Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But most of all he nagged about Stephen, because this as he knew, irritated his wife: ‘How’s your freak getting on? I haven’t seen her just lately; have you quarrelled or what? Damned good thing if you have. She’s appalling; never saw such a girl in my life; comes swaggering round here with her legs in breeches. Why can’t she ride like an ordinary woman? Good Lord, it’s enough to make any man see red; that sort of thing wants putting down at birth, I’d like to institute state lethal chambers!’ Or perhaps he would take quite another tack and complain that recently he had been neglected. ‘Late for every damned meal—running round with that girl—you don’t care what happens to me any more. A lot you care about my indigestion! I’ve got to eat any old thing these days from cow-hide to bricks. Well, you listen to me, that’s not what I pay for; get that into your head! I pay for good meals to be served on time; on time, do you hear? And I expect my wife to be in her rightful place at my table to see that the omelette’s properly prepared. What’s the matter with you that you can’t go along and make it yourself? When we were first married you always made my omelettes yourself. I won’t eat yellow froth with a few strings of parsley in it—it reminds me of the dog when he’s sick, it’s disgusting! And I won’t go on talking about it either, the next time it happens I’ll sack the cook. Damn it all, you were glad enough of my help when I found you practically starving in New York—but now you’re for ever racing off with that girl. It’s all this damned animal’s fault that you met her!’ He would kick out sideways at the terrified Tony, who had lately been made to stand proxy for Stephen. But worst of all was it when Ralph started weeping, because, as he said, his wife did not love him any more, and because, as he did not always say, he felt ill with his painful, chronic dyspepsia. One day he must make feeble love through his tears: ‘Angela, come here—put your arms around me—come and sit on my knee the way you used to. His wet eyes looked dejected yet rather greedy: ‘Put your arms around me, as though you cared—’ He was always insistent when most ineffectual. That night he appeared in his best silk pyjamas—the pink ones that made his complexion look sallow. He climbed into bed with the sly expression that Angela hated—it was so pornographic. ‘Well, old girl, don’t forget that you’ve got a man about the house; you haven’t forgotten it, have you?’

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She steadied herself and leaving the room and the house, went and fetched her car from the stables. She drove to the telegraph office at Upton: “Come back, I must see you at once,’ she wired, taking great care to prepay the reply, lest Angela should find an excuse for not answering. The clerk counted the words with her stump of a pencil, then she looked at Stephen rather strangely. 2 THE NEXT morning came Angela’s frigid answer: ‘ Coming home Monday fortnight not one day sooner please no more wires Ralph very much upset.’ Stephen tore the thing into a hundred fragments and then hurled it away. She was suddenlv shaking all over with uncon- trollable anger. THE WELL OF LONELINESS 197 3 RicHT up to the moment of Angela’s return that hot anger sup- ported Stephen. It was like a flame that leapt through her veins, a flame that consumed and yet stimulated, so that she purposely fanned the fire from a sense of self preservation. Then came the actual day of arrival. Angela must be in London by now, she would certainly have travelled by the night express. She would catch the 12.47 to Malvern and then motor to Upton — it was nearly twelve. It was afternoon. At 3.17 Angela’s train would arrive at Great Malvern — it had arrived now —in about twenty minutes she would drive past the very gates of Mor- ton. Half-past four. Angela must have got home; she was probably having tea in the parlour — in the little oak parlour with its piping bullfinch whose cage always stood near the casement window. A long time ago, a lifetime ago, Stephen had blundered into that parlour, and Tony had barked, and the bullfinch had piped a sentimental old German tune — but that was surely a lifetime ago. Five o’clock. Violet Antrim had obviously lied; she had lied on purpose to torment Stephen — Angela and Roger — it couldn’t be; Violet had lied because she liked to torment. A quarter past five. What was Angela doing now? She was near, just a few miles away — perhaps she was ill, as she had not written; yes, that must be it, of course Angela was ill. The persistent, aching hunger of the eyes. Anger, what was it? A folly, a delusion, a weakness that crumbled before that hunger. And Angela was only a few miles away. She went up to her room and unlocked a drawer from which she took the little white case. Then she slipped the case into her jacket pocket. 4 Sue found Angela helping her maid to unpack; they appeared to be all but snowed under by masses of soft, inadequate garments. The bedroom smelt strongly of Angela’s scent, which was heavy, yet slightly pungent. 198 THE WELL OF LONELINESS She glanced up from a tumbled heap of silk stockings: ‘ Hallo, Stephen! ’ Her greeting was casually friendly.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Their accession was not in Christian style, but after the manner of genuine Turkish, oriental despotism; it trod upon the corpses of the numerous kindred of their father, excepting two nephews, Gallus and Julian, who were saved only by sickness and youth from the fury of the soldiers. Three years later followed a war of the brothers for the sole supremacy. Constantine II. was slain by Constans (340), who was in turn murdered by a barbarian field officer and rival, Magnentius (350). After the defeat and the suicide of Magnentius, Constantius, who had hitherto reigned in the East, became sole emperor, and maintained himself through many storms until his natural death (353–361). The sons of Constantine did their Christian education little honor, and departed from their father’s wise policy of toleration. Constantius, a temperate and chaste, but jealous, vain, and weak prince, entirely under the control of eunuchs, women, and bishops, entered upon a violent suppression of the heathen religion, pillaged and destroyed many temples, gave the booty to the church, or to his eunuch, flatterers, and worthless favorites, and prohibited, under penalty of death, all sacrifices and worship of images in Rome, Alexandria, and Athens, though the prohibition could not be carried out. Hosts now came over to Christianity, though, of course, for the most part with the lips only, not with the heart. But this emperor proceeded with the same intolerance against the adherents of the Nicene orthodoxy, and punished them with confiscation and banishment. His brothers supported Athanasius, but he himself was a fanatical Arian. In fact, he meddled in all the affairs of the church, which was convulsed during his reign with doctrinal controversy. He summoned a multitude of councils, in Gaul, in Italy, in Illyricum, and in Asia; aspired to the renown of a theologian; and was fond of being called bishop of bishops, though, like his father, he postponed baptism till shortly before his death. There were there, it is true, who justified this violent suppression of idolatry, by reference to the extermination of the Canaanites under Joshua.56 But intelligent church teachers, like Athanasius, Hosius, and Hilary, gave their voice for toleration, though even they mean particularly toleration for orthodoxy, for the sake of which they themselves had been deposed and banished by the Arian power. Athanasius says, for example: "Satan, because there is no truth in him, breaks in with axe and sword. But the Saviour is gentle, and forces no one, to whom he comes, but knocks and speaks to the soul: Open to me, my sister?57 If we open to him, he enters; but if we will not, he departs. For the truth is not preached by sword and dungeon, by the might of an army, but by persuasion and exhortation. How can there be persuasion where fear of the emperor is uppermost?

