Dolores Claiborne

grabbed me around the middle. The next second it was me holdin her again, and she cryin against my neck.

“Come on,” I says. “Come on over here and sit down with me. We’ve had enough rammin from one side of this boat to the other to last us awhile, haven’t we?”

We went over to the bench by the aft companionway with our arms around each other, shufflin like a pair of invalids. I don’t know if Selena felt like an invalid or not, but I sure did. I was only leakin from the eyes a little, but Selena was cryin s’hard it sounded like she’d pull her guts loose from their moorins if she didn’t quit pretty soon. I was glad to hear her cry that way, though. It wasn’t until I heard her sobbin and seen the tears rollin down her cheeks that I realized how much of her feelins had gone away, too, like the light in her eyes and the shape inside her clothes. I would have liked hearin her laugh one frig of a lot better’n I liked hearin her cry, but I was willin to take what I could get.

We sat down on the bench and I let her cry awhile longer. When it finally started to ease off a little, I gave her the hanky from my purse. She didn’t even use it at first. She just looked at me, her cheeks all wet and deep brown hollows under her eyes, and she says, “You don’t hate me, Mommy? You really don’t?”

“No,” I says. “Not now, not never. I promise on my heart. But I want to get this straight. I want you to tell me the whole thing, all the way through. I see on your face that you don’t think you can do that, but I know you can. And remember this—you’ll never have to tell it again, not even to your own husband, if you don’t want to. It will be like drawin a splinter. I promise that on my heart, too. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mommy, but he said if I ever told… sometimes you get so mad, he said… like the night you hit him with the cream-pot… he said if I ever felt like telling I’d better remember the hatchet… and…”

“No, that’s not the way,” I says. “You need to start at the beginning and go right through her. But I want to be sure I got one thing straight from the word go. Your Dad’s been at you, hasn’t he?”

She just hung her head and didn’t say nothing. It was all the answer I needed, but I think she needed to hear herself sayin it right out loud.

I put my finger under her chin and lifted her head until we were lookin each other right in the eye. “Hasn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said, and broke out sobbin again. This time it didn’t last so long nor go so deep, though. I let her go on awhile just the same because it took me awhile to see how I should go on. I couldn’t ask “What’s he done to you?” because I thought the chances were pretty good she wouldn’t know for sure. For a little while the only thing I could think of was “Has he fucked you?” but I thought she might not know for sure even if I put it just that way, that crude. And the sound of it was so damned ugly in my head.

At last I said, “Has he had his penis into you, Selena? Has he had it in your pussy?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t let him.” She swallowed back a sob. “Not yet, anyway.”

Well, we were both able to relax a little after that—with each other, anyway. What I felt inside was pure rage. It was like I had an eye inside, one I never knew about before that day, and all I could see with it was Joe’s long, horsey face, with his lips always cracked and his dentures always kind of yellow and his cheeks always chapped and red high up on the cheekbones. I saw his face pretty near all the time after that, that eye wouldn’t close even when my other two did and I was asleep, and I began to know it wouldn’t close until he was dead. It was like bein in love, only inside out.

Meantime, Selena was tellin her story, from beginnin to end. I listened and didn’t interrupt even once, and accourse it started with the night I hit Joe with the creamer and Selena come to the door in time to see him with his hand over his bleedin ear and me holdin the hatchet over him like I really did intend to cut his head off with it. All I wanted to do was make him stop, Andy, and I risked my life to do it, but she didn’t see none of that. Everything she saw stacked up on his side of the ledger. The road to hell’s paved with good intentions, they say, and I know it’s true. I know it from bitter experience. What I don’t know is why—why it is that tryin to do good so often leads to ill. That’s for wider heads than mine, I guess.

I ain’t gonna tell that whole story here, not out of respect to Selena, but because it’s too long and it hurts too much, even now. But I’ll tell you the first thing she said. I’ll never forget it, because I was struck again by what a difference there is between how things look and how they really are… between the outside and the inside.

