The Second Rape of Dr. Emily Pershing - C9

Chapter 9

New Year’s Eve - 1971

There were no medical records of this meeting, but I recollect the event being it was New Year’s, and because this was the day Gabby and me really became friends.

Gabby’s new foster family, the Devereux’s, had invited me to their New Year’s Party at her asking. Mr. Pershing and I obliged, but only to stay for a short time. We have something of a tradition that would lead us to our own destination for the ringing in of the new year. I wanted to see Gabby again since her daddy’s arrest anyway.

The Devereux’s have a great little ranch right on Vernon Lake. It had been such a warm winter that this would likely be a great time to visit the lake in the evening. I found Gabby straight away. I should say, rather, that she found me. I still wasn’t sure about everything that had taken place the other day, and I wanted to get a few things answered. Hated feeling this way about anyone. Especially a young girl.

Never seen a child so in need of good, loving parents, but Gabby had none. She needed a mama more than anything right now, and Mrs. Devereux would not fill that role. Gabby had only been with them for about a week and already they’d made it clear that this arrangement would only be temporary. Turns out the Devereux’s prefer younger children to troubled teenagers.

Mr. Pershing headed off to discuss football with some of the other men while Gabby pulled me down toward the water to speak privately. There were four things Gabby told me that night that stick out in my mind today. First, she told me that nobody knew she was pregnant.

The pregnancy part I recollect because it was the most important thing on my mind. **There were a lot of responsibilities to get in line for a young mother-to-be, especially one in her situation. She asked me straight away if I’d told anyone about it. No. That was a real relief to her. **I said something like, “Look, you got a child on the way and there are a lot of things that need to happen starting real soon, and I’m willing to help you; but, first I need to know some things about what happened that night when you got brought into the hospital.”

*She took me by the hand the way a mother might take her daughter’s hand and she looked me straight in the eyes and said, “It aint his.” *“It aint whose?” *“My daddy’s. It aint his. My daddy may be a lot of things, and he is a sonofabitch and I’m glad he’s gettin’ his come-uppin’s, but don’t you think on him like that.” That didn’t seem, at first, to help much since she’d already said she wasn’t raped.

OK I said. Miss Gabby has a skill for saying things that don’t have anything to do with what you’re asking, but at the same time, she makes you think she answered your question just the same. One of the most likable young ladies I’ve ever met, which unfortunately, makes her very easy to believe. I asked her if she planned to tell the father of her baby that she was pregnant. She shied away from that and eventually said that she hadn’t figured out just how, or even if she was ever going to. Told her there were certain responsibilities a man has when something like this happens. Even if he’s a real SOB, a woman still has the right to have her child taken care of. *“Oh, he’s an SOB alright. He’s the worst kind of SOB,” she said. Told her I could help her if she decided to tell him. Left it at that.

The second thing she told me about was her life’s dream. She said when she was nine or ten, she had looked through a magazine and seen a picture of a beautiful tall waterfall surrounded by green trees and plants and things. It’s called Victoria Falls. She had no idea where it was, but that was where she was going someday. She said that when God created the Earth, he did it pretty quick. Just a day. But there are some places where he must have gone back later and made something real special. Victoria Falls was one of those special places.

Ever since she’d seen the pictures in that magazine, that was the place she’d go to in her mind when things got bad with her family. Apparently her Uncle Reb had also been abusive. Not just to her, but to his wife and sons too. Reb’s wife, Marion, had three sons: Tad, Will, and Robert who everybody called Big Buddy. Buddy was the youngest and still four years older than Gabby. It was after a particularly bad night of yelling and cursing that Tad had had enough. Reb had been drinking and took out a fair piece of his life’s frustration on Marion and Gabby. Tad was eighteen and more than a match for his daddy. The two wrestled until Reb was just too tired to go on. The next morning Tad drove Gabby to the cemetery. Showed her the old stick that marked her mother’s grave. They talked for a couple hours that morning.

Talked like they’d never really talked before. Drove her to her daddy’s place and had a word with him too. That was the last time she saw Tad.

Will was gone too. Gone off to find a better life. Only Buddy stayed with them there in Texas, they all called him Big Buddy, but Buddy wasn’t nobody’s friend. He took after his daddy, bullying people. Buddy learned from his daddy when he was little, that big people hurt little people, and eventually, Buddy got big, real big.

