The Hired Girl(19)

I wish Ma were here. If Ma were here she’d put her arms around me, and — there! — I’ve started crying again, wailing like a baby because I want Ma so. I’m sure Jane Eyre and Rebecca wouldn’t be so childish — but no, that’s worse. I think about my friends, my burned friends, and that makes me cry even harder. I must stop. I will stop.

I’m beginning to be hungry. I suppose I could creep downstairs and bring a little bread up to my room. I fixed breakfast this morning, same as always, but as soon as the men came down, I came back upstairs. Seems like I couldn’t face any of them. I’d hoped — how stupid I was! — that one of the boys might say something kind, but of course they didn’t. They don’t like me. It took Father to teach me that. I’ve known for some time that Father doesn’t love me, but I didn’t know about the boys.

My heart is broken.

I look ahead and I don’t know how I can bear the life that’s laid out for me. Years and years of it: washing and ironing and scrubbing out the privy, cooking and scouring and feeding and mending, everything the same, day after day, season after season, working myself to death, as Ma did. Only Ma wasn’t strong. It’ll be years before the work kills me. I see all those years ahead of me, and a dreadful bleakness comes over me and I want to die.

Except that I don’t. Even if I could go straight to heaven, like the holy saints, and didn’t have to bother with Purgatory, I don’t want to die. Miserable though I am, I feel the blood alive in my veins and I know my lungs are taking in air, and when I think of all of that stopping, I feel such horror and sadness that I can’t bear it. I could never kill myself.

But to go on, after last night — friendless, hopeless, imprisoned in this house of hateful men —

I find myself needing to write it all out in this book, which is blotted with tears and full of sentiments that aren’t refined. I meant so much better by this book. But then, I meant to have a better life — I meant to better myself, as Miss Chandler said. Only yesterday, I thought it was possible; I was a cocksure little girl who thought she could win the egg money from Father by going on strike. I want to weep for that girl. But at the same time I’m ashamed of her, because she was such a fool.

I came in from writing last night, with this book still hidden in my workbasket. The sun was down and the house was dim. The men had gone to bed. I came in through the kitchen and I ought to have noticed that the stove was lit and there was a smell of burned paper. I suppose I did notice, but I didn’t stop to think why. The kitchen’s always full of smells, and my mind was on other things.

I took a candle so I could read when I got upstairs. I thought I’d read a little of Jane Eyre before I went to sleep — the scene in the garden when Mr. Rochester asks her to marry him. I went up to my room and lit the candle and set it on my dresser. That’s when I saw my precious books were missing. The two round stones I use as bookends were there, and the Bible — even Father wouldn’t dare to burn Holy Writ. But the books that Miss Chandler gave me — Dombey and Son, and Ivanhoe, and Jane Eyre — were all gone. I stood aghast. I might have misplaced one of them — left it on the bed or even in the kitchen. But for all three to be missing —

Then I knew. I knew what Father had done, and I knew why a fire had been kindled in the stove. A different kind of father — not mine — might have taken my books as a rebuke, to be returned after I promised to be more respectful. But my books were gone for good. I knew it.

I had to make sure. I guess there was one part of me that cherished a hope that maybe one of the books mightn’t have burned to ashes; that I might be able to save just one. I ran downstairs to the kitchen and opened the stove. There was nothing but a bed of cinders.

I saw the book covers lying in the slop pail, and I shrieked. The slop pail! Leather stinks when it burns, so Father tore the books out of their bindings — I could see the tattered linen webs, with only a few shreds of paper still attached. It made it worse that my books had been mauled like that. I seemed to see Father wrenching out the pages that contained my dearest friends: Jane and Mr. Rochester, Wamba and Rebecca, Florence and Captain Cuttle and Mr. Toots. I remembered Miss Chandler’s handwriting on the flyleaves: “To Joan.” She wrote that in Jane Eyre and Dombey and Son, but “To dear Joan”— that’s what she wrote inside Ivanhoe.

I ran straight to Father’s bedroom and yanked open the door. I wasn’t afraid, not one bit, not then; not even when I saw that Father was undressing. He’d lowered his braces and taken off his stockings and boots; he was unbuttoning his shirt. “My books!” I cried. “How could you? You burned my books! You cruel, wicked man, you unnatural father!” And then I echoed Jane Eyre’s very words: “You are like a Roman emperor — you are like a murderer —”