The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [31]
Mary deflated. Mairead had always got in the way before—even dead she could win credit, while Mary was left with simple earthly work.
“She told me that I should find some thread and start to stitch again.”
“Well, anyway,” Mary interrupted. “How will we tell the rest of the family? Will we tell them tonight or will we let you surprise them?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t wait to tell Mrs. Carroll. She’ll think there’s hope for poor Sean yet!”
Emer went back to her sewing, and Mary didn’t know what else to say.
“Can I have another scrap today?”
“Certainly. You can have whatever you want today, Emer.” She smiled and found a large square of wool twill in her dresser.
Emer set to work immediately, still working in only one color, to regain what she’d lost after seven years with no practice.
That night at the table, Emer asked for the salt. Her cousins were shocked and her uncle was angry. It was always that way with Martin. He could find a reason to be angry about anything, even if it was something that should have made him happy.
“Since when can she talk?” he asked Mary in a threatening tone.
“Since this morning.”
“That’s odd,” he said, staring directly at Emer. “I heard that Sean Carroll spoke today as well. Does he have anything to do with it?”
Emer nodded.
Mary grabbed Emer’s arm. “Tell me you haven’t been seeing him since I asked you not to!”
“Only a few times,” she lied.
Martin leaned toward his wife. “I told you, didn’t I?”
“Oh Martin, they’re children.”
“He’s no child,” he boomed. “And you,” he continued, pointing at Emer, “you should be smarter. I made a promise to your father to mind you, and mind you I will. Come to me after dinner.”
That meant a lashing, and Emer knew it.
“Why are you punishing me for—”
“Don’t get smart with me now, girl. You know damn well why. You put us through all these years of silence, all along able to talk? Do you know at all what we’ve done for you? How we worried?”
“Worried?” Emer yelled, figuring she’d get a slap anyway. “You’re the reason I stopped talking! You and your lashings and slaps! Don’t you remember the day you dragged me from the well into the hedge? Don’t you remember what you did?”
“Stop that, Emer,” Mary said, fearing she would hear things worse than she was prepared for.
“I will not!”
“You stop now or I’ll—”
“Or what? You’ll hit me and beat me and what? Kill me? I don’t care. All these years you lied and blamed it on Cromwell’s army, when all along you knew!”
Mary looked shocked. No one ever yelled at Martin.
He pushed himself from the table and walked with heavy steps to her, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her from the chair. Before his hand made contact with her skin, she screamed.
“If you hit me, I’ll run away and you’ll never see me again!”
He slapped her face.
“I hate you!”
He punched her in the chest.
“It was all your fault! Now look at you!”
Her cousins watched in horror as their father leveled punch after punch at her abdomen and sides. Mary tried to stop him, and he lashed out and slapped her too.
“Don’t think you have any control over me! I can do what I like!” he said, slapping her again—this time a swipe to her head, which pulled several hairs from her plait and splattered them across her face, now slightly bloodied from a bleeding nose.
“Yes! You can do what you like!” she said between blows. “Because you lived! Because you were too much of a coward to fight the English, so now you beat little children and your own wife!”
He stopped at that and held her tightly by the arms. He was close enough that his spit hit her in the face as he replied. “I fought hard in that battle, girl, and you’ll spread no such lies about me!”
“Tell me,” she answered, staring into his cold eyes. “Tell me—if you fought so hard, why are you alive? My father died at the Carabine Bridge! My mother fought until she fell! You’re just a coward with clean hands, probably spared in a deal with Cromwell himself!”
By the time Emer finished her sentence, her uncle was shaking her body so hard that her head was lashing