“He looked so sad,” she said. “There was blood running between his fingers and tears in his eyes and he just looked so sad. I hated you more for that look than for the blood and tears, Mommy, and I made up my mind to make it up to him. Before I went to bed, I got down on my knees and prayed. ‘God,’ I said, ‘if you keep her from hurting him any more, I’ll make it up to him. I swear I will. For Jesus’ sake, amen.’ ”

You got any idear how I felt, hearin that from my daughter a year or more after I thought the door was shut on that business? Do you, Andy? Frank? What about you, Nancy Bannister from Kennebunk ? No—I see you don’t. I pray to God you never will.

She started bein nice to him—bringin him special treats when he was out in the back shed, workin on somebody’s snowmobile or outboard motor, sittin beside him while we were watchin TV at night, sittin with him on the porch step while he whittled, listenin while he talked all his usual line of Joe St. George bullshit politics—how Kennedy was lettin the Jews n Catholics run everythin, how it was the Commies tryin to get the niggers into the schools n lunchrooms down south, and pretty soon the country would be ruined. She listened, she smiled at his jokes, she put Cornhuskers on his hands when they chapped, and he wasn’t too deaf to hear opportunity knockin. He quit givin her the lowdown on politics in favor of givin her the lowdown on me, how crazy I could be when I was riled, and everythin that was wrong with our marriage. Accordin to him it was mostly me.

It was in the late spring of 1962 that he started touchin her in a way that was a little more’n just fatherly. That was all it was at first, though—little strokes along the leg while they were sittin on the couch together and I was out of the room, little pats on the bottom when she brought him his beer out in the shed. That’s where it started, and it went on from there. By the middle of July, poor Selena’d gotten as scared of him as she already was of me. By the time I finally took it into my head to go across to the mainland and get some answers out of her, he’d done just about everything a man can do to a woman short of fucking her… and frightened her into doing any number of things to him, as well.

I think he would have picked her cherry before Labor Day if it hadn’t been for Joe Junior and Little Pete bein out of school and underfoot a lot of the time. Little Pete was just there and in the way, but I think Joe Junior had more’n half an idear of what was up, and set out to put himself in the way of it. God bless him if he did, is all I can say. I was certainly no help, workin twelve and sometimes fourteen hours a day like I was back then. And all the time I was gone, Joe was around her, touchin her, askin her for kisses, askin her to touch him in his “special places” (that’s what he called em), and tellin her that he couldn’t help it, he had to ask—she was nice to him, I wasn’t, a man had certain needs, and that was all there was to it. But she couldn’t tell. If she did, he said, I might kill both of them. He kep remindin her about the creamer and the hatchet. He kep tellin her about what a cold, bad-tempered bitch I was and about how he couldn’t help it because a man had certain needs. He drilled those things into her, Andy, until she was half-crazy with em. He—

What, Frank?

Yes, he worked, all right, but his kind of work didn’t slow him down much when it came to chasin his daughter. A jack of all trades, I called him, and that’s just what he was. He did chores for any number of the summer people and caretook two houses (I hope the people who hired him to do that kep a good inventory of their possessions); there were four or five different fishermen who’d call him to crew when they were busy—Joe could haul traps with the best of em, if he wa’ant too hung over—and accourse he had his small engines for a sideline. In other words, he worked the way a lot of island men work (although not as hard as most) —a drib here n a drab there. A man like that can pretty much set his own hours, and that summer and early fall, Joe set his so’s to be around the house as much as he could when I was gone. To be around Selena.

Do you understand what I need you to understand, I wonder? Do you see that he was workin as hard to get into her mind as he was into her pants? I think it was seein me with that goddam hatchet in my hand that had the most power over her, so that was what he used the most. When he saw he couldn’t use it anymore to gain her sympathy, he used it to scare her with. He told her over n over again that I’d drive her out of the house if I ever found out what they was doin.

What they was doin! Gorry!

She said she didn’t want to do it, and he said that was just too bad, but it was too late to stop. He told her she’d teased him until he was half-crazy, and said that kind of teasin’s why most rapes happen, and good women (meanin bad-tempered,. hatchet-wavin bitches like me, I guess) knew it. Joe kep tellin