Safe Here in God’S Shadow

By June Judd

She was just a child the first time she heard the gentle, guiding voice of God, but that was just the beginning. God became a constant in her life, and she depended on Him to be there for her.
The author reminds us that God was therenot because she was good or holy but because she needed Him. She is no better than anyone else, and she is a sinner who deserves nothing. Safe Here in Gods Shadow is a love story, the story of a loving God and the story of love found because of Him.
This book is a reminder that life isnt without adversity but that God is there with us through good times and bad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514457818

June Judd

June Judd lives on Lake Conroe in Texas with her husband. They love spending time with their children, grandchildren, and friends on the lake. They also spend time traveling.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The Voice

The first time I heard what I believe was God's voice, I was six years old. My half brother, Derrick, nineteen years older than I, had been dead for two or maybe three weeks.

My mom had barely ventured out of bed since the funeral. She had hardly stopped crying through the night and sleeping through the day since the pies and casseroles stopped coming to the front door.

But that day Mom got up. She was sobbing, her face pasty white, her eyes red and swollen, her robe open at the top, showing too much flesh. The house, I'm sure, was a disaster, and while she didn't seem to notice it, she singled me out and began backing me into a corner.

It's your fault, she cried, shaking a fist at me, walking toward me. Derrick killed himself because of you. You never pick up your toys or your clothes, and he liked things neat and tidy. She broke down even more then, and both of us were crying.

She took a flowered hankie from the pocket of her robe and blew her nose before telling me how wretched I was, again.

My heart broke at her words, but then a voice that sounded like a thought---and yet it didn't sound like my thoughts at all, said my name.

June, listen, the voice said gently, firmly. You didn't cause your brother's death, and your mother doesn't mean what she's saying. She's just very sad because her son died. You can't believe what she's saying. It isn't true. Derrick isn't dead because of you.

I suddenly stopped crying and felt calmer, dropping down into the old, maroon overstuffed chair Mom had backed me into. Suddenly I knew I was going to be all right.

I never forgot that voice, and I never forgot that day. But it was years before I decided the voice was God's or, at the very least, that one of God's angels had spoken to me.

That voice changed who I would have become. If I had believed that I caused my brother's death, I truly would have been a broken child---not that I didn't have some dents and scratches here and there.

But also when you're six years old, everything is black and white, good or bad. And whoever spoke to me that day didn't judge my mom for her harsh words.

Whoever spoke to me seemed to know how much my mother was suffering and that she really wasn't thinking straight when she accused me of causing Derrick's death.

God didn't speak to me because I was good, holy, or worthy. God spoke only because I needed Him.

If it sounds to you like my mother was a terrible person, that isn't true. Maybe she was damaged or fragile, but she wasn't terrible. She was the eldest child in a first-generation Mormon family, born Betty Jean Schultz in 1912 to Zoe and Robert Schultz. They moved from Ohio to Utah. Her dad left the Methodist Church to become a Latter-day Saint, being baptized on their first anniversary.

I never met my maternal grandfather, but I know this about him: When my mom told my grandmother that her dad was touching her---I'm sure she didn't know the word molest---my grandmother slapped her across the face. Then she told Grandpa what Betty Jean had said, and he beat her with a razor strap.

I also know this about my grandpa: When he read in the Bible about circumcision, he told his four young sons that they were going to the circus. Instead he took them to be circumcised at the doctor's office. Roy, Joseph, Nephi, and Robert Jr. forever afterward joked, Well, boy, that was no circus.

There were twelve children born to Zoe and Robert, but only eight of the babies lived.

From the time she could walk, my mother had to help with her siblings, do dishes, cook, and put up with her father's inappropriate touching. It was no wonder that she got married at seventeen to her first husband, Chris, but she jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Chris played the banjo and sang in a band during nights, slept days, and took his bride to live with his parents, who thought their son could do no wrong.

Ten months after they were married, Chris Jr., also known as C. J., was born. That boy also could do no wrong in his paternal grandparents' eyes. Eleven months after C. J. was born, baby Derrick came along.

When my mom was expecting Derrick, her little brother Hank died of a stomach problem. Mom was nineteen years old at the time.

