Chapter 1

The tiny church was packed to the rafters with folks wanting others to see them sitting there, bored and wishing they were somewhere else, but willing to suffer for a reputation of being well-behaved “God-fearing” citizens of a valley with no name.

Of course, I was sitting there in the second pew with my “hard to miss” retinue of relations. There was Ma and Pa and Granny Moses dressed in their Sunday best and all my brothers and sisters fidgeting and squirming on the hard wooden planks. None of us young ones were dressed splendiferous like regular adults, but that was normal up our way. I was the only one of the girls that had her legs up high on the pew because I still had some sore spots on my bottom where Pa had gotten carried away with “teaching me a lesson” I wouldn’t forget.

I should say my name is Sue Ellen Barker and that I am just turned sixteen. In these parts, that makes me almost an old maid because the female humans all get a man to lean on at an early age before they get to drinking and carrying on with those strange creatures up by the paved highway that goes all the way to the State capitol. Those little minxes spritz their hair with sticky stuff and even paint everything on their face with lipstick and powder making them look like clowns and not real women that have babies and do the cooking and the cleaning all day long. They even wear shoes with long spikes instead of heels walking like they got something up their “you know what” and they got to walk that way to keep it inside.

Between you and me, I never had anything up my dirt hole except my oldest brother Jethro’s finger when he was feeling no pain testing Uncle Simple’s white lightning for being ripe enough to sell down at the crossroads market. Jethro had a habit of wrapping me in his big hairy arms and telling me,

“It’s time to check your insides for fever, little girl, get them drawers down for Jethro’s fever checker.”

I would just bent over and pull my drawers down in front of all my other siblings laughing hard enough to beat the band and he would shove his big middle finger up my boom-di-ay without any ceremony whatsoever. I never liked it on the way in, but after he had me hooked nice and proper, I have to admit his shameful stretching was something I eventually got addicted to just like the ice cream from the freezer in the store that sold almost everything imaginable. He made me get up on my toes and sort of dance at the end of his thick paw like a pretend ballerina without any music. I pretty much sort of missed his attentions when he took his finger out and I knew it was a sin and all, but it was always on my mind like watching one of the older girls getting it behind the privy from one of my brothers or the workers at my Uncle’s still. I honestly don’t know why my brother Jethro liked making fun of me with his finger like that, but I generally got to hoping strange boys might like doing the same thing but they never seemed to get my unspoken message. I noticed that I was starting to enjoy Pa’s heavy hand and his belt a lot more as I got older and my Ma didn’t miss the way I was squirming on his lap the entire time.

Our farm had the biggest still in the valley.

It didn’t belong to my Daddy.

It belonged to Uncle Simple.

I thought Simple was a strange name and asked my Ma why he had that unusual name because he certainly looked more devious than simple to me. My Ma laughed and told me,

“We call him Simple because he always used to chase the young girls with a one-track mind. You be right careful around him because he never asks for permission and simply sticks it in before a girl rightly knows what is going on.”

For some strange reason that sounded totally exciting and I was reminded of my brother Jethro with his impetuous finger that was a source of guilty addiction to me. I was often in or around the still out in the deep forest delivering food or ingredients on orders from either my Ma or Pa and I would squat down in the grass and watch Uncle Simple haul the sacks of mash over and adjust the heat in the coils to just the right level for a perfect brew of hooch. I was never tempted to taste the stuff because I had seen one of my older sisters in the clutches of withdrawing from the poison after using it far too much for her own good. She was a teetotaler now and wagged her pretty finger at the drunks down at the crossroads trying to forget how she was in their place for longer than she wanted to remember. I also remembered how “loose” it made her when she was feeling no pain and the way she would rub her heels in men’s backsides when they were giving it to her hard and heavy. I had dreamed of doing it just like that with some of the young boys in church but I knew in my mind that I didn’t have the nerve and I wasn’t about to start in drinking the rotgut my Uncle produced with surprising efficiency.

One afternoon down at the still, I went into the weeds to take a long-delayed wee-wee and was startled to see my Uncle Simple looking at me real strange from behind one of the tall trees that had survived the long-ago fire that had cleared out all the dead wood down low on the ground. He could probably see my white cotton undies and from his angle probably had a good field of vision right up my naked crack as I squatted down doing my business the way nature demands from time to time. I wasn’t ashamed of my body and I found that the thought of Uncle Simple seeing me with my drawers down wasn’t entirely embarrassing at all. In fact, I felt the same way I did when my brother Jethro was making me dance at the end of his finger like I was a puppet on a string.

I was able to stand and re-arrange my clothing before he approached me and wrapped his big arms around me like some bear getting ready to fight an intruder. My head only came up to his belly and the next thing I knew he had pushed my head down lower and I was introduced to his long thick shaft sticking out in a way that indicated to me he was expecting me to do something nasty like one of those girls over by the highway.