Dolores Claiborne

I heard Selena jump outta bed, but I didn’t dare look around. I could have been in hot water if I’d done that —when he wanted to, he could be sneaky-fast. I’d been holdin the hatchet in my left hand, down to my side with my apron almost coverin it. And when Joe started to get up outta his chair, I brought it out and showed it to him. “If you don’t want this in your head, Joe, you better sit down again,” I said.

For a second I thought he was gonna get up anyway. If he had, that would have been the end of him right then, because I wasn’t kiddin. He seen it, too, and froze with his butt about five inches off the seat.

“Mommy?” Selena called from the doorway of her room.

“You go on back to bed, honey,” I says, not takin my eyes off Joe for a single second. “Your father n I’re havin a little discussion here.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Ayuh,” I says. “Isn’t it, Joe?”

“Uh-huh,” he says. “Right as rain.”

I heard her take a few steps back, but I didn’t hear the door of her room close for a little while —ten, maybe fifteen seconds—and I knew she was standin there and lookin at us. Joe stayed just like he was, with one hand on the arm of his chair and his butt hiked up offa the seat. Then we heard her door close, and that seemed to make Joe realize how foolish he must look, half in his seat and half out of it, with his other hand clapped over his ear and little clots of cream dribblin down the side of his face.

He sat all the way down and took his hand away. Both it and his ear were full of blood, but his hand wasn’t swellin up and his ear was. “Oh bitch, ain’t you gonna get a payback,” he says.

“Am I?” I told him. “Well then, you better remember this, Joe St. George: what you pay out to me, you are gonna get back double.”

He was grinnin at me like he couldn’t believe what he was hearin. “Why, I guess I’ll just have to kill you, then, won’t I?”

I handed over the hatchet to him almost before the words were out of his mouth. It hadn’t been in my mind to do it, but as soon as I seen him holdin it, I knew it was the only thing I coulda done.

“Go on,” I says. “Just make the first one count so’s I don’t have to suffer.”

He looked from me to the hatchet and then back to me again. The look of surprise on his face would have been comical if the business hadn’t been so serious.

“Then, once it’s done, you better heat up that boiled dinner and help yourself to some more of it,” I told him. “Eat til you bust, because you’ll be goin to jail and I ain’t heard they serve anything good and home-cooked in jail. You’ll be over in Belfast to start with, I guess. I bet they got one of those orange suits just your size.”

“Shut up, you cunt,” he says.

I wouldn’t, though. “After that you’ll most likely be in Shawshank, and I know they don’t bring your meals hot to the table there. They don’t let you out Friday nights to play poker with your beerjoint buddies, either. All I ask is that you do it quick and don’t let the kids see the mess once it’s over.”

Then I closed my eyes. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t do it, but bein pretty sure don’t squeeze much water when it’s your life on the line. That’s one thing I found out that night. I stood there with my eyes shut, seein nothin but dark and wonderin what it’d feel like, havin that hatchet come carvin through my nose n lips n teeth. I remember thinkin I’d most likely taste the wood-splinters on the blade before I died, and I remember bein glad I’d had it on the grindstone only two or three days before. If he was gonna kill me, I didn’t want it to be with a dull hatchet.

Seemed like I stood there like that for about ten years. Then he said, kinda gruff and pissed off, “Are you gonna get ready for bed or just stand there like Helen Keller havin a wet-dream?”

I opened my eyes and saw he’d put the hatchet under his chair—I could just see the end of the handle stickin out from under the flounce. His newspaper was layin on top of his feet in a kind of tent. He bent over, picked it up, and shook it out—tryin to behave like it hadn’t happened, none of it—but there was blood pourin down his cheek from his ear and his hands were tremblin just enough to make the pages of the paper rattle a tiny bit. He’d left his fingerprints in red on the front n back pages, too, and I made up my mind to burn the damned thing before he went to bed so the kids wouldn’t see it and wonder what happened.

