Stephen King - Dolores Claiborne

As for Selena… well, I think Selena tried me in her own court. Every now n then I’d see her eyes on me, dark n squally, and in my mind I’d hear her askin, “Did you do anything to him? Did you, Mamma? Is it my fault? Am I the one who has to pay?”

I think she did pay—that’s the worst part. The little island girl who was never out of the state of Maine until she went to Boston for a swim-meet when she was eighteen has become a smart, successful career-woman in New York City—there was an article about her in the New York Times two years ago, did you know that? She writes for all those magazines and still finds time to write me once a week… but they feel like duty-letters, just like the phone-calls twice a month feel like duty-calls. I think the calls n the chatty little notes are the way she pays her heart to be quiet about how she don’t ever come back here, about how she’s cut her ties with me. Yes, I think she paid, all right; I think the one who was the most blameless of all paid the most, and that she’s payin still.

She’s forty-four years old, she’s never married, she’s too thin (I can see that in the pitchers she sometimes sends), and I think she drinks—I’ve heard it in her voice more’n once when she calls. I got an idear that might be one of the reasons she don’t come home anymore; she doesn’t want me to see her drinkin like her father drank. Or maybe because she’s afraid of what she might say if she had one too many while I was right handy. What she might ask.

But never mind; it’s all water over the dam now. I got away with it, that’s the important thing. If there’d been insurance, or if Pease hadn’t kep his mouth shut, I’m not sure I woulda. Of the two, a fat insurance policy prob’ly woulda been worse. The last thing in God’s round world I needed was some smart insurance investigator hookin up with that smart little Scots doctor who was already mad as hell at the idear of bein beaten by an ignorant island woman. Nope, if there’d been two of em, I think they might’ve got me.

So what happened? Why, what I imagine always happens in cases like that, when a murder’s been done and not found out. Life went on, that’s all. Nobody popped up with last-minute information, like in a movie, I didn’t try to kill nobody else, n God didn’t strike me dead with a lightnin-bolt. Maybe He felt hittin me with lightnin over the likes of Joe St. George woulda been a waste of electricity.

Life just went on. I went back to Pinewood n to Vera. Selena took up her old friendships when she went back to school that fall, and sometimes I heard her laughin on the phone. When the news finally sunk in, Little Pete took it hard… and so did Joe Junior. Joey took it harder’n I expected, actually. He lost some weight n had some nightmares, but by the next summer he seemed mostly all right again. The only thing that really changed durin the rest of 1963 was that I had Seth Reed come over n put a cement cap on the old well.

Six months after he died, Joe’s estate was settled in County Probate. I wa‘ant even there. A week or so later I got a paper tellin me that everythin was mine—I could sell it or swap it or drop it in the deep blue sea. When I’d finished goin through what he’d left, I thought the last of those choices looked like the best one. One kinda surprisin thing I discovered, though: if your husband dies sudden, it can come in handy if all his friends were idiots, like Joe’s were. I sold the old shortwave radio he’d been tinkerin on for ten years to Norris Pinette for twenty-five dollars, and the three junk trucks settin in the back yard to Tommy Anderson. That fool was more’n glad to have em, and I used the money to buy a ’59 Chevy that had wheezy valves but ran good otherwise. I also had Joe’s savins passbook made over to me, and re-opened the kids’ college accounts.

Oh, and one other thing—in January of 1964, I started goin by my maiden name again. I didn’t make no particular fanfare about it, but I was damned if I was gonna drag St. George around behind me the rest of my life, like a can tied to a dog’s tail. I guess you could say I cut the string holdin the can… but I didn’t get rid of him as easy as I got rid of his name, I can tell you that.

Not that I expected to; I’m sixty-five, and I’ve known for at least fifty of those years that most of what bein human’s about is makin choices and payin the bills when they come due. Some of the choices are pretty goddam nasty, but that don’t give a person leave to just walk away from em—especially not if that person’s got others dependin on her to do for em what they can’t do for themselves. In a case like that, you just have to make the best choice you can n then pay the price. For me, the price was a lot of nights when I woke up in a cold sweat from bad dreams n even more when I never got to sleep at all; that and the sound the rock made when it hit him in the face, bustin his skull and his dentures—that sound like a china plate on a brick hearth. I’ve heard it for thirty years. Sometimes it’s what wakes me up, and sometimes it’s what keeps me outta sleep and sometimes it surprises me in broad daylight. I might be sweepin the porch at home or polishin the silver at Vera’s or sittin down to my lunch with the TV turned to the Oprah show and all at once I’ll hear it. That sound. Or the thud when he hit bottom. Or his voice, comin up outta the well: “Duh-lorrrr-issss …”

I don’t s‘pose those sounds I sometimes hear are so different from whatever it was that Vera really saw when she screamed about the wires in the corners or the dust bunnies under the bed. There were times, especially after she really began to fail, when I’d crawl in bed with her n hold her n think of the sound the rock made, n then close my eyes n see a china plate strikin a brick hearth and shatterin all to bits. When I saw that I’d hug her like she was my sister, or like she was myself. We’d lie in that bed, each with her own fright, and finally we’d drowse off together—her with me to keep the dust bunnies away, and me with her to keep away the sound of the china plate—and sometimes before I went to sleep I’d think, “This is how. This is how you pay off bein a bitch. And it ain’t no use sayin if you hadn’t been a bitch you wouldn’t’ve had to pay, because sometimes the world makes you be a bitch. When it’s all doom n dark outside and only you inside to first make a light n then tend it, you have to be a bitch. But oh, the price. The terrible price. ”

Andy, do you s’pose I could have one more tiny little nip from that bottle of yours? I’ll never tell a soul.

Thank you. And thank you, Nancy Bannister, for puttin up with such a long-winded old broad as me. How your fingers holdin out?

Are they? Good. Don’t lose your courage now; I’ve gone at it widdershins, I know, but I guess I’ve finally gotten around to the part you really want to hear about, just the same. That’s good, because it’s late and I’m tired. I’ve been workin my whole life, but I can’t remember ever bein as tired as I am right now.

I was out hangin laundry yest‘y mornin—it seems like six years ago, but it was only yest’y—and Vera was havin one of her bright days. That’s why it was all so unexpected, and partly why I got so flustered. When she had her bright days she sometimes got bitchy, but that was the first n last time she got crazy.

So I was down below in the side yard and she was up above in her wheelchair, supervisin the operation the way she liked to do. Every now n then she’d holler down, “Six pins, Dolores! Six pins on every last one of those sheets! Don’t you try to get away with just four, because I’m watching!”

“Yeah,” I says, “I know, and I bet you only wish it was forty degrees colder and a twenty-knot gale blowin.”