Chapter 23-1
Dad Tells All
Part 2
I did not need much as I stuffed some clothes into my backpack, just a pair of shorts, a shirt, and my sneakers as well as a pair of boxers and socks. Mom made a comment about their compromise for keeping me a whole extra week. That she and my adoptive parents had decided she would be taking me to and from school on Thursday and Friday. So, I wouldn't miss anything because I would be going to a new school and had tons of paperwork to do as well as register for my extracurricular activities under my new Rothwell name. I enjoy swimming, Gymnastics, and kickboxing with an add-on for Karate to earn my yellow belt, something I have wanted to do for a very long time.
In some ways, I was excited to go back to school, mostly because I would be getting my driver's license in the spring. I liked doing my extracurricular activities regardless of whether my father found them immoral because boys only wear a pair of shorts and go barefoot and shirtless. Mostly I think it is because he hates knowing that, that the longer I participate, the better shape I'd be in to kick his ass any day of the week.
Realizing he was not as tough anymore and I was not a little kid anymore where he always had the advantage over me. Plus, my mother was part of his tag team to beat the crap out of me and Aaron, now he no longer has her, and I am capable of defending myself. I am not sorry about it regardless of how hard I have to work to maintain those capabilities when every time I go on a home-visit; he is there always trying to kill me.
Being a nudist has its advantages, besides a great tan. My clothes are always staying newer unless I have outgrown them. My adoptive Mom had planned to buy me new clothes because I had a growth spurt over the summer, but now my mother was filling in. I can guarantee they won't be secondhand.
So, the first thing they had to decide was that Greg, Chad, Cindy, and I, as well as each of our mothers, were planning to take us all shopping on Monday after Greg and I put in our hours at Mr. Stringham's store. My Rothwell Mom invited them all to our house in Highland for dinner afterward. I did not think that was a good idea because of Shawn and Arthur, even more so when they were spending the night with us as well instead of making the long drive back.
We had just arrived when Jody pulled up to the driveway with Dave, wearing a very attractive red dress that showed off her figure and those breasts that Greg and I liked very much. With a red lace bra that barely peeked through as she cupped her breasts showing them off and ran her hands down her dress. She wore red fishnet stockings that went all the way down to red high heels. She gave me and Greg a silly grin, asking us if we liked what we saw. Giving us each a kiss as she brought her arms around our butts to give us each of them a little squeeze.
She pouted that she was hoping to see us naked, but she whispered that she was looking forward to ripping our clothes off. I did not ask Dave if he minded if she did or had sex with us, knowing he was all in for having a good time. Yet I felt terrible about what Dad was going to tell everyone and really, really hoped it wouldn't spoil our good time. I cursed Shawn and Arthur inwardly as Greg opened the door for Jody and my mother.
Dad had us all take a seat, finding plenty of chairs for all of us borrowed from the kitchen table. Jody and Dave gave a strange look, noting that everyone was fully dressed. Which was very unlike us considering that at home, my mother's house everyone was usually naked. Even more so, all of us wearing shoes and socks, Dad waited as everyone took a seat.
Dad seemed nervous about it, considering he had not told them about the shaming ritual. Dad said. "Greg and Eric's mother and his Grandmother only know what I know about what Shawn and Arthur had done. Nothing more, not even Greg's parents knew the full story and did not really want to discuss it with them, but it seemed I would have no choice because Greg, Chad, and Cindy would be visiting my Rothwell home, which meant that they will see Shawn and Arthur the second they arrive. They can't stay locked in their room forever. Chores still have to be done, regardless."
My adoptive Mom took my Dad's hand, giving him the courage to tell them everything. Dad sighed and said. "When I was eight years old, my father raped me. I am not talking about masturbating me or doing me oral or kissing me. My mother and my father had been doing that since the day I was born with all my brothers and sisters, and it was quite common to do those things being raised as a nudist. In fact, it brought us closer than friends and family.