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Ignoring the summons, Rygge appointed Repyngdon, another of Wyclif’s supporters, to preach, and when Peter Stokys, "a professor of the sacred page," armed with a letter from the archbishop, attempted to silence him, the students and tutors at Oxford threatened the Carmelite with their drawn swords. But Courtenay would permit no trifling and, summoning Rygge and the proctors to Lambeth, made them promise on their knees to take the action indicated. Parliament supported the primate. The new preaching was suppressed, but Wyclif stood undaunted. He sent a Complaint of 4 articles to the king and parliament, in which he pleaded for the supremacy of English law in matters of ecclesiastical property, for the liberty for the friars to abandon the rules of their orders and follow the rule of Christ, and for the view that on the Lord’s table the real bread and wine are present, and not merely the accidents.569 The court was no longer ready to support the Reformer, and Richard II. sent peremptory orders to Rygge to suppress the new teachings. Courtenay himself went to Oxford, and there is some authority for the view that Wyclif again met the prelate face to face at St. Frideswides. Rigid inquisition was made for copies of the condemned teacher’s writings and those of Hereford. Wyclif was inhibited from preaching, and retired to his rectory at Lutterworth. Hereford, Repyngdon, Aston and Bedeman, his supporters, recanted. The whole party received a staggering blow and with it liberty of teaching at Oxford.570 Confined to Lutterworth, Wyclif continued his labors on the translation of the Bible, and sent forth polemic tracts, including the Cruciata,571 a vigorous condemnation of the crusade which the bishop of Norwich, Henry de Spenser, was preparing in support of Urban VI. against the Avignon pope, Clement VII. The warlike prelate had already shown his military gifts during the Peasants’ Uprising. Urban had promised plenary indulgence for a year to all joining the army. Mass was said and sermons preached in the churches of England, and large sums collected for the enterprise. The indulgence extended to the dead as well as to the living. Wyclif declared the crusade an expedition for worldly mastery, and pronounced the indulgence "an abomination of desolation in the holy place." Spenser’s army reached the Continent, but the expedition was a failure. The most important of Wyclif’s theological treatises, the Trialogus, was written in this period. It lays down the principle that, where the Bible and the Church do not agree, we must obey the Bible, and, where conscience and human authority are in conflict, we must follow conscience.572 Two years before his death, Wyclif received a paralytic stroke which maimed but did not completely disable him. It is possible that he received a citation to appear before the pope.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Accordingly, they fared on and came, after some days, to Antioch, where Giosefo kept Melisso with him, that he might rest himself a day or two, and being scurvily enough received of his wife, he bade her prepare supper according as Melisso should ordain; whereof the latter, seeing that it was his friend's pleasure, acquitted himself in a few words. The lady, as her usance had been in the past, did not as Melisso had ordained, but well nigh altogether the contrary; which Giosefo seeing, he was vexed and said, 'Was it not told thee on what wise thou shouldst prepare the supper?' The lady, turning round haughtily, answered, 'What meaneth this? Good lack, why dost thou not sup, an thou have a mind to sup? An if it were told me otherwise, it seemed good to me to do thus. If it please thee, so be it; if not, leave it be.' Melisso marvelled at the lady's answer and blamed her exceedingly; whilst Giosefo, hearing this, said, 'Wife, thou art still what thou wast wont to be; but, trust me, I will make thee change thy fashion.' Then turning to Melisso, 'Friend,' said he, 'we shall soon see what manner of counsel was Solomon's; but I prithee let it not irk thee to stand to see it and hold that which I shall do for a sport. And that thou mayest not hinder me, bethink thee of the answer the muleteer made us, when we pitied his mule.' Quoth Melisso, 'I am in thy house, where I purpose not to depart from thy good pleasure.' Giosefo then took a round stick, made of a young oak, and repaired a chamber, whither the lady, having arisen from table for despite, had betaken herself, grumbling; then, laying hold of her by the hair, he threw her down at his feet and proceeded to give her a sore beating with the stick. The lady at first cried out and after fell to threats; but, seeing that Giosefo for all that stinted not and being by this time all bruised, she began to cry him mercy for God's sake and besought him not to kill her, declaring that she would never more depart from his pleasure. Nevertheless, he held not his hand; nay, he continued to baste her more furiously than ever on all her seams, belabouring her amain now on the ribs, now on the haunches and now about the shoulder, nor stinted till he was weary and there was not a place left unbruised on the good lady's back. This done, he returned to his friend and said to him, 'To-morrow we shall see what will be the issue of the counsel to go to Goosebridge.' Then, after he had rested awhile and they had washed their hands, he supped with Melisso and in due season they betook themselves to bed.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Old Williams was openly disgusted and hostile; he con- sidered the car to be an outrage to his stables — those immaculate stables with their spacious coach-houses, their wide plaits of straw neatly interwoven with yards of red and blue saddler’s tape, and their fine stable-yard hitherto kept so spotless. Came the Pan- hard, and behold, pools of oil on the flagstones, greenish, bad- smelling oil that defied even scouring; and a medley of odd- looking tools in the coach-house, all greasy, all soiling your hands when you touched them; and large tins of what looked like black vaseline; and spare tyres for which nails had been knocked into the woodwork; and a bench with a vice for the motor’s insides which were frequently being dissected. From this coach-house the dog-cart had been ruthlessly expelled, and now it must stand chock-a-block with the phaeton, so that room might be made for the garish intruder together with its young bodyservant. The young bodyservant was known as a chauffeur—he had come down from London and wore clothes made of leather. He talked Cockney, and openly spat before Williams in the coach-house, then rubbed his foot over the spittle. ‘T’ll ’ave none of yer expectoration ’ere in me coach-house, I tells ee! ’ bawled Williams, apoplectic with temper. ‘Oh, come orf it, do, Grandpa; we’re not in the ark!’ was how the new blood answered Williams. There was war to the knife between Williams and Burton + Burton who expressed large disdain of the horses. 70 THE WELL OF LONELINESS “Yer time’s up now, Grandpa,’ he was constantly remarking; “it’s all up with the gees — better learn to be a shovver! ’ “Opes TIl die afore ever I demean meself that way, you young blight!’ bawled the outraged Williams. Very angry he grew, and his dinner fermented, dilating his stomach and caus- ing discomfort, so that his wife became anxious about him. ‘Now don’t ee go worryin’, Arth-thur,’ she coaxed; ‘ us be old, me and you, and the world be progressin’.’ ‘It be goin’ to the devil, that’s what it be doin’!’ groaned Williams, rubbing his stomach. To make matters worse, Sir Philip’s behaviour was that of a schoolboy with some horrid new contraption. He was caught by his stud-groom lying flat on his back with his feet sticking out beneath the bonnet of the motor, and when he emerged there was soot on his cheek-bones, on his hair, and even on the tip of his nose. He looked terribly sheepish, and as Williams said later to his wife:

