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Photo of Jackson Square, New Orleans, by O'Neil De Noux, a great mystery writer, mentor and good friend. Visit O’Neil’s web site using the button at the left.
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Part 1
Fall 1897
Chapter 1
HER PAW WAS DRUNK AGAIN ... happy drunk, but that would change. It always did.
Not quite thirteen years old and already life battered her, brutal cycles stretching as far into the past as she could remember and as far into the future as she could imagine. In her mind she began her week on Tuesday, sorry-day for paw. He apologized for everything he had done since Saturday, promised never to do it again and tried to make his family as happy as poor white trash with empty bellies could be. Wednesday was find-an-odd-job-day and, with luck, not-so-hungry-day. Thursday was work-or-hunt-day and usually full-pot-at-dinner-day. Friday was complain-day; never-had-a-man-worked-so-hard-for-a-family-so-ungrateful-day. Then came two-jug Saturday--anxious morning, agonizing afternoon, appalling night. Tomorrow the horror of Saturday would continue until her paw could only snore and drool, sleeping straight through until Monday, vomit-and-be-sick-day.
"Come here, ya vixen."
She heard her paw's liquor-slurred words and her momma's shrill, nervous laugh in reply, both firmly fixing their exact position in the demon's repertoire of brutality.
He always calls momma vixen 'fore he takes her the first time.
The child knew that had she been peeking through the cracks in the cabin's clapboards instead of hiding at the edge of the clearing where their shack stood, she would have seen her paw roughly undress her momma, then be quick about his business with her. All the while the woman praised the wonders of her husband, holding him close as he had his way with her and staring vacantly at the roof of the dilapidated hovel the four of them called home.
"Oh, you're a wonderful man," her momma always said as her paw, walking away unsteadily, pulled up his pants and went for his jug again.
Then the brief interlude in which the demon sometime actually bared his fangs and smiled would end; not all at once, but slowly, inevitably, like the Mississippi rising during spring flood. She had watched this ritual so many times through the chinks in the cabin wall she knew exactly what was happening inside. Today, huddled at the edge of the woods, she saw the minute details of each abomination in the archives of her memory, sounds from the cabin moving the images in her head toward their inevitable conclusion.
Her momma, dressed now, would be going about her chores as her paw sat in the family's only chair--a rickety, old ladder-back--pulling on his jug.
She waited. Without a breeze to stir them, the tall pines where she hid seemed carved from the cloudless blue background and painted in earth tones. In the grass at her feet, a spider ran the tightropes of its web, worried by the water collecting on the strands. Where'd it come from? she wondered, then realized she was crying.
After a while her paw's loud demand carried to the trees. "Where's m' woman!"
In her mind's eye the child saw her momma trudge to where he sat, putting on a forlorn smile as she came into his view, herding wisps of ornery, broom-straw blonde hair into place, uselessly smoothing the wrinkles in her apron. "Here I am, Herman. Can I get ya somethin'?" she always asked, anxious brown eyes flitting around the shack as if looking for some minor household god to make this Saturday different from all the rest.
"Got me an itch needs scratchin'. Takes a real woman. Think the likes o' you can do it?"
"Oh, I'll try, Herman, I surely will," her momma always said as she helped her husband out of his clothes, then undressed herself, frantically attempting to be erotic. But the poor woman never succeeded.
In all the years she watched her mother's inept, almost comic, efforts to be seductive, the child did not know liquor diminished a man's prowess, that the failure did not belong to her momma. She only knew her paw's manhood would not peak and he blamed his wife.
Waiting for Saturday's inevitable tragedy to play itself out, the child hunkered to insignificance in the scrub. Haunches to heels, she squatted, hugging her knees to her chest, barely breathing the pine-scented air. Cramped thighs, calves and arms ached; a muscle under her right shoulder blade knotted. She bit her lower lip until tiny drops of blood seeped through the skin. Tears fought against the pain in her body and the agonizing images in her mind. Daren't cry out, daren't move, lest the demon catch me up in his nettle-cloth.
"Damn you!" her paw yelled. "If I had me a real woman, I'd be all right. But I'm stuck with you. A real woman'd put me in fine fiddle, wouldn't she now? Not a cow, though. Not a floppy-titted bitch!"
"Oh, Herman, I'm trying. Don't you think ... Well ... M-Maybe if you didn't drink so--".
"Leave my drinkin' out o' this!"
The sound of an open-palm slap and her momma's scream reached the child, made her shrink further into the undergrowth.
Then the demon called for her. "Sarah Beth!"
This, the most recent vagary in the savage cycles of her life, had begun a few months ago. After her bout with yellow fever, Sarah Beth first noticed how strangely her paw stared at her, but dismissed it. Just another puzzlement.
"Oh, Herman, no. Please. PLEASE!"
Her mother's terror plain in the woman's voice, the child did not understand it.
"You don't need her," Sarah Beth's mother continued in a plaintive voice. "Ya got me. Let her be. She's so young. She's--".
"You surer-than-hell ain't no good f' me!" A slap and scream for punctuation. "That's just what-alls I need ... A young 'un ... SARAH BETH! Git yourself in here, gal! Ya old paw's got somethin' sweet f' ya ... Somethin' real sweet!"
"No, Herman. Oh, God, Herman, no! Leave her be! You got me. You don't need--".
Her paw hit her momma again.
Sarah Beth wanted to run into the cabin and make him stop but could not, frozen by fear and promises.
"Listen t' me good, Sarah Beth," her momma had said time after time. "No matter what all happens t' me, promise you'll never get next to ya paw when he's drunk. Understand me?"
"Yes, 'um." But Sarah Beth only understood her momma took beatings meant for her.
"Swear it!"
"I swear, Momma."
The loathsome sounds of her mother being knocked into the cabin walls, the poor woman's screams and pleas drove Sarah Beth deeper into the woods. The scrub pulled at her, knotted in the thick mass of her scarlet-gold hair. Vines tripped her. Branches and brambles tore her clothes, ripped her skin. Captured in a hell gone green, she twisted; stumbled; fought the thicket; thrashed; punched her leafy, insubstantial captor; sobbed; saw her paw's face in the tree trunks; ran on legs that would not, could not move; gulped for air; lost her sight to tears; fell; split her knee; ripped her palms; pounded her forehead on the ground to banish the terrible sights trapped forever in her head. But nothing could release her from the scenes playing endlessly in the cabin and her mind. Eyes squeezed tight, every angle of her consciousness, like mirrors in a fun house, reflected her momma's plight to the far-off crannies of her brain. She had to find a way to stop the beatings meant for her. But I promised!
Lying in the undergrowth, bleeding, out of breath, the image of her paw's face, twisted and leering, came into view behind her closed eyelids. Bit-by-bit the bead of a gun sight assembled in her mind's eye and nestled between his thick eyebrows. She imagined the rifle's smooth, wooden stock against her cheek; the cool, metal trigger under her finger.
Fear and confusion suddenly gone, Sarah Beth knew how to keep her promise and still save her momma.
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