ow let's get one thing straight - I ain't tryin to say I ended up spendin the best years of my life with that old rumpot just because I liked the look of his forehead in period seven study-hall when the light came slantin in on it. Shit, no. But I am tryin to tell you that's all the love part I was able to remember today, and that makes me feel bad. Sittin out on the stairs today by the East Head, thinkin over those old times . . . that was damned hard work. It was the first time I saw that I might have sold myself cheap, and maybe I did it because I thought cheap was the best the likes of me could expect to get for herself. I know it was the first time I dared to think that I deserved to be loved more'n Joe St George could love anybody (except himself, maybe). You mightn't think a hard-talking old bitch like me believes in love, but the truth is it's just about the only thing I do believe in.

It didn't have much to do with why I married him, though - I got to tell you that straight out. I had six weeks' worth of baby girl in my belly when I told him I did n I would, until death do us part. And that was the smartest part of it . . . sad but true. The rest of it was all the usual stupid reasons, and one thing I've learned in my life is that stupid reasons make stupid marriages.

I was tired of fightin with my mother.

I was tired of bein scolded by my father.

All my friends was doin it, they was gettin homes of their own, and I wanted to be a grownup like them; I was tired of bein a silly little girl.

He said he wanted me, and I believed him.

He said he loved me, and I believed that, too, and after he'd said it n asked me if I felt the same for him, it only seemed polite to say I did.

I was scared of what would happen to me if I didn't - where I'd have to go, what I'd have to do, who'd look after my baby while I was doin it.

All that's gonna look pretty silly if you ever write it up, Nancy, but the silliest thing is I know a dozen women who were girls I went to school with who got married for those same reasons, and most of them are still married, and a good many of em are only holdin on, hopin to outlive the old man so they can bury him and then shake his beer-farts out of the sheets forever.

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 well: 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 f6ur 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 she 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 workboots. 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.

No one calls it home correction anymore - the term has passed right out of conversation, so far as I can tell; and good riddance - but I grew up with the idear that when women and children step off the straight n narrow, it's a man's job to herd them back onto it. I ain't tryin to tell you that just because I grew up with the idear, I thought it was right, though - I won't let myself slip off that easy. I knew that a man usin his hands on a woman didn't have much to do with correction . . . but I let Joe go on doin it to me for a long time, just the same. I guess I was just too tired from keeping house, cleanin for the summer people, raisin m'family, and tryin to clean up Joe's messes with the neighbors to think much about it.

Bein married to Joe. . . aw, shit! What's any marriage like? I guess they are all different ways, but there ain't one of em that's what it looks like from the outside, I c'n tell you that. What people see of a married life and what actually goes on inside it are usually not much more than kissin cousins. Sometimes that's awful, and sometimes it's funny, but usually it's like all the other parts of life - both things at the same time.

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 AA 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 AA 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 wood-box 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 sneakyfast. 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, seem nothin but dark and wonderin what it'd feel like, having 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 if I hadn't felt I had a pretty good chance of comm 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 goin to have to remember her mother sittin in the comer 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 judgement 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.

There were times when he raised his hand to me, but then he'd think better of it. Sometimes when the hand was up, wantin to hit but not quite darin to hit, I'd see in his eyes that he was rememberin the cream-pitcher. . . maybe the hatchet, too. And then he'd make like he only raised that hand because his head needed scratchin, or his forehead wipin. That was one lesson he got the first time. Maybe the only one.

There was somethin else come out of the night he hit me with the stovelength and I hit him with the cream-pitcher. I don't like to bring it up - I'm one of those old-fashioned folks that believes what goes on behind the bedroom door should stay there - but I guess I better, because it's prob'ly part of why things turned out as they did.

Although we were married and livin under the same roof together for the next two years - and it might have been closer to three, I really can't remember - he only tried to take his privilege with me a few times after that. He -What, Andy?

Accourse I mean he was impotent! What else would I be talkin about, his right to wear my underwear if the urge took him? I never denied him; he just quit bein able to do it. He wasn't what you'd call an every-night sort of man, not even back at the start, and he wasn't one to draw it out, either - it was always pretty much wham, bam, and thank you, ma'am. Still n all, he'd stayed int'rested enough to climb on top once or twice a week until I hit him with the creamer, that is.