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  NEIGHBORS RECALL CHANGES IN MURDER SUSPECT, 42 Special to The Tribune AMERICAN FORK—A determined man who evolved from an active Mormon and conservative Republican to a strict constitutionalist and excommunicated fundamentalist is how neighbors remember Ronald Watson Lafferty. . . . Mr. Lafferty served on Highland’s first City Council when the small northern Utah County town was incorporated in 1977. At the time, Mr. Lafferty successfully led a drive to outlaw beer sales in the town’s only grocery store—where travelers to American Fork Canyon still can’t buy beer. “Two years ago, he looked clean, all-American, even in the mornings after milking the family cow,” said a neighbor who resides in an acre-lot subdivision filled with children, horses, goats, chickens and large garden plots where Mr. Lafferty once lived. Last year he and his wife of several years divorced. Mr. Lafferty has not been seen in the neighborhood for a year. Shortly after Christmas, Mrs. Diana Lafferty, described as “a pillar of the Mormon ward,” took the couple’s six children out of state. Neighbors said the divorce stemmed from differences of opinion on religion and politics. “He talked about standing up for what was right—no matter the consequences,” said a neighbor. Friends said Mr. Lafferty’s political beliefs changed as well—or perhaps evolved—from conservative Republican to strict fundamentalism. During the 12 years he lived in Highland, he came to believe in a return to the gold standard, strict constitutionalism and obedience only to “righteous laws,” said a neighbor. “He had a fervent desire to save the Constitution—and the country,” said a long-time friend. “It became a religious obsession.” Detectives interviewed as many of Allen’s siblings as they could locate, as well as his mother and various friends. As the front page of Saturday’s Tribune revealed, the cops were beginning to piece together a motive for the brutal acts: TWO MURDERS A RELIGIOUS REVELATION? 3 CHARGED IN SLASHING OF MOTHER AND INFANT

