I Cried All Night
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The poignant moving story of a young girl’s search for happiness in a life that had cruelly betrayed her. Mary Marsden lay on the white hospital bed and wondered if it were worthwhile to go on living. She whom tragedy had marked for its own, at last had her unwanted revenge---and the taste was bitter in her mouth. Now, when happiness seemed within her grasp for the first time since that night of horror, five years before, fate had stepped in again to impress upon her even more deeply the be and that made her an outcast. But could it ever have been different? Here Darrell Skaggs, with a style as simple as it is effective, has wrought a story of one woman's tragedy---packed with searing realism and dramatic tension---yet touched with genuine humanity.
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About the Book
Mary Marsden lay between the two white sheets thinking should she end her worthless life or should she hang on. She had just been raped by an old man that she looked up to so much. He didn’t know what he was doing, it was the whisky. I have contempt for quitters. I believe only the weak take their own lives or bury themselves in that more harrowing grave of drunkenness. Yet, I---who consider myself strong---am contemplating suicide. I am alone in this sterile hospital room and under my pillow are fourteen yellow capsules, the accurate dose to put me to sleep dreamlessly forever. But even a criminal has a trial, so I shall write this plea for mercy tonight and when the gray light of early morning shows through the window, I shall judge myself impartially and decide if circumstances were sufficiently extenuating for me to continue my existence . . .. The wheel of my memory swings back to nineteen hundred and thirty-six--and it was April. Where was her father? Why had he not been to see her there in the hospital. Surely he would have been there if he knew. They were so close, her father and her, since her mother was gone. Where was he? She turned her face to the pillow and sobbed. Mary was left alone when her father committed suicide and was under age, therefore, she had to be sent to an orphanage. From there she learned a trade in the laundry room, washing and ironing all types of linen that the Catholic orphanage took in. From there, she took on a job working for an Italian man with a laundry where she went to live. There she met a man that traveled in a circus doing horseback riding stunts with a girl. The girl took sick, when Mary asked to go in her place the ringmaster fell in love with the young girl in spite of his age, and hoped that maybe things would develop between the two in spite of their age difference. This is a wonderful, exciting, and heartwarming book that will keep you reading to the end.
About the Author
I was born in 1932, in Lookout, West Virginia, a town so small that it wasn't on most maps. It was not really known as a coal-mining town like most of the other towns around us. During the Depression my mother hardly knew where the next meal would be coming from. What clothes I had were given to me by some relative that had grown out of them. Rich Creek, Sugar Creek, Ansted, Winona, and Lookout all were in my area. My father was very strict and many times I had my backside whipped with a miner’s belt. Being a man of 5’ 11" and 240 pounds of solid meat, he didn’t realize how hard he could hit. In later years, he would have been put in jail for child abuse, but I thought that that was the way it was. I stayed away from him as much as I could and so did my sister. By the time I started high school, we had done well enough to own our house. It cost close to 1100 dollars and I thought we were so rich and that we were getting up in the world. Little did I know that we were still poor. Dad worked at several mining towns as a machinist and electrician. In spite of his strictness, I thought he was quite a man even if I was frightened of him. Mother was easygoing, but had a look that made a boy ashamed of himself without saying a word. I left the hills, during the Korean War in 1951, for four years and returned home for almost a year. I married and left again for Chicago in search of work. There was so little work around my home area that almost all of the boys and girls left for the big cities in search of work. I thought, all along, that the hills would be there for me all my life, but it could not be. My wife and I remained in Chicago for 33 years raising 5 children before moving back to the hills, retiring from Teletype Corporation.