We did not have an open relationship where we would talk openly and not hide secrets from each other. I only had that with my mother, but she passed away when I was seven from childbirth, having both her and the baby die before they could save either of them on the way to the hospital.
"At first, I thought it was a new thing my father wanted us to do as a new game, but it hurt really bad and we bled a lot when he put his penis inside our butts telling us we will like it, now that we were old enough to have sex together. That it won't hurt anymore once we get used to it.
I asked other boys my age if their fathers did the same to them. They looked horrified, and I knew that this was not what fathers should do to their children. Stimulate them yes, but not have sex with them. I asked other fathers in the community and a couple of doctors and clergymen of our church. When I brought it up, they brought my father in to question him. He lied to their faces and said he never touched us in that way.
"When we got home, he would beat us for telling our family secrets. He started to drink and became angrier, and when he did, he would force us to have sex with him. First, it was just me and my older brother, then it was my friends, then my sister. He would stop when he sobered up and apologize only to do it again.
"Finally, someone believed us, but by that time I had turned ten and my older brother was sixteen and my sister had moved out and left the community and we never saw her again until I had kids of my own and in my late thirties. They sent my father to a hospital for drunks, like a rehab center, and we both moved in with relatives. Unlike my father, they did not have sex with us but only stimulated us.
The only sex they had was with each other and other parents who wanted an open relationship where they could share each other. I did not understand why until I was much older. We were just grateful that we weren't being sexually abused anymore by our father and things were good like they were with my mother. We were living a normal life.
"It was nearly a year when he came back home and six months later, we were sent back to live with him with a clean bill of health. We had thought he wouldn't do it again because he stopped drinking, but we were wrong. It got worse, not better. He had a taste for it and liked it, but this time people knew about it. So, he moved us further away from the community in the middle of the night, knowing they were coming for him and would take us away. He drugged us just enough to make us compliant and unable to fight back.
"We lived on the outside of the community and from their laws, we were outcasts because of what my father had done. When my brother had his seventeenth birthday, he was considered a man in the state we lived in, and we waited for my father to fall asleep, and we ran away. Hoping to never see our father again. I married my wife Karen when I was eighteen, and we had our first child Kerry a year later, and Shane, our oldest boy, almost two years later. We joined the LDS church soon after and we were taught to forgive and come onto Christ. My father had been searching for us so he could apologize, saying he too had joined the church and wanted to be part of our family.
"We prayed a lot, asking for guidance, and even went to the temple. We had thought we had made the right decision to forgive him. By that time, we had Jody and Shawn and felt we needed to move back to the community. My father visited often and at first, there were no problems and his remorse seemed real. By that time, Shawn was seven.
My father, we had thought was on the up and up and had moved in with us. The community had forgiven him because he hadn't repeated his crimes over the last fifteen years. That anyone knew of, and the shame ritual started three to six years before their sins were forgiven. They are welcomed back into the community for first-time offenders that had chosen to go through it or had chosen death.
"How wrong we were. By the time Shawn was nine, we had come home early finding my father having sex with our son and three other boys the same age as Shawn days later. We had learned that this had been going on for two years under our very noses. Not once did Shawn come forward until we caught them in the act me and Mr. Rockwater my best friend and his wife." The law in the community that we lived in had very special punishments for sex crimes such as these. It is called the Shaming Ritual. Which is very strict and can be very deadly for the person found committing these crimes the second time.
"My father was a second offender and escaped the first time and because of that, he was killed publicly in the town square. They painted him in white salt and hung him in the sun for four days, but first, they beat him and broke nearly every bone in his body, only keeping him barely alive enough so he could suffer. On the last day of his fourth day, they castrated him and cut his penis off, and buried him alive in an unmarked grave. This ritual is only used for people who are caught twice performing the same crime when they are sixteen or older, if younger, they would be treated as a first offender. It is a rarity that this law is enforced but still exists even today.
