Eve, and upon Eve did the Crafty Serpent found a kingdom of whoredoms and pestilences.”
“M omma!” she shrieked. “Momma, please listen! It wasn’t my fault!”
“Bow your head,” Momma said. “Let’s us pray.
“You should have told me!”
Momma brought her hand down on the back of Carrie’s neck, and behind it was all the heavy muscle developed by eleven years of slinging heavy laundry bags and trucking piles of wet sheets. Carrie’s eye-bulging face jerked forward and her forehead smacked the altar, leaving a mark and making the candles tremble.
“Let’s us pray,” Momma said softly, implacably.
Weeping and snuffling, Carrie bowed her head. A runner of snot hung pendulously from her nose and she wiped it away (if i had a nickel for every time she made me cry here) with the back of her hand.
“0 Lord,” Momma declaimed hugely, her head thrown back, “help this sinning woman beside me here see the sin of her days and ways.
Show her that if she had remained sinless the Curse of Blood never would have come on her. She may have committed the Sin of Lustful Thoughts. She may have been listening to rock ‘n roll music on the radio. She may have been tempted by the Antichrist. Show her that this is Your kind, vengeful hand at work and-”
“No! Let me go!”
She tried to struggle to her feet and Momma’s hand, as strong and pitiless as an iron manacle, forced her back to her knees.
“-and Your sign that she must walk the straight and narrow from here on out if she is to avoid the flaming agonies of the Eternal Pit.
Amen.”
She turned her glittering, magnified eyes upon her daughter. “Go to your closet now.
“No!” She felt her breath go thick with terror.
“Go to your closet. Pray in secret. Ask forgiveness for your sin.
“I didn’t sin, Momma. You sinned. You didn’t tell me and they laughed.”
Again she seemed to see a flash of fear in Momma’s eyes, gone as quickly and soundlessly as summer lightning. Momma began to force Carrie toward the blue glare of the closet.
“Pray to God and your sins may be washed away.”
“Momma, you let me go.
“Pray, woman.
“I’ll make the stones come again, Momma.”
Momma halted.
Even her breath seemed to stop in her throat for a moment. And then the hand tightened on her neck, tightened, until Carrie saw red, lurid dots in front of her eyes and felt her brain go fuzzy and far-off.
Momma’s magnified eyes swam in front of her.
“You spawn of the devil,” she whispered. “Why was I so cursed?”
Carrie’s whirling mind strove to find something huge enough to express her agony, shame. terror, hate, fear. It seemed her whole life had narrowed to this miserable, beaten point of rebellion. Her eyes bulged crazily, her mouth, filled with spit, opened wide
“You SUCK!” she screamed.
Momma hissed like a burned cat. “Sin!” she cried. “0, Sin!” She began to beat Carrie’s back, her neck, her head. Carrie was driven, reeling, into the close blue glare of the closet.
“You FUCK!” Carrie screamed.
(there there 0 there it’s out how else do you think she got you o god o good)
She was whirled into the closet headfirst and she struck the far wall and fell on the floor in a semi daze. The door slammed and the key turned.
She was alone with Momma’s angry God.
The blue light glared on a picture of a huge and bearded Yahweh who was casting screaming multitudes of humans down through cloudy depths into an abyss of fire. Below them, black horrid figures struggled through the flames of perdition while the Black Man sat on a huge flame-colored throne with a trident in one hand. His body was that of a man, but he had a spiked tail and the head of a jackal.
She would not break this time.
But of course she did break. It took six hours but she broke, weeping and calling Momma to open the door and let her out. The need
to urinate was terrible. The Black Man grinned at her with his jackal mouth, and his scarlet eyes knew all the secrets of woman-blood.
An hour after Carrie began to call, Momma let her out. Carrie scrabbled madly for the bathroom.
It was only now, three hours after that, sitting here with her head bowed over the sewing machine like a penitent, that she remembered the fear in Momma’s eyes and she thought she knew the reason why.
There had been other times when Momma had kept her in the closet for as long as a day at a stretch-when she stole that forty-nine-cent finger ring from Shuber’s Five and Ten, the time she had found that picture of Flash Bobby Pickett under Carrie’s pillow-and Carrie had once fainted from the lack of food and the smell of her own waste. And she had never, never spoken back as she had done today. Today she had even said the Eff Word. Yet Momma had let her out almost as soon as she broke.
There. The dress was done. She removed her feet from the treadle and held it up to look at it. It was long. And ugly. She hated it.
She knew why Momma had let her out.
“Momma, may I go to bed?”
“Yes.” Momma did not look up from her doily.
She folded the dress over her arm. She looked down at the sewing machine. All at once the treadle depressed itself. The needle began to dip up and down, catching the light in steely flashes. The bobbin whirred and jerked. The side wheel spun.
Momma’s head jerked up, her eyes wide. The looped matrix at the edge of her doily, wonderfully intricate yet at the same time as precise and even, suddenly fell in disarray.
“Only clearing the thread,” Carrie said softly.
“Go to bed,” Momma said curtly, and the fear was back in her eyes.
“Yes,
(she was afraid i’d knock the closet door right off its hinges) Momma.”
(and i think i could i think i could yes i think i could) From The Shadow Exploded (p. 58):
Margaret White was born and raised in Motton, a small town which borders Chamberlain and sends its tuition students to Chamberlain’s junior and senior high schools. Her parents were fairly well-to-do; they owned a prosperous night spot just outside the Motton town limits called The Jolly Roadhouse. Margaret’s father, John Brigham, was killed in a barroom shooting incident in the summer of 1959.
Margaret Brigham, who was then almost thirty, began attending fundamentalist prayer meetings. Her mother had become involved with a new man (Harold Allison, whom she later married) and they both wanted Margaret out of the house-she believed her mother, Judith, and Harold Allison were living in sin and made her views known frequently. Judith Brigham expected her daughter to remain a spinster the rest of her life. In the more pungent phraseology of her soon-to-be stepfather, “Margaret had a face like the ass end of a gasoline truck and a body to match.” He also referred to her as “a little prayin’ Jesus.”
Margaret refused to leave until 1960, when she met Ralph White at a revival meeting. In September of that year she left the Brigham residence in Motton and moved to a small flat in Chamberlain Center.
The courtship of Margaret Brigham and Ralph White terminated in marriage on March 23,1962. On April 3,1962, Margaret White was admitted briefly to Westover Doctors Hospital.
“Nope, she wouldn’t tell us what was wrong,” Harold Allison said.
“The one time we went to see her she told us we were living in adultery even though we were hitched, and we were going to hell. She said God had put an invisible mark on our foreheads, but she could see it. Acted crazy as a bat in a henhouse, she did. Her mom tried to be nice, tried to find out what the matter with her was. She got hysterical and started to rave about an angel with a sword who would walk through the parking lots of roadhouses and cut down the wicked. We left.”
Judith Allison, however, had at least an idea of what might have been wrong with her daughter; she thought that Margaret had gone through a miscarriage. If so, the baby was conceived out of wedlock.
Confirmation of this would shed an interesting light on the character of Carrie’s mother.
In a long and rather hysterical letter to her mother dated August 19, 1962, Margaret said that she and Ralph were living sinlessly, without
“the Curse of Intercourse.” She urged Harold and Judith Allison to
close their “abode of wickedness” and do likewise. “It is,” Margaret declares near the end of her letter, “the oney [sic] way you & That Man can avoid the Rain of Blood yet to come. Ralph & I, like Mary &