Dolores Claiborne

if he’d worked the miracle of the loaves and fishes. I meant to get the kids out of that house or see him dead before the turn of the year. Which way it went didn’t make much difference to me, but I didn’t want him to know somethin was comin his way until it was too late for him to do anythin about it.

“Good,” he says. “Then we’re all done and buttoned up, ain’t we, Dolores?” But he was lookin at me with a funny little gleam in his eyes that I didn’t much like. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”

“I dunno,” I says. “I used to think I had a fair amount of intelligence, but look who I ended up keepin house with.”

“Oh, come on,” he says, still lookin at me in that funny half-wise way. “You think you’re such hot shit you prob’ly look over your shoulder to make sure your ass ain’t smokin before you wipe yourself. But you don’t know everything.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You figure it out,” he says, and shakes his paper out like some rich guy who wants to make sure the stock market didn’t use him too bad that day. “It shouldn’t be no trouble for a smartypants like you.”

I didn’t like it, but I let it go. Partly it was because I didn’t want to spend any more time knockin a stick against a hornet’s nest than I had to, but that wasn’t all of it. I did think I was smart, smarter’n him, anyway, and that was the rest of it. I figured if he tried to get his own back on me, I’d see what he was up to about five minutes after he got started. It was pride, in other words, pride pure n simple, and the idea that he’d already got started never crossed my mind.

When the kids came back from the store, I sent the boys into the house and walked around to the back with Selena. There’s a big tangle of blackberry bushes there, mostly bare by that time of the year. A little breeze had come up, and it made them rattle. It was a lonesome sound. A little creepy, too. There’s a big white stone stickin out of the ground there, and we sat down on it. A half-moon had risen over East Head, and when she took my hands, her fingers were just as cold as that half-moon looked.

“I don’t dare go in, Mommy,” she said, and her voice was tremblin. “I’ll go to Tanya’s, all right? Please say I can.”

“You don’t have to be afraid of a thing, sweetheart,” I says. “It’s all taken care of.”

“I don’t believe you,” she whispered, although her face said she wanted to—her face said she wanted to believe it more than any thin.

“It’s true,” I said. “He’s promised to leave you alone. He doesn’t always keep his promises, but he’ll keep this one, now that he knows I’m watchin and he can’t count on you to keep quiet. Also, he’s scared to death.”

“Scared to dea—why?”

“Because I told him I’d see him in Shawshank if he got up to any more nasty business with you.”

She gasped, and her hands bore down on mine again. “Mommy, you didn’t!”

“Yes I did, and I meant it,” I says. “Best for you to know that, Selena. But I wouldn’t worry too much; Joe probably won’t come within ten feet of you for the next four years… and by then you’ll be in college. If there’s one thing on this round world he respects, it’s his own hide.”

She let go of my hands, slow but sure. I saw the hope comin into her face, and somethin else, as well. It was like her youth was comin back to her, and it wasn’t until then, sittin in the moonlight by the blackberry patch with her, that I realized how old she’d come to look that fall.

“He won’t strap me or anything?” she asked.

“No,” I says. “It’s done.”

Then she believed it all and put her head down on my shoulder and started to cry. Those were tears of relief, pure and simple. That she should have to cry that way made me hate Joe even more.

I think that, for the next few nights, there was a girl in my house sleepin better’n she had for three months or more… but I laid awake. I’d listen to Joe snorin beside me, and look at him with that inside eye, and feel like turnin over and bitin his goddam throat out. But I wasn’t crazy anymore, like I’d been when I almost poleaxed him with that stick of stovewood. Thinkin of the kids and what would happen to em if I was taken up for murder hadn’t had any power over that inside eye then, but later on, after I’d told Selena she was safe and had a chance to cool off a little myself, it did. Still, I knew that what Selena most likely wanted—for things to go on like what her Dad had been up to had never happened—couldn’t be. Even if he kep his promise and never touched her again, that couldn’t be… and in spite of what I’d told Selena, I wasn’t completely sure he’d keep his promise. Sooner or later, men like Joe usually persuade themselves that they can get away with it next time; that if they’re only a little more careful, they can have whatever they like.

