When I was a young-un, growing up in the mountains of Western North Carolina, I whiled my evenings away in front of the TV, and my daytimes in long hours of fantasy. My family was dysfunctional and I longed for the sense of love and belonging that we weren't blessed with. My thoughts were most strongly captured by stories of families, especially renegade families who hung together no matter what: The Addams Family, The Cartwrights, Robinhood and his Merry Men, The Waltons...

Me and John Boy (Alone on Walton Mountain)

© Gavin Dillard

They say that it is our first love that we carry with us all of our lives. That must be true, for I have never forgotten John Boy, nor the tenderness and joyful abandon that I experienced in my brief sojourn in his hands, not so many years ago.

It was the end of the summer when the circus set its stakes outside a small town in the mountains of Western North Carolina. It was just across a small valley from a lovely farm at the foot of a great stony mountain known as Walton Mountain.

I was a part of that circus then. My momma had been a trapeze girl before she took off with a fella she met after the show one day in Louisville, Kentucky, leaving me to the care of the circus management. They kept me on - nobody could calm the elephants like I could, even at that early age of nine years. But I was somewhere around thirteen when we drove the horses, the elephants, and all our rigs into the Great Smoky Mountains.

It was a rough life, the circus, but it was the only one I had ever known. There weren't any other children my age but I ended up spending most of my time with the tent boys, who were all older and had dirty and rough hands from pulling on ropes and wielding hammers. I often got struck by those hands, and I have to admit that my mouth could spew forth some pretty adult words when I was pushed up against the wall.

On this particular day I had told the wrong person that he should eat all the elephants' poop and die an agonizing death. His name was Lester and he grabbed me by my shirt and smacked me across the face. Two of his stooges came up beside him and they all began spitting on me and shoving their filthy fingers into my ribs.

"One of these days you're gonna die, you little fairy, and today just might be that day."

I took an opportunity to kick my left knee up between Lester's legs and that was my undoing. I ended up yanked out into the nearby woods, a nasty handkerchief pushed half down my throat, and tied up to the lower limbs of a small oak tree. Them boys had wrangled my clothes off and they all had their fun with me until my bottom felt like my whole insides had come out through it. They had kicked and bruised me till I was lucky to have all my bones left intact. I went unconscious and just hung there like a naked dummy for God and anybody to see.

In fact it was the sound of voices that brought me back to. There were a couple of children's voices, and that of a young man, his voice still crackling with fresh manhood.

"John Boy!" the girl's voice gasped.

And the young man's voice said, "Mary Ellen, just you take Jim Bob home right now!"

"But John Boy..."

"You do as I say! Tell Pa I'm right behind you if he sees you, you here? I'm not gonna tell you again. Go!"

I heard their footsteps disappear into the leaves when I first felt a warm hand on the back of my shoulder. He pulled the handkerchief out of my mouth and touched my forehead as if looking for a fever. "You alright there, Boy?"

"Yeah," I said, "I'm okay." But I was trembling like I'd explode.

"Who did this to you, Boy?"

"The tent boys did it. I didn't do nothin'. They did it to me. I didn't..."

"There doesn't seem to be anybody around now, Boy," he said in a warm and comforting way. "I'm going to untie you."

I felt his breath hot on the back of my neck as he reached over my head and chopped at the ropes with a pen knife. His left hand cupped my waist as my one hand fell back and he worked on the other. Then I dropped back against his chest and the flannel of his arms swept up under my own arms and held me there like a spineless scarecrow.

"Can you stand up?" he said.

"I hurt, Mister, and I'm cold." I was shaking like a leaf in an autumn storm. Maybe from the cold; maybe from something else. "I'll be just fine," I said, but I choked on the words and began to weep.

John Boy dropped down to the ground with me and with his spit on a handkerchief began to wash off some of the blood on my face and arms.

"What's your name, Boy?" he asked in the kindest way I could ever imagine. "You belong to the circus?"

"My name's Gavin," I said, "but everyone calls me just Gav. And no, I don't belong to the circus. Not no more I don't."

"Well then come on home with me. There's a creek on the way and we can clean you up better. These must be your pants," he said, handing me the wadded up pair of corduroys, "don't see any shirt, but you can wear my jacket back, I'm plenty warm enough."

I tried to say thank you but the words just didn't come out. Instead I followed right behind him like a puppy that's been fed a scrap from a stranger.

Because John Boy was becoming a man, his pa let him set up his own private quarters in what looked like it had been an old smokehouse. It had a narrow bed with a steel frame and lots of bright-colored quilts. The rest of the room was bare except for a bureau for his clothes, a single wooden chair, and a picture of Jesus with a big red heart on his chest circled with thorns.

"You can roll these up," he said with a slightly crooked grin, handing me a pair of fresh trousers and a green plaid woolen shirt. "Can't go in for dinner looking like you've been shoveling the horses, now can you?"

"Elephants," I said.