“I’ll be gettin into my nightgown soon enough, but we’re gonna have an understandin on this first, Joe.”

He looks up and says, all tight-lipped, “You don’t want to get too fresh, Dolores. That’d be a bad, bad mistake. You don’t want to tease me.”

“I ain’t teasin,” I says. “Your days of hittin me are over, that’s all I want to say. If you ever do it again, one of us is goin to the hospital. Or to the morgue.”

He looked at me for a long, long time, Andy, and I looked back at him. The hatchet was out of his hand and under the chair, but that didn’t matter; I knew that if I dropped my eyes before he did, the punches in the neck and the hits in the back wouldn’t never end. But at long last he looked down at his newspaper again and kinda muttered, “Make yourself useful, woman. Bring me a towel for my head, if you can’t do nothin else. I’m bleedin all over my goddam shirt.”

That was the last time he ever hit me. He was a coward at heart, you see, although I never said the word out loud to him—not then and not ever. Doin that’s about the most dangerous thing a person can do, I think, because a coward is more afraid of bein discovered than he is of anything else, even dyin.

Of course I knew he had a yellow streak in him; I never would have dared hit him upside the head with that cream-pitcher in the first place I hadn’t felt I had a pretty good chance of comin out on top. Besides, I realized somethin as I sat in that chair after he hit me, waitin for my kidneys to stop achin: if I didn’t stand up to him then, I probably wouldn’t ever stand up to him. So I did.

You know, taking the cream-pitcher to Joe was really the easy part. Before I could do it, I had to once n for all rise above the memory of my Dad pushin my Mum down, and of him stroppin the backs of her legs with that length of wet sailcloth. Gettin over those memories was hard, because I dearly loved them both, but in the end I was able to do it… prob’ly because I had to do it. And I’m thankful I did, if only because Selena ain’t never going to have to remember her mother sittin in the corner and bawlin with a dishtowel over her face. My Mum took it when her husband dished it up, but I ain’t goin to sit in judgment of either of em. Maybe she had to take it, and maybe he had to dish it up, or be belittled by the men he had to live n work with every day. Times were different back then—most people don’t realize how different—but that didn’t mean I had to take it from Joe just because I’d been enough of a goose to marry him in the first place. There ain’t no home correction in a man beating a woman with his fists or a stovelength outta the woodbox, and in the end I decided I wasn’t going to take it from the likes of Joe St. George, or from the likes of any man.

There were times when he raised his hand to me, but then he’d think better of it. Sometimes when the hand was up, wantin to hit but not quite darin to hit, I’d see in his eyes that he was rememberin the cream-pitcher… maybe the hatchet, too. And then he’d make like he only raised that hand because his head needed scratchin, or his forehead wipin. That was one lesson he got the first time. Maybe the only one.

There was somethin else come out of the night he hit me with the stovelength and I hit him with the cream- pitcher. I don’t like to bring it up—I’m one of those old-fashioned folks that believes what goes on behind the bedroom door should stay there—but I guess I better, because it’s prob’ly part of why things turned out as they did.

Although we were married and livin under the same roof together for the next two years—and it might have been closer to three, I really can’t remember—he only tried to take his privilege with me a few times after that. He—

What, Andy?

Accourse I mean he was impotent! What else would I be talkin about, his right to wear my underwear if the urge took him? I never denied him; he just quit bein able to do it. He wasn’t what you’d call an every-night sort of man, not even back at the start, and he wasn’t one to draw it out, either—it was always pretty much wham, bam, and thank you, ma‘am. Still n all, he’d stayed int’rested enough to climb on top once or twice a week… until I hit him with the creamer, that is.

Part of it was probably the booze—he was drinkin a lot more durin those last years—but I don’t think that was all of it. I remember him rollin offa me one night after about twenty minutes of useless puffin and blowin, and his little thing still just hangin there, limp as a noodle. I dunno how long after the