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Arriguccio, having leapt out of bed and buckled on his sword and dagger, rushed to the door to find out who this fellow was, and do him an injury. Now, for all that he was a merchant, Arriguccio was as strong and as fierce as a bull, and in opening the door he made a lot of noise, whereas his wife always opened it quietly. On hearing this, Ruberto, as he waited outside, rightly concluded that the person opening the door was Arriguccio, and so he promptly took to his heels, with Arriguccio in hot pursuit. Eventually, after running for quite a while without shaking off his pursuer, Ruberto, who was also armed, drew his sword and faced about; and so they began to fight, with Arriguccio attacking and Ruberto defending himself. Meanwhile, Arriguccio’s wife, having woken up as he opened the door of the bedroom, had no sooner found that the string was missing than she realized that her stratagem had been discovered, and on hearing Arriguccio giving chase to Ruberto, she leapt out of bed. Foreseeing what was likely to happen, she summoned her maid, who knew all about the affair, and prevailed upon her to take her own place in the bed, at the same time entreating her to keep her identity a secret and patiently bear all the blows that Arriguccio might give her, for which service she would be so well rewarded that she would have no cause for complaint. And after extinguishing the light that was burning in the bedroom, she went away and concealed herself in another part of the house, and waited to see what would happen. On hearing Arriguccio and Ruberto fighting with one another, the people living nearby rose from their beds and began to curse and swear at them; and so Arriguccio, for fear of being recognized, broke off the engagement and reluctantly made his way home, seething with anger, having failed either to identify the young man or to injure him in the slightest. And on reaching the bedroom, he began to shout and rave, saying: ‘Where are you, strumpet? You thought you’d get away from me by putting out the light, did you? Well, you’d better think again!’ Then, going up to the bed, he took hold of the maidservant, thinking her to be his wife, and kicked and punched her with all the power he had in his feet and hands, until her face was black and blue all over, at the same time addressing her by the foulest names that an unchaste woman was ever called; and finally, he cut off her hair. The maidservant wept bitterly, and with good reason, but although from time to time she cried out, saying ‘Alas, for God’s sake have mercy!’ or ‘Oh, please, no more!’ her speech was so distorted by her sobbing, and Arriguccio was so demented with rage, that he failed to notice that the voice was not his wife’s.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  The departure of his wife and their six children to a distant corner of the nation gnawed at him day and night. Over time his hurt was transformed into an implacable rage, and most of that anger was directed at the three individuals who, in his estimation, bore responsibility for Dianna’s decision to abandon him: Richard Stowe, Chloe Low, and Brenda Lafferty. Stowe, a pharmacist by trade and a neighbor of Ron and Dianna’s, was president of the LDS Highland Stake. He directed the stake’s High Council Court, which had tried Ron in August 1983 and subsequently excommunicated him. Much worse, in Ron’s view, Stowe had offered crucial financial assistance to Dianna, via the church, which had allowed her to survive while the divorce was being finalized; and Stowe had also provided a great deal of counseling and emotional succor. Chloe Low had been an uncommonly close friend to both Ron and Dianna for a dozen years. Her husband, Stewart Low, was the bishop of Ron and Dianna’s LDS ward, and had handpicked Ron to be his first counselor in the bishopric. Chloe had long admired the Lafferty family, and she went to Dan for chiropractic treatment when her back gave her trouble. As Ron and Dianna’s marriage began to fall apart, Chloe offered unstinting support to both of them, but when Ron’s behavior grew increasingly monstrous, she came down firmly on Dianna’s side of the fence. Once, when Ron was making life particularly unbearable for Dianna, Chloe invited her and her children to stay in the Low home for four days; on another occasion Chloe took them in for ten days. After the execution of the divorce, Chloe had been there to help Dianna and her kids pack up the shards of their broken lives and move to Florida. As Ron saw it, without Chloe Low’s advocacy and assistance, Dianna would never have had the wherewithal to leave. The greatest portion of Ron’s long-simmering wrath, however, was reserved for Brenda Wright Lafferty—Allen’s smart, beautiful, headstrong wife—whom Ron regarded as being instrumental in persuading Dianna to abandon him. Rejected by his wife, scorned by his community, Ron poured himself completely into the School of the Prophets. It became his family, his life, his world. Much of Ron’s time with the school was occupied by expediting the shipping of the pamphlets to LDS leaders, urging them to abandon their ungodly path. But the school’s main thrust, as Onias had conceived it, was to teach the faithful how to receive and interpret revelations from God, and as the winter of 1984 edged toward spring, Ron began receiving this instruction in earnest. On February 24, Ron became the first of Onias’s students to take delivery of a commandment from the Almighty. Sitting at a computer he’d borrowed from Bernard Brady, Ron closed his eyes and waited until he felt the spirit of the Lord cause a finger to depress a key, and then another, and another.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Touched by Pratt’s kindness, Eleanor fell in love with him, abandoned her husband, left her three children in the care of her mother, and then found passage to Salt Lake City working as a cook for a party of Mormon emigrants. Although Eleanor remained legally married to Hector McLean, in Deseret Brigham sealed her to Parley Pratt for time and eternity, making her the twelfth of the apostle’s plural wives. In 1856, while Pratt was in St. Louis doing missionary work, she returned to New Orleans and absconded with her three children, inducing murderous rage in her first husband, who blamed Pratt for wrecking his marriage. McLean set out in hot pursuit of Pratt and managed to intercept a letter from Pratt to Eleanor in which the apostle described his plans to meet her on the Arkansas River. Armed with this information, and working in cahoots with a federal marshal who hated Mormons, McLean had Pratt arrested and jailed in Van Buren, Arkansas. The non-Mormon magistrate assigned to hear the case quickly saw that the charges against Pratt were without merit. Concerned that the Mormon apostle would be lynched by vigilantes if he remained locked up, the brave magistrate surreptitiously released Pratt, but McLean was notified immediately by jailhouse spies. The obsessed McLean and two accomplices tracked Pratt