Between Big Buddy and Reb, Gabby told me she went to her special places in her mind many many times. She’d been to all kinds of magical places since she was just a little child, but when she saw Victoria Falls, it became a light at the end of the tunnel. This place was real, and someday, she would really go there. Until that day, she’d do her chores. They were hard, but not as bad as what came to her if she didn’t finish them. Sometimes, she got both anyway.

She told me she started getting into fights at school. She’d hadn’t been a bully like Buddy, but she quickly learned that when you can finally win a fight, there’s nothing you want to do more. Only difference between her and Buddy is, she didn’t start fights, she just finished them. The real trouble happened when a boy at school had picked on her one time too many. She said she beat him up pretty good and as she was hitting him, she was telling him he needs to go to his special place. She was crying for him, beating on him, and eventually she just sat there crying and holding onto him. For a lot of reasons, that boy was never quite the same.

That’s when she came back to Burr Ferry here in Vernon Parish to live with her daddy. The chores were just as hard, but the beatings weren’t nearly as often. Gabby said she’d rather take a good whooping sometimes though when her daddy talked to her the way he did. His words stung worse than Reb’s backhand any day. Told her she was worthless, just like her dead mother. She never got to know her mama like most kids do, but she loved her like nobody’s business just the same.

We talked for a good couple hours out by Vernon Lake. She told me an awful lot about herself that night. Things she’d been keeping inside all her life til she found somebody she could tell. I don’t know what exactly came over me, but I did some talking too.

Told her about when I was twenty-one going to school over in Austin. I don’t know for sure if it does any good to retell that story here, but in case it does, I’ll tell it. I was going to UT during the Spring of ’62. My daddy and his daddy before him are alumni of UT, so it was decided long before I was born that I would attend UT as well. I’m the oldest of five children in my family. That puts some pressure on me. My younger brother, Alvin, had been sent to Vietnam in January. That put pressure on the whole family.

In May, I took it upon myself to relieve some of those pressures. Alcohol was easy to come by and I had recently discovered what so many other people have discovered over the last decade, marijuana. Now, this night in May, a whole big bunch of people were at a party near campus and some of them decided we should all go up in the tower over at UT. Most of them went. They never even made it to the tower. I had self-diagnosed my condition as being unfit to travel by foot, so I stayed behind.

What happened in the following hours, I don’t recollect. All I remember is their faces. I’d gone numb. I knew something had happened. You can tell that much. What I didn’t know was who it happened with. I’d woken up on a couch downstairs from where we’d been partying. There were a few bodies laying around, but nobody I knew. My friends had all gone home.

A day of worry and regret went by and none of my friends knew anything about who I might have been with that night. It was the next day when the stories got round to my girlfriends. Turns out some guys were telling stories about a girl who had passed out Saturday night and a bunch of jocks had “run a train” on her. My girlfriend, Jamie, heard the story as some boys were laughing about it, not really believing that it was true. Jamie got scared and came to me. Told me what she’d heard.

All at once I started seeing the faces again, just as I remembered before, but knowing now what had happened, the faces became distorted and grotesque. I was mad. Scared and mad. We didn’t know for sure that this story was about me or if it was even true. Didn’t take much work to find out more about it. It was me alright. Jamie and me put so much thought into how to find out more information that after a while, it didn’t seem like this had anything to do with either one of us. It was research. By evening, we knew who was there, who did something, and who did nothing.

Couldn’t sleep that night. Tried, but just couldn’t. Kept seeing the faces in the dark. Next day Jamie and me went straight to the dean’s office with our lists and facts. On the way to the office, it hit me that I might be pregnant. Started crying as we walked. Jamie was wonderful, or at least she was just then. We went right up to the secretary’s desk and demanded to see the dean. She said we had to have an appointment. Jamie showed her what it was about and that got her to act. She called into the dean’s office and she explained that there had been a rape on campus. He was wonderful too… until he heard that it all actually happened in a house just outside of campus. It didn’t matter that they were students at the university, he ushered us out and told us to go to the police. There was nothing he could do.

