Thread: Young, Wild, and Free (Crusade and Mim)

Celia sat, curled up in a corner and gingerly covering her face. She wanted to stop crying it hurt to cry. But the pain was just so much. Henry had come home drunk as usual, and she had accidentally burnt his supper. It was the second time that week. He just made her so nervous and it was easy to lose watch of the stove when she was more focused on where his fists were. Before the stock market crash they hadn't done too badly for themselves. Sure, he still drank but it wasn't as much. Henry had had a job out on an oil rig and provided well for his wife and child. But then in the summer of '29 their toddler son, their sweet little Henry Jr., had died. Bitten by a rattlesnake. That was when Henry had started getting violent, telling Celia it had been her fault she hadn't kept a close enough eye on the boy while he was playing outside. The flatlands of Oklahoma weren't exactly the kind of place you let a child play out on his own, but she had and now he was dead. That was two years ago. Since then, Henry had lost his job in the oil fields because the company went under with the market crash. He managed to get a job on a farm belonging to a friend of theirs, but the soil was starting to dry up and it looked like this job, too, would lead to a dead end like so many before it. They may even have to leave Bernsflat so he could find another job. They'd be starting all over again in a new town, maybe even a new state, with hardly a dollar to their names when the farthest either of them had been from this tiny town was Tishomingo. He...he's just under a lot of stress. Henry had since gone back to work, and the quiet words echoing in the small house were spoken to try to assure herself that that's what it was. Henry...he cares for me...he's just under a lot of stress, and he shouldn't have to have burned food on top of all that. Henry cares for her. That was what Celia kept telling herself, though she knew it wasn't true. If she genuinely thought it was, she wouldn't have taken a lover eight months ago and spent every moment she could with him. Even as she walked to the bathroom to clean herself up she knew that she was married to a hateful drunkard. How she wished she could just leave, just run away with her lover and never look back...but she had vowed til death do us part, and although divorces weren't unheard of not only were they still taboo but she took her vows seriously. Til death do us part, the battered woman sniffed thickly as she shuffled into the bathroom and turned on the faucet to rinse the blood off her face. Once she had she looked in the mirror. Celia's twenty-year-old face was worn with cares far beyond her years, that much was clear even through the swelling. How had it come to this? How could her Henry, who she'd loved so much, have become this and done this to her? Sure it had been a shotgun wedding when at fifteen she'd gotten pregnant, but hadn't it been heading that way anyway? Surely he didn't mean it whenever he said he'd been saddled with her, that she'd gotten pregnant on purpose to keep him with her, that he'd been about to leave for New York when she told him she was having his baby. No, he couldn't have meant it...even though even back then he'd shown these kind of tendencies. He'd apologized back then. Every time he slipped, which was far less often than the nearly-daily basis it was now, Henry had come back to Celia with flowers or candies and apologized. He told her he didn't mean to, that he had just lost his temper. She used to think she could help him tame that temper...ha! What a fool she'd been! He never apologized now. Sometimes he even smiled when he hit her. Often if it was in the evening or if he had time before returning to work, he'd throw her onto the bed while she was still bleeding and rut away like an animal while she still hadn't the strength to protest. Maybe one day he'll take me away from all of this, Celia thought to herself of her lover as she dabbed iodine into a cut over her eyebrow. Maybe one day he'll give me the strength to leave. She highly doubted it, though.