Meantime, that inside eye saw more n more. It saw the crisscross scars on his ear from when I hit him with the creamer; it saw the squiggly little veins in his nose; it saw the way his lower lip pooched out so he almost always looked like he was havin a fit of the sulks; it saw the dandruff in his eyebrows and the way he’d pull at the hairs growin out of his nose or give his pants a good tug at the crotch every now and then.
All the things that eye saw were bad, and it come to me that marryin him had been a lot more than the biggest mistake of my life; it was the only mistake that really mattered, because it wasn’t just me that would end up payin for it. It was Selena he was occupied with then, but there were two boys comin along right behind her, and if he wouldn’t stop at tryin to rape their big sister, what might he do to them?
I turned my head and that eye inside saw the hatchet, layin on the shelf over the woodbox just the same as always. I reached out for it n closed my fingers around the handle, thinkin, I ain’t just going to put it in your hand this time, Joe. Then I thought of Selena turnin back to look at me as the three of em walked down the driveway, and I decided that whatever happened, the goddam hatchet wasn’t going to be any part of it. I bent down and took a chunk of rock maple out of the woodbox instead.
Hatchet or stovelength, it almost didn’t matter —Joe’s life come within a whisker of endin right then and there. The longer I looked at him sittin in his dirty shirt, tuggin at the hairs stickin outta his nose and readin the funnypages, the more I thought of what he’d been up to with Selena; the more I thought about that, the madder I got; the madder I got, the closer I came to just walkin over there and breakin his skull open with that stick of wood. I could even see the place I’d hit the first lick. His hair had started to get real thin, especially in back, and the light from the lamp beside his chair made a kind of gleam there. You could see the freckles on the skin between the few strands of hair that was left. Right there, I thought, that very place. The blood’ll jump up n splatter all over the lampshade, but I don’t care; it’s an ugly old thing, anyway. The more I thought about it, the more I
wanted
to see the blood flyin up onto the shade like I knew it would. And then I thought about how drops would fly onto the light-bulb, too, and make a little sizzlin sound. I thought about those things, and the more I thought, the more my fingers bore down on that chunk of stovewood, gettin their best grip. It was crazy, oh yes, but I couldn’t seem to turn away from him, and I knew that inside eye would go on lookin at him even if I did.
I told myself to think of how Selena would feel if I did it—all her worst fears come true—but that didn’t work, either. As much as I loved her and as much as I wanted her good regard, it didn’t. That eye was too strong for love. Not even wonderin what would happen to the three of em if he was dead and I was in South Windham for killin him would make that inside eye close up. It stayed wide open, and it kep seein more and more ugly things in Joe’s face. The way he scraped white flakes of skin up from his cheeks when he shaved. A blob of mustard from his dinner dryin on his chin. His big old horsey dentures, which he got from mail-order and didn’t fit him right. And every time I saw somethin else with that eye, my grip on that stovelength would tighten down a little more.
At the last minute I thought of somethin else. If you do this right here and right now, you won’t be doin it for Selena, I thought. You wouldn’t be doin it for the boys, either. You’d be doin it because all that grabbin was goin on under your very nose for three months or more and you was too dumb to notice. If you’re going to kill him and go to prison and only see your kids on Sat’dy afternoons, you better understand why you’re doin it: not because he was at Selena, but because he fooled you, and that’s one way you’re just like Vera—you hate bein fooled worse’n anything.
That finally put a damper on me. The inside eye didn’t close, but it dimmed down and lost a little of its power. I tried to open my hand and let that chunk of rock maple fall, but I’d been squeezin it too tight and couldn’t seem to let go. I had to reach over with my other hand and pry the first two fingers off before it dropped back into the woodbox, and the other three fingers stayed curled, like they were still holdin on. I had to flex my hand three or four times before it started to feel normal again.
After it did, I walked over to Joe and tapped him on the shoulder. “I want to talk to you,” I says.
“So talk,” he says from behind the paper. “I ain’t stoppin you.”
“I want you lookin at me when I do,” I says. “Put that rag down.”
He dropped the paper into his lap and looked at me. “Ain’t you got the
busiest
mouth on you these days,” he says.
