Wicked

By: TheJadeTipster

Author's Note: This fiction was orginially called "Lily White." I changed the name because the theme of the story has changed quite a bit, though the general framework is the same. Anyway...read, enjoy, and review!

That night, so long ago, in the summer that I was eight, the world changed for me. Nights were thick and hot, days almost unbearable. If I’d a friend, a real friend, someone to cry to, someone to ice my bruises, someone who really and truly loved me, maybe I would’ve gotten through unscarred.

But there was nobody. My daddy leased a small patch of land, a little corner of the grand plantation the Lavelles owned. The Lavelles had three kids, all of them around my age, but they were a tad too high and mighty for me to play with them. Gaps in social standing were uncrossable chasms, and, though we were polite enough to each other, we stayed on our own sides of the fence.

For a time, when I was younger and didn’t know the dangers of letting my mind flex and stretch and wander, I’d dream of Hope. She’d play with me. I know she didn’t exist, or wasn’t supposed to, but it was oh so fun to sit on my bed and think of her, for her to appear at my side and smile at me, placing a comforting hand near my shoulder. She never touched, just as she never spoke, but our bond was there, with the deep and immediate strength only desperate children are able to forge.

She was tall, fragile of bone, delicate of feature. She was a wispy thing, with almost translucent gray eyes and milky-white skin. Her hair was the pale color of corn silk, and slid prettily down her narrow back. I envied her that hair, wishing that my dirty-brown locks would lighten to that too-perfect shade. Whenever I told her so, she’d smile.

She lived for adventures. When I was with her, I did too. With her, I escaped from the miseries and turmoils of my own house, my own life, and became her partner. We were spies, detectives, knights on quests, pirates, or space marauders. We were brave and true, bold and daring. She wasn’t just my imaginary friend, and I still don’t rightly believe that she was imaginary.

Even though I trusted her, I never told her about my life, even though I had a strong suspicion that she already knew. She was simply a child’s escape into a wonderful world where there’s sunshine and flowers and love. I loved her, the kind of love that only young girls with scabs on their heart could feel. Hope helped me through the worst of my childhood, but, on a day where the air was like syrup, thick and sweet, she was gone. No justification, no good-bye. Just…gone.

The night my life as I knew it ended came long after Hope had left me. I’d learn to care for myself, had retreated into my mind where the loneliness couldn’t stab the unique of betrayal through my stomach. She had to have had a good reason to go, had to, yet my little girl heart still throbbed and ached, and I don’t I ever forgave her for leaving me all alone.

That night, we had chicken and rice for supper. The house was so hot, even with all of the fans going on high, that eating was a chore. But if there was a grain of rice on your plate, Daddy expected you to ea it, ad be damned grateful. Before supper there was always grace. Depending on Daddy’s mood, it would last anywhere from five minutes to twenty, while the food sat growing cold and your belly grumbles and sweat ran down your back in nasty rivers.

He was a big man, my father, and grew thick in the chest and arms. I’ve heard that he was once considered handsome. Years carve a man in different ways, and my fathers years had carved him bitter. Bitter and stern with pure meanness under it all. He wore his thinning dark hair slicked back, and his face seemed to rise out of that dome like sharp-edged rocks out of a mountain. Rocks that would flay the skin off your bones at one careless misstep. His eyes were true blue, though, the innocent eye color of sweet-cheeked baby dolls. Sometimes, I had dreams about those eyes, where I would peer into them and see darkness lurking in their depths, a burning kind of darkness I recognize now in the eyes of some television preachers and street mongrels.

My mother was afraid of him. I try to forgive her for that, for fearing him so much she never came to my side when he used his belt to whip his vengeful god into me.

That night I was quiet at supper. Chances were he’d take no notice of me if I was quiet and cleaned my plate. I kept my eyes cast down, trying to pace my eating so he wouldn’t accuse me of dawdling over the food, or of bolting it. It was always a fine line to balance with Daddy.

I remember the sound of the fans whirling, and of forks scraping against plates. I remember the silence, the silence of souls hiding in fear that lived in my father’s house.

When my mother offered him more chicken, he thanked her politely and took a second helping. The room seemed to breath easier. It was a good sign. My mother, encouraged by this, made some mention of the tomatoes and corn coming in fine, and how she’d be canning for the next few weeks. They’d be canning over at the plantation house, too, and did he think it was a good idea for her to help out there as she’d been asked.

She didn’t mention the wage she’d earn. Even when Daddy’s mood was mild, you were wise not to bring p the coin that the Lavelles would dole out for a service. He was the breadwinner in his house, and he were not permitted to forget this all-important point.

The room held its breath again. There were times just the mention of the Lavelles put the thunder in Daddy’s Crayola blue eyes. But that night he allowed as that would be a sensible thing. As long as she didn’t neglect any of her chores under the roof he was putting over her head.

