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Where some patriarch of pioneer days had first hung the length of leather that would serve as a reminder, even when he wasn’t laying it across the bare backside of a naughty wife or daughter, that in this house proper behavior represented not an option but a requirement.
Mr. Carpenter let go of my arm.
“Fetch it down, honey,” he told me, “and bring it to the table, like I told you.”
I clenched my hands into fists in front of my midsection. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to follow his instructions, at this point. My new foster father had definitely conveyed the idea that I wanted to get the inevitable over with as quickly as possible. But my body had started to shake with fear, and I found I couldn’t reach out my hand to touch the horrid thing.
“If I have to fetch it for you,” Mr. Carpenter said, his voice growing more stern, “this little butt’s going to be a lot sorer.”
He put his hand there and squeezed. Startled, I let out a little cry, and jumped forward, trying to get away from that firm grasp. No one had ever done that to me before, and it sent a roiling mass of sensation and emotion through my system that I just didn’t want to think about.
The hand followed me, though, still holding my bottom through my jeans, as if making sure I understood that my foster father would do as he chose, when it came to disciplining me. I had brought myself much closer to the strap than I wanted to be. Partly to keep from having to look at it, I turned to look at Mr. Carpenter over my shoulder. I could see Shelly in the kitchen, too, watching us with a look of sympathy on her face, but no disapproval of what her husband did.
He for his part had a hard look in his eyes. Not angry, or even disappointed: Mr. Carpenter’s eyes seemed to say that he had undertaken the task of re-educating me—training me… bringing me up, even—and he meant to accomplish that task. In ‘fostering’ a nineteen-year-old shoplifter, it seemed, he had known what he was letting himself in for, and he intended to apply the old-fashioned methods that had raised generations of obedient young women to graceful adulthood.
“Go on, now,” he said. “It’s time to start learning how to behave like decent folks, honey.”
I felt my face crumple, and the tears start at the corners of my eyes again. I turned back to the fireplace, and the mantelpiece, and the awful brown strap. I reached out a trembling hand. It scared me so much that when my fingers touched it, near the loop of string that it hung from, I felt a little sting, like an electric shock. I pulled back my hand, and I turned my head a little, about to plead for mercy out of sheer instinct.
But Mr. Carpenter gave a firm squeeze with his hand on my ass. He said, his voice growing impatient at last, “You’re going to have to get used to bringing me the strap, girl. There’s no time like the present to start. Get it down so your foster mama and I can finish supper before I whip you.”
I felt tears start to trickle down my cheeks. I reached my hand out again, and watched it shake as I fumbled to get the thing off its hook.
“Give it to me,” my foster father said. “Then pull your jeans and your panties down to your knees. I’m going to give you a few licks now, for you to think about while we eat.”
CHAPTER 6
Grace
For a moment I just stared at him. The words didn’t seem to make sense. Licks? It wasn’t that I didn’t know that the word meant a hit or a blow, in old-time speak, but my brain seemed set on telling me that Mr. Carpenter couldn’t mean that. I had an absurd yet stomach-churning image in my mind’s eye for an instant, of him… licking my backside.
I also knew that I had decided to focus on the word licks because I didn’t want to think about the rest of what he had said.
“Y-you…” I stammered. “You c-can’t… can’t be…”
He reached out his right hand and took the strap from me. Part of me wanted to try to hold on to it, as if while I held it he wouldn’t be able to use it on me, but most of me just didn’t want to touch the terrifying thing any longer than I had to.
Then, with his left hand, he took hold of my arm again, and he started to pull me toward him, as he turned, so that he could propel me toward the bigger of the two chairs that flanked the fireplace. Not having any idea what he intended, I stumbled in the direction he drew me. Did he mean to have me sit down so he could talk to me?
“I try to be as patient as I can,” he said, his voice rising slightly, demonstrating very clearly that his patience had definite limits, and I had crossed at least one of them, “but your foster mama will tell you that when my instructions get ignored, my patience can wear out pretty quickly.”
The chair seemed to rush toward me, and not at an angle that would allow me to sit down. My confusion about what was happening lasted, though, until Mr. Carpenter actually began to bend me over the arm of it. I let out a cry of alarm, but even if I had had the foresight to brace myself I would have stood no chance of keeping him from pressing my upper body downward with his strong left arm.
“Face in the cushion, honey,” he told me. “That’s how a girl takes her whipping in this house.”
How could he say honey and then follow it with such a mortifying command? My body started to resist then, out of sheer reflex from the terror and the embarrassment. Mr. Carpenter overcame that little bit of physical defiance with such ease that I couldn’t tell if he had even noticed I had attempted to stop him. I found myself bent deeply at the waist, and I had to put my hands out in front of me to keep myself from falling over into the chair.
I needn’t have worried, because my foster father’s muscular left arm came around my waist at that point, to hold me in place. I wouldn’t fall—but I also wouldn’t rise until Mr. Carpenter allowed it.
“Let her keep her jeans on, sir?” I heard Shelly say from the kitchen. “For this part? It’s her very first time, I’m sure.”
My stomach lurched. Had Mrs. Carpenter just called her husband sir? For some reason that simple word, from her mouth, seemed to bring all of it—the whole crazy ‘program’—home to me in a gut-punching way that nothing previously had done. About to try to twist out from under my foster father’s arm in some certainly foolish attempt to get to the door a second time, I froze instead.
“That’s a fine idea, hon,” he said, from what seemed way above me. “I don’t want the girl to think I’m a tyrant.”
I shook my head. Really, it happened completely instinctively, so it was more like I felt my head shake, my chin move across the worn leather seat of the armchair. The way Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter were discussing the horrible, unimaginable fact that he had a strap in his hand and he would soon start whipping my ass with it… it made the odd sense of detachment that had started to engulf me even more striking, the strange floating feeling even more distancing from my body.
Then my foster father’s arm tightened around my waist, and the shaking of my head turned into a wild flailing of my body. It seemed like an intimate communication from Mr. Carpenter’s body to mine, that my terrible lesson would start momentarily and that he would make certain my backside remained firmly in place to receive it. My nervous system seemed to react on its own, though my floating-away mind told me that it would do me no good at all. I tried desperately to free myself, even as I heard the horrid whistling sound that could only be the strap, traveling fast through the air.
