Dolores Claiborne (9 page)

What people
think
is that Joe was an alcoholic who used to beat me—and probably the kids, too —when he was drunk. They think he finally did it once too often and I punched his ticket for it. It’s true that Joe drank, and that he sometimes went to the A.A. meetins over in Jonesport, but he was no more an alcoholic than I am. He’d throw a drunk every four or five months, mostly with trash like Rick Thibodeau or Stevie Brooks—those men really
were
alcoholics—but then he’d leave it alone except for a nip or two when he come in at night. No more than that, because when he had a bottle he liked to make it last. The real alkies I’ve known in my time, none of em was int‘rested in makin a bottle of
anythin
last—not Jim Beam, not Old Duke, not even derail, which is antifreeze strained through cotton battin. A real drunk is only int’rested in two things: puttin paid to the jug in the hand, and huntin for the one still in the bush.

No, he wasn’t an alcoholic, but he didn’t mind if people thought he’d
been
one. It helped him get work, especially in the summer. I guess the way people think about Alcoholics Anonymous has changed over the years—I know they talk about it a lot more than they used to—but one thing that hasn’t changed is the way people will try to help somebody who claims he’s already gone to work helpin himself. Joe spent one whole year not drinkin—or at least not talkin about it when he did—and they had a party for him over in Jonesport. Gave him a cake and a medallion, they did. So when he went for a job one of the summer people needed done, the first thing he’d tell em was that he was a recoverin alcoholic. “If you don’t want to hire me because of that, I won’t have any hard feelins,” he’d say, “but I have to get it off my chest. I been goin to A.A. meetins for over a year now, and they tell us we can’t stay sober if we can’t be honest.”

And then he’d pull out his gold one-year medallion and show it to em, all the while lookin like he hadn’t had nothin to eat but humble pie for a month of Sundays. I guess one or two of em just about cried when Joe told em about how he was workin it a day at a time and takin it easy and lettin go and lettin God whenever the urge for a drink hit him ... which it did about every fifteen minutes, accordin to him. They’d usually fall all over themselves takin him on, and at fifty cents or even a dollar an hour more than they’d intended to pay, like as not. You’d have thought the gimmick would have fallen flat after Labor Day, but it worked amazin well even here on the island, where people saw him every day and should have known better.

The truth is most of the times Joe hit me, he was cold sober. When he had a skinful, he didn’t much mind me at all, one way or the other. Then, in ‘60 or ’61, he come in one night after helpin Charlie Dispenzieri get his boat out of the water, and when he bent over to get a Coke out of the fridge, I seen his britches were split right up the back. I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. He didn’t say nothin, but when I went over to the stove to check on the cabbage—I was makin a boiled dinner that night, I remember like it was yesterday—he got a chunk of rock maple out of the woodbox and whacked me in the small of the back with it. Oh, that hurt. You know what I mean if anyone’s ever hit you in the kidneys. It makes them feel small and hot and so
heavy,
like they’re gonna bust loose from whatever holds them where they’re supposed to be and they’ll just sink, like lead shot in a bucket.

I hobbled as far as the table and sat in one of the chairs. I woulda fallen on the floor if that chair’d been any further away. I just sat there, waitin to see if the pain was gonna pass. I didn’t cry, exactly, because I didn’t want to scare the kids, but the tears went rollin down my face just the same. I couldn’t stop them. They were tears of pain, the kind you can’t hold back for anybody or anythin.

“Don’t you ever laugh at me, you bitch,” Joe says. He slang the stovelength he hit me with back into the woodbox, then sat down to read the
American.
“You ought to have known better’n that ten year ago.”

It was twenty minutes before I could get outta that chair. I had to call Selena to turn down the heat under the veg and the meat, even though the stove wasn’t but four steps away from where I was sittin.

“Why didn’t you do it, Mommy?” she asked me. “I was watchin cartoons with Joey.”

“I’m restin,” I told her.

“That’s right,” Joe says from behind his paper, “she ran her mouth until she got all tuckered out.” And he laughed. That did it; that one laugh was all it took. I decided right then he wasn’t never going to hit me again, unless he wanted to pay a dear price for it.

We had supper just like usual, and watched the TV just like usual afterward, me and the big kids on the sofa and Little Pete on his father’s lap in the big easy-chair. Pete dozed off there, same as he almost always did, around seven-thirty, and Joe carried him to bed. I sent Joe Junior an hour later, and Selena went at nine. I usually turned in around ten and Joe’d sit up until maybe midnight, dozin in and out, watchin a little TV, readin parts of the paper he’d missed the first time, and pickin his nose. So you see, Frank, you’re not so bad; some people never lose the habit, even when they grow up.

That night I didn’t go to bed when I usually did. I sat up with Joe instead. My back felt a little better. Good enough to do what I had to do, anyway. Maybe I was nervous about it, but if I was, I don’t recall. I was mostly waitin for him to doze off, and finally he did.

I got up, went into the kitchen, and got the little cream-pitcher off the table. I didn’t go out lookin for that special; it was only there because it was Joe Junior’s night to clean off the table and he’d forgotten to put it in the refrigerator. Joe Junior always forgot something—to put away the cream-pitcher, to put the glass top on the butter dish, to fold the bread-wrapper under so the first slice wouldn’t get all hard overnight—and now when I see him on the TV news, makin a speech or givin an interview, that’s what I’m most apt to think about ... and I wonder what the Democrats would think if they knew the Majority Leader of the Maine State Senate couldn’t never manage to get the kitchen table completely cleared off when he was eleven. I’m proud of him, though, and don’t you ever, ever think any different. I’m proud of him even if he
is
a goddam Democrat.

Anyway, he sure managed to forget the right thing that night; it was little but it was heavy, and it felt just right in my hand. I went over to the woodbox and got the short-handled hatchet we kep on the shelf just above it. Then I walked back into the livin room where he was dozin. I had the pitcher cupped in my right hand, and I just brought it down and around and smacked it against the side of his face. It broke into about a thousand pieces.

He sat up pretty pert when I done that, Andy. And you shoulda heard him. Loud? Father God and Sonny Jesus! Sounded like a bull with his pizzle caught in the garden gate. His eyes come wide open and he clapped his hand to his ear, which was already bleedin. There was little dots of clotted cream on his cheek and in that scraggle down the side of his face he called a sideburn.

“Guess what, Joe?” I says. “I ain’t feelin tired anymore.”

I heard Selena jump outta bed, but I didn’t dare look around. I could have been in hot water if I’d done that—when he wanted to, he could be sneaky-fast. I’d been holdin the hatchet in my left hand, down to my side with my apron almost coverin it. And when Joe started to get up outta his chair, I brought it out and showed it to him. “If you don’t want this in your head, Joe, you better sit down again,” I said.

For a second I thought he was gonna get up anyway. If he had, that would have been the end of him right then, because I wasn’t kiddin. He seen it, too, and froze with his butt about five inches off the seat.

“Mommy?” Selena called from the doorway of her room.

“You go on back to bed, honey,” I says, not takin my eyes off Joe for a single second. “Your father n I’re havin a little discussion here.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Ayuh,” I says. “Isn’t it, Joe?”

“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, seein nothin but dark and wonderin what it’d feel like, havin 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 I hadn’t felt I had a pretty good chance of comin 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 going to have to remember her mother sittin in the corner 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 judgment 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.