Summary

Scared and confused, Marietta went to fetch her father, as her mother had asked. She went to the lumber mill where her father worked, but she did not find him in his office. She passed grown men on the street and felt afraid. She ran back home. Thinking to herself that she should not have left her mother in the first place. She worried that her mother had already hung herself. Marietta believed that other households did not have to endure the “threats and miseries” (226) that were so prevalent in her family’s household. Marietta, crying, returned to the barn to find it unoccupied. The rope hung over the back of the chair. Mrs. Sutcliffe brought Marietta inside. There, Marietta’s mother and Beryl sat at the kitchen table. Marietta fainted. As a child, Euphemia was always frightened and confused by these types of...