For years I didn’t realize why it was called furnace creek, even though I’d been uncovering bullets in the vicinity ever since I was old enough to explore the creek on my own. The bullets in question were misshapen slugs of Confederate vintage, buried in the flinty soil, scattered in the underbrush, and sometimes wedged between the rough-hewn slabs that made up the sides of that rocky mound built on the steep embankment overlooking the creek. Decades of creeping ivy and a skein of Virginia honeysuckle held the mound in place, frustrating any temptation that its roughened walls might harbor to tumble earthwards.....

That was the “furnace”—a towering outdoor stone oven in which molten lead had once been shaped into the slugs we kids showed off whenever we unearthed them from their recesses one hundred years later. It was one of the countless Civil War relics that haunted the mountains and valleys of Franklin County, reminders of a cause that, long since vanquished, stubbornly refused to vanish. But to my young fancy, the blackened furnace, hidden in the woods on the edge of town, looked more Egyptian than Confederate: it loomed in my childish imagination as a four-sided pyramid whose top had been whacked off twelve feet above the ground...

And whacking off was the fine art I learned there the summer of 1965, lying prone on those grim stones as furnace creek—taking its name from this landmark—churned and chortled through the forested landscape surrounding my perch In that initial onslaught of adolescence, as I was coming into my first and most vivid impressions of a wider world lying in wait just beyond the horizons of my vision, stealthy as a bobcat readying to pounce, I had found a haven for my solitary vice, so recently learned and so eagerly cultivated, on the top of that old relic. Stretched out on its summit and hidden by a shroud of greenery, visible only to unquiet jays hopping from branch to branch overhead, I found a refuge from the domestic surveillance that attended every creaking bedspring or locked bathroom door in my parents’ well-regulated house...

Here, dappled in sunlight that purified the act whose pleasure even then was obscurely related to the guilty suspicion that I ought not be doing what I so obviously wanted to do, I learned to bring myself to delirium with strokes as sensuous as those summer hours of daylight were long. That was the summer when semen still smelled astonishingly fresh, an elixir of unfathomed potency. That was the season of unmediated expectation, when the simple ecstasy of touch was all that was needed to bring me off again and again up in my leafy eyrie, my hideout from the world, ten-bike-minutes away from the chores I was avoiding at home...

How vividly I still remember the day I first came into a sense of my place in the world—that is, my place as something more culpable than a thirteen-year-old boy whose greatest misdeeds to date had been bullying his younger brother, tracking muddy prints across the newly waxed kitchen floor, neglecting his prayers. I was lying atop the furnace on that particularly blazing and humid July afternoon, shirtless and the elastic waistband of my shorts pushed to my knees....

It was that kind of hazy day when the air conspired to look as thick as it felt, so that the sweat generated by the humidity and compounded by my handy exertions swamped me in a lubricant as much a deterrent as a stimulus to satisfaction. My vision had gone white from staring at the sun straight overhead, and just as my pent-up labors verged on completion, a dark fist bore down on my chest, a rasping voice demanded.