Prologue

 

For nearly the first three years of our marriage, The Reverend had, for the most part treated me decently: his courtesy at times a little brittle; his respect and tolerance sometimes appearing to fray; his emotions tethered-if, clearly, at times, roiling.

I had not become pregnant, which clearly disappointed him, though this was not something he ever openly criticized.

We had what he referred to as "physical communion" more or less every Friday-three of four weeks of the month.

He wet himself with saliva before he thrust into me; his motions were firm but not violent; after the initial weeks, when the pain faded, there wasn't much in the way of sensation-neither bothersome nor, in truth, pleasurable.

He would finish fairly quickly, peck me on the cheek, and excuse himself to the bathroom, where he would spend upwards of half an hour bathing and scrubbing himself.

Often, I would fall asleep before he returned to our bed.

This, of course, was before I became, or before he turned me into, a Harlot.

I now know sensation: hot waves of pain, sickening storms of pleasure, every channel and crevice of my body penetrated, punished, and pleased by a multitude of men, a handful of women, and a variety of objects and . . . devices, the possibilities seemingly similar to the infinite reflections created when two mirrors are placed opposite one another.

Now and then The Reverend murmurs and muses darkly of animals, of how I would look on my hands and knees, beneath a dog, or strapped into a wooden frame, to be assaulted by a donkey-he speaks of these possibilities in terms so specific as to suggest long thought, if not actual planning.

My stomach churns and I break into a hot sweat when he says this, my body going shaky and feverish with the disease of desire, as I too picture these things-hoping fervently that he will not grow in me that need too.

Or hoping that he will?

I have no doubt that he wouldn't force me; he never has.

But-steadily, inexorably, pitilessly-he has made me . . . want. He has made me . . . need. Should I find myself-and perhaps soon-beneath a beast of the non-human variety . . . it will be because I have begged him to permit this.

That has been the pattern: he makes me beg.

I do it now with an odd kind of joy.

And gratitude.

 

Chapter One

The Giving & The Taking

 

I had left the conservative Christian college to which I had been sent, one state over, after two years, returning to the family farm to spend the decade that followed keeping watch over my parents as they died.

This was tedious and exhausting work.

My only regret is that it took so long.

My brothers-fourteen and sixteen years older-had left for college and never returned; they sent money, but that was all.

At the time that I was forced to abandon my education my father was seventy-six years old, my mother seventy-two.

My parents always reminded me of Grant Wood's American Gothic, sober to the point of desiccation.

While my birth had been improbable, given their ages, I'd never found the birth of my brothers any more explicable. I've come to understand that people being unable-or unwilling-to picture their parents having sex is rather common; I believe my "claim" in this direction is stronger than most.

When I married, at thirty, I was, in the ways important to my parents and to The Reverend, untouched.

Which is not to say that no one had ever laid a hand on me.

From the time that I was eight, when my younger brother left home, until near the time of their deaths-with semester-long hiatuses for the two years I was away at college-my parents punished me on a weekly basis: both "for cause" and "for maintenance."

"Maintenance" was a Friday evening ritual: the two of them would lead me solemnly into the bathroom, at bedtime.

Father would have me kneel on the cold tiles, head bowed, forehead and hands on the edge of the old claw-footed tub. He would lace my nightgown up onto my lower back, pull my panties down around my thighs, and strap my buttocks and my hips, making little grunting sounds of either displeasure or satisfaction-perhaps both.

Then he would spread me open with his huge, work-calloused hands, thrust a thumb into me, greasing my bottom with petroleum jelly, and leave Mother to administer my enema, which she did with a quiet, angry, efficiency. The pulsing of the nozzle into me, on introduction and removal-longer but thinner and smoother than Father's thumb-was both balm and irritant, soothing and disquieting me as a sort of warmth spread from what I could only think of as my lower belly.

When hair began to grow between my legs, this seemed to somehow enrage my mother even more; she took it to be a personal affront, something that I had done specifically in defiance of her.

Sometimes, straining to hold the enema until given permission to release, I would clench my buttocks and rub my thighs together which, on more than one occasion, caused her to fly off the handle.

She would pull Father's razor strop off the shelf over the sink, yank my legs as far apart as the panties that bound my thighs would permit, and lash underneath me, curling the length of leather upward, striking the offending hair and the lips of my cunny.

