Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
EBONY
Everyone imagines a cult and thinks sex orgies, crazed leader, multiple marriages.
Give them a medal—sometimes the initial assumption is the correct one.
My father wasn’t exactly creative in his madness.
Thankfully, my only role in the Voselle leadership was to read the scriptures and tend to the horses.
Adding child bride to my list of traumas might have been the one that tipped me over the edge.
My father was many things, but a child molestor wasn’t one of them, child abuser – however , he had that down to a fine art.
Tucking myself away in the stables, I experienced some of the most peaceful times of my life; no one to tell me what to do or how to act.
When people say animals are better than humans, believe them.
My father’s warped dreams of a self-serving commune would have been fine if he wasn’t also wildly psychotic—convincing his flock to literally drink a Kool-Aid spiked with barbiturates; murdering my mother, and then turning the gun on himself is a seventh birthday I’m sure to never forget.
All those people I had considered family who settled in the surrounding campsites that survived my father’s attempt at a Jonestown reckoning moved on pretty quickly once the police showed up.
Huddled in the cupboard under the stairs of our modest shack, I stayed exactly where my mother had hidden me as my father downed his seventh glass of homemade moonshine.
My father was particular, and he liked numerical cohesion wherever he could find it—my seventh birthday on the seventh day of the seventh month, seven candles on the cake my mother had spent hours making for me, his seventh drink, the seventh bullet he had selected from his holster pocket, each of the others neatly lined up on the fireplace to taunt me.
I was cursed from the moment I had been born into that life, and while I could say I escaped one hell, it wasn’t long before I was thrown headfirst into another.
I had arrived in the idyllic Hells Haven with its backdrop of sprawling hills and pathless country lanes, with holes in my shoes, highly medicated, severely malnourished, and wearing a patchwork dress of my mother’s that she had altered for me shortly before her death.
Hanging on the coattails of my social worker fresh out of college, I was a mumbling wreck, too traumatised to really understand what was happening.
I hadn’t expected a palace but was immediately charmed by the three-story house that I always thought leaned a little to the left.
With the black-painted Louvre shutters, quaint flower baskets filled with daisies on every window, the hand-painted rainbow stone pathway, and the kids’ swing set beneath the large oak tree, it felt idyllic to a child who had only known a life of discontent.
Mr and Mrs Turner appeared kind and welcoming, a ragtag of other kids just like me filling their house with a chaos that somewhat settled me. I was used to sharing my space, every kid was a cousin back in the commune. But I had quickly come to realise that the Turner house was different.
Over the months, I made it my business to learn everything I could about my new home, about the family that had taken me in, to assimilate the best I could to make them like me.
The Turner house was built on the boundaries of two neighbouring towns which meant half the kids went to one school, the other half to another, it even had two addresses; it was revered as being a house that brought two worlds together, helping children to find their forevers.
To anyone outside of the walls decorated with that god-awful floral paper and exhibiting Mr Turner’s art, this was a haven.
I learned quickly, you can pretty hell up with all the flowers and trinkets you want—it’s still hell.
My new foster parents were great actors, i’ll give them that.
The more time I spent there, the less of myself that remained, like a flower trying desperately to flourish in a dank basement, the only signs to life a dirt-covered window barely letting in the light, teasing my petals with the promise of more.
We were conditioned with what was an acceptable narrative to relay to others who got a little too curious.
How they were perceived by the community was important to them—because who would suspect the happily married young couple of abuse and torture?
Mr Turner liked to think of himself as an artist, owning a little shop in the town centre where he sold pieces that most often looked like he had haphazardly thrown paint cans at the canvas and slapped on a price sticker.
I said nothing and smiled dutifully as he sat us down around the dinner table and explained the inspiration for each piece, never understanding the grim wash of a sickly green tinge darkening the faces of some of the kids who refused to make eye contact with him.
“It’s pain, torture, innocence.” He had grinned proudly, his t-shirt splattered with the maroon paint dousing the canvas, the image created with blacks and deep oranges beneath visible most at the edges where the paint hadn’t quite reached.
“You need to look beyond the surface level, peel back the layer to truly discover what’s beneath.
” To my little brain, his cryptic speech sounded like a chapter pulled from a C.S.
Lewis book. Naive as I was, it took me a good five years to realise his poetic grandstanding was to taunt the other children at the table, the ones who had already bore witness to Mr Turners depravity.
It was after the accidental death of Lily Mayfair that I learned it wasn’t what we all saw at first glance with Mr Turner’s art that was important; it was the drawings of what he did to the kids under his care that lived beneath the splash of paint the world saw.
The sketched secrets hidden in plain sight.
Lily Mayfair walked herself right off the bell tower of the town’s church with a smile on her face, but it was Mr Turner and his complicit wife who were the ones who pushed her to it.
When I turned eleven, I had begun what Mr Turner called my ‘priming.’ The beginnings of womanhood changing my body in ways that garnered attention from my foster father that I didn’t like.
Living with Nathaniel Turner, you never knew what version of him you were going to get.
Perpetually held in limbo on a knife’s edge, waiting to see what personality greeted you before bed.
I wasn’t stupid enough to go against the Turners; they had made it clear what we could expect if we brought the law to their door. Lily was a cautionary tale for every kid that got a little combatively bold.
I did the next best thing; I found twin souls who helped me to forget my life in the Turner house, for the brief time I got to spend with them.
Two scruffy boys who worked on the neighbouring farms three streets away from my foster home.
Their dreams of one day owning their own ranch, grafting during the day and working on their art of an evening by the open fire under the stars almost to good to be true.
I don’t think they realised how magical that had sounded to me.
The day our lives intertwined, I had been swimming in the lake behind their property.
I had stopped showering at home, not entirely convinced that Nathaniel hadn’t rigged the bathrooms with cameras, like he had the rest of the house.
I’d shower at school or the local gym, but on this particular day, I felt like an open-air swim would do me a world of good.
At the fork in the road where I’d usually turn left towards home, I decided to turn right.
Hungry for an unknown adventure. I had just received a D on my maths quiz, and I knew the second my foster parents found out, I would pay the price for the failing grade.
I had an image to uphold. I audibly gasped and dropped my backpack as the lane opened up into a clearing that looked like an oasis, bursts of sunlight filtering in through the canopy of tall trees surrounding the clear blue stretch of water, the silence only broken by the lapping of the water against the shore.
The air was crisp and cool, the scent of fresh herby beef stew dancing on the breeze and making my belly grumble.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a homecooked meal from scratch.
I wanted to get lost in the moment of serenity this place afforded me, before I was summoned back to the madness at home, that I knew I’d inevitably have to face.
I must have swum out and floated there for an hour, letting the current push and pull me wherever it wanted to.
A rustling in the trees and retreating footsteps snapping twigs as they hurried back around towards the dilapidated barn, was what had me rushing out of the water, not knowing who it was that stalked around in the forest unseen.
My initial panic was that Mr Turner had found me—or worse, one of my foster siblings who could run home and tell on me to ensure they were clear for a beating, for tonight at least. But I quickly realised it was someone else, two someones I’d later learn.
Hanging from the tree was a freshy laundered towel, with the name Caleb handstitched into one corner.
It would be the first of many instances where those boys cared for me.