Chapter 1

When I was fourteen years old, in the early '50's, the Ledbetter family got transferred out of the area, and a new family moved into their vacated house. Clyde and Laverne Gordon had come up from Charleston, South Carolina with their two daughters and a niece. Shannon was the oldest at fifteen, and she was tall and thin, with long red hair that she always kept in pigtails. Her breasts were almost non-existent, and this was a real sore point with her, because both her sister and her cousin were younger, and richly endowed in that particular department. Her sister's name was Trudie, I suppose it was a nickname for Gertrude, she was fourteen, and she was not as tall as her sister, with a darker shade, and much shorter, red hair. The thing I remember most about her, was that she was always dirty. Her sister, cousin and both of her parents were always getting on her to wash herself, but she would refuse and pitch a big tantrum until they left her alone, declaring that it was too big a bother to force her. Once in a great while, her father would chase her down and throw her into the tub with all of her clothes on, and then he, and her mother would scrub her with a bristle brush that her mother normally used for their laundry. On those rare occasions you could hear her yelling and screaming all over the neighborhood. The cousin, Clara, who was also fourteen, was a dark haired girl, what you would call a deep chestnut I think, and she was built really heavy up top and had something wrong with her that made her get headaches all of the time. When she got these headaches, she would be cranky and petulant, and would sometimes be unable to sleep, occasionally for two or three nights in a row. When Clara couldn't sleep, their whole household would be up and worried, because Clara's mother had suffered from the same problem, and had walked out into a pond down in South Carolina one night and drowned herself. They all worried that Clara might decide to try the same remedy some night.

In our neighborhood, people seemed to have an inborn mistrust of all newcomers, fearing that they were going to either introduce some new and contagious diseases, or maybe some bad habits that would be harmful to everyone already living there. After a family had been around for a few months, if nobody came down with a new sickness, and if their behavior seemed in line with neighborhood standards and customs, they were slowly accepted, especially if other, even newer people, happened to move into the neighborhood. The Gordons were always treated as newcomers though, in spite of the fact that they lived in our neighborhood for over two years. They were much too different from the regular New England residents for them to assimilate. They talked with thick southern accents, and weren't able to understand any of us when we talked, unless we spoke really slowly for them. Neither of my sisters liked the Gordon family, but Ray and I liked all three of the girls, and my father, let's just say that he developed a certain closeness and familiarity with Laverne Gordon that became a huge bone of contention between my father and my mother and between Clyde Gordon, his wife and my father.

The trouble with my father and LaVerne started one day when Clyde was at work and so was my mother. My father was off work from the Sub base for some reason, and was out doing some crab net repairing along the west side of our house. Each of the houses in the project that we lived in was part of a duplex. They were built back to back, with a single shared wall. It happened that my parent's bedroom shared the same back wall with the senior Gordon's back wall, and that Ray's and mine shared a wall with Trudie and Clara's room. My parents did not practice discrete sexual congress as a rule, and it wasn't that unusual to have the two of them banging the headboard up against the wall and making various sounds, consisting either of shouted notice of impending satisfaction, or frantic efforts at motivating someone to greater effort and more energetic intensity. If you picture in your mind the sounds that the crowd makes when a hotly contested prizefight is in the last round and one of the opponents is hurt and ready to go down, then you get the general idea of what it sounded like when they were really going at it in their bedroom. On this particular day, the Gordon's had lived in their house for about one month. It was around two o'clock on a sweltering hot afternoon in August, when Laverne came out of her house and walked over to where my father was working on his nets. She was wearing tight toreador pants and a shirt that was tied in front and left her midriff bare. I remember her as a fairly ordinary looking woman, somewhere in her early thirties. She was a redhead too, but I doubt it was the same hair color that she was born with. I was standing not too far away when she walked over to my father and started up a conversation with him. I wasn't able to hear what they were talking about, but being nosy, I casually starting drifting closer. To say that my father lacked discretion would be gross understatement. In reality, when he got the scent of impending conquest in his nostrils, he just threw caution and restraint right out the window.

"So Laverne, why weren't you able to get much sleep last night? Was there something about all that noise that disturbed you and kept you from relaxing? Last night wasn't special you know, some nights it lasts all through the night. Didn't you enjoy listening even a little bit?"

"How's a body supposed to get any rest with all that carrying on goin' on? I decare John, I've never heard the like. Clyde and I thought you two were fightin' at first."

"Well, when I get a head of steam built up, it's pretty normal for the lucky lady to have to scream. If you'll pardon my candor."

"You Northerners, are you always so bold?"

"I can only speak for myself Laverne, but I'll be as bold as you want me to be. You just let me know."

"It's so warm out here, and muggy too. I think I'll just go in and have myself a nice cooling bath." There was no doubt, even to my relatively unschooled fourteen year old ears that Laverne was attracted to my father and was flirting back with him too.

"Give me a holler if you need help in reaching any places. I'm always ready to assist a pretty neighbor." She smiled and twirled around, heading back over to her front door. She was exaggerating her hip movement as she walked slowly away, stopping once and looking backwards, making sure that my father's eyes were trained on her as she walked. This time her smile was even more engaging, practically an invitation. Hell, I was sporting a boner and that was just from eavesdropping on the two of them. After she went back inside, I went over to speak with my father, asking him to teach me how to make the perfectly square nets that he did, seemingly without even paying attention. He put me off, telling to go somewhere else and play because he might have important things to take care of soon and me being there might screw it up. Like I mentioned before, discrete, he wasn't. Five minutes later, having crawled under our house from the otherside, I was hanging back a few feet from the wooden lattice that hid the buildings raised foundation, trying to keep out of my father's sight. I heard the window to the Gordon's bathroom being opened, and then I heard LaVerne calling out to my father.