Reckless: Shades of a Vampire(2)

She wanted to make a new dress and wear it on a chilly, late fall night for a young man who knocked at the door, greeted her with a smile, took off his jacket, placed it around her arms, walked her to the car, opened the door, helped her in, closed the door, walked to the other side, got in the car, started the car, and looked at her and smiled with a fireplace warmth before driving off along a road to anywhere. She wanted to wrap her arms around him, have him thrust his tongue into her mouth. She wanted him to strip off her shirt, lick her nipples, pull of her panties, and thrust his erection deep into her and she buried her groan into his shoulder.

It didn’t happen that way, though.

Her father didn’t dream the same dreams she did on her behalf. And his will was her way in life. He had a plan for Emma that was to be followed, religiously. For Emma, that meant she was bound by an invisible leash that she could feel at all times, meaning she rarely veered far off the few square miles of winding county road that connected the parsonage grounds, where they lived, and Sand Mountain Pentecostal Church, where her father, Jeremiah Johnson Mays, was the pastor and only paid staff member.

A big trip for Emma meant going four miles down the road past the church to the biggest nearby town. Ider had a population of 664, but it was a metropolis to Emma, the biggest place she knew.

Home to the only post office and grocery market for miles around, Ider was the center of the community’s universe – a crossroads of commerce and connectivity for the mountaintop community.

Most children in the area attended Ider schools, which started in kindergarten and went all through high school. Ider High had sports teams and cheerleaders and even a 33-member marching band. Nicknamed the Rattlers, the school’s black and gold colors were painted on just about everything in town. Mailboxes. Storefronts. Pickup trucks. You name it. The Rattlers ruled Ider as the biggest game in town, outside of church, of course.

When she was 13, Emma prayed most every night for her father to let her attend Ider High School. But those prayers went unanswered.

“God did not make you to sit in a classroom all day,” he said. “Where in the Bible does it dictate that?

“Women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be submissive, as the law also says,” said her father, quoting 1 Corinthians 14:34. “That means a women’s place is in support of man. You learn that in the home, and in the church. Not in a school building.”

On the leading edge of a string of small towns dotting the sandstone plateau that rises 1,500 feet above sea level in the northern reaches of Alabama known as Sand Mountain, Ider was also the biggest place Emma had ever been. With a population of 2,400, Henegar was four times bigger than Ider, and just nine miles south of the town on County Road 75. But though her parents went there every week or two on errands, she was never taken along.

They did not take her to Henegar; they did not take her along when they went in to Chattanooga, the Tennessee town of almost 200,000 people 43 miles away to the Northeast; they did not take her to Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city 115 miles away to the Southeast; nor did they take her to Huntsville, the Alabama town with a rocket ship factory that was 69 miles away to the East. The few times Emma had asked to go to Henegar, or beyond, she was reprimanded by her father with the accusation of parental disobeying that came with corresponding punishment in the form of lashes across the backs of her thighs with her dress pulled up to the elastic bottom bands of her panties so her flesh was struck with clarity.

“He that spares the rod hates his son,” said her father, quoting Proverbs, “but he who loves him disciplines him promptly.”

She wanted to tell her father that she was a daughter, not a son, since they were following the words so literally. But Emma knew that would only mean more lashes. So she stopped asking at the age of 15 to go along on trips to Henegar, or anywhere else beyond Ider. Emma pretty much stopped asking for anything.



The Mays family had just one car, a silver 1994 Ford Taurus that had stubs where seat belts once were. Her father had cut them out with his pocketknife the day they bought the car from a church member for $1,950. Emma's mother rarely drove, and Emma did not have a driver’s license, relegating her world on Sand Mountain to one small revolution, taken typically by either by the power of her own her legs or the family car, if and when her parents were inclined to give her a ride.

Typically, that was only to church, and back.

“You can walk most anywhere you need to go,” her father said.

He was right. She could walk anywhere she needed to go, since her home, the pasture out back, and the church up the road were the only places she needed to go or was allowed to go.