“You have to understand what she was like. She wouldn’t obey him. Wouldn’t listen. Sosometimeshe had to use other methods as well.”
“Such as?”
Eileen thought for a moment.
“It would depend on what she’d done. If she’d blasphemed, then he would make her eat excrement. If she had stolen, he would fill her mouth with coins and make her swallow them. If she’d been with boys, he... he would beat her between her legs to make sure she wouldn’t do it again—”
“He tortured her?” Helen roared.
“He corrected her,” Eileen retorted. “You don’t understand. She was wild. Ungovernable.”
“She wastraumatized. Traumatized by your bully of a husband. Why didn’t you intervene, for God’s sake?”
Eileen could no longer look Helen in the eye. For all her conviction, without her husband present, nothing seemed certain anymore.
Helen continued in a more soothing tone:
“Why her and not the others?”
“Because they did as they were asked.”
“Carrie—how old was she when she got married?”
“Sixteen. She finished her schooling, then married a good man.”
“From the church?”
Eileen nodded again.
“How old was her husband? When they married?” Helen continued.
“Forty-two.”
Eileen suddenly looked up, as if searching for Helen’s disapproval.
“Young girls need discipline—”
“So you said,” Helen interrupted firmly.
A heavy silence followed. This room had been so full of misery, so full of vitriol, hatred and abuse. How powerless must the young girl have felt down here alone with her bully of a father, while he abused her physically and verbally. It conjured up images of her own childhood long since buried, which Helen pushed away forcefully now.
The twins were getting restless, calling down to their mother. Eileen turned to go, but Helen caught her arm, stopping her in her tracks.
“Why did she leave?”
“Because she was lost.”
“Because she wouldn’t give up school and marry a guy old enough to be her father?”
Eileen shrugged, resentful now of Helen’s presence and the judgment it brought.
“She wanted to study, didn’t she? She wanted to be a doctor. In spite of everything that had happened to her, she wanted to help people?”
“It was the school’s fault. They put ideas in girls’ heads. We knew it would end in tears, and it did.”
“What do you mean?” Helen responded.
“She walked out on us. Disobeyed her father, said she would find her own ways to fund her ‘studies.’ We all knew what that meant.”
