Free Dedicated to God by Abbie Reese Page B

were good,” she says. She doesn’t remember receiving a quarter. “I don’t think we were good.”
    Her father, never satisfied as an employee, “wanted to be on his own,” Sister Joan Marie says. “He didn’t want to be under anybody. He was kind of a tyrant.” Virginia was terrified of her father. Her mother, it seemed, could talk to him, even during his rants. She warned her husband she was going to record his outbursts and play them back when he was sober and spent. “She should have,” Sister Joan Marie says. “He liked to talk. When he got upset, he liked to talk. Just crazy. Wasn’t reasonable. Unreasonable. But she could control him, pretty much. I think she was able to. But I was affected more than she. Because he would take it all out on her, it kind of got me.”
    Sister Joan Marie believes her father was a complicated figure. “Sometimes he would be so good,” she says. “He would always stop on the highway if he saw anyone in trouble; he would stop to help. I guess he must have been real hungry when he was little because he always thought he should feed everybody. He wouldn’t give you an ice cream cone unless he gave the whole group a cone. One time it was raining and we were soaked and we had to stay in the tent—we had a big tent that we went around with—and he got us all suckers. I think he came with suckers and it broke the day a little bit. He was real good with children. He always liked children. He had a lot of good points. But the sickness got him. When you’re discouraged and it goes into depression, then you seem to take it out on the ones you love the most. It’s terrible. But that’s what happens. Suffering from Dad, I think we naturally turned more toward God because there was nothing else to turn to. Mother always said, ‘Don’t tell anybody, don’t tell anybody,’ because at that time you didn’t have these groups—support groups. There was nobody we could talk to.”
    Sister Joan Marie remembers that her mother loved reading the melancholy Old Testament books of Job (the story of the holiest man alive, who experienced an epic plight, with his loved ones killed and his fortune erased, in a series of temptations to curse God) and Ruth (a widow who refused to follow her mother-in-law to her homeland, found love with a rich relative of her in-laws, and famously said, “Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following you; for wherever you go, I will go; and wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God, my God”).
    With no one to talk to, no one to help carry her burdens, Sister Joan Marie turned to her dog, Suzy. She told her pet her worries.
    It was in her maternal grandmother’s care and in the United Brethren denomination, and their small, poor church with its conspicuous crack in the wall, where Sister Joan Marie felt safe and her faith took root. Sister JoanMarie says her parents did not want to be “prejudiced,” and so they left the matter of religion to their children’s efforts. “I think they were hoping that we would choose some religion. My mother said she just thought it would take. She had been brought up in it. In college, I guess she just got that idea, that you should choose your own religion, you should bring your children up to choose. She was religious but she didn’t know that she had to train; she didn’t realize that you have to get some training.”
    Virginia was often anxious for her mother. Once, her mom disappeared in the middle of the night. Virginia screamed at her father, demanding to know what he had done to her. He laughed. The following day, Virginia was relieved that her mother had given birth, which explained why her mother had sent Virginia and her brother outdoors and out from underfoot in the previous months. Virginia’s fear for her family grew, and this was justified: Her father, without any means and one more mouth to feed, experienced a psychological break. He told his family