"You say what?" He smiled big and I could see what pretty hay-colored hair he had, soft like a doll's, and a long square jaw that had some patches of a new shaved-off beard. I reckon John Boy was about sixteen, and he was a man indeed.

"I work the elephants," I explained, "but I don't do that anymore."

I could never imagine a family of people accepting me like the Walton's did. John Boy just said I'd been in some trouble at the circus, and I explained that my ma was gone and I had no pa. Mrs. Walton said that I could stay out with John Boy just as long as was needed and we'd talk about work and school later. I was encouraged—no, directed—to eat until I thought my stomach would bust at the seams. I had never had such fine food before, and though I was afraid to talk much, everyone acted like they had known me since I was a little boy.

Later that night I asked John Boy where I was to sleep and he said with him, if I didn't mind holding on tight on the small mattress. I started to get in bed with all my clothes on, but John Boy, laughing, said that it was bad luck to sleep in one's clothes, that I had to get naked and that we had lots of blankets to keep away the autumn chill. Just before he blew out the lamp I saw his long white torso glowing like a torch, and at the bottom, where his business was, there were golden feathers like one would see on the wings of an angel in a picture. I glanced up into Jesus' bleeding heart, and then it was dark and two warm arms pulled me into the mattress and covered us with a weight of blankets.

"I know you've been hurt," John Boy said, "but you're as safe a clam tonight."

"Alls that hurts right now is my belly from all that fine dinner." We both laughed like children and his breath was all over my face in the blackness. I could feel his lips on my chest, and then my cheek, and then my forehead. I froze in silence and presently his lips were upon my own and we stayed like that for a long long time, and he moved his body directly on top of mine and the mattress surrounded me and I cried again.

"Am I hurting you?" he asked.

"No, John Boy, I like this. And I can feel that you're excited down there. And I want you to do to me what you want to do to me."

"I don't want to hurt you anymore," he said in a voice that broke. "You've been hurt enough. This can wait, Gav."

"You won't hurt me, John Boy. You won't hurt me at all. I swear. I want you to do for yourself." And he kissed me some more until we had maneuvered my legs up on either side of his waist and he put it inside me.

"Gav, I..."

"John Boy, you saved my life. I'd do anything for you. You feel good inside me. I'm not afraid of anything now."

"I love you, Gav."

It did hurt me. But I didn't mind the pain and the darkness concealed my winces. And I could feel it when his body went limp and collapsed on top of mine. Our faces were cheek-to-cheek and his heavy breathing sounded like a hurricane in my right ear.

"Good night, John Boy."

He did it like that on top of me every night for five nights. I wouldn't've said no for the world. In the mornings we'd get up with the chickens and I'd help John Boy tend to the birds and let the goats and the cows out to the pasture. Granny'd have eggs and biscuits ready just as soon as we were through, and we'd pack the extra biscuits up with some hard cheese and carrot sticks to take off for long hikes in the woods atop Walton Mountain.

On our second trip up the side of the rockiest arm of the mountain, John Boy seemed as though he was brooding. His eyebrows, which met together over his nose, were deep and furrowed with thought.

"You okay, John Boy?" I asked.

He stopped me and took both my hands into his. His eyes were the color of the poplar trees behind him and I could see the mole on his chin tremble ever so slightly.

"I promise," he said, "that I will never let anybody treat you like that again. I swear to you."

"I love you, John Boy," was all I could say, and I broke down crying again. We sat long under a white pine tree looking out over the Walton farm and all the corn fields and cow pastures in the valley beyond. Somewhere off to the left, behind a steeple almost obscured by trees, were the bright yellow tops of the tents of the circus. "I'll never go back there," I thought, "John Boy will surely see to that."

On the morning of the sixth day we were lying in each other's arms. We had already done the chores and eaten breakfast, but snuck back to the shed, giggling, and fell down on the crunchy hay mattress. Already I could smell that warm daytime smell of this man that I was getting so used to. He was kissing me along the collar bones beneath my chin when of a sudden he perked up his head and told me to Shhh!

"What is it, John Boy?"

Then I heard what he heard. Some men's voices approaching the yard, and the voice of Mr. Walton saying Howdy, and asking the men what he could do for them.

John Boy was peeking through the slit of the door when I heard something about a missing boy, and the mention of my name.

"Just you wait here, Gav," John Boy said, and he went out into the courtyard to be with his pa.

I never saw John Boy or Walton Mountain again. I shimmied through the small window over the bureau against the back wall and down into a poison ivy patch. I started running through the goat field and never even looked over my shoulder until I had reached the woods and run so far that only poplars and silence surrounded me. It was two days of creek water and wormy walnuts bashed open on rocks for me, until I eventually came to a railroad track, hopping on the slow-moving train that wouldn't stop until we were clear out of Tennessee and into Arkansas.

John Boy must be married by now and have his own brood. I never wrote because I frankly never even knew the name of the town we were in. Somewhere in the mountains of Western North Carolina was all I knew. I knew I'd never go back there or see John Boy again. But there ain't been a day I haven't thought about him or smelled his breath in my face when all the lights were off.