The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss Read Online Free PDF Page A

of tech sergeant and departed for England to serve in the 615th Bombardment Squadron. By August 1944, he was a top gunner and engineer on a B-17 bomber flying over Europe and Germany.
    During that period, our mother worked in Oakland as a personal assistant (the term then was “secretary”) to Henry J. Kaiser, one of the iconic industrialists of the day, now remembered as the founder of Kaiser Aluminum, Kaiser Steel, the HMO Kaiser Permanente, and the philanthropic Kaiser Family Foundation. How she landed in the office and sometimes, literally, in the lap of Kaiser, I am not certain, but I fantasize that the comely young woman must have caught his eye at a company function staged for the benefit of the shipyard workers. Subsequent discreet enquiries would have revealed her to be fresh out of business school and eminently qualified in all the secretarial arts—typing, dictation, filing—as well as being quite easy on the eyes. Old Henry J. must have made an executive decision that she was just what he needed to give his office a little class, to say nothing of an efficient assistant. I have no idea if there was ever any real hanky-panky between them; I doubt it, but I do remember that Dad used to tease Mom about it. The fact is I think my parents were so much in love and enthralled with each other that there was no room for jealousy. Dad was a very lucky man to have our mother, and he knew it; they were in love right up until the day she died.
    After surviving his combat missions, our father returned and became an instructor at what I believe was the Army Air Field in Charleston, South Carolina. He mustered out of the service shortly after VE Day, 8 May 1945, when the war in Europe ended. After reuniting out East, my parents embarked on a road trip back to California. My mother’s job at Kaiser was waiting and my father expected to work at an insurance company in San Francisco. Their itinerary included a stop in Paonia, where, on the spur of the moment, they decided to stay. They temporarily moved in with Dad Kemp, in our mother’s childhood home, until they could build a house of their own.
    From my perspective, staying in Paonia was either the best or the worst decision they ever made. I have often speculated about how differently our lives might have been had they stuck to their plan and settled in the Bay Area. Upon reflection, I’d say it was probably a lucky turn of events, because it allowed us to grow up where we did. The perspective of age has helped me appreciate what a special place Paonia was then, and still is, though in our youth both Terence and I hated it and wanted nothing more than to escape, as eventually we did, each in our own way. Now I might consider expending almost equal effort to live there again, though the practicalities of life make it quite unlikely that will ever happen.
    One reason our parents suddenly decided to put down roots was tied to the fact that Mayme and her husband already had. Mayme, a homebody, was more timid and less adventurous than her older sister. After the business-training program in Grand Junction, she returned to Paonia and took a job at the Oliver Coal Company. There she met a young coal miner named Joe Abseck from Somerset, a small town just a few miles up the North Fork of the Gunnison River. Mayme kept an orderly house and an orderly life. During that era, women were supposed to find fulfillment in raising kids and being good homemakers, and most men would have been surprised if not offended to learn that a young housewife might have greater ambitions. Yet my mother and her sisters were all smart women—smart enough, I suspect, to let their men think that as husbands they were in charge.
    By the time Mayme married Joe Abseck in 1934, he and Joe McKenna, my father, were fast friends. I suspect they bonded in part over getting to double date the two prettiest girls in Paonia. Doubtless many of the young men in town were disappointed when Mayme became the first of