And yet: fourteen years old and in eighth grade (which she’d already finished in Muskegee Falls) so she towered over the girls and was of a height with the taller boys.
She’d begged the woman in the principal’s office with the prissy eyeglasses could she take the test again, thinking she would remember the answers the second time, but it did not work out that way for the second test was all different questions and her score was even lower than the first.
“Eighth grade will not be so bad. You will be a little ahead of the other students, Dawn. Look at it that way!”
She had grown inches in a single year. She stood five feet five inches tall. She weighed 130 pounds. All that worry about Daddy—her stomach was always empty-feeling, needing to be filled. She was solid-built as a young heifer with hard-muscled shoulders, arms, thighs, legs that wanted to lower her into a crouch, for better protection. Her feet were large as her brother Luke’s feet and held the grip of the earth firm as hooves.
Luke and Dawn watched TV boxing when everyone else was in bed at Aunt Mary Kay’s house. In their aunt’s house Edna Mae did not have such control over the TV as she’d had in Muskegee Falls where, when their crummy old set no longer worked, Edna Mae hadn’t gotten it repaired for months and there was nothing of interest they were allowed to watch anyway.
TV boxing came on late on one of the cable channels—10:00 P.M. to midnight. Her and Luke’s favorite boxers were Roy Jones Jr., Floyd Mayweather, Arturo Gatti, and Mike Tyson—who wasn’t heavyweight champion any longer but in film clips you saw him, Ironman Mike Tyson.
They cheered the winning boxers. Sneered at the losers dripping blood onto the canvas.
“I could box as good as some of these guys,” Dawn said. “I bet I could.”
“Bet you could not.”
“There’s girls boxing now. I could be one of them.”
“Women’s boxing is such shit. People just like to see their titties jiggle and their asses. Don’t kid yourself.”
Dawn’s face flamed. Her brother was like most of the boys she knew, he could say nasty things to shock and silence you, and to wound you deeply, without seeming to know what he did. Or, if he knew, not giving a damn.
Seemed like, now their father was gone, and their mother sick or sleeping most of the time, there was no one to hear Luke say crude nasty things right inside the house where he’d never have dared, before. And Dawn was more and more saying bad words, like her tongue was too big for her mouth and could not be controlled.
Shitty. Fuck. These words came into her head to suffuse her with shame and dismay, that Jesus would hear such nastiness.
But Jesus understood. Jesus would not judge.
Stubbornly she said to Luke: “Still, I bet I could. If I tried.”
“Tried what?”
“Tried to be a boxer.”
Luke laughed, dismissively. He said:
“A boxer uses his feet, to move around fast. A boxer uses his brains, to figure out what to do. You’d stand there like some half-ass and get hit in the face and go down in a heap—knockout.” Luke laughed meanly as if seeing this spectacle on TV right now.
“If I was trained, I’d know better what to do. They use their ‘jab’—see?” Dawn jabbed with her left arm, fiercely.
Just holding her arm in such a way, and “jabbing”—it did feel like an effort. Just in a second or two her arm felt heavy.
Luke sneered: “Y’think Mawmaw would let you show yourself half-naked in some little T-shirt and shorts—in public? Or him?”
All the time now it seemed, Luke referred to their father as him. Since the arrest when they’d taken him away to the detention it was rare for Luke to speak of Daddy, or my father.
This was so disrespectful! It just made Dawn feel sad, when talk turned onto him.
“Anyway,” Luke said, “it’s against what Jesus teaches. ‘Turn the other cheek.’”
You’d have thought that Luke was joking. But Luke never joked about Jesus. He’d told Dawn that Reverend Dennis had taken him aside, after their father was arrested, and said now that their father was away—“for a while, we don’t know how long”—it was up to Luke to take his place, as best he could. It would be a time of trial for them all, not just the Dunphys but also their friends and neighbors and the church congregation, all put to the test. Terrible things would be said to them and of them but they must not weaken and lower themselves to the level of their enemies who hated Jesus.
“‘Turn the other cheek is the hardest test a Christian must face’”—Luke spoke in a way strangulated with emotion and with fury, you could not have said which.