It was Mom's job to dress this toddler, who just a few days before had been Chris Jr.'s playmate. I remember her telling us many years later that it was like dressing a mannequin. His limbs were so stiff, and she tried not to look at his small, pale face, with his hair falling down over his forehead.

She made a coffin out of two cocoa crates, covering them with satin out of Zoe's fabric bin. (Grandma was a seamstress.)

As an adult, I think about how sensitive I was at nineteen and how overemotional I was when I was pregnant. I can't even fathom how my mother made it through those days after Hank's death.

I know she held on to C. J. as though he were her last connection to life, and she felt Derrick moving inside her like some kind of promise that she might survive the ordeal.

As she listened to her in-laws' criticisms, not having two extra nickels to her name, I know her heart must have been heavy.

Eventually, Betty Jean and Chris got their own house, but even then, it was next door to his parents, and the in-laws were the landlords. Once they had their own four walls, Chris Sr. drank even more and began to hit his wife. He pushed her down some stairs and knocked out some of her teeth.

Meanwhile, a son, Lance, and one daughter, Karen, came along. Sometimes Chris would bring home no paycheck because he drank it all away. On one occasion, Chris was beaten up and robbed on his way home from playing in the band at two o'clock in the morning.

When there was no food, Mom would send her kids to pick wild asparagus in the ditch or fruit off a neighbor's tree for dinner.

Mom's dad, Grandpa Robert, died young. He keeled over from a heart attack without any warning. Although there was much talk at his funeral of what a great man he'd been, I think there were those who knew a different side of the story.

As much out of need as anything, Grandma Zoe met and married a Mormon widower named George Wilson. He'd lost his wife, Mary, to lung cancer, although she'd never smoked a cigarette in her life. They introduced Betty Jean and Chris Jr. to George's son, Oliver.

Oliver had lost his wife and mother the same year. He was a driver for the colonel at the air base, and he often got called to work at odd hours. He had a daughter, Beth, and didn't always know what to do with her when he had to work, now that his wife had passed away.

Oliver made friends with Mom and Chris Sr. and hired Mom to check in on Beth when he was called to work without warning. (This was almost the first income Mom had ever made, although she had worked a short stint at the canning factory once for twenty cents an hour.)

Mom so respected Oliver that she tried several times to line him up with single women she knew. She felt he was such a nice man. (Many years later, I loved to tell the story to my friends that I had only one set of mismatched grandparents---my mother's mother and my father's father.)

By now, Mom had baby Ted. C. J. had grown into a red-haired, freckle-faced bully who picked on Derrick constantly. Derrick was soft-spoken, shy, and contemplative. Lance was coy and artistic. And Karen, as the only girl, was sweet, but she was a survivor.

One day Oliver came over to find everyone scattered to the wind. Derrick, for once in his young life, had gotten the best of C.J and shut him in the shed. Derrick had folded the metal latch over and stuck his finger in it while he bent over and looked for a stick. Meanwhile, C.J. rammed the door from the inside, mangling and breaking Derrick's pointer finger. Mom and Chris Sr. rushed Derrick to the doctor; they took the other children next door to the grandparents' house, borrowed the car, and left the house wide open.

By the time they got home, Oliver had changed the sticky oilcloth on the kitchen table, chopped firewood, stacked it by the stove, and swept the floor. He was whistling while he washed the dishes. In one short afternoon, Oliver had done more around the house than Chris Sr. had done in fourteen years of marriage.

Still, Mom kept trying to make her marriage work. It was a couple of more years before Oliver cornered Betty Jean and got an answer about the bruises and black eyes. It would be a couple of more years before Chris, in the middle of a fight, said to Betty Jean, I think you're in love with that red-faced b---d. And Mom, with her mouth open, realized she couldn't deny it. She knew she was indeed in love with Oliver Wilson.

The real breaking point for Mom came on the day Chris Sr. kicked in the bathroom door and came at her with a broken vodka bottle, trying to stab her while she was in the bathtub.

She knew then that she had to take her kids and leave. Oliver had always had a pocketful of money. But once he married Betty Jean and took on her five kids, he never had a dime again.

Between them, they had six kids, and they certainly didn't need any more. They didn't plan on having more children, but there weren't many birth control options in 1944. So one year after they were married, my sister Valerie was born. Mom didn't know much about biology, and she'd been so sure that, with her record, she'd been able to give my dad a son, but I think Dad got Ted as a little guy and considered him his boy anyway. The older kids, when they'd still lived with Chris Senior., had huddled behind the sofa while their dad beat up their mom and had some pretty deep psychological wounds.

