Dolores Claiborne

“Six weeks,” I said. My voice had sunk back to a whisper. “Selena come a little early.”

She nodded. “And what does a conventional little island girl do when she finds the loaf’s been leavened? The obvious, of course… but those who marry in haste often repent at leisure, as you seem to have discovered. Too bad your sainted mother didn’t teach you that one along with there’s a heartbeat in every potato and use your head to save your feet. But I’ll tell you one thing, Dolores: bawling your eyes out with your apron over your head won’t save your daughter’s maidenhead if that smelly old goat really means to take it, or your children’s money if he really means to spend it. But sometimes men, especially drinking men, do have accidents. They fall downstairs, they slip in bathtubs, and sometimes their brakes fail and they run their BMWs into oak trees when they are hurrying home from their mistresses’ apartments in Arlington Heights. ”

She went out then, closin the door behind her. I made up the bed, and while I did it I thought about what she’d said… about how when a bad man has a bad accident, sometimes that can be a great thing, too. I began to see what had been right in front of me all along—what I would have seen sooner if my mind hadn’t been flyin around in a blind panic, like a sparrow trapped in an attic room.

By the time we’d had our pie and I’d seen her upstairs for her afternoon nap, the could-do part of it was clear in my mind. I wanted to be shut of Joe, I wanted my kids’ money back, and most of all, I wanted to make him pay for all he’d put us through… especially for all he’d put Selena through. If the son of a bitch had an accident—the right kind of accident—all those things’d happen. The money I couldn’t get at while he was alive would come to me when he died. He might’ve snuck off to get the money in the first place, but he hadn’t ever snuck off to make a will cuttin me out. It wasn’t a question of brains—the way he got the money showed me he was quite a bit slyer’n I’d given him credit for—but just the way his mind worked. I’m pretty sure that down deep, Joe St. George didn’t think he was ever gonna die.

And as his wife, everything would come right back to me.

By the time I left Pinewood that afternoon the rain had stopped, and I walked home real slow. I wasn’t even halfway there before I’d started to think of the old well behind the woodshed.

I had the house to myself when I got back—the boys were off playin, and Selena had left a note sayin she’d gone over to Mrs. Devereaux’s to help her do a laundry… she did all the sheets from The Harborside Hotel in those days, you know. I didn’t have any idear where Joe was and didn’t care. The important thing was that his truck was gone, and with the muffler hangin by a thread the way it was, I’d have plenty of warnin if he came back.

I stood there a minute, lookin at Selena’s note. It’s funny, the little things that finally push a person into makin up her mind—sendin her from could-do to might-do to will-do, so’s to speak. Even now I’m not sure if I really meant to kill Joe when I came home from Vera Donovan’s that day. I meant to check on the well, yes, but that could have been no more than a game, the way kids play Let’s Pretend. If Selena hadn’t left that note, I might never have done it… and no matter what else comes of this, Andy, Selena must never know that.

The note went somethin like this: “Mom—I have gone over to Mrs. Devereaux’s with Cindy Babcock to help do the hotel wash—they had lots more people over the holiday weekend than they expected, and you know how bad Mrs. D.’s arthritis has gotten. The poor dear sounded at her wit’s end when she called. I will be back to help with supper. Love and kisses, Sel.”

I knew Selena’d come back with no more’n five or seven dollars, but happy as a lark to have it. She’d be happy to go back if Mrs. Devereaux or Cindy called again, too, and if she got offered a job as a part-time chambermaid at the hotel next summer, she’d prob’ly try to talk me into lettin her take it. Because money is money, and on the island in those days, tradin back n forth was still the most common way of life and cash a hard commodity to come by. Mrs. Devereaux would call again, too, and be delighted to write a hotel reference for Selena if Selena ast her to, because Selena was a good little worker, not afraid to bend her back or get her hands dirty.

She was just like me when I was her age, in other words, n look how I turned out—just another cleanin-witch with a permanent stoop in her walk and a bottle of pain-pills in the medicine cabinet for my back. Selena didn’t see nothing wrong with that, but she’d just turned fifteen, and at fifteen a girl don’t know what the hell she’s seein even when she’s lookin spang at it. I read that note over n over and I thought, Frig it—she ain’t gonna end up like me, old n damn near used up at thirty-five. She ain’t gonna do that even if I have to die to keep her from it. But you know something, Andy? I didn’t think things’d have to go that far. I thought maybe Joe was gonna do all the dyin that needed to be done around our place.

