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Shadows
, a Gothic soap opera complete with werewolves and vampires. I fell madly in love with the resident Transylvanian, Barnabas Collins, whose tragic andnoble desire to resist his thirst for blood seemed to embody the human condition: in order to regain his soul, he must deny his body its pleasure.
    I T WASN’T UNTIL THE ARRIVAL of the new preacher and his family that I came to understand such visceral desire. By 1968, the year the Langs took over pastorship of our church, the last of my uncles had taken his wife and children and moved to the city. We claimed Brother and Sister Lang, their two sons and one daughter, as kin.
    There were long sessions of Bible study and sermons, midday suppers of fried deer meat and mashed potatoes, the grown-ups laughing and happy, the children wading the creek or hunting squirrels in the meadow. In the hours after evening service, I would sit in the parsonage stairway with Luke—at thirteen the preacher’s youngest son. Tall and lean, with blue eyes and full lips, he was handsome enough to turn any girl’s head, and in the feel of his hand stroking my knee, I came to an awareness of a truer temptation, too sweet not to be sin. Yet even as I prayed for forgiveness, I longed to be next to him, longed for the pleasure his closeness might bring.
    What little I knew of sex had come to me via school-yard rumors and from a single book my mother handed to me a few months before I turned twelve, although what it had to say about my rapidly maturing body I’d already learned, and what it had to say about intercourse was,
Don’t
. Mostly I heard about sex in the dire warnings against it. Kissing would lead to petting, and petting was going-too-far andmight lead to going-all-the-way. This I knew from the endless lectures on the subject given by our Sunday-school teachers and the preachers themselves. They seemed, in fact, obsessed with man and woman’s desire for each other, and I came to understand that all other wide and crooked roads led to this one intersection: the illicit coming together of the sexes outside the marriage bed. Drinking led to fornication and adultery, as did going to pool halls, bowling alleys, and movie theaters. Rock and roll was nothing more than an excuse to bump and grind: the beat—the hard-driving insistence of the drums and guitars, urging us back to our animal desires, our savage roots—told it all. Anything that throbbed or pulsed, shimmied in the darkness, was there for one reason and one reason only: to lure our souls away from Heaven, to fill the coffers of Hell.
    During those long Sundays of church and covered-dish socials and hours spent in the stairway with Luke, I never thought to question this truth. I believed that, should Christ return while I sat with the preacher’s son, his fingers brushing my thigh, I would be doomed. No matter how much my father had encouraged me to think for myself, I knew that to question moral law was to doubt, to doubt was a weakness in faith, and faith was everything. The answers were all there, in the King James Bible: “There hath no temptation taken you but that which is common to man.” I prayed that God give me strength to resist the new feelings flaring within me, feelings that I believed arose not from the physical maturation of my body or from my elemental need for Luke’s attention but from my ancestral transgression: it was Satan who whispered in my ear so that I in my weakness would takewith me this other soul, whose only excuse was the man’s natural and predictable passion for a woman made easy by sin.
    A T SCHOOL , in the aging brick building that smelled of sour wool and paste, I felt protected by the innocence of my peers, few of whom seemed yet aware of their own sure damnation. I prayed over my sack lunch while the other children nibbled their cheese sandwiches in teacher-imposed silence, yet I never felt marginalized by my habits and appearance. There were so few of us, each with his or her