Dolores Claiborne(27)

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 f**ked 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 pu**y?'

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 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 f**king 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 he 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?