The Hired Girl(20)

“That’s enough,” said Father. “You shut up about those books, you hear me? They’re burned up and good riddance.”

“I won’t shut up,” I said. At that moment, I was fearless. In one of Miss Chandler’s books — I think it was Oliver Twist — I read that when a woman is thoroughly roused, no man dare provoke her. I think I must have been in just that state, because Father seemed startled by my defiance. I screamed at him, “You are like a murderer! You’ve murdered me — taken away everything I care about, and I’ll never forgive you! My books, that Miss Chandler gave me, my only source of —” But there I broke down and sobbed, because I couldn’t even say what those books meant to me. During bad times, I’ve turned to them the way a pious girl might turn to her Bible. There was wisdom in them, though they were storybooks. And poetry. They might not have been books of verse, but they were poetry to me. Miss Chandler says that life isn’t worth living if you haven’t a sense of poetry.

But I think the most important thing those books gave me was a kind of faith. My books promised me that life wasn’t just made up of workaday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that. Maybe not here at Steeple Farm, but somewhere. It has to be. It has to be.

I glared at Father through my tears, and he no longer seemed like my father but like some misshapen fiend. “Why are you so horrible to me?” I demanded. “You don’t show me one bit of kindness or affection; you treat me with miserable cruelty! And now you destroy my books! What have I ever done to you?”

“What I’ve done to you?” echoed Father. “What about what you’ve done to me? What about what you took from me?”

I threw up my hands. I couldn’t think of anything I’d done that could justify him burning my books and throwing the covers in the slop pail. “Took from you! What did I ever take from you?”

Father stepped forward. “I had a wife,” he said, and there was so much hatred in his voice that it sent a chill down my spine. “She was a good worker and a helpmeet, till you came along. We had three sons, and the doctor told her not to have another. He said she wasn’t strong —”

I couldn’t believe he was blaming me for Ma’s death. “She wasn’t strong because you worked her to death!” I shrieked. “She was too frail to do all that work! I helped her — you worked her to death —”

He went for me then. I must have known he was going to strike me, because I dodged the blow and shot for the door. Down the stairs I went, and I had it in my mind to dash out the kitchen door and escape into the darkness. But at the bottom of the stairs I turned to face him. I clutched the newel post to my bosom like a shield. “Don’t you dare strike me!” I yelled, and I scarcely knew my own voice; it was so low and harsh and fierce.

I stop now, writing this. Because I think — I think — that even though I was shouting at Father, I meant the boys to hear me. It all happened so fast, and I was in the grip of passion. But I think that at the back of my mind, there was an idea that if the boys knew Father meant to strike me, they might come.

But they didn’t. Father stopped halfway down the stairs, as if there were a barrier between us that he didn’t want to cross. I could feel his glare in the darkness. “She wanted a little girl!” he yelled, and I never heard the words little girl sound so terrible in all my life. They sounded like profanity. “After you were born, she didn’t give two cents about anything but you.” His voice rose to a falsetto; he was mimicking Ma. “‘Joan has to have hair ribbons! Joan has to have a doll! Joan has to go to high school! Promise me you won’t ever hit Joan! ’” He dropped the falsetto and bellowed, “She turned her back on her husband and forgot her sons! All she cared about was her precious Joan —”

“That’s not true!” I shouted, but it was no use, because now Father was thundering at me, and the things he said came so fast it was as if they were hailstones. He said I was stuck-up and conceited and a sneak, always reading instead of doing my chores. He said he’d promised Ma he wouldn’t hit me, but that a good whipping might have been the saving of me, only it was too late now. He said I was idle and clumsy and such a big ugly ox of a girl that nobody’d ever take me off his hands. I can’t even remember all the cruel things he said, but listening to them was like having someone hold my nose and tip back my head and pour poison into my mouth. At first I cried out in defiance, saying I wasn’t, and none of it was true. But after a while I only cried. I put my head down on the newel post and waited for him to stop. After a long time I heard him go up the stairs. He shut the bedroom door with a bang.