Betsy was scared of her premonitions but more scared of her father, who was a menacing, yelling figure who called her, a young child, “evil” and “possessed by the devil.” That the devil possessed her made her wet her pants every time she thought of it.

Soon she knew not to tell her parents what she saw in the future, but when she was older she also knew she had to take action to save the people she loved. She let the air out of a tire on Miss Jane’s car next door when she was seven. She knew how to do that because her mother’s uncle showed her how to change a tire. “Your father is clueless and lazy, Betsy, so you’re going to have to know how to do it,” Uncle Jacko told her.

Betsy knew that Miss Jane was going to help her friend Dixon on his farm that day, based on the clothes she was wearing, the same clothes as in the premonition, and her arm was going to be ripped off by some sort of farm equipment. She could not have Miss Jane losing an arm. Miss Jane was only twenty-five and baked the best chocolate chip cookies, and she snuck them to Betsy through a hole in their fence. By letting out the air in Jane’s tire, Betsy ensured that Jane couldn’t go to the farm, and she avoided having her arm ripped off.

Miss Jane did not like her father. She sprayed him with her hose when he was yelling at Betsy one day in the front yard after church. Her father was telling Betsy that she was not “a good Christian. Not prayerful, not obedient, an embarrassment to the family!” He was soaked through from Miss Jane’s hose. When Hansen charged her, his face mottled and red, Miss Jane sprayed him right in the head, then told him, “If you take one step onto my property, Hillbilly Hansen, I will shoot you.”

Her father was livid, but he backed off and yanked Betsy inside, her feet dragging across the lawn. The next day Children’s Services came out to talk to her dad and mom and to her. The lady was nice to her, but Betsy was petrified because her father whispered to her, “Don’t say anything bad about me or you will go to hell and I will spank you there.”

Betsy also knew that her dad would hit her with the Bible again or lock her in the closet in the basement and tell her to copy a book out of the Bible if she opened her mouth. While she was locked up, he would give her only bread and water, as if she were Paul in one of the jail cells in the Bible. She hated that because when she became super hungry her whole body shook and she became dizzy. She told the Children’s Services lady that everything was “happy at home.”

The next time Miss Jane saw her father, she called him “Mr. Monster Father” to his face. She was fearless! Betsy tried not to laugh, but Hansen heard her and she spent an afternoon in the closet.