The first time Colm struck me I lay on the kitchen floor with my hand on my cheek too stunned to move. We’d been married for only four months and we had just come back from a walk into the village from our little seaside home at the end of a long lane. A man whom we both knew well had tipped his hat to me in greeting and I had wished him a good day. This was the reason Colm had hit me when we returned to our cottage, though at first I didn’t understand why and I had to ask him. I could not grasp what the offense had been. Colm yelled that it was not that I had said hello to the man; it was how I had said it and how I had looked at the man, but I didn’t know what Colm meant. I hadn’t looked at the man in any particular kind of way.

It happened again a few weeks later, and then again a few weeks after that. I realized I could not return the greeting of any man in the village when Colm was nearby, as he mistook every cordial interaction as coquettishness on my part. I began to look forward to the times when he was out at sea because then I could relax and not worry about the grocer or the cobbler or the milkman talking to me.

Colm didn’t hit me when he was drunk. Strangely enough he was lazily cheerful when he had too much drink. It was when he was sober that he was the most dangerous, and I never knew when something I would do would set him off. Sometimes he’d get angry if I took too long making supper or if I had it ready before he was wanting to eat. Sometimes he would not come home at night, and if I asked him where he’d been, he would go into a rage, saying it was not my place to question him. He would usually apologize hours or days later, but he’d never say he’d try to change. I wanted to reach out to Mam to ask her how to have the kind of marriage she had with Da, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what Colm was truly like. My friends from my school days were living their own lives now in other villages, or they’d gone to Belfast to secretarial school or nursing school. I had no one to confide in.

A year passed and then I found myself pregnant. I foolishly believed that my being with child would make a better man of my husband and he would begin to see anew his role as loving provider. But Colm took the news strangely that we were to have a child, and in bed that night he was savage toward me, hurting me as he lay on top of me. It was as if he wanted to yank out the new life he had put in. But weeks later he was happy about it and he put his hand on my growing stomach and talked to the child, calling him a little boy and telling him what it would be like to teach him the ways of the sea.