down twelve miles outside of Van Buren, where they stabbed him, shot him for good measure, and then left him by the side of the road to slowly bleed to death. Afterward, McLean boasted that killing Parley Pratt was “the best act of my life,” and he was cheered as a hero across western Arkansas for the deed. He was never arrested or charged with any crime. After her husband’s death, Eleanor Pratt gradually made her way back toward Utah, destitute and dispirited. On the trail near Fort Laramie, she crossed paths with Porter Rockwell, who gave her a ride to Great Salt Lake City as he hurried to inform Brigham, on Pioneer Day, of the invading army. About the time the Fancher wagon train was crossing the border into Utah Territory, Eleanor delivered a detailed account of her husband’s murder to the leaders of the church. Her report heaped blame on the entire state of Arkansas and implored the Saints to avenge Parley’s innocent blood. On August 3, 1857, the same day the Fancher train arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley, Apostle George A. Smith (first cousin to Joseph Smith), who held the rank of general in the Nauvoo Legion, rode out of Great Salt Lake City in a carriage bound for southern Utah. Six years earlier, General Smith had led the settlement of this distant corner of the territory. * The Saints who had colonized the region under his direction were known to be the most fanatical in all of Mormondom.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  An editorial in the Nauvoo paper declared, “The murderers can rest assured that their case, independent of earthly tribunals, will be tried by the Supreme Judge of the universe, who has said vengeance is mine and I will repay.” A month later, on the first anniversary of Joseph Smith’s death, Brigham spoke bitterly of the trial verdict and proclaimed that “it belongs to God and his people to avenge the blood [of His] servants.” Toward this end, he instructed church authorities to issue a formal “Oath of Vengeance,” which was immediately made part of the temple endowment ceremony, one of the church’s most sacred rituals. The oath required Mormons to pledge, “I will pray, and never cease to pray, and never cease to importune high heaven to avenge the blood of the Prophets on this nation, and I will teach this to my children, and my children’s children unto the third and fourth generations.” This solemn vow to take vengeance was recited by every Latter-day Saint who participated in the standard temple ritual until it was removed from the endowment ceremony in 1927, after the oath was leaked to the non-Mormon press, sparking an outcry from politicians and the Gentile public that it was treasonous. In the months following Joseph’s murder, most residents of Nauvoo didn’t need any prodding to seek revenge against Gentiles. Ever since the assassination, non-Mormons had stepped up their violent campaign to drive the Saints from Hancock County. Emboldened by the acquittal of Joseph’s killers, throughout the summer of 1845 anti-Mormon vigilantes led by Levi Williams (the primary defendant in the murder trial) roamed the county setting fire to Mormon homes and farms. By September 15, 1845, forty-four Mormon residences had been burned to the ground. On September 16, Porter Rockwell was on his way to help a Mormon family salvage possessions from the ruins of one such incinerated home when he chanced upon Lieutenant Frank Worrell of the Carthage Greys—the same man who had been in charge of guarding the jail on the evening Joseph was murdered. Worrell had commanded the militiamen who’d conspired to fire blank cartridges at the approaching mob and had then stepped aside so the vigilantes could assassinate the prophet without impediment. When Rockwell encountered Worrell on that September afternoon, the latter was on horseback, chasing a local sheriff who’d had the temerity to express sympathy for the Mormons. As Worrell galloped after the terrified sheriff, Rockwell fired a rifle ball into Worrell’s gut. The victim “jumped four feet in the air,” said a witness to the shooting, “and rolled away from his horse dead.” The killing of Worrell significantly worsened relations between the Saints and their adversaries. A few days later, a band of Mormons captured a youthful Gentile man named McBracking, whom they suspected of burning Mormon homes. McBracking begged for his life, but the Saints weren’t in a forgiving mood.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She was our neighbour too, which made it more awkward, and not only that—her position in the county—oh, Ralph, you must help me, I’m completely bewildered. How on earth does one answer this sort of thing? It’s quite mad—I believe the girl’s half mad herself.’ And she handed him Stephen’s letter. He read it slowly, and as he did so his weak little eyes grew literally scarlet—puffy and scarlet all over their lids, and when he had finished reading that letter he turned and spat on the ground. Then Ralph’s language became a thing to forget; every filthy invective learnt in the slums of his youth and later on in the workshops, he hurled against Stephen and all her kind. He called down the wrath of the Lord upon them. He deplored the non-existence of the stake, and racked his brains for indecent tortures. And finally: ‘I’ll answer this letter, yes, by God I will! You leave her to me, I know how I’m going to answer this letter!’ Angela asked him, and now her voice shook: ‘Ralph, what will you do to her—to Stephen?’ He laughed loudly: ‘I’ll hound her out of the county before I’ve done—and with luck out of England; the same as I’d hound you out if I thought that there’d ever been anything between you two women. It’s damned lucky for you that she wrote this letter, damned lucky, otherwise I might have my suspicions. You’ve got off this time, but don’t try your reforming again—you’re not cut out to be a reformer. If there’s any of that Lamb of God stuff wanted I’ll see to it myself and don’t you forget it!’ He slipped the letter into his pocket, ‘I’ll see to it myself next time—with an axe!’ Angela turned and went out of the study with bowed head. She was saved through this great betrayal, yet most strangely bitter she found her salvation, and most shameful the price she had paid for her safety. So, greatly daring, she went to her desk and with trembling fingers took a sheet of paper. Then she wrote in her large, rather childish handwriting: ‘Stephen—when you know what I’ve done, forgive me.’ CHAPTER 27 1 T wo days later Anna Gordon sent for her daughter. Stephen found her sitting quite still in that vast drawing-room of hers, which as always smelt faintly of orris-root, beeswax and violets. Her thin, white hands were folded in her lap, closely folded over a couple of letters; and it seemed to Stephen that all of a sudden she saw in her mother a very old woman—a very old woman with terrible eyes, pitiless, hard and deeply accusing, so that she could but shrink from their gaze, since they were the eyes of her mother. Anna said: ‘Lock the door, then come and stand here.’