“I’ll take care of my mouth,” I says, “you just want to take care of your hands. If you don’t, they’re gonna get you in more trouble than you could handle in a year of Sundays.”
His brows went up and he asked me what that was supposed to mean.
“It means I want you to leave Selena alone,” I says.
He looked like I’d hoicked my knee right up into his family jewels. That was the best of a sorry business, Andy—the look on Joe’s face when he found out he was found out. His skin went pale and his mouth dropped open and his whole body kinda jerked in that shitty old rocker of his, the way a person’s body will jerk sometimes when they are just fallin off to sleep and have a bad thought on their way down.
He tried to pass it off by actin like he’d had a muscle-twinge in his back, but he didn’t fool either one of us. He actually looked a little ashamed of himself, too, but that didn’t win him any favor with me. Even a stupid hound-dog has sense enough to look ashamed if you catch it stealin eggs out of a henhouse.
“I don’t know what you’re talkin about,” he says.
“Then how come you look like the devil just reached into your pants and squeezed your balls?” I asked him.
The thunder started to come onto his brow then. “If that damned Joe Junior’s been tellin lies about me—” he begun.
“Joe Junior ain’t been sayin yes, no, aye, nor maybe about you,” I says, “and you can just drop the act, Joe. Selena told me. She told me everything—how she tried to be nice to you after the night I hit you with the cream-pitcher, how you repaid her, and what you said would happen if she ever told.”
“She’s a little liar!” he says, throwin his paper on the floor like that proved it. “A little liar and a goddam tease! I’m gonna get my belt, and when she shows her face again—if she ever
dares
to show it around here again—”
He started to get up. I took one hand and shoved him back down again. It’s awful easy, shovin a person who’s tryin to get out of a rockin chair; it surprised me a little how easy it was. Accourse, I’d almost bashed his head in with a stovelength not three minutes before, and that mighta had somethin to do with it.
His eyes went down to narrow little slits and he said I’d better not fool with him. “You’ve done it before,” he says, “but that don’t mean you can bell the cat
every
time you want to.”
I’d been thinkin that very thing myself, and not so long before, but that wasn’t hardly the time to tell him so. “You can save your big talk for your friends, ” I says instead. “What you want to do right now isn’t talk but listen ... and hear what I say, because I mean every word. If you ever fool with Selena again, I’ll see you in State Prison for molesting a child or statutory rape, whichever charge will keep you in cold storage the longest.”
That flummoxed him. His mouth fell open again and he just sat there for a minute, starin up at me.
“You’d never,” he begun, and then stopped. Because he seen that I
would.
So he went into a pet, with his lower lip poochin out farther than ever. “You take her part, don’t you?” he says. “You never even ast for my side of it, Dolores.”
“Do you
have
one?” I asked him back. “When a man just four years shy of forty asks his fourteen-year-old daughter to take off her underpants so he can see how much hair she has growin on her pussy, can you say that man
has
a side?”
“She’ll be fifteen next month,” he says, as if that somehow changed everything. He was a piece of work, all right.
“Do you hear yourself?” I asked him. “Do you hear what’s runnin out of your own mouth?”
He stared at me a little longer, then bent over and picked his newspaper up off the floor. “Leave me alone, Dolores,” he says in his best sulky poor-old-me voice. “I want to finish this article.”
I felt like tearin the damned paper out of his hands and throwin it in his face, but there would have been a blood-flowin tussle for sure if I had, and I didn’t want the kids—especially not Selena —comin in on somethin like that. So I just reached out and pulled down the top of it, gentle, with my thumb.
“First you’re gonna promise me you’ll leave Selena alone,” I said, “so we can put this shit-miserable business behind us. You promise me you ain’t gonna touch her that way ever again in your life. ”
“Dolores, you ain’t—” he starts.
“Promise, Joe, or I’ll make your life hell.”
“You think that scares me?” he shouts. “You’ve made my life hell for the last fifteen years, you bitch—your ugly face can’t hold a candle to your ugly disposition! If you don’t like the way I am, blame yourself!”
“You don’t know what hell is,” I said, “but if you don’t promise to leave her alone, I’ll see you find out.”
“All right!” he yells. “All right, I promise! There! Done! Are you satisfied?”