This relatively pleasant response made her smile. I remember how her face softened up, and how it made her almost pretty again. Now and again, if I think very hard, I can remember Mama being pretty.

Han, she called him when she was smiling, and it sounded like the name of an angel on her lips. Tory and I’ll keep things going around here, don’t you worry. I’ll go on over and talk to Miss Lilith tomorrow and see about getting it all down. With the berries coming in, I’ll be making jelly, too. I know I’ve got some paraffin around here somewhere, but I can’t think of where it’s got to.

And that, just that casual remark about jelly and wax and absentmindedness changed everything. I supposed my mind had drifted off during the conversation, and I hate myself for it. I spoke without thought, without conscious knowledge of the consequences. So I said the words that damned me.

The box of paraffin’s in the top shelf of the cabinet over the stove, up there behind the molasses and the cornstarch.

I simply said what I saw in my head, the square rusted box of block wax behind the dark bottle of blackstrap, and reached for my cold sweet tea to wash down the starchy grains of rice.

Before I took the first sip, I heard the silence come back, the mute wave that swamped even the monotonous hum of fans. My heart started to pound inside that vacuum, one hard hammer strike after the next, with a ringing that was only inside my own head and was the sudden and vicious pulse of blood. The pulse of fear.

He spoke softly then, as he always did just before the rage. Hoe do you know where the wax is, Victoria? How do you know it’s up there, where you can’t see it? Where you can’t reach it?

I lied. It was foolish, because I was already doomed, but the lie tumbled out, a desperate defense. I told him I guess I saw Mama put it there. I just remember seeing her put it there, is all.

He oe that lie to shreds. He had a way of seeing through lies and ripping them to uneven pieces ad sticky parts. When did I see that? Why didn’t I do better in school if my memory was so keen I could remember where the paraffin was a year after the last canning season? And how was it I knew it was behind the molasses and cornstarch and no in front of them, or beside them?

Oh, he was a clever man, my father, and he never missed the smallest of details.

Mama said nohing while he spoke in that soft voice, punching the words at me like fiss wrappe d delicately in silk. She folded her hands, and I saw her small, frail body shake. Did she tremble for me? I suppose I like to think so. But she said nothing as his voice thoruhg louder, nothing as h shoved back from the table, hard. Nothing as the glass slipped from my clammy hand and crashed to the floor. A shard of it nicked my ankle, and through the rising terror in, I felt that little pain.

He checked first, of course. He would tell himself that was the fair thing, the right thing, to do. When he opened the cabinet, pushed aside the bottles, slowly produced that square rusted box of canning wax out from behind the bottle of molasses, I cried. I still had tears in me then. I still had hope. Even as he yanked me o my feet, I had the hope that the punishment would onl be prayers, hours of prayer until my knees went numb.

Hadn’t he warned me not to let the devil in? But still, I brought wickedness into his house, shamed him before God. I said I was sorry, that I didn’t mean to. Please, Daddy, please, I won’t do it again. I’m sorry, Daddy. I’ll be good, I promise.

I begged him; he shouted scripture and with his big, callused hands dragged me toward my room, but still I begged him. It was the last time I did so.

There was no fighting back. It was worse if you fought him. The Fourth Commandment was a sacred thing, and you would honor your father in his house, goddammit, even when he beat you bloody.

His was face was deep red with his righteousness, big and blinding as the sun. He only slapped me once. That was all it took to stop my pleading, and my excused. And to kill my hope.

I lay across the bed on my stomach, passive now as any sacrificial lamb. The sound his belt made when he slid it of the loops on his work pants was a snake hissing, then a crack, sharp, slick as he snapped it.

He always snapped it three times. A holy trinity of cruelty.

The first whip is always the worst. No matter how many times there's been a first, the shock and pain is stunning and rips a scream from your belly. Your body jerks in protest. No, in disbelief, then the second slap bites into you, and the third.

Soon your cries are more animal than human. Your humanity has been compromised, buried under an avalanche of pain and humiliation.

He would preach as he beat me, and his voice would become a great roar. And under that roar was a hideous excitement, a vile sort of pleasure I didn't understand and recognize. No child should know that slippery undercoating, and from that, for a time, I was spared.

The first time he beat me, I was five. My mother tried to stop him, and he blackened her eye for it. She never tried again. I don't know what she did that night while he whaled away, beating at the devil that gave me visions. I couldn't see, not with eyes nor with mind, anything but a blood-red haze.

The haze was hate, but I didn't recognize that either.

He left me frozen on the bed, slipping into unconciousness, and locked the door from the outside. After a while, the pain drove me to sleep.

When I awoke, slowly and unmovingly, they way I’d learned to wake, it was dark and it seemed a fire burned in me. I can't say the pain was unbearable, because you bear it. What choice is there? I prayed, too, prayed that whatever was inside of me had finally been driven out. I didn't want to be wicked.