Savages (AHS: Roanoke)

Chapter 1

My life before all of this, uh, stuff happened, was near-perfect. Had its flaws, but I wouldn't change it for a thing. I lived in a small town called Barnwell in South Carolina. Barnwell County is near the border of Georgia – we had driven there a few times when I was young to vacation with my dad's family. He wasn't originally from Barnwell.

He also isn't with us anymore. He joined God when I was 8. I remember my little sister, Rebecca, was just a few months old. My dad had a massive heart attack at dinner. We thought he was choking on a thick piece of pork, but it was his heart. Gave out on him. We were scared to death, and the hospital couldn't save him.

My mom never remarried – she had to take an extra job, though. She made money at her full-time job as a manager at the grocery store, and then worked nights, too, to keep us afloat. Shortly after my dad's death, we got two dogs. Our whippet, we got within 3 months after his passing, was Scout. Then when I was 11, we got our beagle, Jack.

I always found it weird that we were white trash, pretty much, yet her family; well, extended family, was of old Southern money. She was related to one of Barnwell's most prominent families. All of the wealth belonged to a grumpy, crazy, misogynistic, sickeningly old-fashioned, 89-year old Christian fundamentalist in a wheelchair – my third cousin, Charles Loring.

I saw this man every Sunday. Every Sunday. My mom, sister and I were Christians, and went to church like pretty much everyone else in Barnwell. We had a Lutheran church, but we also had a fundamentalist one that Uncle Charlie (we 'affectionately' called him that) insisted we go to. Every Sunday was the same old, droning pastor giving sermons, expecting us to take it all in and literally to the tooth. I didn't believe EVERYTHING that was told to me, like the idea of the Earth being 2,000 years old or that women were made from the ribs of men.

My mom, sister and I only went to church to spend time with family, because the weekdays were really busy for us all. I had taken up a job as young as 13 doing manual labor. Family was more important than some guy blabbing about the fires of hell and the grace of God. Seeing Uncle Charlie, however, was literally the lowlight of the entire day.

We would head to his plantation, owned by my mother's family since the 1800s, after every service and have lunch. Uncle Charlie had maids as well as a live-in nurse to help him dress, bathe and what have you. I don't even want to know. What I do know, is that he had a stroke in the '90s, and it's prevented him from moving like normal. Hence the wheelchair. Rest is history.

He'd sit at the head of the table, literally a bag of wrinkles over a frail, thin, weak frame of bones and sinewy muscle, clad in a top-dollar suit and tie with his nurse sitting diagonally from him. I was toward the end; the more immediate you were related to Uncle Charlie, the closer you got to sit with him. Family rules. So I had some second-cousins and great-aunts and uncles sitting to my right, and younger extended family members to my left. This table in his dining room was massive, but even bigger was the sound of Uncle Charlie's non-rhotic, stammered drawl when he judged family members.

Before I left Barnwell, I remember our last family gathering. I remember what we ate, too – mashed potatoes, beef au-jus, and green peas.

"I think I'm getting' e'gaged soon," my first-cousin Josiah said as a part of casual conversation. While everyone was smiling with some older family members patting him on the back for congratulations, Uncle Charlie goes in and gives his (unwarranted) input.

"B-Better make sure she wholesome 'nd docile," he said strongly, his accent thick and nearly making my ears bleed. "Ephesians! Remember, ol' boy! As the church's s-subject to Christ, so also the wives oughta be t' the' husbands in everythin'!"