• From Trash (1988)

  My aunt, like my mama, understood everything, expected nothing, and watched her own life like a terrible fable from a Sunday-morning sermon. It was the perspective that all those women shared, the view that I could not, for my life, accept. I believed, I believed with all my soul that death was behind it, that death was the seed and the fruit of that numbed and numbing attitude. More than anything else, it was my anger that had driven me away from them, driven them away from me—my unpredictable, automatic anger. Their anger, their hatred, always seemed shielded, banked and secret, and because of that—shameful. My uncles were sudden, violent, and daunting. My aunts wore you down without ever seeming to fight at all. It was my anger that my aunts thought queer, my wild raging temper they respected in a boy and discouraged in a girl. That I slept with girls was curious, but not dangerous. That I slept with a knife under my pillow and refused to step aside for my uncles was more than queer. It was crazy. Aunt Alma’s left eye twitched, and I swallowed my tears, straightened my head, and looked her full in the face. I could barely hold myself still, barely return her look. Again those twin emotions, the love and the outrage that I’d always felt for my aunt, warred in me. I wanted to put out my hand and close my fingers on her hunched, stubborn shoulder. I wanted to lay my head there and pull tight to her, but I also wanted to hit her, to scream and kick and make her ashamed of herself. Nothing was clean between us, especially not our love. Between my mama and Aunt Alma there were five other sisters. The most terrible and loved was Bess, the one they swore had always been so smart. From the time I was eight Aunt Bess had a dent in the left side of her head—a shadowed dent that emphasized the twitch of that eye, just like the twitch Aunt Alma has, just like the twitch I sometimes get, the one they tell me is nerves. But Aunt Bess wasn’t born with that twitch as we were, just as she wasn’t born with that dent. My uncle, her husband, had come up from the deep dust on the road, his boots damp from the river, picking up clumps of dust and making mud, knocking it off on her steps, her screen door, her rug, the back rung of a kitchen chair. She’d shouted at him, “Not on my clean floor!” and he’d swung the bucket, river-stained and heavy with crawfish. He’d hit her in the side of the head—dented her into a lifetime of stupidity and half-blindness. Son of a bitch never even said he was sorry, and all my childhood he’d laughed at her, the way she’d sometimes stop in the middle of a sentence and grope painfully for a word.

• From Trash (1988)

  Some of these stories are easily ascribed to rage. “Monkeybites,” “River of Names,” “Her Thighs,” “Muscles of the Mind,” “Demon Lover,” “Steal Away,” “Violence Against Women Begins at Home”—all of them began with me walking back and forth in front of my desk in the dark of night. Sometimes it was a person that had filled me with outrage, but sometimes it was someone else’s story. I had to figure it out. I did it on the page. Reading these stories again, I go back to the time in which they were written. The early women’s movement was a genuinely remarkable moment in history, perhaps most of all because we were all so sure that we were going to change the world. Talking to twenty-year-olds these days, I find it difficult to get them to understand what it was like being part of the early liberation movements that so impacted this country in the sixties and seventies. We were fighting for our lives, I say, and I mean it literally. The life I was meant to have is what I was fighting. I did not want to be a waitress my whole life, to be poor or to come to accept being treated with contempt. I did not want to be ashamed of my family, my sexuality, or myself. I did not want to despair or commit suicide out of hopelessness. One generation back, I can name people who did just that—who despaired and died. They were no fiction. When I talk to young people, I find myself telling very specific stories. I tell them about my first decent job, the one with the Social Security Administration, where I was put on probation and almost fired for wearing pantsuits to the office—tasteful, respectable outfits with high-buttoned white blouses, paired with low heels and nylons, even in that Tallahassee humidity. A shinyhaired eighteen-year-old boy at Stanford laughs and says, “What were they thinking?” What indeed? I tell how when, at twenty-three with my respectable government job, I tried to get a credit card, I was asked to have my stepfather cosign the application. We were never quite adults, I explain, we women. You have no idea how different was the world we set out to change. That was the world in which I began to write these stories. That was the context. Reading them over, I fall back in time and remember the writing of them. I remember working long hours, hurrying home, and napping briefly in order to have the ability to spend more long hours at my desk in the night. I never went after a grant, never believed I could get one. I took it as a given that a woman like me would have to do it the hard way, steal time from my day job, work without an editor or ready reader, and never have any confidence that what I was writing would be anything anyone would want to read. But I never imagined not writing.

• From Trash (1988)

