My Family Chapter 18

I was the only person willing to do housework or run errors for Anne (the crazy lady). This is how I came to work for her. One day, I was by her fence and she came outside to say hello to me.   We began to talk and she invited me into her house. Anne and her husband lived in two rooms with kitchen (which served as a dining room and living room) and one bedroom.  After we talked for awhile, she asked if I  would do her dishes. That's how I earned the money so Shirley and I could go to the movies.  I always went with Shirley by Dad's orders.  She kept me out of trouble.  If I made more than fifty cent working at Anne's, I'd have to give it to Shirley because she started to charge to go to the movies with me.

I had been working over Anne's for some time when I  asked her husband what made her crazy.  He told me it happened because he was married at the time when he first met Anne. He said he fell in love with her at first sight. She was sixteen (at the time I was working for her she was only about twenty-three) and he was twenty years older than her.  At first, she didn't know he was married until she was pregnant. He didn't have any children by his wife. Well, he told his wife he wanted a divorce, but she said if he left her she would kill herself. He didn't believe her and left.  His wife hung herself. When Anne found out it caused her to miscarry the baby because just days previously his wife came to Anne and begged her not to take her husband.  

Her husband said one night after she had lost the baby, he woke up and she had an axe in her hand was standing over him.  He put her in the state hospital for about a year and since then, ever so often, she would get bad and he would have to put her back in the hospital. At the time he told me this story, she had been in the state hospital three times. Her husband told me to always be careful when I was at their house. He warned me that if Anne told me to leave I wasn't to stop and ask why, I was just to go. 

After school, I went down to her house, let myself in, and started to do the dishes.  I could hear Anne in the bedroom cussing and talking to herself. I became very nervous and tried to hurry up finish the dishes and leave. Anne suddenly appeared in the doorway of the bed room and told me to get out.  I stopped washing, thought about it for a moment, but  then I decided to run.  I almost never made it out of the yard before she came out of the bed room with a pick in her hand. behind me screaming with her pick saying I'm going to dig your grave. Her husband had to send her back to the hospital, and I since didn't go down to their house when she wasn't home, I lost my movie money.