My Husband Tied Me to the Porch Post Over a Bus Ticket, and His Mother Walked Out Holding Her Biggest Kitchen Knife

My mother-in-law stood on the porch sharpening a kitchen knife while her son tied me to the post, and for one long minute I honestly believed she was getting ready to help him.

That’s what nineteen years in that house had taught me to expect from Opal Gentry.

My name is Junie. I’m 41, and until this past August I lived on eleven acres of red dirt outside Hartshorne, Oklahoma, in a white clapboard farmhouse with peeling porch paint and a yard full of old tires my husband Dale swore he’d sell someday. Dale’s daddy built that porch in 1971. Every summer I’d scrape and repaint it, and every summer the Oklahoma sun would blister it right back.

I married Dale at twenty-two, when I was working the register at the Sooner Feed Store. He had nice hands and a slow smile and he opened the truck door for me. His mama lived with us from the start. Opal kept her rules like a hymnal: supper on the table at 5:30, Sunday service at First Baptist, and what happens in a family stays in a family.

The first time Dale hit me was over a burnt pan of cornbread. Opal was standing right there at the stove. She didn’t say a word. She just handed me a bag of frozen peas and went back to snapping her green beans.

That was the day I learned I was on my own.

So I started saving. I kept about forty hens out back and sold eggs to neighbors and church folks, four dollars a dozen. Dale thought I made maybe fifteen dollars a week. Every extra dollar went into an old Crisco can buried under a loose board in the chicken coop. Mrs. Alvarez down the road was my best customer. She bought six dozen a week, which seemed crazy for a widow living alone, but I never asked. I just said thank you and tucked her twenties in the can.

By the end of July I had $611. My sister Lorraine in Tulsa said she had a bed for me and a job at her laundromat. I bought a Greyhound ticket at the gas station in McAlester for Friday morning, 6:40 a.m., folded it tiny and slid it inside the cover of my Bible, because Dale never touched my Bible.

I should’ve known better. Dale touched everything.

That Thursday it was ninety-eight degrees by ten in the morning. I came in from the coop with eggs in my apron and found him at the kitchen table with my Bible open and the ticket laid flat on top of the Book of Ruth.

He didn’t yell. That was the worst part. When Dale yelled, at least I knew where I stood.

“Where’s the money, Junie?” he said, real calm.

I told him there wasn’t any. He stood up and backhanded me so hard I saw white, and the eggs went all over the linoleum. I’ve still got a little mark on my cheek from his ring.

Then he dragged me out the screen door onto the porch, grabbed the old well rope off the nail where it had hung since his daddy’s time, and tied my wrists to the post by the steps. The one with the paint flaking off in long strips.

“You want to run?” he said. “Then everybody driving by can see what a runner looks like.”

He pulled the belt out of his jeans. In nineteen years he’d never raised it at me. I yanked at that rope till my wrists burned, and I screamed for Opal.

The screen door creaked.

She came out slow, in the brown snap-front housedress she wore to can tomatoes. In one hand she had her big kitchen knife, the one nobody else was allowed to touch. In the other, the sharpening steel. She stood behind me and drew the blade down the steel. Once. Twice. That long scraping sound.

“Mama, go back inside,” Dale said. “This ain’t your business.”

Opal didn’t answer. She just kept sharpening, looking at me, her face so still I couldn’t read it.

I’d heard the talk in town about Earl Gentry, Dale’s daddy. How he fell off the hay barn in ‘93. How nobody cried much at the funeral. And I’d always wondered why Opal never sat on that porch, not once in nineteen years, not even on the Fourth of July when everybody else was out there with sparklers and watermelon.

Now she was walking toward me with that knife.

I closed my eyes and prayed the only prayer I could remember, the one my grandma taught me, and I waited.

I felt the blade touch my wrist. Then a hard tug. Then the rope went slack and dropped onto the boards at my feet.

When I opened my eyes, Opal was standing between me and her son, knife pointed at the ground, her whole body shaking.

“Sheriff Tate’s about two miles out,” she said. “I called him when I heard the eggs hit the floor.” She looked straight at Dale. “Your daddy tied me to this same post in 1989, son. You were six. You watched it through the kitchen window.”

Dale’s face did something I’d never seen it do. It went young. For a second he looked like the little boy in the school picture on Opal’s dresser, the one with the bowl cut and the missing front tooth.

“That’s a lie,” he said. But the belt came down to his side.

“It’s not, and you know it,” Opal said. “You hid under those steps till dark. I found you asleep down there with the barn cat.”

He threw the belt into the yard, kicked one of his tires so hard it rolled into the weeds, and went for his truck. He made it as far as the cattle guard. Sheriff Boyd Tate’s cruiser was already coming up the dirt road, dust rolling behind it like smoke.

I won’t tell every detail of what came after, because some of it still makes my hands shake. A deputy photographed my cheek and my wrists. Dale sat in the back of the cruiser with his head down and never looked at either of us. Opal gave her statement standing at the kitchen counter, wiping egg off the linoleum the whole time because she said she couldn’t stand the mess.

That night she came into my room carrying a tin recipe box. I’d seen it a hundred times. Her mother’s recipes, on index cards gone soft and brown at the edges.

She pulled out the card for chess pie. Behind it were thirty-four more cards, folded in half, each with a date and a few words in her tight church-lady handwriting.

March 3. Left eye. Said she hit the cabinet.
Oct 18. Wrists. Long sleeves to church.
Christmas Eve. Didn’t come down for supper.

Three years of my life, kept by the one person I thought hadn’t noticed.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” I asked. I wasn’t angry. I just needed to know.

She sat on the edge of my bed. “Because nobody believed me in 1989,” she said. “Sheriff back then was Earl’s deer-hunting buddy. Told me to go home and fix my husband a nice supper. I knew if I spoke up for you without proof, it’d go the same way, and then Dale would know I was against him.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. “I’m sorry it took me so long, honey. I’ve been a coward for forty years.”

Then she told me something else. Mrs. Alvarez never ate six dozen eggs a week. Opal had been slipping her forty dollars every Sunday after church to buy them, so my can would fill faster. Pilar had been carrying the eggs to the food pantry over in Krebs.

I laughed so hard I cried, and then I just cried.

Dale took a plea deal in November. Domestic assault and battery, plus a protective order that keeps him five hundred feet from the property. And it is Opal’s property. Earl put the deed in her name back in ‘84 to dodge a tax lien and never got around to changing it. She told Dale’s lawyer, “He’s the one leaving. Not her.”

I never used that bus ticket. Lorraine drove down instead and helped us rip the porch post out with a crowbar and a come-along. Opal took the first swing with a sledgehammer. She’s sixty-eight, and she missed twice, and we laughed about it till supper.

Earl really did fall off that barn, by the way. Drunk, in a thunderstorm. I asked her once. She said the only thing she did wrong that day was not cry.

This spring we planted zinnias where the post used to be. Last Sunday evening Opal carried two glasses of sweet tea out front, sat down in the rocker, and stayed till the lightning bugs came out.

First time in nineteen years.