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

daughters, Jody and Judy. Both “the twins,” as we called them, married local boys and have lived in the area their entire lives. Thanks to them, I am blessed with a loving family of cousins, nieces, and nephews, and still feel tied into the ancestral village where it all began. On my rare visits, I am welcomed with love like the proverbial prodigal son, which I suppose I am.
    I remember Mayme as a worrier, prone to fret over the littlest things. Snakes terrified her, as did thunderstorms. She’d read somewhere that she’d be safe in a car from lightning because cars were grounded. Accordingly, Mayme would get in her car and wait out storms in the garage. Her daughter Judy’s husband, Laddie, once joked that you could go into her refrigerator on any given day and reach for the half-and-half without looking because it had been in exactly the same place for thirty years.
    When I was a kid, the twins were a trip, of course. Born in 1941, they were teenagers by the mid-fifties, the early era of rock and roll—Buddy Holly, James Dean, Elvis. That was the strange, surrealistic decade when the country, still benumbed by the trauma of the war, was yearning to rediscover some semblance of normalcy, either unaware or in denial of the forces that were gathering beneath the surface, ready to burst into what American culture became in the sixties. But for the moment it was an innocent, if less than fully conscious, time.
    It must be exceedingly odd to be an “identical” twin, in that no one is really identical even if they have exactly the same genes. In the fifties, that fate had to be even more difficult, because society at the time placed such emphasis on conformity, on fitting in.
    That left Judy and Jody not only genetically identical, but faced with the expectation that they should be as identical as possible. They wore the same clothes, listened to the same music, dated the same boys—until finally Judy broke the pattern and fell in with Laddie, a James Dean type and perhaps Paonia’s first existentialist. He looked and dressed the part of a juvenile delinquent: flattop hairstyle, low-cut jeans, leather jacket, and large-buckled belt. It was all just an act. In reality he was something far more dangerous: a brooding, bookish intellectual, fond of reading Nietzsche and Heidegger, who kept such interests well concealed lest he reveal his true identity to his less brainy peers. Eventually Judy and Laddie married, and Laddie became the superintendent of schools in Delta County. He had radical ideas about education, which is to say, he sought to change a local system that in the past had stifled curiosity and the desire to learn. His reforms led to a remarkable crop of well-educated students who actually knew how to think. Unfortunately, all that happened in the eighties and nineties, long after Terence and I had a chance to benefit from the changes. But Laddie was a big influence on us in subtler ways. He was one of the few people in our youth who could actually hold his own with Terence, and in fact could beat him in most arguments. I think Terence was a little afraid of him, because he knew Laddie saw right through him. He remains one of the smartest and most perceptive people I’ve ever known.
    Our mother’s youngest sister, Tress, was destined to affect our lives as well. Like Mayme, she started at Paonia High a year early; the fact that one of her half-sisters was married to the town’s venerated football coach may have helped her pull some strings. After she graduated in 1938, Tress did not attend business college like her sisters; instead she moved to Delta and spent the summer with Hadie and Joe, my parents. She had earned a scholarship at the University of Colorado, if I recall, but couldn’t afford the other expenses. That fall she moved to Glendale, California and enrolled in junior college while living with her half-brother John—the oldest son of her father’s first family—and John’s wife. After the