I didn’t want to go to the police. It was all I could do to keep from running on back home. Jamie said she didn’t want to get involved with the police but that I should go ahead on and tell them what happened. I was scared to go at all and now I had to go alone. Couldn’t do it. Another night of faces. **Slept for some time though. Next morning I went to the police. Brought all the paperwork and decided to admit we were smoking marijuana and just face up.

They were no help at all. Told me if I carried this thing through, the families of those boys would make me look like a lying whore. Said I had been stoned and couldn’t prove anything at all. They’d make a laughing stock out of me and even if one of them admitted it, he’d have been drinking and smoking too so it wouldn’t matter anyway. Told me if I wanted to press charges, I could, but it wouldn’t make no difference in the end. That was all I cared to hear. Called my parents straight away after that. Told them everything. What I expected was a far cry from what I heard. My daddy told me to finish out the semester and then I could come home to figure out what to do. A girl expects her daddy to take care of her, not tell her to finish out the semester and we’ll deal with it later. I might have been pregnant for Pete’s sake! I was devastated.

I dropped out, moved out of the state and into the smallest community I could find. Packed up everything I could and hitch-hiked my way until I stopped in Rosepine, LA. A few weeks later after I missed my period, I bought a ticket to Beaumont and had an abortion. It wasn’t an “abortion-friendly” time or place, but under the circumstances, folks seemed to be willing to make an exception. That child growing inside me was a reminder of that horrible night, the days that followed, and the terrible things my own parents had said. I’m sure it was the right thing to do, but I still think about how old he would be, or she would be. Don’t think about it any more than that at all. Haven’t spoken to my parents since then either. Alvin come back from the war a couple years later. Chloe, my sister, told me he come back, but he wasn’t the same. It was good to hear that he was home just the same. Our brother, Jared, didn’t come back at all.

“That’s just awful,” Gabby told me. She had a neat way of looking at the world. She couldn’t understand why Jared had to die. People don’t always get along, but that don’t mean people should die just because other people can’t steer clear of one another. Hard to disagree with that. Gabby had it in her mind that if people can’t get along, they should work out their problems themselves rather than getting other folks killed who they don’t even know. I guess the world would be a different place if all the old men who run the governments did their own fighting. But that was the way Miss Gabby had it figured. Thinking back on it now, I guess that day at the lake was what got Gabby thinking. “You know what Miss Em? I think whenever all the bad stops, something good just has to come out of it. You watch and see. Something good just has to come out of all this bad.”

I guess Gabby felt a connection with me then. I know I did. She told me that there was a way to get out of the foster care system and that all she had to do was get her daddy to sign a piece of paper which would basically give her custody of herself. She asked me if that didn’t work if I’d think about adopting her for a year or so until she was 18 and would be off and out of the way. We cried and hugged like best friends and I told her yes. Of course yes. Told her anything you need, I’ll do whatever I can to make sure you get it. *She looked at me as kindly as anyone ever has before and said, “Yes, I believe you will.”

Turns out her daddy signed that paper anyhow, so it was all for naught, but I still appreciated the asking. I can’t tell you how much I’d like to have a daughter like Gabby. Anyway, that was the third thing she told me.

*The fourth was that the night she had come into the hospital, she had, in fact, been raped. Said she went home to her daddy afterward and he was drunk. She told him what happened and he beat her up for being a lying whore. *Said she ought not tell no one because everyone already thinks she’s just a whore—the way she acts. I knew every word she was going to say before she said it. Gabby didn’t want people to know anyhow. Said her Aunt Marion would take it too hard and be real ashamed. *So she wouldn’t say who done it, but she knew, and in time, she would tell. It had never occurred to the deputy or me that she might have been raped at one point, then beaten by her daddy later on. Maybe we just didn’t think of it because it’s really just too terrible to think of at all.

Told her tomorrow was a new day and a new year. Held onto her while she cried. *We walked back up toward the house and she told me, “Ms. Pershing, that’s the closest I’ve ever been to having a real mama, since my mama died, anyway.” In fact, from then on, folks just assumed we were mother and daughter. We certainly looked enough alike for it to be so. Must admit it made me proud. *She started laughing, too, and said, “With all this bawling, this is the closest I ever got to the falls too.”

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