Start with the happy ending. Then walk backwards, step by painful step, until you reach the dark heart of what the heroine has been fighting all along.
That’s the essence of “The Wind Spoke of Rain.”
And it’s also Milly Prothe’s life — sort of.
“The Wind Spoke of Rain” isn’t a biography. It’s a slim novel about Lindsey Campbell, a woman who was molested as a child and has spent years picking up the pieces again. But while parts of the story were invented, the key event comes from brutal truth.
Just like her main character, Prothe was molested at age three. Just like in the story, it was by a family friend. And in both the fictional world and the real one, it was years before anyone else knew.
“I was 23 before I told anyone,” said Prothe, who lives just northeast of Emporia. “I was hanging out laundry on a clothesline, out in the country, and a man drove by, slowed up and whistled at me. That vulnerability brought a wave of fear back and I had a panic attack.”
She told her husband soon afterward.
“He was very understanding,” said Prothe, who is now 53. “He was alarmed, but he was extremely understanding. Perhaps he suspected that there was something and this was verification.”
The book appears under the name Saren Eveninghawk — not out of a desire to hide what happened, but to separate the book from her other work. Prothe’s first book, “Come Under The Blue Umbrella” was a 55-page cookbook that called on its readers to rediscover the joy of really good food.
“I thought ‘Would someone want to read a novel by a cookbook writer?’” Prothe said.
The name Eveninghawk, she said, came from a vision quest she had once taken; Saren was a word she accidentally discovered in the dictionary that she liked the sound of.
If the two books do have anything in common, it may be a sense of joy. It’s a hard-earned joy in “The Wind Spoke of Rain” but no less real for all that. As Prothe’s hero grows, she eventually learns to have compassion for herself again and to draw joy from it. Again, that’s a journey Prothe made as well.
“For a long time, I didn’t hold any ill feelings toward the man that did this,” she said. “There is another phenomenon ... where you think ‘There must be something wrong with me to do that.’ So you have to step back and say ‘Oh, I need compassion — first for myself and then for everyone else involved.’”
The book is dedicated to a cousin who was also abused as a child. The cousin died at 23, possibly from suicide.
Several of Prothe’s poems appear in the book as well (One, called “Never So Beautiful,” she hopes to have become a song someday.) And not every memory she calls on is a painful one. Once, Prothe said, she was visiting a nursing home with her mother when a older woman appeared in a bright chenille robe.
“She scopes the room and says ‘You know, heaven’s a great place. But to get there, you’ve got to die, ‘cause if they let living people in, they’d mess it up,’” Prothe recalled. “I grabbed a pen and paper and wrote that down.”
It was a hard story to write at times, Prothe said. But it was also a therapeutic one.
“I’m trying to help my children with whatever they might be dealing with, and if they see I’ve been dealing with a tough thing ...” she started to say, before breaking off for a second to reflect.
“I get so much strength from reading about someone who’s overcome a personal problem,” she finally continued. “I’d like to be that source of strength for someone else.”
“The Wind Spoke of Rain” is available online and through the Town Crier bookstore.