Two and a half years after Valerie was born, my sister Lindsey came along. And two and a half years after Lindsey, I came along.

I was a big disappointment to Mom. She was having her tubes tied soon after I was born, putting an end to their personal population explosion. I had been her last chance to give my dad a boy.

My name, June, came for two reasons. First, I was born in June; and second, Mom's little sister June had died very young. But Mom never gave up on her cause that I should be a boy.

My two sisters had hair to their waist; there's even a picture of Valerie and Lindsey from behind, hair to their waist, and you can't tell them apart. Mom always had my hair cut short no matter how I begged for long tresses, and she regularly told me stories about girls who turned into boys: one while jumping into a swimming pool. She often asked me whether I had grown a male member, only believe me: she didn't word it that delicately.

I was nearly a grown woman before I realized I was configured no differently than any other female.

When Derrick took his life, Mom stopped cooking, cleaning, telling us when to bathe, and doing our hair: all the motherly things parents do. I think my sisters have memories of Mom baking bread, making homemade mac and cheese, vacuuming, and so forth. But I had none of that.

We didn't understand words like clinical depression. I lay in bed at night and heard my mother crying. Then I'd hear Dad, who didn't have the art of whispering, talking her through it, telling her she'd done just fine as a mother and that no one could have stopped the decision Derrick made. It was between him and God. Dad's voice was my lifeline and soothed me to sleep.

On top of losing Derrick and my mother who stopped functioning when I was just six years old, my brother Ted disappeared as well. He was there with us, crying over Derrick's death, and then he was gone. Since they were drowning in their grief, no one explained that he'd moved to Hawaii with C. J., who at that time was stationed there with the US Navy.

As a matter of fact, no one had even told us right away about how Derrick had died. Leaving us out wasn't on purpose, mind you. Beth and her husband were visiting with their two little girls. Valerie, Lindsey, and I were the girls' aunts, but to us those little girls felt like cousins.

We were playing in the yard on a beautiful July day, and a police car pulled up. The officers walked to the front door, and even from outside, we could hear Mom cry out. Then our half sister, Karen, and her husband, Charles, arrived. Karen was sobbing.

Finally, Lindsey went in the back screen door and asked Dad what had happened. He said Derrick had died. It was a day or two before we knew the whole story. Derrick had driven to Monte Cristo, a beautiful mountain area in Utah where we lived, and he ran a hose from his exhaust pipe to his car window. He carefully taped the windows so that no fresh air could get in. He died, stretched across the seat of his brand-new 1956 Ford. His shiny new car had plastic on the seats so they'd never get dirty.

Derrick had been a meticulous person. His shirts were always pressed at the laundry. He had three toothbrushes: one for morning, one for noon, and one for night. His bed was always made without a wrinkle, and he'd had a well-paying government job.

He hadn't left a suicide note.

As a little girl, I had strong opinions. Derrick got sad easily. His girlfriend had broken up with him, but he hadn't waited for the happy ending. He hadn't waited to see whether God had somebody better for him than the girl who left him. He killed himself on a day in July and didn't wait to see whether August held anything better.

I don't know what business I had being so opinionated or optimistic. It wasn't like anyone was reading to me every night and telling me stories with happy ever after endings.

Valerie, Lindsey, and I survived the best we could. Valerie was eleven when Derrick died. She had a very good friend Lucy, and she spent hours and hours at Lucy's house. Lucy's family allowed her to go camping and fishing with them, and she often spent weekends there and sometimes ate dinner with them.

Lucy's little sister, Nedra, was my friend, and I watched how she dressed to figure out how not to look like a fool, because Dad worked long hours, and Mom was AWOL and deeply depressed.

I know that Lindsey and I depended on each other to do everything.

Lindsey's fourth-grade teacher that fall told Mom and Dad they were making too much of Derrick's death. I wonder if she had ever lost a child.

Lindsey was having headaches so severe, she was vomiting. When my parents had Lindsey's eyes tested, they realized she needed glasses.