I put her note back on the table, did up the snaps on my slicker again, and pulled on my gumrubber boots. Then I walked around back n stood by the big white stone where me’n Selena sat the night I told her she didn’t have to be afraid of Joe anymore, that he’d promised to let her alone. The rain’d stopped, but I could still hear the water drippin deep in the blackberry tangle behind the house, and see drops of water hangin off the bare branches. They looked like Vera Donovan’s diamond-drop earrings, only not so big.

That patch covered better’n half an acre, and by the time I’d pushed my way in, I was damned glad I had on my slicker and tall boots. The wet was the least of it; those thorns were murder. In the late forties, that patch had been flowers and field-grass, with the wellhead sittin on the shed side of it, but about six years after me n Joe were married and moved onto the place—which his Uncle Freddy left him when he died—the well went dry. Joe got Peter Doyon to come over and dowse us a new one, on the west side of the house. We’ve never had a spot of water- trouble since.

Once we stopped usin the old well, the half-acre behind the shed grew up in those chest-high snarls of scrub blackberry, and the thorns tore and pulled at my slicker as I walked back n forth, lookin for the board cap on the old well. After my hands got cut in three or four places, I pulled the sleeves down over em.

In the end, I almost found the damned thing by fallin into it. I took a step onto somethin that was both loose and kinda spongy, there was a cracklin noise under my foot, and I drew back just before the board I’d stepped on gave way. If I’d been unlucky, I’d’ve fallen forward, and the whole cap would most likely have collapsed. Ding- dong-bell, pussy’s in the well.

I got down on my knees, keepin one hand up in front of my face so the blackberry thorns wouldn’t scratch my cheeks or maybe put out one of my eyes, and took a good close look.

The cap was about four feet wide n five feet long; the boards were all white n warped n rotted. I pushed on one of em with my hand, and it was like pushin down on a licorice stick. The board I’d put my foot on was all bowed down, and I could see fresh splinters stickin up from it. I woulda fallen in, all right, and in those days I went about one-twenty. Joe weighed at least fifty pounds more’n that.

I had a handkerchief in my pocket. I tied it around the top of a bush on the shed side of the cap so I could find it again in a hurry. Then I went back into the house. That night I slept like a lamb, and I had no bad dreams for the first time since I’d found out from Selena what her Prince Charmin of a Dad had been up to with her.

That was in late November, and I didn’t intend to do anythin more for quite awhile. I doubt if I need to tell you why, but I will, anyway: if anythin happened to him too soon after our talk on the ferry, Selena’s eyes might turn to me. I didn’t want that to happen, because there was a part of her that still loved him and prob’ly always would, and because I was afraid of how she’d feel if she even suspected what happened. Of how she’d feel about me, accourse—I guess that goes without sayin—but I was even more afraid of how she might feel about herself. As to how that turned out… well, never mind now. I’ll get there, I guess.

So I let time go by, although that’s always been the hardest thing for me to do once I’ve made up my mind about a thing. Still, the days piled up into weeks, like they always do. Every now n then I’d ask Selena about him. “Is your Dad bein good?” is what I asked, and we both understood what I was really askin. She always said yes, which was a relief, because if Joe started up again, I’d have to get rid of him right away, and damn the risks. Or the consequences.

I had other things to worry about as Christmas passed and 1963 got started. One was the money —every day I’d wake up thinkin that this might be the day he’d start spendin it. Why wouldn’t I worry about that? He’d got through the first three hundred right smart, and I had no way of keepin him from pissin away the rest while I was waitin for time to take time, as they like to say in his A. A. meetins. I can’t tell you how many times I hunted for the goddam savins passbook they had to have given him when he opened his own account with that dough, but I never found it. So all I could do was watch for him to come home with a new chain-saw or an expensive watch on his wrist, and hope he hadn’t already lost some of it or even all of it in one of the high-stakes poker games he claimed went on every weekend in Ellsworth n Bangor. I never felt s’helpless in my whole life.

Then there was the questions of when and how I was gonna do it… if I ended up havin the nerve to do it at