"We moved away soon after, hoping to still save Shawn from experiencing that crime, knowing he was only a first offender. Were the Shaming Ritual is a little less violent but just as harsh? We did not agree with their laws, so we moved before we had to give Shawn up. Being a first offender, there would be a trial of their peers. To find out if they were the victim, or if they are now the person raping and molesting children. As well as having sex with their friends and family of the same sex and doing it in secret.
We were not talking, stimulating or masturbating, or kissing, all those things were allowed and were part of our community as part of sharing with each other. I am talking about what my father had done to me and my brothers and sisters having sex and forcing himself on us raping us.
"The ritual for the first offender wasn't death, nor did they beat you or break every bone in your body. It was shunning you; it was taking your rights away as a person. To the point, if it was your own child, you were not allowed to love them. They were dead to you but living with you. Until they earned that right, again, but it is a very harsh life. Because they had no friends, they had no family, they were there, but not there.
They were marked with a black star with black ink and a branding iron. To show they are being shamed as well as wear a shaming ritual robe like an open vest, shaved heads, and kept groomed that way over the first or second year.
"When they are home, they wore it as well as a girl's wig and sometimes clothing, to humiliate them because they liked having sex with the same sex and were treated as a girl. Each year they survived they would be marked on their shaming day with a small star that was placed in between the five points. When they reached their third star, they received a circle around them all. Stating they had been through the ritual and were now considered forgiven and were allowed back into the community." Dad passed around a picture of Dillon showing he had completed the shaming ritual, which was hard to see.
Dad continued. "During those three years, their parents and the community would judge them. If they were just a victim and were not the ones participating in the crime. Which they would be rewarded and become less harsh, like allowing them to become part of the family. They are given a test … like being allowed to have sex with the opposite sex. In hopes of either turning them around or finding out if they were truly the victim and they weren't guilty during those three years.
"Yet if they were not turned, or they were no longer the victim and had a taste of sexual perversion, then a new trial would be given… and if anyone that came forward or found that they had recommitted the crimes would consider a second offender and be put to death as one.
"Dillon, Eric's best friend and his first boyfriend, was a victim. He never once wanted to be a sex offender having sex with his own kind. Instead, he was rewarded and welcomed back, but the shaming star would always mark him and remind him and everyone he was with or lived with. That there was a chance that he could be and would commit the same crimes.
"Always having to prove himself for the rest of his life as long as he remained in the community. Other boys that were given the same option, most take their own life during their first year of the shaming. Others are caught repeating the same crime and put to death.
"Because we loved our son and we couldn't put him through it, so we chose the third choice. To leave the community and only visit, but Shawn would never be allowed to come until either the time expired or he went through the shaming ritual and stayed in the community and be judged accordingly.
During the time we lived there, I was drafted into the war effort and met a man named David Stringham. He was a man who could get anything and was one of the best medical soldiers I have ever met. He lived in a similar community and like our community; they too had the same laws to keep people from committing crimes of this nature.
"He had an idea about creating a place here in our state where we could live a secret life as a nudist. Maintain the principles it was based on, family and open relationship, but doing so in secret behind closed doors. I thought he was crazy at the time. Considering how the outside world felt about us sharing ourselves with our family and friends being a nudist, but the movement grew quickly. People too were looking for ways to bring ourselves closer together and as a family and to God.
"Other people came and found us. Most of them were people who had been shunned by either the church they went to or wanted to try new things. To keep their marriage strong and their children grounded from the world that was destroying the values we were teaching them. Having them turn to pornography, drugs, alcohol and prostitution, and other vices. That's how the Garden Club began and remained in secret because of the rules of membership." Mom and Dad passed around their cards so everyone could see them.
Dad said. "I am not here to tell you about the club today. I am telling you all this because of the contract I signed saying no secrets, and because when you come to my house as visitors, or I bring them here. I cannot hide the fact that Shawn and Arthur or in the process of the Shaming Ritual. They have been found guilty and would have been put to death if we lived in the community. We don't like the idea of killing young children, but I felt, and my wife and others felt that we had a small chance that we could still save them by putting them through the ritual, only using the rules and guidelines of a first offender.
