we wound up going to school together and learning from each other and together. In fact, she did the same homework I did. I actually had my high school English teacher review a few of the papers Mother wrote and was told they were quite good. Mother loved hearing that.

Since my father didn’t agree with my finishing high school, he didn’t come to my graduation, which meant my mother wasn’t able to be there, either. I could tell that the day I left to go to college was one of the worst days of my mother’s life. It didn’t help that, since I had to earn my way through school, I was only able to get home a few times during the four years I was in school. Mother and I did write, but I was never sure how many of my letters my father allowed to get through. It bugged him that mother had learned to read and write, something he never learned to do. And because of my father, my mother didn’t get to attend my college graduation, either. I did have friends take lots of pictures, which I shared with Mother when I returned to my home.

During my high school years I developed a close friendship with the local sheriff, Lincoln Ames. He helped me get the job with his department’s youth program-the one that bugged my father so much. I also spent a lot of time hanging out with him and his deputies and that prompted me to major in law enforcement in college. Sheriff Ames told me I could have a job with his department when I finished college and I took him up on the offer. I’d seen far more of the world than most of the kids I grew up with, and part of me didn’t want to go back to my home county, but Mother was there and I didn’t want to abandon her. At that point in time, my reasons for going home weren’t in the least sexual. Well, not that I was aware of, anyhow.

“You think I want some fucking cop living here?” was what my father said when I told him I had a job with the sheriff’s department and wanted to live at home.

“I thought maybe you could use a couple hundred dollars a month rent,” I told him. Dad wasn’t much for liking people, but he did like money. His face changed immediately. It was the look of greed I’d come to know only too well over the years.

“Gonna have to feed you, too,” he grumbled. “Make it three hundred a month and I’ll feed you breakfast and dinner. You can get your own damn lunch.” I loved his comment. “I’ll feed you...” Yeah, sure. He’d starve to death if he had to cook.