Free Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King Page B

told him and he said he didn’t want no beer but a glass of lemonade would hit the spot. I ran to fetch it. Mum was gettin his supper. Her face was still kinda swole from cryin, but she was hummin a tune, and that night they bounced the bedsprings just like they did most nights. Nothing else was ever said or made of it. That sort of thing was called home correction in those days, it was part of a man’s job, and if I thought of it afterward at all, I only thought that my Mum must have needed some or Dad never would have done what he did.
    There was a few other times I saw him correct her, but that’s the one I remember best. I never saw him hit her with his fist, like Joe sometimes hit me, but once he stropped her across the legs with a piece of wet canvas sailcloth, and that must have hurt like a bastard. I know it left red marks that didn’t go away all afternoon.
    No one calls it home correction anymore—the term has passed right out of conversation, so far as I can tell, and good riddance—but I grew up with the idear that when women and children step off the straight n narrow, it’s a man’s job to herd them back onto it. I ain’t tryin to tell you that just because I grew up with the idear, I thought it was right, though—I won’t let myself slip off that easy. I knew that a man usin his hands on a woman didn’t have much to do with correction ... but I let Joe go on doin it to me for a long time, just the same. I guess I was just too tired from keeping house, cleanin for the summer people, raisin m’family, and tryin to clean up Joe’s messes with the neighbors to think much about it.
    Bein married to Joe ... aw, shit! What’s any marriage like? I guess they are all different ways, but there ain’t one of em that’s what it looks like from the outside, I c’n tell you that. What people see of a married life and what actually goes on inside it are usually not much more than kissin cousins. Sometimes that’s awful, and sometimes it’s funny, but usually it’s like all the other parts of life—both things at the same time.
    What people think is that Joe was an alcoholic who used to beat me—and probably the kids, too —when he was drunk. They think he finally did it once too often and I punched his ticket for it. It’s true that Joe drank, and that he sometimes went to the A.A. meetins over in Jonesport, but he was no more an alcoholic than I am. He’d throw a drunk every four or five months, mostly with trash like Rick Thibodeau or Stevie Brooks—those men really were alcoholics—but then he’d leave it alone except for a nip or two when he come in at night. No more than that, because when he had a bottle he liked to make it last. The real alkies I’ve known in my time, none of em was int‘rested in makin a bottle of anythin last—not Jim Beam, not Old Duke, not even derail, which is antifreeze strained through cotton battin. A real drunk is only int’rested in two things: puttin paid to the jug in the hand, and huntin for the one still in the bush.
    No, he wasn’t an alcoholic, but he didn’t mind if people thought he’d been one. It helped him get work, especially in the summer. I guess the way people think about Alcoholics Anonymous has changed over the years—I know they talk about it a lot more than they used to—but one thing that hasn’t changed is the way people will try to help somebody who claims he’s already gone to work helpin himself. Joe spent one whole year not drinkin—or at least not talkin about it when he did—and they had a party for him over in Jonesport. Gave him a cake and a medallion, they did. So when he went for a job one of the summer people needed done, the first thing he’d tell em was that he was a recoverin alcoholic. “If you don’t want to hire me because of that, I won’t have any hard feelins,” he’d say, “but I have to get it off my chest. I been goin to A.A. meetins for over a year now, and they tell us we can’t stay sober if we