In the town where I grew up a woman caught fire last month.
I say this as if she spontaneously combusted, a Mrs. Krook among her mysterious papers. This is the real story: she loved a man. He set her on fire. He tried to burn her children alive too.
She spent almost three weeks in the hospital, burns covering 70% of her body, and then she died last night.
I don't know her, but I know several of the people who are grieving her death. I clicked through to her Facebook page to see if she was one of the Belindas I knew in high school. There she is alive and smiling, enthusiastic about the fiancé who was just about to set her on fire.
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My best friend from sixth grade lived with her mom after the divorce; they moved to an apartment far from our subdivision. The mom's new boyfriend was bad news, but she couldn't seem to break things off. I got a letter from my friend when I was 13: they had packed up suddenly and driven off to Iowa to live with family. The plan was to get away from the boyfriend who wouldn't stop drinking, even though drinking made him lose control of his temper and his fists. "Mom got tired of getting beat up every time he got drunk," she wrote. I hadn't known. I wasn't sure I wanted to know.
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In junior high I met a girl named Ruth. She and I were never close friends, but we had close friends in common. She moved away from West Virginia; she moved in with a boyfriend when we were still in high school. It's been more than 30 years since he killed her with a shotgun, but I'll never forget the way her best friend Linda wept over the news. "I told her he was trouble," she said. "I told her."
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I was thinking about domestic violence as a plague on West Virginia in particular, but then I remembered a conversation with a dear friend here in Gladlyville. "I need to tell someone what happened," she said, and her story came bursting out. She asked me to help her in a small way with getting free. Yes, OF COURSE, I said. It took her a couple of tries, though, to make the final break.
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I didn't know until I looked it up that half of murdered women are killed by intimate partners. I didn't know until recently about the connection between domestic violence and mass shootings.
Even across the course of our marriage the culture has changed. Do people still laugh about Ralph Kramden telling Alice she's going to get it one of these days? We've moved away from settling conflicts with fists on playgrounds and in bars. And yet we still live in a world where a man can get into an argument with his fiancée, and settle it by dousing her in gasoline and lighting a match.
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