"They have been marked. They had been judged by their peers and found guilty with evidence that I was willing to show you now, or when you come to our house, or anytime you want if feel we are being too hard on them. But consider this first before you judge us. Our three boys, Jared, Jason, and their baby brother Jonathan, had all been raped and sexually abused by Shawn, Arthur, and many of their friends over the last few years. Shawn did not rape Jody, but because of his hate and jealousy for her and our family. He helped his friends and another foster boy by playing a part in it, which he had been taking part in her rape.
"Shawn has served his time in jail for it but was released early because there wasn't enough evidence to say he was just as guilty as the other boy named Danny. Shawn would be in jail at this very moment for the sex crimes he committed and would be raped and killed in prison before his sixteenth birthday. Yet we love him and hope that by shaming him he will come back to us. We don't want to see him killed in prison. We want our son back, but if he can't be turned back, we will suffer for it. Even if it means his and Arthur's death.
"Linda, your Grandmother asked an important question about our son Eric and why we allow our boys to have sex now instead of waiting until they are married or have turned eighteen to make their own adult decisions. The reason is this. We do not want another boy of ours to become like Shawn and Arthur or the other boys we have had in our home over the years.
"All our boys were sexually active because of Shawn and them and what they had done to them. The only way to make sure that did not happen was to show them and let them have sex with as many women and girls as possible and as well and to the point that all they think about is girls and more girls. Instead of taking the chance that Shawn and his friends or anyone destroy that part of being with a girl and wanting to live in sin having sex with boys, raping boys, and girls, putting them all in already a full prison of sex offenders. That list keeps growing every day.
"Eric is not like the other boys we have taken in over the years. We missed judging him thinking he was because he had the same markings in his file: Physically abused most of his life, a runaway, a known troublemaker in the home, and mentally retarded, which was very untrue and has shown that time and time again. It even said he had turned to drugs and alcohol and liked boys a lot more than girls, and again that was untrue. Even his bad grades in school said he was just like all the other boys.
"When the truth was, his grades were only bad when he lived at home with you or in an abusive environment. Not everything was what it had seemed, and he worked his way into all our hearts. Wanted a home where people loved him, where he did not have one, because of you and your husband's greed of ownership, you made sure he would never have one. He has lost the Steeds because you refused to let him go. He lost the Downings because you wanted him to suffer your wrath of anger for him wanting to be happy.
"If it wasn't for your new lease on life. You would never see him again. We wanted him to have a home, but Shawn and Arthur were corrupting our way of life. Taking our values and making them dirty, making the love we have for all our boys seem inadequate. We had to do something; we wanted Eric to have what he always wanted. So, we trusted him with our secrets and waited to see if he too would choose our way of life or choose the dark path like the other boys, by throwing him into the sharks and seeing if they would eat him alive.
"Instead, he made quick friends, he became a hero, he became the person we had thought he was and more. He became a Rothwell and a nudist. He became a master of love that girls scream his name even now. He became a best friend and to Greg wanted the same things he has, and the same for Cindy and I have no doubt Chad as well. He is not gay. He has no desire to become like Shawn and Arthur or anyone like them. He is a person everyone looks up to, someone willing to share his love with everyone.
"I am proud of my son. But angry because he lied to me and his mother about the night his father tried to kill him, once more, which needs to stop. Because he did not trust us enough to make the right decision about the contract we had with his mother. He lied because he loved you and did not want to lose you. I would put him over my knee and tan his cute butt.
"I won't because he did so out of love. We have made a compromise to forget that ever happened, but again we're not here to discuss how proud we are of our boys. We are here to share our dark secrets, so there will never be any lies behind our closed doors. If you would allow me, my wife and I would like you to meet our very bad boys being held behind closed doors in a cell at a police station for their own protection."