I think back on this now with something approaching nostalgia: I have come to love, I have come to crave, the multiple ways in which The Reverend-and the special members of his congregation to whom he gives this authorization-lashes every part of my body, reserving for particular attention my nipples, my cunny, and my anus.

This is not how my marriage started; but perhaps I should have expected it.

Father stopped talking a year or two after I moved back home, not something that was immediately obvious to me: he had always been the implacable Head-of-the-Household, but Mother had always done a great deal of his talking for him.

"Your Father is greatly disappointed by your behavior," she would say sharply, over dinner.

Father would nod darkly.

Off to the bathroom we would troop.

Later, I would be told that he had probably been having small strokes for quite some time.

My greatest upset on hearing this was that he hadn't simply had, what the doctors referred to as, "a massive stroke," sooner than the one that killed him when I was twenty-seven.

The Reverend had preached Father's funeral, in his storefront Church of The Message, in a strip mall on the edge of town.

I had never really met him before. I knew of him, but little about him, save that he was seventeen years my senior, that there were rumors of a rough past, and that he had crosses crudely tattooed on the webbing between thumb and index finger, on both hands.

His was not the church we attended; the choice of both minister and location was odd.

Moreover, this was a matter which, apparently, had been pre-arranged.

As had my betrothal, The Reverend informed me, graveside.

"It was your Father's wish that you be given to me," he said quietly.

And so I was.

 

Chapter Two

The Wait

 

It took another two and a half years for Mother to die, during which time I continued to live with her-my betrothal an incontrovertible fact which, in the beginning and somewhat confusingly, changed my life not at all.

She regularly strapped me-taking over for Father-and flushed me, until the last few weeks of her life.

Once I'd made my permanent return home from college, there was little in the way of pretense or justification; punishment became what it had always really been: a ritual, a rhythm, a tradition.

I could have resisted.

I suppose.

I just don't quite see how.

When, on rare occasion, I hesitated?

If I made an expression, or the smallest sound, suggestive of disapproval?

Were Mother's bony, commanding, finger, pointing in the direction of the bathroom, not heeded with alacrity bordering on enthusiasm and gratitude?

She would often grab me by my ear; she would swish the strap in the air impatiently; she would mutter about cutting a switch, as though she might drive me down the hallway like a recalcitrant cow to the milking parlor.

There was also the addition, post-engagement, of a new ritual: Friday night dinners for which The Reverend would join us, at what was now Mother's home, which shifted my punishment-the weekly "maintenance" ration of discipline, at any rate-from bed time to late afternoon.

This "new tradition" gave an odd twitch and spark to a period that I have trouble properly naming.

You couldn't call it courtship; we were already engaged.

There was nothing in the way of wooing; what would have been the point?

The Reverend would give me a perfunctory peck on the cheek, on arrival and on departure; the first time he kissed me on the lips was at the altar.

I called him "Sir," always and only, which I continue to do to this day-reserving his title for conversations with others.

I waited for him dutifully on the front porch, no matter the weather.

And I spent almost every dinner in close to full flush, trying not to squirm when I was seated-rather than serving-the heat of the punishment, always dispensed moments before his arrival, making my buttocks sting as I sat gingerly on, tried not to hover above, the hard, wooden, dining room chair, the greasy ring between atwitch with the effort of controlling my watery bowels.

"She's looking very much in the pink today," The Reverend would joke dryly, now and then, speaking-as he often did-about me, rather than to me; whether he suspected-or simply knew-the reason for my coloration was never clear to me.

"She's excited to see you, Sir," Mother would murmur, always more respectful and deferential to him than she had ever been to Father.

"And I her," he would respond somberly. "Of course."

Perhaps he did not notice how this assertion infallibly made Mother purse her lips, either in skepticism or disapproval; perhaps he chose not to notice.

"Well," she would say, "I'm not long for this earth. She'll be yours soon enough."

"She is already mine," The Reverend would say, gazing at me, eyes and expression flat, "always and eternally. Where she is, for the moment, housed makes no difference. Isn't that right?" he would prompt me.

"Yes, Sir," I would murmur, blushing hotter than ever, my heart hammering in my chest, that greasy and sore ring of muscle aflutter.