Chapter Text
To begin with these are the facts: Sometime at the turn of the 20th century, a woman named Diligence came to America from somewhere in Europe, leaving behind a dead husband and bringing with her a young daughter. She also carries with her a lot of family history and some particular traditions that have not been used in a long time. She settled in a small patch of what used to be southern Texas farmland, built herself a house, and set about building a life. She married again and had two more daughters. Her husband worked at the local meatpacking plant slaughtering cattle, but when the Great War broke out and he went off to fight, she took over and proved to be quite good at it. When the war ended and he came home no longer in any condition to work his old job, she kept it up. Years later, when the Depression hit and the Dust Bowl kicked up, when farming was no longer viable where they lived and people were losing jobs every day, she drew on her family’s resourcefulness in times of hardship and revived an old tradition so she and her girls could keep themselves fed.
Her daughters were named Verity, Constance, and Humility, in that order. The youngest always went by Homily instead, which she preferred for obvious reasons. They were never religious, despite the names, though the family tradition of them implied that they once were, in a forgotten era. Of their heritage they knew little; it was a bit English, a bit Irish, a bit Scottish, a bit of this and that. There was a rumor back home that they were descended from an offshoot of the Sawney Bean clan; when her girls learned about what that was, they gleefully repeated it at school, regaling the other children with the gruesome details of the legend, until their mother told them to stop with such nonsense. She always made certain they were as cautious as possible.
When the Depression hit the older two daughters had gone off on their own, but the youngest, Homily, was still living with her mother and father. She did love her father, known to most as a quiet and gentle man, but she had always been especially close with her mother. They bore out the hardest years of the decade together, and the disappearances went unremarked upon. They lived well away from town as it was; they preyed on those coming from outside it. (Many were on the move in those years. They were all doing what they could to get by.)
Towards the end of the decade Homily met a man, who promised to provide for her. She was taken in by the prospect, and she did want to have children, but she kept in mind what her mother had done – had to do – before she left for America. They were married in the year 1938, and their first child, a daughter, was born the next year. Her husband wanted a son and she promised to keep trying. A few years later the second Great War broke out and he went off to fight; she went to work, slaughtering cattle just as her mother had done before her. She was also quite good at it. Her mother watched her daughter during the day. They kept themselves fed, when they needed to.
Her husband came home after the war ended, but he was distant and away much of the time. She birthed two more children, at the same time, both daughters, which disappointed him; he vanished for a time, then came back. The night he did, she took a hammer from her job and knocked him firmly in the head with it, then again to stop him from twitching. Then she took him and the girls to her mother’s house and made dinner.
The last thing he gave her was a fourth and final daughter, born the next year. She raised them well enough with the help of her parents for a time; she sent them to school and kept up her job and their extra practice on the side, because who knew when they might be in desperate need of something to eat, it was good to keep up the habit even if her daughters would grow up having to keep an awfully big secret. Her parents grew older; her father passed away peacefully; and one day she did too, but much less peacefully. She’d gotten into a struggle with a man who was supposed to be that night’s dinner guest and he’d grabbed something to strike her hard in the head with and she died. Her oldest daughter, making the younger girls hide in another room, grabbed her grandfather’s shotgun that hadn’t been fired in years and took care of the man herself.
Patience, the eldest, was seventeen years old when it happened. Chastity and Temperance, the twins, were nine. Charity, the youngest, had just turned eight. They had never exactly been living a normal life in the first place, but their lives had just experienced a significant upheaval.
What happened to them from there is anyone’s guess. (But I know.)