Yes, you read that right. I am a rapist. The girl was only nine years old, which made it a clear-cut case of statutory rape in the State of North Carolina. Of course, I was only nine years old myself, which may or may not be considered an exculpatory factor, since all this took place in North Carolina, a state where the only generally recognized exculpatory factor is a white skin. But I am not a lawyer and that’s a different subject. I will just tell you what happened and you be the judge. On my ninth birthday my mother presented me with a book called “Where We Come From.” Whether she did this out of a desire as a dutiful parent to equip me with reliable information, or from a wish to avoid an embarrassing face-to-face conversation, I don’t know. I do not remember any family discussion of sex in any context at all before that time, or at any other time, for that matter. My parents, aside from being mostly worn out from the effort to recoup financially after having been floored by the Great Depression, never displayed much physical affection around the house. I do remember one occasion when they indulged in a few dance steps in each other’s arms in the living room before going out to a neighbor’s party. When father bent my mother backwards in her little flapper dress in a graceful tango move I was greatly embarrassed.

The book was slim. The text was dry and contained terms I had no familiarity with, like “gestation” and “fertilization.” Of course I knew about fertilizer, living on a farm, but I had a hard time connecting that with the diagrams in the book, which were hard to understand. The “female reproductive tract”, for example, was depicted as a Y-shaped arrangement that looked mostly like the willow branch old Mr. Simmons our local dowser had used when he was figuring where we should dig our well. Eggs, I was familiar with, since my first assigned chore every morning was to visit the henhouse and collect the night’s production, and I knew that if you left them under the hen instead of collecting them, they would eventually hatch chicks, but I had never associated this with the idea of a woman producing a baby. Sperm, shown as little teardrop-shapes with long tails and black dots that might have been eyes, were totally mysterious.

I puzzled over the book, and finally decided to seek help from my best friend, Barbara, who lived at the dairy farm up the road. She often helped me with my homework, although I would never have admitted this to any of my overalled barefoot buddies . For Barbara and me this was just another puzzle to be deciphered. We pored over it together, and finally figured out that something had to be transferred from my wee-wee to her wee-wee for her to start making a baby. Beyond that the process remained a mystery. But the start looked to be simple enough, and we decided to give it a try.

We swam together in the pond naked all summer, so our differing physical configurations were not news to either of us. How this transfer might be accomplished though was not obvious. But the idea of a baby that we would be able to play with — to dress and undress and tickle and try to persuade to laugh — was an irresistible attraction. Practical details, like what would we do with the baby when we got tired of playing with it, or how we would feed it, or where we could keep it so our parents wouldn’t find it, didn’t concern us. Sufficient unto the day… Nine-year-olds are not any bigger on foresight than tangerine-haired real estate barons. But that’s another subject and we need to stick to the story.

So we went up into the hayloft, took off our clothes, and tried out the transferring part. After a few attempts, the prospect of success became clearer, but while the game was enjoyable enough, even a repetition over several days running produced no sign of the baby, which was supposed to give notice of its pending arrival with a swelling of Barbara’s stomach and a kick or two. We went back to the book, and decided that our problem was that nothing had passed from me into her during our gymnastics. The only logical candidate was pee, so we tried that. In fact, we tried both peeing at the same time, just in case, which was messy but the hay would dry out long before the cows got it in the winter and we used to salt it anyway, so no harm done. We washed ourselves afterwards at the pump in the yard, which occasioned no comment since my mother always encouraged us to clean ourselves up after being outside to avoid tracking Carolina’s red clay onto her kitchen floor.

But still no baby, even after an interminable wait (a week?), so we gave up the attempt at parenthood in favor of trying to excavate a rabbit hole all the way down to where the rabbit must be. There were no consequences to the rabbit but there were unfortunate consequences to my mother’s kitchen floor, and we heard about them. The book got shuffled under my bed with the previous year’s dog-eared schoolbooks, and it was several more years before the memory turned up again on my calendar, this time not because of Barbara.

I trust that by now the statute of limitations in North Carolina has run out. I ran into Barbara years later, at the front door of her house in town where I had tracked her down and rang the bell. She remembered me, and she wasn’t embarrassed; just tired. There were three kids clinging to her knees, and a fourth perched on her hip. Her hair was in mostly a bun, with some loose strands. From the bulging belly under her bathrobe she had obviously figured out the proper procedure.

There is no moral to this story.