Lyin there in the dark and calm again at last, the answer seemed simple enough: I had to take the kids and move to the mainland, and I had to do it soon. I was calm enough right then, but I knew I wasn’t gonna stay that way; that inside eye wouldn’t let me. The next time I got hot, it would see even better and Joe would look even uglier and there might not be any thought on earth that could keep me from doin it. It was a new way of bein mad, at least for me, and I was just wise enough to see the damage it could do, if I let it. I had to get us away from Little Tall before that madness could break all the way out. And when I made my first move in that direction, I found out what that funny half-wise look in his eyes meant. Did I ever!

I waited awhile for things to settle, then I took the eleven o’clock ferry across to the mainland one Friday mornin. The kids were in school and Joe was out on the boundin main with Mike Stargill and his brother Gordon, playin with the lobster-pots—he wouldn’t be back til almost sundown.

I had the kids’ savins account passbooks with me. We’d been puttin money away for their college ever since they were born… I had, anyway; Joe didn’t give a squitter if they went to college or not. Whenever the subject came up—and it was always me who brought it up, accourse—he’d most likely be sittin there in his shitty rocker with his face hid behind the Ellsworth American and he’d poke it out just long enough to say, “Why in Christ’s name are you so set on sendin those kids to college, Dolores? I never went, and I did all right.”

Well, there’s some things you just can’t argue with, ain’t there? If Joe thought that readin the paper, minin for boogers, and wipin em on the runners of his rockin chair was doin all right, there wasn’t no room at all for discussion; it was hopeless from the word go. That was all right, though. As long as I could keep makin him kick in his fair share if he happened to fall into somethin good, like when he got on the county road crew, I didn’t give a shit if he thought every college in the country was run by the Commies. The winter he worked on the road crew on the mainland, I got him to put five hundred dollars in their bank accounts, and he whined like a pup. Said I was takin all his dividend. I knew better, though, Andy. If that sonofawhore didn’t make two thousand, maybe twenty-five hundred, dollars that winter, I’ll smile n kiss a pig.

“Why do you always want to nag me so, Dolores?” he’d ask.

“If you were man enough to do what’s right for your kids in the first place, I wouldn’t have to,” I’d tell him, and around n around it’d go, blah-blah-blahdy-blah. I got pretty sick of it from time to time, Andy, but I almost always got out of him what I thought the kids had comin. I couldn’t get too sick of it to do that, because they didn’t have nobody else to make sure their future’d still be there for em when they got to it.

There wasn’t a lot in those three accounts by today’s standards—two thousand or so in Selena‘s, about eight hundred in Joe Junior’s, four or five hundred in Little Pete’s—but this is 1962 I’m talkin about, and in those days it was a fairish chunk of change. More’n enough to get away on, that was for sure. I figured to draw Little Pete’s in cash and take cashier’s checks for the other two. I’d decided to make a clean break and move us all the way down to Portland—find a place to live and a decent job. We wasn’t none of us used to city livin, but people can get used to damned near anything if they have to. Besides, Portland wasn’t really much more than a big town back then—not like it is now.

Once I got settled, I could start puttin back the money I’d had to take, and I thought I could do it. Even if I couldn’t, they was bright kids, and I knew there were such things as scholarships. If they missed out on those, I decided I wasn’t too proud to fill out a few loan applications. The major thing was to get them away—right then doin that seemed a lot more important than college. First things first, as the bumper sticker on Joe’s old Farmall tractor used to say.

I’ve run m’gums for pretty near three-quarters of an hour about Selena, but it wasn’t only her who’d suffered from him. She got the worst of it, but there was plenty of black weather left over for Joe Junior. He was twelve in 1962, a prime age for a boy, but you wouldn’t know it lookin at him. He hardly ever smiled or laughed, and it really wasn’t any wonder. He’d no more’n come into the room and his Dad’d be on him like a weasel on a chicken, tellin