Dolores Claiborne(19)

'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, seem nothin but dark and wonderin what it'd feel like, having 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 if I hadn't felt I had a pretty good chance of comm 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 goin to have to remember her mother sittin in the comer 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 judgement 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.