The Friday evening after she got her new glasses, Lindsey and I lay on the front lawn as the stars popped out in the black night sky. In awe Lindsey said, Oh, that's what everyone has been talking about! I felt tears burn my eyes as I held on to her arm, realizing that she'd never seen the stars before.

There was a phase when I was angry at Derrick so in childish fashion, felt he must be angry at me. His photo was in my parents' bedroom, and whenever I passed it, I stuck out my tongue at him. By opting out of life, he'd robbed me of my mother and destroyed our family.

All in all, we three girls were quite a mess, but we faced most things with our own strange sense of humor too. We had to so we could keep on going.

CHAPTER TWO

End of Innocence

When I was a tiny girl, my half sister Karen still lived at home. There are pictures of her carrying me around on one hip like her own personal baby doll. Karen grew up to be one of the kindest people I had ever known.

All my life, Beth was married and lived away, but she was fascinating to me.

My brother Ted was nice to me and one of my heroes. Valerie, Lindsey, and I were close. But the scars C. J., Lance, and Derrick bore, from we aren't sure what, were never healed.

Derrick couldn't face life, Chris Jr. was a brutal pedophile, bully, child abuser, and other things I don't know how to label. Lance also did some horrific things.

We will never know whether my mother's father molested those boys, or whether just watching their own father beat their mother left those wounds on them, or both, but these people were not okay.

During the summer I turned nine, Chris Jr. was living in Salt Lake City on sabbatical from the Navy and going to the University of Utah. His new wife, Janice, wasn't with him. C. J. and Janice would separate several times, and eventually years later, a judge told Janice that if she didn't get their two boys away from CJ, he would take Thomas and Derrick (Derrick was named for our brother) away from her.

C. J. would put on boxing gloves and beat those two boys up, make them stand at attention without food and water for hours, and do other forms of discipline that were perhaps suitable for the navy but not for young boys. It would be years before Janice knew what else he did to those vulnerable little boys.

That day, C. J. came to the house and told Mom he wanted to take me to his apartment overnight. We lived in a small town about thirty miles from his place. I told Mom and Dad I was sick and didn't want to go. I told them I felt bad; I needed a nap. I whined and I pleaded. They picked up on none of my cues. They put pajamas, a change of clothes, and a toothbrush in a paper bag and sent me on my way.

I don't remember much about the ride there except for a sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. C. J. had a basement apartment, and though it was tidy, it had books stacked on every chair. The only place to sit was his bed. I'm not sure where he intended for me to sleep. C. J. had said he was going to cook lunch, but when I took my shoes off and plopped on the bed, he was immediately next to me.

I was a little nine-year-old girl, and he was twenty-nine, six feet tall, and 240 pounds. It took him only seconds to peel off my clothes.

If anyone thinks for a moment that molestation is no big deal, let me tell you that it's humiliating and demeaning, and it strips the victim of self-worth.

I turned onto my stomach and bit the pillow with everything in me, holding onto the edge of the mattress. He said, softly at first and then louder, for me to turn over. I heard him unbuckle his belt and then unzip his pants. I knew very little about the facts of life, but I did know I was in terrible trouble, and it was suddenly a David-and-Goliath situation.

I fought for my life. I was drenched with sweat, and I scratched and bit him, but he knew better than to leave a mark on me.

Finally, after an exhausting fight, he stopped and stood a few feet from me, touching and stroking himself. I was afraid I would be sick to my stomach. Afterward, he walked to the bathroom and washed up with the door open. He told me to get dressed and said he was taking me home. I felt like I was in trouble and being scolded.

I dressed, gathered my paper bag, and followed him to his car. I was shaking all over---and I wasn't just shaking. My teeth were chattering, though it was a hot summer day. While we were driving, I looked out the window and not at him, my head against the cool glass.

Finally, he said, We have to talk about what happened back there.

I said, I don't know what you're talking about. I was asleep. I couldn't imagine anything worse than discussing that awful experience.

He threw back his head and started to laugh. He laughed harder and louder. He slapped his leg and wiped tears off his face. His laughter was humiliating, almost as horrible as being molested.

When we got to the house, C. J. went inside to talk to my parents. I know he told them some huge fabrication about me---how I'd done something wrong, so he wasn't going to have me as a houseguest. He would say not to bring it up, because he'd already disciplined me. Let's not make a big deal of it.

