All Right I'll Do It

"Alright I'll do it but you promise you will never tell or bring this up again?"

It was spring of 1970 and I had just turned eighteen a week earlier. My last year at Reidel High, located in a small northwestern town Nowhere USA with a Population of 2,700 and far away from the anywhere else Reidel had a national forest and farmland surrounding it. The high school had one hundred attendants with a graduating class of nine girls and sixteen boys. Most of the seniors had turned eighteen in the spring, which meant most of us had been conceived in late summer.

Unlike the other young men in my class I was small. Where the other boys ranged from skinny tall to immensely large I was barely 5'6" and weighed 125 pounds. So, as you can guess, I was often bullied during my school years. My Dad was the local pastor and an emasculated husband. My mother was a unhappy since she had thought she deserved more.

This fateful day, when I uttered those words, my parents were away with my fourteen-year-old sister. They were three hundred miles away. It was spring break and they had gone to a parish run by an old friend of Dad's. They left me alone since they knew I wouldn't do anything wrong and could take care of myself. But also because his friend had only one child, also a fourteen-year-old girl and the house three bedrooms like our home. So there really wasn't any room for me and I was more then happy to spend the week at home alone.

Our modest ranch house was on the out skirt of town where the small church was located as well. Dad had built the house away from the church along a winding dirt road. The national forest abutted the rear of the house. Trees surrounded the land between the house and the church. If you didn't know a house was back there you may not ever find it. The only visible entrance to the winding dirt road was at the very back of the parishioner parking lot. An opening in the fenced area was the entrance to the small dirt road surrounded by brambles and rutted from rainfall. Dad wasn't much of an outdoorsman. The landscape company kept the church grounds cleared t but it all ended at that opening in the fence.