  I couldn’t help myself. I’d sit and listen, open-mouthed and fascinated, while this shining creature went on and on about decapitations. She loved best little children who had fallen in the way of large machines. It was something none of the grown-ups knew a thing about, though once in a while I’d hear a much shorter, much tamer version of one of Shannon’s stories from her mama. At those moments, Shannon would give me a grin of smug pride. Can’t I tell it better? she seemed to be saying. Gradually I admitted to myself what hid behind Shannon’s impassive pink-and-white features. Shannon Pearl simply and completely hated everyone who had ever hurt her, and spent most of her time brooding on punishments either she or God would visit on them. The fire that burned in her eyes was the fire of outrage. Had she been stronger or smarter, Shannon Pearl would have been dangerous. But half-blind, sickly, and ostracized, she was not much of a threat to anyone. “I like your family,” Shannon sometimes said, though we both knew that was a polite lie. “Your mama’s a fine woman,” Roseanne Pearl would agree, while she eyed my too-tight raggedy dresses. She reminded me of my stepfather’s sisters looking at us out of smug, superior faces, laughing at my mama’s loose teeth and my sister’s curls done up in paper scraps. Whenever the Pearls talked about my people, I’d take off and not go back for weeks. I didn’t want the two parts of my life to come together. We were living out past Henderson Road, on the other side of White Horse Highway. Up near the highway a revival tent had been erected. Some evenings I would walk up there on my own to sit outside and listen. The preacher was a shouter, something I had never liked. He’d rave and threaten, and it didn’t seem as if he was ever gonna get to the invocation. I sat in the dark, trying not to think about anything, especially not about the whipping I was going to get if I stayed too long. I kept seeing my Uncle Jack in the men who stood near the highway sharing a bottle in a paper sack, black-headed men with blasted rough-hewn faces. Was it hatred or sorrow that made them look like that, their necks so stiff and their eyes so cold? Did I look like that? Would I look like that when I grew up? I remembered Aunt Grace putting her big hands over my ears and turning my face to catch the light, saying, “Just as well you smart; you an’t never gonna be a beauty.” At least I wasn’t as ugly as Shannon Pearl, I told myself, and was immediately ashamed. Shannon hadn’t made herself ugly, but if I kept thinking that way I just might. Mama always said people could see your soul in your face, could see your hatefulness and lack of charity.

• From Trash (1988)

  “He never had to hit her. She beat herself up enough. And every time the son of a bitch hit us, he was hitting her. He beat us like we were dogs. He treated her like her ass was gold. And she always talked about leaving him, you know. She never did, did she?” “What do you want?” “I want somebody to do something.” Jo slammed her fist into the window frame. “I want somebody to finally goddamn do something.” I shook my head, gently stroking Mama’s cool clammy skin. There was nothing I could say to Jo. We always wanted somebody to do something and no one ever did, but what had we ever asked anyone to do? I watched Jo rub her neck and thought about the pins that held her elbow and shoulder together. There was my shattered coccyx and broken collarbones, and Arlene’s insomnia. At thirty, Arlene had a little girl’s shadowed frightened face and the omnipresent stink of whiskey on her skin. I had been eight when Mama married Jack, Jo five, but Arlene had been still a baby, less than a year old and fragile as a sparrow in the air. “What is it you want to do? Talk? Huh?” Jo rolled her shoulders back and rubbed her upper arms. “Want to talk about what a tower of strength Mama was? Or why she had to be?” My shrug was automatic, inconsequential. A flush spread up from Jo’s cleavage. It made the skin of her neck look rough and pebbly. Deep lines scored the corners of her eyes and curved back from her mouth. In the last few years, Jo had become scary thin. The skin that always pulled tight on her bones seemed to have grown loose. Now it wrinkled and hung. I looked away, surprised and angry. Neither of us had expected to live long enough to get old. For all that we fight, Jo is the one I get along with, and I always try to stay with her when I visit. Arlene and I barely speak, though we talk to each other more easily than she and Jo. There have been years I don’t think the two of them have spoken half a dozen words. In the ten weeks since Mama’s collapse, their conversations have been hurt-filled bursts of whispered recrimination. At first, I stayed with Arlene and that seemed to help, but when Jo and I insisted that Mama had to check in to MacArthur, Arlene blew up and told me to go ahead and move over to Jo’s place. “You and Jo—you think you know it all,” Arlene said when she was dropping me off at Jo’s. “But she’s my mama too, and I know something. I know she’s not ready to give up and die.” “We’re not giving up. We’re putting Mama where she can get the best care.”

• From Trash (1988)

  On Sundays the counter didn’t open until after church at one o’clock. But at one sharp, we started serving those big gravy lunches and went right on till four. People would come in prepared to sit and eat big—coffee, salad, country-fried steak with potatoes and gravy, or ham with red-eye gravy and carrots and peas. You’d also get a side of hogshead biscuits and a choice of three pies for dessert. Tips were as choice as the pies, but Sunday had its trials. Too often, some tight-browed couple would come in at two o’clock and order breakfast—fried eggs and hash browns. When you told them we didn’t serve breakfast on Sundays, they’d get angry. “Look, girl,” they might say, “just bring me some of that ham you’re serving those people, only bring me eggs with it. You can do that,” and the contempt in their voices clearly added, “Even you.” It would make me mad as sin. “Sir, we don’t cook on the grill on Sundays. We only have what’s on the Sunday menu. When you make up your mind, let me know.” “Tourists,” I’d mutter to Mama. “No, Yankees,” she’d say, and Mabel would nod. Then she might go over with an offer of boiled eggs, that ham, and a biscuit. She’d talk nice, drawling like she never did with friends or me, while she moved slower than you’d think a wide-awake person could. “Uh huh,” she’d say, and “Shore-nuf,” and offer them honey for their biscuits or tell them how red-eye gravy is made, or talk about how sorry it is that we don’t serve grits on Sunday. That couple would grin wide and start slowing their words down, while the regulars would choke on their coffee. Mama never bet on the tip, just put it all into the pot, and it was usually enough to provoke a round of applause after the couple was safely out the door. Mama said nothing about it except the first time when she told me, “Yankees eat boiled eggs for breakfast,” which may not sound like much, but had the force of a powerful insult. It was a fact that the only people we knew who ate boiled eggs in the morning were those stray tourists and people on the TV set who we therefore assumed had to be Yankees.