I sat on the front porch and told Lindsey what happened. I begged her not to tell anyone. She whispered to me, What did he do?

I told her, Took my panties off Touched me and unzipped his panties.

Uck! she said.

Sure, I should have told Mom and Dad.

If you ever wonder why children don't tell, it's because the situation makes them feel like they somehow caused it. It makes them feel dirty and unworthy, like the world's worst scum.

That day I'd worn my favorite blue-and-white-checkered shorts. After that day, I never wore them again. I rolled them up and hid them in the basement. They were a symbol of something so horrible that I can't begin to explain it.

Forever after, I thought, if I'd just cleared off a chair and hadn't sat on the bed, maybe it wouldn't have happened. I blamed myself.

Later that day C. J. took Valerie, Lindsey, and some kids from down the street swimming. I went too, but I stayed far away from my half-brother, C. J. All the chlorinated water in the world couldn't wash me clean. I felt filthy.

Years before that awful day, Lance tried to molest Lindsey, although I will say that Lance was a little more subtle than C. J. Lindsey told Mom and Dad. I'm sure Dad gave Lance a talking to, and we have to surmise that Lance mentioned it to C. J.

For a long time, Lance stayed away, but C. J. was horrible to Lindsey. He took us all out for ice cream but left Lindsey behind, standing on the sidewalk, crying. He called her a dirty, nasty little pig. He abused her psychologically.

One time one of our cats got locked in the upstairs bedroom and made a terrible mess. C. J. gave Lindsey rags and a bucket of soapy, hot water. He locked her in that room for hours, making her clean up that disgusting mess. She was just a little girl and didn't know where to begin. To this day she isn't a big cat fan.

Valerie and Lindsey don't remember C. J. ever molesting them, but our two half brothers groomed all of us. They fed us beer as little girls, told dirty jokes, and bought us gifts. Almost fifty-four years later, I know those awful jokes I didn't understand then, jokes that confused me terribly.

As early as my kindergarten class, we children were all sitting in a circle, talking. Suddenly, the teacher, Miss Tanner, grabbed me by one arm and pulled me from the group. She shook me until I thought my teeth would rattle from my head. Don't you ever, ever [do, say?] that again. Do you understand me, young lady?

Terrified, I told her, Yes, ma'am! But I had no idea what I'd said or done. When you live in an inappropriate environment, how do you know what is appropriate and what isn't?

C. J. studied hypnotism. I don't know how he used it to his favor. You can't hypnotize people and make them do something their conscious mind disapproves of, but you can, for instance, hypnotize them and tell them their clothes need washing and that this box is a washer. Then they need to take off their clothes and put them in this washer.

C. J. hypnotized Valerie and Lindsey's friends and made them believe they were riding a horse or eating popcorn at a movie, all in good fun. But he had Lindsey well trained and could hypnotize her in an instant by merely touching the bridge of her nose. I was a constant frustration toward him because I refused to be hypnotized.

When Derrick died, I began wetting the bed. The one thing Mom did in her depressed state was laundry. It seemed to be therapeutic for her. She didn't wash dishes, vacuum, or sweep. She didn't even cook after Derrick's suicide. But she'd go around, looking for clothes to wash. She didn't fold them or put them away, but she did wash them.

Just the same, she didn't appreciate having to strip my bed every morning to wash my sheets.

No one seemed to put two and two together that my brother's death had traumatized me. Still, Mom asked C. J. to hypnotize me. I had no part of it. My resistance frustrated him terribly.

C. J. was a chief in the navy, studying at the university. He talked down about anyone who did drugs or broke the law. He gained Mom and Dad's trust. That is what pedophiles do. They gain the parents' trust and respect, and they groom the children.

As far as Mom's emotional absence, I knew it wasn't normal. I went to my friend Nedra's house and saw her mother busy while dusting, cooking, and taking care of business. My friend Pam across the street wasn't allowed to come to my house very often, but I could go to hers. That showed good instincts on her parents' part.

I can remember inviting Nedra, Pam, and a boy named Patrick to my house for a party. Mom just happened to be up that day. They rang the bell and said they were here for the party, and Mom was aghast. She yelled at me, You little stink. What party?

I looked at her, thinking, You don't take care of me. What does it matter to you if I have a party? (I'm not proud of this, by the