By 1952 or so I’d pretty well forgotten his forehead, and by 1956 I didn’t have much use for the rest of him either, and I guess I’d started hatin him by the time Kennedy took over from Ike, but I never had a thought of killing him until later. I thought I’d stay with him because my kids needed a father, if for no other reason. Ain’t that a laugh? But it’s the truth. I swear it is. And I swear somethin else as welclass="underline" if God gave me a second chance, I’d kill him again, even if it meant hellfire and damnation forever… which it probably does.
I guess everybody on Little Tall who ain’t a johnny-come-lately knows I killed him, and most of em prob‘ly think they know why—because of the way he had of usin his hands on me. But it wasn’t his hands on me that brought him to grief, and the simple truth is that, no matter what people on the island might have thought at the time, he never hit me a single lick during the last three years of our marriage. I cured him of that foolishness in late 1960 or early ’61.
Up until then, he hit me quite a lot, yes. I can’t deny it. And I stood for it—I can’t deny that, either. The first time was the second night of the marriage. We’d gone down to Boston for the weekend—that was our honeymoon—and stayed at the Parker House. Hardly went out the whole time. We was just a couple of country mice, you know, and afraid we’d get lost. Joe said he was damned if he was gonna spend the twenty-five dollars my folks’d given us for mad-money on a taxi ride just because he couldn’t find his way back to the hotel. Gorry, wa’ant that man dumb! Of course I was, too… but one thing Joe had that I didn’t (and I’m glad of it, too) was that everlastin suspicious nature of his. He had the idear the whole human race was out to do him dirty, Joe did, and I’ve thought plenty of times that when he did get drunk, maybe it was because it was the only way he could go to sleep without leavin one eye open.
Well, that ain’t neither here nor there. What I set out to tell you was that we went down to the dinin room that Sat’dy night, had a good dinner, and then went back up to our room again. Joe was listin considerably to starboard on the walk down the hall, I remember—he’d had four or five beers with his dinner to go with the nine or ten he’d took on over the course of the afternoon. Once we were inside the room, he stood there lookin at me so long I asked him if he saw anythin green.
“No,” he says, “but I seen a man down there in that restaurant lookin up your dress, Dolores. His eyes were just about hangin out on springs. And you knew he was lookin, didn’t you?”
I almost told him Gary Cooper coulda been sittin in the corner with Rita Hayworth and I wouldn’t have known it, and then thought, Why bother? It didn’t do any good to argue with Joe when he’d been drinkin; I didn’t go into that marriage with my eyes entirely shut, and I’m not gonna try to kid you that I did.
“If there was a man lookin up my dress, why didn’t you go over and tell him to shut his eyes, Joe?” I asked. It was only a joke—maybe I was tryin to turn him aside, I really don’t remember—but he didn’t take it as a joke. That I do remember. Joe wasn’t a man to take a joke; in fact, I’d have to say he had almost no sense of humor at all. That was something I didn’t know goin into it with him; I thought back then that a sense of humor was like a nose, or a pair of ears—that some worked better than others, but everybody had one.
He grabbed me, and turned me over his knee, and paddled me with his shoe. “For the rest of your life, nobody’s gonna have any idear what color underwear you’ve got on but me, Dolores,” he said. “Do you hear that? Nobody but me.”
I actually thought it was a kind of love-play, him pretendin to be jealous to flatter me—that’s what a little ninny I was. It was jealousy, all right, but love had nothing to do with it. It was more like the way a dog will put a paw over his bone and growl if you come too near it. I didn’t know that then, so I put up with it. Later on I put up with it because I thought a man hittin his wife from time to time was only another part of bein married—not a nice part, but then, cleanin toilets ain’t a nice part of bein married, either, but most women have done their fair share of it after the bridal dress and veil have been packed away in the attic. Ain’t they, Nancy?
My own Dad used his hands on my Mum from time to time, and I suppose that was where I got the idear that it was all right—just somethin to be put up with. I loved my Dad dearly, and him and her loved each other dearly, but he could be a handsy kind of man when he had a hair layin just right across his ass.
I remember one time, I must have been, oh I’m gonna say nine years old, when Dad came in from hayin George Richards’s field over on the West End, and Mum didn’t have his dinner on. I can’t remember anymore why she didn’t, but I remember real well what happened when he came in. He was wearin only his biballs (he’d taken his workboots and socks off out on the stoop because they were full of chaff), and his face and shoulders was burned bright red. His hair was sweated against his temples, and there was a piece of hay stuck to his forehead right in the middle of the lines that waved across his brow. He looked hot and tired and ready to be pissed off.
He went into the kitchen and there wasn’t nothing on the table but a glass pitcher with flowers in it. He turns to Mum and says, “Where’s my supper, dummy?” She opened her mouth, but before she could say anythin, he put his hand over her face and pushed her down in the corner. I was standin in the kitchen entry and seen it all. He come walkin toward me with his head lowered and his hair kinda hangin in his eyes—whenever I see a man walkin home that way, tired out from his day of work and his dinner-bucket in his hand, it makes me think of my Dad—and I was some scared. I wanted to get out of his way because I felt he would push me down, too, but my legs was too heavy to move. He never, though. He just took hold of me with his big warm hard hands and set me aside and went out back. He sat down on the choppin block with his hands in his lap and his head hung down like he was lookin at them. He scared the chickens away at first, but they come back after awhile and started peckin all around his shoes. I thought he’d kick out at em, make the feathers fly, but he never done that, either.
After awhile I looked around at my Mum. She was still sittin in the corner. She’d put a dishtowel over her face and was cryin underneath it. Her arms were crossed over her bosom. That’s what I remember best of all, though I don’t know why—how her arms were crossed over her bosom like that. I went over and hugged her and she felt my arms around her middle and hugged me back. Then she took the dishtowel off her face and used it to wipe her eyes and told me to go out back and ask Daddy if he wanted a glass of cold lemonade or a bottle of beer.
“Be sure to tell him there’s only two bottles of beer,” she said. “If he wants more’n that, he better go to the store or not get started at all.”
I went out and told him and he said he didn’t want no beer but a glass of lemonade would hit the spot. I ran to fetch it. Mum was gettin his supper. Her face was still kinda swole from cryin, but she was hummin a tune, and that night they bounced the bedsprings just like they did most nights. Nothing else was ever said or made of it. That sort of thing was called home correction in those days, it was part of a man’s job, and if I thought of it afterward at all, I only thought that my Mum must have needed some or Dad never would have done what he did.
There was a few other times I saw him correct her, but that’s the one I remember best. I never saw him hit her with his fist, like Joe sometimes hit me, but once he stropped her across the legs with a piece of wet canvas sailcloth, and that must have hurt like a bastard. I know it left red marks that didn’t go away all afternoon.