“Everything’s okay,” she said. “Go on to bed.” They didn’t move at first, but then she said, “Hurry up, now. It’s late.” Her voice pacified them, and they obeyed her.
She went to the bathroom, where she cleaned herself and doctored her face, and then returned quietly to the children’s room to make sure they were asleep. The girls were both out, but Tildon was merely pretending. She didn’t question him, though, just kissed all their foreheads. She whispered in his ear, “Don’t you worry.” And then she left the room, closing the door behind her.
She started to go back to her bedroom, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She shuffled into the dark living room and lay on the sofa, where she just wanted to close her eyes for a few minutes and collect herself. The house was silent except for the whisper of branches brushing against the window. She rose and went to the kitchen, where she thought about administering Maria Fernandez’s remedies. She knew that she would begin vomiting in an hour or so if she did, so she decided to wait. After pulling her favorite cast-iron skillet from the cabinet, she shifted it from hand to hand, feeling its familiar heaviness. She drank a glass of water slowly, rinsed the glass, put it in the drainer, and then carried the skillet back to the bedroom.
She shut the door and pulled the cord on the lamp so that a yellow glow enveloped the bed, where her husband lay, his mouth agape, his naked body sprawled over the tangled sheets. He looked like a dead man, limp and pale, splotched with blisters at his neck and wrists. Holding the cool and slightly greasy handle, she raised the skillet and hit him across his face, the flat bottom covering his nose and right eye socket. She heard bone crack and felt his blood spray her arm and the hollow of her throat.
Immediately, she knew that she hadn’t hit him as hard as she had wanted to. She had wanted to crush his skull, and she felt she would have been justified in doing so, but at the last second she’d held back just enough so that only his nose and perhaps his cheek appeared to break. He did not move, though, and she was unsure whether or not she had, despite her failure of courage, killed him.
For a solid sixty seconds she watched him, counting each second. He still didn’t move. She sat down on the chair next to the bed and studied, with the skillet in her lap, the shape of his body.
Tentatively, she put her hand on his chest, searched for the thump-thump of his heartbeat. She tipped his chin away from her and inspected the broken part of his face. His nose and cheekbone were starting to swell and appeared pulpy. The dried blood from the scratches created a black line running from his temple to his jaw, another one on his forehead. Fresh blood from his nose trickled over his upper lip. She reached over to the dresser and pulled a clean handkerchief from the top drawer and dabbed gently at his face until the white cotton turned red.
When he woke forty minutes later, she was holding a cloth full of ice against his nose and cheek. Groggily, still in shock, he asked, “What happened?”
“The dresser tipped over onto the bed. We’re lucky it didn’t kill us both.”
She could tell he didn’t believe her. In all this time of waiting, she hadn’t given one thought to what she would say to Blue when he woke. She was surprised by the words that came out of her mouth. It seemed outlandish even to her, but she decided, out of curiosity, to leave it at that, to offer nothing else in order to see how he’d respond. She was even more surprised that he didn’t challenge her story, just lay there, limp and swelling. He pulled the sheet up over his exposed body.
When he said nothing, she felt some crucial element of power in her marriage shift.
At five-thirty, he went to work with his nose bandaged, the cuts on his face beginning to harden, his good eye as threaded with broken blood vessels as his bad one had been several years before.
When Tildon and the girls woke, shortly after their father left, they studied their mother’s face, but she understood that they didn’t really want her to tell them anything. The inner life of a marriage must be kept hidden from children. She knew that much. Loretta made them oatmeal and toast, fixed their lunches, and hurried them off to the bus stop, and then she bathed quickly. She remembered that she hadn’t taken Maria Fernandez’s powder. Maybe it wouldn’t make her vomit this time. Maybe she had built up immunity, like a person who is bitten several times by snakes becomes snake-proof. But when she went to the pantry and opened the tin can on the top shelf where she kept the powder hidden, she found it empty. She would deal with that later. Right now she needed to remain as clearheaded as possible. She put on her nicest wool skirt and dark purple sweater and walked down to the courthouse.
“I want a divorce,” she told the clerk, Gail Weathers, a man who’d lost all four fingers of his left hand in the war.
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t love my husband anymore.”
“That ain’t a good enough reason for the state of Texas.”
She pointed to her bruised face, and when he still seemed unconvinced, she discreetly rolled back the waistband of her skirt and slip to reveal the belt buckle puncture, a halo of swollen pink flesh surrounding the still-infected hole. This got Weathers’s attention, mainly because of the audacity of the revelation rather than the impressiveness of the wound. But he didn’t show his surprise, just continued chewing on an already gnawed toothpick.
“Guess you should talk to Hef Givens,” he said.
She walked over to the office of Hef Givens, one of only two lawyers in town.
“A divorce’ll cost you more than it’s worth,” he said. “And you can be sure Blue won’t take it well.”
Hef Givens and Blue Simpson sometimes hunted deer together. He was not excited about being enlisted as the attorney in a divorce proceeding against his friend.
“Here,” Loretta said, handing Hef Givens $25 for his retainer, money she had been hoarding the past year by shaving a couple of dollars off the grocery bill each month. “That’s all I have right now.”
These were not, despite postwar prosperity, exactly fat times in Charnelle, but Hef Givens was doing well enough. He did not need to take on this case. But his own father had been a thief who sometimes savagely beat his mother and him and then deservedly spent seven years in jail for armed robbery-a time of poverty for Hef and his mother, yet also a period of relative safety and occasional happiness, especially after they moved to Charnelle to live with his grandparents.
Hef looked at Loretta, an intelligent but sullen woman, and saw in her bruises and resolve a refracted portrait of his own mother’s life. “Okay, then,” he said, without touching the money. “Here’s the first order of business.”
She returned home, as Hef Givens instructed her to do, and packed Blue’s personal belongings into two boxes, which she placed on the porch, along with a suitcase filled with his clothes. She took the children to Carol Lippincott’s house. Then she called the sheriff and requested that a deputy be sent to escort Blue away when he arrived home.
The sheriff’s office had already received a call from Hef Givens, and no one there relished this assignment. They didn’t appreciate domestic situations, since those were often the only dangerous ones in Charnelle. Not many people were injured with criminal intent in the county unless, experience had taught Sheriff Britwork, they were on the receiving end of a love gone sour. In 1949 there was very little by way of criminal activity at all in Charnelle, so Sheriff Britwork and his four officers spent most of their time at the Ding Dong Daddy Diner, drinking coffee and munching onion rings, or hanging out at the high school football and basketball games to prevent adolescent brawls, or cruising through Mexican Town to make sure the residents knew that someone was keeping a suspicious eye on them. There were also no divorces recorded in Charnelle during the previous six years, even if a majority of marriages, by Britwork’s estimation, were not happy ones. Sometimes a couple would separate temporarily, or a man would run off with a mistress for a while, or a wife would run off with her husband’s best friend, only to return a few days or weeks later. These incidents seldom resulted in divorce. Acrimony, certainly, and a malignant resentment. Sometimes shots were fired or knives wielded or suicides threatened. But seldom divorce.