“Yes,” I says, although I wasn’t. He wasn’t ever gonna be able to satisfy me again. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d worked the miracle of the loaves and fishes. I meant to get the kids out of that house or see him dead before the turn of the year. Which way it went didn’t make much difference to me, but I didn’t want him to know somethin was comin his way until it was too late for him to do anythin about it.
“Good,” he says. “Then we’re all done and buttoned up, ain’t we, Dolores?” But he was lookin at me with a funny little gleam in his eyes that I didn’t much like. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”
“I dunno,” I says. “I used to think I had a fair amount of intelligence, but look who I ended up keepin house with.”
“Oh, come on,” he says, still lookin at me in that funny half-wise way. “You think you’re such hot shit you prob’ly look over your shoulder to make sure your ass ain’t smokin before you wipe yourself. But you don’t know everything.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You
figure it out,” he says, and shakes his paper out like some rich guy who wants to make sure the stock market didn’t use him too bad that day. “It shouldn’t be no trouble for a smartypants like you.”
I didn’t like it, but I let it go. Partly it was because I didn’t want to spend any more time knockin a stick against a hornet’s nest than I had to, but that wasn’t all of it. I
did
think I was smart, smarter’n him, anyway, and that was the rest of it. I figured if he tried to get his own back on me, I’d see what he was up to about five minutes after he got started. It was pride, in other words, pride pure n simple, and the idea that he’d
already
got started never crossed my mind.
When the kids came back from the store, I sent the boys into the house and walked around to the back with Selena. There’s a big tangle of blackberry bushes there, mostly bare by that time of the year. A little breeze had come up, and it made them rattle. It was a lonesome sound. A little creepy, too. There’s a big white stone stickin out of the ground there, and we sat down on it. A half-moon had risen over East Head, and when she took my hands, her fingers were just as cold as that half-moon looked.
“I don’t dare go in, Mommy,” she said, and her voice was tremblin. “I’ll go to Tanya’s, all right? Please say I can.”
“You don’t have to be afraid of a thing, sweetheart,” I says. “It’s all taken care of.”
“I don’t believe you,” she whispered, although her face said she wanted to—her face said she wanted to believe it more than any thin.
“It’s true,” I said. “He’s promised to leave you alone. He doesn’t always keep his promises, but he’ll keep this one, now that he knows I’m watchin and he can’t count on you to keep quiet. Also, he’s scared to death.”
“Scared to dea—why?”
“Because I told him I’d see him in Shawshank if he got up to any more nasty business with you.”
She gasped, and her hands bore down on mine again. “Mommy, you
didn’t!”
“Yes I did, and I meant it,” I says. “Best for you to know that, Selena. But I wouldn’t worry too much; Joe probably won’t come within ten feet of you for the next four years ... and by then you’ll be in college. If there’s one thing on this round world he respects, it’s his own hide.”
She let go of my hands, slow but sure. I saw the hope comin into her face, and somethin else, as well. It was like her youth was comin back to her, and it wasn’t until then, sittin in the moonlight by the blackberry patch with her, that I realized how old she’d come to look that fall.
“He won’t strap me or anything?” she asked.
“No,” I says. “It’s done.”
Then she believed it all and put her head down on my shoulder and started to cry. Those were tears of relief, pure and simple. That she should have to cry that way made me hate Joe even more.
I think that, for the next few nights, there was a girl in my house sleepin better’n she had for three months or more ... but I laid awake. I’d listen to Joe snorin beside me, and look at him with that inside eye, and feel like turnin over and bitin his goddam throat out. But I wasn’t crazy anymore, like I’d been when I almost poleaxed him with that stick of stovewood. Thinkin of the kids and what would happen to em if I was taken up for murder hadn’t had any power over that inside eye then, but later on, after I’d told Selena she was safe and had a chance to cool off a little myself, it did. Still, I knew that what Selena most likely wanted—for things to go on like what her Dad had been up to had never happened—couldn’t be. Even if he kep his promise and never touched her again, that couldn’t be ... and in spite of what I’d told Selena, I wasn’t completely sure he’d keep his promise. Sooner or later, men like Joe usually persuade themselves that they can get away with it next time; that if they’re only a little more careful, they can have whatever they like.