• From Trash (1988)

  All you ever talk about—you and her and all of you. Like that was the end-all and be-all of everything. Never mind what happens to them once they’re made. That don’t matter. It’s only the getting of them. Like some goddamned crazy religion. Get your mother a grandchild and solve all her problems. Get yourself a baby and forget everything else. It’s what you were born for, the one thing you can do with no thinking about it at all. Only I can’t. To get her a grandchild, I’d have to steal one!” I was wringing my own hands, twisting them together and pulling them apart. Now I swung them open and slapped down at my belly, making my own hollow noise in the room. “No babies in there, aunt of mine, and never going to be. I’m sterile as a clean tin can. That’s what I told Mama, and not to hurt her. I told her because she wouldn’t leave me alone about it. Like you, like all of you, always talking about children, never able to leave it alone.” I was walking back and forth now, unable to stop myself from talking. “Never able to hear me when I warned her to leave it be. Going on and on till I thought I’d lose my mind.” I looked her in the eye, loving her and hating her, and not wanting to speak, but hearing the words come out anyway. “Some people never do have babies, you know. Some people get raped at eleven by a stepfather their mama half hates but can’t afford to leave. Some people then have to lie and hide it ’cause it would make so much trouble. So nobody will know, not the law and not the rest of the family. Nobody but the women supposed to be the ones who take care of everything, who know what to do and how to do it, the women who make children who believe in them and trust in them, and sometimes die for it. Some people never go to a doctor and don’t find out for ten years that the son of a bitch gave them some goddamned disease.” I looked away, unable to stand how gray her face had gone. “You know what it does to you when the people you love most in the world, the people you believe in—cannot survive without believing in—when those people do nothing, don’t even know something needs to be done? When you cannot hate them but cannot help yourself? The hatred grows. It just takes over everything, eats you up and makes you somebody full of hate.” I stopped. The roar that had been all around me stopped, too. The cold was all through me now. I felt like it would never leave me. I heard her move. I heard her hip bump the pool table and make the balls rock. I heard her turn and gather up her purse.

• From Trash (1988)

  “They don’t all hang on the men, you know.” Lenore didn’t even look in my direction. “Twenty tables in there and never less than five of them have women playing each other—some pretty tough-looking women. The men stay out of their way, and that’s nice to see.” “If you ask me there’s no difference between those women and the men in there anyway.” Judy took the bowl of sunflower seeds out of her lap and pushed it at Mona. Her face was twisted in disgust. “There’s always a couple of them punching each other in the arm, arms all ugly with ink tattoos, and their girlfriends in tight skirts sitting up on stools behind them, not daring to say a word. That’s what people think we are when we say we’re dykes, and that’s not what we are at all.” “I like tattoos,” I said, “and I like women who can really play pool, play it well enough to make all those men bite their tongues. They play for money, you know. Some of them pay their way out of what they earn off those boys, and I like that, too.” “Well, I don’t like it.” Judy looked like she was going to spit. “Competition games, swinging those sticks like they were holding swords, carrying knives—they do, you know—it’s a cesspit of violence in there, and they all get off on it. People are always getting beaten up in that parking lot and women get hassled on the sidewalk all the time. I think it should be closed down.” “I think it must be different for you, all of you,” Anna said after a while, carefully not looking in my direction. “When I was your age, places like that were the only way you could find other lesbians. I used to go in there and nod at women I would see nowhere else. There’s a lot of women work down in the paper mills come all the way up here to sit on those stools and watch other women play pool.” “Exactly.” I took another deep breath, trying not to get too angry. “You always talking about class, Judy, the working classes supposed to make the revolution. They’re the ones over there in that parking lot, leaning on tailgates, holding their own meetings.” “It’s not the same thing.” “But maybe we ought to go over there and pass out leaflets some time, invite those women to a dance or something.” Mona put her embroidery down. Her face was flushed and excited. Anna looked uncomfortable. Judy stared directly at me, and I could feel my neck getting hot. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t think what. Lenore cleared her throat and cracked a few sunflower seeds. “I don’t know,” she giggled. “Don’t really feel like playing feminist evangelist to the pool hall set myself.”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  I hope Adèle’s filled your hot water bottle; she’s rather light-headed over her Jean.’ ‘Never mind, I can fill it myself,’ smiled Puddle. She went, and Stephen sat on by the fire with her eyes half closed and her lips set firmly. She must put away all these thoughts of the past and compel herself to think of the future. This brooding over things that were past was all wrong; it was futile, weak-kneed and morbid. She had her work, work that cried out to be done, but no more unworthy books must be written. She must show that being the thing she was, she could climb to success over all opposition, could climb to success in spite of a world that was trying its best to get her under. Her mouth grew hard; her sensitive lips that belonged by rights to the dreamer, the lover, took on a resentful and bitter line which changed her whole face and made it less comely. At that moment the striking likeness of her father appeared to have faded out of her face. Yes, it was trying to get her under, this world with its mighty self-satisfaction, with its smug rules of conduct, all made to be broken by those who strutted and preened themselves on being what they considered normal. They trod on the necks of those thousands of others who, for God knew what reason, were not made as they were; they prided themselves on their indignation, on what they proclaimed as their righteous judgments. They sinned grossly; even vilely at times, like lustful beasts—but yet they were normal! And the vilest of them could point a finger of scorn at her, and be loudly applauded. ‘God damn them to hell!’ she muttered. Along in the kitchen there was singing again. The young men’s voices rose tuneful and happy, and with them blended Adèle’s young voice, very sexless as yet, like the voice of a choirboy. Stephen got up and opened the door, then she stood quite still and listened intently. The singing soothed her over-strained nerves as it flowed from the hearts of these simple people.